The Lady from the Black Lagoon Page 2
Horror films help explore these fears and imagine what it would be like to conquer them. Women need to see themselves fighting monsters. That’s part of how we figure out our stories. But we also need to see ourselves behind-the-scenes, creating and writing and directing. We need to tell our stories, too.
Unfortunately, just like in the rest of the film world, the statistics of women working in the horror genre are abysmal. In 2016, of all the film genres, women were least likely to work in horror. In the face of these odds, Milicent should have been hailed as a hero. She’s not just the queen of monsters, she’s the goddamn Joan of Arc. When I drive down Hollywood Boulevard, I should have to honk at a group of incorrigible drunken tourists as they take selfies with a statue of her. Milicent’s incredible life should have earned her an honored place in film history. But few even recognize her name.
There’s still time to change that.
1
Establishing Shot
Having a new tattoo really sucks.
Getting one isn’t a total picnic either, unless you’re into being stabbed repeatedly with ink-covered needles. Hey, I’m not one to judge. But I’ve always found the aftermath to be the toughest part. Over a few weeks, your tattoo undergoes a transformation from raw, open wound, to itchy, flakey mess. Eventually, the swelling goes down and you stop wanting to scratch it. The irritation fades. It’s a part of you now, in your skin. All that suffering and you can’t even feel it there. Those weeks of discomfort are worth it, though. You get to dedicate a place on your body to an idea you believe in, a piece of art you think is beautiful, to something beloved.
The tattoo I walked into that party trying not to itch was all three.
It was a portrait of Milicent Patrick being embraced by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I had had it for a couple of weeks and there was still some residual discomfort. The tattoo wraps around the underside of my left forearm and I was holding it at the awkward angle you usually reserve for holding other people’s babies.
The party took place at the Manhattan headquarters of The Society of Illustrators, blocks away from Central Park on the Upper East Side. It was a long haul on the subway from where I lived in Brooklyn and by the time I arrived, I was thrilled to step out of the biting December air. New York City can be beautiful in the winter, but that doesn’t make it any less miserably cold.
Milicent was my eighteenth tattoo and not one that I expected. It wasn’t that I planned on stopping at number seventeen. I was twenty five years old and had been steadily accumulating tattoos since being legally able to at age eighteen. Thanks to my full-time job as a genre film producer, I didn’t have to stop accumulating them. There’s a different definition of “looking professional” when you make horror and science fiction movies for a living. That said, I didn’t expect to get this particular tattoo because I had always shied away from portraits of real people. It’s difficult to find an artist talented enough to put one to flesh that doesn’t end up looking like some child’s nightmarish drawing.
The suggestion came while I was getting tattooed by my regular artist, Matt Buck, a few months before. Matt and I have similar tastes and over the many uncomfortable hours we spent together while I paid him to stab me, we talked about the things we love: horror and monsters. During this particular session, Creature from the Black Lagoon was mentioned. Like a nerdy Old Faithful, I began my usual gushing about Milicent. I never missed a chance to tell people what little I knew of her story. Matt had heard of the Creature, but never of Milicent. By now, I was used to people exclaiming, “Wow, I never knew it was designed by a woman!”
Ever the artist, Matt wanted to see a picture of her. I pulled one up on my iPhone and he whistled.
“Man, I’d love to tattoo her on you. She looks incredible.”
“I don’t know, dude. I’m not into portraits.”
“Let me draw something up. I promise, it’ll be amazing.”
“Okay...but you’ve got to incorporate the Creature into it, too.”
Holiday parties always make me uncomfortable. I don’t really celebrate any holiday that isn’t Halloween. I wear only black, so it’s difficult to pick out festive holiday wear from my regular wardrobe. Everyone wants to air kiss and I never figured out how to do that without looking like I’m trying to eat someone’s ear. All of this makes me want to find an air vent to crawl into.4 As far as holiday parties go though, this one was fine. Since it was in The Society of Illustrators building, there was a lot of gorgeous art to look at. Many of my friends were there. Also, free food.
