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In general, an overtly skeptical attitude in star discourse toward the offscreen identity of actresses who played orientalized vamps—chief among them Bara—appears to reflect an understanding that these actresses were called upon to encourage the public’s desire to consume their taboo-violating screen roles. Yet within the framework of the industry’s demand that its players be respectable, a star like Bara—and her numerous rivals in vamp-dom—needed also to be distinguished from vampire screen roles in ways that actors who played more sympathetic and less sexually transgressive roles might not require. Star discourse’s disavowing “I know but neverthe-less” strategy thus served to reaffirm the tendency to play hide and seek with the “truth” of the star’s personality, sometimes aligning a female star like Bara with power, independence, and nonconformity, but only in the star’s expressed thoughts, in her personal style, or her professional choices—never in her private sexual behavior. Thus, whether feeding “little chick-a biddies”
in the backyard or even in a reverie calling up her past lives in Spain, Egypt, or points further east, Theda Bara remained as sexually “pure” offscreen as Mary Pickford was on.
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✩ “I’m Bad,” or How a Nice Jewish Girl
Becomes a Star
In 1909, songstress Fanny Brice performed the Jewish com-
edy song “Sadie Salome, Go Home!” in burlesque. Written by Irving Berlin and Edgar Leslie, the song was the centerpiece of Brice’s parody of a well-known phenomenon among women: young single females—including Jewish ones (like Brice herself)—became “stage-struck” and left home to try show business (see “The Stage Struck Girl,” Theatre, November 1917, 249–50). In her burlesque routine featuring the song, Brice sang about Sadie, a girl of the Jewish immigrant class who decides to become an
“actress lady” by dancing the role of the Judean princess, Salome. Sadie’s boyfriend, Mose, reacts with alarm: “Don’t do that dance, I tell you Sadie.
That’s not a bus’ness for a lad-y! . . . Oy, Oy, Oy, Oy—Where is your clothes? Oy! Such a sad disgrace. No one looks in your face.”5
Brice’s parodic performance depended not only on her audience’s knowledge of stage struck girls, but upon public awareness of the wave of “Salomania” that had recently rolled across the Atlantic from Britain to the United States (see Glenn 119; Showalter 160–62). This controversial fad took the form of women who performed Salome’s “dance of the seven veils” in many amateur and professional venues—at all-female house parties, dance schools, or on the stage (see Kendall 10–12; Showalter 161–62; Studlar, “Out-Salomeing” 106). Via “Salomania,” Salome, the Judean princess, became the center of attention in the United States. One New York newspaper commentator suggested that Salome’s appeal was simple: “She is bad and that is a great element in her attraction” (Glenn 96). Although Sarah Bernhardt (another Jewish “Sadie”) rejected the role of Salome, in her wake Mary Garden, Maud Allan, and Gertrude Hoffman went on to enact Salome to great audience demand in (respectively) opera, legitimate theater, and vaudeville. The Ballets Russes took the “Dance of the Seven Veils” and transferred it to their version of Cleopatra for Ida Rubenstein to perform (Showalter 160). In 1908, New York’s Metropolitan Opera promised an equally high-brow Salome (in the form of Richard Strauss’s opera), which censors banned. Nevertheless, a trove of performing women, including Brice, pitched their portrayals of Salome—in varying degrees of mirth or melodrama—at American audiences.
These included La Sylphe, Olive Fremstadt, Julia Marlowe, Eva Tanguay, Laura Guerite, Lotta Faust, and Aida Overton Walker, the first African American Salome (“All Sorts and Kinds of Salomes,” Theatre, April 1909, 130).
Fox claimed Theda Bara was an exotic artiste born out of the meeting of Europe and the Middle East, but she was actually another “Sadie
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Salome,” the stage-struck daughter of Jewish immigrants who had settled in Cincinnati (Genini 6). And, like Sadie of the song, Theodosia left home to become a sinful Salome. As one of those many Sadies who, in seeking stardom, offered exhibitionist display of their bodies as Salome, Bara had absorbed a phenomenon that Susan Glenn argues had become thoroughly Americanized. Not only did American women do what Bernhardt (twenty years before) had not dared, these stage-struck girls, many from immigrant backgrounds, had taken up “the godless sex-crazed ways of American mainstream popular culture, including its Salome dancing” (Glenn 120).
