One of the actor Boris Karloff’s most lauded roles was his humanizing portrayal of a horror film progenitor: Frankenstein’s monster, based on the novel by Mary Shelley. He first played the monster, a nameless “creature” in Shelley’s novel, in the 1931 film “Frankenstein,” directed by James Whale.
“‘Frankenstein’ transformed not only my life but also the film industry,” Karloff, who was born William Henry Pratt, once said.
When he died in February 1969, The New York Times wrote of Karloff’s career in an article that featured a photograph of an actor, in costume as the monster.
One problem: The man in the makeup, with the bolts in his neck, wasn’t Karloff.
The image — a publicity photo, copyrighted by Universal Pictures — depicted the actor Glenn Strange, who had succeeded Karloff in the role, playing the monster in subsequent films, including “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,” which was released in 1948.
At least one astute reader had spotted the mistake and sent a letter to The Times.
The photograph was seemingly mislabeled around 1948, the copyrighted date on the image, and incorrectly placed in a folder for Karloff, one of the millions of files stored in the Morgue, The Times’s subterranean clippings library. (The Times issued a correction, a copy of which is pasted on the back of the photo in the Morgue.)
Almost 20 years after the first misprinting, in March 1987, the same photo, though cropped tighter and tilted slightly, was used to accompany a letter to the editor that referenced Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Again, the caption incorrectly identified Strange as Karloff.
Dr. Jane Bishop of Brooklyn, the same reader who caught the mistake in 1969, wrote to The Times and explained that she had lodged an identical complaint 18 years earlier. Dr. Bishop also wrote that, in 1969, she had received “a nice letter in reply” from the writer of the obituary, Alden Whitman, “but apparently it was not a permanent remedy.” The letter is also now stored in the Morgue.
Fortunately, almost 40 years have passed without another monster mix-up.
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