Who Was Dracula? (14 page)

Batty Street placed Tumblety in the geographic center of the Jack the Ripper murders. His manner of dress and foreign accent brought him to the attention of the police: A number of witnesses thought that the man seen in conversation with the victims had spoken with an accent, and foreign doctors, not registered in England, were naturally under suspicion.

In October 1888, well into the crime spree, Scotland Yard contacted the San Francisco police and asked for a sample of Tumblety's handwriting—the letters from Jack were considered some of the best clues. The San Francisco police responded, offering a sample.

Just weeks later, the November 19
New York Times
reported that Tumblety had been arrested in London on suspicion of complicity in the murders. The
Times
article suggested that he was “proven innocent of that charge.” That was an error, but it suggests that the detectives did not have enough evidence to charge him, perhaps hoping that his arrest would inspire additional evidence or a confession. A
New York
World
article on Sunday, December 2, explained: “The police being unable to procure the necessary evidence against him in connection [to the Whitechapel murders], decided to hold him for trial for another offense.”

Tumblety was charged under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885; this was a sexual offenses act. Most of the sections apply to procuring underage female prostitutes or to holding women against their will. Considering that Tumblety would have avoided women, it's more likely that he was accused under Section 11: “Any male person who, in public or private commits or is a part to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person. . . .”

Section 11 was the famous Labouchère Amendment, coincidentally the legislative work of Henry Irving's old friend and patron, and a frequent guest at the Lyceum.

—

Labby, Henry Labouchère, returned to Parliament in 1880 and continued publishing his muckraking journal,
Truth
. Labouchère's causes were often libertarian; he joined the Radical wing of the Liberal Party. In 1885, a series of articles by the reformer W. T. Stead in the
Pall Mall Gazette
had called attention to underage female prostitutes. The government, anxious to quell the controversy before an upcoming election, pushed through the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The night before the vote, Labouchère added his amendment, which prohibited any homosexual “indecency.”

The courts already had a law banning sodomy, but Labouchère's Section 11 expanded the charges against homosexual acts. It was vaguely written, leaving “consent” and “procuring” to judicial interpretation, and the amendment was unrelated to the bill that carried it. It shouldn't have passed, and would not have, except for the hurried legislative push.

Even today, it's unclear why Labouchère felt compelled to propose this amendment. It didn't match his causes or agendas. His friend, the publisher Frank Harris, insisted that Labouchère's amendment had intended to “make the law ridiculous.” It seems that Labouchère had objected to the discussion of the age of consent and had hoped to force debate on the entire bill by adding his purposely vague addition.

Author F. B. Smith has come to agree with Harris's theory, after studying Labouchère's legislative work and editorials. He believes that Labouchère's amendment was proposed as an “extravagant motion designed to overturn the bill—but one which got away.” Labouchère's own editorials in
Truth
, which appeared the very same day he moved the amendment, indicate his impatience with the bill: “The Act itself is . . . very badly drawn up. . . . It would have been better had the bill been sent before a large and representative select committee.” He also warned, “The greatest care ought to be taken not to confound immorality with crime. . . . I somewhat question whether there has been sufficient care in regard to the above essentials.”

Purposeful or reckless: Whatever Labouchère's intentions had been, after the bill passed it became an invitation for blackmailers. Labby learned to live with the amendment, later justifying it in vague terms and with a variety of excuses. He was, after all, a politician.

The bill was a convenient charge for the police when they were dealing with a fellow like Tumblety. But within a decade, it forced a famous showdown in the courts.

—

Once charged, Tumblety's bail was set at 1,500 pounds ($7,500), which should have been a prohibitive amount for anyone lodging in the East End. But his bail was quickly made by two unnamed gentlemen. They later asserted to the police that “they had only known the doctor for a few days previous to his arrest.”

Not surprisingly, Tumblety jumped his bail, sailing for Le Havre, France, on November 24, under the name Frank Townsend. From there, he left on a seven-day voyage to New York, on the steamship
La Bretagne
. He must have remained secluded in his room. Passengers didn't recall seeing him aboard.

