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By Scott Essman

“Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.”

–The Wolf Man (1941)

Among the men who made the original horror films at Universal Pictures in the late-1920s through the mid-1940s, few were as impor-tant and none was more important than legendary makeup artist and monster maker Jack Pierce. Creat-ing all of the original characters at the studio during that time, Pierce’s highest achievements certainly in-cluded the three Frankenstein Mon-sters with Boris Karloff; the original Mummy, Im-Ho-Tep, with Karloff in 1932; Elsa Lanchester’s glamorously ghoulish Bride of Frankenstein; and Pierce’s finest last original work, the Wolf Man, whom he realized in four films before his dismissal from the studio. Not only was the 1941 film The Wolf Man crucial among these individual masterpieces, but the character, though not the first, is largely still considered the best man-wolf hybrid in cinema history. Of course, Pierce’s fortunes all began in the silent period, dur-ing which Pierce toiled as an actor, assistant director, and stuntman, often applying his makeup skills to his own filmed performances. In 1928, after Universal founder “Uncle” Carl Laemmle had appointed his son, 21-year-old Carl Laemmle, Jr., as head of production at Uni-versal Studios, the machinery was in place for a new wave of films based on classic horror stories. Junior Laemmle made Pierce makeup department head that year, also the year of his first major Universal triumph with Gwynplaine (Conrad Veidt), in The Man Who Laughs. By 1931, the studio had both Dracula and Frankenstein as two of its greatest successes, and they followed those up with a few more early 1930s originals, including the aforementioned masterwork, The Mummy, and 1933’s The Invisible Man. During this period, Universal developed a werewolf vehicle for Boris Karloff that was never produced. Pierce created a test makeup concept for Karloff, but the project never went

into full production. In fact, Laemmle ap-proved a film of The Werewolf, the classic story that had its origins in France as the tale of the “loup garou.” Karloff was pre-cast as the title character, and Pierce went as far as to design an extensive lycanthrope makeup for him. In 1935, The Werewolf was reconfigured as Were-Wolf of London starring Henry Hull. An original at its time of release, Were-Wolf of London was Universal’s first film based on the classic Loup Garou stories of men who turned into wolves at the turning of a full moon. On the project, Pierce ran into a roadblock of sorts as Hull rejected a complete masking of his face by the makeup as Pierce had planned for Karloff. Instead, Pierce devised a strategically frightening likeness that included no less than five facial stages of man-into-wolf transformation on film. Pierce’s toned-down lycanthrope makeup

for titular actor Henry Hull was surely a compromise. Pierce would have to hold off his handcrafted painstaking methods as he had done with Karloff on Frankenstein and The Mummy for another six years and several re-gime changes at Universal for the studio’s next werewolf film. Instead, Hull wore a makeup in which his facial features shone through, suggesting an upright beast of murderous potential with Pierce’s hand-laid hair work providing the requisite mammalian threat. When the Laemmles left the studio in 1937, Universal seemed doomed to a slate of strategically produced sequels to the great films of the Laemmle era as the new regimes quickly churned out sequels to Dracula, Fran-kenstein, and The Mummy, arriving in droves at this time, 1939-1945. However, the one exception to the rule arrived in 1941 to set a new standard and ultimately be ranked with

the greatest of the Universal horror classics. As the 1940s began, horror movies were beginning to take a back seat to sweeping ro-mantic dramas and comedies. But one picture that reestablished the horror genre at Univer-sal was the landmark new horror classic, The Wolf Man. The same type of film was originally meant for Boris Karloff some ten years earlier, but by 1941, when Karloff had moved onto mad scientists and other older characters, a new actor was positioned as the new Karloff at the studio. His name was Lon Chaney, Jr. Until the late 1930s, the younger Chaney had been less heralded than his silent movie superstar father (and Pierce’s great friend), but his ap-pearance in 1939’s adaptation of Of Mice and Men put him on the cinematic map. Chaney Jr. was a star in the making, and Universal snapped him up for a run of horror films that lasted throughout the 1940s. With Jack Pierce’s innovative makeup—a more thorough lycan-thrope overhaul of Chaney Jr.’s face than had been used on Henry Hull in Were-Wolf of Lon-don—the Wolf Man was a remarkable horror movie character and equally as memorable as Karloff’s Frankenstein Monster and Mummy and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. In addition to Jack Pierce, the crafts-manship of The Wolf Man was also entrusted to director George Waggner, visual effects wizard John P. Fulton, and editor Ted J. Kent, A.C.E. For the Waggner (also spelled Wag-goner) Wolf Man film, slated as a B picture by the Universal brass, Pierce and Fulton

