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WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BEATRICE WEEKS?

The Unhappy Story of the Third Mrs. Bela Lugosi

by Frank J. Dello Stritto

In late July 1929, Bela Lugosi arrived in San Francisco with a touring company of Dracula. Within 10 days he wed and allegedly separated from Beatrice Weeks. The Weeks‑Lugosi marriage has all the credentials of a wild fling from the Roaring 20’s—she a wealthy, widowed heiress; he a rising stage and screen star. Both marrying for the third time; both living life to its fullest. Lugosi breezed into town, and breezed out never to see his bride again. She hopped over to Reno and filed for “incompatibility”. Their divorce was final in December. The tabloids picked up the story, linked the break-up of the newlyweds to screen siren Clara Bow, an easy target for the scandal sheets.

Lives cannot be told from newsclippings, but Beatrice Weeks’ may have left no other trace. Any biography of her is filled with “probably” and “may have.”  The press clippings tell a depressing tale, one that can be documented today only because the four men in her life each achieved prominence. Beneath the glitter of her showbiz style marriage to Lugosi lurks the sobering tale of a woman slipping from desperation to destruction.

Weeks and Bow are minor but pivotal figures in the Lugosi legend. His marriage to Weeks and his torrid affair with Clara Bow (all Bow’s affairs are described as “torrid”) prove that the commanding, caped figure once cast spells over women. Weeks and Bow were both financially independent, quite younger than he and first saw him in an audience watching Dracula. The sexual element in the Lugosi mystique wears a bit thin with time, and without it Lugosi is less a prince of darkness and more a high lord of camp. But in his prime in the 1920’s—before the movies had influenced our view of the man and the actor—Lugosi was reaching across the footlights to sweep young women of position and means off their feet. Dracula himself could have done no better.

Of course, that is the stuff of legend. In fact the Weeks-Lugosi marriage was not the impulsive event invented by myth. Their intentions were announced at least 3 days before the wedding. By then the couple had known each other for about a year, during which, if Lugosi is to be believed, they had been in frequent contact. Lugosi was hardly a rising star. When he married this rich, young widow, his film career had stalled. The Dracula tour of 1929 was  undertaken out of necessity. His limited English and thick accent made finding roles in early sound films difficult. Not until after the marriage ended did he start regularly landing character parts. Dracula was not filmed until a year later.

A “Torrid Affair” with Clara Bow?

Lugosi’s and Bow’s first meeting can be reliably dated. Dracula closed on Broadway on May 19, 1928, and opened with much of the Broadway cast in Los Angeles on June 24, 1928 for an eight-week run. The play received a press ballyhoo that it never got in New York, and Lugosi quickly became a much talked-about celebrity. Hollywood was then beginning the conversion from silent to sound films—an upheaval dreaded by many performers who had no experience with dialogue. Clara Bow, whose voice no audience had yet heard, was particularly intrigued by publicity claims that Lugosi learned his lines phonetically. Bow’s friend, comedian and comic character actor Jack Oakie, recalls in his light-hearted autobiography (Jack Oakie’s Double Takes) Bow’s first meeting with Lugosi:

Suddenly she came running out (to her swimming pool, where she had left friends to take a phone call). “Come on everybody! We’ve got tickets!” she said. “We’re going down to the Biltmore to see Dracula.” She was so excited she didn’t stop to dress. She just threw a great long mink coat over her swimsuit, and we all got into her chauffeur-driven black Packard limousine. Bela Lugosi was starring in Dracula on the stage of the Biltmore Theatre downtown.

Bow had read about it. “I want to meet that man,” she said. “Do you know he doesn’t know how to speak English.” She couldn’t get over the fact that he was on stage for two hours performing in a language he couldn’t speak. Bow kept her mink coat on, and we watched Bela Lugosi in his monstrous makeup with his teeth sticking out, chewing on gals’ necks all evening. Then we went backstage.

He couldn’t speak English, but no language barrier could hide his thrill at meeting Clara Bow. He was overwhelmed with the redhead. “How do you know your lines?” Bow asked him immediately. We finally understood the Hungarian’s explanation. He told us that he memorized each word from a cue and, if by mistake another actor should ever give him a wrong line, he would be lost for the rest of the night. Bow invited him to her home, and they became very good friends.

