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| Vampira in her heyday |
I spent a lot of my teens hunting down the legendary screen siren and horror movie hostess Vampira... I was completely obsessed with her. It took me quite a long time to figure out that the friendly older woman I used to sit next to at Angel's Coffee Shop in Hollywood WAS Vampira, Maila Nurmi herself!
Just before this story was published, I arranged for Vampira to make a live comeback, by popping out of a coffin at a Cramps show in Northridge, California.
This article was originally
published in LA Weekly on October 30, 1981
I
first discovered Vampira when I was twelve years old. An avid fan of horror movies and monster
magazines, I saw her pictures, and fell in love. Later, when I discovered James Dean and started reading
everything I could get my hands on about him, Vampira
figured prominently in many of the stories.
As an adult, I was still completely fascinated and spent hours trying to look her up, cruising
down Melrose Avenue looking for her store and mooning over every publicity
still I could find of her. Like me, many
of the people obsessed with Vampira weren’t even born during her short career
span … It’s only because of Plan 9 From
Outer Space, a few scattered stories and the old stills that they even know
she existed. Apparently that was enough
to trigger the mania.
Her
five-inch-long fingernails were painted “hemorrhage red,” as were her
cruel-looking lips. Her skin had a
luminous alabaster pallor, in direct contrast to her stringy raven mane and
tattered black shrouds which clung to her body like wallpaper … and what a body
- her measurements were a stunning 38-17-36.
Her face was angular, with high-jutting planes for cheekbones and black Gothic
arch slashes of eyebrows.
Her icy blue eyes glittered with come-hither
invitation and sly menace as she’d say in a throaty voice at the end of the Vampira Show she hosted on Channel 7,
“Bad dreams, dahling.”
She
drove through Hollywood in a chauffeured hearse, maintained that she signed
“epitaphs, not autographs” and drank nothing but Bloody Marys. One fan who worked at L.A. Children’s
Hospital even offered her a test-tube full of her “favorite cocktail.” She was considered one of the original
beatniks and hung out at Googie’s and other bohemian coffeehouses. She took in stray cats as well as stray
actors, like Marlon Brando and James Dean.
She sent “Jimmy,” as she referred to him, a postcard of herself in a
coffin with the inscription “Wish you were here” - a week later he was dead.
In
1956, she starred in the triple-B movie and cult favorite Plan 9 From Outer Space along with Bela Lugosi and Tor
Johnson. Although she admits to being “a
terrible snob” and has little regard for that movie, it was Plan 9 and its frequent runs in revival
houses that has spurred the renewed interest in the prettiest vampire ever.
Hollywood
legends are made, not born, as the old saying goes. And most of the legends are made, at least in
part, by untimely deaths - witness Marilyn Monroe, Jean Harlow and, of course,
James Dean. Vampira is not dead. (Well, she always was, anyway.) But she disappeared from the public eye over
25 years ago. She not only dropped out
of the limelight, she holed up and became a virtual hermit. Why?
She says she was getting a lot of
crank phone calls and being pestered by bizarre people who thought she really was Vampira. Notes written in blood would be delivered
daily, and sometimes appetizing treats like decaptitated animals would appear
on her doorstep as love offerings. She
was plagued with death threats by people who thought she’d be more sexually
attractive as a corpse, and later, when Dean died, she was bombarded with
people wanting to touch someone close to him.
Today,
Vampira leads a quiet life in East Hollywood, working as a waitress and selling
various items at swap meets and flea markets.
She shares her small apartment with three dogs and tries to keep a low
profile. In person, at the age of 60,
she is still gorgeous. Although she has
a row of teeth missing on the right side of her mouth, her skin is clear and
unlined, and the incredible bone structure is still there. When she unwinds, she is animated and laughs
easily. She is extremely intelligent,
not to mention well-informed on current events.
Vampira
was born Maila Nurmi in Finland and migrated to the U.S. with her family at the
age of two. Her father was a newspaper
editor and a temperance lecturer, and the family roamed around America before
finally settling in Oregon. Although
Maila had a strict religious upbringing, she’d been acting since she was very
young. At the age of seventeen, she moved to Los Angeles to stay
with relatives and pursue a theatrical career.
In between too few acting jobs, Maila began doing exotic dancing up and
down the West Coast. At last, an offer
to appear with a Shakespeare company just outside of Chicago came through, and
Maila and a friend packed up and left on a bus for the “legitimate stage.”
“Well,
we got off the bus,” she laughed, “and there was nothing there, only a
field. I saw a tent and thought, ‘This
must be it.’ So we went over to the
tent, and it turned out to be a carnival!
It was they who had hired us. We
were supposed to stand on these giant blocks of ice right outside of the
hootchie-koo tent and wear ice-skates and hula dance! We lasted about a week - it was a pretty
rough place. But the carnies were
wonderful; they all pitched in for bus fare to get us back home.”
Back
in L.A., Maila did cheesecake photos for Bernard of Hollywood, a well-known
photographer. His stable included
Marilyn Monroe, Irish McCalla and Mamie Van Doren. This helped to pay the rent until she moved
to New York City to appear in Mike Todd’s Spooky
Scandals, portraying, ironically enough, a dancing vampire. Howard Hawks spotted her, brought her back
out to Hollywood, and because he thought she had a rather sensuous Lauren
Bacall type appeal, gave her the old “I’ll make you a star” treatment. Things looked promising, but nothing ever
came of it. She lived in furnished rooms
and generally weathered the starlet struggle.
She recalls waking up one night and having an experience with astral
projection.