It was my second holiday season in New York City. Two years before, I moved from Rhode Island to Brooklyn so I could live with my boyfriend. Said boyfriend was also the reason that I moved from my warm bed and to-be-read book pile to the party that night.
The air in the room was stuffy with conversations, with wine and warm string lights combining to make everybody glow. As I meandered among clusters of increasingly drunk partygoers, Milicent’s portrait throbbed on my forearm. Scratching a new tattoo can damage it, so I had to make do with surreptitiously slapping the area around it and trying not to look like a weirdo conga drummer.
The social merry-go-round of the party kept turning and eventually I found myself talking to Sam Morgan, a literary agent friend of mine. Sam is a great person to hang out with at a party because he’s extremely funny, but more importantly, extremely tall and easy to find in a crowd. We started talking and he asked about my new tattoo, a picture of which I had recently posted on Facebook. Everyone who had seen the tattoo was wowed by the portrait. It made a lot of people curious, including Sam. He wanted to know more about Milicent.
When I walked into the tattoo shop for the appointment, I looked on Matt’s desk and fell in love. Milicent’s face commands attention no matter what medium it’s in. Matt kept his word; it was an amazing sketch. He had penciled a stunning portrait of her adorned in pearls with the Creature looking over her shoulder, his long, scaly arm reaching around with a protective hug. I was struck, just like I was the first time I saw her, with how capable and collected she looked.
A few months before, the first monster movie I had ever worked on was released and Milicent Patrick had been an inspiration through the entire process. If I was going to have any face permanently inked into my skin, hers was the one. She was a talisman I always carried. Now it wasn’t just metaphorical.
I finished gushing to Sam about Milicent, her work and her mystery, enthusiasm enhanced by my second glass of house white. He looked at the tattoo again.
“Man, that story would make a great book.”
“Oh, shit, yeah it would!”
“You should write it.”
I laughed.
“No, really. You should. It’s a great story.”
Thanks to that second glass of house white, I had to make my way to the bathroom. As I walked into the stall, my mind whirled from more than booze. I was stuck on Sam’s words. Surrounded by fantastic art by famous illustrators, I thought about how Milicent belonged in there, too.5 Why shouldn’t I tell her story?
The idea was so exciting that I was finally distracted from wanting to scratch the tattoo.
* * *
A few days later, I saw Sam again at another event. This time he was accompanied by Brady McReynolds, who worked at the same literary agency. Brady is one of the friendliest, most equanimous people you’ll ever meet. He’s the kind of person you hope to consult if you ever have to buy an expensive, confusing appliance. The three of us started talking about the tattoo of Milicent and the concept of a book about her life. Brady was enthusiastic about the idea. He encouraged me to think about writing it and offered to send some information about creating a nonfiction project.
I wanted to tell Milicent’s story, of course I did. But first, I had to find it. I’m not a detective. I had no clue where to start tracking her down. Most of the time, I can barely keep trac
k of my sunglasses. Milicent lived in a time before the miraculous internet. How do you find people without Facebook?
Getting tattooed requires some serious dedication. Hours and hours of being stabbed with tiny needles as something hopefully beautiful and maybe meaningful is driven into you. It’s the reverse of writing. If I could get tattooed for Milicent, I could write for her, too.
* * *
Milicent Patrick was born Mildred Elisabeth Fulvia Rossi on November 11, 1915. I found her birth certificate listed in genealogical records as Mildred Elisabeth Tuloia Rossi, which is the government equivalent of a mistake on your Starbucks cup. This name confusion was the perfect way to start a life made up of a multitude of identity changes. Milicent’s propensity for shifting personas made sense once I discovered where she came from. Her life was in constant flux from the beginning.
She was born the second of three children to Camille Charles Rossi and Elise Albertina Bill. The couple met in San Francisco, California, in the early 1900s, where Elise was raised.