knew they had an opportunity to create a unique project that would harken back to the old Laemmle years at the studio. In Chaney, they had the hulk-ing physical actor who could be used to realize their ideas. Working closely with Pierce, Fulton was the mas-termind of the “transforma-tion” sequences in the film, in which stages of makeup were photographed identically and lap-dissolved in the final film so as to match together seam-lessly and create the illusion of an on-screen transformation. The technique had been done before on film—notably in 1932’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount) —and in Fulton’s own Were-Wolf of London in 1935, but Fulton’s use of matching his dissolve from one stage of Pierce’s makeup to the next had been perfected by 1941. It is likely that Fulton learned to master what was then called “trick” photography at an optical house, where he worked as a technician in the 1920s. Despite the early evidence of his talents, Fulton’s first truly groundbreaking work on 1933’s The Invisible Man would earn him the industry nickname, “The Doctor.” He would work alongside Jack Pierce at Universal until 1947.

With The Wolf Man, Kent, along with ma-jor contributions by studio mainstays Pierce and Fulton, created the film’s showpiece two transformation sequences, which became standard fare in the many spin-offs that fol-lowed. Witness the lap dissolves that Kent and Fulton implemented for transforma-tions from man to wolf, and especially in the film’s tragic climax, from wolf back to man.

Kent also cleverly orchestrated the noted end of the film, where Claude Rains unknowingly beats his own son with a silver-tipped cane, later realizing that it was his own flesh that he killed. In their tussle, an especially marked cut to a close shot of Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man struggling with Rains makes for one of the film’s most fascinating moments. During preproduction of The Wolf Man, Jack Pierce worked diligently to create the makeup for the title character, having been disappointed with his reduced makeup for Henry Hull in Were-Wolf of London. Pierce pulled out all the stops for The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., in the title role. Though the two reportedly did not get along—Chaney did not like wearing the makeup or undergo-ing the lengthy application and removal period—Pierce excelled again with his werewolf concept, using a design he had created for Boris Karloff a decade earlier

WOLF MEN: JACK PIERCE’S INCARNATIONS OF THE WOLF MAN

After the hair was applied, Pierce said he would “curl it, then singe it, burn it, to look like an animal that’s been out in the woods.” Here Pierce uses that technique during a make-up session for Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Above: A posed studio still from 1941 detailing Jack’s perfectionism with hair work and finely applied mixtures of early materials such as cotton, collodion, spirit gum, and other items primitive for a makeup artist. The nose appliance here, given its inflexibility, was likely made from slip rubber formulated in a separate lab by Ellis Burman, Sr. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

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when the Laemmles were planning a werewolf film. Thus, The Wolf Man was a true horror classic, and Pierce’s version of the character has been the model for the numerous werewolves that have since come to the screen and the benchmark against which all such characters have been judged since. To the lay observer, the idea of Jack Pierce re-creating a wolf charac-ter from scratch every day of princi-pal photography may seem daunting, but—as with the Frankenstein Mon-ster and the Mummy before—Pierce prided himself on working from the bottom up with each new makeup application. “I don’t use masks or any appliances whatsoever,” proclaimed Jack Pierce about the development of his famous monster characters. The one exception to Pierce’s rule occurred with his striking initial realization of the Wolf Man in 1941. “The only appliances I used was the nose that looks like a wolf[‘s nose]. There you either put on a rubber nose or model the nose every day, which would have taken too long. It took 2-1/2 hours to apply this makeup,” Pierce said, indicating the head, chest piece, and hands. “I put all of the hair on a little row at a time. After the hair is on, you curl it, then singe it, burn it, to look like an animal that’s been out in the woods. It had to be done every morning.” With regard to his chosen techniques,

Pierce might have lifted these from at least one Loup Garou story, which described a werewolf-attacked man this way: “There stood Page with his shoulders scratched, his hair be singed, his nose poisoned with sulphur breath of the wolf, his knife reeking with the blood of the cursed Loup Garou.” Pierce’s other key characters in The Wolf

Man included 1940’s “scream queen” Evelyn Ankers as Gwen Conliffe, Claude Rains as Sir John Talbot, Bela Lugosi as Bela the gypsy, and Maria Ouspenskaya as Maleva, the gypsy woman. As a result of Pierce’s methods, audiences were treated to perfectionism in The Wolf Man. As legend has it, wear-ing the Wolf Man makeup was an unpleasant experi-ence for Lon Chaney, Jr. Ac-cording to Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies, (Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited, New York, 1974, page 136), Chaney Jr. explained it in detail: “The day we did the transforma-tions I came in at two a.m. When I hit that position they would take little nails and drive them through the skin at the edge of my fingers, on both hands, so that I

