Like many, I first discovered Vampira in my early teens through The Misfits’ horny tribute on 1982’s Walk Among Us. I became instantly enamoured with Hollywood’s preeminent glamour ghoul, but in time, I became fascinated with the vision behind the vamp — the iconic Maila Nurmi (née Maila Elizabeth Niemi). Last month, I finally picked up a copy of Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi, written by Maila’s niece, Sandra Niemi. The book is an 11-year long labour of love that sensitively pieces together reflections pulled from journals Maila kept until her death in 2008. After reading it, I immediately rummaged through digital archives for more information on the circumstances that pushed this radical figure into the shadows of showbusiness.
The rebel and the vampire
As Maila fans know, Nurmi and James Dean were close friends. According to Maila, she first spotted Dean at the premiere of Sabrina in August 1954, and decided he and Jack Simmons were the only people amongst the Hollywood elite that she had cared to know. She said of Dean:
“[S]omebody came out of an automobile, out of a limousine in a tuxedo that he didn’t want to wear. He was very angry and he was with Terry Moore for God’s sake, and I said, “That’s who I want to meet, the boy who was with Terry Moore”.
Maila Nurmi in an interview with Stacey Asip-Kneitschel for Please Kill Me.
At this time, Maila was at the apex of her career. Travelling between LA and New York, she had worked odd jobs as a hat check girl, a bell-hop, a model, a cigarette girl, and a columnist. She starred in the Mae West production, Catherine Was Great (1944), and even signed a contract with Howard Hawks before tearing it up in front of him when he insulted her. Unfortunately, she also found that young hopefuls are prime prey for industry sleazeballs. This reportedly included Orson Welles, to whom Maila allegedly bore her first and only child. But for all the horrors of Hollywood, Maila persevered. Finally, in 1954, she was spotted by Hunter Stromberg Jr — program director for KABV-TV — at the Bal Caribe. Dressed as the unnamed matriarch of Charles Addams’ New Yorker comics, Maila was awarded first prize in the costume competition, and Stromberg knew he had landed on the perfect personality to hook KABC’s late night viewers. He offered Maila a position as Channel 7’s horror hostess, but to avoid infringing on Addams’ intellectual property, Maila changed up her costume by melding dark glamour with fetishist signifiers inspired by John Willie’s Bizarre. Stromberg loved it, and in April 1954, The Vampira Show was born. Though the programme was broadcast live on local television, the show became a national hit, and a promotional spread in Life magazine introduced Maila’s creation to an international audience.
James Dean, on the other hand, was a relative unknown on the ascent. The young actor secured a co-starring role in East of Eden in April 1954, but it wasn’t until the release of Rebel Without a Cause in October 1955 that he truly became the perennial poster boy for disenfranchised youth. Then, the morning after the premiere of Sabrina, Maila’s wish to meet him was realised. Jack Simmons took Maila to the late night coffee hangout, Googie’s, where they again saw Dean and this time made his acquaintance. Maila claimed she could sense Dean’s yearning for a mother-figure, and he subsequently invited her to his apartment where he read her a story about a 12 year old boy who commits suicide. Soon enough, the Nurmi-Dean-Simmons trio were joined at the hip, keeping late hours at Googie’s and taking twilight drives to local cemeteries. The press apparently dubbed the trio ‘the Night Watch’ for their unusual antics, and archives show that columns frequently reported on sightings of Maila and Dean. On 20 November 1954, Dean even made an anonymous appearance on The Vampira Show, acting as a naughty schoolboy who the titular hostess beat with a dictionary.
Though Maila insisted she and Dean were kindred spirits who were ‘karmically drawn’ to one another, many have suggested that she embellished the story. One thing’s for sure — Maila adored Dean, and she stated many times that their relationship was strictly platonic. When asked about her connection to Dean and Simmons, she told Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, “I feel it’s my duty to clear up the rumours […] We saw our psyches reflected in each other like Cocteau’s Enfants Terribles… an incestuous menage a trois without the sex”.
Despite Maila’s obvious devotion to her friend, Dean publicly disavowed her in a widely syndicated interview with gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, who was a driving force behind the creation of the Hollywood blacklist.
“I don’t date witches, and I dig cartoons even less. Vampira was merely a subject about which I wanted to learn, and after engaging the girl in conversation, I found that she knew absolutely nothing and is only obsessed with her Vampira makeup”.
