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A couple of years later I would become involved with PBS and a very nice couple named Gene and Susie Feldman who were preparing a documentary on the horror film entitled “The Horror of it all”. I not only appeared on camera on that show but also helped the Feldman’s in locating some of the subjects for the broadcast. I called John Carradine and convinced him to allow them to film an interview at his home in Montecito near Santa Barbara. They photographed John as he sat in front of a magnificent painting depicting him as Hamlet. It was one of the highlights of the program. John displayed great dignity as he reminisced about his admiration for who else…John Barrymore, and what John felt about acting the title role of Bluebeard for Edgar Ulmer.

During this time I was having a lot of parties at my place, and at one of them a rather derelict actor named Hy Peak arrived with a very fun lady in tow who he introduced as his “girlfriend,” claiming to have met her wandering in the desert near Hemet, California, alone and a bit out of it. She was a former actress named Sonia Sorel. Now Hy had just appeared in Ridley Scott’s BLADE RUNNER, and was on a bit of a roll. He reminded me of another boozy eccentric actor, Fox Harris, who I’ve mentioned earlier, in my recollections of Elizabeth Shepherd. Sonia had also been the second wife of John Carradine during his salad days in wartime Hollywood, playing one of his victims in the film BLUEBEARD. She had been the leading lady of John’s Shakespeare Company. Sonia was the mother of actors Keith and Robert Carradine, as well as actor Michael Bowen {KILL BILL, PT 1, LESS THAN ZERO} from her marriage to world renowned artist Michael Bowen.

From what I was able to discover that evening, John had been her soul mate in life, and his departure was something from which she never fully recovered. Eventually they divorced in 1956. Sonia had fallen on hard times, living a life of poverty [When I asked John about her he replied “I heard she was a bag lady in Hollywood”] yet that evening in my home she laughed and seemed happy in spite of everything. Her sense of humor was intact: listening to a song that was being played at the party, she turned to me and said “I wish someone would write a song about me.” I replied “Honey, they did: it was called “I’m Easy”(the song her son Keith had won the Oscar for composing). I said that without really thinking about the ramifications, but she roared when she heard it none the less. I liked her instantly, and regret that soon afterwards she disappeared from Hollywood altogether. I learned recently that she died on my birthday September 24th in 2004.

After all that I decided that it was time to do my own interview with John Carradine, and enlisted my friend photographer Dan Golden to drive me up to John’s house, to do an audio recording, and to prepare him for taping my cable television show “Sinister Image”.

The trek from LA to Santa Barbara is always fraught with delays, as the coastal highway is crowded no matter what time you start your journey. I had called John late in the afternoon, telling him we should be with him in a couple of hours. Unfortunately we arrived sometime after nine that evening. John was waiting with the patience of Job and immediately offered us drinks and a little tour of his comfortable home nestled in the hills between Santa Barbara and the sea.

The interview began with John laughing about the film he had seen earlier in the day, starring his son Robert – REVENGE OF THE NERDS. John said “You know, I’ve been around nerds for years and never knew what to call them until today.” Then he said, “I am very proud of all my sons, as they learned their craft from me.” John had appeared in a number of shows with his sons, on stage as well as being on David’s ‘Kung Fu’ television series.

I asked him about turning down the role of Frankenstein’s monster in 1931, and he explained that it was Cecil B. De Mille who discouraged him by telling him that “’…your face is too thin and narrow, and the camera won’t record anything from your face.’ I listened to every word he said at that moment. I was working around Hollywood full time as a sculptor and sketch artist. .During that period I sculpted a magnificent bronze bust of DeMille, which he had on display up at that house of his on DeMille Drive for years. I also did one of John Ford, who is still my favorite director. I’ve done ten films for him in my career, including some that are now considered masterpieces in the art of filmmaking.”

We made plans that evening for John to tape a segment of my Sinister Image show in Santa Monica. He was having a great deal of fun speculating about what if John Barrymore had played Dracula instead of Lugosi. John felt Barrymore could play any role placed in his path, not to mention he had a real fascination with the macabre. Yet by the time I had reserved studio space, John was off working on films all over the world. I regret that fate decreed that we would not document his long career and especially preserve that amazing stentorian voice of his that made any line of dialog memorable just by the sheer power and range of his talent.

John Carradine was a unique figure in film history who could have achieved greatness if he had not followed the example of his idol, John Barrymore, allowing his career to lapse
into self-parody or, more so in John’s case, descend into grade-z horror films, until his reputation could never fully recover from it. However, unlike Barrymore, he lived long enough to create some memorable moments in Television as well as on film. John had been a memorable Dracula over at Universal in the forties, and even managed to play a werewolf towards the end of his life for director Joe Dante in THE HOWLLING (1981). In that film John managed something even Chaney Jr. could never do – pathos and humor at the same time. Who can ever forget John’s retort to Patrick MacNee’s therapist werewolf, “Screw all this ‘channel your energy’ crap! You can’t change us doc. It just ain’t natural we gotta eat meat!” I will always remember what his co-star in that film, the late, great Elizabeth Brooks, said to me right after it came out “It looks like Hamlet met the wolf man after all”.

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