Review by Sam Moffitt
Being the first is not always a good thing. Many ground breaking artists who introduce something new into the cultural mix do not always fare well after they have changed the rules and the game. Take, just as one example, Orson Welles who changed forever how movies were made as well as radio drama and stage productions. Although Welles made out better than Maila Nurmi, also known as Vampira, the subject of the incredible and unforgettable documentary Vampira and Me.
H Greene first got to know Maila Nurmi when he interviewed her for a documentary called Schlock! The Secret History of Hollywood, (a good documentary in its own right.) Nurmi had grown distrustful of just about everyone, and with good reason. Yet for reasons Greene doesn’t even speculate on she trusted Greene and gave him almost two hours of interview time and discussed every last moment of her bizarre, glorious, hypnotic and finally tragic and horrifying career. If in fact you could say Maila Nurmi had a normal “career” at all.
Maila Nurmi created Vampira, the first horror movie show host, the first ever “Gothic” personality, one of the first major television stars and may very well have been the first performance artist. Vampira became a character onto herself who may or may not have actually been Maila Nurmi!
Despite the lack of any major amount of footage of Maila Nurmi in character Greene has fashioned a wonderful and in depth look at a major personality who never, ever got the credit due her, and certainly never made any money despite being a major television personality, and a LOCAL personality at that, who never the less became a worldwide phenomenon! Something unheard of in 1954 or any time since.
Greene, using found footage of all types to illustrate the story of Maila Nurmi and her descent into the Hollywood maelstrom, takes us step by step on the journey to Vampira and the shocking aftermath.
Like many young women of the 1940s and 1950s (and to this day for that matter) Maila Nurmi had dreams of Hollywood stardom, but on her own terms. Always a rebel, always outside the main stream, Maila embraced the “Beat” generation early on. In fact, in the only film clip with Maila playing a part other than Vampira we see her in the movie The Beat Generation (appropriately enough) reciting vintage beat poetry in a coffeehouse, to the accompaniment of bongo drums, while caressing a white rat and smoking a cigarette! In the audience are Jackie Coogan and Steve Cochran who both admit, they don’t get it! And the Beats are NOT the good guys in this movie!
Maila taped herself for a possible autobiography or memoir which she never finished and in one of several fascinating audio clips stated that as a teenager she declared “that man on the radio is a genius and he is my friend!” Her Mother cautioned her that “of course he is a genius he is Orson Welles! Everybody knows he is a genius but he is not your friend, you work in a canning factory and will never know anybody like Orson Welles!” Maila states that she did meet Orson Welles who advised her to tell her Mother that he was in fact “her friend and her Mother should have more faith in people!”
AS we follow the arc of Maila’s strange and frustrating career, we find out she was actually under contract to Howard Hawks! She got a weekly paycheck from Hawk’s production company but rarely got in front of the cameras for any acting. She declares that she thought Hawk’s was “stupid!” Don’t get me wrong, I love Maila and Vampira but find the idea that the man who directed Red River and Bringing Up Baby and Rio Bravo might be a bit thick in the head a little hard to accept… but I digress.
Maila tore up her contract with Hawks, which may have sealed her fate right then, before the 1950s even began. She became a top “cheesecake” model, she even has to explain to Greene what cheesecake actually was. These photos show just what a staggeringly beautiful young woman Maila really was. We learn that East Coast modeling was dominated by no less than Betty Page,(herself the subject of an excellent documentary) the girl next door who just happened to be tied up and strapped in with black leather. West coast cheesecake was all about the beach, surfing, and the then new bikini bathing suits. Pretty tame stuff by today’s standards.
By fate, coincidence or the stars being in alignment Maila made a costume for herself based on Charles Addam’s cartoons and went to a combination costume contest and beauty pageant called the Bal Caribe. She was spotted by a television producer named Hunt Stromberg, who signed her almost immediately and put together what became Vampira’s Midnight Madness.
Maila’s original idea in creating Vampira was to get an Addam’s Family tv show off the ground, with herself as Morticia. I love The Addam’s Family show as it became, with Carolyn Jones in the role, but if Vampira had actually succeeded and played that part The Addam’s Family would have been something else entirely!
1954 became the year of Vampira, Maila Nurmi put together a character that sent shock waves through American culture that is still being felt to this day. In what can only be described as a perfect media storm Vampira became a household word, all over the world, while only being seen on a local Los Angeles television station! The tip of the iceberg was an article in Life magazine complete with wonderful photographs and a text describing what the Vampira Show was like. I used to have that issue of Life! Hate to tell you what happened to it!
Maila states that KABC, the station that aired Vampira, never paid one nickel for marketing or promotion, they got all the free publicity they wanted, every photographer and journalist in the country wanted to cover the Vampira phenomenon. And we see dozens of these photos and articles. The station did hire a classic, convertible car to drive Vampira around Los Angeles, which created chaos and pandemonium where ever Vampira stopped to talk to her fans, resulting in true street theater.
