Exploring "Britten as Performer."

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: OCTOBER 28, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 102801np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography"
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "THE TINGLER")

VINCENT PRICE, ACTOR: Ladies and gentlemen, just a word of warning. If any of you are not convinced that you have a Tingler of your own, the next time you're frightened in the dark -- don't scream.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: That's Vincent Price in "The Tingler," one of the films that earned him the name the King of Horror. There was also "House of Wax," "House on Haunted Hill," "House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Tales of Terror," "The Raven," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tomb of Ligeia," "The Conqueror Worm," and "Theater of Blood," films that have a special appeal around Halloween time.

My guest is Price's daughter, Victoria Price. She's written a new biography of her father. On the first page, she points out that although his name is virtually synonymous with the horror genre, Price's horror films add up to fewer than a third of the more than 100 pictures he made in his 55-year career as an actor.

Victoria Price was born in 1962 at the height of her father's fame, when he was just over 50. I asked if she watched her father's horror films when she was growing up.

VICTORIA PRICE: I did, but I didn't like them very much. I was very scared by this person that I saw on the screen, because he bore almost no resemblance to the person that I knew in real life. The kind of person my dad played on screen was a sort of hypersensitive aesthete who was an outsider and was always in some kind of conflict with society at large.

And the man who I knew as my dad was the most expansive, loving, fun people person you could possibly imagine. So they were very different, the two people, and that was hard for me to reconcile. And then the other part that was very difficult was the fact that in almost every movie he did, he was killed, and not just, you know, some sort of swooning Camille-like death, he was bludgeoned, immolated, plunged into vats of boiling wax.

And when you're a kid who's got a vivid imagination, and that was encouraged by my dad, it was hard to watch, because reality and film seemed to merge. And I was terrified, actually.

GROSS: How did he get started doing horror films?

PRICE: Well, it's an interesting story. When he started out as an actor, he was a huge star on Broadway. And he signed a contract with Universal. That was the first movie contract he signed. And of course they were the big horror studio of the '30s. But he only did one or two quasi-horror movies at that time.

He was in a movie called "The Tower of London," which was sort of a bastardized version of "Richard I." And Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone were in that movie, and my dad had a short role as the Duke of Clarence. So it wasn't really a horror role.

And then he played in "The Invisible Man Returns," he played the invisible man, the part that Claude Rains had originated. So those were two little forays into horror, but he was by no means a horror star. He was seen as a leading man, and in fact sort of a matinee idol.

But the first real horror movie per se came in 1953. He was offered tow parts in the same week, one for a play on Broadway called "We're No Angels," which actually went on to become a hit movie with Humphrey Bogart, and the other was for a movie. And my dad decided to take the movie. And that movie was "House of Wax."

And that was the film that really catapulted him into the horror genre, although it would be almost another 10 years before he became the, quote unquote, "King of Horror."

GROSS: In "House of Wax," you know, he runs a wax museum. It's shot in 3-D. And the director of the movie, Andre De Toth (ph) was blind in one eye. What did your father, Vincent Price, have to say about that?

PRICE: Well, he actually thought that his blindness was the reason that the film succeeded, because 3-D was one of these studio gimmicks aimed at bringing the audiences who had left going -- left off going to movie theaters because of television back into the theaters, so there were wide-angle processes like CinemaScope, and there was 3-D.

And 3-D relied on gimmickry, really. So things were hurled out at the audience or came flying out into your face, and you had the illusion of something coming toward you. But with only one eye, De Toth had no depth perception, so he kind of didn't get what all the fuss was about.

And he would remember every so often, Oh, right, let's, you know, throw something out at the audience. And my dad always felt that it was his restraint in using the technique, or the gimmick, that made the film such a success.

GROSS: My guest is Victoria Price, and she's written a biography of her father, Vincent Price.

What was the importance of the 1958 film "The Fly" in your father's career?

PRICE: Well, that was an interesting time for him. He had just come off of being gray-listed during the McCarthy era, and he had only just started to get film work back. It wasn't, you know a fantastic role, but it was a fun movie. He liked that. And it was a studio film. And it was a studio film for the studio that had been his mainstay during the '40s. And so it was sort of like being invited back into the fold.

