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by Ellen Dawson

  Fox hired De Coppet in what appears to have been the financially strapped studio’s strategy to avoid paying the kind of salary many established screen personalities were demanding (Sinclair 56–57). Not long after, W. Stephen Bush, writing in Moving Picture World, railed against the “evil” of

  “gouging stars” who demanded “fabulous and ridiculous salaries” merely because they thought they had “a name” (“Gouging Stars,” 5 August 1916, 100). The strategy of casting an unknown paid off: A Fool There Was created a sensation at the box office. With the nine other feature films Fox rushed Bara into that year, it was instrumental in making the actress that rare film industry commodity—an overnight star. As one fan magazine writer proclaimed in Photoplay a few months after the release of Bara’s debut film, “I

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  know of no actress who has become so widely known in such a short space of time” (Wallace Franklin, “Purgatory’s Ivory Angel,” September 1915, 69). Fox continued to energetically exploit Bara’s vampire image in all but a half dozen of the thirty-eight other star vehicles the studio produced for her over the next five years.

  As a result, “To Thedabara” became American colloquial for the particular form of seduction associated with the “beautifully wicked” woman (Mary B. Mullett, “Queen of Vampires,” Motion Picture Magazine, September 1920, 34). Becoming a star who changed the English language added to the virtual inseparability of Bara’s name from the figure of the vamp. As early as 1916, a theater magazine was prescient in articulating the running theme of all later commentary on Bara’s stardom when it predicted, “If she ever escapes the cloth of red with which she has been shrouded, she will be little less than superhuman. . . . Just as actresses of the legitimate stage are always remembered by the roles they have played so Theda Bara is marked for life by the films as a sorceress and a vampire” (“The Vampire of the Screen,” Green Book, February 1916, 263). In 1919, Fox decided the vamp phenomenon had run its course. They declined to renew Bara’s contract.

  Her attempts in the 1920s to orchestrate a successful film comeback failed to reignite her earlier box office appeal.

  Unfortunately, Bara’s films are almost all missing today, most having disappeared, disintegrated, or been destroyed in the Fox archive fire of 1937.

  The only Bara feature film made during the height of her fame that is widely available in a complete print is A Fool There Was. Without firsthand knowledge of Bara’s films, there is much regarding her appeal to audiences, her performance style, and her stardom that we will never know. However, we do know, through newspaper, fan magazine, and industry trade paper sources, that Bara’s films often ignited censorship by city and state boards and controversy.3 Ronald Genini claims that Bara’s portrayal of an Irish heroine in Kathleen Mavoureen (1919) incited rioting by Irish American societies offended that “an Irish heroine was being played by a Jewish actress” (50).

  These riots relate to the last crucial element of “oddness” in Bara’s stardom—her Jewishness. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, she was the daughter of Jewish immigrants from central and eastern Europe. In an era that glorified Anglo-Saxon whiteness through female film actresses such as Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Pearl White, Mae Marsh, and even Gloria Swanson, Bara, as a Jewish star, transgressed normative requirements of female stardom in terms of ethnic, religious, and even (as perceived by some Americans)

  “racial” difference. While the film industry depended upon the talents of many Jews in important creative and financial positions, it appears to have

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  operated on the assumption that gentile-dominated audiences wanted to see actors they could easily presume were also gentiles.

  Did the revelation of Bara’s Jewish immigrant background contribute, not only to Hibernian Society riots, but, as Maria Elana Buszek implies, to Bara’s marked decline in popularity in 1919? Buszek argues that this decline in the star’s box office clout reflected Anglo-Saxon America’s racism directed against “the wave of new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe” (163). Yet attributing the decline in Bara’s stardom to pure and simple antisemitism raises the question of how Bara could have become a star just four years earlier. While any star’s fall from popularity is likely to be a complex phenomenon, it is worth exploring the question of how Bara’s Jewishness was negotiated by star discourse in relation to her star appeal.