Arguably, Bara would become the most famous Salome of the 1910s. Inar-guably, because of the “miracle of the movies,” her performance of Oscar Wilde’s dancing Jewish princess was seen by more of the American public than any other incarnation of the role.
Salome may have been “bad,” but Bara denied that the character as she portrayed her was a “vamp” (“Theda Bara Sees Salome as Pale-Green Flower,” Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1918, 3:1). By 1918, Bara’s typical interview strategy was to deny the obvious redundancy of roles that much of the public regarded as mere vamps. In keeping with her attempt to artistically elevate her acting, “La Bara” represented her Salome as serious rather than sensational: “As Salome I tried to absorb the poetic impulse of Oscar Wilde. I tried to interpret the extraordinary, the hopeless moral disintegration of a woman’s soul with sincere artistic effort” (Glenn 123). In spite of such pronouncements, Bara would be on the receiving end of many cries from city and state censorship boards who asked, like Sadie Salome’s Mose, “Where is your clothes?” Bara claimed to be uninterested in censors (like those in St. Louis) who were appalled by her characters’ daring costuming: “I never think of the flesh when I am working on a role such as Salome,” she sniffed (Hamilton 54).
Did Bara or her studio try to repress her Jewish background? How did the star’s Jewish origins figure in star discourse focused on Bara and in the trajectory of her brief career? Bara’s true birth name, with its implication that she was a “Sadie” from the mundane Midwest, appeared in print no more than a few months after the debut of A Fool There Was. These revela-tions directly contradicted her studio-generated biography, and the publication of her actual birth name may have allowed some viewers to infer the actress’s Jewish origins.
In general, fan discourse left space for contradictions and discrepancies in the revelation of the “authentic” truth of the star’s identity, but pressure was put on Theda Bara’s star construction by the need to negotiate the contradictions created by the circulation of biographies that so radically contradicted
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Theda Bara as the Queen of the Nile in the kind of costume that enraged censors but made the actress a box office bonanza.
each other. Bara’s two biographies began to emerge almost simultaneously with her first screen success. In Photoplay of September 1915, Wallace Franklin offered up the contradictions in Bara’s star construction in typical fan magazine style with a tongue-in-cheek satire on the excesses of Fox’s publicity department make-believe combined with his farcical imitation of likely fan reaction to the news of Bara’s plain American upbringing: “I wish
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to believe, I am going to believe, I do believe that Allah is Allah, and that Bara is Bara; that the ivory angel of purgatory is an Eastern star, born under the shadow of the sphinx” (“Purgatory’s Ivory Angel,” 69). He goes on to assert that he has chosen to disbelieve “those stupid people who insist that Theda Bara’s right name is Theodosia Goodman and that she is, by, of and from Cincinnati” (70).
Also demonstrating how a problem or truth “gap” in star construction could be placed in the category of Hollywood humbug, Archie Bell, writing in Theatre (“Theda Bara—the Vampire Woman,” November 1915, 246, 254), concluded that Bara, with her claim that she has been reincarnated many times over and her habit of placing two Amen-R
a clay statuettes beside her
“vampire lunch” plate of raw beef and lettuce, displayed behavior so very, very strange that the actress could never have been born Theodosia Goodman of Cincinnati, Ohio: “No, it is impossible. Theda Bara must have been born on Saturn, Mars . . . or perhaps on Venus.” Bell’s acknowledgment of Bara’s impossibly wacky, over-the-top Hollywood excess, however, did not absolve the actress of the burden of accounting for how she could be born in both Cincinnati and the Sahara, nor did it help the actress cultivate public confidence in the authenticity of her star persona, a quality often cited as favorably differentiating film stars like Mary Pickford from stage actors like Bernhardt (Gordon Gassaway, “Personality—Plus,” Motion Picture Classic, September 1915, 55–57).