When he arrived back in America, he had already made headlines. Newspapers reported that New York detectives were waiting, at the gangplank, to follow him home. Tumblety arrived at 79 East Tenth Street, next to his herbal business, staying in a room with his landlady, a Mrs. McNamara. Then, according to the
New York
World
, a British detective arrived on the scene, nervously pacing outside the residence and watching for the mysterious doctor.

New York Police Inspector Byrnes admitted that he “simply wanted to put a tag on him so we can tell where he is,” conceding that Tumblety couldn't be arrested or extradited. “The [morals] crime for which he was under bond in London [according to the Criminal Law Amendment Bill] is not extraditable.” Tumblety left the residence several days later, disappearing to an apartment uptown.

The
Pall Mall Gazette
reported only that the search for Jack had moved from Whitechapel to New York City; British newspapers never mentioned Tumblety, and presumably Scotland Yard was embarrassed by his escape.

—

The significance of Tumblety was made clear in 1993, when author Stewart Evans discovered a letter that had been written by John G. Littlechild, a chief inspector of the Scotland Yard's Secret Department during the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. In 1913, Littlechild had responded to a journalist's inquiry about the case.

Amongst the suspects, and to my mind a very likely one, was a Dr. T. . . . He was an American quack named Tumblety. [He] was at one time a frequent visitor to London and on these occasions constantly brought under the notice of police, there being a large dossier concerning him at Scotland Yard. Although a ‘Sycopathia [
sic
] Sexualis' subject, he was not known as a ‘Sadist' (which the murderer unquestionably was) but his feelings towards women were remarkable and bitter in the extreme, a fact on record.

Littlechild concluded his note by observing that, significantly, the murders ended after Tumblety left for France.

—

A New York
World
reporter finally caught up with Francis Tumblety, and the interview appeared on January 29, 1889. Tumblety avoided mention of the morals arrest, insisting that he was arrested simply because he had gone to Whitechapel for “the excitement and the crowds and the queer scenes and sights.” He happened to be wearing a slouch hat and was unaware that English detectives had been looking for a suspect that matched his description. In Tumblety's telling, it was a simple, awkward case of mistaken identity and sloppy police work. He concluded the interview with the expected boasts: “If it were necessary, I could show you letters from many distinguished people who I have met abroad. I am a frequenter of some of the best London clubs, among others the Carlton Club and the Beefsteak Club.”

The phrase “Beefsteak Club” offers a chill.

—

In 1888, there was a Beefsteak Club, an offshoot of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks that had been founded at Covent Garden. They had headquarters near the Savoy Hotel in London. Three years later, Bram Stoker restored the original Beefsteak headquarters at the Lyceum Theatre and rechristened this the Beefsteak Room. This, too, was an offshoot of the Sublime Society of Beefsteaks—principally celebrating the theater association and serving as a social dining room for Henry Irving's guests.

Was Tumblety a guest of the Beefsteak Club or the Beefsteak Room? (Confusion over the terms was common, even for Londoners.) As a proper club, with a small group of members, the Beefsteak Club may not have been an option. But to gain access to the Beefsteak Room, upstairs at the Lyceum, he would only have had to finagle an invitation from his old friend, Hall Caine, a Beefsteak Room regular. Or, through Caine, he may have made entreaties directly to Bram Stoker, who was always accommodating to colorful Americans, and then attended a performance at the Lyceum, offering praise for Henry Irving.

Stoker's records from the Beefsteak Room are not complete, and there's no way to know if the proud, social-climbing Francis Tumblety ever shook Henry Irving's hand and offered toasts to Bram Stoker. Most intriguing, did they share advice about fallen women or crime on the street?

Two years after the Whitechapel crimes, Bram Stoker began compiling his notes for
Dracula
. He was in a unique position to hear that Tumblety had been connected to the crime—as a friend of Hall Caine and a visitor to New York with Henry Irving's company, where the newspapers had buzzed over the odd American doctor who became a suspect.

—

Francis Tumblety lived the remainder of his life out of the headlines. He spent most of the year with an elderly niece, Alice FitzSimons, in Rochester, New York, where he kept a small office. He wintered in St. Louis, and he was there when heart disease struck. He checked himself into St. John's Hospital, and died on May 28, 1903, at age seventy.