Maila Nurmi was part of a new wave in Hollywood, it seemed predestined that she would be linked with another Hollywood icon, and tragic figure, none other than James Dean. Maila was a very spiritual, metaphysical person. She tells us that she and James Dean knew each other in a previous life, and I see no reason to doubt that. They were good friends and kindred spirits, not lovers. In the tragic aftermath of his death Maila was blamed. No less a voice than Hedda Hopper told the world that James Dean collided with dark forces unleashed by Vampira, which led to his doom. Maila attempted suicide after that column saw the light of day.
It gets worse. KABC tried another female movie host, Voluptua, also known as Gloria Pall, who hosted romantic movies from her boudoir while clad in lingerie. She lasted only 7 weeks and did not have Maila’s sense of post modern irony and bohemian intellect. Running less than a year Vampira’s show was canceled at the height of its popularity. Maila descended into dire poverty and has-been status from which she never really recovered. The rest of the story is quite frankly, horrifying. But while she was on top Vampira was all over television, most of which is now lost. She appeared on game shows and variety shows. On a special Halloween show of Red Skelton’s she appeared in a comedy sketch…with Bela Lugosi! Of course the footage is lost but some tantalizing stills remain, how I would love to see that kinescope!
There does remain a promotional film of Vampira doing a very basic intro for the show, and a recently unearthed piece of footage has a Vampira appearance on the George Gobel Show. Which leads to some interesting information about Vampira, Maila Nurmi herself always referred to Vampira in the third person, either by name or as “she.” Performers who appeared on the same shows with Vampira admit they liked Vampira, but never really met Maila Nurmi! Vampira was always Vampira, Maila never stepped out of character when making any appearance, including the street theater she became a part of. Greene advises us that this is “dangerously close to performance art!” Do you think?
The George Gobel Show footage is especially precious. Vampira owns the sketch from the moment she opens a door, Gobel seems genuinely unnerved by the whole experience. But then Gobel always did strike me as something of a sniveling weasel. Gobel ends the sketch by literally running away from it and closing the stage curtain himself!
Vampira was famous for her 17 inch waist, we learn that did not come easy. Maila would not eat for 48 hours before every broadcast, and then cinch herself into a semi-rigid corset on show night. She also tenderized her own flesh with papaya powder! She put herself through a weekly ordeal that would make Lon Chaney wince!
That hunger artist routine would come back to haunt her, Maila ended up in such a dire financial predicament friends would leave bags of food on her doorstep, knowing she was too proud to answer the door to receive a handout.
In the aftermath of Vampira’s cancellation she took a few acting jobs, most famously her appearance in Ed Wood’s now legendary Plan Nine From Outer Space. Even though she was billed as Vampira, Maila herself does not consider that character, (The Ghoul Woman) to actually be Vampira. She calls that role “Maila in an alpha state!” Robbed of that great voice Maila did not speak in Plan Nine because she utterly rejected Wood’s entire inane dialog. I will always be curious as to what words Ed Wood attempted to put into Vampira’s mouth! Could they have been worse than “Inspector Clay is dead, murdered, and someone’s responsible?!”
There is no mention of Maila’s brief appearance in Bert Gordon’s The Magic Sword. Any acting jobs were few and Maila opened an arts and crafts store which failed. She cleaned houses, laid linoleum and worked in restaurants just for something to eat. As if poverty were not bad enough Maila was repeatedly hounded and assaulted by James Dean fans who blamed her for Dean’s death! In the worst of these incidents, while living in New York, she was beaten, dragged up and down stairs by the hair of her head and threatened with mutilation and death! A shocking photo has Maila sitting on a desk pointing to her bruises. Don’t get me wrong, I like James Dean as much as any movie geek, I’ve seen all three of his movies in theaters, some of them more than once. But rabid James Dean fans are among the scariest I have ever encountered. That kind of behavior is despicable, for any fan.
Even worse still, these assaults were treated like a joke by the police, the media and the general public. Maila Nurmi endured crap that would have driven a lesser soul to suicide.
Late in life she was finally embraced by the Goths, and the punk bands who specialized in horror themed music, such as the Misfits, who got her into a studio to record her own songs and managed to get her some paychecks. She found kindred spirits in all sorts of marginalized groups, especially movie geeks like myself who grew up as monster kids in the 60s and 70s.
