On
Nov. 28, 1956, a down-at-the-heels actress dressed in a revealing
homemade vampire costume walked out of her tiny apartment at 5906
Carlton Way in Hollywood, California. Unable to spring for cab fare, and
working for a producer/director as cash-strapped as she was, she
climbed aboard a Los Angeles city bus and rode just over a mile to the
ironically-named Quality Studios, a postage-stamp-sized Hollywood
soundstage, where she was about to put in the second of two days’ work
on what would come to be seen as the worst movie ever made, director
Edward D. Wood Jr.’s “Plan 9 From Outer Space.”
It was a sad
ending to an amazing ride. Two and a half years earlier, Maila Nurmi had
set Hollywood on its ear when she took to the L.A. airwaves as Vampira,
the impossibly sexy KABC-TV horror hostess who ignited a local and then
a national pop culture explosion. An instinctive rebel who hobnobbed
with James Dean, Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley at various points in
her improbable rise and fall, Nurmi had used the Vampira character —
which she designed herself, and which her former common-law husband
named — to both titillate the masses and to parody the cult of female
passivity that prevailed in the America of 1954.
Vampira was the
ideal suburban hostess, welcoming viewers into her dank, cobwebbed
attic/living room, where the house pet was a tarantula named Rollo and
the martinis were “vampire cocktails” garnished not with an olive but an
eyeball. In the time of Marilyn Monroe and the absolute supremacy of
the hourglass physique, Nurmi starved, steamed and self-mutilated her
way to a 17-inch waist, then built up her bustline with handmade
enhancements designed to mimic the look and feel of real breasts.
Nurmi’s
TV career was over by 1956, but she is well remembered for the eerie
sensuality of her entranced “Plan 9″ performance. In just two days of
filming, on a movie she never took seriously, Nurmi secured her place in
pop culture history, and created several of the most iconic American
screen images of the 1950s.
It was the second time she did so in less than a week.
Nurmi’s
involvement with “Plan 9″ has been dramatized by director Tim Burton in
the comedy “Ed Wood,” and was recounted by Nurmi herself for various
documentaries including my own 2012 film
“Vampira and Me.”
But virtually unknown is the private performance Nurmi gave on the
Disney back lot just five days before shooting her “Plan 9″ scenes,
wearing the horned headdress and flowing robes of Maleficent, the evil
witch in the Disney conception of the classic fairy tale “Sleeping
Beauty.”
advertisement
Vampira
fans have long noted the unmistakable similarities between Nurmi’s bone
structure and character make-up and Disney’s most popular villainess.
The Disney animators would have been quite familiar with the imperious
and sexual Vampira character, which became a local smash in Greater Los
Angeles from the moment it took to the air. The Disney organization is
also known to have redesigned Maleficent several times; initial versions
of the character were round-faced and featured a pair of antennae and
green skin worthy of a ’50s cartoon Martian.
Unconfirmed rumors of
Nurmi’s involvement have circulated for many years, but scant evidence
of a Vampira/Maleficent connection emerged during Maila Nurmi’s
lifetime. The issue was further confused by “Sleeping Beauty’s”
eight-year production cycle (though begun in 1951, three years before
Vampira first appeared on television, the film was not released until
1959). And the Disney organization’s corporate euphemisms about the fact
that major elements of their “golden era” animated output were
rotoscoped (i.e., painted over live-action footage to insure realistic
motion) made Maila Nurmi’s participation as Maleficent’s character model
part of a process that was secretive by design.
The handful of
stills that have trickled out over the years depicting what Disney calls
a “live action modelling” shoot for “Sleeping Beauty” show round-faced
voice actress Eleanor Audley wearing Maleficent’s horned crown.
But
after Maila Nurmi’s death, her extensive datebooks and personal diaries
(initially written at the behest of close friend and therapy addict
Marlon Brando, who felt diary writing would keep Nurmi grounded) became
the property of her niece Sandra Niemi. The year 1956 was especially
well-documented by Nurmi. Here are some of her datebook entries for the
last three weeks of November:
November 8, 1956: Droopert campaign……..Doodles Weaver & Ed Lytell at my house tapes etc.
Nov. 9: Get into costume pick me up at 11:30 Membership Luncheon…Speak Press Party
Nov. 12: Rise & Shine WALT DISNEY Jack Latham or Lavin
Nov. 13: Costume Rally etc. pics downtown
Nov. 16 DISNEY WARDROBE (for “Sleeping Beauty” “Maleficent”)
Nov. 17: Droopert Day (In costume)
Nov. 23: 8:00 a.m. Into costume for X & J Day 1:00 p.m. WALT DISNEY WARDROBE
Nov. 27: 7:30 Rise & Shine ”I woke up for Outer Space Plan 9″
The
entries specifically namecheck the Maleficent character, and indicate
that Nurmi went to the studio for a Maleficent wardrobe fitting and then
posed for Disney’s animators on two consecutive Fridays, dressed for
the part.