But the great story from that movie is, the final climactic scene, which everyone remembers, is the scene in which the fly with the human head is trapped in the spider web, and it's about to be eaten by the big, hairy, very fake-looking spider, and it's screaming "Help me!"

So they shot that whole scene with the fly and the fly head. And then when my dad and Herbert Marshall, his co-star, had to shoot that, they actually were looking at a black rock that had a little white head painted on it. They thought this was so hysterical that they would just start to shoot the scene and get the giggles and be doubled over laughing.

And Herbert was always trying to be the one, you know, who was getting them back on cue. Come on, Vinnie, we have to do the take. Let's get this right. And my dad would look at the fly and really try and do it, and burst out laughing. I think it took them an hour to finally get the shot right.

I would give anything to see those outtakes.

GROSS: Well, let's hear the actual scene that they did together. And Vincent Price is the brother of the scientist who has accidentally transformed himself into a fly. So the fly, who is the brother, and this spider that's about to eat him, have both been killed by Herbert Marshall, who's thrown a rock into the spider web. And here's what happens.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "THE FLY")

VINCENT PRICE: You've committed murder just as much as Helene did. You killed a fly with a human head. She killed a human with a fly head. If she murdered, so did you.

HERBERT MARSHALL, ACTOR: I know. Who's going to believe us here? They'll say we're both mad.

VINCENT PRICE: But he could have started the press and got under it in time. It could have been suicide. Andre's mind was deranged. Helene just tried to stop him.

MARSHALL: But the stroke count (ph)?

VINCENT PRICE: I was the one who forgot to reset it after it was used the last time.

MARSHALL: Yes. Yes. It could have been suicide.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: That's Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall in a scene from the 1958 film "The Fly." My guest is Vincent Price's daughter, Victoria Price, who has just written a biography about her father.

Your father, Vincent Price, did a couple of movies for William Castle, "House on Haunted Hill" and "The Tingler." And Castle was a real showman who would use all these, like, scary techniques to get the audiences into theaters and then try to scare them even more once he got them there.

"House on Haunted Hill" had some kind of special effect that he described as what, Emrego or something?

PRICE: Emergo (ph)...

GROSS: Emergo.

PRICE: ... or Emer-jo. Yes. The theaters were rigged up, as close as I understand it -- I wasn't alive at that point, but someone like John Waters could probably give you a blow-by-blow of William Castle.

GROSS: Oh, he's a big Castle fan, yes.

PRICE: Yes. He said going to see "The Tingler" was one of the highlights of his youth, I think sort of propelled him into the career that he has today.

But my understanding is that there's a scene in "House on Haunted Hill" where a skeleton comes out of a vat of boiling acid or something, there was always a vat of boiling something. And at this point, there was a pulley system rigged up in the movie theaters, and the skeleton would sort of appear to emerge from the screen and swing out into the audience and scare them to death.

So that was the premise as far as I understand it behind Emergo or Emer-jo.

GROSS: Well, let's talk about "The Tingler," which is one of Vincent Price's more famous horror films. And the Tingler is a creature that looks a lot like a plastic lobster (laughs) that -- not the most impressive special effect, that grows in your spine as you become more afraid. But if a Tingler gets loose from a person's body, it can kill another person and lodge in their body.

But it shrinks if you scream. And in the climactic scene in "The Tingler," a Tingler has gotten loose, and one of the characters in the movie "The Tingler" actually owns a movie theater. And the Tingler has gotten loose in the movie theater that's owned by this character. So in the movie, Vincent Price darkens the lights in the movie theater and announces to the patrons of this theater that the Tingler is loose.

And the screen goes to black. And all the -- all the real moviegoers see is a black screen. And here's Vincent Price.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

VINCENT PRICE: Ladies and gentlemen, please, do not panic. But scream -- scream for your life! The Tingler is loose in this theater, and (inaudible), it may kill you!

(AUDIENCE SCREAMS)

VINCENT PRICE: Scream! Scream! Keep screaming! Scream for your lives!

ACTOR: It's here! It's over here! (screams)

ACTOR: Look out, it's under the seats!

VINCENT PRICE: Ladies and gentlemen...

ACTOR: Oh, my God, it's under the seats!