James Dean on Maila Nurmi. The quote was printed in Hedda Hopper’s syndicated column on 18 November 1954.
Some have suggested Dean’s comments may have been the machinations of Warner Brothers, who felt Maila was a black mark on his rising star. Maila suggested Dean was bitter after she spoke about their relationship to Hopper’s rival columnist, Luella Parsons. However, in an interview with Aline Mosby in April ’55, Maila seems to confirm that Dean struggled to separate the person from the performance: “I’m not at all like the Vampira character. James Dean sought me out but was disappointed to see I’m not a character”.
The death of The Vampira Show
According to Sandra Niemi, Dean’s comments devastated Maila. To make matters worse, she and her partner, screenwriter Dean Reisner, ended their common law marriage in January 1955. It seems that his embarrassment about the Vampira character had driven an insurmountable wedge between the two, and Maila was forced to call it quits. At the same time, there was increased friction between Maila and KABC-TV. The station owned a minority share of the Vampira character, and they were always hungry for more. According to Niemi, ‘Maila felt that the studio wanted to own her character, along with the Vampira name’, a prospect Maila was entirely opposed to. Maila claimed the station withheld high paying opportunities to loosen her grip on her creation:
“I was at the KABC 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…”
Maila speaking to LA Weekly, 30 October 1981.
One appearance Maila did make as Vampira was on NBC’s The George Gobel Show. At the time, Gobel’s show boasted a top 10 rating and hosted such luminary stars as Jimmy Stewart and Kirk Douglas. But as it was filmed the same night as The Vampira Show, KABC-TV ordered Maila to reject the offer. She ignored them. The sketch she performed with Gobel perfectly encapsulates Maila’s artistic intent with the Vampira character — a send up of American domesticity dripping with dark, postmodern humour. It’s a veritable blueprint for the screen adaptations of The Addams Family, for Tim Burton’s filmography, and — much to Maila’s dismay — for Cassandra Peterson’s Elvira.
Following the appearance, Maila was called to the office of ABC producer, Selig J. Seligman. Maila’s suspicions were confirmed when Seligman offered to buy the rights to Vampira with the intent of syndicating The Vampira Show. Ever uncompromising when it came to her intellectual property, Maila refused to relinquish control of her creation, and on 16 April 1955, KABC annulled her contract and officially pulled the plug on The Vampira Show. The show ran for scarcely a year. According to Maila, the friction with ABC resulted in her being blacklisted by Hollywood.
The nightmare in New York
Contractually, Maila was unable to appear as Vampira for six months after leaving ABC, and as public memory is short, her popularity quickly waned. Then, after just a year of intense friendship, Maila received the news of James Dean’s sudden death in September 1955. The culmination of tragic events was too much for Maila, and she decided to get out of Hollywood. With what little money she had, she followed her friend — the actor Anthony Perkins — to New York, hoping to find some work through his theatre connections. She moved into a sparsely furnished brownstone on 136 West 46th Street, where she slept on a makeshift bed of plastic wrapping paper. Much of her time was spent scraping meals at Perkins’ place, as her inability to capitalise off Vampira had left her in dire financial straits.
Maila’s hopes of starting over in New York were abruptly dismissed when on the night of 7 January 1956, a 23 year old named Ellis Barber broke into her home. He terrorised Maila for hours, holding her in the apartment and repeatedly threatening her life. After fighting back and making multiple attempts to escape, Maila finally managed to flee the building and alerted staff in a nearby Italian restaurant. Barber was arrested and found guilty of attempted rape on 20 January 1956, with Maila acting as a witness to the proceedings. He reportedly had two other attempted rapes on his arrest record. Chillingly, his street name was revealed to be ‘The Vamp’. The press couldn’t believe their luck. They clamoured for the headline of Vampira and The Vamp and harassed Maila for photographs as she exited felony court. As if things weren’t bad enough, the press predictably treated the attack as a humorous curiosity, publishing tacky headlines including ‘The Vamp Rips off Clothes of Vampira’. A traumatised Maila was on the Greyhound back to LA as fast as she had left.
The Dean death curse
Sadly, she hadn’t been in LA a month when the scandal mag, Whisper, published an article which claimed Maila was James Dean’s jilted lover who had performed a deadly black magic ritual that resulted in Dean’s death. The conflation of Maila the person with Vampira the character was never more evident, and the public ate it up.
