Maila Nurmi's Vampira Dead at 85: TV Host was Creator of the "Goth" Look

Maila Nurmi, the first "Goth" to register in the public consciousness with her gig as the television host "Vampira" in the mid-1950s, died of cardiac arrest during her sleep on January 10, 2008. As the ghoulish and sexy Vampira, Nurmi hosted a late night showcase of horror films on Los Angeles TV in 1954-55, winning her an Emmy Award nomination and a cult following that lasted over 50 years.

The woman who would become Vampira was born Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi on December 11, 1921, in Petsamo, Finland. The young Maila and her family moved to the United States two years later, settling in a Finnish-American community in Ohio. Claiming that world-class Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi ("The Flying Finn") was her uncle, Maila took his surname as her own when she moved to New York at the age of 17 with dreams of breaking into show business.

Like many a young beauty with stars in her eyes and a limited amount of cash in her purse, Nurmi was forced to become an exotic dancer after hitting the Big Apple. To make ends meet, she also was a model for photographers. Reportedly, it was the great theatrical impresario Mike Todd (Elizabeth Taylor's fourth husband) who cast the young Maila in the Broadway burly-cue revue Spook Scandals, where she first played a vampire. In his incarnation as a Broadway showman, Todd was famed for being a master of shows featuring "low comedy and tall broads," frequently presented en déshabillé (or nude, as in the case of Michael Todd's Peepshow).

Spook Scandals wasn't one of the maestro's great successes, the revue running all of two performances in December 1944. If Maila did indeed appear in the show, she would have had to have been 13 years old and lied to the producers or later lied about her birth age when she had her 15-minutes of fame in the 1950s.

Maila Nurmi claimed that the great director-producer Howard Hawks became intrigued with her in this period, and had her relocate to Hollywood. Hawks, as the story goes, promised her a role in one of his movies, but it came to naught. Now In Los Angeles, Nurmi again supported herself with exotic dancing. She also modeled and posed for pin-up artists and photographers, including illustrator Alberto Vargas.

Nurmi eventually made her movie debut in an uncredited bit role in 1947's If Winter Comes, starring Walter Pidgeon and Deborah Kerr.

The character of Vampira character was born in 1953 when she attended a masquerade ball as a Gothic wraith inspired by The New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams, modeling herself after the character that would become known as Morticia Addams. Local TV producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr. was intrigued, and eventually hired her to host horror movies on the TV station KABC, Channel 7, Los Angeles. At the time, Nurmi was married to screenwriter Dean Riesner, who came up with the name "Vampira."

She made her small-screen debut on Friday night, April 30, 1954, in The Vampira Show, which was produced by Stromberg.

Maila Nurmi had a striking 38-17-36 figure, and the Vampira character was clad in a tight décolletage dress cinched at the waist, an effect that showed off her cleavage. Nurmi introduced the horror flicks while wandering around a haunted house set, filled with fogs and cobwebs, accompanied by her pet tarantula. Her shtick was the bizarre, but she also trafficked in comic quips and the double entendre, a format that later would be used by Cassandra Peterson in her Elvira: Mistress of the Dark incarnation.

After winning a 1954 Emmy Award nomination as Most Outstanding Female Personality, the series was canceled by KABC in 1955. However, Nurmi owned the rights to the Vampira character and was hired by a rival station. However, the buzz was over.

Maila Nurmi never attained such prominence again, although her one-day role in Ed Wood, Jr. 's so-bad-it's-good Grade Z horror classic Plan 9 From Outerspace has given her immortality of sorts. In the 1956 film (which was released three year later), routinely cited as "The Worst Film Ever Made" since the late 1970s, Nurmi reprised her Vampira look. Unlike the TV Vampira, there were no quips or weird poetry. Though the part originally was intended as a speaking role, Vampira played her zombie character as a mute, supposedly because the dialog was so awful, Nurmi refused to say it. She took the part as she was unemployed at the time and Wood paid her $200.

Reportedly, Nurmi was a social acquaintance of both Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, and may have been romanced by Orson Welles. Nurmi claimed to have had a close relationship with James Dean at the time of her Vampira success, but some of Dean's biographers claim that the interest mostly went one way, from Nurmi to Dean. According to David Dalton's seminal biography James Dean: The Mutant King, Nurmi sent Dean a picture of herself posed on an actual gravestone.

Nurmi's life was relatively uneventful after the mid-1950s. She appeared in several exploitation movies, and opened an antique shop called "Vampira's Attic" in her Melrose Avenue home in the 1970s. Nurmi later claimed that KHJ-TV approached her about reviving the Vampira character in a new movie showcase to be hosted by a scintillating young Goth sexpot. Nurmi said that she was offered an executive producer credit, but that the TV-station later double-crossed her and changed the name of the Vampira character to Elvira, who was played by Cassandra Peterson.

Maila Nurmi eventually sued Peterson for infringing her intellectual property rights, but the case was dropped as Nurmi didn't was unable to afford the cost of litigation.

She became a cult figure after the Ed Wood boom in the 1980s, which culminated in Goth director Tim Burton lensing the 1994 biopic Ed Wood, which featured Lisa Marie playing Maila Nurmi on-screen. Her official website http://www.vampirasattic.com, through which she sold her art, autographs and memorabilia, went on-line in 2001.

Nurmi lives on, according to her friend Dana Gould, as she was the inspiration for the Goth look. "She really sort of cast the mold for a look that is still around." Gould told the Los Angeles Times.

Sources:

Cult Sirens: "Vampira (Maila Nurmi) "

HotWeird.com "Vampira (Maila Nurmi)," by Ray Greene (reprinted from BOXOFFICE magazine)