VINCENT PRICE: ... the Tingler has been paralyzed by your screaming. There is no more danger. We will now resume the showing of the movie.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: That's Vincent Price in "The Tingler."

PRICE: That's so great.

GROSS: And...

PRICE: It's fabulous.

GROSS: And, of course, the movie theater seats were rigged in a certain way by William Castle so that people who were watching the movie "The Tingler" would feel what?

PRICE: Well, they would feel a buzzing sensation. It was called Percepto. So -- and not every seat was rigged, only a few random seats in the theater. So there you were, sitting watching the movie, not expecting anything to happen, and all of a sudden this buzz or this shock would go through your body, and you'd scream, and that would start the audience screaming.

It was definitely an audience participation kind of thing.

GROSS: Have you heard great stories from people who saw "The Tingler" when it was first released?

PRICE: I have, and John Waters was the best. He just -- he called it one of the defining moments of his childhood. And I can only imagine what that must have been like. One of the regrets I have of growing up as Vincent Price's daughter and so having my fear issues about those movies is, I've never been able to enjoy the horror genre as some people do with that kind of gleeful excitement that people get.

And I regret that, because it sounds like so much fun.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Victoria Price, and she's written a new biography of her father, Vincent Price.

Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Victoria Price, and she's written a biography of her father, Vincent Price.

Now, he starred in several movie adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Raven." "Masque of the Red Death" is Poe too, isn't it?

PRICE: Yes.

GROSS: How...

PRICE: "Tomb of Ligeia."

GROSS: "The Tomb of Ligeia." How did Vincent Price end up starring in these Roger Corman-Edgar Allen Poe movies?

PRICE: Well, Roger had been a youthful prodigy. He's been a young producer-director for American International Pictures in the 50s when they were one of a handful of independent producers trying to get independent pictures out to the movie theaters to compete with or to sort of fill a gap that was made by the studios, making fewer pictures and concentrating on big Technicolor efforts.

And they saw an audience, particularly for teenagers who loved going to drive-ins and movie theaters. And he had quite a success doing this. And by 1960, he sort of felt that he had explored that avenue to the fullest, and so when the two producers, Sam Arkoff (ph) and James Nicholson (ph) at AIP approached him about doing a series of black and white horror films, he said, I have a better idea, let's do one adaptation of "The Fall of the House of Usher" in color for the price of the two.

And they talked about it, and they agreed upon it. And Roger's a very erudite, educated man, and he'd loved Poe since he was in high school. And he said to me that he only ever had one choice for the part, and that was my father. And he saw my father as having a great deal in common with this tortured hero, who is Roderick Usher.

And it was a wonderful collaboration, because Roger brought to the Poe stories a wonderful aesthetic sense. He really tried to be as true to the spirit of Poe as he could be.

And my father, after making a lot of fun films but not necessarily films that were high art, like "House on Haunted Hill" or "The Tingler," saw this as an opportunity to do something that had a little more artistic merit.

And so he and Roger collaborated, and it became a huge success. It played on a double bill with "Psycho," and received great critical acclaim, I mean, in places like "The New York Times," it was acclaimed.

And so this started, you know, the two guys, Arkoff and Nicholson saw, you know, how to make a buck, and they went after doing a whole series of Poe films.

GROSS: I want to play another Edgar Allen Poe adaptation that is a collaboration between Roger Corman and Vincent Price, and this is "The Pit and the Pendulum." And the movie takes a lot of liberties with the story on this, because it's really a short story and a much longer movie.

But your father played Don Medina, whose father had a torture chamber during the Spanish Inquisition, you know, the Vincent Price character's father was a notorious torturer. And he played both roles in this, Don Medina and Don Medina's father.

PRICE: Of course.

GROSS: So -- because there's flashbacks and so on. So early in the movie, I think it's Don Medina's brother-in-law comes looking to unravel the mystery of his sister's death. And Vincent Price is trying to explain what happened. And he takes the brother-in-law down to the father's torture chamber. And here's Vincent Price showing the torture chamber to his brother-in-law.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM")

VINCENT PRICE: This was my father's world, Mr. Barnett.

ACTOR: Spare yourself at least this, Nicholas.

VINCENT PRICE: How can I spare myself? Was he not my father? Am I not the spawn of his depraved blood?

