Hazel Court - Horror Queen: An Autobiography

Abstract

How else to explain her girlishly gushing recollections of an idyllic, chocolate-box childhood complete with Bob the milkman, Dobbin the horse, and Cinderella's glass slippers, to say nothing of her prescription for world peace: "With the world in great turmoil, one wonders sometimes if maybe coffee isn't the answer. [...]it made men's hair look like the shine my mother would get on her grate after using black lead polish."

Hazel Court, Hazel Court - Horror Oueen: An Autobiography Tomahawk Press , 2008

Hazel Court, co-star of such films as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Raven (1963) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964), died in April of this year, a week before the publication of her autobiography. That regrettable occurrence, combined with her iconic status among horror aficionados, has led certain reviewers to offer opinions of Hazel Court - Horror Queen which, it must be said, reflect better on their sense of delicacy than their sense of judgement. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and all that sort ofthing...

The fact remains, however, that reading Hazel Court - Horror Queen is an experience akin to being stuck in a lift with Madeline Bassett, that most terrifyingly empty-headed and sentimental of Bertram Wooster's matrimonial near-misses. Whether Miss Court would have shared Miss Bassett's view that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen and that the stars are God's daisy chain, is now impossible to ascertain, but on the evidence of this book, it seems more than likely. How else to explain her girlishly gushing recollections of an idyllic, chocolate-box childhood complete with Bob the milkman, Dobbin the horse, and Cinderella's glass slippers, to say nothing of her prescription for world peace: "With the world in great turmoil, one wonders sometimes if maybe coffee isn't the answer. The way of simplicity can be powerful/' So there we are. "With milk or without, Mr. Bin Laden?"

Even by the deplorably low standards of luvvie-lit, this book is an embarrassment. At times, Miss Court appears to be addressing a particularly backward group of children: recalling Paul Robeson, she writes, "Some of you may not know who he is but there's never been anyone like him before or since. He was a magical human being." Having mentioned that Richard Greene was once known as "the Brylcreem Boy", she then adds, helpfully, that "Brylcreem was a product used to slick down men's hair and make it shine, and it did just that. In fact, it made men's hair look like the shine my mother would get on her grate after using black lead polish." Write that down in your jotters, boys and girls. And when, for reasons not worth going into, she happens to refer to the death of Mary, Queen of Scots, one can almost see her stamping her foot, her brow furrowed like Shirley Temple's, as she delivers the following admonition, "To die by the sword of an executioner was very wrong." Very, very wrong! Bold, bad executioner!

Platitudes flow from Miss Court's pen more freely than blood in a Hammer film. Particularly cherishable is her recollection of discovering a young Bill Clinton, a friend of her step-children, cooking hamburgers in her kitchen: "He still loves hamburgers, his favourite food. Born a Leo in August, it's no surprise. They love meat. My son is a Leo, so I know." Best of all, however, is a brief encounter, at MGM Studios in 1965, with Elvis Presley. Rushing from her dressing room to the set of Dr. Kildare, Miss Court found herself unable to stop for an audience with the King: "Fleeing down the corridor, I turned around. He was laughing as he waved one of those famous hands. I will never forget the energy that surrounded him, even as he waved. Mesmerising. I should have gone back and talked, but I was very young." The eternally girlish Miss Court, it seems worth mentioning (as she coyly fails to do herself), was born in 1926, and so was 39 at the time of this "youthful" missed opportunity.

Buttock-clenchingly awful though Hazel Court - Horror Queen is in almost every respect, none of that would have mattered had Miss Court had anything even remotely interesting or novel to relate concerning her work for Hammer and AIR Predictably, of course, she does not. The section (one can hardly dignify it with the description of "chapter") on The Curse of Frankenstein contains the following pearls of perspicacity: Peter Cushing was "a wonderful human being", Christopher Lee was "very funny, and really not scary at all", Robert Urquhart was "a very nice human being ... and quite attractive", while director Terence Fisher "knew his craft and gently steered the production." Her recollections of working for Roger Corman are equally vapid ("He was a fast director, and we worked very quickly ... Roger was very, very clever") and include the priceless (or should that be "Price-less"?) revelation, regarding The Masque of the Red Death, that, "The scenes in the film where I sacrifice myself to the devil gave me a very strange feeling. It was almost like I was really doing it, and I thought, 'Oh my God, I am giving myself to the devil!'" Clearly, there was Method in Miss Court's madness.

Given that her horror films are the entire raison d'être - and sole selling point - of these memoirs, one can imagine a rictus-grin of disappointment freezing the face of publisher Bruce Sachs as he waded through this mindless waffle. "When I had asked Hazel Court some years ago to write her autobiography, I never expected the one she finally delivered," Mr Sachs has recalled (see www.hammerfilms.com), and there can be little reason to doubt the veracity of that statement. Mr Sachs, however, is nothing if not loyal: "She spent the last days of her life studying every page [of the proofs]. She loved it. 'The most important thing I've done in my life', she told me. Hazel's opinion on the finished book was the only one that mattered to me." Which, one imagines, is just as well, as there will be no shortage of disappointed horror fans willing to share a rather different opinion of this "important" work. It would be gratifying to report that Mr Kenneth Bishton, credited as proof-reader of the book, had also studied "every page", but the constant misspelling of "Edgar Allan Poe" in the memoirs of an actress remembered for adaptations of that author's work rather suggests he did not, as do Miss Court's uncorrected assertions that Stuart Whitman won an Oscar for The Mark (he was nominated but didn't win), and that she and second husband, the director Don Taylor, "were filming in Rome right after Liz Taylor and Richard Burton made Cleopatra there" (Don Taylor's The Five Man Army was made six years after the release of Cleopatra). Picture captions are not usually the preserve of the proof-reader, but someone at Tomahawk should have known that John Gregson did not look remotely like Michael Craig.

Tomahawk Press have published some excellent books (Tony Eamshaw's Beating the Devil - The Making of Night of the Demon, Wayne Kinsey's Hammer Films - The Elstree Studio Years, and Sheldon Hall's book on Zulu come readily to mind), but Hazel Court - Horror Queen is not one of them. Even the plethora of photographs, seized on by some reviewers as an excuse to pass over the accompanying prose, are largely banal, an endless succession of magazine covers and studio portraits which only serve to reinforce the impression that Miss Court's most abiding memories of her film career were the opportunities it afforded her to dress up prettily in pretty dresses. Unless, like Madeline Bassett, one believes that "every time a fairy hiccoughs a wee baby is bom" or one has a particularly well-developed taste for masochism, there is no good reason for wasting either money or time on a book which, to borrow the title of Miss Court's first film for AIP, would have been best served by a "premature burial".

JOHN EXSHAW