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STRANGE CARGO

By Frank J. Dello Stritto & Gary Don Rhodes

Bela Lugosi first arrived in the United States on December 4, 1920 aboard the steamship Gráf Tisza Istvan (“Count Steven Tisza”). He was then an unknown 38 year-old Hungarian actor and political exile, In less than a decade, Lugosi he would film his classic Dracula in Hollywood and be awaiting its release.

The basic facts of his maiden voyage have been long established. The ship sailed from Trieste; Lugosi worked in the crew, and upon disembarking in New Orleans, he immediately went to New York City. Much more detail on the voyage has been unearthed from shipping news reported in New Orleans’ newspapers and from the U.S. National Archives. The National Archives keep ship arrival records, mainly for genealogical research. These reliable documents can be compared to the colorful tales about the passage that have become part of the Lugosi legend.

Lugosi rarely reminisced on record about his time on the Gráf Tisza Istvan. One brief comment occasionally appears in publicity releases for his 1930s and 1940s films:

It was in December, in 1920 that I left Europe on a cargo-boat. The weather was appalling. In a very heavy sea and storm the cargo of the boat was in a slanting position, which resulted in a delay in our scheduled arrival to New Orleans before Christmas. You can imagine spending, unprepared, a Christmas Eve on a slanting, floating cargo boat. I locked myself in my cabin, and the rest is too personal to me to be given to the public.

Lugosi embellishes the account, but not much. He left Europe in late October, not December, and spent Christmas Eve safely onshore, probably in New York. But the ship was weeks late on a routine voyage. In a 1941 interview for Modern Screen, Lugosi elaborated to Gladys Hall:

Our cargo was steel plates. There was a very heavy storm at sea. Our ship turned over on its side and for three and a half weeks we were that way. Five weeks it took us to go from Trieste to New Orleans. Spend three and a half weeks turned sidewise upon a raging sea and the mind totters and heaves like the seas beneath.

Much of this account is roughly correct. The Gráf Tisza Istvan arrived in New Orleans about 5 weeks after leaving Trieste, and about three and a half weeks after leaving Gibraltar and entering the open Atlantic. But the ship’s cargo on arrival in the United States, as reported in the December 7, 1920 Times-Picayune, was 12,250 boxes of lemons, 185 cases of grapes, 230 cases of preserves, 275 bags of almonds and 125 bags of fillet nuts. That produce was loaded in Palermo about a week after the Gráf Tisza Istvan left Trieste. Quite possibly, steel was loaded at Trieste, an industrial port, and unloaded at Palermo, an agricultural port. Precisely why the ship was so late in arriving in New Orleans is not known, but Lugosi himself simply blamed the weather.

For each member of the crew, the ship’s manifest lists name, age, sex, race & nationality, height & weight, ability to read, date & place of signing on, and position in the ship’s company. Average height and weight of the crew, 5’7” and 152 pounds, was typical of the time, and the average age was 32. Lugosi, at 6’1”, was the tallest man onboard, and at age 38 was six years older than his Captain, Lodovico Szabo. Race of all 39 men who eventually made the voyage is given as “European”, and nationality as “Italian”, though clearly many were not. Only three—Gennaro Sappio, Domenico Ascione and Alberto Gitz—were illiterate. They were part of the nine-man team of “firemen” who stoked coal into the engine furnaces.

