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by Ellen Dawson

  Likewise, in “Theda, Misunderstood Vampire,” she calls upon her connections to serious acting by emphasizing her desire to move beyond film as a “training school” to appear in tragedies on the “legitimate stage”

  (Roberta Courtlandt, Motion Picture Classic, October 1916, 28). The New York Times at first seems to obligingly confirm her aspirations in “From Siddons to Theda Bara,” giving a thumbnail history of the great actresses who played the “siren queen” and plugging Bara’s Cleopatra; but the article goes on to cite Bara’s film as “one of the most unusual in the annals of the

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  drama,” not for its dramatic qualities but for its “sheer daring,” a reference, no doubt, to Bara’s scanty costumes and the film’s problems with censors (10 February 1918, 3:8).

  While Bara struggled to assert her acting credentials and overcome the public’s perception of her as a cinematic sexpot, at least one other actress managed to do what Bara could not. As Anne Morey argues in this volume, opera star turned film actress Geraldine Farrar performed multiple roles as a sexually déclassé character, including the notorious Carmen (1915), a role Bara also essayed the same year. But, in Farrar’s case, the star system highlighted the laborious work and artistic ingenuity demanded of her operati-cally trained talents in order to counterpoint the transgressive mores associated with the unleashed female sexuality of her screen characters. In contrast, Bara’s stereotyped screen image as an exotic vamp and her lack of credible history of “high-class” stage work made it difficult for her to assert her artistic credentials in a similar manner, especially in the wake of the skeptical reaction to studio claims regarding her origins and history.

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  ✩ A Star Is Born in the “Shadow of the Sphinx,” or

  Selig and Goldfrap Give Birth to Theda Bara

  In promoting A Fool There Was, Fox’s publicity department, led by the imaginative machinations of former newspapermen Selig and Goldfrap, drew heavily upon the Bernhardtian model when constructing the biography of Bara initially offered to the public. The role of the publicity man or press agent in the industry’s systematic construction of stars as commodities for the consumption of fans was well known by this time—

  and widely disparaged. Within a discursive context of skepticism, the actress Theda Bara was introduced to members of the press at a legendary Chicago conference. The event strained the boundaries of credulity, but succeeded in establishing Bara as a bizarre movie industry phenomenon worth paying attention to—in spite of, or perhaps because of, all the press agent “humbug.”

  At the press conference, it was said that Bara arrived straight from Paris; she spoke very little English. Her press agents declared she was the child of a French actress and an Italian painter/sculptor. Was she a love child? Bara’s illegitimacy, unlike Bernhardt’s, was only implied and could be subject to debate. It was claimed she dabbled in the occult and was famous in France for playing vampire roles on the Parisian stage, although they emphasized she had been born not in Europe but “in the shadow of the Sphinx.” Adding to the sensational impact, Fox eagerly pointed out that

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  “Theda Bara” was an anagram for “Arab death” (Sinclair 57; P. A. Parsons,

  “Here Comes the Latest Thing in Vampire Ladies! ’Ware, Theda!” Motion Picture Classic, February 1917, 33–34). In short, Theda Bara was presented as a diva, an “artiste,” in the sensationally exotic tradition of Bernhardt and, indeed, she came to be called “The Divine Bara.” Years later, William Fox claimed that the actress herself had come up with the idea of being born in the Sahara Desert as a more interesting alternative to admitting she grew up in Cincinnati, as Theodosia Goodman, one of three children of a lower-middle-class Jewish family. Bara’s father, a tailor, had emigrated from Russia, and her mother had family ties in France and Switzerland (Sinclair 57; Genini 16; Hamilton 19–20). Fox thus replaced Bara’s Jewish immigrant parents with adventuresome European artists (a painter and an actress) while allowing her Egyptian birthplace to provide a touch of the exotic without giving up the actress’s claim to whiteness.