  This also means exploring how the vamp may have functioned as an image of racialized femininity, the sexually seductive Jewess associated with the East. Discussing this fin de siècle stereotype in a German cultural context, Sander L. Gilman argues that actress Sarah Bernhardt and the fictional Salome—two important referents for Bara’s stardom, as I show here—were primary cultural embodiments of a broadly circulating stereotype that represented more than just feminine corruption; as a Jewess identified with both modernity and the more primitive East, this seductress was regarded in Germany as a source of contagion who spread death amongst non-Jewish males (Gilman 77–85).

  In spite of the loss of her films and the briefness of her popularity, Bara has achieved iconic status for almost one hundred years as one of the most recognizable of motion pictures’ inscriptions of seductive feminine evil.

  While her films obviously have not played a role in the perpetuation of her image, a number of production stills and publicity portraits have. Our contemporary vision of Bara is shaped chiefly through these images and through those of other women who imitated her signature characteristics: a predatory pose from atop a divan or bed, scanty Orientalist costume, and heavy-lidded, kohl-ringed eyes, the latter often aimed at the camera with startling directness. Even the screen epitome of 1950s blond sexuality, Marilyn Monroe, reproduced this iconic Bara look for Richard Avedon’s camera in a photo feature on sex goddesses for Life in 1958 (December 22, n.p.).

  Beyond these individual images, star discourse as represented by fan magazines, newspapers, advertising, general interest magazine commentary, and other ephemera such as sheet music and commodity tie-ins, while not substituting for Bara’s missing films, can move us in the direction of understanding her stardom, how it was constructed by the studio with the cooperation—and sometimes complicating participation—of the actress.

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  Star discourse can also help us understand how that star construction negotiated the tensions between American culture and Bara’s differences to secure her popularity with audiences as a Jewish woman playing a dangerous Orientalized vampire. The myriad sources that make up this discourse also suggest how the industry sought to stabilize sometimes contradictory meanings that were generated by the actress’s performances, onscreen and off, as “Theda Bara.”

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  ✩ Figuring the Orient into the Odd Woman

  The implications of Bara’s stardom run deeper than her connection to a screen fad emphasizing an extremely stylized vision of feminine evil that is easily dismissed as a misogynistic projection of male fantasies and fears. Instead, as Antonia Lant has pointed out, there is “a complex intersection between definitions of the vamp . . . and Orientalist discourse” (Lant, “Curse” 90–91). Even though early cinema learned to borrow from almost every mode of popular entertainment and trend in art appearing during its time, Orientalism was a particularly powerful attraction, especially in the United States (see Edwards). Across high and low culture, in many venues, including consumer advertising, dance, the decorative arts, fashion, movie palace architecture, literature, theater, and vaudeville, the Orient was figured through narrative tropes and visual conventions based on a tradition that had been thoroughly codified by Victorian culture. In this tradition, “The East” was offered as fascinating in its exotic picturesque qualities. Like the vamp, it was also regarded in the Western imagination as “Other,” decadent and immoral, aligned with primitive, even perverse, sexual
ity, and with extremes of power (as in the sultan and slave girl). Those extremes were enhanced by the mystery of the seraglio, where, it was imagined, surrender to unspeakable sexual impulses went unchecked by Anglo-Saxon, Christian morality.

  While the sultan and the dancing harem girl were conventional Oriental figures who became ubiquitous in advertising of the turn of the century (particularly favored in cigarette advertising), another, more radical figure—that of the imperious Orientalized woman—also came to be central to some cultural discourses that proved particularly popular with women as, indeed, Bara’s stardom was. In opera, ballet, painting, film, and theater, bib-lically and mythically inspired women (such as Cleopatra, Judith, Lilith, Medea, Medusa, Phaedra, Salome, Thaïs, the Empress Theodora, Turandot, and “The Sphinx”) often occupied center stage, capturing the public’s imagination and creating controversy around performances of femininity that

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  transgressed existing norms of female sexual propriety and the gendered alignment of power.