ACTRESS: His depravity is not yours, Nicholas. Why scourge yourself because of it?

ACTOR: You have not answered me, Don Medina.

VINCENT PRICE: I shall not dwell upon the history of this -- this blasphemous chamber. Suffice it that the blood of a thousand men and women was spilled within these walls, limbs twisted and broken, eyes gouged from bloody sockets, flesh burned black.

ACTOR: Why are you telling me these things? What have they to do with my sister?

VINCENT PRICE: I should never have brought her here. She was too sensitive, too aware.

ACTOR: Aware of what?

VINCENT PRICE: The malignant atmosphere of this castle. It destroyed her.

ACTOR: My sister was a strong and willful woman, not subject to the influence of atmospheres.

VINCENT PRICE: You have been here only a matter of hours, Mr. Barnett. You cannot know what it is to live here month upon month, year after year, breathing this infernal air, absorbing the miasma of barbarity which permeates these walls, particularly this chamber.

But it did not bother her at first either. Our life was good, rich with the shared pleasures of our love.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: That's Vincent Price in "The Pit and the Pendulum."

One of the things I love about that scene is that he's doing his lines almost as if it was Shakespeare.

PRICE: Absolutely. And he was the most incredible speaker of verse. And so the opportunity to get to say things like, you know, "miasma of barbarity" must have thrilled him after the usual Hollywood fare.

GROSS: (laughs)

PRICE: But people told me that a lot while I was working on the book. It was Diana Rigg who said to me, People don't realize what a wonderful speaker of verse he was. And he was incredible. He had poem upon poem in his head. He loved one particular poem by Poe called "The Conqueror Worm," which he would at any provocation recite.

And loved to make us learn how to recite. He once, when I was about 10, paid me a dollar if I would learn the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" soliloquy from "Julius Caesar."

So he was big on propagating that.

GROSS: Now, your father, as we've been discussing, starred in a lot of horror films, and he says that he thought terror and horror were closely connected. You quote him as saying, "My job as an actor is to make audiences enjoy themselves even as they're being scared. My job is to try to make the unbelievable believable and the despicable delectable."

That last part really describes him, making the despicable delectable, particularly in a film like "The Masque of the Red Death," in which he plays this sadist who runs a castle with all these really perverse parties in it.

PRICE: Absolutely. Yes, and I think my father never lost his sense of humor about the movies. Of course, there were some movies which were just high camp, like "The Raven," but in a movie that was, in theory at least, more serious, like "The Masque of the Red Death," he infused his parts with a kind of glee, is the best way I can say it, so that even as you were being scared to death, you sensed that he got this kind of perverse joy out of what he was doing.

And it didn't feel malevolent or evil, it felt like you all were in some sort of conspiracy together, and you were all agreeing to participate in this scary activity together.

GROSS: Were there things that he didn't like about being a horror film star?

PRICE: Very many, actually. He loved the identity that it brought him. He loved the new audience that it brought him. He loved many aspects of the genre. He felt there was a place for the genre, that it was cathartic, and he loved some of the costume roles that he got to play.

But it's a tradeoff when you allow yourself to be typecast. And here was a man who had had a lengthy career in radio, in theater, in dramatic roles, in comedies. And all of a sudden he was the King of Horror, and that's all he was. People forgot that he'd ever done anything else. And he was also a man who had an entire second life in the visual arts. And that was forgotten too in the face of his horror legacy.

And so he felt that many of the things that he had done were neglected or underestimated, and parts that he could have played or would have loved to have played, he wasn't even offered because people felt that there was no way he could play them. All he could do was Poe, all he could do was scare people and wield pendulums.

GROSS: Victoria Price is the author of "Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography." We'll talk more in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

We're talking about actor Vincent Price with his daughter, Victoria Price. She's written a new biography of her father.

You say of all the films that he was in, the film that he considered to be the best film was "Laura."

PRICE: Yes.

GROSS: And that was pretty early in his career. That was before he did the horror films, wasn't it?

PRICE: Mm-hm, 1944.

GROSS: And what he said about the film was that it was "one of those few pictures that is perfect, not pretentious very simple, just brilliant." You want to describe the plot of "Laura"?

