Ed Wood Wednesdays, week 230: The Mortician's Tale (1966-1968)

Something about this particular story must have really captured Ed Wood's imagination.

Early in Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), a psychotic hitchhiker (Ed Neal) explains to a vanload of horrified hippies how the delicacy known as "head cheese" is made:

They take the head [of the cow] and they boil it, except for the tongue, and they scrape all the flesh away from the bone. They use everything. They don't throw nothing away. They use the jowls and the muscles and the eyes and the ligaments and everything! From the nose and the gums and all the flesh, and they boil it down into a big jelly of fats!

Ed Neal as the hitchhiker.

Ed Wood could definitely relate to this. Both his films and his writings have that distinct "head cheese" quality to them. If Eddie could help it, he didn't throw anything away either. He'd shamelessly recycle dialogue, plots, character names, and whatever he had on hand. He was so frugal that he edited footage from three separate, failed projects into his film Night of the Ghouls (1959) even though most of it clearly didn't belong there. And he'd occasionally publish short stories that were thin rewrites of stories he'd published only months before! In summary, he just took all the material he had available to him, the jowls and ligaments, and boiled it down into a big jelly of fats. Waste not, want not.

There is one particular plot that turns up at least three times in Ed Wood's literary canon, and it's a perfect metaphor for how Eddie worked. It tells of a disreputable mortician who bilks grieving families out of their money and blatantly abuses the helpless corpses placed in his care, sometimes for profit, sometimes just for fun. To put it mildly, this guy is a real scumbag: a liar, a thief, a necrophile, and a desecrator of graves. Even though he is eventually found out and must face the consequences of his actions, his story still leaves us with a feeling of disgust. And Ed Wood kept returning to that story! I wouldn't be surprised if it turns up in more places that I just haven't found yet! But why? What, exactly, was the appeal of this story?

Well, let's examine it. As far as I know, we first meet this dastardly scoundrel in Chapter Twelve of Orgy of the Dead (Greenleaf, 1966), Ed Wood's patchwork novelization of his film script from the previous year. As I explained in my review of that book, the mortician is just one of the deceased individuals being judged by the Emperor, a mysterious cloaked figure who rules over the underworld and who holds court in a spooky cemetery on a moonlit night. Most of the other "defendants" in the novel are imported from Wood's short stories, but our mortician friend is a new creation.

The Orgy novel.

In Orgy, the mortician is identified as Lyle Carriage, a "cocky," well-dressed man of 45. He's so arrogant, in fact, that the Emperor has to scold him for being too familiar. Lyle says that he was considered "worse than a killer" and that his story received (in a rare Woodian acknowledgement of Vietnam) "more newspaper space than the war." He started out as a physician but was unable to make much money in that profession. Then, fatefully, he inherited a funeral parlor from his uncle. The only other employee besides himself was an elderly embalmer. Fortunately, Lyle's medical training made the job a natural fit for him.

On his first day at the funeral parlor, Lyle was overwhelmed by the sight of a deceased young woman in her late teens. This may have been the first indication of the mortician's latent perversities. Typical of an Ed Wood character, he obsessed over the woman's appearance and outfit. He became especially fixated on a handkerchief he used to wipe some makeup off the woman's face.

After a few months, Lyle began to hatch a scheme. He bought a nearby cemetery, forced the embalmer into retirement, and hired a couple of local drunks (similar to the characters from "To Kill a Saturday Night") to be his gravediggers. He also started convincing families to hold closed-casket funerals for their loved ones. That way, he was free to exploit the corpses. He sold their hair, their blood, and even their internal organs. Eventually, he started removing the flesh from the bones. That way he had two more saleable commodities: skeletons and meat. He especially enjoyed mutilating the bodies of "young girls" and then wearing their clothes. All the while, coffins full of rocks were being buried five or six deep in his cemetery.

It was quite a profitable operation, but it couldn't last. One day, while Lyle was chopping up another young woman and wearing her clothes, one of the drunken gravediggers staggered into his office. The other gravedigger had just recently died, and his sentimental coworker wanted "one last look at his buddy." Upon making the horrible discovery, the surviving drunk notified the police. After posting bail, Lyle decided to abscond with some money he had hidden away in one of the coffins he had buried. That's when a bony hand reached up from beyond the grave and dragged Lyle down to hell. The Emperor sentences the mortician to a most cruel fate: he shall forevermore be forced to wear a "frilly pink dress" that is "tattered, decaying, [and] crawling with grave mold and worms." The phony funeral director runs screaming into the woods. Interestingly, Lyle has become a "little man" by the end of the chapter. He'd been tall at the beginning of it.

