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"Gary Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger have added the final chapter to
Bela Lugosi's career, combining fascinating unknown details of his
film and stage activities with post-WWII film history. Superbly
researched and written as an engrossing story of an actor's
struggle against professional decline. A must-read " - Robert
Cremer, author of Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape (Henry Regnery,
1976). "Gary Rhodes represents that elusive Gold Standard in
narrative research into the full depth and breadth of Bela Lugosi's
complicated career. Rhodes' devotion to the banishment of myth, and
to its replacement with frank and humanizing truth, has provided a
wealth of historical storytelling that, in turn, renders the
actor's known body of work all the more fascinating and
comprehensible. Just when I catch myself believing I know all there
is to be known about Lugosi - along comes Gary Rhodes and Bill
Kaffenberger with a fresh brace of revelations. The process
advances immeasurably in No Traveler Returns: The Lost Years of
Bela Lugosi." - Michael H. Price, coauthor of the Forgotten Horrors
series. In No Traveler Returns, Bela Lugosi scholar extraordinaire
Gary D. Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger provide a fascinating time
travel journey back to the late 1940s/early 1950s, when Lugosi -
largely out of favor in Hollywood - embarked on a Gypsy-like
existence of vaudeville, summer stock, and magic shows. While many
historians have considered this era a limbo in Lugosi's career,
with precious few facts unearthed, Rhodes and Kaffenberger take the
reader along for a wide-eyed ride as Bela performs in a nightclub
so notorious that armed guards keep watch on the roof, dresses as
Dracula in a magic show where he and a gorilla (a man in a suit)
play football with the guillotined head of a woman (a dummy), and
races from one stock engagement to another without ever missing a
cue. Never in his American career was Bela so busy, and never did
his light shine so brightly as he valiantly troupes to support his
family, dominate age and illness, and please his audiences. It's a
fastidiously researched education in the show business world of the
time - and a stirring tribute to the charm, brilliance and
inexhaustible professionalism of the star who was Dracula. -
Gregory William Mank, author of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The
Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration (McFarland, 2009).
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