  Nevertheless, some potentially problematic confusion arose about Bara’s racial identity. William Fox remembers that they decided she would be their first Arab star (Sinclair 56–57), but Fox’s publicity machine soon made it clear that the studio’s exciting new acquisition was not an Arab in spite of her anagrammatic name and birthplace. Fox’s clarification (or restatement) likely was motivated by the fact that many (if not most) white Americans (like Brits) considered Arabs and Egyptians to be black. This is illustrated by one of the central conceits driving the taboo-challenging E. M. Hull novel, The Sheik (1919). The novel’s English heroine travels in the Sahara where she is kidnapped and raped by a “black” (as she refers to Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan). Lady Diana falls in love with the sheik, but in order for them to be happily united in the end without violating Anglo-American racial hierarchies, he—whether in the novel or played by Rudolph Valentino in the film released in 1921—must be revealed at the last moment to be of Spanish and British blood rather than Arab. The delicious, taboo-breaking thrill of “interracial” romance can still be vicariously enjoyed for, as Richard Koszarski asks of Valentino’s The Sheik, “who in the audience remembered or cared that Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan had been a European all along?” (Koszarski 301).

  Bara’s alignment with the Orient, onscreen and off, anticipated Valentino’s star persona in permitting viewers to enjoy a taboo-defying slippage between whiteness and an ethnic or racial Otherness. Bara’s “dark” Otherness, like that of Hull’s “black” sheik, was linked to a dangerous and fascinating sexuality. Fox hired illustrator Charles Dana Gibson to wax ecstatic over Bara in a press release: “In her dark eyes lurks the lure of the Vamp; in her every sinuous movement there is a pantherish suggestion that is won-

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  derfully evil” (Golden 57). Bara was quoted as declaring: “You say I have the most wicked face of any woman. You say my hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, that my eyes have the cruel cunning of Borgia, that my mouth is the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, that my hands are like the talons of a Circe or the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory. And then you ask me of my soul—you wish to know if it is reflected in my face” (Hamilton 29).

  How bad could Bara be? As noted, by the time she came to the screen, the American film industry was in transition in how it used screen actors’

  identity as a marketing tool. By 1915, the industry was well beyond its earlier strategy of advertising screen actors as “picture personalities” whose

  “existence outside of films emerge merely as an extension of an existence already laid out within films” (deCordova 88). Instead of seamlessly reproducing the onscreen personality of the actor’s roles in his or her offscreen identity, publicity was being leveraged in more complex ways to construct a coherent extrafilmic identity for the actor that would not contradict the tenor of his or her screen casting. As a result, the star’s offscreen identity might share something with the screen persona, but its measured distanci-ation from the screen persona would make the “star” a more marketable and versatile commodity.

  In Theatre in 1918, Mildred Cram’s “Popularity and the Press Agent” uses Theda Bara as her prime film-based example of the power of the press agent.

  Interestingly, she laces both within an Orientalist discourse: “In ancient Greece, in Troy, Carthage and Sicily, the P. A. was an oral liar. He sat in sunny market-places with his back against a wall and talked and talked and talked

  . . . he sang of a certain Helen . . . the delectable vampire of antiquity. What would happen to-day, I wonder, if some inspired P. A. should stand with his back against the Times building, singing, tenderly, of Theda Bara?” (May 1918, 363). Cram’s article acknowledges the press agents’ duping of the public. F
an magazines sometimes also sometimes referred to the gullibility of the public, but as frequently acknowledged the gap between the star’s offscreen identity and his/her onscreen image, in both the tone and substance of their articles. Letters from readers were often published that substantiate the public’s awareness of the role of studio publicity departments and press agents in creating outright fictions regarding actors’ backgrounds, suppressing facts that might conflict with their players’ screen image (such as being married or divorced), and organizing events or incidents that would lead to free press coverage (see Studlar, “Perils of Pleasure” 273–75).