Bara and the studio kept up the pretense of her birth “in the shadow of the Sphinx” throughout 1916 and into 1917. During this time period, Bara’s identity is put into question time and time again, and she seems to have tired of being asked about her origins. In February 1916, she answered a reporter’s questions about her real name and background by testily responding: “And what, pray, has that to do with my art? What does it matter who I am or whence I came?” In November 1917, the New York Times revealed that members of Bara’s immediate family were all legally changing their names from Goodman to Bara. By 1918, Bara’s sister, Lori Bara, formerly known as Esther Goodman, was appearing frequently in stories focused on Theda’s home life.6 Certainly a family name change was not an unprecedented gesture among stage and screen folk: stage actress Gladys Smith’s family changed their name to “Pickford” when Gladys attained success as “Mary Pickford.” However, the Goodman to Bara name change of Theda’s immediate family may also have been an attempt to repress public perception that her parents were Jewish émigrés. This is in keeping, it might be argued, with the repression of Douglas Fairbanks’s Jewish father, Charles Ullman, in his superstar son’s biography. Still, there seems to have
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been no direct reference to Bara’s Jewish origins in star discourse before 1918, and the star stepped into film as a cultural platform in which many Jewish performers became important cultural icons.
Bara became an object of satire almost from the beginning of her appearance in film, but none of these mild satirical jabs (at least in fan magazines) appear to have referred to her Jewishness, only to the excesses of the screen vamp. However, in 1916, Fanny Brice made Bara the object of a devastatingly satiric imitation of the movie star in “I’m Bad” for the Ziegfield Follies. In the same year, another Jewish comedy song appeared, obviously derived from Berlin’s “Sadie” song. Its overdetermined references to Jewishness (Salome/Sadie/Bara/Brice) were also present in Brice’s performance of “I’m Bad.” “Since Sarah Saw Theda Bara,” by Alex Gerber and Harry Jentes, now made Bara the new Salome to be imitated by Jewish ghetto girls like “Sadie Cohn”: “Oi, how she rolls her eyes, Oi, she can hypnotize. With a wink she’ll fascinate, And she wiggles like a snake. . . . Since Sarah saw Theda Bara, She’s a wer-ra wer-ra dangerous girl” (Gerber and Jentes, “Since Sarah Saw Theda Bara,” Leo Feist Inc., 1916).
In 1918, an openly hostile account of Bara, her dual biographies, and her constructed and exotic persona as a cover for her Jewishness appeared in Photoplay. The author, Delight Evans, draws pointed attention to the actress’s
“rather painful [French] accent” and evasive answers: “She is a consummate actress; but it is such a pity that she must make up for the role. She had a part to play that afternoon; and she played it much more cleverly than she played
‘Cleopatra.’ The only thing her p.a. doesn’t tell about her is the truth.” Part of that truth as reported by Evans is one man’s account of knowing Bara when she played “second parts” “in a little Jewish Theatre on the East Side”
(“Does Theda Bara Believe Her Own Press Agent?” May 1918, 62–63, 107).
A 1920 article in Picture Play on the Orientalized dancer/film actor Doraldina suggests the humbug of the film industry in general and of Theda Bara more specifically. The author, Herbert Howe, notes, “There are moments when my faith in the wickedness of Salome and Cleopatra is sorely tried. It is my experience in motion pictures which has caused me to disbelieve everything that is written.” His primary example of this experience is “the expose of Theda Bara, with proof positive . . . [that she] is a dutiful daughter of Ma and Pa Goodman and a regular attendant at the synagogue” (“Outstripping Salome,”
November 1920, 44). By 1921, Bara’s mother was authoring an article in Motion Picture Classic accompanied by pictures of Theda, mother Pauline, and sister Lori (Pauline L. Bara, “My Theda Bara,” Part 2, January 1921, 19–20, 79). However, this was after Bara’s contract with Fox was abrogated, and she was looking for reentry into the movie industry.
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Buszek argues that Bara’s ethnic difference, her “darkness,” and her Jewishness made her subject to “the larger American panic” over immigration (160–63). But how can such a simplistic reflection theory of society/
mass media account for why Bara could attain such overwhelming popularity in 1915 and be a “has been” in mid-1919? Is there actual evidence that views on this matter changed so quickly during U.S. involvement in the war (1917–1919)? Had Bara become so unpopular so quickly because of her Jewishness—in spite of her much-lauded public efforts for the war effort and her articulate, heart-felt assertions of American patriotism at war-bond rallies and visits to army hospitals (see “Southern California Goes Over Top on Liberty Day,” Los Angeles Times, 27 April 1918, 2:1; Genini 71–73)?
