Glamour Ghoul, page 12
During the interview, Stromberg alternately clapped his hands and emitted gasps of sheer ecstasy while continuing to gaze lovingly at his protégée. “Isn’t she perfect?” he sighed.
“How do you feel about children? Do you like them?” Coates asked.
“Oh, yes,” the ghoul exclaimed. “Delicious!”
Coates had to admit the girl was perfect.
Not to be left out of the conversation, Ciro’s manager, Hover, added, “You could say she’s just a girl from the Styx. Get it? S-T-Y-X.”
When the interview was over, Coates remained unsettled. It was just weird. Was the ghoul girl psychic as well? She told him he was a Pisces because he had watery eyes. He was indeed a Pisces. He went away not realizing that Vampira was his friend Maila—the girl who worked at the Savoy, whom he’d spoken to often and nicknamed “the Nordic Empress.”
Chapter Nine
The Eisenhower administration made good on its promise to restore peace and prosperity to the country. By 1954, the Korean War was over, and thanks to the G.I Bill, the American dream of home ownership was never more attainable. The economy was strong, and unemployment rates were low. More than half of American families owned a television, and families gathered around their sets to eat their dinner on aluminum trays and watch Beat the Clock and I Love Lucy.
The same year, at the stroke of midnight on the last day of April, KABC premiered a preview of Maila’s show, from an episode titled “Dig Me Later, Vampira,” and Los Angeles’ insomniacs got their first glimpse at the phenomenon that would spawn an entire genre.
The next night, the first full episode of Nightmare Attic, the show’s original working title, debuted. A bizarre-looking woman draped in black tatters entered the shot from the left side of the screen. Her waist was so tiny, it defied comprehension that she could be human. Soundless as an apparition, she seemed to float, before stopping in front of an upholstered Victorian sofa accented with skull finials along the back. The woman turned and spoke into the camera.
“Hello,” she said, her voice low and deliberate. “It’s time to do it again. Oh, but we haven’t been introduced yet. I think introductions are so important. They kind of separate the living from the dead. Anyway, I am Vampira.”
She sat down on the sofa and arranged herself to prime advantage. The slit in her skirt parted to reveal a long length of leg sheathed in fishnet hose. Her décolletage was exposed to the limits of decency. Her pale skin, her hollowed cheeks, her eyebrows arched like twin boomerangs. She was beautiful in a deranged sort of way. In the glow of candlelight, she spoke.
“Oh, I’ve got a wonderful offer to make to you tonight. It’s a new hospitalization plan called the Yellow Cross. It’s for people who unsuccessfully try to commit suicide. The plan pays all the bills ’til you’re well enough to try again. If you’re interested in such a plan, I’ll be glad to get in touch with you. Of course, I hope you never have to use it. It’s disheartening to hear of an unsuccessful suicide. And remember our slogan: If at first you don’t succeed, die, die, then die again.
“It’s time for our love story now. I hope you all enjoy … Condemned … to Live. It’s a lovely tale of tender unique murders. Just the sort of thing we all hope for.”
She went on.
“I went to a delightful funeral yesterday. We buried a friend of mine—alive. It takes a heap o’ dyin’ to make a house a tomb. This is Vampira, until next week, wishing you bad dreams, darlings.”
Vampira succeeded in doing what Maila always wanted to do: rage at the establishment for their artificial lives. But Vampira was clever. Instead of angry admonitions and rebukes, she spun a dark web of sex and death and made it palatable with humor. Invited into Middle America’s immaculate living rooms, she thanked them by blasting them where they lived—and sometimes serenading them.
Oh, ain’t she sweet,
Lyin’ drunk there in the street,
Now I ask you very confidentially,
Ain’t she sweet?
As “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody” played softly in the background, Vampira appeared wearing an executioner’s black hood while assuring the housewife that her “hat” is “suitable for indiscreet excursions or public hangings. And if your husband is so fortunate as to be the one being hanged, it can also double as mourning wear. That way, you can say you kept your head while everyone else around you was losing theirs.”