It’s important to note that these are private jottings,
never intended for publication. Their informational authenticity is
corroborated not only by what we know of the timing of Ed Wood’s “Plan
9″ shoot but also by a contemporary photo of the Vampira/Droopert safety
campaign, taken for the Los Angeles Examiner by photographer Bill Brunk
and residing in the USC Digital Archive. Nurmi’s datebook recounts a
Droopert rehearsal on Nov. 8, then she “gets into costume” on Nov. 9,
the date Brunk’s photo was taken.
So secretive were
Nurmi/Vampira’s “live action reference” modeling sessions for Maleficent
that the Disney organization lost all institutional memory of them.
Contacted for this article and provided with Nurmi’s datebook entry for
her first meeting at Disney, Rebecca Cline, the current and very
enthusiastic director of the Walt Disney Archives, grew palpably excited
by the mention of “Jack Lavin” in Nurmi’s datebook. Lavin, as it turns
out, was “Sleeping Beauty’s” casting director.
A thorough search
of Lavin’s records turned up no mention of Maila Nurmi or Vampira. But
fortunately for animation and pop culture history, Maleficent is a hot
topic at Disney just now, and many old documents have been pulled. A
wider exploration of Disney’s “Sleeping Beauty” production files
discovered paperwork confirming Maila Nurmi’s participation as a “live
action reference” model for Maleficent, definitively establishing
Nurmi’s pivotal contribution to the character.
A wealth
of Maleficent-related material is currently being exhumed and examined
by Disney’s in-house historians, so hopefully additional discoveries and
revelations are on the way.
According to Nurmi’s niece Sandra
Niemi, who is currently at work on “Glamour Ghoul,” a book about Maila
Nurmi’s life, it was common knowledge in the Niemi household that Maila
Nurmi was being used as a “live reference” for the “Sleeping Beauty”
villainess. In an email interview, Niemi remembered how “Aunt Maila,”
ever the iconoclast, “didn’t like the head piece the animator
designed. She didn’t like the horn thing, she wanted it to be more like
bigger-than-life cat ears.”
“I was told Maila found work on a
movie for Walt Disney,” Niemi explained. “Then a letter came with a full
sized sheet of drawings in pencil that Maila had made with what I know
now to be Maleficent’s head, only Maila drew huge cat ears.”
“There
were probably eight different versions of [Maleficent's] head, which
looked like Vampira but with big horns, small horns, cat ears, big cat
ears. I had that artwork until 1965, the year I graduated high school…
damn, I wish I still had it now! I remember when ‘Sleeping Beauty’ came
out that I was excited because I was going to get to see an Aunt Maila
cartoon. I must have been 12 or 13 by then.”
It’s characteristic
of the weird tapestry of Nurmi’s career that she could contribute to two
iconic screen images in the same week for minimal compensation and
absolutely no glory. Her “lost period,” during which she would become a
reclusive and forgotten figure, commenced virtually simultaneously with
her Disney employment and Wood’s film shoot. She would linger on in
obscurity until the Ed Wood revival of the late 1970s and early ’80s
made Vampira into a pivotal cult icon of feminine strength, which she
remains to this day.
Exactly one month after Nurmi’s second Disney
session and just two days before Christmas 1956, Nurmi was nearly
burned to death in an apartment fire, caused by her desire to brighten
an impoverished Christmas by frying up some doughnuts for her boyfriend.
Nurmi made local headlines for this misfortune, and a humiliating photo
of a manic and bandaged Nurmi cradling a cat after her narrow escape
survives.
But Nurmi’s virtually simultaneous and quite significant
contribution to animation history went unremarked upon, and has been
just an unproven rumor — until now.
The primal force of the
Vampira character was something Nurmi well understood; it brought her
both the greatest joy she was to know and also some of the most intense
suffering. Even uncredited, unacknowledged and buried under an avalanche
of animator’s ink, the pop icon Nurmi made of herself has still had the
power to endure for more than half a century, and to draw the most
popular actress in the world, a recovered goth named Angelina Jolie, to
Vampira’s bosom, in a dark and sisterly embrace as old as Homer’s Circe,
and destined to outlast us all.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered