"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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