PRICE: Yes. "Laura" is a -- was based on a novel written by Vera Caspari or Cas-PA-ri, I'm not sure how you pronounce her name. And it's a murder mystery, a film noir. A man named Waldo Leidecker, he's a gossip columnist a la Walter Winchell, has a protegee who is a gifted advertising woman, and that is -- she's played by Gene Tierney. And Gene Tierney attracts a -- she's beautiful, Gene Tierney, obviously, so she attracts a coterie of admirers, among whom is a sort of ne'er-do-well Southern cad from Kentucky, played by my father. His name is Shelby Carpenter.

And Shelby keeps company with Laura's aunt, played by the great Judith Anderson. Well, Laura is murdered, and the film revolves around solving the mystery of Laura's murder. And leading the investigation is a very sort of prosaic character, a cop, played by Dana Andrews. And it's one of these perfect pieces, because it's really an ensemble piece. The five of them all play off of each other. Of course, what is revealed is that there's been a case of mistaken identity, and it's not Laura who's been murdered but another woman.

But it's one of those movies where each person brings something essential to the plot, and there's a great deal of dry wit. And it's really a sort of a brilliant piece, because each of the characters -- the other reason my dad felt that it worked is that each of the characters, as directed by Otto Preminger, had an undercurrent of evil or malevolence. So while there was a lot of sort of charming '40s New York high society banter going on, there was a definite element of evil going on underneath.

And it's a wonderful movie. It really holds up, even today.

GROSS: I -- he said that "Laura," he thought, was the best of all the movies he made. What were his favorite movies that he made?

PRICE: I think he liked "Theater of Blood" quite a bit, for a number of reasons, the first reason being -- well, I'll give you a little brief synopsis of the plot. He played a Shakespearian actor, a British Shakespearian actor, who has been continually slighted by the critics. It's sort of a critics' board that votes every year. And so in front of this board of nine critics, he leaps from a building into the Thames and dies, supposedly.

But he's faked his death, and so he comes back to murder each of the critics, an actor's dream. But not only does he murder them, he murders each one in the style of the Shakespearian play that each critic panned.

So he got to finally play all the great Shakespearian roles. He got to recite verse in screen, but in a sort of wonderfully campy way.

GROSS: Let's talk a little bit about his family background. He came from a very wealthy family. How did his father and grandfather make their money?

PRICE: Well, his grandfather was a homeopathic doctor who invented baking powder. It was an accidental invention. He was trying to help out his mother in the kitchen, who made these wonderful biscuits, but she couldn't get them to rise. And they were hard to digest. And he invented baking powder, went West to make his fortune, and became a household name. He then patented extracts of vanilla. He was one of the first breakfast cereal manufacturers. And he was a multimillionaire who theoretically, according to family lore, lost most of his money or all of his money in the crash of 1893.

He then pulled my grandfather, my father's father, out of Yale to go back into business, and he started up a candy company that would go on to become one of the largest candy companies in the United States. And he would be president of the National Candy Makers' Association.

So he grew up -- my father grew up pretty much in the lap of luxury. They weren't, you know, incredibly wealthy, but they were certainly very, very, very comfortable, in, you know, upper middle class St. Louis.

GROSS: What did Vincent Price's parents want him to do as an adult?

PRICE: I think they knew what he would end up doing. All of his siblings -- they wanted his -- he was the youngest by about, oh, seven years, and his eldest brother they wanted to go into the business, and his sisters, they basically just wanted to marry well, which was fairly common in those days.

But their younger son, they knew from a very early age, was unusual. They knew he had a passion for the visual arts. At age 11, he discovered an Indian burial ground, an Anastazi Indian burial ground in southern California -- I mean, southern Colorado. In the next year, he bought his first piece of art, which was a first-state Rembrandt etching, for $37.50. And it took him about a year to earn that.

From then on, he was driven to become a great collector. He also participated in acting and singing. He loved doing musicals. But they thought from an early age that he would somehow be a creative person. I think they imagined that it would be in the visual arts and not acting.

GROSS: My guest is Victoria Price. She's written a new biography of her father, actor Vincent Price. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Victoria Price, author of "Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography."

Tell me what it's been like to do a biography of your father. Your father was in his early 50s when you were born, and I think when you were around 10, he and your mother divorced, and he remarried. And he was also very busy when you were a girl. So although you loved your father a lot, and he loved you a lot, you didn't see that much of him, you know, because of the divorce and because of all of his work.

