The Book of Joe: About a Dog and His Man
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About this ebook
Actor Vincent Price won acclaim for his performances as a menacing villain in dozens of macabre horror films, such as House of Wax. Less well known, though, is Price’s lifelong love of animals, especially his fourteen-year-old mutt, Joe. From his wife’s passion for poodles to film set encounters with all types of creatures, including goats, apes, and camels, Price’s life was full of furry, four-legged friends. But it was Joe who truly captured his heart. Intelligent, courageous, and devoted to his owner, Joe was a special dog with a personality all his own.
In this touching and light-hearted memoir, with a new introduction by Bill Hader and a preface by Vincent Price’s daughter, Victoria, Joe gets involved in all sorts of hijinks: At one point, the actor has to defend his canine companion in court! Despite some bad habits, like stealing guests’ shoes, pursuing lustful trysts with neighboring dogs, or belly flopping into the garden fishpond—crushing more than a few fish—Price loves his Joselito, whose unconditional loyalty more than makes up for his minor indiscretions. And when Price’s elderly cousin who comes to stay with him is stricken with cancer, Joe never leaves her side. Price’s tender and witty recollections of his time spent with Joe will bring joy to any animal lover’s heart.
The Vincent Price Family Legacy will donate a portion of the proceeds from this book to the Fund for Animals.
Vincent Price
Vincent Price (1911–1993) was a prolific American actor, best known for his roles in horror films such as House of Wax, The Mad Magician, and The Fly. He also starred in a series of Edgar Allan Poe film adaptations directed by Roger Corman, including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Raven, and The Masque of the Red Death. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Yale University, Price began his acting career while pursuing a master of fine arts at the University of London. His vast work included more than one hundred roles in film, radio, and television, with his singular, deep voice becoming synonymous with PBS’s Mystery! and BBC Radio’s The Price of Fear. An avid art collector, Price and his wife, Mary Grant, established the Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College with two thousand pieces from their own collection. Price is the author of I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography and The Book of Joe.
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The Book of Joe - Vincent Price
Preface
Children are like anthropologists. They gather clues about life by observing the world around them. And the thing children most want to learn about is, of course, love.
As the child of a man who was adored by everyone he knew or met—family, friends, and strangers—numbering into the millions, a man who loved many people, places, and things (art being his greatest and most public passion), learning about love from my father was tantamount to being taught how to swim by being tossed into the Pacific halfway to Hawaii and being told to head for shore. Whatever he did, he did it big and with his whole heart. Love was no exception. So I just swam in the sea of his love and let the currents take me.
But ultimately, when it comes right down to it, children are pragmatists. While I could feel my father’s huge heart in everything he did and every encounter I witnessed, I realize now that I learned the most about how to love by watching my dad with his dogs. What I learned was that when love is true, it is simple, sweet, and shared.
Dog is Love.
Vincent and Victoria Price with Puffie the pug
Photo: From the personal collection of Victoria Price.
That would be my three-word synopsis for this wonderful little book—my favorite of my father’s books. I am not the first person to believe that dogs crack open our hearts in ways that other human beings sometimes can’t, just by being totally present and loving unconditionally, no matter what. In doing so, they help us to be better people.
Joe found my dad at a time of great upheaval, during a nasty divorce that took his son away, followed by the deaths of both his parents. To say my father loved Joe makes the word love
suddenly seem inadequate—as words often are to describe the feeling of giving your whole heart to someone. But in the end, it is my father’s words, his gift as a storyteller, that allow us a glimpse of the sweet, simple, shared love between a man and his dog.
Vincent Price with his last two dogs, Willi and Kiki
Photo: From the personal collection of Victoria Price.
I was very young when Joe passed. There would be many more dogs in our lives: Paisley the Skye Terrier, Puffie the pug, Pretty the Pekingese. (All P’s—you’ll find out why when you read this book!) My stepmother brought her Chihuahua, Tiggy (short for Antigone), with her from England when she moved to California. More Chihuahuas followed: Maile and Fendi. The last dogs in my dad’s life were two Schipperke sisters, Willi and Kiki. My dad loved them all in the darling uncomplicated way we dog lovers love our dogs. But Joe was special—as you will read in this love letter from a man to his dog.
This gem of a book has been out of print for a very, very long time. It gives me great pleasure to reintroduce readers to one of the sweetest love stories I have ever read, written by a man who taught me as much about love as anyone I have known. World: Meet Joe, the four-legged love of Vincent Price’s life!
Victoria Price
Lifelong Dog Lover
Santa Fe, New Mexico
February 2016
Introduction
The first time I saw Vincent Price was in a Tilex commercial. I was six years old and the experience was pretty traumatic. But my mom calmed my nerves, saying, That’s Vincent Price. He always plays scary people but in reality he’s a very nice man. He’s just pretending.
In reality? What do you mean? I just saw him in a chamber of horrors scrubbing mildew off a shower wall. Are you saying that’s not his house? That’s not his shower? And the hunchback guy isn’t his roommate?
