Anne Rice

• 1. Introduction

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  Howard Allen Frances O'Brien grew up to become Anne Rice, one of the best-selling authors of modern times. She was born in New Orleans on the 4th of October 1941. According to Rice, her mother believed that naming a daughter Howard would give her "an unusual advantage in the world." Whatever the merit of that theory, the child with a boy's name went on to sell over 100 million books.

  Her career crossed unusual borders. It took in Gothic horror, erotica and fiction about the Bible, and it made her a figure that critics could not easily place. This documentary asks how that happened. What did a girl raised in a strict Catholic home see in immortal monsters? What did grief have to do with her first novel? And why did a writer who built such an enormous fictional world end up giving so many of her possessions away?

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• 2. A Girl Named Howard

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  On her first day of school, a nun asked the little girl her name, and she answered "Anne." She simply thought it was a pretty name. Her mother was standing beside her and let the answer stand, knowing how self-conscious her daughter felt about the real one. From that day everyone called her Anne, and the change became legal in 1947.

  The original name had come from her father. Howard O'Brien, who lived from 1917 to 1991, was a naval veteran of World War II and a lifelong resident of New Orleans. He worked as a personnel executive for the U.S. Postal Service and wrote one novel, The Impulsive Imp, which was published only after his death. The authorized biography Prism of the Night, by Katherine Ramsland, suggests he remembered when his own name was linked with girls and perhaps wanted to give it away.

  At twelve, Rice was confirmed in the Catholic Church. She took the full name Howard Allen Frances Alphonsus Liguori O'Brien, adding the names of a saint and of an aunt who was a nun. Looking back, she said it was her "burden and joy as a child to have strange names."

  The family lived at 2301 St. Charles Avenue, in the rented home of Rice's maternal grandmother, Alice Allen, known as "Mamma Allen." Rice was the second of four daughters, and her sister Alice Borchardt later wrote fantasy and historical romance. The house stood five blocks from Magazine Street, the main artery of the Irish Channel, which Rice said many people called a "Catholic Ghetto." Mamma Allen had gone to work as a domestic worker after separating from her alcoholic husband. She held the household together while Rice's mother, Katherine, sank deeper into alcoholism. She died in 1949, yet the family stayed in her home until 1956. They then moved to 2524 St. Charles Avenue, a former rectory, convent and school owned by the parish, to be closer to the church and to support for Katherine's addiction. Rice's first school was St. Alphonsus, which her father had attended before her.

  Rice was fifteen when her mother died of alcoholism. Soon afterward, the girls were placed in St. Joseph Academy. Rice called it "something out of Jane Eyre... a dilapidated, awful, medieval type of place." She added, "I felt betrayed by my father."

  In November 1957, her father married Dorothy Van Bever. Rice remembered hand-delivering his formal lunch invitation, which came with a pin Dorothy was to wear if she accepted. The next day, the pin was on. A year later the family moved to Richardson, in north Texas, where the sixteen-year-old Rice sat in a journalism class beside a fellow student named Stan Rice.

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• 3. Her Own Square

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  Rice graduated from Richardson High School in 1959, and her college years began badly. She finished one year at Texas Woman's University in Denton, then moved to North Texas State College. There she ran out of money, could not find a job, and dropped out.

  San Francisco came next. She stayed with a friend's family until she found work as an insurance claims processor. Her former roommate from Texas Woman's University, Ginny Mathis, joined her, and the two rented an apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district. They took night courses at the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit school for men that admitted women after dark. At Easter, Rice went home to Texas and rekindled things with Stan. Some time later, a special delivery letter arrived from him with a marriage proposal.

  They married in Denton on the 14th of October 1961. Rice had just turned twenty, and Stan was only weeks from his nineteenth birthday. In 1962 the couple returned to San Francisco and watched the hippie movement take shape around them. They lived in Haight-Ashbury, then in Berkeley, and later in the Castro District.

  "I'm a totally conservative person," Rice later told The New York Times. She recalled typing away in the middle of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s while everybody else was dropping acid and smoking grass. "I was known as my own square," she said.

  She earned a B.A. in political science from San Francisco State University in 1964. Graduate work followed, and she became a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. The emphasis on literary criticism and the language requirements wore her down. In her words: "I wanted to be a writer, not a literature student." She went back to San Francisco State in 1970 to study creative writing and finished her M.A. in 1972.

  Stan, meanwhile, became an instructor in the same program after earning his own creative writing M.A. there. He eventually chaired the department and stayed until he retired in 1988.

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• 4. Grief and the First Vampire

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  On the 21st of September 1966, Rice and Stan had a daughter, Michele, later nicknamed "Mouse." In 1970, while Rice was still in graduate school, Michele was diagnosed with acute granulocytic leukemia. Rice later described a prophetic dream, months before the illness, in which her daughter was dying from "something wrong with her blood." Michele died in 1972, shortly before she would have turned six.

  In 1973, still grieving, Rice took a short story she had written earlier and expanded it into her first novel, Interview with the Vampire. Her model for the vampires came from film. Gloria Holden's character in Dracula's Daughter showed her what vampires could be: "these elegant, tragic, sensitive people." As for research, she admitted, "I didn't do a lot of research."