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✩ Conclusion
Bara’s very rapid falling out of favor as a star is obviously a complicated phenomenon, made even more challenging as a research subject because of the loss of most of her films. Unlike Pickford, Fairbanks, or Chaplin, she never gained control of her career or her films. She was at the mercy of Fox in determining the quality of her productions, which was often, according to reviews, not very good. Fox oversaturated the public with her vamp films and, like rival studios, featured other players (like Suratt) in similar vehicles . Thus, Bara became subject to fluctuation in production trends that, in this circumstance, may have been exaggerated by virtue of the great number of vamp-centered films made within a short time span. Also, the vamp type was a figure of feminine seduction so exotic and extreme and so “touchy” and troublesome in its sexual implications to Americans that it easily became a target for anxiety-deflecting ridicule.
Yet when Bara ventured into roles beyond the stereotyped vamp character, audience response was mixed at best, and she herself acknowledged this in interviews. By 1918, the New York Times suggested of “the old-time vamp”:
“a surfeited public emphatically says it has had enough of her” (Antony Anderson, “Drama,” 4 December 1918, 2:3). In the same year, it was obvious that Bara was tired of playing Fox’s game, and by 1919, with the vamp phenomenon having reached its maximum return, Fox was unwilling to pay the actress almost $5,000 a week for what promised to be less box-office return on their dollar.
Would things have been different had Fox offered Bara better vehicles all along? Had she been a more accomplished actress? Had she not been called on to negotiate the daring and extravagant spectacle of the vamp figure? Would her fate have been different had she, like Pickford, been able to
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switch studios and sacrifice immediate monetary gain for the improvement of her vehicles? It is, frankly, impossible to answer these questions separately. They all may have played a role in her fall from popularity.
Theda Bara’s star persona as a vamp took widespread cultural interest in the Orient and wedded it to images and narratives in which an odd woman might be elevated to a strange and rapturous domination of men.
In a 1923 fan magazine articl
e, Frederick Van Vranken noted that, in spite of the fact that the “semi-fabulous and immemorial creature of glamour and romance—the vampire—has been banished from the screen,” her passing “merely marked the passing of a style. Some sort of vampire is to be found in all domestic dramas” (“The Vampire and the Flapper,” Motion Picture Magazine, April 1923, 28, 27). Likewise, in 1927, an article by Carter Greene in Motion Picture Classic noted that “the Bara type of siren [had]
faded into the wings,” so that “we no longer have brunette vampires writhing a la serpent over silken divans amid clouds of smoke that would rival Pittsburg on a busy morning” (“We Could Vamp and Make-’Em Like It,” June 1927, 48). Nevertheless, Greene, like Van Vranken, acknowledges that even though the Bara-esque “Cobra and Incense” style of female screen villains had changed, the presence of alluring, dominating women in screen dramas was now inevitable. Theda Bara had proven the box office force of the “wer-ra wer-ra dangerous girl,” and in that respect her influence on the history of the cinema demands attention.
N OT E S
1. See P. A. Parsons, “Here Comes the Latest Thing in Vampire Ladies! ’Ware, Theda!”
Motion Picture Classic, February 1917, 50; Carol Lee, “A Vampire Who’s Proud of It,” Motion Picture Classic, March 1917, 44–46; and Waldemar Wynefort, “Sirens of the Screen,” Motion Picture Magazine, June 1916, 62–68.
2. For an extended discussion of this painting and of the plot of Porter Emerson Browne’s novel, see Dykstra. Also see Thompson, “Role of Woman.”
3. See, for instance, Theda Bara, “Theda Bara Sees Salome as Pale-Green Flower,” Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1918, 3:1; Genini 64; Hamilton 54–56; and “Theda Bara’s Defense,” Motion Picture Magazine, August 1918, 99–100.