The Phantom of Manhattan

A visitor even today can descend to these levels (a special permit is needed) and peer through gratings at the buried lake. Every two years the level is lowered so that engineers in flat-bottomed punts can pole around and inspect the foundations for possible damage.

Storey by storey Garnier’s giant rose until he was back at ground level, then went onwards and upwards. In 1870 work came to a halt as yet another revolution swept France, triggered by the short but brutal Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon III was deposed, and died in exile. A new republic was declared but the Prussian army was at the gates of Paris. The French capital starved. The rich ate the elephants and giraffes from the zoo while the poor fricasseed dogs, cats and rats. Paris surrendered, and the working class of the city was so enraged at what they had gone through that they rose in revolt.

The insurrectionists called their regime the Commune and themselves the Communards, with 100,000 men and cannon spread throughout the city. The civil government had quit in panic and the Civil Guard took over as a military junta, finally crushing the Communards. But during their time in charge the rebels had used the shell of Garnier’s building with his labyrinth of cellars and storerooms as a base for weapons, powder … and prisoners. Terrible tortures and executions took place in those vaults far below ground and buried skeletons were still being discovered many years later. Even today there is a deep chill there that never goes away. It was this underground world and the idea of a lonely disfigured hermit living down there in the darkness that fascinated Gaston Leroux forty years later and fired his imagination.

By 1872 normality had been restored and Garnier got on with his job. In January 1875, almost seventeen years to the day since Orsini had thrown his bombs, the opera house, whose conception his act had triggered, held its gala opening.

It covers almost three acres, or 118,500 square feet. It is seventeen storeys from deepest cellar to pinnacle of roof, but with only ten above ground and an amazing seven storeys underground. Surprisingly, its auditorium is quite small, seating only 2,156 opera-goers as opposed to 3,500 at the Scala in Milan and 3,700 at the New York Met. But backstage it is vast, with ample dressing-rooms for hundreds of performers, workshops, canteens, wardrobe departments and storage areas for complete theatrical backdrops so that entire sets fifty feet high and weighing many tons can be lowered and stored without being dismantled, then raised again to be installed when needed.

The point about the Paris Opera is that it was always designed as more than just a site for the performance of opera. Hence the relative smallness of the auditorium, for much of the non-working space is taken up with reception halls, salons, sweeping staircases and areas fit to offer a glittering venue to great state occasions. It still has over 2,500 doors which take the resident firemen more than two hours to check before they go home. In Garnier’s day it employed a permanent staff of 1,500 (about 1,000 today) and was illuminated by 900 gaslight globes fed by ten miles of copper pipe. It was converted to electricity in stages through the 1880s.

This was the intensel

y dramatic building that caught Gaston Leroux’s vivid imagination when he visited in 1910 and first heard talk that once, years earlier, there had been a phantom living in the building; that things simply went missing; that unexplained accidents had occurred; and that a shadowy figure had occasionally been seen flitting from dark corners and always heading downwards to the catacombs where none dared follow. From these twenty-year-old rumours Leroux created his story.

Old Gaston seems to have been the sort of man with whom one would love to take a drink at some Parisian cafe if only the ninety interceding years could be breached. He was big, jovial, bluff and cheerful: a bon viveur and generous host, wildly eccentric with a pair of pince-nez perched on his nose to compensate for poor eyesight.

He was born in 1868 and though from Normandy he actually arrived in the world during a train-change in Paris when his mother was caught short. He was bright at school and in the manner of clever boys in middle-class France was destined to be a lawyer, being sent back to Paris to study law at the age of eighteen. It was a study he had no taste for at all. He was twenty-one when he graduated and the same year his father died, leaving him a million francs, which was a considerable fortune in those days. Hardly had Papa been popped below ground when young Gaston went on the town in quite a big way. Within six months he had got through the lot!

