The Lady from the Black Lagoon Read online

  It’s a treasured family story that while en route to the dam, Camille was captured by Pancho Villa, the infamous Mexican revolutionary. Villa originally only wanted to commandeer Camille’s automobile, but once he found out that he had captured an engineer, he detained him for a while so he could also commandeer his professional skills. Pancho apparently had the idea that an engineer would be an expert on artillery. Once he realized that was not the case, he let Camille go.9

  For the next year, Camille worked on the dam with periodic visits up north to visit Elise. In September of 1913, she discovered that she was pregnant. When he got the news, Camille decided that they should to return to the United States. Widespread violence and worker strikes made Mexico an unstable work environment for anyone in construction and there was no end in sight for the roiling revolution. The dam was incomplete (it would not be finished until 1915) but he now had a pregnant wife to worry about and family on the horizon. The couple left Mexico and arrived back in San Francisco just before the birth of their first child, Ulrich Conrad Marion Rossi, on May 30, 1914.

  But Camille was soon itching to get back to work, back to adventure. Within a year, in 1915, the family moved to El Paso, Texas. Camille had friends and business associates in this part of the continent and he headed as close to Mexico as he could get without actually entering the country. It was here, on November 11, 1915, that the family celebrated the birth of their second child, Mildred Elisabeth Fulvia Rossi. A few days later, on the afternoon of the seventeenth, was the biggest celebration the Southwest had ever seen. Twenty-five thousand people thronged the streets to get a glimpse of the Liberty Bell on its tour home to Philadelphia from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair in San Francisco. The timing was a coincidence, but I hope that little Milicent thought the excitement was for her.

  In 1917, Camille took a job as a mining engineer for the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation and the entire family moved down to South America, to Oroya, Peru. At the time, Cerro de Pasco was the largest copper mining company in the world. It seems as if every job Camille took had to have some sort of superlative. Oroya is in the center of Peru, on a plateau in the Andes Mountains. Milicent, not even two years old yet, and the rest of the family had to adapt to the high, dry air and cold climate. The family stayed there for three years.

  Moving from the warmth of Texas to an average temperature of forty-five degrees must have been a shock, but Elise was devoted to Camille and followed him anywhere. If she was unhappy in their new home, she wouldn’t have said anything. All her husband’s brilliance and ambition and work ethic came with a dark side. Camille was power hungry, both at work and at home. His will was law in the Rossi household. Later in life, Milicent would describe how strict her father was with Elise. He wouldn’t tolerate being told no and had a reputation of expecting submission from all women, not just his wife and children. This came back to bite him. Unfortunately, it eventually bit Milicent, too.

  In Oroya, Camille was in charge of the mining operations, a position that suited his temperament. Elise settled in and cared for Ulrich and Milicent, and in the summer of 1919, she was pregnant again. Camille stayed busy at work and applied his talents elsewhere in the town. Along with overseeing the building of the mines, Camille helped build the first modern hospital in Oroya. It was completed, conveniently, just in time for Ruth Rose to be born there on February 8, 1920. This was the last baby for Camille and Elise. At four years old, Milicent became a middle child.

  Oroya did not leave much of a mark on Milicent’s life. She didn’t pick up a fluency in or understanding of the Spanish language. She never publicly spoke in detail about this period of her life besides occasionally mentioning that she grew up “briefly” in Peru. My guess is that she just didn’t remember much and fair enough, I don’t have a lot of memories from when I was a toddler, either.

  A few months after Ruth was born, news reached Elise that her mother had died. She wanted to be with her family, so Camille decided that it was time to say goodbye to Peru and head back to California. Milicent was only four years old and already embarking on her second continent hop.

  Camille, Elise, Ulrich, Milicent and Ruth had a lengthy trip to San Francisco. They traveled through Argentina before sailing out of Chile’s Valparaíso seaport on June 12, 1920. After two and a half weeks at sea, they arrived in the sweltering New York City summer heat.

  The family likely visited Camille’s mother, Anna, who was living in Brooklyn. Camille’s father, Mario—or Andrew, depending on who you were and when you asked—had died a couple of years earlier, in 1918. Camille did not visit his family often, so Anna would have been delighted to see her grandchildren.

  With Elise anxious to return to her grieving family, the Rossis didn’t stay for more than a week before embarking on the final leg of the trip. A cross-country train sounds glamorous, but this was before many of the transit luxuries we now take for granted. If you have ever looked with pity at a mother consoling a crying baby on a flight, imagine Elise traveling by car, train and ship through four countries with a baby, two small children and no disposable diapers or air conditioning.

  After several days, the family finally arrived in San Francisco. The mild weather of northern California in July must have been a welcome relief. Elise’s family was thrilled to have her back after so many years away. With the loss of his wife weighing on his mind, Elise’s father, Conrad, pleaded with Camille to take a job closer to home. The Bills—Elise’s extended family—were prosperous and deeply entrenched in San Francisco. Conrad wanted his daughter near this affluent support system. Camille agreed and began to look for work in the area. Conrad got his wish when Camille was offered the job of a lifetime.