Elise was born in San Francisco, the blonde, blue-eyed daughter of German immigrants. Her parents, Conrad Bill and Elisabeth Krausgill, had both been born in Nieder-Weisel, Germany. They immigrated to America separately, met in San Francisco and were married in 1872, thirteen years before Elisabeth gave birth to Elise in 1885.
Elise was a society girl who loved the arts, especially theater and performance. Her family considered her unhappy, a description that would follow her into adulthood. She had what her family called a “nervous breakdown” when she was eleven years old, a term that today could mean any number of different types of mental affliction: depression, anxiety, panic attacks, a whole menagerie of illnesses. The vagueness of the term makes it impossible to say what specifically Elise was struggling with, besides some form of inner turmoil. Milicent would describe her mother as a “frustrated woman.” This unhappiness and frustration was passed down to Milicent, along with her love of art in all forms.
But it was Camille who would ultimately be the force that shaped Milicent’s life. And force he was. His dealings with his employees and with the women in his life deeply affected the way that Milicent interacted with the world, for better and for worse. They cast a long shadow that she was never quite able to escape.
Camille started life in Naples, Italy, in 1885. He was born Camillo John Chris Vincent Chas Rossi to Mario Rossi and Anna Lauria de Palombara. When Camille was eleven, the family immigrated to New York City, where his parents stayed for the rest of their lives. Camille was tall, with dark hair and hazel eyes. He had a sculpted face: a strong, straight nose with prominent cheekbones and heavy brows that are echoed in Milicent. From a young age, he wanted more out of life, but not just excitement. Milicent described her father as a power-hungry man. Camille wanted influence and authority. Along with a strong work ethic, Camille had a wild, ambitious streak that he rode all the way to the West Coast. Although primarily self-taught, he studied architecture at the Mark Hopkins School of Design in San Francisco, California.
At the time, San Francisco was the dominant city of the far side of the country. Its population had swelled after the Gold Rush of 1849 and it joined the forefront of urban America. Architecture was a booming industry here, and Camille, a young structural engineer, found this to be the perfect place to start his life. Mansions and hotels rivaling that of Manhattan were popping up all over the city.
More than the attraction of industry, Camille must have felt pulled toward San Francisco because of its culture. As a newer city—it was only established in 1847—traditions were not as strong here. The social climate was a little more ethnically and religiously diverse.6 It was a hotbed of social movements and political reform. This was where the first state organization dedicated to the furtherance of women’s suffrage was created, in 1869. Status and prestige could be based on individual achievement, rather than group identity. It wasn’t all Yosemite-Sam-looking dudes hunting for fame and fortune, but there was an air of tradition-flouting, adventurous individualism that San Francisco’s Gold Rush roots inspired. Lots of young, experimental thinkers and writers—like Mark Twain—flocked to the city. It was a place for reinvention. California has always been the place to change who you are, something Camille wanted desperately to do.
He arrived in California and started passing as a natural-born American citizen. He claimed on official documents that he had been born in 1886 in San Francisco to Andrew and Anna Rossi and that his name was Camille Charles Rossi. San Francisco had more relaxed views on immigration; at this time it was over 90 percent European American immigrants and their descendants. But Camille was an intelligent, ambitious man. It wouldn’t have been difficult for him to figure out that he would have an easier shot at success in this country as an American than as an Italian immigrant. Beautiful high-society, American Elise would have seemed like a perfect match for him. The two fell in love.