  While the vamp as an onscreen harbinger of sexual anarchy had to be publicized and exploited by Bara’s offscreen persona, the latter had to be brought into compliance with the film industry’s anti-theatrical model of

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  respectable film stardom. Bara could be bizarre. She could be exotically eccentric. But central to her construction as a film star was the imperative that her offscreen identity could not follow the model of Sarah Bernhardt in one important direction—she could not follow Bernhardt down the treacherous path of sexual nonconformity. This strategy was advanced consistently in written texts such as “The Divine Theda,” where the author claims that ancient Egyptian inscriptions prophesy Bara’s appearance as a woman “who shall seem a snake to most men. . . . Yet . . . she shall be good and virtuous” (Roberta Courtlandt, “The Divine Theda,” Motion Picture Magazine, April 1917, 59).

  Photographs, however, were not as consistently on message. Like those for other stars, they often emphasized Bara’s resemblance to her screen characters and sometimes suggested a different identity altogether. In a 1915

  portrait of the star in Motion Picture Magazine’s “Gallery of Picture Players,”

  Bara is shown attired in an elaborately embroidered Chinese robe covering her almost completely (November 1915, 14). In spite of the Orientalist theme, the actress’s rather passive expression as well as the modesty of her costuming contribute to making the photo a somewhat anomalous visualization of Bara in relation to what would become the dominant tropes of her femininity.

  In contrast, many publicity images regularly featured Bara in revealing Orientalist costumes (usually from her films) or shoulder-baring dresses.

  Characteristically, a studio portrait featured in a 1916 Motion Picture Classic article shows Bara dressed in black and appearing in profile. One of her hands is placed underneath her chin; her fingers point away from her face in an approximate imitation of Ruth St. Denis’s signature pose from her famous dance, “The Cobras” (“Theda, Misunderstood Vampire,” October 1916, 27). Often quite sensationally, photos aligned Bara with symbols of death and darkness, as in the shot that serves to introduce the same article (25). In this photo, she is shown straddling a skeleton, with her hair flowing over the remains, thus creating a sexually suggestive “hair tent” recalling Burne-Jones’s vampire painting. This image, one of several that exist of Bara posed with a skeleton, might have been influenced by a 1914 Orientalist painting entitled Sphinx produced by American artist William Sergeant Kendall (Dykstra 263). First used in conjunction with the selling of A Fool There Was, Bara’s image is accompanied here by a caption that evokes the ending of the film: “The vampire mourns over the remains of one of her former victims.” It also may have conjured up memories of the cabinet card featuring Sarah Bernhardt sleeping in a coffin and the legend that the stage actress kept the skeletal remains of a young man who died for love of her

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  Publicity for A Fool There Was (1914) shows Bara straddling a skeleton, with her hair flowing over the remains. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  in her apartment. In a similar vein, a publicity shot for Cleopatra shows Bara, dressed in street wear, staring down onto an Egyptian mummy cas-ket, with reflections off the glass museum case superimposing the face of Bara onto that of the mummy.

  At the same time that photos like these linked Bara to her films and their representation of the dark woman as a harbinger of desire inseparable from death, some fan articles worked against the grain of the disturbing connotations of these photographs to suggest that the actress was completely different from her screen image as a destructive vamp. Roberta Courtlandt does this first through the title of one of her articles, “Theda, Misunderstood Vampire,” but also in its subtitle, which asserts that Bara’s

  “greatest wish” is “to play the part of a sweet, essentially feminine woman”

  ( Motion Picture Classic, October 1916, 26). To support the appropriateness of this wish, Bara is depicted on a subsequent page in a flower-print diaphanous frock and a beribboned hat. This image is said to show how she

  “appears off the screen,” but it actually depicts Bara in costume for one of her rare nonvamp roles as the sacrificing mother in East Lynne (1916).

  “Theda, Misunderstood Vampire” is typical of fan magazine star discourse and its approach to Bara. It works to distance the actor from her screen

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  image, but also binds Bara to the vamp’s image of deadly sexual allure.