  * * *

  So I wanted to learn more about Milicent. Where to begin?

  I didn’t think I could afford a private investigator, but it couldn’t hurt to check. I had fantasies of strolling into some grungy New York City office to talk to a worn-down guy wearing a fedora. He’d be smoking a cigarette and would refer to me as a dame. After some wisecracks and banter, he’d take my money and go off on a quest to find Milicent while I leaned against his desk, wearing a really nice pair of heels.10

  Feeling a little silly but unsure where else to start, I simply Googled “NYC private investigators.” The first page of results dashed all of my film-noir-inspired hopes. The companies that popped up were run by guys who looked like suburban dads. My fantasy couldn’t take place on a well-manicured lawn with a guy wearing khaki shorts and flipping burgers on a grill. On a more practical note, they were also expensive. Making independent genre movies isn’t like making blockbuster Hollywood movies. I was on my own.

  The only publicized part of Milicent’s life was her work on Creature from the Black Lagoon, so this was my starting block. There had to be some clues as to where she came from and where she went after the film. Sitting at my desk in Brooklyn, I started scouring the internet.

  There were a handful of blogs featuring posts about her, but they were all without sources and had wildly differing claims. Some said that she had nothing to do with design of the Creature, some said that she did everything herself. None of them had any new information for me.

  There was a single article about her from a notable speculative fiction website, but it was incredibly long-winded and ended up being more about the sci-fi films from the era in which she worked in Hollywood. The parts of the piece that were actually about her had no sources and the few facts of her life it presented were disputed in the comments section. Even the queen bee of unsubstantiated information, Wikipedia, had no article on her.11 The internet failed me. I needed help.

  Luckily, I had an ace up my sleeve. Many aces, actually.

  There are no private investigators in my contact list, but I sure know lots of monster nerds. One of the greatest things about making horror movies is the people you meet. I’d been working in the industry for several year
s at that point and had an excellent network of friends and colleagues that adore monsters as much as I. My unabashed enthusiasm for the Creature was shared by many. I sent a flurry of emails out to writers and historians and filmmakers. Of course they’re going to want to help me find Milicent Patrick, I thought.

  I had no idea what I was in for.

  I was so thrilled about finding people to help with this project and the prospect of bringing Milicent’s story to the world that it was all the more disappointing when I began to get emails back. That disappointment quickly shifted into frustration, which shifted into rage. Most people were tentative. Several expressed doubt that her story could be more than an article, let alone fill an entire book. Some said that she didn’t seem interesting enough to merit examination and implied that was why no one had looked into her story before. I don’t need to tell you that every single one of these infuriating responses was from a man. These casual dismissals made me want to fling furniture through windows. Fancy, heavy furniture through large, expensive windows. One guy suggested that I not waste my time, since he thought that the only reason she was seen on the set of Creature from the Black Lagoon was because she was someone’s girlfriend.

  Molten anger bubbled inside my chest. If hate-lasers could shoot out of my eyes, I would have melted my glasses. I immediately began to craft a response to him that justified Milicent’s work and contribution to the film. I got about halfway through this scathing email before I realized why I was so upset.12 It wasn’t just because some crusty old dude insulted my hero. It was because having to justify and validate a female presence in a male-dominated space was a reflex.

  Two years before, I helped produce a feature film called Kids vs Monsters, a cheesy, special effects–laden romp filled with—you guessed it—monsters. None of the crew was under the illusion that the film would be in the running for an Oscar, but I was over the moon with joy. I was making a monster movie! In Los Angeles! All around me, there were men and women in monster suits, monster puppets and artists applying amazing special effects makeup. If you stuck me with a pin, all the happiness leaking out would have made me sail around the room.

  I was twenty-three years old and just an associate producer on the film. I was clinging precariously to the bottom rung of the producer hierarchy ladder. The production company, Dark Dunes Productions, had hired me only seven months before. Kids vs Monsters wasn’t the first film I was a producer on for this company, but it was the first to go into production and would end up being my first completed film. I knew this was my foot in the door to the horror film industry and I wasn’t going to take it for granted. I would sometimes work over sixty hours a week, sitting in front of my computer and monitoring my email inboxes like a hawk.

  A film producer is the person who oversees the creation of the film, from its start in development as an idea or a screenplay, all the way to marketing and distributing the finished movie. There are many types of film producer: executive producer, line producer, supervising producer, etc. But a plain old producer is the one involved in every single aspect of the film at every stage of the process. You’re a project manager, businessperson, people wrangler, problem solver, salesperson, logistical wizard, creative guide, financial coordinator and a supervisor. You become a producer because you adore cinema, you’re great with organization and you’re able to stifle the constant urge to scream. An associate producer is essentially an assistant producer. My tasks included all manner of things, from picking up a fake hand from the special effects studio, to weighing in on wardrobe choices, to running the social media pages, to hiring a sales agent. My main job, just like any producer, was to be stressed out all the time. But I loved it. I woke up for every early call time with unbridled glee.