wouldn’t move them anymore. While I was in this position they would build a plaster cast of the back of my head. Then they would take drapes from behind me and starch them, and while they were drying them, they would take the camera and weigh it down with one ton, so that it wouldn’t quiver when people walked. They had targets for my eyes up there. Then, while I’m still in this position, they would shoot five or ten frames of film in the camera. They’d take that film out and send it to the lab. While it was there the makeup man [Jack P. Pierce] would come and take the whole thing off my face, and put on a new one, only less. I’m still immobile. When the film came back from the lab they’d check me. They’d say, “Your eyes have moved a little bit, move them to the right . . . now your shoulder is up. . . .” Then they’d roll it again and shoot another ten frames. Well, we did twenty-one changes of makeup and it took twenty-two hours. I won’t discuss about the bathroom!” Alas, with the films that followed, what might have been was never realized in exactly the same way as with the stunning originality and critical and commercial suc-cess of The Wolf Man. As the United States entered World War II, a slew of sequels and remakes of the original horror films were cranked out at Universal with few standouts as momentous as their antecedents. Pierce went on to create the Wolf Man character in succeeding sequels, including Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and both House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula

Jack Pierce in a posed Universal studio shot applying makeup to Chaney Jr.’s Wolf Man. Pierce first conceived of a similarly designed lycanthrope makeup for Boris Karloff almost a decade before, but the project never came to fruition. Below: Lon Chaney, Jr., brilliantly posed by the Universal Pictures still department as the Wolf Man and revealing the entire character head to toe. Chaney would play the part in five Universal films in eight years. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

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(1945). The latter, originally titled The Wolf Man’s Cure, featured an end to the cycle of appearances by the Wolf Man in Universal films, but the character would inexplicably reappear in Abbott and Costello Meet Fran-kenstein three years later. By that point, Jack Pierce had been dismissed from Universal, and Bud Westmore was supervising young-er makeup artists Jack Kevan (who created the 1948 Frankenstein Monster) and Emile LaVigne (who created that film’s version of the Wolf Man) in their execution of Jack Pierce’s original designs. Notably, LaVigne streamlined Pierce’s work with a larger foam rubber nose, additional appliances, and a more comfortable, quickly applied approach for Chaney, Jr. With that final 1940s Universal Monster film, the classic monster movie era, in effect, was over. In retrospect, Pierce’s makeup slightly evolved over his four Wolf Man films. Com-pared with the overall wilder approach of the 1941 film, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man was a slightly more polished ap-proach—one might say that the character had a haircut with more closely cropped (meaning applied) rows of hair and a new nose appliance for Chaney Jr. In point, these foam rubber appliances from the 1941 film onward were molded and produced by Ellis Burman, Sr., whose son Tom and grandsons Robert and Barney continue to work as Hollywood makeup artists

specializing in prosthetics. Note the subtle change from the 1941 character’s nose to that in 1943. With the 1944 and 1945 House films, Pierce, with a full list of characters to prepare for shooting on each film, surely simplified his Wolf Man application pro-cess further than he had for the 1943 film. While in Fran-kenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Pierce had double the char-acters to get ready for screen daily than in the original The Wolf Man, in each House film he had Count Dracu-las, hunchbacks, and mad scientists to boot. Without question, the Wolf Man, with its meticulous hair work, was the most complicated of these House characters, necessitating that the process (regardless of Pierce’s careful attention to detail) become more efficient with a quicker application time. Among those to assist Pierce during these years were three craftspeople who rarely receive due note in popular literature about the period. Carmen Dirigo, who was the 1940s head of Universal’s hairstyling department (as her mother had been in the

1930s), assisted Pierce in preparing the char-acters in Universal’s makeup department, which was reportedly situated on the site of the current Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios, Hollywood, amusement park. With Dirigo’s knowledge of hair products and wig preparation, she surely provided at least ad-vice, if not outright hand-to-hand assistance,

to Pierce on these films. Another key collaborator was Bill Ely, a noted makeup technician who worked with Pierce in the depart-ment in the 1940s (until Pierce was let go in 1947). Finally, a major 1930s to 1940s Pierce ally was makeup artist Abe Haberman, a craftsperson who often worked on the many Abbott and Costello pictures of the period. Before his death in winter 1998, Haberman stated, “I used to hold the dryer when [Pierce] was doing the Wolf Man. He would lay that whole beard in, then singe it to give it the animal look. They light the fire in a fireplace, he would light that and then very carefully singe it, and it would curl up and change color and everything.” Working at Max Factor’s make-up enterprise in the early 1930s, Haberman freelanced at many stu-dios in town, often landing at Uni-versal. When Joan Bennett brought Haberman with her to Universal in 1938, Haberman encountered Jack Pierce. In 1996, Haberman said of

