Dana Gould

Thursday, April 10, 2008

What's With All This Vampira Stuff?

Those of you who frequent my website or MySpace page have probably noticed in recent months a growing number of ads and such relating to someone named Vampira. If you don’t know who she is, or was, I’d like to use this space to tell you. Vampira was a character created and played by an actress named Maila Nurmi. She was an overnight sensation in the 1950’s, fell from grace rather quickly, acted for one or two days in a movie called "Plan 9 From Outer Space", spent a couple decades in obscurity and then, in the 1980’s, when "Plan 9 From Outer Space" experienced its "so-bad-it’s-good" resurrection, was thrust back into, well, if not the spotlight, the blue-grey glow of a thousand TV screens.

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She was a caring, funny person and, as it so happened, a good friend of mine. Maila passed away earlier this year, peacefully and of natural causes. Following is a more detailed article I wrote about her for a magazine called Rue Morgue. If you’re interested, I hope you enjoy it.

And I thank you...

Actors who become identified with iconic characters often refer to it as a blessing and a curse. This is especially true of actors in the genre. Bela Lugosi spent his whole life trying in vain to escape Dracula’s typecasting clutches. In the end, he was even buried wearing the Count’s cape. Leonard Nimoy’s love/hate relationship with Mr. Spock has been well documented, often by Nimoy himself. He is the author of both "I Am Not Spock" and its later refutation "I Am Spock". With J.J. Abrams’ new Star Trek movie on the way, perhaps we’ll soon be treated to "Wait, Now He’s Spock" or maybe "Can I Be Spock Again?" But never have the roles of actor and character been so intricately intertwined as in the strange case of Maila Nurmi and her alter ego, TV’s original "Glamour Ghoul" Vampira.

The story of Vampira’s origins has been told many times. In 1953, young Maila Nurmi attends Lester Horton’s Bal Caribe, a popular Los Angeles costume ball, dressed as the morose housewife from Charles Addams’ comic strip in The New Yorker (twelve years later, the strip makes it to television as The Addams Family, but by then the character has undergone a peculiar transformation and now, named Morticia, bears a striking resemblance to… Well, we’re getting ahead of ourselves).

Maila takes first prize at the ball and comes to the attention of a TV producer named Hunt Stromberg, Jr., who asks her to recreate her Charles Addams get-up on local station KABC, hosting late-night, grade-Z horror flicks. Maila, despite being broke and looking to jump-start her career, turns him down. Not wanting to rip-off Charles Addams, she steals off into the night and creates her own character, "Vampira".

Maila once published a "Recipe For Vampira", revealing the character to be a cocktail of screen sirens Theda Bara, Norma Desmond, Tallulah Bankhead, Marylin Monroe and Marlene Dietrich and the afore-mentioned Morticia, all gussied up in clingy, black fetish wear. It’s an accurate description, missing one obvious ingredient, a big dollop of an ambitious young pin-up model and aspiring actress named Maila Nurmi. For, though Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney played their characters, Maila created hers, and she did it at a time in America when such blatant weirdness wasn’t appreciated, most certainly not from a woman.

It’s important to remember how repressed American culture was in the early 1950’s. Traumatized by World War II, the population settled into a quiet, dull, conformist expansion. This was the smiling and sanitized, all-white world of Happy Days and Howdy Doody, certainly no place for a strong-willed, acid-tongued, hepcat hottie who tooled around town in old hearse sneering, "I sign epitaphs, not autographs." She might as well have added, "Dig me, Daddy-O?" for, though known as a horror icon now, Vampira, like Maila Nurmi herself, was just a beatnik chick at heart.

The beatniks. Inspired by the cool-cat, hipster lifestyle depicted in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road, the beatniks were the finger-popping, poetry-spouting, goateed voices of dissent in post-war America. They were the poets, writers, artists, jazzbos and other be-boppin’ ne’er-do-wells that came boiling out of New York’s Greenwich Village in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. Vampira was so identified with beat culture that the early ads for her show read like a primer on hipster slang; "Dig this real nervous devil doll every Saturday at the stroke of twelve, Midnight, as she screens some long gone films as KABC-TV’s Lady Of Horrors…" Like, wow, man. Like, crazy wow!

The headquarters of beat culture in L.A. (or "The Coast" as they called it) was a swinging, all-night coffee shop on the Sunset Strip called Googie’s. There, piled into booths, peering through the cigarette smoke, the black clad and the bongo-toting came to get their kicks. One group of regulars so dominated the scene they had their own name, the Night Watch. The charter members included doomed matinee idol James Dean, actor Jack Simmons, and Maila Nurmi.

