March 9, 1935 dawned cool and cloudy when Jack Pierce boarded a plane in Los Angeles, bound for Kansas City, MO. In addition to the standard luggage a man might take on a typical business trip, Pierce carried something else: a small makeup kit and a pair of large boots. The kit contained a surprise which would end up creating a buzz in the basketball world that would last for years.
The makeup man was en route to the Missouri Valley Amateur Athletic Union (A.A.U.) Basketball Tournament, where his team, Universal Pictures, would play the hometown Stage Liners. At the time, Pierce was working on one of the greatest horror films of all time, The Bride of Frankenstein, and he devised a scheme to draw interest to both his team and the movie, which would be released just two months later.
The starting center for Universal Pictures was the 232-pound Lithuanian Frank Lubin, who stood six feet, seven inches -- a towering person for that era. Pierce created a Frankenstein Monster makeup for the big center: grease paint, head piece, wig, coat, and boots. No one would mistake Lubin for Karloff, but the crowd roared its approval when the big man walked out on court prior to the game, “menacing” the spectators as the Monster. Once play started, Lubin retreated to the locker room where Pierce quickly removed the makeup and Frank donned his game uniform. He missed the first few minutes of playing time, but everyone -- especially the crowd -- thought it was well worth the sacrifice. Pierce and Lubin repeated the stunt a few times again during the following season, giving the center a nickname he carried the rest of his life: “Frankenstein Lubin.”
As reported in the Kansas City Star on March 10, 1935:
The Stage Liners lost in the finals of the Missouri Valley A.A.U. basket ball tournament in Convention Hall last night, but their excuse can be that Universal Pictures ran in Frankenstein on them.
“It is enough for one team to be pitted against “Chuck” Hyatt, who came out of the bottle for nine points in another of these hectic thrillers in which the final score, with half the players on the floor , was 22 to 21.
It was a fitting climax to a sensational tournament and 4,000 spectators screamed the rafters down. They must have been yelling on borrowed vocal chords, because the ones they originally had were lost during the semifinal round.
It was Frank Lubin’s goal with about three minutes remaining to play which settled the issue, thereby proving that Frankenstein, who might have played football at Nebraska for all his size, had a hand in this triumph for the Hollywood quintet.
Before the game Jack Pierce, makeup man for the Hollywood studios, built a Frankenstein creation out of Lubin and sent the big fellow plodding out on the court. He made a very realistic robot, did Lubin, who to exert all his strength to lift his boots, which weighed twenty pounds. It required ten minutes for Pierce to remove the grease paint from Lubin. But the effect was not removed from the minds of Stage Liners. To them Lubin remained a Frankenstein. He and Hyatt did the scoring. . . .
. . .The Liners were in front, but the line of march changed quickly for Lubin, still the Frankenstein, got his short side shot and with that the scoring of the game ended. With that drama depended on whether the Liners could get any more chances. They did but they didn’t make the most of them.
It was a bitterly fought game. .
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| Frank Lubin. |
Lubin was a center for the UCLA Bruins. He played in the 1936 Olympics and was inducted into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame in 1997. As for Pierce, he went on to make Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr. and Bela Lugosi into screen Frankenstein monsters, as well as one of his most famous creations, The Wolf Man.