Lugosi probably exaggerated his language difficulties for Bow’s benefit, for he was more proficient in conversational English than he let on. Horror film producer William Castle relates in his autobiography that, as 14 year-old Bill Schloss from Brooklyn, he met Lugosi in New York in 1927 and conversed well enough with him. Throughout the Los Angeles run of Dracula Lugosi was interviewed by the papers constantly, and handled questions with some aplomb. When The Los Angeles Examiner asked if he was a bachelor, Lugosi responded, “Oh, surely, madame. And ‘open for business,’ you think, yes?”

If indeed Lugosi and Bow were lovers—and given Bow’s legend, “became very good friends” is interpreted as such—the romance was probably not the kind Lugosi favored. He certainly did not care to share his women, but Bow’s favors were widely distributed.  Gorgeous, carefree, age 23 and definitely not in the market for a husband or even a regular lover, she was constantly surrounded with friends and hangers-on. On one weekend (according to David Stenn’s biography Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild), Lugosi arrived at her Malibu cottage only to find every bedroom occupied by guests. One gave her room to Lugosi and moved in with Bow.

When Clara met Lugosi in 1928, she was moreorless between great romances. Her typically “torrid affair” with Gary Cooper had just ended, and a romance of allegedly equal passion and abandon with Broadway singer Harry Richman had not yet begun. Though Cooper would be one of her great loves, she certainly had others during 1926 and 1927 when their romance peaked. By 1928 each had moved on, but were occasionally seen together, as both juggled multiple lovers. Though Clara openly prized her freedom, the press often carried announcements of her engagements and pending marriages. These abound for Cooper and Richman, but neither was true. Nor were they true for Lugosi, when those same rumors started in 1929, probably long after whatever relationship they had ended. Lugosi’s film career struggled through 1928 and 1929. The simple fact he never appeared in a Bow film or at her studio (Paramount) suggests the limitations on their fling. Bow was never shy about using her influence to land her lovers roles, with or without their knowledge.

About the time Lugosi met Bow, her brief stardom had crested. Scandal, her own fragile health, and sound films (she had a wonderful Brooklyn accent) brought her downfall. By 1931 her career was in ruins and by 1933 she had made her last film.Lugosi apparently retained affection for this unpretentious, generous woman, for he kept a tasteful nude painting of her until he died. What sort of relationship Lugosi maintained with Bow beyond his two-month engagement at the Biltmore is unknown. In August 1928 Dracula moved on to San Francisco, where Lugosi would meet a woman who at first appeared more to his tastes.

Beatrice Woodruff, Beatrice Mills, Beatrice Weeks

Beatrice Woodruff was born in 1897 in New York City. Her father, John S. Woodruff graduated from Harvard shortly before her birth, and soon afterwards entered a career in naval law. He eventually became Director of the Bureau of Law of the United States Shipping Board. Through her mother, Marion Parker, Beatrice could trace her lineage back to the Pilgrims. As befitting a young woman of her rank, she attended the exclusive Wellesley school and a European finishing school. There, she developed a proficiency in foreign languages.

In 1921 she married Goadby Mills, son of a prominent New York stockbroker. Immediately following their large, elaborate ceremony, Mills told his bride, 20 years his junior, “Now we are married and the main point is that you are legally mine.” In the succeeding weeks Mills proved his claim. After 57 days Beatrice could stand no more and the two separated. Mills died 10 years later in a plane crash.

In January 1922, Beatrice filed for divorced in Los Angeles on the grounds of cruelty. She may have gone from New York to the West Coast because she was already developing health problems, and needed milder winters. In California she met Charles Peter Weeks, a San Francisco architect of local notoriety. Mills had lived in his father’s shadow and off his wealth, but Weeks was a self‑made man. His firm, Weeks and Day (presumably no pun intended), built many of the finest structures of San Francisco’s post‑earthquake renaissance. He designed a number of fashionable homes, apartment buildings and hotels on Nob Hill. About the time he met Beatrice he was caught in the roguish position of admitting that a magnificent golden staircase in an office building he had just completed was an unaccredited duplicate of that in the Borgos Cathedral. His romance with the still‑married Beatrice raised eyebrows in the society circles into which he had risen. On January 30, 1923—one day after her divorce from Mills was final—Beatrice, age 25, married Weeks, age 45. She chose not to relive any moments from her first marriage; this time the ceremony was quite modest.