The Vampira Show stretched the limits of innuendo. America was at the dawning of the nuclear age, when movies began to feature monsters and flying saucers, when a vampiric succubus appeared on the television, and beckoned you to join her in her creepy attic. And the Angelenos responded.
Three weeks later, Stromberg called Maila with news that surprised no one more than KABC. To accommodate the huge viewer response, the show would appear an hour earlier. And there was even better news: Saturday morning, Life magazine was sending a photographer.
That was a huge deal, and Maila knew exactly what it meant. National exposure.
Dennis Stock looked young enough to be in high school. Maila took an instant liking to the photographer. He told her she had the look for high fashion, to which Maila scoffed, “High fashion, indeed. I prefer to slink rather than strut.”
It was a warm, sunny day when Stock set out with Vampira in the old convertible with its obligatory uniformed chauffeur. One of his photographs from that day is a favorite of author and filmmaker R.H. Greene’s. In an addendum to his radio documentary Vampira and Me, Greene wrote about his friend, Maila, and the photo of her. “It shows Maila in full Vampira mode, leaning out of the back seat of her trademark 1932 Packard toward a mother and two daughters, who look like they just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting for the Saturday Evening Post. We can’t see the girls’ faces, but their body posture indicates hesitance. And no wonder. Because Maila’s expression captures something simultaneously true to her character and to the woman who played her: She’s utterly baffled by the pretty little tableau of normalcy before her. This affluent trio of females is a foreign thing to Maila/Vampira, some horror from another world. A walking nightmare herself, Maila stares at a perfect icon of American middle-class bliss as if she’s the one having the nightmare.”
KABC publicity still, courtesy of the Jove de Renzy collection.
On the studio set, a cobweb-draped corridor was readied to coincide with Stock’s arrival and would become the show’s signature opening. Vampira took her mark behind a curtain at the end of a narrow, dark hallway. Stock poised with his camera, ready as the show went live.
The theme music—excerpts from Gustav Holst’s The Planets and Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta—was cued. A figure emerges from the shadows and glides down a cobwebbed hallway framed by tall candelabra. Slowly, she advances down the corridor through a miasma of swirling dry ice vapors. For a few seconds, the juxtaposition of the woman’s wasp-waisted silhouette against the white mist is startling.
Maila at Liberace’s “Come As You Were” show at the Riviera in Las Vegas, 1956.
Courtesy of the Jove de Renzy Collection.
She stops directly in front of the camera, her face impassive. Without warning, she screams the kind of scream that warns of bloody murder, yet in a nanosecond, her countenance changes from horror to bliss.
“Oooh,” Vampira purrs, stretching like a cat waking up from a nap in the sun, “screaming relaxes me so.”
Fade to black.
The censors never caught it. In a time when Lucy and Desi could not be filmed in the same bed together, Maila Nurmi feigned an orgasm on live television. Saturday night after Saturday night.
Soon, offers arrived. One of the first was an invitation to appear with established horror stars Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi, and Lon Chaney, Jr., on The Red Skelton Show. KABC took the deal.
During rehearsals, Maila was introduced to one of Skelton’s writers and sometime announcer, a young Johnny Carson. According to Maila, when a very ill Lugosi missed several cues, Carson could be heard laughing and belittling the aging actor. Maila developed a lifelong dislike for Carson and an affinity for Lugosi, whom she remembered as the consummate gentleman. Later, she wrote:
Just recalling that moment, I am permeated with serenity. Bela, my dear, if you’re listening, let me tell you this. When at the end of the show, you took my arm to guide me to the footlights for a curtain call, I was suddenly ten feet tall & wore a fifty-foot aura of royalty. I was all the queens of history rolled into one. Yes, Bela. You touched me with a magic I have never known before or after.
From the appearance on Skelton’s show, she was paid the AFTRA standard, five hundred dollars, and KABC would take 49 percent of that. But how the money came to her was bizarre. Checks were made payable not to Maila Nurmi but to Vampira and sent directly to KABC in care of Hunt Stromberg, Jr. CBS used the same method to make paychecks out to Clem Kadiddlehopper instead of the character’s creator, Red Skelton. It was but another sign that Stromberg wanted to remain in control and that Maila was a nonentity. It was Vampira who mattered.
