The Unsorted BBS Collection/thegreatunsorted.tar/thegreatunsorted/texts/txtfiles_misc/vamp23.faq

Text File | 1995-03-26 | 6KB | 112 lines

The Big Picture
A Short Biography of Vampira (Maila Nurmi)

BOXOFFICE - April 1994 - The business magazine of the motion picture industry

(reprinted with permission from BOXOFFICE)

THE BIG PICTURE

    When an image enters the popular imagination, its
origins can become difficult to trace. How many people can
name the silent film in which  a heroine was first tied to
railroad tracks by a snarling evildoer? Or the western in
which a lock-jawed hero first told the bad guys to Reach for
the sky!? Even familiar things become distorted in the
funhouse mirror of common usage; how else can we account for
the fact that, in a classic like Casablanca, the most
famous piece of dialogue, Bogart saying "Play it again,
Sam", is a phrase never once spoken in the film?

       So it is with Maila Nurmi, whose image is known all over
the world, though she has rarely been given her due as its
source. Even at the height of what was worldwide fame,
Nurmi's work was unseeable outside greater L. A.; but still
she managed to present the world with a lasting archetype of
sex, death and humor that survives to this day. An aspiring
actress, chorus girl and cheesecake model (I was trying to
prove something to my then-husband, she says impishly) who
posed for Vargas and worked with a pre-stardom Marilyn
Monroe, Nurmi's moment came in 1953 when she attended Lester
Horton's annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in Hollywood dressed
as the then-unnamed ghoul-woman from Charles Addams' New
Yorker cartoons.

    I bound my bosoms, so that I was flat-chested, Nurmi
says, and I got a wig, and painted my body a kind of a
mauve white pancake with a little lavender powder so that I
looked as though I'd been entombed. To everyone's surprise
but her own, Nurmi defeated 2,000 contestants and was named
best-costumed reveller at the ball. So strong was the
impression she made that KABC-TV producer Hunt Stromberg Jr.
spent five months tracking her down in order to offer her TV
work as hostess of a late-night horror show. Unwilling simply
to rip-off Addams creation (an irony, since Nurmi herself was
the victim of much plagiarism in subsequent years), Nurmi
decided to create her own unique persona, and the campier,
sexier Vampira took to the airwaves.

    An instant sensation which spawned fan clubs all over
the world and led to Nurmi's being featured in a multi-page
spread in LIFE Magazine, Vampira also attracted the attention
of a B-Movie director named Ed Wood and his down-and-out
star-performer, horror great Bela Lugosi. It was Lugosi who
saw Nurmi on TV and told Wood he'd like to work with her some
day. Wood, the much-maligned director of Bride of the
Monster and the cross-dressing classic Glen or Glenda
(which he also wrote and starred in, as a man addicted to
drag), honored Lugosi's request in typically oddball fashion.
Years later, when Nurmi's fame had waned thanks to what she
terms a blacklisting, and after Lugosi died, leaving behind
some unexploited movie footage, Wood cast Nurmi as Lugosi's
undead wife in an unlikely zombies-of-the-stratosphere
scenario, and the schlock-horror classic Plan 9 From Outer
Space was born.

    At the time, I thought it was horrible, Nurmi says of
a film some have called the worst movie ever made. I knew
immediately I'd be committing professional suicide, but I
thought `what choice do I have?' Somehow, I seemed to be dead
already. She found Ed Wood very unbright, and says she pitied him,
because I always pity people who aren't very bright, unless
they're just barefoot primitives who are artless. But Nurmi
remembers Wood as almost shockingly handsome. I love
glamour, she says, and physical beauty. I've always been
fascinated by beautiful men on the screen: Tyrone Power,
Robert Walkerwith soft-focus filters and velvet voices.
That's what Ed Wood was like. Beautiful dreamy eyes and long,
sweeping lashesjust beautiful. He didn't make a very pretty
lady, but he made an awfully pretty man.

    Ironically, thanks to the perishable nature of 50s TV,
it is through Plan 9 From Outer Space (plus a thousand
imitators, including one prominent mistress of the dark who
shall remain nameless, lest we succumb to what Nurmi calls
subsidizing my burglar) that Nurmi's Vampira survives
todayalbeit in bowdlerized form. Appalled by her dialogue,
Nurmi begged Wood to let her perform wordlessly, and the
result was a sleepwalking character dressed like Vampira, but
who was actually what Nurmi calls Maila in an alpha state.

    To set the record straight, we've published this
exclusive, personally autographed photo, taken by
photographer Sam Woo, which shows Vampira in all her
unearthly and seductive glory. Like any good, undead creature
of the night, Vampira will rise again when Tim Burton
chronicles the life of her Plan 9 director in the fall
release Ed Wood, starring Johnny Depp as Wood and super-
model Lisa Marie as Nurmi. As for Nurmi (who is retired in
Los Angeles, and whose painted self-portraits of Vampira are
much-sought-after collector's items), she's undergone
something of a conversion experience. In contrast to her
former low opinion of him, she now sides with the smaller but
more passionate group that defends Ed Wood as a low-budget
visionary, who made up for his lack of craft with a
passionate commitment to the creative act.
He wasn't as dumb as I thought he was, Nurmi says wryly. I
was probably the dumb one. He was an auteur; I know that now.
In those days, I didn't even know what that meant.

Viva, Vampira!
Ray Greene