I said this before and I’ll reiterate. Maila Nurmi and Vampira never got the credit they were due, Vampira was the first horror movie show host. To illustrate how ahead of the curve she really was, the official date for the beginning of the Monster Craze was 1957, the year Screen Gems released a package of Universal Horror movies called Shock Theater to television stations. Local stations were encouraged to use Horror Hosts to introduce the movies on late night tv. Zacherley, Svengoolie and many, many others followed. In St. Louis we had Zone 2 hosted by Jack Murdock as “Cronos,” in 1965. And in 1958 the first issue of Famous Monsters was published by James Warren and Forry Ackerman. Vampira premiered in 1954, three years ahead of the first wave, and she did not have access to the classic Universal horror movies! Her show made do with movies that were probably already in public domain, White Zombie, 13th Guest, King of the Zombies. Not mentioned in the documentary Forry Ackerman never did respond to accusations that Vampirella was based on Vampira.
Vampira was the first horror show host but also the first Goth, one of the first icons of the Beat Generation, as important as William S Burroughs or Jack Kerouac, and the first performance artist. Most importantly she presented an image of strong, even dangerous female empowerment, sexual, provocative, predatory, in the most famously chauvinist era in American History. We see throughout the documentary clips from tv shows, commercials, educational and promotional films of the submissive, dish washing, cooking and cleaning stay at home woman, contrasted with the outrageous behavior of Vampira! Quite a comparison!
If you’ve seen the movie Ed Wood you have seen Lisa Marie attempt a Vampira impersonation. Again, I like Lisa Marie, but she can’t even come close to Vampira’s charisma. While Vampira was still a going concern imitators began cropping up. We see a clip from another Red Skelton show with a blatant Vampira imitator in a Honeymooners sketch with Skelton and Peter Lorre.
Of course Vampira and Me deals with the still controversial (to my mind) creation of Elvira. Maila was attempting to revive the show in the 1980s, and walked away due to creative differences. The producers then brought in Cassandra Peterson. Maila introduced a lawsuit claiming copyright infringement, which sounds right to me. In a heartbreaking moment we see the actual handwritten note from Maila dropping the suit due to lack of legal representation and money to pursue the claim.
Again, don’t get me wrong, I love Elvira, have enjoyed her for years. I got her autograph at a car show in Springfield, Missouri in 1992. In Vampira and Me we get side by side comparisons of the two, uncanny, like seeing a gothic Mother and Daughter carry on the same routine.
Elvira has always been more like a fan girl herself, poking fun at the movies, herself and her fans. Elvira always seemed accessible, friendly, she could be a friend, or even a girlfriend, to fan boys like us.
Vampira on the other hand had chunks of guys like you and me (and George Gobel) in her morning stool! Vampira, to quote Jimi Hendrix “drank the blood from a jagged edge!” Maila herself admits that she may have tapped into something truly dark and powerful when she created Vampira, something she could not control, and which back fired on her and led to her miserable situation. Which may put her in the same arena as yet another Jim: Morrison. The Lizard King had a Gothic sensibility and deliberately turned Doors concerts into ceremonial Magik rituals and may very well have unleashed occult forces he could not begin to deal with.
One incredible bit of information, Maila informs us that Vampira’s trademark scream at the beginning of every show was meant to be autoerotic! Vampira would scream bloody murder and then do a fake orgasm! I cannot imagine any other actress, especially on 1950s faking an orgasm on live television and getting away with it! Lucy and Ethel? Audrey Meadows? Molly Goldberg? Then again, the orgasm may not have been faked!
It’s entirely appropriate that Vampira would be linked with other Hollywood tragedies like James Dean, Bela Lugosi and Orson Welles (although I doubt Welles considered his life a tragedy, I’ll have more to say about Welles in another review.)
H Greene has put together an amazing documentary, I have watched Vampira and Me three times and have not got to the bottom of it yet. Vampira and Me belongs in every movie geeks collection. There have been many good show business documentaries recently, subjects as varied as Roger Corman, Stanley Kubrick, Tab Hunter, George Takei. Add Vampira and Me to the list.
In a better world than the one we live in Vampira would have stayed on KABC, gone into syndication, been preserved on kinescope and video tape for future generations to enjoy, and the release of the Shock theater package would have ramped the show up to a whole new level. Vampira and Maila Nurmi would have gotten much more work in acting, and most importantly Maila Nurmi would have made a whole lot of money and been idolized at fan conventions and poetry readings.
In the end Vampira and Me is many things all at once, cultural history, a meditation on identity, the trap of fame and the grind of poverty. But I think any feeling person can gather a lot of inspiration from Vampira and Me. Maila Nurmi was a survivor, she endured and she lived and she got to a place where she could talk about her misfortunes and laugh about them. Throughout the interview footage shot by Greene I never saw one moment of self pity or sadness or lingering anger. Only when talking about James Dean does her heart grow sad. Maila Nurmi is gone but Vampira will live forever.
So let us celebrate what we do have, the few minutes of precious Vampira footage and the long interview that make up Vampira and Me are truly a cause to celebrate. With another Halloween fast approaching let’s all light some black candles on All Hallow’s Eve, turn the lights down low and watch Vampira and Me. You’ll be glad you did!