  Courtlandt affirms that distance as well as the inevitable binding by observing that “a picture vampire gives up much in order not to step out of her character” (26). That Bara has a natural connection to her casting as a vamp, in spite of trying to play “her character” offscreen, is advanced in Courtlandt’s recounting of a story from the actress’s schoolgirl days. Other children “were afraid” of Bara as a reaction to her “big and black and strange-looking” eyes and the “sometimes weird fancies that possessed her” (25). The mistaken belief that she is dangerous haunts her adulthood as well: Bara reveals her womanly sensitivity by bemoaning the fact that “people hate me so” because

  “they refuse to believe that I, in real life, am not as I am in my screen life”

  (26). The article concludes that the actress is not a vamp, but “just a warmly human woman, with a woman’s loves, desires and ambition” (28). Thus, while proving that Bara has a natural affinity for playing strange women, readers can be comforted by Courtlandt’s first-hand knowledge that the star does not possess the same dangerous and deviant nature as her screen characterizations. Similarly, in “A Peep into Their Boudoirs” ( Motion Picture Classic, May 1917, 19–20), Bara is revealed as living in a house that is not a vampish den of iniquity, but “a treasure-house of splendid, old-fashioned Chippendale and Sheraton bits,” that reveals her tasteful (and expensive) penchant for antiques that turns her home into a model for consumerism (another favorite theme of fan magazines). Bara is shown posing in the mirror of her expensive vanity, with reporter Carol Lee extending to her readers the all-important gesture of reassurance: “Miss Bara isn’t a bit like the cruel, designing creature that scenario writers would have you believe” (20).

  While fan magazines sometimes assumed an ironic and undermining tone toward star construction, this seems especially evident in their response to the movie industry’s textual conflation of the modern sexualized woman with the oriental archetype of the vamp. Specialists in vamping in the 1910s—including but by no means limited to Bara, Valeska Suratt, Louise Glaum, Virginia Pearson, and Mutual’s Bara-look-alike, Margarita Fischer—might assume aspects of the stereotypical screen vamp in interviews and photos in order to call attention to and fulfill their obliga-tion to “sell” their screen roles. As a result, fan magazines might inscribe an actress as eccentric or odd, confused about her identity, or even a poseur taken in by the industry’s pressure to create a sensational masquerade for her fans’ consumption, but she could not be promiscuous and predatory.

  Star discourse might align the offscreen style and sexual allure of the star with the stereotypical screen vamp, but inevitably attention is drawn also to the exaggerated nature of the latter. In 1916, Bara’s rival in vamp-

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  dom at Fox, Valeska Suratt, became the subject of a fan magazine tongue-in-check description of her bedroom: “Black and white, please know, is typical of screen vampires. . . . Why this should be so must ever remain a mystery. . . . Returning to Miss Suratt’s gorgeous den of iniquity—it is here she plans the devastation of men’s lives and the wrecking of their homes—

  we find a splendid example of the effectiveness of black and white for boudoir use” (“A Peep into Their Boudoirs,” 19). Suratt’s over-the-top attempt to express her screen personality in her private life through the stereotyped vamp style is rendered ridiculous.

  While Valeska Suratt could not be taken seriously for trying (over-strenuously) to be like her screen characters, Bara’s attempt to escape vamp roles and show that change through her lifestyle is rendered equally excessive and silly in Alma Whitaker’s tongue-in-cheek article for the Los Angeles Times in 1918 (“New Theda Bara Is Born of Exclusive Society Setting,” 28

  July 1918, 2:1–2). Whitaker explores Bara’s private life in relation to the announcement that the actress “will vamp no more” (see also Grace Kingsley, “Theda Bara, Expert on Tears, Makes Smiles,” Los Angeles Times, 7 July 1918, 3:1). Whitaker relates that Theda and her sister Lori are ensconced in a Los Angeles mansion once owned by socialite Mrs. Randolph Huntington Miner, with Bara’s life consisting of reading Little Women and “feeding the little chick-a-biddies in the backyard.” Whitaker teases: “I ask you, could she continue to play Cleopatra in two breast plates and a wisp of chiffon for the sensation of the rabble after that?” (2:1–2).