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When we last left Spanish Drácula lovely Lupita Tovar, a fat female German warden was driving her Nazi by threatening to “look in my ass” during a 1935 strip search.
So let’s explore a bit deeper, shall we?
“I was shivering in the cold, and I may have called her a few names that I had learned in German,” Lupita continues the tail. After a thorough search, she threw my clothes at me. When I was taken back to their office, Paul [Kohner, her husband] said, ‘My wife doesn’t speak German.’ The fat woman guard said, ‘Oh, yes she does, and she has a dirty mouth.’”
She’d need it to fend off one of her husband’s wealthy allies shortly thereafter. “Paul had a Swiss friend, a very rich film financier by the name of Herr Weissman,” Tovar tattles. “This man had a villa in St. Moritz, where he lived with his mistress and her young son. When Paul had to go for a few days to the filming location, the Swiss couple invited me to stay with them at their villa, and I accepted.
“He stopped and pleaded with me not to tell anyone. He offered me anything if I would keep quiet. I grabbed my clothes and ran.” And then “told my husband how his friend had tried to **** me!”
Far more tactful … but perhaps more terrifying … was menacing Mexican revolutionary GeneralSaturninoCedillo—who became besotted with his country’s “sultry sweetheart.”
Planning to overthrow the government in 1936, the dangerous dictator arranged to meet Lupita at Universal Studios—where he tried to arrange with her old boss from Drácula days, Carl Laemmle, to ‘loan her out.’
“General Cedillo wanted to see me,” she writes in her memoirs. “This was the same General Cedillo who had pursued me so ardently four years earlier. The general seemed to devour me with his eyes. He begged me to ask for anything; was there anything he could do for me? Of course, I refused.”
Three years later, the strongman summoned her again. “We had almost finished filming María, when one morning I found a woman waiting for me outside the studio,” Tovar recounts. “She was desperate to talk to me. She said General Cedillo had sent her to get me—to bring me to him. Cedillo had started his own revolution, and President Lázaro Cárdenas had just sent federal troops north to put down this rebellion. I knew Cedillo was dangerous when he didn’t get what he wanted, and he still wanted me.”
Yet for a third time Lupita rebuffed the revolutionary {“Tell him that I can’t leave my work, and to please forgive me”}. She sighs: “Two days later, I read in the newspaper that General Saturnino Cedillo had been shot dead” {in his bed, ‘in the early hours’ of 1/9/39}. I was lucky not to have been there with him at the time.”
Indeed, as the Mexican outlet The Bable reported: “General Cedillo made every effort to get actress Lupita Tovar intobed, without any positive results.” Well, maybe for her …
War would also figure prominently in the next shock to the señorita’s system … when she again lost out on “the role of a lifetime” which would have brought her Ecstasy: “In 1942, I was cast for the movie Casablanca,” she told United Film about playing the part of Humphrey Bogart’s beautiful lover he spurns for Ingrid Bergman. “But then they gave it to Madeleine Lebeau”—just 19 at the time {like Sleuth, born on June 10th}, to Lupita’s 32.
Despite the age difference, the vampire vixen also outlasted her ravishing rival—Madeleine died earlier this year, six months before Lupita, at age 92.
But she left behind the scene that made her immortal, singing the French national anthem in a room full of occupying German soldiers: “As the song nears its stirring finale,” the New York Times wrote in Lebeau’s obituary 74 years later, “the camera closes in on the character of Yvonne, her face lit with patriotic fervor, tearsstreaming from her eyes as she sings.”
“She will forever be the face of French resistance,” that country’s culture minister announced after her death. And perhaps the figure ‘two’…
Though Tovar lost the plum part, she also had attri•beauts … and mas oui, how many men ‘liked them apples! Like LeBeau, this was born out in France—a dozen years after their Casablanca connection. “In the summer of 1954,” she recalled, notorious German film director Erich von Stroheim and his actress lover Denise Vernac “invited us to lunch at their house in Paris.
“There, Erich tried to shock me by showing me his collection of erotic sculptures that he kept in a barn,” Lupita laughed. “Erich was a naughty man” {below left, on that very day!}.
At night, “Erich and Denise picked us up at our hotel {with the Kohners’ son Pancho, above right, then age 15} and we went to the Folies Bergère” topless cabaret club. “When asked what he thought of all the bare breasts on stage” …
… Lupita later confided, “Pancho said, ‘I’ve seen better at home.’”
Which is where Mrs. Kohner preferred to be. Turning her back on acting after the Casablanca disappointment, Tovar was content to raise her children. “You simply can’t do two things and do them well,” she told Western Clippings. “Something will suffer. It is not satisfactory. I preferred my family to my career.”