“All
of a sudden I saw myself, but I was far thinner than I was then and about four
inches taller. I looked just like a
vampire, and I was walking into Ciro’s with a blond young man following
me. He stepped on my train, and I looked
back and stopped for a moment. Then the
vision went away.”
Eight
years later, the vision became a reality. Maila and her then-husband, producer Dean Reiner were to
attend a costume ball. Maila spent a lot
of time on her costume and made herself
up as the wife in the Charles Addams cartoons, whose macabre work for The New Yorker spawned The
Addams Family television series. Maila’s appearance was so breathtaking
that Hunt Stromberg, Jr., head of ABC ,
spent two months after the event
searching for her to host the Channel 7 late-night horror movie show. She
consented, and in 1954, Vampira was born.
She
was an instant hit the moment the program aired. Red-blooded American males (
and of course, that was the way she liked them!) spurned innocent-looking
blondes in favor of “The Ghoul Nextdoor”, who wowed ‘em weekly with vast
expanses of cleavage, drinking “poison” from an ornate antique bar ans she
lounged provocatively on a sofa
decorated with skulls. She’d open the show with a blood-curdling scream and
croon,
“I
hope you’ve all had the good fortune to have had a terrible week!”
In
between bitingly sarcastic comments on the movies, which were generally just as
horrible as Plan 9 but not nearly as
humorous, she’d make double-entendre
necrophiliac jokes. Aside from a few housewives complaining about Vampira’s
bosom and licentious attitude, she was
an all-around smash. Life magazine did a four-page spread on her, she
was written up in Newsweek, and The
Academy Of Television Arts And Sciences nominated her “Most Outstanding Female
Personality” for 1954. Offers for guest
appearances poured in by the hundreds, and the fan mail was staggering.
Newspapers did huge layouts on “The girl who put the HEX in sex appeal”, and
Confidential, the most outrageous of the scandal rags, really played up the
friendship between Vampira and “America’s Number One Teenager”, James Dean.
Vampira befriended James Deam when her star far outshone his. East of Eden was doing well but wasn’t a hit. By that
time, Vampira was making grand sweeping entrances into
Hollywood hotspots like Ciro’s.
“I
was so sad because I was getting invited into such lovely places,” she laments,
“And I couldn’t even eat an olive, or my waist-cincher would pop and I’d throw
up!”
The
pair met at Googie’s, the hip
place to see and be seen, and got along
like gangbusters. The rest is Hollywood
history…but not quite.
“
No one ever really got close to
Jimmy, “ she recalls, “He was a loner. The whole ‘James Dean set’ was invented
by the studios. I didn’t even know Sal Mineo. Natalie Wood was just a stupid
little girl with a crush on him- she had a crush on everybody! Deennis Hopper
was the only one who really admired him. People would fall in love with him at
the movie theaters, but would’nt even recognize him on the street.”
As far as their personal relationship goes,
Vampira will only concede to telling short anecdotes like The Postcard Story.
But she admits,
“We
saw each other’s psyche reflected in each other, like Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles.”
Just
around the time of Dean’s death, she was blacklisted by the ABC Netwrok for refusing to relinquish the rights
to the Vampira copyright to them. The day the contract was annulled, she was planning on having a small party with
Dean to celebrate her freedom, but it turned out to be the day he was
buried. Vampira went into seclusion and
eventually passed through the public’s forgetfulness and imagination into
nothing more than a puzzle-piece in the Dean legend.
“Jimmy
died at the right time; he’s immortal,” she said, “His glory is bigger than
valentino’s.”
Aside
from a few pulp magazine articles with
lurid titles like Vampira And The
Ghost Of James Dean Maila and her alter ego vanished almost entirely. The blacklist was in full effect and people
in the biz either wouldn’t touch her, or
couldn’t get in touch with her.
“I
was at the ABC offices and one man said,
‘Do you know what’s in my bottom drawer? Over $60,000.00 worth of offers for guest appearances for you, and we
have refused every one of them.’ And
that was just for the month of January! I couldn’t get any work at all- I was cleaning
people’s houses and going back to my furnished room…”
In
1956, hack director extraordinaire Edward G. Wood met Maila at a part at Bela Lugosi Jr.’s house.
He was working on Plan 9 and wondered
if she’d want a part in it.
“Well,
I asked how much, and he was paying $200.00 for one day of work, so
naturally I accepted- I was penniless. They weren’t a big movie company, you
know. No limousines or anything like that. I went to the job every day on the
RTD bus in my Vampira get-up.”
She
launches into a gale of giggles before continuing,
“The
dialog was terrible so I played the part mute. They were all amateurs. Wood was
supposed to be wild- a transvestite, things like that- but they all just struck
me as a bunch of half-assed backwoods people. I couldn’t imagine anyone believing it or wanting to see it, but
it ran on 42nd Street in New York for ages, and look at it now!”
At
a recent Los Angeles screening at the Nuart Theater, Nurmi tried
to attend but was refused because the
show was sold out.
“My
friend was saying ‘But this is Vampira, don’t you see? She hasn’t ever seen the
movie and she wants to. She’ll stand in
the aisle…”
The man at the box office replied, “Vampira is dead.”
Such
was the extent of her reclusiveness.
Once
in an interview, she lamented, “My whole life has been one big Halloween
party!” and maybe most of it has been.
But like a true vampire, she will live
forever with her otherworldly beauty and her image as “The Girl Of Your Screams”.
Think
of Vampira at The Witching Hour, and hopefully all of you dahlings out there will have the good fortune
to have wondrously bad dreams.
#
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| One of my prized possessions: a signed poster given to me by Maila herself |
Find me on online:
"Vampira befriended James Deam" oppsies :)
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