Edward D. Wood Jr

Ed Wood was born in 1924 in Poughkeepsie, New York to Edward Wood Sr. and his wife Lillian. On the surface, the Woods seemed like the perfect nuclear family—but dark secrets lurked beneath. According to Wood’s second wife, Lillian always wanted a girl, and took it out on little Edward by forcing him to dress in girls’ clothing. 

Maybe because of his unorthodox childhood, Wood was a lifelong devotee of cross-dressing. In fact, one of his most scandalous nom de plumes was “Ann Gora,” a reference to the textile angora, his favorite kind of women’s clothing to dress up in. The director was reportedly obsessed with the soft, fuzzy feeling of the fabric on his skin. 

As a child, the young Wood was obsessed with films. He particularly loved Westerns as well as the occult, and he would frequently skip school just so he could sneak into the movie theater and watch his beloved matinee stars. 

Wood has said that during his time fighting in World War II, he was more terrified of getting injured than he was of dying—because he was hiding a steamy secret. Underneath his Marines uniform, he claimed he was actually wearing a bra and women’s panties. He lived in fear that a medic would tear off his clothes and reveal his “dirty laundry.” 

Ed Wood used a truly incredible number of pseudonyms. One of them, “Adkov Telmig,” was actually just his favorite drink spelled backwards, AKA “vodka gimlet.” 

Wood loved using his films to collect Hollywood’s forgotten and neglected artefacts. Among his most notable collaborators were Tor Johnson, a washed out Swedish wrestler; the campy Vampira; and the Amazing Criswell, an American psychic and TV personality. Like so many TV psychics, Criswell was infamous for giving out shockingly bad predictions. 

In 1952, Wood got the chance to meet his childhood icon Bela Lugosi—but it was far from a happy meeting. At the time, Lugosi was aging, impoverished, and dependent on morphine. Even so, Wood accepted the Hollywood thespian and gave him work in several of his productions, including Plan 9 From Outer Space. 

Wood and Bela Lugosi developed a deep friendship, but tragically, it had a dark, co-dependent side. According to Wood, Lugosi once called him up in the middle of the night and begged him to come over with a bottle of scotch. When Wood did, he found a disturbing sight. Lugosi was shaking, crying, and holding a gun pointed right at him. Lugosi then said, “Eddie, I’m going to die tonight. I want to take you with me.” Wood stayed calm and defused the situation by simply saying, “Well, I’ve got your scotch here.” Always works for me, anyway. 

Wood’s sets were notoriously haphazard affairs, but one story takes the cake. In Plan 9 From Outer Space, viewers often note that a detective points a gun at himself several times. This wasn’t some stupid flub, though. The actor was doing it on purpose to check if Wood would even notice. Ed Wood, being Ed Wood, did not. The actor’s prank is in the film to this day. 

When Wood cast his girlfriend Dolores Fuller in his early movie Glen or Glenda, she was in for an unpleasant surprise. In the film, Wood’s “character” experiments with cross-dressing—a pastime of Wood’s that Fuller had absolutely no idea about. When Fuller saw him dressed up, she was reportedly shocked and mortified. 

When Wood started Plan 9 From Outer Space, Bela Lugosi was already dead—leaving the director only with unused footage of the late actor from a previous project. In order to shoot the rest of his scenes, Wood came up with a plan so bad, it went down in film history. He asked his chiropractor, Tom Mason, to fill in as Lugosi’s body double. It, uh, wasn’t exactly a perfect fit. Mason was noticeably taller than Lugosi and had to cover his face with a cape to make the stunt even somewhat believable. He was also a chiropractor, not an actor. Still, Wood of all people knew that a finished film is a finished film. 

Wood always claimed that Plan 9 From Outer Space was his favorite film. 

Wood often went out in public dressed in drag. His drag name was “Shirley.” 

In 1952, Wood met beautiful actress and singer Dolores Fuller. They quickly started up a relationship, and the director began to use her as his muse, casting her in three of his films. Fun fact: Fuller later went on to write songs for Elvis PresleyElvis Presley. 

In 1955, Wood had a whirlwind romance with actress Norma McCarty. The pair married while filming Bride of the Monster together—but it was doomed to a heartbreaking end. They never consummated the union, as McCarty reportedly kicked Wood out on their wedding night after discovering, you guessed it, that he was wearing women’s underwear. 

The biopic Ed Wood includes a scene where the desperate director steals an octopus prop from Paramount Studios to finish shooting a set piece from Plan 9 From Outer Space. Wood claimed this actually happened in real life, and both he and his one-time girlfriend Dolores Fuller would frequently boast about the feat. Others, however, say that’s a complete lie; the octopus was only ever a mere rental. Another reminder that you can’t always trust Wood on Wood. 

All Hail Our Lord and Savior Ed Wood. No, really—Ed Wood has his own religion. Reverend Steve Galindo initially started the Church of Ed Wood as a joke, but the faith now has a tidy 3,500 followers. They call themselves “Woodites,” and even celebrate “Woodmas” on Wood’s birthday, October 10th. He really puts the “cult” in “cult figure.” 

According to Wood’s third wife O’Hara, Wood loved cross-dressing for one specific reason. An avowedly straight, heterosexual man, O’Hara claimed that he enjoyed dressing in women’s clothing not as a sexual fantasy, but because it gave him a kind of maternal comfort from the memory of his mother, particularly feeling his beloved angora. 

In his later years, Wood slid from camp master to seedy hack as he worked on more and more exploitation films, then skin-flicks, then right into bona fide adult video. But you couldn’t say he didn’t work hard at it. At the end of his life, Wood wrote at least 80 smutty crime and bedroom novels as well as literally hundreds of shorter stories. 

In 1980, Ed Wood earned true cult status when film critic Michael Medved crowned Plan 9 From Outer Space “The Worst Film Ever Made.” The dubious honor posthumously shot the neglected director back into the spotlight.