The King of Horror? Bah! Vincent Leonard Price was still in short pants when his family moved from Washington Avenue to 6320 Forsyth. In the 1850s, his grandfather, Vincent Clarence Price, was a baby-faced New York pharmacist and homeopath who couldn’t grow a beard. Patients just didn’t trust rosy-cheeked wisdom, so, with time on his hands, he mixed up the world’s first cream of tartar baking powder to help his mother (lovely woman, terrible cook) reinvent her leaden biscuits. Then he went west, knocking on doors to sell the stuff. Soon he was also purveying the finest extracts of vanilla and lemon, then a breakfast cereal. Sage heard he even dabbled in dog food.
Then the stock market crashed. His youngest son, the first Vincent Leonard Price, was at Yale at the time, but Vincent Clarence yanked him out of school to help save at least one of the family businesses, the National Candy Company. Realizing that St. Louis was about to become the stage for the Olympics and the World’s Fair, Vincent Leonard moved here in 1902. Soon, his was one of the biggest candy companies in the country. When Vincent Leonard Jr. was born, in May 1911, the National Candymakers’ Association christened him the Candy Kid.
Off to Country Day School he went, then to Yale, where he was studying art history when the stock market crashed even harder. This Vincent didn’t have to leave school, though, because his father had specialized in penny candy—all that anyone could afford at the time. After graduation, he left to study art at the University of London but wound up performing on the London stage.
The Candy Kid came bounding home eager to be a character actor. But he was 6-foot-4, with patrician features and a refined elegance that made a Jimmy Cagney gangster role ludicrous, so instead he found roles as suave, often likable Gothic villains, then slid into the burgeoning genre of horror movies.
“I sometimes feel that I’m impersonating the dark unconscious of the whole human race,” he said about 100 films later. Yet all that horror and evil and fear were balanced by oodles of joy. An art collector (he bought a Rembrandt etching at age 12), he was deeply interested in culture and food, wrote cookbooks (perhaps Granddad’s influence), and taught his daughter, Victoria, to make pancakes from scratch and wait for the little bubbles before she flipped them. “He was like a big kid,” she once confided. “Always curious, always interested in the world, with such generosity of spirit. His go-to mode was gratitude. And fundamentally, he was an optimist. He just felt like we have to go into the dark and face our fears.”
And, like his granddad, he knew how to get a rise out of us.