So I'm sure you learned a lot about him from doing the research for the biography. I guess I'm wondering if you saw him as a different person after you did the research.

PRICE: Yes, I think -- well, I definitely did. I was one of those daughters who idolized their father. He was to me the most magical, smart, funny, open-hearted person. And i just wanted to be with him every minute. And because we didn't get to spend that much time together, because he was working or after his marriage to my stepmother, that made those feelings stronger in me, those -- that exacerbated them.

And so I had this kind of longing for my father, that no matter how much time we spent together, I always wanted more. And so when he died, I had this sense of having known part of this person, the image of himself that he wanted to convey, but I always felt that there was something more or something he wasn't sharing or something he was holding back.

And so I kind of approached writing this biography like a mystery, in a sense, where he was a character about whom I knew a great deal. He certainly told me many stories about himself. I had lots of written material about him. He was a great interview giver. He constantly jotted down his own life stories.

And yet I felt like I wanted to know more. And in the process of constructing his life as a biographer, he became more of a real person and less of somebody that I just idolized.

So it was very gratifying, in a sense, because I feel like I still have that huge amount of love for him, but it seems to be more in proportion with who he was as a person.

GROSS: What are some of the biggest surprises that you learned about your father in doing the research for your biography of him?

PRICE: I think the biggest surprise was his early anti-Semitism. And I brought that up with the press, and all of a sudden, you know, he became Hitler's best friend, the next thing to Goebbels. You know, he was a Nazi sympathizer. But none of those things were true. My father was a very typical young man of his era. He was brought up in conservative St. Louis by Republican parents. St. Louis was a very pro-German town, big German population. It was, after all, the place where Lindberg made his mark, and Lindberg was certainly one of the more anti-Semitic public figures of the 20th century.

So he just kind of learned his parents' point of view without really thinking about what that meant. And really what it was, was a cultural anti-Semitism. I don't think that he would have even thought to be anti-Semitic toward another person. But it was a kind of pervasive cultural anti-Semitism that existed in the white Anglo-Saxon upper middle classes in England and America. And that's what was mirrored back to him at Yale, and when he went to the University of London.

And so when he went to Germany and saw that -- or perceived that what Hitler was doing was taking a country that had fallen apart and whose former glory was gone during the Weimar Republic, and he was espousing notions of brotherhood and national unity, my father thought, Well, this could only be a good thing.

Now, what was interesting to me is, my father -- the father that I knew was the most liberal person. If I had had an anti-Semitic thought, I would have been punished severely. It would never have occurred to me to have an anti-Semitic thought as a young person. And so that this man who I knew as being unjudgmental and openhearted and accepting of everybody had had these views as a young man was very shocking to me.

And I thought about not including it in the book. But his mind was changed when he fell in with the sort of New York liberal theater crowd. He became friends with Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker, Paul Robeson, did a lot of work for Spanish Civil War relief. And I think very quickly saw the error of his ways.

And I thought it was important to include, because, you know, how many of us have just been inculcated with values that we haven't really thought about? And when we come to adulthood and have the opportunity to sort of decipher what we've been encoded with and figure out what is real and what's not, it's wonderful to know that we can change as people, as my father did.

GROSS: When you were a girl, and your father was so famous for his horror films, how was Halloween celebrated in your house?

PRICE: Well, my mother was a costume designer, so that added...

GROSS: Oh, yes!

PRICE: ... that heightened it even more. So the costumes were a big deal in the house, and what we would do was quite fun. We had something that was called the Clark Cortez (ph). It was an early RV, really. And it was a great escape for my parents. They would get in it and make a lovely meal and go sit overlooking the ocean.

Well, on Halloween we would all pack in, with my friends from elementary school, and there was one street in Beverly Hills that had the best houses, I think it was Palm. And they really went all out at these houses, haunted houses and great decorations. So we would park at the top of the street, and my mother very sensibly would stay in the RV, and the kids and my dad would run out and go trick or treat.

And, of course, you know, for them to open the door and see Vincent Price was equally as much fun as for us to go to their haunted houses, so...

GROSS: Would he dress up?

