THEDA BARA

1895-1955

It all ended as suddenly as it began. In 1915 a film was released—“A Fool There Was”—and the first overnight, instant celebrity of filmdom was born. Theda Bara, “born in the shadows of the pyramids,” the only daughter of a French actress who saved the life of an Italian artist lost in a swirling delirium of Egyptian sands. Her name was “an anagram for ‘Arab Death,’” she was “the wickedest woman in the world,” “Satan’s Handmaiden,” “The Devil’s Daughter.” With her waterfall of wavy waist-length black hair, blood-red lips, intense, penetrating kohl-rimmed eyes, corpse-pale skin, curvy, buxom figure, and scandalous, skin-revealing gowns, she brought a new kind of femme-fatale to the silver screen—“The Vamp,” a sexual vampire who sapped and drained men’s vital energies to the dregs and left them more dead than alive, leaving a trail of death and destruction in her wake, broken men and lost and shattered souls, remorseless and pitiless, laughing scornfully, this “devourer of men’s souls” went on to her next victim. Then suddenly, a scant few years later in 1919, she disappeared.  But who was Theda Bara really? Join me as I try to pierce the veils of illusion and the haze of opium-scented incense that surround this woman of mystery.

The truth is about as far from the legend as it is possible to get. Theodosia Goodman, a nice Jewish girl born in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 29, 1885, used to quip that the closest she ever got to Egypt was an Egyptian cigarette. Her exotic background was completely fabricated by publicity men on the payroll of Fox Studios. She was actually the daughter of a Swiss wigmaker and a Polish tailor who gave their three children (Theodosia, Lori, and their brother Marque) a comfortable upbringing in a warm and loving home situated in a neighborhood predominantly inhabited by successful Jewish merchants. Theodosia, named after Aaron Burr’s ill-fated daughter who was lost at sea, sparking numerous tales of abduction and a fate worse than death at the hands of villainous pirates, was called Theda for short. Though she caught theatrical fever early and longed to be an actress from childhood, Theda was a homebody, a non-athletic, old-fashioned, stay-at-home girl at heart. She loved her family, pet dogs, and good food. Throughout her life, books were Theda’s best friends. It was said of Theda that she was never truly happy unless she had her nose buried in one book and a stack of others nearby waiting to be read.  She had a somewhat shy, retiring nature that made it difficult for her to forge friendships, though those who made the effort to befriend her found her to be a warm and caring friend, as well as an intelligent and amusing woman. As for that riveting, intense, penetrating stare that peered out from Theda’s dark-rimmed lids, that was the result of myopia; Theda was extremely near-sighted, blind as a bat, helpless without the hand-held lorgnettes she always carried with her as they were easier than spectacles to whisk out of sight when photographers came snooping around the film set. When she became a star, she had to study and map out the sets beforehand, otherwise she would bang into and fall over the furniture like a comedienne in a Keystone comedy.

In 1903, Theda graduated from Walnut Hills High School and went on to attend the University of Cincinnati. After two years of college, she dropped out and moved to New York to pursue her dream of footlights, fame, and glamour.

The mists of time obscure much of Theda’s New York stage career and it is impossible now to separate myth from reality. But, as far as can be discovered, she never got beyond bit parts in road companies despite the stories the Hollywood star later fed the newspapers and fan magazines about playing Shakespearean heroines on the legitimate stage, both in New York and abroad.

In 1914 Theda was pushing thirty, and svelte, willow-slender stage stars, dancers, and ladies of fashion were pushing the curvy, buxom, ample figure that reigned supreme in Victorian and Edwardian days off the fashion scene, doubly giving full-figured Theda cause to despair when director Frank Powell accosted her with a line that even in those adolescent days of the film industry was already hackneyed and well-worn: “Would you like to be in the movies?”

Though in later years she heatedly denied it, claiming: “I started out a star and remained a star!” Theda was given a bit part in a film called “The Stain” to see how she photographed and responded to direction. Theda passed the test with flying colours. Whatever was lacking that kept her from succeeding on the stage was there in abundance when the movie cameras were rolling.