  The book was rejected by many publishers. After that she developed obsessive-compulsive disorder. She became convinced that she contaminated everything she touched, washed her hands constantly, and checked the locks on doors and windows again and again. Of that period she said, "What you see when you're in that state is every single flaw in our hygiene and you can't control it and you go crazy."

  After a year of therapy, Rice attended the Squaw Valley Writer's Conference at Olympic Valley in August 1974. Writer Ray Nelson conducted it. There she met Phyllis Seidel, who became her literary agent. In October 1974, Seidel sold the book to Alfred A. Knopf with a $12,000 advance on the hardcover rights, when most new authors received around $2,000. It reached readers in May 1976, and in 1977 the Rices traveled to Europe and Egypt for the first time.

  A son, Christopher, was born in Berkeley in 1978. He grew up to be a best-selling author himself and published his first novel at twenty-two. In mid-1979, Rice, an admitted alcoholic, and Stan stopped drinking so that their son would not have the childhood she had known. In 2008, she posted a YouTube video celebrating 28 years of sobriety.

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• 5. Pseudonyms and Series

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  Two historical novels followed her debut: The Feast of All Saints and Cry to Heaven. Rice also published under other names. As A. N. Roquelaure, she wrote three erotic novels: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty's Punishment and Beauty's Release. As Anne Rampling, she wrote two more, Exit to Eden and Belinda.

  Then she returned to vampires with The Vampire Lestat and its bestselling sequel, The Queen of the Damned. The Vampire Chronicles kept growing for decades. A spin-off line, New Tales of the Vampires, added Pandora and Vittorio the Vampire.

  Rice went back to New Orleans in June 1988, and she wrote The Witching Hour as an expression of her joy at coming home. Lasher and Taltos completed the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. Three later Vampire Chronicles novels, Merrick, Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle, crossed over with the witches. In 1989 she also published The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned.

  In 1997 came Violin, a tale of a ghostly haunting. Rice appeared on an episode of The Real World: New Orleans that aired in 2000. The Songs of the Seraphim series began with Angel Time and Of Love and Evil. The Wolf Gift Chronicles followed with The Wolf Gift in 2012 and The Wolves of Midwinter in 2013.

  On the 9th of March 2014, Rice announced a surprise on her son's radio show, The Dinner Party with Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn. She had finished another Vampire Chronicles book, Prince Lestat, which she called a "true sequel" to The Queen of the Damned. It was released on the 28th of October 2014. A year later came Beauty's Kingdom, a sequel to the Sleeping Beauty trilogy.

  Christopher also became her collaborator. He worked with her on Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra in 2017 and Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, which carries a 2022 date.

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• 6. Florid and Lurid

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  Whenever Rice was blocked, she turned to Stephen King's novel Firestarter. "Reading the first few pages of Firestarter helps to get me going," she said. King was one name on a long list of influences that also included Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, John Milton, Ernest Hemingway and William Shakespeare. She added the Brontë sisters, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard.

  The critics were slower to come around. Interview with the Vampire drew mixed reviews in 1976, and Rice retreated for a time from the supernatural. When The Vampire Lestat appeared in 1985, reaction from critics and readers was warmer, and its first hardcover edition sold 75,000 copies. The Queen of the Damned opened in 1988 with an initial hardcover printing of 405,000. The Literary Guild of America made it a main selection for that year, and it stayed on The New York Times Best Seller list for more than four months.

  Susan Ferraro of The New York Times argued that Rice turned vampire conventions inside out. Because Rice identified with the vampire rather than the victim, Ferraro wrote, the horror comes from "the monster within the self." Her vampires, Ferraro added, are "loquacious philosophers who spend much of eternity debating the nature of good and evil."

  The prose divided readers. Ferraro called it "florid, both lurid and lyrical, and full of sensuous detail." Author William Patrick Day found it "long, convoluted, and imprecise." Another New York Times critic, Michiko Kakutani, summed her up as having "a Gothic imagination crossed with a campy taste for the decadent and the bizarre."

  Many members of the LGBT+ community read her vampires as symbols of isolation and social alienation. A reviewer for The Boston Globe saw them as "the walking alienated, those of us who, by choice or not, dwell on the fringe." Rice said she had gay fans from the start. "I didn't set out to do that, but that was what they perceived," she said, noting that she lived in the gay neighborhood of the Castro when her son was a baby.

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• 7. Beyond the Page

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  In 1994, director Neil Jordan brought Interview with the Vampire to the screen from Rice's own screenplay. Tom Cruise played Lestat and Brad Pitt played the guilt-ridden Louis. A young Kirsten Dunst made her breakout appearance as the deceitful child vampire Claudia. That same year, Exit to Eden became a film with Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd. It turned a BDSM-themed love story into a police comedy, flopped at the box office and received near-universal negative reviews.

  The second Vampire Chronicles film, Queen of the Damned, arrived in February 2002 with Stuart Townsend as Lestat and singer Aaliyah as Akasha. It blended plot points from two novels and cost $35 million, but it recouped only $30 million at the U.S. box office. Rice said on Facebook that the filmmakers had "mutilated" her work.