Maila was an incredibly funny lady, and beatnik humor, known as "sick jokes" at the time, was a huge part of The Vampira Show. "People ask me why I don’t have electricity in my pad," she would deadpan to camera. "Silly. Everyone knows electricity is for chairs." This brand of dark humor was all the rage at the time, and it became personified on stage in the form of one Brother Theodore, a particular favorite of Nurmi’s.

Born Theodore Gottlieb, a German Jew who literally bought his way out of Dachau, Brother Theodore was a comedian and monologist who gained fame performing famously dark, Grand Guignol, horror-comedy monologues in long-running midnight shows at various New York theaters. His best stuff paints him as something of a spiritual sibling to Vampira. "I gazed into the abyss, the abyss gazed into me, and neither one of us liked what we saw."

Later in life, Maila would entertain friends by waiting until they were not home, then calling to leave a Brother Theodore nugget on their answering machine. No hello, no goodbye, just some dark little joke and… click. It’s ironic, therefore, that this bright, colorful person is known mostly for her "role" in Plan 9 From Outer Space, a movie in which she does pretty much next to nothing. And yet, even when staggering mutely through a cardboard graveyard, she somehow stood out.

I first discovered Plan 9 when it resurfaced as a so-bad-its-good classic in the mid-1980’s. I was an aspiring comedian and thought it was the funniest movie I had ever seen. I was also a monster kid, and appreciated, let’s just say, the Bela Lugosi of it all.

Ten years later I was living in Los Angeles, working as a comedian, and looking for a way to satisfy my monster jones. Produced in 1995, The Big Scary Movie show was my version on The Vampira Show, only instead of a wise-cracking, Goth’d-up fetish model, the show would be hosted by a dumpy, white guy in an old suit. Just as good, right?

Wanting to kick off the festivities in style, my first guest was the original Lady Of Horrors, Vampira herself, Maila Nurmi.

I had been warned that Maila was very private, reclusive and wary of strangers. Years ago, immediately after the death of James Dean, a gossip magazine ran an article that insinuated that Maila had put a curse on Dean, and that was the cause of his car accident. What occurred in reality was a sad coincidence that was misinterpreted and exploited, with near tragic results.

During a Vampira photo shoot, Maila posed in front of an open grave at The Hollywood Forever Cemetery. She took the photo and scribbled, "Darling, come and join me!" across it and sent it to Dean as a joke. When the police investigating the death entered his apartment, they found the postcard, which was then passed on to gossip reporters, who, being gossip reporters, made up a story.

The "James Dean’s Black Madonna" headline that ran across the cover of Whisper magazine insinuated that Dean’s death was caused by a curse, and that Maila was the witch in question. Despite being ridiculous on its face, some lunatic James Dean fans, who were many, apparently, took it very seriously and began peppering Maila with death threats. This trauma, piggy-backed upon the death of her close friend, shook her deeply, and affected her approach to new people for the rest of her life.

Although I had no idea what to expect, I found Maila quite charming and funny. I wanted to thank her for helping me launch the show but, despite its being 1995, she didn’t have a phone ("Ugh! Awful things."), so I wrote her a thank you letter. She wrote me back and we became pen pals of a sort. This evolved into a genuine friendship and, though my time was limited, with a wife and family, I greatly enjoyed our back-and-forthing.

Like water dripping over a rock, eroding, ever slowly, I finally convinced Maila to get a telephone. And, just as slowly, she began to let her guard down. Over time, I began to realize how hard she worked keeping up with who she thought she was supposed to be. The caustic wag, so willing to dish, was a smokescreen. It was the show the public expected and she was honor-bound to oblige. In reality, she liked her life quiet and uneventful. She stayed up on the events of the world, had a friend or two from the old days, paint, write letters, "a not-so-starving, starving artist’s life".

For those who have only seen Vampira in Plan 9 From Outer Space, and who would like to get a view of the real deal, a small clip of the original The Vampira Show still exists and can probably be found floating around YouTube. One can also track down a film called The Beat Generation, a 1950’s cops-and-robbers potboiler where Maila plays a snide beat chick, cigarette in one hand, pet rat in the other, slyly reading a nasty little poem called "Dear Parents" in a smoke-filled coffeehouse. She is basically playing herself, dressed in sneakers, jeans and a sweater, her blonde hair a short-cropped, casual mess, but she is billed as Vampira.

And therein lies the rub. It’s difficult to find where Maila Nurmi ends and Vampira begins, which possibly explains why Maila felt so wronged when Cassandra Peterson assumed the character of Elvira in the 1980’s. It’s well established that Maila was approached to help re-launch The Vampira Show, with a new Vampira, and that somewhere along the way there was a falling out. Maila claimed to have been fired off the project, based on her refusal to surrender the rights to the character, wanting instead to maintain ownership of the copyright. It’s a common practice and an indisputably wise business decision, but it cuts much deeper. Vampira was a lot more than just a character Maila created. Vampira was very much a part of Maila herself, and she couldn’t have given her away if she wanted to.