THE ACTOR, “ABJECT TERROR, GRIM HUMOR”

F
or nearly a century, the primary suspect for inspiring Dracula has been Henry Irving. It's a delicious story: The dutiful, abused worker gets his quiet revenge; the arrogant boss gets his comeuppance. Was literature's greatest monster inspired by thirty years of high-handed, monstrous behavior? Was Dracula modeled after Henry Irving? Author and
Dracula
expert David Skal neatly explains the appeal of this theory:

Virtually all of Stoker's chroniclers find in
Dracula
an allegory of an unequal, draining relationship between the two men; Stoker locked up in the Lyceum castle, as it were, serving a master's wishes while having his own attempts at written expression inhibited. Harker's letters are confiscated; Stoker's direct dramatic collaboration with Irving is never realized.

The recent Norton critical edition of
Dracula
, edited by Skal, uses a cover portrait of Irving as Mephistopheles—it makes an effective and convincing picture of the infamous vampire. Stoker's biographer Barbara Belford also endorsed Irving as the inspiration. “Dracula became a sinister character of Irving as mesmerist and depleter, an artist draining those about him to feed his ego. It was a stunning but avenging tribute.”

The first edition of Belford's book is called
Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula
. The paperback edition includes a cover portrait of Henry Irving and was retitled
Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula.

When the anecdote is told, “He wrote it about his boss,” and the climactic phrase is inserted, “a blood-sucking vampire,” every long-suffering employee smiles and pumps a fist. This is exactly the way we would like the story to end; this is the twist that turns Stoker into a folk hero. Orson Welles once chuckled to Daniel Farson, Stoker's great-nephew: “Stoker had his revenge. . . . If you read the description of the Count, you will find it identical to Irving!”

Welles had heard—or more precisely, read—the backstage scuttlebutt from the Lyceum. He was right in a theatrical sense but wrong in a personal sense. The Count was certainly not identical to Irving, and Stoker never gave evidence that he needed, or exacted, revenge.

—

Henry Irving overcame a humble, provincial upbringing, as well as a lanky, ungainly body, an erratic gait, a homely face, a speaking voice that hissed and slurred, and a barrage of affectations that often left his onstage characters maddeningly opaque when they should have been perfectly clear.

Once, on a train journey during an American tour, Ellen Terry noticed Irving gazing out the window with an odd expression. She asked him what he was thinking about. “I was thinking how strange it is that I should have made the reputation I have as an actor,” he told her softly. “With nothing to help me. With no equipment. My legs, my voice, everything has been against me. For an actor who can't walk, can't talk and has no face to speak of, I've done pretty well.”

This was no self-effacing anecdote, the great man professing humility. Irving seemed genuinely puzzled and in a careless moment of honesty admitted it to his lover. She thought to herself, “And I looking at . . . the whole strange beauty of him, thought, ‘Ah, you little know.'”

—

Irving was born John Henry Brodribb in 1838, at the Somerset village of Keinton Mandeville, in southwestern England. As a boy he was raised in Cornwall and adopted the short
a
and the hard
o
of this region. He also spoke with a stammer. When he became devoted to acting at a young age, his elocution teacher helped him overcome the stammer and soften the vowels, imparting a natural form of acting. When he auditioned for Samuel Phelps, a Devon-born actor who managed Sadler's Wells Theatre, Phelps listened to young Brodribb's speech from
Othello
and gave him some advice: “Have nothing to do with the theatre.” This only stiffened Brodribb's resolve. Phelps, in turn, was inspired by his determination, and he offered the boy a salary.

John Henry changed his name to Henry Irving—taken from the American writer Washington Irving—and worked as a professional actor in Sunderland, Edinburgh, and Manchester, learning roles and earning praise from the critics. He was a natural mimic and had an early success in Manchester with a parody of the American performers the Davenport Brothers. The Davenports held apparent séances on the stage, supposedly contacting ghosts. They were frauds, of course, and Irving made the most of their claims in his burlesque performance. His scientific introduction, offered with the twang of an American accent, began:

I do not deem it necessary to offer any observations upon the extraordinary manifestations. I shall therefore at once commence a long rigamarole—for the purpose of distracting your attention, and filling your intelligent heads with perplexity. Many really sensible and intelligent individuals seem to think that the requirement of darkness seems to infer trickery. So it does. But I will strive to convince you that it does not. . . .