From data in the manifest, movements of the Gráf Tisza Istvan just prior to the voyage can be discerned. Some of the crew were “old hands”—had been on the ship for months and years—but most positions saw high turnover. The ship’s homeport was Monfalcone, across the bay from Trieste, and groups of men signed-on about every two weeks: around September 25, 1920 (when Captain Szabo took command), then around October 10 and again around October 25. Two weeks is not long enough for a round trip voyage to America, so the Gráf Tisza Istvan probably did short charters in the Mediterranean. Lugosi joined the company at Monfalcone on Thursday, October 26. He and 24 year-old Natale Miandielo were the last crewmembers to board before leaving port. The document in the National Archives is the “List or Manifest of Aliens Employed on the Vessel as Members of Crew” required of any vessel landing in a US port. Captain Szabo prepared the document in English, listing all 37 men then onboard as Italian, and sailed for Palermo to load the fruit, nuts and preserves. The manifest lists Lugosi as apprentice (ie, “Appr.”). Ship’s crews are usually rather young; and a 38 year-old apprentice at sea is almost as rare as a 38 year-old rookie in baseball. Lugosi must have been rather persuasive to land the job.

The U.S. Consulate at Palermo notarized the crew manifest when the Gráf Tisza Istvan again set sail on November 3. The vessel stopped briefly at Gibraltar to take on two more crewmen, Romeo Fiume and Mario Leban, and again the local U. S. Consulate notarized the amended manifest. On November 9, the ship finally sailed into the Atlantic. Coming from land-locked Hungary, Lugosi had never seen an ocean before.

The Times-Picayune estimated the Gráf Tisza Istvan arrival as November 22. On the 22^nd, the ship was nowhere in sight, and thereafter day-by-day each update of shipping activity pushes the arrival back a day. The crew manifest includes no radio officer, and perhaps the ship had no way to communicate its delay to shore. On the night of December 4, twelve days overdue, the Gráf Tisza Istvan reached New Orleans. It had to wait a day until its berth on St. James Street could received it. In addition to Lugosi, five men disembarked: Miandielo, Fiume, Loban, Pietro Fiaraguna, the 2^nd Steward, and Giovanni Albanese, a 16 year-old cook’s boy, the youngest man onboard.

No more information can be squeezed from the terse manifest and shipping news, but they can be measured against the full-blooded account of Lugosi’s first trans-Atlantic crossing in Robert Cremer’s 1976 biography Lugosi - The Man Behind the Cape. Cremer pieces together the tale Lugosi himself allegedly told in private, and the recollections of a shipmate, Hugo Koepleneck. Both versions came to Cremer via Lugosi’s long-time friend, Willi Szittja. A brief summary of the Cremer/Szittja/Koepleneck account is:

Lugosi arrived in Trieste from Berlin in mid-October 1920. Many penniless refugees crowded into the city, but Lugosi was not one of them. He could not afford passage to America, but his year in Berlin (where he made 10 films after fleeing Hungary) gave him a bit of a bankroll. He hoped to hire on a ship bound for the United States. His only credentials were his time almost 25 years before as a riveter and machinist’s apprentice. Luigi Cozzi, the portmaster in charge of issuing seamen’s papers, immediately saw through Lugosi’s claims of experience, but he needed able-bodied men, and he was touched by the refugees’ plight. Lugosi never saw Cozzi again, but as with anyone that helped him, Lugosi never forgot his generosity. Lugosi got his papers, signed on the Gráf Tisza Istvan, and watched the iron beams loaded.

That Lugosi is “apprentice” in the ship’s company implies that the job was more due to Cozzi’s kind heart than any shortage of men. Lugosi remembered his position as “assistant engineer”, though no such position exists in ships’ companies and the Gráf Tisza Istvan had a full complement of Chief, 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd Engineers. With a crew of 36 already onboard at Trieste, the ship was not undermanned. It did stop to take on two more men at Gibraltar—but that was probably a simple economy: they were not needed in the Mediterranean, but would be in the Atlantic.