Nothing is known of Beatrice Weeks’ life for the next five years. She and her husband settled into the Brocklebank Apartments, which of course Weeks had designed. Their contentment, if any, collapsed in March 1928. Pulmonary disease, which would plague her for the remainder of her life, struck Beatrice at age 31. As she hovered near death, Weeks died without warning in his sleep on March 25. The cause of his death was described only as due to “a malady from which he had been suffering for a number of years and for which he had been under the care of a physician for many months.” He died in the room next to Beatrice, but she was not told of his death until sometimes afterwards.

That Beatrice ever fully recovered, emotionally or physically, from the ordeal is doubtful. The unexpected death of her father at age 58 in January 1929 caused yet another setback. Perhaps the only bright spot for her in these tragic months involved a handsome, exotic actor in the summer of 1928.

The First Meeting in 1928

The touring company of Dracula arrived in San Francisco in mid‑August 1928 for a three week run. The troupe booked into the Mark Hopkins Hotel, just a short walk from the Columbia theatre and, incidentally, one of Weeks’ architectural masterpieces. Dracula opened on the 20th to rave reviews, and its star soon became a celebrity throughout the Bay Area. Bela Lugosi at 46 was at the height of his powers. Commanding and aristocratic in presence, riding success as Dracula, he was finally poised to claim the stardom that world war and political upheaval had denied him in Hungary.

Shortly after the San Francisco premiere of Dracula Lugosi attended a reception at Mare Island, and met a shapely, raven‑haired woman. The party was one of Beatrice Weeks’ first outings since her near‑fatal illness and the death of husband five months before. She and Lugosi struck up a quick friendship and became constant companions for the remainder of Dracula’s run in San Francisco and then Oakland. When Lugosi returned to Hollywood in late September, the two wrote and stayed in touch.

Lugosi still commanded the striking good looks of his youth, and American women found his old world mien irresistible. Weeks herself was a stunning beauty. History has played a cruel joke in that the only photograph of Beatrice Weeks seen today is singularly unflattering. In this photo, which appears in every Lugosi biography, she and Lugosi seem to be comparing their large noses. As a good many photos in San Francisco newspapers testify, she was quite beautiful. Perhaps the woman with Lugosi in the famous photograph is not Weeks at all.

At 31 Beatrice was wealthy, beautiful and quite alone. With her lung condition she now lived with the lingering possibility of early death. That question must have haunted her through 1928 and 1929 and the successive deaths of her husband and father. Now to her came a worldly foreigner who had survived several close brushes with death and who was famous in a role as lord of the undead. Goadby Mills, Charles Weeks and now Bela Lugosi all were in their mid‑forties when their romances with Beatrice began; all were well‑known in their professional and social circles; all three can be surmised to have been men of strong and dominant personalities. These similarities beg the question—was Beatrice marrying the same man time and again? Was her father—Harvard lawyer, naval officer and Washington bureaucrat—the prototype for Beatrice’s three husbands?

Much the same can be asked of Lugosi. Beneath his self‑assured exterior must have lurked a man daunted by his new surroundings. He no doubt hoped to pool Dracula into a film career, but the advent of sound films stalled his progress. The thick Lugosi accent and the crude sound equipment were simply not ready for each other. Shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles in June 1928, he was whisked off to a screen test with Gloria Swanson. He did not get the part, not due to his English, but because unlike most actors in Hollywood claiming to be over 6 feet tall, Lugosi actually was. Swanson disappeared when next to him. Surely, by the time he first met Weeks, he had learned—as in the past 15 years he had learnt on the Italian front, in post‑war Europe, and in New York—that Hollywood was yet another jungle with its own laws of survival. One of those laws was the worship of youth, and Lugosi was pushing 50. Another creeping notion was worrying him: in 1928, two years before filming Dracula, he was already complaining that American acting relied too much on typecasting and that he was playing the same type of role too often.

The Woman in Hungary, The Widow in California

When Lugosi fled Hungary in 1919, his sheltered wife Ilona did not follow. Both the Cremer and Lennig Lugosi biographies testify that he loved his young bride very much. The suggestive evidence that he never forgot her, that he was haunted by that loss, is considerable. In speaking of life in Hungary to interviewers, Lugosi would sometimes indulge in the most incredible fantasies. He told of an encounter with a female vampire; he once conjured up the famous story of Hedy the Cat Woman; he once claimed he deserted not only a wife but also sons in Hungary. For two decades he whimsically doled out variations of these tales to eager journalists and publicists. The one consistent element in all of them is the Woman in Hungary.