It was journalism, not the law courts, that beckoned, so he got a job as a reporter with Echo de Paris and later Le Matin. He found a love of theatre and did some drama criticism but it was his knowledge of the law that made him a star court reporter and required him to witness a number of executions by guillotine. This made him a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, a most unusual outlook in those days. He showed ingenuity and audacity in obtaining scoop after scoop over the competition and secured hard-to-get interviews with celebrities. Le Matin rewarded him with a commission as a wandering foreign correspondent.

These were the days when readers had no objection to a foreign correspondent having a pretty vivid imagination and it was not unknown for a journalist far from home, unable to garner the true facts of a story, simply to make it up. There is a glorious example of the American from Hearst Newspapers who arrived by train somewhere in the Balkans to cover a civil war. Unfortunately he overslept on the train and woke up in the next capital down the line, which happened to be rather quiet. Rather perplexed, he recalled he had been sent to cover a civil war so he had better do it. He duly filed a vigorous war report. The next morning this was read by the embassy in Washington who sent the report back to their masters at home. While the Hearst man slept on, the local government mobilized the militia. The peasants, fearing a pogrom, revolted. A civil war subsequently began. The journalist woke up to a telegram from New York congratulating him on a world scoop. Gaston Leroux took to this ethos like a duck to water.

But travel then was harder and more tiring than now. After ten years covering stories across Europe, Russia, Asia and Africa he had become a celebrity but was exhausted. In 1907, aged thirty-nine, he decided to settle down and write novels. None in fact was more than what we would today call a potboiler, which is probably why virtually nothing he wrote is easily available. Most of his stories were thrillers and for these he invented his own detective; but his creation never became Sherlock Holmes, his personal icon. Still, he made a good living, enjoyed every moment of it, spent his advances as fast as the publishers could produce them and churned out sixty-three books in his twenty years of professional writing. He died aged fifty-nine in 1927, just two years after Carl Laemmle’s version of The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney received its premiere and went on to become a classic.

Looking at his original text today, frankly one is in a quandary. The basic idea is there and it is brilliant, but the way poor Gaston tells it is a mess. He begins with an introduction, above his own name, claiming that every line and word is true. Now that is a very dangerous thing to do. To claim quite clearly that a work of fiction is absolutely true and therefore a historical record is to offer oneself as a hostage to fortune and to the sceptical reader, because from that moment on every single claim made that can be checked must be absolutely true. Leroux breaks this rule on almost every page.

An author can start a story ‘cold’, seemingly recounting true history but without saying so, leaving the reader guessing as to whether what he is reading truly happened or not. Thus is created that blend of truth and invention now called ‘faction’. A useful ploy in this methodology is to intersperse the fiction with genuinely true interludes that the reader can either recall or check out. Then the puzzlement in the reader’s mind deepens but the author remains innocent of an outright lie. But there is a golden rule to this: everything you say must either by provably true or completely unprovable either way. For example, an author might write:

‘At dawn on the morning of 1 September 1939, fifty divisions of Hitler’s army invaded Poland. At that same hour a soft-spoken man with perfectly forged papers arrived from Switzerland at Berlin’s main station and disappeared into the waking city.’

The first is a historical fact and the second cannot now be either proved or disproved. With a bit of luck the reader will believe both are true and read on. Leroux, however, begins by telling us that what he has in store is nothing but the truth and buttresses this with claims of conversations with witnesses of the actual events, perusal of records and newly discovered (by him) diaries never seen before.

But his narration then hares off in all sorts of different directions, down blind alleys and back again, passing by a host of unexplained mysteries, unsupported claims and factual howlers until one is seized by the urge to do what Andrew Lloyd Webber did. This is, take a large blue pencil and trim out the rather breathless diversions to haul the story back to what is, after all, an amazing but credible tale.

Having been so critical of Monsieur Leroux, it would be only right and proper to justify one’s censures with a few examples. Quite early in his narrative he refers to the Phantom as Erik but without ever explaining how he learned this. The Phantom was hardly in the habit of small talk and was not accustomed to go about introducing himself. As it happens, Leroux was right and we can only surmise he learned this name from Madame Giry, of whom more anon.