Fox Studios had bought the film rights to that success-de-scandale “A Fool There Was,” a sensational melodrama inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” from which it derived its title, about a family man seduced and ruined by a wicked woman. As with the stage play, the success of the film depended on the actress chosen to portray “The Vampire,” her performance would make or break the picture. It was a tremendous burden for a beginner to bear. But Theda triumphed and, to use another old Hollywood catch-phrase, “a star was born,” and the publicity machine went into full swing, fabricating and weaving like a black widow spider a dark, exotic, and intriguing past for Theda Bara, “the wickedest woman on the screen.” Because Theda’s own apartment with its comfortable furniture and shelves of beloved books did not suit their star’s sultry, sinister image, a hotel room would be rented especially for each press conference and decked out with occult symbolism and paraphernalia, statues of Egyptian deities, tiger skins, dim-lighting, and heavy incense, and Theda, alluringly gowned would be plunked down in the midst of it all, reclining languidly on a chaise-longue, to recite, like an early twentieth century Scheherazade, the fables the publicity men penned for her, of lovers who took poison and died at her feet, little children who fled from her in terror when she offered them treats, her past lives as some of the wickedest women in history, including the Biblical temptress Delilah, Lucrezia Borgia, Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who murdered hundreds of servant girls to bathe in their blood in the belief that it kept her young and beautiful, and, of course, that serpent of the Nile, Cleopatra whom Theda would later portray, and expounded at length on the female vampire or “Vamp” persona. “I have never loved,” she once declared, “and if I ever fall under the spell of a man, I know that my power over men will be gone!” a statement that would later prove prophetic. Afterwards, Theda would go home to her warm and cheery apartment, her books, pets, and her loving family who followed her first to New York and then to Hollywood. If she ever had a love affair, she was so discreet that all traces of it are lost to history. The public lapped it all up—or should I say laughed it all up?—few were gullible enough to take such stories seriously, but it was all good fun, and that was what the movies were all about—escapism and make-believe.

Theda Bara sky-rocketed to the top, becoming the movies’ first sex symbol and the third most popular star, right behind Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. And just like Pickford, “The Little Girl with the Golden Curls,” and Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character, Theda became trapped by her screen persona. The demon of typecasting caught Theda in the vise of “The Vamp,” never to let go. A string of films with such lurid titles as “Sin,” “Destruction,” “The Devil’s Daughter,” “The She-Devil,” ”and “When A Woman Sins,” soon followed, to the delight of movie-goers and the horror of censors, the Church, and women’s committees, but Theda’s picture on a poster outside the movie theatre was a guarantee of filling every seat. Then there were the lavish, big-budget, historical extravaganzas, beginning with “Cleopatra,” today the most famous and sought-after of all the silent films lost to history due to neglect and decaying and highly flammable nitrate film-stock, followed by “Madame DuBarry,” and “Salome.” In between there were occasional attempts to break the mold, when, to keep Theda happy, Fox Studios relented and let her shed her evil vamp trappings and play a good girl or a wholesome heroine, but these invariably bombed at the box office despite some good reviews that stand as testament to Theda’s versatility and talent.

Today it is virtually impossible to accurately assess Theda’s  talent. Of the 42 films she made, only four survive, all of them, with the exception of “A Fool There Was,” mediocre, and the cheap, low quality quickie vamp programmers made in between her lavish productions that traded on Theda’s star power to sell tickets and keep the profits pouring in. Sadly all the historical extravaganzas—“Cleopatra,” “Madame DuBarry,” “Salome,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Carmen,” and “Camille,”—are lost, presumably forever. Critical reviews of the era are little help; while many praised her to the skies, others deplored her as an overstuffed ham. Theda was apparently an actress audiences either loved or loathed.

During World War I, Theda was very active in aiding the war effort; she visited military bases, sponsored a regiment, donated costumes and mementos to auctions to raise money, and was one of the best at selling liberty bonds, once selling over $300,000 worth in a single afternoon. On camera she even did her bit for the war effort, playing a Mata Hari inspired character in “The Eyes of Buddha.”