Not too long after this, I was up late watching TV and caught House of Wax. At first I was scared—it’s the guy from the Tilex commercial!—but I remembered my mom’s words: He’s a nice man, he’s just pretending. I relaxed and by the end was completely enthralled.
As I watched more of his films I realized that I was receiving my first lessons in acting: Be committed and have fun. That was the constant in every Price performance. And it’s what kept bringing me back again and again to his movies. By the time I was in high school I was a fanatic. One of my first purchases with my lawn mowing money was a box set of six of his Edgar Allan Poe movies. I had a Tomb of Ligeia poster in my room. I was a card-carrying Vincent Price geek.
Years later, not long after I’d been hired as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, a writer on the show, Matt Murray, suggested we try out a Vincent Price sketch. I’d been doing my Vincent Price voice in the office (really just ripping off Dana Gould’s impression) and it was making us laugh. What if he had a series of holiday specials in the late ’50s that were always being ruined by the stars of the day? We did the first one for Thanksgiving and it went great! It was a real moment for me. I’d just played my hero on my favorite show!
I love it when teenagers tell me that the Vincent Price sketches inspired them to check out his movies. It’s the least I could do for the man who taught me the basics.
It’s a true honor to be a part of this book.
Bill Hader
March 2011
Chapter One
THIS IS A TALE OF how I went to the dogs or, to be numerically correct, to the dog. Now please do not expect this book to end with a glorious proclamation of rehabilitation. Not a chance. After fourteen years I’m incurably hooked on, intoxicated by, and addicted to—my dog, Joe.
No candidate for a show ring, my Joe. The only kind of ring with which he’s familiar is the one he inadvertently but unremovably dyed in the dining-room rug. Dear but tactless friends have remarked that Joe is ugly. They make sport of his hairy, pointed ears; his legs that bow before and waddle after; the sweep of his tail (so luxurious even I have to admit it’s slightly ridiculous … kind of like a waif wearing mink); they consider his color untidy and his nose tough as a truffle. Well, either they’re blind or I am, because the older he gets the stronger these debatable charms take their claim of me.
As I’m writing this, he is comfortably curled up on my feet. That is, he used to be able to curl when he was slimmer. Now his position at my feet could probably best be described as lumped, and the sound accompanying this lump these days—a muted symphony of snorts and wheezes—is not unpleasant save, perhaps, that it harbingers the winter of his existence, a thought that causes a lump in my throat … and one I’ll happily forgo for now.
Through fourteen years of togetherness, with life’s inevitable highs and lows, there have been times when Joe has offered me more humanity than humans could. Between Joe and me there is only one line of communication: affection. And it is the only communication system I know of that so seldom needs repairs. Attention, vigilance, yes. But the power that feeds it has the soul as its source—the basic dynamo that makes us all go—and I go all the way with Joe.
I’m a man who needs a lot of definitions. I have a library that, by no means totally definitive on any subject, does somewhat placate my inquisitiveness about the whys and hows of lots of things with lots of answers. On the subject of man’s relationship with dogs, however, I can find little explicit information. There are volumes on how this relationship affects men, and a few attempts to tell how it affects dogs—not, unfortunately, firsthand from a dog. But apparently the fact that it does exist and has existed since the beginning of time is taken so for granted that no author I can find has felt called upon to try to explain why. There it is. Most men patently love dogs, and dogs, for the most part, apparently love men.
So much whimsey, sentiment, and bathos have been written about it that one is almost put off attempting it once again, especially one determined to avoid some of the above approaches. The whole subject seems somehow to sum itself up in a somewhat saccharine statement that a man’s best friend is his dog. This devastating declaration, which quite blandly eliminates the possibility of man’s liking his own kind anywhere near as well, no one seems concerned about. And every day, now that I’m hypersensitive to it as a statement of fact, I see new evidence of its truth.
For example, there’s the brute who belts his wife in the jaw, dresses his children down with a stream of toothsome oaths, then turns to his pet and purrs it an earful of sweet talk that would put a traveling salesman to shame. He will order his family around like a sergeant, and then wait, hand and foot, on his four-pawed friend, whose watery eyes will only reproach him for his kindness by demanding more. No effort is too great to make his animal feel as a man’s best friend should: beloved. To hell with the wife and kids.
At a gala party one night, in the best of company, suddenly two poodles arrived, unannounced, and immediately took over all conversation, social intercourse, and two of the far-too-few chairs. Exquisite ladies in fashionable creations and priceless jewels put the fragile seams of their dresses to unendurable stress in inelegant positions to get on a level of social exchange with the poodles. The men, usually voraciously hungry and thirsty at the cocktail hour, became abstaining circus trainers in their efforts to lure the poodles away from the ladies with fancy hors d’oeuvres and even the martinis. The host and hostess turned into an ogre and ogress who gave evidence of wishing that we’d all go home so they could enjoy their dogs by themselves. For the half hour of the poodles’ stage center not a single sentence was exchanged by the guests unless by someone who, made unbearably homesick for his own dog, frantically tried to divert attention from the poodles present by relating laborious tales of the cute intelligence and acid acumen of his own Scotty, beagle, Dalmatian, basset hound, or—pardon the