Dennis Polkow

How ironic that the 1925 "Phantom of the Opera" is known as the "silent" version, for that is not how Chicago native Carla Laemmle remembers it. Her uncle was onetime Chicagoan Carl Laemmle, the famous pioneering movie mogul who built Universal City Studios in 1915, and Carla is the last known surviving "Phantom" cast member.

Cast as the prima ballerina in the classic horror film when she was 16 years old, the role necessitated Carla and her dancing colleagues to be filmed in elaborately choreographed full ballet scenes that were shot in two-strip Technicolor and accompanied by a live symphony orchestra performing music from Gounod's "Faust" right in the orchestra pit of what today is Stage 28 at Universal City. Eighty years later it is still known as the "Phantom" stage.

Most memorable about the experience for Carla, though, was the frightful sight of Lon Chaney in his famous self-created "Death's Head" makeup, a sight she says she will never forget.

"If you think it was scary in the film--which it was--it was unimaginably gruesome in person," Carla recalls. "The makeup was a ghastly, ghostly, pale white and really gave him the appearance of living death. I had no trouble shirking away from him in those scenes where the Phantom was lurking around and we were supposed to be running away from him, because it was a sight you wanted to keep a good distance from. I knew it was makeup, but it was so, so hideous. I don't know how Mary [Philbin] could stand to be so close to it for so many shots."

Mary Philbin, the actress who played Chaney's love interest in the film and who unmasks him in one of cinema history's most unforgettable and imitated moments, was also a Chicagoan who grew up near Washington Park with Carla.

"We were neighbors in Chicago," Carla recalls. "She was six years older than I, but we were very close. Mary was a beautiful, beautiful girl, and it was my father who sent a picture of her to my uncle at the time Universal was having a beauty contest. She didn't win the contest--Fay Wray did--but she did get a studio contract, which brought Mary from Chicago to Hollywood. We were all very excited for her."

Carla herself would go on to tap dance on the keys of a gigantic piano while George Gershwin and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra performed "Rhapsody in Blue" in "The King of Jazz," and speak the first words ever heard in a talking horror film as a secretary reading aloud from a guide book amongst a carriage full of frightened travelers on their way to Transylvania in 1931's "Dracula," which would make a star out of Bela Lugosi.

I still remember the line, says Carla, her voice and features becoming more youthful as she intones it: "Among the rugged peaks that frown down upon the Borgo Pass are found crumbling castles of a bygone age."

"Phantom of the Opera" will be shown accompanied by its original 1925 orchestral score by Gustav Hinrichs and Max Winkler; Richard Kauffman will conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with organist Dennis James and soprano Elizabeth Norman, 8pm. October 21 at Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan, (312)294-3000.

(2005-10-18)

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