A scary femme fatale peddles old horror films on TV the year 1954
She walked screaming out of the white smoke, a black-clad goddess of death, exuding aggressive sex. Her eyes held just a tinge of threat. Her nails, phallic daggers of implied violence. Waist shrunken to a ghastly circumference, her eyebrows archly painted, her long black hair swirling behind and around her, she shocked, titillated, angered, obsessed.
She called herself Vampira.
She introduced every show with a scream, a bloodcurdling extrusion that had to issue out of some cavern too big, dark, and lonely to live inside her impossible 36-17-36 figure. She screamed and looked directly at the camera, a goth Garbo who seized the eye of the audience, refusing to become a simple object of their regard. She seduced them with the offer of a night of B-movies, horror and sci-fi fare, mostly execrable, but seasoned with her spicy sweetness and her undertone of aggression that radiated underneath heavy white pancake make-up.
Nobody could turn off the TV. It was 1954.
Maila Nurmi screamed in a postwar America of chilling optimism, everyday repressions, and awkward silences. She was the child of Finnish immigrants, a runaway in the 30’s who worked as an actor, a model for softcore men’s magazines, and a burlesque dancer. She had a taste for the macabre that led her to delve into the sediment of midcentury America until it yielded its dark treasures. A pin-up model who found herself turned into the 50’s American middle class housewife, she refashioned herself to escape the confines of cultural expectation.
Nurmi had explored the tangled underside of the country since the mid-1940s; an underground gothic land lived beneath the sun- lit world of postwar America. As a young runaway, she performed in a New York horror/burlesque show known as “Spook Scandals” that had called for her to rise out of a coffin and scream. There she had begun to craft the character of Vampira, thinking about how the sexy and the horrific could intertwine, a dance between Eros and Thanatos.
“Dig Me, Vampira” was like nothing that had yet appeared in television’s brief existence. Premiering on April 30, 1954, it became an instant hit in the Los Angeles area. Then things exploded. *****
Vampira quickly reached a larger audience through a Life magazine photo shoot. She appeared on Red Skelton’s popular show alongside Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi. She hung out with James Dean and his entourage at Googie’s Restaurant, one of the few late night spots in 1950s Hollywood. She became part of “the night watch,” aspiring actors and directors that hovered around Dean, the strange and beautiful boy from Indiana who had yet to reach superstardom in East of Eden.
Ratings for the Vampira show shot through the roof in the year to come and Nurmi seemed on the verge of major stardom. But KABC cancelled her contract around the time of the death of James Dean. Despite her popularity, Vampira had spun a web of controversy that entangled her and the station. FCC warnings, a lawsuit by a starlet who thought her career had been ruined by the image of Vampira, and, finally, the end of Nurmi’s marriage to Reisner, a blow to the station’s public relations campaign that had attempted to portray her as a normal housewife who liked to play dress-up as a bit of “horrific whimsy.” Dean’s death, or at least the bizarre rumors that surrounded Nurmi in the aftermath of it, represented the final straw.
By the late 1950s her television career was over; she lived with her mother while receiving unemployment benefits. She appeared in the Ed Wood directed Plan 9 from Outer Space that, while later a cult hit, barely had any audience at all in the first years of its existence. True and lasting stardom never came calling again. By the 1960s, Nurmi supported herself as a tile contractor. Stories, patently untrue, circulated of roles in pornographic films. She became a figure of local legend in West Hollywood, part of a cast of peculiar characters who’d once been famous and now were not.
Vampira disappeared. But she thrived in the cultural underground. Maila Nurmi hung out with the punk/metal band the Misfits in the 80s at places like West Hollywood Vinyl Fetish. She also worked on a book she never finished, a memoir of underside of a 50s Hollywood that stayed up late nights at Googies Restaurant, popped pills, and lived off the warm glow of stardom it stalked.
She died, alone, in 2008.
Perhaps this is all that we need know of her story. Perhaps it’s more or less all that can be known. It’s true that her influence has spread far and wide. There may not be a horror convention where her visage doesn’t influence the tattooed seductress cos-players, not a horror host who doesn’t owe something to her camp humor, no mistress of the night anywhere whose ultimate origin point can’t be traced to this runaway, this late night comedian.
Vampira borrowed from many of the ghosts that haunted American culture, elements never before brought together with the kind of sexual energy and threatening cultural pose that Vampira adopted. She described her character as a monster crafted out of the elements of American history, the terrors of the great depression, and the postwar style of the Beats. She raises questions about everything we think we know about the American fifties.
Excerpted from Vampira: Dark Goddess of Horror. Copyright 2014 by W. Scott Poole. Published by Soft Skull Press. All rights reserved. Photos: Collection of the Author
My queen.
Vampira
An aspiring actress, chorus girl and cheesecake model who posed for Vargas and worked with a pre-stardom Marilyn Monroe, Maila 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.