In America, Lugosi's wives would be either very young, very Hungarian or both. His second wife, Ilona von Montagh, was Hungarian. Sometime after their marriage ended she sailed for Europe and never returned. Beatrice, his third, was his junior by 15 years; Hope Lininger, his fifth, by 32. His fourth and only marriage of any duration was to Lillian Arch, 30 years younger and a second generation Hungarian‑American. She states in Cremer’s biography:

Yes, that was the reason why he married me. I was a person he could mould to his complete satisfaction.

Lugosi’s memory of Ilona crept into at least one of his film roles. The Black Cat of 1934 offered Lugosi one of the few roles which he himself helped design. Lennig relates in The Count that Vitus Werdegast was only a small part until Lugosi talked director Edgar G. Ulmer into expanding it. In the film, Werdegast returns to Hungary after 15 years in prison to find his lost bride and daughter and to kill the man who took them from him. He finds his wife unchanged—dead and encased in glass. His daughter, her mother’s image, is killed before Werdegast can reach her. He weeps over her body before taking his revenge. Werdegast’s plight is a morbid distortion of Lugosi’s own. This incredible film is almost a dark biography of the actor—the lost love in Hungary, the upheaval of world war, 15 years of exile, and the evils of the new world personified by Boris Karloff. If The Raven is Lugosi’s self-parody, The Black Cat is his self-tragedy.

Reclaiming a young, unspoilt love is a common male fantasy, and a familiar element in horror plots. The fantasy dogged Lugosi, most clearly in The Raven, The Corpse Vanishes, The Invisible Ghost, Voodoo Man, and his soliloquy in Bride of the Monster. Of course to suggest that the theme’s relation to Lugosi’s own life was intentional in any films other than The Black Cat is absurd. But the list contains his most personal performance, his most passionate, the best of his poverty row films and a surprisingly poignant moment in an otherwise typically awful Ed Wood film.

In Beatrice, Lugosi might well have seen a clear reflection of his first Ilona. Both came from social classes above his. Despite their financial means, both were in need of a strong man. When he last saw Ilona and when he first met Beatrice a distinct air of tragedy hovered over them.

The Whirlwind Marriage and Divorce of 1929

Dracula reopened at the Columbia Theatre on July 22, 1929. A notice appeared in the July 24 San Francisco Chronicle, announcing Beatrice’s and Lugosi’s impending wedding for Saturday, July 27. The marriage therefore was not the unplanned affair as it has been often described. According to The Chronicle, after meeting again “both decided nothing but marriage could make them happy.” The couple and a few of the bride’s friends went to Redwood City (now in the news everyday, as the site of the Laci Peterson murder trial) on the morning of the 27th and returned in time for a matinee performance of Dracula.

At the Columbia a reporter from The San Francisco Examiner caught up with Lugosi. The actor, joking about the impossibility of hiding from the American press, was in rare form:

Examiner: Is she a blonde or a brunette?

Lugosi: Ooooooooo, I do not know.

Examiner: You do not know?

Lugosi: No. You see, it is like this. The eyes got in the way. You understand.

The interview ended with a remark by Lugosi quite out of context that must have sent shivers through Beatrice Lugosi when she read it:

Marriage and a career? No, the Hungarians believe that the man should take care of the woman. Her divine profession is motherhood.

That remark, of course, marked Lugosi's unfailing transition from a passionate lover to a tyrannical husband. In marriage, Lugosi's Hungarian upbringing and the example of his imperious father combined with his quirks and insecurities. The result was jealousy and domination. Lugosi’s wives either submitted to, or at least subverted, his will or left.

Beatrice and Lugosi separated, if they are to be believed, approximately August 1. They may have stayed together longer, for Lugosi would remain in the Bay Area for 5 weeks, playing 26 Dracula performances in San Francisco and then 20 more in Oakland.