In 1906, when Elise was nineteen and Camille was twenty, a disaster halted the boom of San Francisco. On April 18, the great San Francisco earthquake hit. Over three thousand people died; the city was devastated. Buildings, infrastructure, dreams. There was a mass exodus from the city, including vast numbers of writers and artists. The roaring arts culture of San Francisco never fully recovered from this blow and the creative torch of the West was ultimately passed down to Los Angeles, a city not on a fault line. Los Angeles still has never been devastated by a major earthquake.7
Elise stayed in the city with her family but by 1907, Camille had left San Francisco to make his fortune. His school was one of the buildings destroyed in the earthquake. A shrewd man, it must have seemed fruitless for Camille to try to make his way in the devastated city. He headed to Mexico City and planned to return to San Francisco to marry Elise when he was financially secure. There, he was hired as a junior engineer by Adamo Boari, an Italian architect tasked with creating the Palace of Fine Arts.
Mexico City was also a city prone to earthquakes and Camille’s talents were sorely needed. As a structural engineer, rather than an architect, he did not design; his job was to make sure the designs were functional. Structural engineers work as partners to architects, applying engineering principles to the construction, planning and design of a building.
It was a relatively new profession, emerging in the twentieth century as a result of the rapid technological advancements of the industrial revolution. As skyscapes began to rise in the city, along with the use of reinforced concrete and the demand for plumbing, structural engineers were sorely needed. There were not a lot of official certification processes and it would have been easy for Camille, with his talent and ambition, to advance in the field.
Mexico City was also an opportunity to explore his adventurous side. Camille spent his off-hours indulging in bullfighting, motorcycle and sport car racing, fencing and mountain climbing. Yes, they had sport cars back then and they weren’t lumbering Model Ts. Some of them went over one hundred twenty miles an hour. They just didn’t have a lot of important safety features yet, like windshields. So this was a little extra badass and also a little extra crazy. Camille sought acclaim even in his leisure activities. An expedition he was part of, up Mount Popocatepetl, was written up in the September 1910 issue of National Geographic.8
While Camille was having a blast during his recreational time, his work hours were filled with frustration. Mexico City is built on top of an underground lake and the soft subsoil the palace was being constructed on was a nightmare for the project. Camille was vocal about his dissent on the structural integrity of the building. He insisted that the soil underneath wouldn’t support the palace, but he was overruled by senior engineers. The heavy building began to sink even before it was finished.
Between the structural issues and political instability—the Mexican Revolution was on its way—construction on the Palace of Fine Arts stopped in 1913 and it sat untouched for twenty years. Much like the Monty Python sketch about building a
castle on top of a swamp, the palace and its sinking base became a classic symbol of things to avoid in structural engineering, something I’m sure gave Camille some satisfaction.
In 1910, Camille left the project and relocated to La Boquilla, where he took a job helping to build a dam in the region of Chihuahua. Nearly three thousand miles north of Mexico City on the Rio Conchos, La Boquilla Dam provided hydroelectricity, flood control and irrigation and created Toronto Lake in the process. It was, at the time, slated to be one of the largest dams in the world. Nearly all of the projects Camille worked on carried some element of prestige and history.
Elise, meanwhile, was still waiting back in California with her family. After two years working on the dam, in 1912 Camille took leave and traveled back to marry her. He returned to find that the city was rapidly on the mend from the earthquake. San Francisco was being built and rebuilt in a grand way. But La Boquilla Dam was nowhere near completion and Camille wanted to continue his work down south. Together, he and Elise traveled to Mexico. This wasn’t a great idea. In 1912, the Mexican Revolution was in full swing. Armed rebellions were breaking out all over the country. It wasn’t a safe place to travel. Camille left Elise at the home of his friend Juan Brittingham, who lived close to the Texas border, and continued south to the dam construction site in Chihuahua.
Elise spent most of the next year with Juan’s family. Juan was a pioneer in the decorative tile industry, the son of a prominent family of soap and cement magnates, which unfortunately for Juan, is one of the least impressive types of magnates. A dual citizen of Mexico and the United States, he was born in Los Angeles. In 1910, with the Border War on between the countries, those with dual citizenship were forced to declare sides. Juan declared Mexican citizenship and traveled there to build his tile business. The business did well, which meant Elise had a very comfortable home to stay in while she waited for her husband.