  Television had a mixed record. CBS aired the pilot Rag and Bone in 1997, based on Rice's story and starring Dean Cain and Robert Patrick. Showtime made The Feast of All Saints into a miniseries in 2001, directed by Peter Medak, with James Earl Jones and Gloria Reuben. NBC planned a Mayfair Witches miniseries in 2002, but it never entered production.

  On the 25th of April 2006, the musical Lestat opened at the Palace Theatre on Broadway. Elton John wrote the music and Bernie Taupin the lyrics, and it was the first production of Warner Brothers Theatre Ventures. Rice praised it enthusiastically. Audiences and critics did not, and it closed on the 28th of May 2006 after 33 previews and 39 regular performances.

  The rights to her vampires then changed hands repeatedly. Universal Pictures acquired them in August 2014, and they reverted to Rice in November 2016. Rice and Christopher teamed up with Paramount Television and Anonymous Content in April 2017. Bryan Fuller joined, and by July 2018 the project was in development at Hulu, with Fuller gone. Hulu's rights expired by December 2019, and in May 2020 AMC acquired the Vampire Chronicles and Lives of the Mayfair Witches. Rolin Jones created Interview with the Vampire in 2022, and Mayfair Witches followed in 2023. The Talamasca was listed for 2025. The AMC series was later retitled The Vampire Lestat.

  A different adaptation had already reached theaters. The Young Messiah, based on Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, was released in 2016, with Chris Columbus reported as producer and Cyrus Nowrasteh as screenwriter.

  Comics and manga carried her stories too. Innovation Comics issued twelve issues of The Vampire Lestat in 1990-91, and Yen Press published Interview with the Vampire: Claudia's Story in 2012. Some runs stalled: issue twelve of The Queen of the Damned was never published.

  Fan fiction made her far less comfortable. In 2000 she issued a statement disallowing it, citing copyright, and asked FanFiction.Net to remove stories using her characters. By 2012 she had softened. "If I were a young writer, I'd want to own my own ideas," she told Metro. "But maybe fan fiction is a transitional phase: whatever gets you there, gets you there."

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• 8. Faith and Farewell

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  On the 14th of December 1998, Rice fell into a coma caused by diabetic ketoacidosis and nearly died. Doctors diagnosed type 1 diabetes, and she became insulin-dependent. That same year she returned to the Catholic Church after decades of atheism. Newsweek noted in 2005 that she had left the church at eighteen.

  Her return did not mean agreement on every question. Rice stayed a vocal supporter of equality for gay men and lesbians, including marriage rights. She also backed abortion rights and birth control, and wrote extensively on those subjects.

  Stan died of brain cancer in 2002 at age sixty, after 41 years of marriage. Following his advice, Rice had gastric bypass surgery soon after his death and lost 103 pounds in 2003. A bowel obstruction, a common complication of the surgery, nearly killed her again in 2004. On the 18th of January 2004, she announced on her website that she planned to leave New Orleans, citing life alone and her son's move to California.

  The Brevard-Rice House, built in 1857 for Albert Hamilton Brevard, had been one of her homes in the city. On the 30th of January 2004 she listed the largest of her three houses for sale and moved to a gated community in Kenner. "Simplifying my life, not owning so much, that's the chief goal," she said. She left the city for good in 2005, shortly before Hurricane Katrina. None of her former properties flooded, and she remained an advocate for the city and its relief projects.

  Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt appeared in 2005. While promoting it in Newsweek that October, she said she would use her talent to glorify her belief in God. She did not renounce her earlier books, and she saw in them a link to her spiritual life. In its Author's Note, she described her childhood Mass and its stained-glass windows as "imprinted on my soul forever." Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana followed in March 2008, and she was at work on a third volume, Kingdom of Heaven, by November 2008. Her memoir Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession also dates from 2008. In it she wrote that "Nobody was going to go to Hell by mistake."

  Her own addresses kept changing. She settled first in La Jolla, California, calling the weather "like heaven" in November 2005. By January 2006 she said it was too cold and moved to a six-bedroom home in Rancho Mirage, closer to her son in Los Angeles. On the 18th of July 2010, her large collection of antique dolls went to auction at Thierault's in Chicago. Her wardrobe, jewelry and collectibles from her books went onto eBay through early 2011, and a large part of her library went to Powell's Books.

  On the 28th of July 2010, she wrote on Facebook, "Today I quit being a Christian." She stressed that she remained committed to Christ, but not to Christianity. "Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be," she added. Asked by the Los Angeles Times how one follows Christ without a church, she answered that the basic ritual is prayer. On the 14th of April 2013, she called herself a secular humanist. In a later interview with Alice Cooper, she said, "I write about outsiders seeking redemption in one form or another and always will."

  Rice died of complications from a stroke at a hospital in Rancho Mirage on the 11th of December 2021, aged eighty. She was laid to rest in January 2022 in the family mausoleum at Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans, beside Stan and Michele. One side of the tomb is stained glass. The other three are engraved with poems from Stan's books False Prophet and Some Lamb, and the mausoleum is open to the public during visiting hours.

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