Chaney Jr.’s makeup underwent small variations from 1941’s The Wolf Man through sequels in 1943, 1944, and 1945 under the guise of Jack Pierce. The makeup was fully overhauled for 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein under Bud West-more’s supervision, with personal makeup application by Emile LaVigne. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

Jack Pierce creating a mid-stage of the Wolf Man character for House of Dracula (1945) for a key “transformation” makeup incarnation. Such makeup stages were regularly highlighted in the 1940s Universal films to feature the character representing different manifestations of man changing into wolf—or back into human. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

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his time with Bennett at Universal, “When she didn’t work I didn’t have to come in but I did anyway and Jack liked that. We became very close friends, he and Blanch [Craven, Pierce’s wife]. At Universal, I worked with Pierce. We would go in at 5:00 or 6:00, 13 or 14 hours a day; we usu-ally were on six days a week. They would ask me to come in and hold the dryer while they were doing the work. On The Wolf Man, when he used to blend the head with cotton and spirit gum—which is a forgotten art today, since I am the only one left who knows it—while he was apply-ing the cotton, I would dry it for him. He would apply it between the head and the forehead. He had the head and then the cotton and spirit gum would blend the edges.” Haberman continued of his time with Pierce in the late 1930s and early 1940s, “Jack Pierce was a perfectionist and he did a lot of research. He did his own molding of the characters because I used to see some of the molds in his garage. His garage was in the [San Fernando] Valley on Haven-hurst, at his home. He fought for his men. We were like a big family, the whole makeup department. He had his private room and there was a little sitting room for you, then there were two makeup chairs in one room and Bill Ely had the end room. There were a

couple of makeup rooms across.” Haberman commented on Pierce’s creativity with his Wolf Man characters: “He picked his own things—all the materials and stuff. He was very creative. Universal gave him carte blanche, do whatever you want. He was making money for them. Jack was one of the most loyal people I ever met. He fought for

everyone in the department. He was a dynamo and very loyal. I have seen him come on the set and just raise the roof with the cameramen because they were complaining about something. He would back his people to the limit because we were all, like I said, like a fam-ily. We all helped each other, which is unusual today. He wasn’t afraid of anybody be-cause he knew his business.” Of all the incarnations of the Wolf Man charac-ter, it would be difficult to think any version was better than that in the original 1941 film. However, according to legendary “Monster Kid,” historian, and collector Bob Burns, by 1943, the character was tweaked to the point that it was “perfect” in Fran-kenstein Meets the Wolf Man. Moreover, Burns, who met Pierce and is perhaps the

greatest living authority on monster films, has publicly stated that the Wolf Man is more than likely his favorite of all screen monsters. Even today’s artists revere Jack Pierce and his majestic triumphs with his various Wolf Man characters. Contemporary makeup effects master Todd Tucker of Illusion Indus-tries created a newly envisioned re-creation of Pierce’s last original classic horror charac-ter, 1941’s Wolf Man, using model and actor Douglas Meyers. Sculpting in clay with help from his assistant, Chris Gallaher, Tucker cre-ated an overhead mask appliance, hands, and feet, rounded off with lenses by Dr. Stacey Sumner. “It was natural for me to do, since I’ve created many of my own wolf characters over the years,” said Tucker. Upon the occasion of Jack Pierce’s death in 1968, one of the all-time greatest monster makers was gone, but his work continues to live on as new audiences begin to discover his treasured films. Perhaps with the fresh perspective now available to audiences through Universal’s recent re-releases of many of the classic horror films on DVD and Blu-ray, including a Legacy Collection of The Wolf Man (1941) on DVD from Universal Studios in 2010, the talented craftspeople who realized these films will ultimately be recognized for their singular efforts. Along-side the collection of actors, directors, and executives responsible for Universal’s great horror collection, Jack Pierce deserves spe-cial credit for bringing the original monsters and their movies to life.

Jack Pierce completes the full Wolf Man character in his Universal Pictures bungalow, which housed his numerous classic makeups from 1928-1947, including those for five films with The Mummy, seven different Frankenstein Monsters, the Bride of Frankenstein (once), Ygor (twice), and hordes of other icons in American cinema. (Courtesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

Chaney Jr. posing for a gag while in his full Wolf Man make-up and costume. In reality, Chaney would have had great difficulty eating and drinking in the full makeup. Despite the comic nature of this still, Chaney found wearing the Wolf Man makeup arduous, with its lengthy application process, irritating texture, and unpleasantly warm conditions. (Cour-tesy of Ronald V. Borst/Hollywood Movie Posters)

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