The mortician's gruesome story resembles not only Night of the Ghouls, in which conman Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) inadvertently provokes the wrath of the dead, but also the long-unproduced I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1997), which also revolves around some money hidden in a coffin, plus the short story "In the Stony Lonesome" (1972). Interestingly, when he's digging up the coffin, Lyle uses a lighted match to see what he's doing, just as Officer Kelton (Paul Marco) does while rooting around in Inspector Clay's grave in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

Ed Wood's Suburbia Confidential.

Ed Wood must have been extremely proud of this story, because he reused it the very next year in a supposed nonfiction book called Suburbia Confidential, which he wrote for Triumph News as a fictional psychiatrist named Dr. Emil Moreau. The eminent doctor generously provides his readers with several bogus case histories from his practice, including "Case 331" aka "The Story of Henry X." 

Henry is a slightly more sympathetic version of Lyle Carriage. At the time of this story, Henry is serving time in a state prison. It was the warden of that prison who brought Henry's case to Dr. Moreau's attention. Dr. Moreau concludes that Henry's problems stem from his repressive suburban upbringing and that much unpleasantness could have been avoided if Henry had only sought professional help at an earlier age.

Henry is much less brash and arrogant than Lyle, but his story is pretty much the same. He had been an unsuccessful small town doctor when his uncle died and left him a funeral parlor. Again, the place had only one elderly employee. This time, however, that character is given a name: Old Maury. Once again, on his first day of work, Henry encountered the body of a pretty, recently-deceased young woman. Henry describes her as "young and beautiful" and dressed "all in pink." Suburbia Confidential adds another new element to the myth when Old Maury tells Henry that the woman died from an illicit abortion. 

Something else that's new this time around is that Henry has a severe drinking problem. He tells us about a night when he went to a local bar and spent a few bleary hours with a beautiful, inebriated housewife. Henry had become impatient with the housewife's coy flirtations and tried to force himself on her; she managed to fight him off and then drove drunkenly home. Did you already guess that the woman crashed her car and became one of Henry's customers? Well, she did. Once he was left alone with the woman's body, Henry gave into his necrophiliac urges. These urges only grew stronger in the ensuing months.

Besides his excessive drinking, Henry also had a compulsion for prostitutes. These habits proved expensive, forcing him to find new ways of making money. To that end, Henry devised a scheme identical to the one from Orgy of the Dead. He fired Maury, hired two new gravediggers, started selling closed-casket funerals to his customers, and exploited the corpses in any way he could, selling their meat, hair, organs, etc. In this telling of the tale, Maury himself became one of the mortician's victims. 

Henry's downfall came in exactly the same way Lyle's had. One of the gravediggers, Cantanker, died, and his grieving companion, Louie, caught Henry red-handed in the act of violating a young girl's corpse while trying to pay his final respects. But Suburbia Confidential is not a supernatural novel like Orgy of the Dead, so the dishonest mortician merely went to prison rather than to hell. Dr. Moreau is even optimistic that, with treatment, the man can be cured.

A third iteration of the story.

Just a year after Suburbia Confidential, Ed Wood wrote another "nonfiction" book called The Love of the Dead for Viceroy under the pseudonym V.N. Jensen. This is another collection of supposed "case studies," though the focus here is strictly on necrophilia, which had become Ed's peculiar specialty. In Chapter Eight of The Love of the Dead, we are given the tawdry tale of Lyle X, whose very name is a combination of Lyle Carriage from Orgy of the Dead  and Henry X from Suburbia Confidential. 

As a youth, Lyle X had no luck with the girls due to his thick glasses, a trait he actually shares with Henry X. Like the previous two characters we've examined, Lyle X became an unprofitable physician before inheriting a lucrative funeral parlor from his uncle. From there, the story unfolds exactly as it did in Suburbia Confidential. This time, only surface details have changed. Old Maury, for instance, becomes Old Kinsey. But the general pattern remains unchanged. All the major story beats are there, including  the mortician's violation of the body of a woman who had previously rejected his advances.

By this point, I started to wonder if Ed Wood simply recycled big chunks of text word-for-word when he wrote these books. Well, I'll let you judge for yourself. Here's an excerpt from Suburbia Confidential:

Henry X would become glazed-eyed when he talked of such affairs. And his chest would swell with a power that never appeared in him at any other time. There was a latent NECROPHILIA complex instilled in him which was proven on his first encounter with the young dead girl on his first day to his uncle’s establishment. He might have furthered those impulses right then and there had it not been for the early arrival of the undertaking assistant.

And here's the corresponding passage from The Love of the Dead:

Lyle X. became glassy-eyed whenever he talked of his affairs. Most of the time his chest would swell with the power that never appeared in him at any other time. There was a latent NECROPHILIA complex instilled in him which was proven on that first day in the Undertaking establishment when he encountered the pretty girl in the coffin. He might have gone into the complete necrophiliac releases right then and there had not Kinsey appeared so suddenly.