  My boss at Dark Dunes Productions, Sultan Saeed al Darmaki, was also the director of the movie. He was and is like my big brother. At the time, I lived in New England. Sultan had flown me out to Los Angeles so I could help with both the preparation and the shooting of Kids vs Monsters. Feeling unbelievably lucky and desperate to earn my place, I threw myself into every task assigned to me with the charged determination of a seagull on a fallen bag of Cheetos.

  While running around the set, making sure nothing was literally or metaphorically on fire, I was constantly aware of the fact that I was the youngest, least experienced producer. Everyone suffers from imposter syndrome sometimes. It’s the feeling that you aren’t qualified and that you have no idea what you are doing. It’s the feeling that you are an impostor and soon, someone will discover that fact and kick you out. I wanted to buy a hat that declared IT’S OKAY I BELONG HERE mostly so that I would believe it myself.

  Toward the end of the month-long shoot, I drove over to the production office to pick up the T-shirts we had custom made for the project. Every member of the cast and crew was getting one. I rifled happily through the boxes full of black shirts, each emblazoned with the electric green words KIDS VS MONSTERS. I did it! I survived my first film shoot! I literally had the T-shirt to prove it!

  One of the production managers in the office came over to see the shirts.

  “Hey, Mallory, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  I looked up.

  “How often do you have to sleep with Sultan to keep your job?”

  I stared at him for a moment. I wish I could tell you that a vicious, brilliant barb shot out of me. Instead, I sputtered. The joy in my chest popped like balloon.

  “Oh. I, uh, don’t.”

  That’s all I could manage.

  “Really? Huh.”

  He shrugged and walked away. I was too stunned to be angry, too stunned to say anything further. I immediately welled up with a hundred reasons why I belonged there, a hundred things I had done in the past months to help this movie get made, a hundred justifications for my presence there in that office.

  They didn’t fly out of my mouth. They congealed in my stomach as I carried the shirts out to my rental car, wondering if I could fit inside one of the boxes and seal it up. A male producer, even one that was only twenty-three, would not have been asked that question. He would not have been asked to justify his presence. Because I was the only female producer and I was young, the immediate assumption was that I must be earning my place with sex. “She must be fucking her boss” instead of “Wow, she must be really good at her job.”

  Now, years later, I was reacting to this same assumption, except it wasn’t about me.

  This was it. This is what was being said between the lines in the emails I was getting back about Milicent Patrick. No one had looked into Milicent’s story because she was a woman. Historians had dismissed her because she was a woman. Milicent was the only female in a male-dominated space. Instead of assuming that she was there for work because she was talented, these troglodytes assumed she was there for the only thing many men assume women are there for: male pleasure. In order to invalidate that assumption, they needed her artistic contributions to be proved beyond all doubt.

  There was another artist who worked on the Creature, a man named Chris Mueller. He was a sculptor. Like Milicent, there were photos of him working on the monster suit even though his name was also left out of the credits for the film. Individual credits for those working in special effects were not usually included in movies during this period; the only name that appeared was the head of the makeup department. But Chris Mueller was included in nearly every article on Creature from the Black Lagoon. No one doubted his work on the monster. It wasn’t even a question.13

  It was becoming clearer with every email I received about the project that I needed to go to Los Angeles. I wasn’t getting anywhere with correspondence. Nearly every film historian I spoke to was located there, along with most film archives and studios. I firmly believed there was evidence that Milicent designed the Creature and somewhere there was a clue to where she had gone. I needed to find it myself.

  I was always happy t
o go to Los Angeles. Years of traveling there for work with Dark Dunes Productions had turned it into my second home. It could be the constant sun and warmth. It could be the omnipresent hustle of creativity. It could be the tacos. Whatever the cause, I was deeply enamored with California. Living in Brooklyn didn’t agree with me. I couldn’t figure out why people love New York City so much. Everything is expensive and everyone is in a rush and everything is crowded. Los Angeles was my escape.

  My plan was to spend two weeks staying with friends while I interviewed historians and investigated archives. I booked a flight, rented a car and stocked up on sunscreen.

  A week before I was set to leave, however, the boyfriend I had moved to Brooklyn for dumped me. I felt like a rug had been pulled out from under me. But in the midst of a drunken cry that night, I realized that my life was much better without that rug. I didn’t have to live in Brooklyn anymore! I could move to California! I already had a plane ticket!

  The gracious friends who had originally offered their guest room told me that I could stay with them while I looked for a place to live. I didn’t have an apartment set up. I didn’t even know how I was getting all my stuff out of my now ex-boyfriend’s tiny studio. My search for Milicent was the only certain thing. In the midst of all the upheaval and packing and sadness, I was reassured by how committed I was to this project, to finding Milicent.

  Just like before, she was reaching out her hand to me. She belonged in Los Angeles, working on movies. I belonged there, too. I followed her to find my career, so following her to my new home felt right. Turns out she was leading me exactly where I needed to go.

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