PRICE: ... that was pretty great. No, he didn't dress up. He -- you know, he was -- it was almost as if he was wearing a Vincent Price mask, you know, it was good enough.

GROSS: (laughs) And what were your favorite costumes?

PRICE: I think my -- I was an animal person, so I think I was a cat, black cat, of course, one year, and that was very Edgar Allen Poe, so that was good. And I think I was a tiger another year. We -- you know, we never went for the conventional costumes. My mother always was very inventive and elaborate in her costumes.

GROSS: One last question for you. The little bio on the back of the dust jacket says that you're a TV screenwriter. Have you written anything we might be familiar with?

PRICE: I write a lot for A&E Biography, so I do a lot of pop biographies, celebrity biographies. I have that great pleasure of doing the Roddy McDowell biography, and Roddy was one of the great, great people and friends in Hollywood, and ...

GROSS: A great friend of your father's.

PRICE: And a great friend of my father's. So it was a little gift I could give back. And he saw it about two or three days before he died, so I was very grateful to be able to give that back. It's fun writing for A&E. It's a -- I think my dad would appreciate it. He was a great populist, and of course A&E is a means of getting a lot of historical and cultural and biographical information out to large numbers of people, and I think he would have gotten a kick out of that.

GROSS: Yes, when you say your father was a great populist, one of the things he really liked doing was being an art buyer for Sears. There was a Vincent Price Collection that Sears sold, and a lot of people mocked him for that. But he thought, This is a great way to help introduce really decent art to people who couldn't afford, you know, incredibly expensive art.

PRICE: I think the single most important thing to my father was art, was the visual arts. And he believed that art was transformative, and art was redemptive. And he absolutely -- it infuriated him, the thought that art was something just for the elite. Art was something that people who didn't have a million or two dollars to throw around at a Van Gogh could only see in museums.

And he -- from going around the country doing his lectures, he came to realize that people were scared, people were intimidated by art. He became a spokesman during the '50s for the Abstract Expressionists and sort of went around and kind of talked to your average person in middle America and tried to make them less fearful of these new kinds of art.

So when the opportunity arose for him to do Sears, he saw it as a way to demystify and -- the arts. And the idea was, he went around and bought -- he was like a Medici in the '60s. He bought hundreds of thousands of pieces of art from local artists to Picassos to Whistlers to Durers to Chagalls. And they traveled around the country in a collection called the Vincent Price Collection, and he promoted that.

And the idea was that you would go into Sears, you could look at something, you could buy it, you could take it home with you, a money-back guarantee, you could buy it on your credit card over time. And it really helped to change the face of art in America. And every time on a Friday night in Canyon Road in Santa Fe, I see the masses going in and out of galleries, I think how pleased my dad would be, because that was his goal, to know -- to have people know that art was for everybody, and I think he helped accomplish that.

GROSS: Well, Victoria Price, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

PRICE: Thank you for having me on the show, I really appreciate it.

GROSS: Victoria Price is the author of "Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography."

Here's Vincent Price in a scene from his 1973 film, "Theater of Blood." Price plays a hammy Shakespearean actor who kills critics who have given him bad reviews. In this scene, Price has lured a critic to a rehearsal of "The Merchant of Venice" and given him a small part in the play.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "THEATER OF BLOOD")

VINCENT PRICE: Now we come to the part where Portia, with a mean, pettifogging little piece of legal trickery, saves your life.

ACTRESS: We have revised the script.

ACTOR: No! Ahh! Ahhh! (inaudible)...

VINCENT PRICE: Do you still think that my Shylock was inadequate? That is the adjective you used, I believe, inadequate?

ACTOR: No, no, the best, the best! I always said you were the best!

VINCENT PRICE: No, the best is given the Critics' Award. Why did you vote against me?

ACTOR: I didn't. It was Devlin. Paul, let me go, please -- let me go!

VINCENT PRICE: Devlin, you craven scum! You're hardly worth the trouble and expense of this special performance.

ACTOR: Oh -- oh, no, no -- no! Aaaaghhhhhhh...

VINCENT PRICE: It was a pound exactly, was it not?

ACTRESS: A pound, no more, no less.

VINCENT PRICE: This is two ounces over. (chopping sound)

Sixteen ounces exactly.