Cremer’s tale becomes fantastic once the Gráf Tisza Istvan passes Gibraltar. After a few days trying to develop sea legs, Lugosi regained his good spirits and a rather expansive mood. He regaled the crew with tales of his exploits in Hungary and met with stony silence. In 1919, he had sided with the revolutionaries; the crew almost to a man were ultra-royalists. Hostility against him grew among them until Lugosi’s very life was in danger. Even Captain Szabo gave his tacit approval of disposing of the “traitor”. Chief Engineer Koepleneck and 2^nd Engineer Felix Hartman became Lugosi’s protectors, and literally hid him for weeks in the bowels of the ship. The thirst for Lugosi’s blood did not slacken through the weeks of the voyage, and he had to constantly change his hiding place to evade capture. Koepleneck and Hartman smuggled him food when they could, but the crew watched them closely. After weeks of this living hell, the Gráf Tisza Istvan finally arrived in New Orleans. Exhausted and starving Lugosi scrambled over the side into a raft, and was finally saved by the harbor patrol.

Can this incredible story be true? If such hostility did indeed erupt onboard, it had to be after Gibraltar when Lugosi could no longer leave. Seaman are often portrayed as politically conservative, but as suggested in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, filmed a few years after the voyage, that stereotype does not always fit. As with all the men who left the ship in New Orleans, a simple “discharged” is stamped above Lugosi’s name on the manifest, with no indication of any exceptional circumstances. An overriding concern of freighter captains is avoiding delays in entering or leaving ports, particularly those involving port and government authorities. Such delays are expensive, especially with a cargo of ripening fruit already two weeks late in the hold, and could easily cost a captain his command. Would Captain Szabo have encouraged a situation that could only invite inquiries or worse? And why must Lugosi starve with a cargo of grapes, nuts and preserves, not iron beams, to feast on?

The manifest does not show of a crew of Hungarian royalists bemoaning the loss of their monarch. Of the 39 men listed, 17 have Italian surnames; another 13 Italian first names--hardly surprising on an Italian freighter, which officially lists its entire crew as “Italian”. Italy still had its King Victor Emmanuel III, and any Italians among the crew would have been unlikely to mourn the downfall of Austro-Hungarian Emperor (and King of Hungary) Charles I. What is most suggestive in the manifest is Koepleneck and Hartmann. Koepleneck (spelled “Kaplanek” on the manifest) is not the Chief Engineer, as related by Cremer and Szittja, but 2^nd Officer, a far less senior position and, as it might be described today, on a distinctly different career path. There is no 2^nd Engineer Felix Hartman--no Felix or Hartman at all (there is a Felice Vukosia, 1^st Steward) and the 2^nd Engineer was a Robert Stulz. Did Kaplanek simply get some names wrong when he told his story to Szittja? Did Szittja confuse Kaplanek’s position in the crew, as he misspelled his name? Over the years, did Kaplanek shift his most colorful sea tale to his most famous shipmate, and also give himself a new career and a promotion? If not—if Kaplanek’s tale is true—could Lugosi have resisted telling his own version of this most incredible adventure? For sailors and actors alike, tall tales get taller over time.

On March 23, 1921 Lugosi reported to Immigration Services on Ellis Island off New York City. The data on the “Inspector’s Interrogation During Primary Alien Inspection” is reprinted in Gary Don Rhodes’ 1997 book, Lugosi. Whether specific information on the form was provided by Lugosi or interpreted by the interviewer (such as the misspelling of “Istwan” and the underestimate of Lugosi’s height at 5”10’) can only be speculated. Ellis Island certainly had competent languists and translators in dozens of languages. Lugosi’s occupation is listed as “sailor”, and all questions about nationality, race, language and country of birth are filled in simply “Roumanian”. Lugosi may have been a legal claim to Rumanian citizenship, since his birthplace Lugoj became part of that country (and still is) after World War I. He himself may not have been sure of which country claimed him—in 1933, on becoming a naturalized American, Lugosi formally relinquished citizenship in both Hungary and Rumania.

Anyone wishing a copy of the 4-page crew manifest for Lugosi’s voyage on the Gráf Tisza Istvan may inquire at their local branch of the U. S. National Archives. Or they can send their address and a check for $3.00 (entirely for copying and postage) to Cult Movies Press—and be patient—as Bela Lugosi learned from bitter experience, sometimes shipments take longer than planned.