And what an accomplished clan they became! Her lookalike lovely daughter Susan Kohner, born in 1936 …
… also became an actress—winning an Oscar nomination and Golden Globe Award playing “a dark-skinned woman who ‘passed’ for white” {like her mother had done in Drácula} in 1959’s Imitation of Life, opposite shy Sandra Dee.
And stacked Susan’s golden globes might even win on points …
... in a match with mom’s mams!
At the conclusion of her award-winning reel, Susan’s character “pushes through the crowd of mourners to throw herself upon her mother’s casket, begging forgiveness.” Yet that was hardly an Imitation of their real Life, as the pair were always quite close.
And what can one say about a long life like Lupita’s: she died the day after her daughter’s eightieth birthday!
Like mom, Susan Kohner quit acting after her marriage … in 1964 to famed menswear designer John Weitz {who, in another coincidence, had been part of the foiled von Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Lupita’s hated Hitler in 1944) … to raise their two boys.
She seems to have raised them well … since sons Paul and Chris Weitz created and directed the raunchy American Pie movie series—where, said one Brit scribe, “Tits were among the most frequently recurring bits.”
So the lads know nudity … making one whistled comment by Chris Weitz (below right with mom granny} all the more mamarable.
“My Drácula wardrobe was very sexy,” Lupita laughed. “I didn’t think I was sexy or anything like that, but my youngest grandson, when he finally saw the film, said, ‘Grandma, I know now why Grandpa married you!’” {Ya can’t make this stuff up … and we didn’t.}
Perhaps, even subconsciously, Chris’ creation of a stacked señorita showering in American Pie was based on glimpses of his Gran’s glands.
Horrifyingly, there would not be another Spanish-language Dracula movie for 42 years … a curse broken by the 1973 sexploitation film Dracula’s Great Love. And the first victim consumed by the Count was an actress named … would you believe? … Loreta Tovar!
But there was nothing conventional about her Drac debut—which required Loreta to go completely nude!
“Once you’ve signed a contract, you have to do it,” the topless Tovar explained in a 2014 interview. “That’s just the way it is. The scenes were filmed with great respect—there was only the director and a lighting technician, and they told the rest to leave. Though every once in a while, I noticed someone hanging in the rafters above.”
The carnal count who drains Loreta’s blood was played by Paul Naschy—whose varied “portrayals of numerous classic horror figures have earned him recognition as the Spanish Lon Chaney.” Vouches his victim Ms. Tovar: “Paul was affectionate and a very nice person, and he explained exactly what I would have to do. Especially in Inquisition (1978), the first film he directed, Paul showed me the ropes after I was already in the torture device assembly—which, for better or worse, I was seeing for the first time!” Yet somehow both actors were able to adjust to the rack.
Again, in a similar vein {ahem} to Lupita, Loreta’s Dracula was simultaneously filmed in two versions: “The amount of exposed flesh in Dracula’s Great Love is quite high,” gushed Cool Ass Cinema. “Spanish horror was, for its domestic releases at the time, forbidden to show sex and nudity {dictator General Franco was still in power till 1975}. So folks kept their clothes on, but took them off for scenes shot exclusively for the international markets” {the opposite of the “far sexier” Spanish version in 1931}.
A duality demonstrated later that same year by Loreta in 1973’s Night of the Sorcerers where, for home audiences, she demurely puts onhose …
… then takes offclothes for the foreign crowd!
“I was, as I have always said, used to spending summers in Ibiza growing up,” this Tovar shrugs, “so goingtopless for me was normal. And if I can do it for free on the beach, what’s wrong with doing it for fee on film?”
And once again like Lupita, Loreta quit making movies at the top of her game: “For me, the Spanish ‘sexploitation’ cinema was starting to go downhill. So before it got worse, I felt an early withdrawal was best. If you can get by, and have a little money to live with dignity, it is preferable to leave at the right time.”
Time will tell: at 64, she’s still smoking hot …
Much like her vintage namesake whose life, though extinguished at 106, was one for the ages. “When I think of her,” marveled famed film historian Michael G. Ankerich, “‘Lady’ is the word that comes to mind. Lupita Tovar is one classy lady!”
“I’m no spring chicken,” Lupita looked back at age 100. I’m an old lady, with grown-up grandchildren. And all of these fantastic things keep happening.”
“I never thought I would live for so long {due to Dracula making her ‘undead’?}. But I survived and I’m glad. I don’t regret anything. I had a great life,” she said shortly before the final curtain. “I was married for 56 years [Kohner died of a heart attack in 1988] and my husband is long time dead, but I give him a ‘good night’ every day. We loved each other deeply and lived for one another. I had a very adventurous and romantic life.”
As flowed in her writing (below left) … and showed in her final photo, signing a poster.
What better END than a look back at her grandsons’ ass•tounding American Pie sequel:
Yet Lupita Tovar needs no remake. Her lovely life will withstand the test of time.