  One example of this controversy-generating transgression in female performance occurred with Sarah Bernhardt’s portrayal of a French version of Cleopatre in the 1880s and 1890s. Anticipating Theda Bara’s association both with Orientalist-grounded feminine evil and female sexuality enacted beyond the pale of existing social norms, Bernhardt’s U.S. appearance evoked this comment from the New York Times: “Good folk regarded her art as something forbidden, an alien evil. Young people did not tell their parents when they went to see her. . . . That scene in which the Serpent of Old Nile drew her coils round the throne of Marc Anthony, circling ever nearer with the venom of her wiles, was a revelation of things scarcely to be whispered” (Ockman and Silver 36). Bernhardt’s performances, like Bara’s, violated the dearly held Victorian belief that women were primarily spiritual rather than sexual or physical beings.

  Earning her the disparaging nickname of “Sarah Barnum,” Bernhardt was a relentless promoter of her star image. In her exhibitionism, she prefigured studio promotion of Bara, but Bernhardt also anticipated Bara’s trading on public fascination with the Orient and its implications for femininity.

  Both women relied on Orientalist tropes to complicate woman’s presumed role in passively satisfying a voyeuristic male gaze. Stage director Félix Duquesnel never forgot his first glimpse of Bernhardt, whom his maid mis-took for a “Chinese lady” because of the actress’s embroidered Chinese-style tunic and stylized coolie hat (Gold and Fizdale 67). Orientalized style in Bernhardt’s personal dress and her apartment décor was used to support her onstage spectacle of an Orient already feminized—as well as sexualized—

  throughout Victorian culture (Shohat 23–25). The Times of London reveals the perception that Bernhardt was inseparable from popular notions of the Orient in its pejorative as well as intriguing connotations of Otherness: “The actress [created] a new type—the embodiment of Oriental exoticism: the strange, chimaeric idol-woman: something not in nature, a nightmarish exaggeration, the supreme of artifice” (Ockman and Silver 136). Not only did Bernhardt capitalize on these associations in her staging of her roles as Phaedra, Medée, Cleopatre, and the Byzantine empress Theodora, but she was forever linked in the public’s mind with a role written for her but which she never publicly performed, the title role of Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play, Salomé (Ockman and Silver 71, 175). The central character of Wilde’s play, the Judean princess who dances so that she might kiss the dead lips of John the Baptist, was considered so daring that even Bernhardt abandoned plans to star in its production (Glenn 98; Taranow 201–02).

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  Carol Ockman has credited Bernhardt with establishing “the template for show business icons as we know them” and launching “the vogue for fashionable vamps” (Ockman and Silver 71). The construction of Bara’s star persona certainly attempted to affiliate her with the thespian accomplishments as well as the eccentric Orientalized femininity of Bernhardt without linking her to Bernhardt’s well-known Jewishness. Fox publicity men Al Selig and Johnny Goldfrap imaginatively played off some elements of Bernhardt’s biography in their invention of Bara’s. In addition, Bara’s public identity, even after her years at Fox, was carefully staged as that of a grand diva in the Bernhardtian mold—the self-possessed, independent woman with a claim to Old World, thespian credentials. Like Bernhardt, she was credited with having an unusual talent for self-promotion. One frequent commentator wrote: “Theda, you’re a wise little girl; when it comes to providing what newspapers and magazines know as ‘copy,’ you are in a class by yourself” (Archie Bell, “Theda the Vampire,” Cleveland Leader, 24 October 1915, n.p.). However, we should not forget that in addition to prefiguring elements in the star construction of Bara, Bernhardt was around long enough to actually compete with the screen star: the last of Bernhardt’s many “farewell” tours of America occurred in 1916–1918, when she performed Antony and Cleopatra (in French) to U.S. vaudeville audiences at the same time that Bara’s much anticipated epic, Cleopatra (1917), was in release.

