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It's that magical time of year, full of monsters, ghouls, and all manner of horror movies. In the nineteen fifties, a new idea in horror hit the airwaves, repurposing vintage scary films for a TV audience. The host of this endeavor was also something the public had never seen before, iconic for her piercing screams, morbid humor, and suggestive costume. Her name was Myla Nermi, better known by the character she created, Vampira, not to be confused with Elvira, but
more on that later. Today, producer Trevor Young takes us through the haunting life and legacy of one of horror's most influential character, Vampire.
What I need is a vampire of cocktails to settle my nose. It'll not only settle them, it will petrifize a vampire cockpail. You like it, it hates you.
She was sexy, but she was untouchable. She had a sense of humor, a bizarre sense of humor.
I've had several letters asking whether olives or carries should be used in making my cocktail. Well, actually neither is necessary, since they'd only disintegrate upon being put into the cocktail. However, if you want to use some gun, if you can drop in an eyeball once you happen to have an extra one around the house.
This was the nineteen fifties, this was during the Eisenhower administration, and no one had ever seen a person like my And she was on television and here she was talking about how sad it was that her sister had died and they had to bury her alive, and that she had Yellow Cross insurance that you could buy because if you were an unsuccessful suicide, you would have insurance to
try again. My name is Sandra Niemi, and I am the author of the book Glamour Ghoul, which is a biography of my aunt Mila Normie aka Vampire.
Sandra. So she never really knew her aunt Mala all that well, but knew about her from TV. Decades later, in the nineteen eighties, Sandra decided to track her aunt Mila down, who by this point was in her mid to late sixties.
I was always obsessed with her, and I think that was because I was an only child and I always wanted a family, a bigger family. And I had this aunt Mila in Hollywood that I knew was beautiful and I thought as a child, kind of a celebrity. And I enlisted the help of the Red Cross to try to find Myla, and they couldn't find her. Well. At that time, she was going by an alias, and that alias was Helen Heaven, so that's why they couldn't find Mila nor Me. I remained obsessed. I have to know her.
I wanted to talk to her. And then one day a state would have it. I got a Star magazine and there was Mila nor Me suing Alvirah for ten million dollars, and I went, she's a live. Mila's alive.
And I immediately sat down and wrote a letter to her attorneys who were mentioned in this article, and I said, please for this letter, and they did, and Mila responded right away, and we had a long letter writing campaign, and it wasn't that long before I said, you know, I'm going to come to Los Angeles and off my daughter and I went to Hollywood to see Mila. I spent a week with Mila. I got to know her. We continued writing and then at Christmas time of ninety two,
she quit writing, and that hurt my feelings. I thought I had her her feelings or she was mad at me for whatever reason. I didn't know. And I even called the police to get a welfare check because I thought maybe she died, but they said no, she's fine, and so I just left her alone. Then I found out in the newspaper that she died in two thousand and eight. January tenth went to Los Angeles and got granted to go into her apartment and started picking up all of her writings.
Inside Myla's apartment, Sandra found an astoundingly detailed record of her aunt's life.
It was full of papers and magazines and folders, and I thought, oh, well, this is how I can know who she really was. This is exciting to me. And I had a friend with me helping me, and I told her anything that you find with Mila's handwriting, keep it well, put it in plastic bags and pictures and you know, photos and things like that. When we came out of there, I had three black garbage bags full of writing, and sometimes there was a cohesiveness to it.
There were pages and pages and pages on notebook paper that she had written on both sides, and sometimes it was just a little note, like a scrap of paper, or written in the margin of a calendar. I found a half page glued to the back of a picture that was hanging on the wall. I found wadded up pieces of notebook paper in pockets of old clothes, and I just gathered everything up. I also found a real Turreal tape, and when we played it, she had recorded
it in nineteen sixty six. But anyway, I have two diaries, a nineteen forty forty one forty two diary and a nineteen fifty six diary. And boy, am I glad I got the nineteen fifty six diary because that was a very busy year for Vampire.
And since then Sandra has spent years sifting through that ephemera, dedicating herself to chronicling the story of Myela Nurmi aka Vampire.
She was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and then her father got a job in Pittsburgh, Massachusetts, so they moved there. And in nineteen twenty six, her father, who was an editor of a Finnish newspaper in America, there was a civil war going in Finland and he wanted to be right there to see what was going on so he
could report it. And he decided to take his wife's inheritance and go to Finland for maybe a year, he said, And he left his wife and his two small children, and he came back a year later, and my grandmother had completely changed. She was no longer this submissive housewife. She was defiant, and she had learned to alcohol. Then the family moved to Ashbuela, Ohio, and they were there
for maybe ten years. Mila had friends, and then in the winter of nineteen thirty four he was sent to Duluth, and it was in the heart of the depression, and they almost starved to death when they lost his job. He was only doing a few hours on the radio a week, and it wasn't enough to sustain them. They didn't even have electricity, They had very little food. Finally, an angel came through and said they wanted him back in Ashabula, So back they went and thrived. Mila accompanied
her father on lecture tours. He was much in demand, he said himself. He was the man of ten thousand speeches, and he lectured against the evils of alcohol, of course, and he lectured for a president. He was paid to stump for Herbert Hoover, and later on he became a huge ponent of FDR. But Mala went with him and sometimes she spoke too, but she listened to all of
his sermonizing. She knew his fire and brimstone approach. Mala told her father that she wanted to be an artist, and my grandfather thought artists meant someone who painted or drew pictures. He didn't know the meaning of what she meant. She wanted to be an artiste, you know, to be free and to be friends with people like her and nothing to do with domesticity at all, no way. She wanted freedom to express herself, to be created.