Much more bewildering, Leroux tells his entire story without ever giving a date when it happened. For an investigative reporter, which he purports to be, this is a bizarre omission. The nearest clue is a single phrase in his own introduction. Here he says: ‘The events do not date more than thirty years back.’

This has led some critics to subtract thirty years from the appearance of his book in 1911 and presume the year to be 1881. But ‘not more than’ can also mean considerably less than, and there are several small clues that indicate the date of his story was probably much later than 1881 and more likely around 1893. Chief among these clues is the affair of the complete power failure of the lights in both auditorium and stage area which lasted only a few seconds.

According to Leroux, the Phantom, outraged by his rejection by Christine, the girl he loved with an obsessive passion, chose to abduct her. For maximum effect, the moment he selected was when she was on centre stage in a performance of Faust. (In the musical Lloyd Webber has changed this to Don Juan Triumphant, an opera entirely composed by the Phantom himself.) The lights suddenly failed, plunging the theatre into pitch-darkness, and when they went up again, she was gone. Now this cannot be done with 900 gas globes.

True, a mysterious saboteur who knew his way around could pull the master lever shutting off the gas supply to this host of globes. But they would extinguish in sequence as the gas supply ran out and after much spluttering and popping. Worse, as automatic reignition was not known then, they could only be relit by someone going round with a taper. That was what the humble profession of lamplighter was all about. The only way to produce utter darkness at the pull of a switch, and illumination again in another millisecond is to operate the master control of a fully electric lighting system. This puts the date rather later than some would have it.

Leroux appears also to have made an error with the position, appearance and intelligence of Madame Giry, an error corrected in the Lloyd Webber musical. This lady appears in the original book as a half-witted cleaner. She was in fact the mistress of the chorus and the corps de ballet who hid behind the veneer of a starchy martinet (necessary to control a corps of excitable girls) a most courageous and compassionate nature.

One must forgive Leroux for this, for he was relying on human memory, that of his informants, and they were clearly describing another woman. But any policeman or court reporter will happily confirm that witnesses in court, honest and upright people, have some difficulty agreeing with each other and recalling with precision the events they witnessed last month, let alone eighteen years ago.

In a much more glaring error, Leroux describes a moment when the Phantom in another fit of pique causes the entire chandelier above the auditorium to crash down upon the audience, killing a single woman sitting beneath. That this lady turns out to be the woman hired to replace the Phantom’s dismissed friend Mme Giry is a lovely storyteller’s touch. But he then goes on to say that the chandelier weighed 200,000 kilograms. That happens to be 200 tonnes, enough to bring it and half the ceiling down every night. The chandelier weighs seven tonnes; it did when it went up, it is still there and it still does!

But far and away the most bizarre departure by Leroux from even the most basic rules of investigation and reporting is his end-of-book seduction by a mysterious character known only as ‘the Persian’. This strange mountebank is briefly mentioned twice in the first two-thirds of the story, and in a most passing manner. Yet after the abduction of the soprano from centre stage Leroux allows this man to take over the whole narrative and tell the entire story through his own eyes for the last third of the book. And what an implausible story it is.

Yet Leroux never attempts to cross-check his allegations. Although the young Vicomte Raoul de Chagny was supposed to have been present at every stage of the events described by the Persian, Leroux claims he could not find the vicomte later to check the story. Of course he could have!

We will never know why the Persian had such a loathing of the Phantom but he produced a character assassination of the man that blackened him to the very gates of hell. Prior to the intervention of the Persian, Leroux the writer and most readers might have felt some human sympathy for the Phantom. Clearly he was monstrously disfigured in a society that too often equates ugliness with sin, but that was not his fault. He was evidently filled with hatred of society but, rejected and an exile, he must have had a truly appalling life. Until the Persian, we can see Erik as the Beast to the singer Christine’s Beauty, but not intrinsically evil.

The Persian, however, paints him as a raging sadist; a serial killer an