Vampira - The first Goth?

Maila Nurmi - considered by her biographer niece to be the ‘architect of the Goth phenomenon’ - was born a century ago today. For a few years, in the 1950s, her character Vampira famously became television’s first horror host, but, by the 1960s, she had faded out of favour. Of late two books - both claiming to access to her private diaries - have refocused attention on her brief career in the spotlight, and he role in the early days of the Goth movement. 

Nurmi was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on 11 December 1922, into a family with Finnish roots (though as an adult she claimed for a while that she had been born in Finland). Her family relocated to Ashtabula, Ohio, before settling in Astoria, Oregon, a city with a large Finnish community. Her father worked as a lecturer and editor; her mother was a journalist and translator. On leaving Astoria High School in 1940, she moved first to Los Angeles then to New York to become an actress. She modelled for painters (not least Man Ray), and played roles on Broadway. Significantly, she appeared in the horror-themed midnight show Spook Scandals, in a role requiring her to scream, faint, and lie in a coffin. Wikipedia notes that in 1944 she was fired by Mae West from the cast of Catherine Was Great because West feared being upstaged.

In 1949, Nurmi married Dean Riesner, a screen writer and former child actor. She was to get married twice more to actors, John Brinkley in 1958, and Fabrizio Mioni in 1961. In the early 1950s, was supporting herself mainly by posing for pin-up photos in men’s magazines, and by working as a hat-check girl on Hollywood's Sunset Strip. However, one night she attended a masquerade - with her long raven black hair, pale white skin and a tight black dress (a costume inspired by The New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams) - and caught the eye of television producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr.. Subsequently, he hired her to host a series of horror stories - and it was Riesner who came up with the name Vampira. She was an immediate success, and even earned herself an Emmy Award nomination in 1954 for Most Outstanding Female Personality. According to IMDB, fan clubs sprouted up all over the world. She appeared in Life and Newsweek among other magazines, and was generally much in demand as the ‘Queen of Horror’. 

By the end of the decade, though Nurmi had fallen out of favour, and she was only appearing in low quality movies. She turned away from entertainment to earn a living in trade, selling linoleum, for a time, and jewellery. In the early 1980s, she became involved in a TV project to revise the Vampira character. She fell out with the producers who renamed their programme Elvira’s Movie Macabre. Nurmi sued but, eventually, lost the case. However, her spirit had been awakened, so to speak, and she made some brief appearances on stage, and she recorded two singles. In 2001, she opened a website selling autographed memorabilia. Otherwise, she lived modestly in Southern California, where she dabbled in painting and became passionately involved in animal protection rights. She died in 2008.

Further information is available from a biography written by her niece Sandra Nurmi - Glamour Ghoul: The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampira, Maila Nurmi (Feral House, 2021). Some pages can be previewed at Amazon. Here is the blurb: ‘Maila Nurmi, the beautiful and sheltered daughter of Finnish immigrants, stepped off the bus in 1941 Los Angeles intent on finding fame and fortune. She found men eager to take advantage of her innocence and beauty but was determined to find success and love. Her inspired design and portrayal of a vampire won a costume contest that lead to a small role on the Red Skelton show which grew into a persona that brought her the notoriety she desired yet trapped her in a character she could never truly escape. This is Malia’s story. Her diaries, notes, and ephemera and family stories bring new insights to her relationships with Orson Welles, James Dean, and Marlon Brando. Sandra - Malia’s niece - fills in the nuances of her life prior to fame and her struggles after the limelight faded and she found a new community within the burgeoning Los Angeles punk scene who embraced her as their own.’

This book is a work of love, for Sandra long idolised her aunt from afar. She considers her a ‘pioneer’, ‘the architect of the Goth phenomenon’. The two were estranged for more than 30 years before re-meeting in 1989. Then, another 20 years or so later, Sandra learned of her aunt’s death, and was the one to deal with the ‘final arrangements’. She saved all of Maila’s writings, scattered about the floors, and in drawers, bags - including a diary. And it is with these that she put together Glamour Ghoul. 

The diary entries, though, are few and far between. There is one Sandra Nurmi refers to, from when Maila was 14. She couldn’t tell her father about an incident, Sandra explains, and instead wrote about it  - ‘in one of her journals’. She wrote, Sandra continues, ‘how the pastor’s roving hands affected the rest of her life making her more vigilant and distrustful.’ Otherwise, there is only one quotation of Nurmi's actual writing that Sandra provides which has a date (others are more memoir-like quotations), as follows:   

16 February 1956
‘Date at Thrifty with T.P. - one hr & 10 min. only - he played it sensuous. He left to rehearse with Piper Laurie. Is Osgood Perkins little boy playing hard to get?’

However, hot on the heels of Sandra’s book has come The Vampira Diaries, written and/or compiled by Jonny Coffin. This is available from the official Vampira website at a cost $89 for a limited edition of one of the 1,000 hand-stamped books. The publisher says: ‘This is sure to be a highly collectable Vampira treasure. The Vampira Diaries are a collection of Maila Nurmi’s personal diaries starting from the year 1953 during her Hollywood rise to fame with the groundbreaking Vampira Show. Featuring unearthed, never-before-seen photos, original scripts, news clips from her personal scrapbook, excerpts written in her own hand, and scores of rare photos from the inception of Vampira 1954-1956.’

A gushing review can be read at Vamp Jenn’s Corner blog; but, unfortunately, I can find no actual diary extracts from the book online.