Father of Frankenstein
Christopher Bram
Phoenix, pbk, 276pp, £6.99
Reviewed by Gerald Houghton (1998)

James Whale, ageing director of The Invisible Man, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, was found one morning in 1957 floating face-down in his Hollywood swimming pool. Christopher Bram's novel speculates on his final days, offering a convincing juxtaposition of fact and fancy.

As a novel -- and a life -- Father of Frankenstein bears comparison to Jim Shepard's recent Nosferatu in Love -- itself a fiction on cinematic pioneer FW Murnau. Both men were immigrants (Whale working-class British, Murnau of wealthy German stock), who began careers in theatre but were, whatever their respective successes, inextricably linked in the public mind to horror film. Both were redheads and, perhaps most tellingly, gay men who lost early lovers to war. That said though, Brams' Whale is the real queen. In the second scurrilous volume of his Hollywood Babylon Kenneth Anger described Whale as 'difficult, witty, demanding and bitchy', and Bram's portrait certainly accords. Anger also suggests Whale had that swimming pool built simply to watch young men cavort in swimming trunks, and it's very much a focus here in the association between the film-maker and his (fictional) gardener, Clayton Boone. Whale's initial attraction to the (very straight) ex-Marine appears lustful, while Boone's is one of grudging respect for that English class and faded Hollywood glamour. Bram's novel looks to complicate their relationship as Whale conspires to uses his young friend to bring his life to a suitably dramatic close.

With occasional flashbacks to the Universal heyday (Whale and Hollywood, it's suggested, never hit it off), and a fabulously bitchy Tinseltown party thrown for Princess Margaret by George Cukor -- 'He's never met a princess. Only queens' -- Father of Frankenstein makes for witty and engaging melodrama. It's less impressionistic than the Shepard, forever working dramatically towards that Sunset Boulevard climax, with perhaps more of an eye for being filmed itself. (Bill Condon just has, as Gods And Monsters, with Ian McKellen as Whale.) It lacks Shepard's resonance, but finds in its subtle, bravely unsympathetic portrait of the befuddled and cantankerous director a wry and wise entertainment all the same.