He was slowly becoming known for his Shakespearean roles and supported Edwin Booth when the famous American actor played in Manchester in 1861. Irving played Hamlet for the first time in that city in 1864, and critics applauded his effort as they criticized his shortcomings, “physique . . . and voice unequal to the demands which Hamlet makes upon [them].” Of course, his Hamlet became more refined and sophisticated (in Manchester he played it in a blond wig, which was then the fashion for the role), but those physical and vocal tics continued to frustrate the critics throughout his career.

Irving's peculiar, bent-legged gait suited later roles such as Richard III and Mephistopheles (whom he played with a sort of skipping limp). His crablike way of skittering around the stage became a target for caricature artists and music hall comics, who later lampooned Irving, the same way he had imitated the Davenport Brothers. Edward Gordon Craig, Ellen Terry's son, insisted that Irving's gait offstage was perfectly normal, but as he approached the stage, “Something was added to the walk—a consciousness, a springing motion, sometimes it wasn't really walking, but dancing. He was essentially an artificial in distinction to being merely natural.”

Even more distinctive was Irving's voice and inflection. An American journalist gave a cruel interpretation of Irving's role of Shylock:

Wa, thane, et no eperes Ah! Um! Yo ned m'elp.

Ough! Ough! Gaw too, thane! Ha! Um! Yo com'n say

Ah! Shilock! Um! Ouch! We wode hev moanies!

(Well, then, it now appears you need my help;

Go to, then, you come to me and you say

Shylock, we would have moneys.)

Irving used his sibilant
s
and broad vowels, adding a strange power to ordinary lines. Many spectators who saw him perform
The Bells
recalled his haunting performance, especially the last line as he staggered across the stage in a death throe: “Tak . . . the rup . . . from . . . mey . . . nek!” (Take the rope from my neck.) His biographer, Laurence Irving, wrote: “Rightly or wrongly, he strove to make words convey not only an idea but an emotion. Those who criticized his methods were those to whom a visit to the theatre was an intellectual exercise rather than an emotional experience.”

—

Critic William Archer thought that Irving's strengths were attuned to villainy: “Hatred, malignity, and cunning dwell familiarly in his eye, his jaw can express at will indomitable resolve or grotesque and abject terror. Grim humor lurks in his eyebrows, and cruel contempt in the corners of his mouth. No actor has ever full command of the expression which has been happily called a ‘lurid glance.'”

It was at the Lyceum, working with Stoker, that Irving gradually developed the repertory plays that showed off his abilities and thrilled audiences. He was a magnificent Hamlet, praised by critic Clement Scott as “a Hamlet who thinks aloud.” He was a scheming Iago but a weak Othello—“I could not bear to see him in the part. It was painful to me,” wrote Ellen Terry, his Desdemona. His Richard III should have been wonderful but was disappointing, even to Irving—for some reason the play ended up being bad luck for him.
Macbeth
was spectacularly staged, but it was Terry, as Lady Macbeth, who won the public's favor. Terry thought that Irving played it as a “great famished wolf.” His Lear was played as too old; his Romeo could not be played as young enough.

But in a melodramatic part—haunted or supernatural—he was perfectly cast. “He had an incomparable power for eeriness, for stirring a dim sense of mystery . . . a sharp sense of horror,” according to Irving's friend, the English essayist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm. He also played comedy with a sardonic, grotesque sense of humor. He was serenely magisterial in roles like Richelieu and Becket.

Terry considered him “an egotist of the great type, never a mean egotist. . . . All his faults sprang from egotism which is, in one sense, after all, only another name for greatness. So much absorbed was he in his own achievements that he was unable or unwilling to appreciate the achievements of others. . . . It would be easy to attribute this to jealousy, but the easy explanation is not the true one. He simply would not give himself up to appreciation.”