Extremely similar, sure, but not word-for-word the same. We know that Eddie took pride in his writing career and held onto copies of his own paperbacks whenever he could, even handwriting inscriptions ("From the private collection of Edw. D. Wood Jr.") on many of them. Perhaps, when he was writing a new novel or sex manual, he'd rifle through his previous works looking for inspiration. Or perhaps, he genuinely didn't know he was repeating himself. I've been writing this column for almost 12 years now, and it's sometimes embarrassing how often I've repeated phrases and ideas.

Ripoff or inspiration?

There is another factor to consider here. In 1963, American International Pictures (AIP) released a film called The Comedy of Terrors, directed by French-born journeyman Jacques Tourneur and written by legendary sci-fi and horror author Richard Matheson, whose resume is too vast to describe here. The film is a ghoulish horror-comedy with an all-star cast, including Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, and comedian Joe E. Brown. If Bela Lugosi had been alive in 1963, he certainly would have been in The Comedy of Terrors, too. 

In Rudolph Grey's Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood, Jr.  (1992), actress Valda Hansen and artist-writer Don Fellman both mention that Ed Wood was planning to make a horror comedy of his own called Invasion of the Gigantic Salami or Operation Salami in the early 1960s and had even wanted to use Joe E. Brown in it. They both mention Brown by name, and Fellman speculates that AIP may have gotten the idea to use the comedian from Wood.

Why does any of this matter? Well, in The Comedy of Terrors, Vincent Price portrays a dishonest, hard-drinking mortician named Trumbull who is unhappily married to a young woman named Amaryllis (Joyce Jameson), the daughter of his now-senile former business partner, Hinchley (Boris Karloff). Together with his bumbling, lock-picking assistant Gillie (Peter Lorre), Trumbull runs the shadiest, most fraudulent funeral parlor imaginable. Even with all his cost-cutting, which includes blatantly reusing the same coffin over and over, Trumbull can't keep up with his bills and is at odds with his greedy landlord, Mr. Black (Basil Rathbone). And so, desperate for more money, Trumbull decides to commit some murders in order to drum up business.

The first place I'd ever heard of The Comedy of Terrors was in Nightmare of Ecstasy, but I didn't actually watch the movie until decades later when it aired on television. When I did finally see it, I was struck by the numerous similarities between it and Ed Wood's thrice-told tale of the unscrupulous mortician. I didn't even mention that, just like Vincent Price's character in the movie, Lyle/Henry is constantly being pursued by his creditors and is desperate to make more money quickly. That's what leads him into his life of crime.

Ed Wood certainly knew of The Comedy of Terrors, and Vincent Price's fiendish character in that film may well have been an influence on the Lyle/Henry character of Ed's books. There are too many parallels to ignore. But Eddie may have been influenced by something else altogether when he devised this terrible tale. In fact, when I first mentioned Ed Wood's mortician to the late, great Greg Dziawer, his immediate response was, "Oh, like Burke and Hare, huh?"

Burke & Hare get their own movie!

For the uninitiated: William Burke (1792-1829) and William Hare (birth and death dates unknown) were two 19th century serial killers who shocked the population of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1828 with a series of gruesome "anatomy murders," sixteen in all. Essentially, the two men worked in tandem to kill their victims, often preying on homeless people and prostitutes, and then sold the corpses to an equally-unscrupulous surgeon named Robert Knox (1791-1862) so that Knox could dissect and study the bodies. 

At that time, corpses were so difficult to obtain that doctors would often buy them from literal graverobbers known as "resurrectionists." (What a term!) The bodies provided to Knox by Burke and Hare, meanwhile, were "fresher" since they'd never been buried in the first place. The victims went straight from being murdered to being dissected. No graverobbing necessary. A horrible scheme like this one cannot last forever, and Burke and Hare were indeed discovered within a year of their association. Although Burke, Hare, Knox, and Burke and Hare's common-law wives were all deeply involved in the case, only Burke faced legal consequences. He was executed in 1829. The rest went free. For all the damage they caused, Burke and Hare's murder spree did lead to new laws regarding the procurement of bodies for medical research.

The story of Burke and Hare looms large in the annals of true crime. The case drew a massive amount of attention in the 1800s and has been much mythologized (and occasionally fictionalized) in the ensuing centuries. An entire Burke & Hare movie was made as recently as 2010, and it is not difficult to find numerous documentaries about the strange and awful case. Although he never wrote about Burke and Hare directly, I am positive Ed Wood knew of their exploits. It's exactly the kind of case that would have captured his imagination. Maybe the dastardly duo never made it into any of Wood's books or articles because, apart from some of their victims being prostitutes, there's nothing particularly sexy about the story.

So what do you think? Was Ed Wood influenced by The Comedy of Terrors? Burke and Hare? None of the above? Whatever the inspiration, this sordid saga exemplifies Eddie's entire career. No wonder he kept returning to it!