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The shooting of THE MUMMY began in September 1932. According to accounts by Zita Johann and Boris Karloff, they worked 12-hour-days late into the night. Both actors suffered exhaustion and fatigue, as the union had yet to be created to prevent this gross injustice to actors while onset. Karloff endured a painful torture with his make-up – he appeared in the beginning as a mummy rotting in a case, and later his make-up was less confining but still a torture. Zita suffered much worse under the direction of Karl Freund. She told me that ‘I had nowhere to sit between takes; the reincarnation sequences, all four of them, were cut after the filmed wrapped because I told Junior Laemmle, the son of Universal’s founder, not to renew my contract. One of the last scenes, where I played a Christian martyr, involved my death by lions in the arena. It was very dangerous, and Freund and the crew were all placed in steel cages while I was just thrown to the lions without any protection. Well by this time I weighed next to nothing, and those lions just looked at me like I wasn’t even worth the trouble, and the scene was wrapped and I walked off that set for good.”

She remembered Karloff as a marvelous person and a good actor. “Karloff had a dark hidden sorrow that came from his soul right through his eyes and yet we never spoke of it.” James Whale must have sensed this sorrow as well in casting Karloff as the monster in 1931; he even said as much in interviews of the period. There was a moment where Karloff shows her some of her past lives in his pool where Zita literally passed out for over an hour. According to her, “I went into a trancelike state where I felt death all around me. I was sure that I was never coming back, and when I finally did come out of it, Karloff was the first thing I saw. He was holding my hand as they waited for the studio doctor to arrive.” By then, she said, “Even the crew had turned against Freund for his mistreatment of me. Since this occurred just before midnight, a doctor could not be found, so that crew literally prayed me back from the dead”

For all her suffering, THE MUMMY was a huge success for both Universal and Karloff, yet for her complaining, and especially for walking out on her contract, Zita Johann lost her star billing with Karloff, and all her scenes of reincarnation were removed, thus taking away some of her motivation and lessening her impact as a character. The legend of the missing footage from this film is right up there with finding the lost Lon Chaney film LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT as a “holy grail” for film historians.

After suffering through the film, Zita still had the burden of supporting husband John Houseman, his mother, and now John’s lover, Eric, all still with their hands out. This led to Zita taking yet another film, this time over at Paramount – 1933’s LUXURY LINER with George Brent. It was during the opening of this film that Zita Johann was an eye-witness to one of the more sordid scandals in Hollywood. While driving with John Huston they had a serious car accident, sending Zita to the hospital and John Huston to jail for drunk driving. This incident nearly destroyed Huston’s career and it took several strings being pulled, including sending Huston out of the country, before all was covered up. Later on John Huston would come back to Hollywood and luck would bring him together with a certain black bird over at Warner Bros, and all was forgiven.

Zita Johann finally got a divorce from Houseman and his mother, not to mention the boyfriend, in 1934. “Houseman likes to put it out that I married him when he was rich and I divorced him when he was poor and he got away with that line. He didn’t have a dime. He liked to say he was the president of Oceanic Drain Company. He was not the boss; they just used his name. He had a very small income and then he lost that job and had no income. He went to London to write a play. Well he couldn’t even do that in those days, so I helped him finish the play so he could collect a paycheck. Same thing at Metro, where I helped him get a job for $250 a week that didn’t last as he really couldn’t write in those days at all. Houseman always puts me down in print but remember this: I opened all the doors for him in Hollywood. He had never heard of show business before he married me, yet he still likes to distort the truth in his books about his ‘salad days in the business.’ What a pompous liar he has become.”

She made a couple more films and then said goodbye to Hollywood. A year later she did tests for both A MIDSUMMER NIGHT DREAM and DRACULA’S DAUGHTER, yet she would make no more films in Hollywood.

Zita returned to New York, and after two bad marriages, bought a pre-Revolutionary house in the wilds of West Nyack, New York, where she would remain for the rest of her life. After my first long phone conversation with her I had asked the important questions regarding my cherished mummy film and began talking with her on all kinds of subjects. Later I would receive a letter inviting me to visit her if ever came to the east coast.

In the fall of 1981 I would indeed visit her, and the experience was more than worth the effort. Zita Johann had very wisely purchased her large, rambling house near the Hudson River around 1939. After about three days in New York I needed to rent a car to make the trek to West Nyack, as her property was way off the beaten track and no taxi could ever hope to find it. I leased a car for the weekend only to discover that the only one the agency could locate the day I needed it was a stretch limousine, which was the usual mode of travel for opening nights or funerals. So off to the country in a long white limousine. Within less than an hour we were getting near the first exit to reach her abode. The trees were losing their leaves and the sky had turned gray; it was all turning into “horror movie weather” and I was loving it. Finally the last turnoff proved to be a dirt road that curved around to where one began to observe the outline of this very old two-story wooden-framed house – definitely the kind George Washington might have slept in, or at least Jack Benny.

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