Of course, Terry never became an egotist; indeed, she remained so fair-minded that she was able to make excuses for egotists. Ellen Terry found her success alongside, and sometimes in spite of, Irving. To a critic like George Bernard Shaw, she was more than a supporting player—she seemed to hold Irving aloft, providing the grace notes in any performance and preventing him from drowning in his indulgent, overwrought puddles of Shakespeare. “Ellen Terry is the most beautiful name in the world; it rings like a chime through the last quarter of the nineteenth century,” Shaw once wrote in praise of the actress.

Shaw was a fellow Dubliner, but he really knew Wilde and Stoker only when the three all converged in London. He was irascible and sometimes devastating in his criticisms of Irving. In 1896, he wrote that Irving did not interpret roles but used them to adorn himself, “compelled to use other men's plays as the framework for his own creations.” When the actor's own understandings came into conflict with Shakespeare's, for example, “He simply played in flat contradiction of the lines, and positively acted Shakespeare off the stage. [In
Hamlet
] he achieved the celebrated feat of performing Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted and all other parts as well, substituting for it and for them the fascinating figure of Henry Irving.”

Irving tried to dismiss him and insisted that he didn't read Shaw's reviews, but Shaw was becoming impossible to ignore. Shaw's work as a playwright was interesting and daring, and Stoker tried on several occasions to bring him into the Lyceum fold, writing for Irving. Stoker played diplomat between Irving and the Irish playwright.

Shaw began a long correspondence with Ellen Terry, offering her advice on roles and criticizing the choices that had been made for her. His influence might be romanticized as Svengali to Trilby (as in the fashionable London play) or Higgins to Doolittle (as in Shaw's later
Pygmalion
). But Terry was smarter and more self-conscious than either Trilby or Doolittle—she had better instincts than Shaw when it came to the theater. Ellen was flattered by Shaw's attention and evaluated his advice wisely.

—

On May 24, 1895, Stoker received a telegram at his office from Irving, who was at his rooms in Grafton Street. “Could you look in at a quarter to six. Something important.”

Stoker was often summoned to the dark, smoky rooms in Grafton Street, sometimes several times a day. Irving liked to work from home and his Acting Manager would be asked to bring drawings, scripts, or letters. But Irving's summons on that day had been especially mysterious. Bram Stoker suspected that Irving wanted to talk about the latest news—for the last week, the newsboys had been announcing the twists and turns of Oscar Wilde's court case, and the theater profession had been following the details with a sense of dread.

When Stoker arrived on that spring day, he bounded up the stairs, anticipating the worst. He started the conversation, “Have you heard the latest news from court?”

But Irving quickly dismissed the question with a wave of his hand, suggesting that Stoker was concerning himself with trivialities. Irving looked priest-like in his serenity. He remained deliberately silent, gesturing for Stoker to take a seat. Stoker was uneasy. He searched Irving's face for a clue, but the actor offered only a sly smile; this was one of his greatest performances.

He handed over two pieces of paper and fell back into his chair. As Stoker opened the letters, Irving watched his expression.

The first letter was from the prime minister, the Earl of Rosebery, with the pleasurable news that Queen Victoria had conferred the honor of knighthood on the actor. The second letter was from the Prince of Wales, offering his personal congratulations.

Stoker inhaled reflexively. It was wonderful news, an antidote to the oppressive gloom of the Oscar Wilde court case. He then looked up at his employer with wide eyes. Irving erupted in a long, uncharacteristic laugh. He had, indeed, been laughing most of the afternoon. Stoker joined him, offering loud congratulations and sharing a toast of good Irish whiskey—with memories of their meeting in Dublin. They took the letters to Ellen Terry's home in Longridge Road, Stoker later reported, to share the news with her.

When the honors list was officially announced, the following day on the Queen's birthday, Irving's office at the Lyceum was quickly piled with tied bundles of congratulatory letters and telegrams—from celebrities, his many guests over the years, admirers, critics, coworkers, and actors from all over the world—especially from actors. This would be a spectacular honor for the profession—Henry Irving would be the first actor knighted by British royalty. Irving dismissed the bundles of notes, telling Stoker, “I really can't read any more of these at present. I must leave them to you, old chap. They make my head swim.”