It turns out the cookbook of his that I have isn’t the valuable one. I’m a bit disappointed, not that I would’ve sold it anyway. I forget where I was, but I saw it cheap and thought, “A cookbook by Mary and Vincent Price. That’s kind of funny.” And then found out, yes, it was actually that Vincent Price, who was a gourmet. He was also an art collector, an activist for civil rights, one of the first celebrities to speak in defense of AIDS patients. He was a better actor than he was given credit for, and he seems to have actually been a pretty decent guy.

While Price got started in horror early in his career, it was merely a small aspect of his work as a character actor. Notably, of course, he was in Laura and The Ten Commandments, among others. He played Cardinal Richelieu, King Charles II, and Sir Walter Raleigh. He was in the not-Sirk-but-could-be Leave Her to Heaven. The entertaining swindle film The Baron of Arizona. Really, up until about 1958, he had a varied career. In Laura, he plays a broke playboy with no compunction about using women for their money. He was even Simon Templar for four years on the radio show of The Saint.

The Fly seems to have been the real moment of change. He’d previously been the Invisible Man in The Invisible Man Returns, but aside from a spot in Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein, that didn’t really lead to much in the way of other horror work. In 1953, he appeared in House of Wax, but the next few years included as many non-horror roles as horror ones. He played both Omar Khayyam and Casanova in the next few years. But after The Fly, he settled into horror and, with few exceptions, remained in the genre the rest of his life.

But even as he played horror villains, he still had a reputation as a charming, avuncular guy. He was on The Muppet Show, on all thirteen episodes of The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, on Columbo. He played the Eggman on Batman and apparently couldn’t resist throwing eggs at Adam West and Burt Ward. He did videos for Michael Jackson and Alice Cooper. He hosted 207 episodes of Mystery on PBS, where I got to know him first. And, of course, his final live-action movie role and the place where I first think of him, Edward Scissorhands.

And that cookbook? The one I own is The Come Into the Kitchen Cookbook. It’s arranged historically, with recipes from various times and places in US cuisine. The “ethnic” food is depressingly sixties, I’ll admit, but it’s not terrible. And a lot of the food is pretty accurate to its time and place. Which I admit means there’s a lot of it I won’t eat, but never mind. I don’t know how much of the writing was Vincent and how much of it was Mary, but it’s still a pretty good cookbook, if you happen to run into a copy.

By the way, Year of the Month?  Yes.  That’s the year Vincent Price died.

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