There were differences of course. Where Vampira was cold and aloof, Maila was deeply compassionate. Vampira surrounded herself with Victorian splendor. Maila, Bohemian to the end, slept on the couch, having turned her bedroom into a painting studio. Vampira had a pet spider, Rollo, who drove her to distraction. Maila lovingly took in strays of any and all variety, claiming even to have a pigeon that made regular visits.

Maila Nurmi and Vampira. Separate entities, hopelessly entwined. And so they lived, until the night of January 10th, 2008, when they joined hands for one last time and disappeared into the mist forever. There is one crucial difference. Vampira will live on. Maila Nurmi will be missed.

Monday, March 3, 2008

Ranch House Of The Apes

Several years ago, in anticipation of a family we did not yet have but were planning on brewing up, my wife and I went looking for a house. Not that our old house wasn’t big enough. It was. We lived in a swanky Spanish hacienda just above Los Angeles’ World Famous Sunset Strip. The house was built directly into the hillside, to which it clung desperately. In fact, all the homes in our neighborhood looked as if they’d been tossed against the Hollywood Hills as part of a large-scale carnival centerfuge ride.

As a result, all the rooms in our house were stacked upon one another, and our then-penciled-in baby’s room would have been two flights down, and she (it turned out) would have had to wail into an intercom at feeding time, and then, I assumed, we would yank her up to us via an elaborate system of pulleys.

Also, more importantly, the World Famous Sunset Strip is a billboard-walled sluice-gate of cultural diarrhea, and no child should have to grow up in its shadow.

To the Valley (!), where we found ourselves clomping through what the pamphlet described as, “a roomy two-story ranch house in a quiet woodsy setting”. To our astonishment, it turned out to be a roomy two-story ranch house in a quiet, woodsy setting. It was perfect. It was also at the upper ceiling of our price range. In fact, it climbed up to the rafters, burst through the ceiling, and was up on the roof scaling the chimney of our price range. We were about to excuse ourselves, fake smiles affixed, when the realtor tossed ten seemingly-innocent words our way. “The house used to belong to that actor, Roddy McDowall.”

Our heads swiveled around like two barn owls gliding past a field mouse get-to-know-you grooming party.

“You know him,” the realtor continued, “he was a child actor in the forties and then went on to be in those ape movies.”

“Yes. Those ape movies,” I huffed. “Those silly, little inconsequential apes movies! Excuse me.”

My wife followed me outside.

“It’s a good thing it’s perfect, ‘cause I guess we’re buying it,” she said.

“We can’t. No one will believe this was a coincidence! People will think I’m really nuts.” An arched eyebrow from my beloved assured me I had cashed the “not-a-nut” chit a long time ago. You see, my friends do think I’m a bit of a nut. A Planet Of The Apes nut, specifically.

The original Planet Of The Apes premiered on network television in the fall of 1973, when I was nine-years-old. I saw a commercial for it one night, and immediately became unhinged. I recall it vividly. We were watching television when suddenly The Bob Newhart Show was gone and across the screen galloped a gorilla. A horseback-ridin’, rifle-totin’, leather jerkin-wearin’ gorilla was chasing Charlton Heston, loincloth a-flappin’, across a cornfield.

“I’m watching it!” I bellowed. I was the fifth boy in a family of six, and if you wanted to watch a TV show, in those pre-Tivo times, you had to “call it”. As the runt of the litter, my demands were frequently over-ruled, but since I had made this proclamation with un-runt-like intensity, standing atop the coffee table with tiny fists clenched, no one challenged me.

That movie rang me like a bell. My room became a shrine. I subscribed to Marvel Comics’ Planet Of The Apes magazine. Those films were as important to me as baseball and blowing stuff up with M-80’s were to my brothers.

Years later, a psychiatrist explained to me that my position in our family was probably what prompted my preternatural affection for the Apes saga. “Growing up small, surrounded by large, intimidating siblings, you related to Charlton Heston’s rage at being powerless.”

That could be. Which is not to say there isn’t something undeniably appealing about watching gorillas dressed like Fonzie aiming shotguns at Moses dressed like Tarzan.

Over the years, my obsession with these movies became something of a running joke amongst with my friends, an inextricable aspect of my personality, a surefire deal-closer when trying to score with the ladies (one of these statements is false, can you find it?), but who would believe that I bought Roddy McDowall’s house by chance? To the casual observer, it would look like a grotesque attempt by an overzealous fan to obtain the ultimate collectible, a veritable orgasm of fiscal recklessness.