According to Sandra Niemi, ‘[a] kind of dialectic hysteria erupted’ following the article’s publication. ‘From James Dean fans came death threats, while necrophiliacs sent love letters. Maila couldn’t avoid being attacked, either physically, as she had in New York, or emotionally in Hollywood’. After reading the article, Hunter Stromberg Jr reportedly called Maila and told her: “I read about you in the Sunday paper. Congratulations on finding a way to stay in the headlines, even when I tried to bury you”. As the rumour that Maila had cursed Dean continued to circulate, the struggling star unwittingly fanned the flames by saying she could communicate with Dean ‘through the veil’. A devout spiritualist, this is a claim Maila maintained into her later years.
“Two days after Jimmy’s death, while I was alone in my living room, I gazed at the fragmentary countenance of Jimmy’s on the wall. And I talked to it. I asked it aloud, “Is it true, Jimmy, that you are in pain?” I hadn’t expected an answer. But I got one! The top part of the ear wiggled…and at the same time my radio came the song Dig Me A Hole and Bury Me Deep and I Will Lie In Peace”.
The public felt Maila was capitalising off her friend’s death. Hedda Hopper returned to the subject of Maila and Dean in her 1962 memoir, writing that Maila, ‘cashed in, after Jimmy died, on the publicity she got from knowing him’. Rumours also circulated that Dean was in fact alive, and had undergone plastic surgery to alter his appearance beyond recognition. In 1956, Maila attended a Halloween party hosted by astrologer, Carroll Rightner, and claimed to have dressed as the yet-to-be-named daughter of Charles Addams’ New Yorker cartoons, though the costume tells a different story. Spectators justifiably interpreted this as an admission that her participation in witchcraft was responsible for Dean’s death. This was compounded by the fact that Maila’s boyfriend, Chuck Beadles, also attended the party dressed as a post car wreck Dean, tapping into the rumours that Dean wasn’t dead at all. According to Niemi’s biography, Maila was later named in Hollywood’s Worst Taste List of 1956.
Right: Maila named ‘worst taste’ in the segment ‘Hollywood’s Highs and Lows of 1956’, The Berkshire Eagle, 27 December 1956.
Maila’s career never fully recovered. KHJ briefly revived The Vampira Show in 1956, but censorship and bad writing meant it was no longer the hit it had been with KABC-TV, and the show was cancelled on 3 August 1956 after filming only 12 of the 13 scheduled shows. R.H. Greene, the director of Vampira and Me (2012), recorded hours of conversation with Maila after interviewing her for Schlock! The Secret History of American Movies in 2001. When asked about the fallout of her short-lived success, Maila reflected, “I had very low self esteem […] when I got blacklisted I took it very personally. I thought, ‘People find me objectionable’. So I hid my head. I hid myself altogether. I went into reclusion”. Despite occasional bit parts and a subcultural reappraisal in the 1980s, Maila is best remembered for starring as a mute variation of Vampira in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), infamously branded ‘the worst movie ever made’. If someone unfamiliar with her trawled internet archives for her history, they would be forgiven for mistaking Maila for little more than a footnote in the legend of James Dean. In fact, Maila Nurmi was a countercultural icon whose impact on popular culture is still felt today. Tragically, she died in relative poverty in 2008. She was buried with her beloved pets in Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Many have called Maila her own worst enemy, and to some extent, that was probably true. Childhood and sustained trauma made her ill-equipped to handle the cutthroat nature of showbusiness, and she was terminally incapable of compromise. But she was also an original with unwavering integrity who refused to bow to the boys at the top. And for that, I applaud her.
I would encourage anyone who wants to know more about Maila’s history to purchase Sandra Niemi’s book directly.*
*Please note that Maila’s family are not affiliated with ‘Official Vampira’ and do not share the company’s profit.
Sources:
History Lessons for Misanthropes, Episode 94: Maila Nurmi aka: Vampira, 6 Dec 2022.
Internet Archive.
Little Steven’s Underground Garage – Coolest Conversation special: ‘Vampira’ Maila Nurmi, 13 May 2021.
Newspapers.com.
Niemi, Sandra Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2021)
Off-Ramp with John Rabe: Happy 100th Maila Nurmi, 13 Dec 2022.
The C-Word, Maila Nurmi AKA Vampira, 29 Sept 2022.
An Exercise in Bad Taste 
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