  In advancing her thespian credentials as an actress and not just as a movie star, Bara proclaimed that she had been educated by Bernhardt

  “when I played in Paris,” but this claim, like so many of her recollections of her life before the movies, was pure fabrication, even if it was consistent in the attempt to associate the film star with artistically elevated, if eccentric (and foreign) femininity ( Motion Picture Classic, October 1916, 25). A similar strategy is evidenced in Bara’s claim to have been taught to walk in a “ser-pentine” fashion for her performance in The Clemenceau Case (1915) by her

  “warm friend” Isadora Duncan (Hamilton 42). “Serpentine,” a term often used to describe Bernhardt, carried associations aligned with the Orient, as well as with feminine evil. Bara was claimed to possess a muscular resemblance to the snake (“The Vampire of the Screen,” Green Book, February 1916, 264), and Archie Bell declared that a voice specialist “would find the coils of the python or ancient oriental poison” in the silent film star’s voice (“Theda Bara—The Vampire Woman,” Theatre, November 1915, 246). We should not forget too that Duncan, like Bernhardt, was a woman whose sexual nonconformity as well as her public performances were the subjects of great controversy.

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  The Soul of Buddha (1918)—Bara representing the mystery and sensuality of the Orientalized woman.

  What do Bara’s connections to Orientalism mean for historical and the-oretical considerations of women’s spectatorship? While it has often been assumed that she appealed primarily to men (a dangerous fascination sati-rized in limericks, satirical stories, songs, and poems that sprang up almost immediately after her first film successes and lasted longer than her stardom),4 Bara often had more to say about her appeal to women who, she claimed, were “her greatest fans” (May 106). Certainly Hollywood Orientalism of this period was constructed to appeal strongly to women, trading on female fantasies in relation to the indulgence of both consumer and sexual desires beyond the established boundaries of proper social norms. In so doing, Hollywood traded on what historian Holly Edwards calls a “new phase of American Orientalism” at the turn of the century, one marked by

  “the evolving therapeutic role” in which “the Orient provided metaphors and models for greater sensuality and liberated passions, relaxing enforce-ment of strict propriety” (Edwards 45). In a 1917 issue of Motion Picture Magazine, Roberta Courtlandt quoted a Columbia University instructor who made a similar claim, noting: “‘Most girls are good, but good girls do not want to see other good girls on the screen. . . . Through the medium of

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  Theda Bara they can do her deeds and live her life’” (“The Divine Theda,”

  April 1917, 61). Bara herself speculated that her vamp films appealed to women’s “primitive desire to subjugate men” as well as the fantasy of being

  “beautifull
y wicked” with “elaborate costumes, the costly jewels, the servants gliding noiselessly about . . . the glittering crystal and china . . . the right setting for their iridescent dream of love” (Mary Mullett, “Queen of the Vampires,” Motion Picture Magazine, September 1920, 34). She also suggested that women appreciated her vampire portrayals more generally as “a sort of revenge for the disappointments and dullness of life” (Glenn 123).

  Noticeably, other stars of the period discussed in this volume, like Mary Pickford, Pearl White, Grace Cunard, and Lillian Gish, modeled various incarnations of modern womanhood defined by physical expressivity and even willful femininity. But Bara’s stardom stood at the intersection of transformative femininity, sexual anarchy, and Orientalism. Rooted in that daring triangulation, Bara’s star identity—ironically—was constructed by a film industry increasingly driven to market stars, not just for economic advantage but also to gain respectability by disassociating its players from the immoral-ity long attributed to theatrical actors. In the 1910s, the movie industry emphasized clean living, marriage, and family ties in stars’ private lives (deCordova 102). The industry saw an economic advantage to linking “the world’s greatest living actress” and her professional accomplishments to its own desire to be a higher class of entertainment. In 1912, Biograph promoted actress Marion Leonard in advertisements that declared: “Sarah Bernhardt is the foremost living female interpreter of human emotions on the stage today . . . the greatest interpreter of human emotions in the moving picture field is MARION LEONARD!” (Biograph ad, Moving Picture News, 17 February 1912, 14). In keeping with this strategy, Bara similarly tried to lay her claim to the artistic heritage of stage divas like Bernhardt in reference to her appearance in Salome (1917): “Of course, I was again accused of emphasizing wickedness on the screen. . . . Other famous tragediennes have given us characterizations in the theatre of complex women and they have not been accused of being vampires. Why not I, Theda Bara?” (Genini 47–48).