To keep the public happy, Theda was thrust into more and more vamp roles, cheaply produced films with dreadful storylines that relied on her star-power to fill theatre seats. In “When A Woman Sins” she played a wicked woman with designs on a divinity student, redeemed by his love at the end. And in the ludicrously awful “A Woman There Was,” in an unflattering short curly wig, dark makeup, and grass skirts that unbecomingly exaggerated her ample hips, she was Princess Zara of the South Seas, a native woman who seduces a missionary then, in a morally edifying finale, 1takes a javelin in her midsection so he can return to civilization and the refined and proper white fiancée waiting for him with open arms. Theda’s star was falling and the actress was finding it hard to care enough to strive to deliver a good performance with such god-awful scripts being handed to her.

In 1919 Theda finally put her foot down and refused to play another vamp role until she was allowed to play a good and virtuous girl on screen. She decided to burn all her bridges behind her and stake everything on her portrayal of the beloved Irish heroine “Kathleen Mavourneen,” in a sentimental melodrama about a poor but pure Irish girl menaced, abducted, and forced to marry the evil Squire of Tralee, though her heart belongs to the boy next door. In simple cotton frocks and Mary Pickford style curls, Theda frolicked with farm animals and skipped through fields of daisies. It was an unmitigated disaster. The Friends of Irish Freedom and The Central Council of Irish Associations protested against a Jewess playing an Irish national heroine, and also to the portrayal of poverty in Ireland. Stink bombs were hurled into theatres where the film was playing, movie projectors were smashed, and in some cases the police riot squads had to be called out. Nervous theatre owners, hearing of these riots in other cities, rejected the film and returned it to the distributors without a single showing.

For Theda the only bright spot in the whole ordeal was that she met her future husband, Charles Brabin, when he was assigned to direct the film. A man whose past, like Theda’s own vamp persona, was an invention, Charles Brabin was an old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip Englishman who pretended to upper-class origins, when he was in fact the son of a Liverpool butcher struggling to keep a toe-hold in the middle class. He started out as a traveling salesman who worked his way up from actor to stage manager to film director, impressing gullible Americans with his accent and high-class British pretensions along the way.

“Kathleen Mavourneen” was the death knell for Theda’s career, and after two more films to fulfill her Fox contract, Theda left the Fox lot forever and, despairing over the future, and with her career in ruins, took ship to Europe.  She returned to America a has-been unable to interest another studio in signing her.

Times and tastes were changing. The boyishly slender, kick-up-your-heels, bobbed-haired, short-skirted, Charleston dancing party girl, “The Flapper” was pushing the last lingering vestiges of the Victorian and Edwardian era and their morality out the door, and that included “The Vamp.”

In 1920, in an act of extremely poor judgment born of desperation, Theda accepted the leading role in a stage play called “The Blue Flame,” about a scientist who invents a machine to resurrect the dead. When his beloved is struck by lightning, he brings her back, only to discover that the woman he has resurrected is a soulless vampire who goes on to destroy, ruin, and even murder a string of nice young men. The play was so awful it instantly became what today would be called a camp classic, so laughably awful it had to be seen. Theda had unwittingly driven the last nail into her career’s coffin and turned herself into a living caricature.

Theda might have been a laughingstock, but she was a rich one. Knowing from the start that fame is fleeting, and smart enough not to squander her money, she had invested wisely and tucked away a small fortune that would allow her to live out the rest of her life in comfort.

In 1921 she quietly married Charles Brabin and retreated into private life. Although there would be occasional talk of a comeback and a few half-hearted attempts to revive her career in years to come, including a Hal Roach comedy short directed by Stan Laurel, and starring his future partner Oliver Hardy in a small role, Theda’s career was over. Charles Brabin did not believe in the independent working woman. Theda had been a career girl when she was single, but now that she was his wife, he put his foot down. In the Brabin family women stayed home while their husbands worked to support them. In later years when she was asked why she had retired, Theda would sigh “I married an Englishman.” And eventually the fire of ambition burned out of her, and Theda accepted that her career was a thing of the past.

But the Brabins’ marriage was actually a very happy one. It lasted for more than thirty years. And Theda found a new lease on life as a popular society matron and a hostess of dinner parties. She bobbed her hair, took up golf, and joined various country clubs and women’s groups, and enjoyed dining out and socializing with friends. Although her husband would not permit her to have a dog, he did allow her to have a Persian cat, and she still had her beloved books.

In 1954 Theda was diagnosed with colon cancer, which quickly spread to her liver. She died on April 7, 1955. But “The Vamp” lives on.