The Creature From The Black Lagoon Has Died

The Creature from the Black Lagoon, otherwise known as Ben Chapman, died on February 21st, at aged 79.

THE monsters created by Universal Studios in the first half of the 20th century evolved in a backwards fashion. In the 1920s Homo erectus distorted himself a bit, and took to swinging round church towers or chandeliers as the Phantom of the Opera and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. A decade later his teeth and hair grew longer and his skin more chalky, preparatory to wallowing in human blood in “Dracula” and “Frankenstein”. The 1940s brought a coating of fur (“Wolfman”) or shrouds (“The Mummy”), the humanoid shape regressing to animal or worse. Then, in 1954, a beast who was half-man and half-fish dragged himself out of the sea.

“Science couldn't explain it!” cried the theatre-trailer for “Creature from the Black Lagoon”. “But there it was, alive!” Its webbed tracks were seen on the shores of the deepest Amazon; a fossilised claw was found by scientists. This “Gill-Man”, like the lungfish, could evidently breathe on both land and water. It was a relic of the Devonian age, one-and-a-half million years ago. Universal could attest that its blood was 35% white corpuscles, like an amphibian's; that it ate fish, when film crews were unavailable; and that beneath its outer layer of scales, dark green picked out with copper and rough-hewn as an alligator's, was soft pink mammalian skin.
Beneath it too, sweating like a trooper in a thick body-stocking of foam rubber, was Ben Chapman. Behind the popping-out eyes, his own were moving—save when the lids came down, and he had to be guided down his monstrous paths by a prop-man with a torch. The truly nasty fluttering of the gills was achieved by another man, out of shot, pumping air through a tube into bladders on Mr Chapman's dorsal fin. He moved as he did, slowly and half-gliding while cymbals and screaming trumpets announced his presence, because he had ten pounds of weights in each webbed foot. His career as a strong-limbed Tahitian dancer in the nightclubs of Los Angeles had not entirely cut him out for this.

His monster-suit, which was to give him a persona he revelled in all his life, cost $18,000 and went through 76 designs. Two or three hours were needed to put the costume on, and as long to get it off again. Head, arms, legs, front torso and back torso had been moulded separately round his body in plaster of Paris and were now fitted separately to him, like a knight's armour. Only the head and the hands were easily removable, and in this garb (in which he could not sit down) he would eat his sandwiches at lunchtime.

For much of the day, however, being so hot, he would lurk in the greenish pool in the back lot at Universal. Out in the middle of the water, he would submerge his imposing frame until only his Gill-Man eyes and nostrils showed above the surface. There he would wait, holding his breath for as long as he could manage. Then—famously just as Rock Hudson was walking past with a group of elderly visitors—he would rise straight up, water streaming down him, lift up his arms, open his fish mouth and ROAR!!!

In Karloff's footsteps

Mr Chapman was not the only man who played the Creature. Its underwater swimming was done by Ricou Browning in relatively pristine Florida waters. But Mr Chapman was the only actor hired, on a studio contract for $300 a week, to get inside the Creature's mind. He therefore knew that, as in the case of Victor Hugo's Hunchback and Mary Shelley's Monster, a great sadness lay there. Jack Arnold, the director (also of “Tarantula” and “It Came from Outer Space”), insisted when he hired him that this was no cartoon. Mr Chapman, with no words to say, therefore used his dancer's body language to show how misunderstood the Creature was.
In the film, scientists invaded the Creature's peaceable kingdom; so naturally he saw them off. In the film he also fell in love with Kay Lawrence (Julia Adams), a comely young woman scientist in a white swimsuit, whom Mr Chapman much enjoyed carrying round in his brawny, scaly arms. The Creature's urge to mate was understandable. He was the last survivor of the fish-men, just as Mr Chapman turned out to be the last in a line of sad-monster-players that stretched back through Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, before more heartless and mechanised species arrived in Hollywood.

In the years before he played him, Mr Chapman had also been a bartender and a brave marine in Korea; in the years after, he worked in property and in a Seven-Up bottling plant. In old age, large, gentle and smiling, he was a fixture at celebrity signings. No other job, he said, compared with those six or seven weeks spent shooting, when he would drive eagerly over the Hollywood hills to that stifling costume again.

He was never credited with playing the Creature, the publicity department not wanting people to think that this was just a man in a suit. (Earlier, Boris Karloff had got no credit for playing Frankenstein's Monster.) Mr Chapman said he doubted audiences were so stupid. He was told, “You'd be amazed what people will believe.” Such as that when he climbed onto the scientists' boat, out of the black water, his eyes burning at the sight of a female butt in shorts, he represented all mankind in its fishy origins, evolving out of the deep.