The June 14, 1954 issue of Life was hot off the press when Maila and her friend Rudi Gernreich met at Googies. Both had reason to celebrate. In a stroke of serendipity, their artistry was featured within the same issue: Maila for her Vampira character and Gernreich for his fashion designs. More press followed. Newsweek and TV Guide ran stories on Vampira. Big-city newspapers published photos of television’s creepy femme fatale, and fan clubs cropped up across Europe, Asia, and as far away as Australia. Vampira was a sensation, and quite unexpectedly, considering Nightmare Attic was a local late-night television show, available only within the greater Los Angeles area.
Around this time, the name of the show was changed to The Vampira Show to reflect the host’s immense popularity. The station’s mail room was deluged with letters from fans—Maila wished her father could see how popular she was now. Among the letters was one from a former classmate at Astoria High School, Betty Ponsness-Long.
Maila’s response to Ponsness-Long survived either because it was a rough draft or because she forgot to mail it. But its importance lies in the fact that it’s a window into Maila’s life as television’s newest sensation. Perhaps Maila engaged in a little puffery, but who could blame her?
Betty dear,
You can’t imagine how thrilled I was to hear from you! My press agent is coming to take me for a fitting (new Vampira gown) then I have a story conference and then a business meeting in which my personal manager and my agent fight over how they can outsmart my studio.
Maila wrote of her happy marriage to Dink, referring to him formally as Dean. She told Betty about how she and her screenwriter husband shared their busy and successful lives with five cats in a canyon away from the city, among the butterflies. Maila professed “to have very little mother instinct,” but she later admitted that she would love to adopt a little boy someday (here the word “boy” is scratched out), adding:
…why did I say boy when I meant girl? Maybe in a few years. An orphan, as I am afraid of childbirth.
As a result of “getting religion” four years before, Maila maintained her ultimate goal was to become an evangelist. Her letter concludes by saying that “all celebrities are just people.”
I personally like the neurotics among the performers—Marlon Brando, Shelley Winters, Laurence [sic] Tierney, John Carradine, Leslie Caron—the Ann Blythes bore me. I do value the friendship of the aforementioned wild hearts—but their public success is only an inconvenience to me.
The requests for interviews and appearances for Vampira kept Maila jumping. In the summer of 1954, Vampira appeared on The Saturday Night Revue, hosted by Ben Blue. She appeared in parades and at conventions, universities, and grand openings—and even on a game show, Place the Face. Walter Winchell, the premier gossip columnist at the time wrote, “The only person more popular than Vampira is Eisenhower.”
Here I was. Me, Maila Nurmi, someone who most people wouldn’t even want to go out & have a hot dog with & as Vampira I had just been given the key to the city.
The same summer, The Vampira Show was renewed for another 13 weeks, and a new contract was executed, wherein the network continued to control a percentage of Vampira.
Hollywood adored her. The nation adored her. But that adoration ended at her front door.
Dink’s career was on the upswing. He didn’t have the time or inclination to participate in all the hoopla surrounding Vampira. Between script conferences and frantic deadlines, his time was tight. The last thing he wanted to do was escort Maila to some ridiculous function as she wore that shroud. At first, he was stunned by her popularity. Then it became an liability.
To the two people in the world whom Maila loved the most—Dink and her mother—she was an embarrassment.
Trouble in Laurel Canyon was brewing. And the news troubled no one more than Maila’s mother. While Sophie was in Oregon for the summer, Maila called her to complain about Dink. She said that he was cruel and heartless, a two-bit former drunk who, after she encouraged and supported him for years, now refused to participate in her success.
In the midst of another fight, Maila revealed to her mother that while experimenting with her Vampira makeup, Dink flew off the handle. She said she locked herself in the bathroom to get away from him, but it only provoked him all the more. She finally emerged and announced she was leaving the house until he cooled off, but Dink physically restrained her, mocking her appearance, saying she was foolish and looked like a clown.