That said, I don’t feel as if I’ve come into ownership of the place as much become its steward. Roddy was a famous and frequent party-thrower, and anyone who was ever anyone has at one time gnawed Fiddle-Faddle on his pool deck. Our downstairs bathroom, once a comfort station for Hollywood’s A list, has been removed en toto from the house and reconstructed on the floor of the Hollywood History Museum, its walls, full of photos of the famous and very famous mucking casually about, a testament to this modest home’s glitzy guest list. Note the picture Betty Davis and Harrison Ford sitting on the window bench my daughter now sprawls across to watch Wonder Pets.

It’s rare day indeed when I bump into a show biz fancy-pants who hasn’t been to my house. Once at a party, I had the good fortune to meet one of the key make-up artist’s from the Apes film. “You live in Roddy’s place?” he marveled “I have something for you.”

Two days later a box arrived containing one of the chimpanzee extra’s masks from the movie. The background apes (you read that right) didn’t endure the grueling six-hour make-up process the principals did, and wore specially designed over-the-head rubber masks, one of which I know held in my trembling fanboy grip. With no one home, unable to restrain myself, I yanked it firmly down over my head.

Here’s a funny fact about polyurethane rubber. Over time, its chemical compound starts to decay, and it undergoes a process called “off-gassing”, where the toxic exhaust of its deterioration is released. In the case of, let’s say, a chimpanzee mask, this gas settles in the muzzle of its mouth. One could say that an over-the-head chimpanzee mask is, in fact, the perfect vessel for capturing these fumes. And when said fumes have brewing for two or three decades, they are exquisitely ripe.

I found this out when I tried to breath. “Ungoo!” I grunted, as thirty-odd years of monkey mustard gas knuckle-punched my nostrils. Stunned, I staggered back and tried to clear my head. Then I coughed, sending what poisonous vapors were not in my nose up into the safety of my eyeballs. Blind and hacking, my head encased in a simian gas chamber, I zig-zagged about the room. “I can’t die like this,” I thought, “it’s too hilarious.”

Finally, I got down on my knees wrenched the mask from my head. A chimpanzee face stared back at me from the floor, impassive, but mocking.

As well I deserved. I look my collection of Apes memorabilia, and wonder what it is I’m really trying to obtain. Don’t I just want to relive that original thrill? The past is a conundrum, yours eternally, gone forever. No reclaimed baseball card, vintage tea set or model train is going to transmute into a time machine and zoom you back there. Then again, these are big words from a Planet Of the Apes fan who lives in Roddy McDowall’s house, with a now-ventilated chimp mask on the mantle, swaddled in the cool leather embrace of Charlton Heston’s original loincloth.

Or hadn’t I mentioned that?

Friday, January 19, 2007

My name is Dana Gould

Hello, comedy nerds.

I apologize for my lame-ass blogging habits, but the days of my post-Simpsons career are unexpectadly jam-packed with primarily useless horseshit. It pretty much consists of me getting up at six-thirty with the Young Goulds, packing said Goulds of to school, and then setting down to actually get some work and/or writing done. That usually ends in failure at about seven at night, and then it's out to the garage with pine cones and glitter for my one true love: CRAFTS!!!

For those of you who took the time to respond to my previous posting, I thank you. I'll figure out how to more properly respond to you, and then things will really rise to a tepid simmer.

This website will be undergoing some bureaucratic changes soon, and I will have a contact e-mail and mailing list link up. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank David Saraniero, who approached me seven years ago after a gig in Minneapolis and offered to create a website for me ("A web-WHAT?", I asked). David went on to create the very dense and content-filled site you now behold. And again, this was seven years ago, when not everyone had one of these dealies. Dave Norman joined David a couple years ago, and he also consistently did an amazing, stellar job. More than all that, they are genuinely good-hearted, decent people.

Thanks, Daves.

While I'm citing the honor roll, the "The Talking Man" painting was done by Greg Brotherton. Greg is quite the mad scientist. Check out his stuff at www.brotron.com.
The overall design and execution was done by the estimable Vera Dufy at Wewa Web design. www.deuxfilles.net/wewaweb.htm

The new administrators of the site, Darrin, Bruce and the rest of the folks at Improv.com, have done an amazingly-fast job with setting up my MySpace page and helping me advertise... well, me. I'm really looking forward to working with these... well, goons.

Lastly, re. Late Night With Conan O'Brien, there was some last-minute schedule shifting at NBC, and the show ended up airing on Wednesday, January 17th. For those of you unfortunate enough to have missed it (HOW COULD YOU????, you can watch it at...

www.myspace.com/danagould

Enjoy.

- DG