Exactly what occurred during the couple’s brief time together is nowhere accurately recorded. Robert Cremer’s Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape describes the marriage as four days of drinking, partying, hangovers and bickering. Beatrice emerges as a Roaring 20’s socialite, living only for fun; Lugosi as a husband expecting a wife to cater to his mornings‑after and not vice versa. Cremer does not mention the prior meeting in 1928 or of Weeks’ background. Whether Cremer is quoting Lillian Lugosi or the Hungarian language newspaper, California Magyarsag, his ultimate source is Lugosi himself. Certainly to his Hungarian friends and particularly his next wife, Lugosi would tend to portray the Weeks marriage as a 4‑day fling and mistake, rather than a year‑long relationship. Cremer’s account is valuable in that relates how Lugosi chose to recall the marriage.

The break-up of the Lugosis might not have attracted much media attention—Lugosi was then only a minor celebrity—except the Hearst newspaper chain, based in San Francisco, sensed a good story. On November 5, 1929 The Daily Mirror, Hearst’s New York paper, ran this highly dramatized, inaccurate account, which dredges up Lugosi’s brief fling with Clara Bow:

Lugosi Wins Heart of Clara Bow, Says Second Wife, Seeking Divorce.

Film Star’s Secret Love is Revealed

Clara Bow, flaming haired siren of the screen, has at last met with true romance--a romance, which ghost-like, sprang from the ashes of another woman’s love.

Folks, meet her fiancé and husband to-be; Count Bela Lugosi, Hungarian actor, the male vampire who took the leading role in the blood-curdling drama, “Dracula”.

Revelation of their secret love came exclusively to the Daily Mirror yesterday when Lugosi’s wife, the specially prominent, former Mrs. Charles Peter Weeks, widow of a noted San Francisco architect, filed suit for a divorce in Reno.

Simultaneously, the actual low-down on the Clara Bow-Harry Richman engagement was obtained from the same source.

Lugosi Returns

Clara, the impetuous, in a spirit of pique, caused the report of the forthcoming nuptials with the handsome night club entertainer to be spread after the long-haired Count Bela jilted her to become the third husband of the California society woman.

The fact that Count’s marriage resulted in a fiasco, lasting only four and one half days, apparently has appeased the feelings of the gay little screen star, and Lugosi has once more resumed his place in her affections.

“I don’t know when they will be married,” Mrs. Lugosi said. “But before I left my husband he told me he and Clara had been engaged; that they had agreed to remain away from each other a year to test their love.”

Lugosi’s ardent attachment for Miss Bow began shortly after he was divorced by his first wife, the former Ilona von Montagh, erstwhile musical comedy star, almost five years ago.

At that time the first Mrs. Lugosi, in gaining her freedom, denounced her married life with the noted Hungarian star, as “two months of boredom.”

He’s Heavy Lover

The Hungarian actor first gained the reputation as a heavy lover in this country, when, prior to his first marriage, he loved Estelle Winwood, in “Red Poppy”, so enthusiastically he cracked three of her ribs, causing her to retire from the cast.

Not at all loath to discuss her unhappy marital adventure with the foreign actor, the latest Mrs. Lugosi expressed no animosity to the youthful screen actress, whom she charges now holds the key to her husband’s heart.

Battle Starts Early

Lugosi fought the second day of their married life, his wife declared yesterday. “He slapped me in the face because I ate a lamb chop, which he had hidden in the icebox for his after‑theater, midnight lunch.

“'If you want lamb chops‑‑buy your own,' my husband said”

Their mutual dissatisfaction with the bonds of matrimony became apparent on the third day following the nuptials, when Lugosi demanded her checkbook and key to her safe deposit vaults, Mrs. Lugosi explained.

“He told me that he was King; that in Hungary a wife and all she possessed were placed at the husband’s disposal; that, in effect, she was nothing but a servant

"Of course, I objected to this, and we quarreled.

“His table manners were terrible. He would break an apple in half and crowd one of the portions in his mouth, unable to speak or to swallow until he had chewed it up fine.

“He constantly used his fingers in place of a fork and was addicted to similar habits that simply frayed my nerves.”

Mrs. Lugosi, who fled from their San Francisco apartment while her husband was portraying his role in a leading Coast theatre, said the actual breaking point came when her husband elaborately furnished his own bedroom, afterward informing her if she didn’t care to equip her own, she could sleep on the floor.

As executrix of her former husband’s $2,500,000 estate, Mrs. Lugosi settled in her luxurious Riverside Hotel, Reno suite, said she was in no need of funds and expected none from her husband.

"I wish Miss Bow all the luck in the world,” she said. “However, I cannot see any happiness for her if she marries my husband unless he improves his manners.”