“Being English, I always find out about American women before I launch into a description of my chief hobby, or shall I say my principal diversion? You see, I am entirely mad about your California, because here I can do what I have always wanted to do – spend all my leisure in the open. Perhaps it is a habit, but I should feel my day entirely lost if I didn’t do something in the way of exercise. I have a canter or a walk in the morning as regularly as I do my breakfast – and usually before.” — Elizabeth Allan
Source: Grace Wilcox (1934)
“But above everything else, Bela had one special command for me: ‘Don’t associate with Elizabeth Allan, because she has a bad reputation!'” — Carroll Borland, who played Lugosi‘s daughter in Mark of the Vampire (1935).
Allan, seen huddling with Henry Wadsworth, apparently had a reputation for “fooling around” even though she was married to a London theatrical agent at the time. The studio gossip in 1935 was that she had jumped from one affair with Clark Gable to another with M-G-M’s “fixer” Eddie Mannix, a man with a sleazy reputation.
During the making of the film, Lugosi was very protective of Carroll and she, in turn, idolized him for the rest of her life (and afterlife no doubt).