ACTRESS: Art thou content?

VINCENT PRICE: I am content.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: Coming up, Lloyd Schwartz reviews new CDs featuring composer Benjamin Britten playing and conducting other people's music.

This is FRESH AIR.

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Victoria Price
High: Victoria Price is the daughter of actor Vincent Price, who was best known as the "king of horror" for his performances in horror films. Victoria is the author of the new book: "Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography."
Spec: Holidays; Vincent Price; Victoria Price; Entertainment

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography"
Show: FRESH AIR
Date: OCTOBER 28, 1999
Time: 12:00
Tran: 102802NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: "Britten the Performer": A Review
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:50

TERRY GROSS, HOST, FRESH AIR: Benjamin Britten is one of the major composers of the 20th century. He's best known for his operas, like "Peter Grimes" and "The Turn of the Screw." Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz says that the recordings Britten made conducting his own works are among the great treasures of recorded music. A new series of CDs features Britten as the pianist and conductor of other people's music. Here's Lloyd's review.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, BRITTEN ORCHESTRAL PIECE)

LLOYD SCHWARTZ, CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITIC: Along with Stravinsky's recordings of his own music, Benjamin Britten's extensive discography of his vocal and orchestral music is the century's other great musical legacy.

Unlike Stravinksy, Britten also made a number of recordings of other music, including eloquent Mozart, some Purcell and other English composers close to Britten's heart, and such large-scale works as Bach's "St. John `Faust.'"

Britten was also a wonderful pianist, and there are recordings of him accompanying tenor Peter Pears, his lifelong companion and inspiration, in Schubert songs and English folk songs, or playing cello sonatas with his friend Mstislav Rostropovich, or piano four-hand with another great Russian, Sviataslav Richter.

The BBC has just released five disks called "Britten as Performer," and they add immeasurably to our understanding of his musicianship. There's more Mozart, a disk that includes Britten the chamber musician playing the piano part in the great G-minor Quartet with uncanny expressivity, and conducting Richter in a sublimely lucid and tender performance of Mozart's last piano concerto.

And there's a Purcell disk with Clare (ph) Watson and Peter Pears as Dido and Aeneas in Purcell's landmark 17th century opera, a performance in Britten's own musical realization, and one that's more intense and alive than most of the antiseptic historically informed versions.

Mozart and Purcell, however, are such obvious role models for Britten's own music that these stylish and nuanced performances come as no surprise. But there are three other disks devoted to cornerstones of Romantic and late Romantic music -- Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and even Mahler, composers we don't associate with Britten, and whom he never recorded.

They too are gloriously convincing. They remind us that Britten's own music is not all ice crystal, that he inherits a gift for melody and intense expression from the masters of the previous century. And in turn, he rescues the Romantics from the heaviness with which they too are often performed.

Listen to the Waltz from Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" in a live performance with Britten conducting the English Chamber Orchestra. It's the best performance of this engaging work I've ever heard. Britten combines a crisp, lilting rhythmic articulation with a kind of inexorable, impassioned forward momentum. Above all, there's a loving yet unsentimental sincerity in his phrasing. This music obviously speaks to him, and he makes it speak to us.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, WALTZ FROM TCHAIKOVSKY'S "SERENADE FOR STRINGS")

SCHWARTZ: You can hear this lightness again in Britten's extraordinary performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra. It's very Viennese. "Rubato" is the term for stretching the rhythm, shaping a phrase beyond the literal notation, to give it a little lift. It's a matter of understanding the style, not just slavishly following the score. But a conductor can't be too free either, or he'll lose the line of the music. Britten's exhilarating rhythmic freedom, combined with his shapely sense of continuity, comes at the very start, and it never stops.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, MAHLER'S FOURTH SYMPHONY)

SCHWARTZ: Britten's Mahler, like everything else he conducts, has a life-affirming buoyancy. It makes listening to music, in the deepest sense of the word, pleasure.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz is classical music editor of "The Boston Phoenix."

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Lloyd Schwartz
High: Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reviews "Britten the Performer" a collection of five CDS on the BBC label featuring composer Benjamin Britten as pianist and conductor.
Spec: Music Industry; Entertainment; Benjamin Britten

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 1999 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 1999 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: "Britten the Performer": A Review
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.