The shoes were like a magnet. Two big black metal behemoths that overwhelmed the auction house table. I moved in to take a closer look, not sure what to make of them. They looked like shoes that a steelworker would wear. But that big?
The heels and soles seemed to be six inches high and just as thick, elevating them above everything else on the table. The upper portion looked to be very tough and stiff.
Puzzled, I wondered where they came from and why they were here. I got my answers as I glanced beyond the shoes to the other items close by: A grotesque rubber face mask with two bolts sticking out of its neck. A bundle of black fabric.
Then I understood. Frankenstein’s monster. They were his shoes.
The shoes were the talk of the table because they were among the most interesting and anachronistic items at the auction house. It took me a few minutes to figure out the shoes because Halloween had come and gone, and I wasn’t expecting to see a costume two months later. Besides, anything might turn up at an auction house – even heavy shoes from some occupation far outside my base of knowledge.
You just never know what you’ll come across. Like the white football shoulder pads lying next to the shoes. Did they or did they not belong with the costume? They did. They were apparently worn to give the illusion of broad shoulders inside the costume recreated from the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein.”
With all the interest in the shoes, I was curious about the origin of Frankenstein’s monster. I’m sure I’ve seen the 1931 movie with Boris Karloff as the creature. And I remember the likable but adolescent Herman Munster, who decades later, took on the same look on a TV show.
But I wondered if there was more to the story, so I Googled. I learned that Shelley had come up with the idea in 1816 after a challenge from Lord Byron that each of his guests write a horror story. The 18-year-old wrote about a scientist and his monster, which evolved into a novel that was published to much success in 1818.
Her creature, though, was quite different from the one played by Karloff in “Frankenstein,” which was adapted from a play. Shelley’s monster had no name. After the novel was published, he was given the name Frankenstein in theatrical plays, and Karloff’s performance in the movie cemented that moniker. The creature was Frankenstein’s monster; the creator was Victor Frankenstein in the book and Henry Frankenstein in the movie.
Karloff’s made-up face will always be the image of that monster. It is such an iconic image that, according to wikipedia, Karloff’s daughter owns it. The brain behind the look was Hollywood makeup artist Jack Pierce (with a little help from director James Whale, who had drawn sketches).
Here’s how Shelley described the monster:
“… An 8-foot-tall (2.4 m), hideously ugly creation, with translucent yellowish skin pulled so taut over the body that it ‘barely disguised the workings of the vessels and muscles underneath’; watery, glowing eyes, flowing black hair, black lips, and prominent white teeth.'”
For the movie, Karloff sat through four hours of makeup as Pierce built up his face, flattened his head and applied two electrodes to his neck. Karloff is said to have removed a dental plate to give his jaw a sunken look. And he wore a padded costume that weighed 65 pounds and shoes that weighed 30 pounds.
All of it apparently worked because when we see the face, we instantly know who this monster is. Even if at first we don’t recognize the shoes. (The photo below shows Pierce applying makeup to Karloff and the finished face.)