Maila wrenched herself free, flew out the door, and ran down the hill, with Dink yelling after her, “Say hi to the stiffs at the morgue, will ya?”
Googies was her sanctuary. There, in full Vampira makeup sans wig and costume, she was home. There was something about looking at the world through the long, feathery lashes of her alter ego that compelled her to stay in character. She was invincible, without the frailties that confound the lives of the living. Being Vampira allowed her to escape from herself, if only for a short while.
In an email, author and former night manager of Googies, Steve Hayes, said:
“I think Maila actually became more weird in real life after she became Vampira. I can say that because I … worked alongside her when she was kind of shy and sweet and somewhat normal. But all that changed after Vampira. It’s as if she believed she couldn’t drop the image.”
In Vampira’s skin, her secret was safe. No one would suspect that Maila was terrified Dink would leave her.
The makeup job carries on while the animation hibernates.
Chapter Ten
In late August of 1954, Billy Wilder’s Sabrina premiered in Hollywood. Like all big galas, regardless of the weather that night, the stars would shine brightly.
Throngs of fans waited in the bleachers across from the theater hoping to catch a glimpse of Audrey Hepburn or Humphrey Bogart. Among the fans was Maila, alone in a crowd. Dink had declined to go with her.
Maila may have been the hottest ticket in town, but without her Vampira costume, no one recognized her, and she was grateful for the anonymity—she was on a mission. She’d already met most of the big-name stars. What she wanted now was to find people who interested her. The stars were here to be seen. Maila wanted to find a misfit, someone who despised the dog and pony show and was only there because he was ordered to attend. Someone like herself. Someone she could relate to.
She’d spotted a young, small-framed nervous-acting fellow standing in the throngs of fans. She didn’t know a thing about him other than he had no fashion sense, as confirmed by the hideous blue plaid jacket he wore, with sleeves that hung down past his fingertips.
Suddenly, the surrounding energy shifted. The crowd erupted into screams and cheers. Flashbulbs popped from every direction, and Maila focused upon the cavalcade of celebrities proceeding to their limos that lined the roadway. Clamoring photographers were rewarded by crimson lips flashing million-dollar smiles. Screaming fans were appeased by concessionary gestures—a wave of the hand, a blown kiss. The excitement was palpable.
Maila with Jack Simmons outside Googies, 1954. Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images.
I saw Martha Hyer. Certainly not her. She was awful, the current mistress of Hal Wallis. Bogart…already met him, he was a nasty oaf. I had about given up when here comes this guy in a tux with Howard Hughes’ whore on his arm. She had a loopy smile on her face, clearly enjoying the attention, but he is mad. It was obviously a studio date. He is angry to have to be there, & he certainly doesn’t want to be with her. And I knew, I had to meet this guy.
The stars disappeared into their limousines to be chauffeured to their respective after-parties, and the fans began to disperse. Although there were no limos for Maila, she did have a party invitation, as well as a car and driver at her disposal.
“Did you see anyone interesting?” the man behind the wheel wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Maila said, “the guy with Terry Moore and the guy in the oversized horse blanket.”
“The guy who doesn’t know how to dress is Jack Simmons. You’ll meet him tonight at the party. I don’t know who the other one is.”
The next afternoon, Maila shared a booth in Googies with plaid-jacketed Jack Simmons, her newfound friend, and a man named Jonathan Haze. While they were socializing, a loud rumble came from the parking lot, and Maila looked out the window to see a couple arriving on a motorcycle.
A young man burst into the restaurant like a cyclone, a one-legged girl in his wake. The girl was Toni Lee Scott, a jazz singer who had lost her limb in a motorcycle accident. But on that day, it wasn’t the one-legged girl who caught Maila’s attention. Her mouth agape, she slammed both elbows on the table, banging her funny bones in the process. Her arms tingled to the tips of her fingers as she stood halfway to her feet.
