San Francisco

San Francisco is the destination of Lestat’s first live concert and the public stage on which his rock-star fame becomes a deliberate challenge to vampire secrecy. The city is at once a landscape of spectacle for mortal fans and a beacon meant to reach the immortals he has lost, betrayed, or hopes to awaken.

The City as Destination and Signal

San Francisco enters Lestat’s plan as the opening stop on a coast-to-coast tour. His first album has sold four million copies, his videos are receiving heavy rotation, and he expects the city’s concert to convert the expanding audience into a public event. The performance is only one part of a coordinated release: he wants the music, sequential films, and autobiography to carry his name and voice around the world, with the films telling the story of the book.

The scale of the campaign is calculated, not accidental. Lestat tells his lawyer, Christine, that success for his small rock band is no longer enough; the undertaking must make him famous in the remotest parts of the world. He directs her to recruit leading French video directors and the best young record producers, secure studios, and prepare the project in secret until the albums, films, and book can be revealed together. San Francisco gives this concealed production a precise point of arrival: the city where the campaign’s first live appearance will make the carefully assembled image visible in person.

That image is also a summons. Lestat wants the records, films, and autobiography to break the old prohibition against telling mortals about vampires, and to provoke both fledglings and ancient ones into finding him. He specifically invites them to come to San Francisco for the first performance. The city therefore serves two audiences at once: it is a concert destination for fans and a declared meeting point for supernatural adversaries or long-lost companions.

A Landscape for Lestat’s Search

The city’s appearance acquires a personal charge as Lestat travels through it. San Francisco charms and somewhat subdues him. Its somber, multicolored mansions and tenements rise wall to wall above narrow, dark streets; hilltop and valley lights compete with downtown’s brilliant skyscrapers, which seem to him to rise from an ocean of mist like a fairytale forest. The impression is not merely scenic. The city’s mixture of old buildings, narrow streets, and conspicuous modern towers gives his search a place where past and present seem to meet.

During his nightly hunts, Lestat rides the length of Divisadero Street in his Porsche, passing ruined Victorian houses and wondering whether one of them might be where Louis told the story that became Interview with the Vampire to a mortal boy. He does not know which house, if any, was the setting. The uncertainty keeps the search open: San Francisco holds both the possibility of finding the site of Louis’s disclosure and the larger question of what Louis intended by revealing their existence.

Lestat’s thoughts range beyond Louis. He wonders whether the electronic reach of The Vampire Lestat can touch Louis, Gabrielle, Armand, and Marius, as well as ancient vampires whose names he has disclosed, including Mael, Pandora, and Ramses the Damned. He knows that telling the whole story has betrayed Marius’s injunction to keep ancient secrets, and acknowledges that Marius’s anger would be deserved. San Francisco becomes the place where the consequences of disclosure might arrive, even though Lestat cannot tell whether the beings he seeks have seen his message.

Secrecy, Publicity, and the Audience

The campaign begins from a direct collision with vampire law. In a bookstore, Lestat encounters the paperback of Interview with the Vampire and considers what other vampires might make of Louis’s account. The rule is that vampires must not tell mortals about their kind, name other immortals, or reveal their lairs. Lestat judges that Louis has gone far beyond the limited disclosure he himself made to his rock musicians: Louis has told a vast readership and, in Lestat’s view, nearly marked the place in New Orleans where he slept. The publication makes secrecy newly vulnerable, and Lestat decides not to preserve the old rules but to break them further.

His own campaign turns that breach into a mass-media spectacle. The album, autobiography, and sequential music videos are designed to reinforce one another, while their secret preparation delays the revelation until the materials can appear together. By the time the first live performance approaches, the band’s records and films have reached audiences well beyond the city. Lestat’s fame is no longer simply a private ambition: publicity is the mechanism by which he hopes to draw the hidden vampire world into view.

The human audience, however, understands the spectacle differently. In fan mail forwarded from New Orleans to Monterey, Lestat searches for signs of supernatural writers: unusually heavy lettering, an old-fashioned style, or an extravagant display disguised as Gothic print. Instead, he finds fervent mortal devotion. One fan says she and her friend stood in line for six hours without obtaining concert tickets and offers themselves as victims who may be drunk. Their letter shows how the vampire image can be consumed as theatrical fantasy even as Lestat intends it as a literal announcement. Publicity reaches people, but does not ensure that they understand what they have seen.

The Concert and Its Aftermath

As the first performance nears, Lestat keeps the band secluded in a plantation house north of New Orleans. After Christine passes on phone messages capturing the timbre of the unearthly voices threatening him, he drives the musicians to the airport in the middle of the night, and they fly west. The secrecy continues in Carmel Valley, where even Christine does not know their exact hiding place and the musicians themselves are not entirely sure. There, they first hear their music on the radio and watch their videos appear on cable television nationwide. Lestat travels to Monterey each evening to collect Christine’s messages, then goes north to hunt.

The advance campaign succeeds commercially. Telegrams reach the Monterey postbox reporting record-breaking album sales in the United States and Europe; the band can perform in any city it chooses after San Francisco, and The Vampire Lestat stands at the top of the charts. The success confirms the reach of the project, but it does not resolve its more personal purpose. Lestat continues to look for a response from the vampires whose attention he has courted, while the fan mail remains unmistakably mortal.

The concert at the San Francisco Cow Palace makes that reach physical. The parking lots overflow with excited fans as a motorcade pushes through the gates. Lestat’s musicians ride in the limousine ahead, while Louis accompanies Lestat in a leather-lined Porsche, dressed in the band’s black-caped costume. The hall has been sold out for a month; fans left outside want the music broadcast to them, and the police authorize outside screens and speakers to prevent a riot. Even before the performance, the crowd’s size strains the boundary between a managed show and an uncontrolled gathering.

Inside, the audience chants Lestat’s name. He answers with theatrical gestures, clasping the ends of his cloak as a signal and shaking out his hair, which sends another wave of screaming through the hall. The scene crowns the public persona he has constructed: the crowd responds to the rock star, while Lestat experiences its adoration as worship and indulgence. The performance gives his announcement an audience on a scale no private disclosure could approach.

The same crowd becomes dangerous as the event spills backstage and into the parking lot. Curtains tear from their rods, allowing the house to surge into the backstage area; outside, police shout for order as the limousine rocks amid struggling fans and the musicians are shoved into it. Young people beat on the Porsche’s hood and roof while security and motorcycle guards try to force a path through the throng. At the same time, two vampires—a thin, grinning man and a woman—press closer behind them. The concert thus joins the two forms of exposure Lestat sought and feared: uncontrolled mortal attention and the approach of other immortals. San Francisco fulfills his plan as a stage and signal, but leaves open what its success will summon next.