Part 29

He sips a glass of apricot juice while a makeup artist brushes his jet black hair straight back and starts to darken his eyes. Removing his shoes, Raul tells all sorts of little anecdotes about his life as the famous Count.

"I usually eat very little during the day. I go to sleep at about five, sometimes six. Maybe I'm getting a Dracula schedule," he says with a laugh. "Some people who see the show write and say they're going to keep their windows open at night.

"Dracula is a myth, although some people think there actually are vampires. Bram Stoker really created the character of Dracula, taking legends from different parts of the world, like the stories of sailors who had been stricken by bats, appearing on deck the next morning, all pale, without blood in them.

"I hear that Bela Lugosi was buried in a Dracula costume. I also hear that Boris Karloff came to the funeral home to visit him and looked down at the coffin and said, 'You're not kidding are you sweetie?'"

Dracula the character is more than 500 years old; Julia the actor declines to give his age. "Actors should be ageless," he says. "You see, what age does, it limits you to a certain category." He doesn't mind telling his height, however. "Eight foot four," he quips. "No, six two."

He was, in fact, born 30-odd years ago in San Juan. In 1964, after graduating from the university there, he was performing in a local nightclub revue, and comedian Orson Bean happened to be in the audience. Bean urged him to come to New York, and introduced him to Wynn Handman of the American Place Theatre. Although he had not studied acting formally, Raul's natural ability and his versatility soon began to pay off. Within two years he was playing lead roles for Joseph Papp.

Married for the past three years to dancer/actress Merel Poloway, Raul devotes a great deal of his spare time to a charitable organization called the Hunger Project. "The purpose of the group is to support anything that will help bring an end to hunger by 1997. Our goal is to transform the atmosphere that exists now,. That says that hunger is inevitable. All the experts and scientists agree that we have the means right now to end the starvation on the planet."

A resident of the Upper West Side for the past 10 years, Raul has two major projects coming up -- the title role of Othello for Shakespeare-in the-Park this summer and a movie called Isabel, which he will film in Puerto Rico this spring: "I wanted to be in it because it's a totally Puerto Rican venture, and I want to encourage the beginning of a quality movie industry."

Raul appears to be utterly at ease as he prepares to make his stage entrance in the middle of the first act of Dracula. I have time for one more question: "Is the acting life everything you hoped it would be?"

Raul wraps the cloak around himself and heads out of the dressing room. He looks back at me and smiles. "Yes," he replies. "Now it is."

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EASTSIDER BOB KANE Creator of Batman and Robin

3-24-79

At the 1939 World's Fair in New York, a time capsule was filled with memorabilia thought to be representative of 20th-century American culture, and scheduled to be opened by historians 5,000 years later. Among the objects chosen was a comic magazine that had appeared for the first time that year, the creation of an 18-year-old artist and writer named Bob Kane. Whoever chose the contents of the time capsule must have been prophetic, because today, 40 years later, few characters in American fantasy or fiction are so well known as Kane's pulp hero -- Batman.

"It was a big success from the very beginning," says the cartoonist, a tall, wiry, powerful-looking man of 58 whose tanned, leathery features bear a striking resemblance to those of Bruce Wayne, Batman's secret identity. "Superman started in 1938, and the same company, D.C. Comics, was looking for another superhero. I happened to be in the right place at the right time.

"The first year, Batman was more evil, more sinister. My concept was for him to scare the hell out of the denizens of the underworld. And then the second year, I introduced Robin, because I realized he would appeal to the children's audience. That's when the strip really took hold."

The walls of his Eastside apartment are covered with vintage hand-drawn panels by America's most famous cartoonists, and Kane, with his casual attire, his broad New York accent, and his habit of twirling his glasses around while slumped far down in his easy chair, would not seem out of place as a character in Maggie and Jiggs. Yet he likes to consider himself a serious artist, and has, in fact, had some notable achievements in his "second career," which began in 1966 when he resigned from D.C. Comics, on the heels of the successful Batman TV series.

"I got tired of working over the drawing board after 30 years. I wanted to be an entrepreneur -- painter, screenplay writer, and producer." Since that time, he has built up a large body of work -- oil paintings, watercolors, pen and ink sketches and lithographs, most of them depicting characters from Batman. They have been purchased by leading universities, famous private collectors, and New York's Museum of Modern Art.

As a writer, Kane has created four animated cartoon series for television, has penned a screenplay for Paramount Pictures, The Silent Gun, has written an autobiography titled Batman and Me (due to be published next year), and has completed a screenplay for a full-length Batman movie. Recently, he has also emerged as an active participant in charitable causes, such as UNICEF, Cerebral Palsy and the American Cancer Society.

>From March 16 to April 8, the Circle Gallery at 435 West Broadway in SoHo will exhibit a one-man show of about 40 Kane originals. Says Kane with his typical immodesty: "I'm probably the first cartoonist to make the transition to fine art. When you do hand-signed, limited editions of lithographs, you are definitely entering the world of Lautrec and Picasso and Chagall."

Kane has lived on the East Side for the past 15 years and has no plans to leave. Asked about his early years, he tells of growing up poor in the Bronx. "I used to draw on all the sidewalks, and black out the teeth of the girls on the subway posters. I used to copy all the comics as a kid, too. That was my school of learning. ... My greatest influence in creating Batman was a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci of a flying machine, which I saw when I was 13 years old. It showed a man on a sled with huge bat wings attached to it. To me, it looked like a bat man. And that same year, I saw a movie called The Mark of Zorro, with Douglas Fairbanks Senior. Zorro fought for the downtrodden and he had a cave in the mountainside, and wore a mask, which gave me the idea for Batman's dual identity and the Batmobile."

As might be expected, Kane takes much pride in his lifelong success. "Batman has influenced four decades of children," he declares. "It has influenced the language. ... It has influenced people's lives whereby it gives them a sense of hope that the good guy usually wins in the end. And mainly, the influence has been one of sheer entertainment. I feel that most people would like to be a Batman-type superhero, to take them out of their dull, mundane routine of everyday living. ... My greatest thrill comes from my 5-year-old grandson. Little did I know when I was 18 that one day I would see my grandson wearing a little Batman costume, driving around in a miniature Batmobile and yelling 'Batman!'"

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WESTSIDER LENORE KASDORF Star of The Guiding Light

1-20-79

For the pat few months at least, the hottest soap opera on television has been CBS' The Guiding Light, which reaches approximately 10 million viewers nationwide. The show has 22 regular characters, and right now the one who is getting the most attention is Rita Stapleton, a beautiful but deceitful nurse who recently brought up the ratings for the week when she was raped by her ex-lover on the night before her engagement to another man. It was all in a day's work for Westsider Lenore Kasdorf, who portrays the popular villainess.

"This is definitely a job, and you get the feeling of a schedule, of punching in and punching out, of rolling it off the presses. But you put in your creative element too," says Miss Kasdorf, taking a break between scenes at the studio. With her soft hazel eyes, pearly teeth, finely chiseled features, and billowing brown hair, she is nothing short of stunning -- an impression that is heightened by her throaty voice and by the red sweater that covers her ample figure.

Being the star of an hour-long "soap" means that Lenore often has to work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. inside the mazelike studio, so that in winter, an entire week may go by when she doesn't see sunlight. Although she receives a tremendous number of fan letters, Lenore does not have time to answer most of them.