Eventually, the family settled in a story at Oregon, but apparently Mala quickly got bored and yearned for a more exciting life.
She was going to go to New York, and the parents put the kibosh on that and only agreed to allow her to go to Los Angeles, where her mother's brother and wife lived. And that's how she got to Hollywood, and that's where Mila started looking for work, first as a radio moonologist. She was interested, very very much interested in being the first female or some wells because she was enamor with Orson when she heard him speak on the radio.
Strange.
It now seems to sit in my peaceful study, Princeton writing down.
This last chapter of the record. Begun at a deserted farm and.
Grover's new Strange to watch children playing in the streets.
The sound of his voice and the words that he chose, and he was her God. That was who she wanted to be. But she didn't have much luck getting a job in that area.
You know.
She tried a few things. She worked in a department store and was a model perhaps and print ads because she had this beautiful face.
It was also around this time that Mala started developing her unique fashion sense, and it was largely inspired by a certain Disney movie.
This is no Alder.
It's a magic wishing apple, wishing apple, one Mike and all your dreams come true.
Real, yeah, girl. She went to see snow White and she was watching it and there was snow White and coming and happy and this good little girl and washing the dishes of the dwarfs and doing their laundry and singing while doing it, and oh my god, Mila was sickened by that. But then when the Evil Queen came on the stage, all powerful and sexy and beautiful and demanding and in control. That's when Mila's brain exploded, and that's when she said, that's who I want to be.
I don't want to be evil, but I want to be everything. She is the evil Queen, and she never forgot that. She adapted part of the evil Queen persona into vampire.
Like many people starting off in Hollywood, Mila had a number of tough breaks and terrible experiences. Early on.
She went to I can't remember the person's name, but they were advertising for a radio monologist, exactly what Mila did, and so she applied. Now, mind you, she's only nineteen years old from Astoria, Ore again and goes into this shabby little studio type thing and the guy is there by himself, and he tricks her into signing a piece of paper and he takes her in the bag to take her picture, and then he asked her to become nude from the waist up, and all she had to
cover herself was some see through scarves. And Mila was horrified. She knew she was locked in and to that office, to that back part of that office, she couldn't escape, and it was upstairs. No one would hear her scream, so she complied, and he took pictures of her with these scarves. She couldn't wait to get dressed, and as she flew out of the office after he unlocked it, he said, the proofs will be ready on Wednesday or whatever, and she just stormed out, running away from the man.
And of course it was just a sham because the proofs never showed up, and even when she went back to the office, the guy was gone and locked up. He was charlatan. And then she tried to I can't remember who mister Clark, I think his name was. She went to interview for a job there, and he made a pass at her. He started moving his hands up her skirt and she wrestled him and ended up breaking his glasses and ran out of his office. And then
she said to herself, Hollywood is just filthy. Those were her words that she wrote.
But one day she met someone who had changed her life forever.
She went with a friend of hers because it was the friend's birthday, ended up at Musso and Franks. They had grabbed a serviceman outside to be their escort into the bar because Mila wasn't twenty one yet. But they went in with the soldier and they sat down. Of course, they got served, and then Mala heard this voice in the back of her and she couldn't believe her ears was Orson Wells in person, her God, and she couldn't help herself, and she ran over to his table and
started babbling whatever it is that she did. Then realized that she had interrupted him in his dinner companions and apologized and went back to her table, which was now gone. Her friend and the soldier boy had decided to googigan out, so now she was alone. So she just sat there wondering what to do. And here comes Orson Wells over to her cable by himself and invites her over to his table. So she goes over there and it's time to go, and he calls the cab and gives her
a kiss. She lived in a hotel then, I think the Commodore hotel. He got out of the cab and he said, I want to see where you live, and he walked her to the door. He didn't kiss her again. He left shortly thereafter. A bouquet of flowers arrived at
the desk they began a romance. At the time, it was during the war, and Orson was always into magic, and he was putting up a type of carnival off LaBrea in Los Angeles, where there were all kinds of tints and games, and he had his celebrity friends come and do tricks like sawing a woman in half and eating snakes and all of this sort of carnival kind of stuff. Well, Orson had quit sending flowers or coming after Mila and had been quite a while, and Mila
was getting a little alarmed. What has happened? Has he ditched me? Is he not interested in me anymore? What's going on? She went to the little house on Hacienda that she had been seeing Orson at, and a man showed up in a bath robe and it wasn't Orson, and he said he didn't know him, mister Wells, And so Mila left. She thought, well, maybe he's moved. I don't know that man. Then she went to the carnival
to look for Orson. There were pictures of all these celebrities that were going to be appearing, and she looked up one of these pictures and it was the man in the bath robe and his name was Joseph Cotton. He was a famous actor in those days and also a very close friend of Orson else. So then Mylea put tuned two together. H these two men have rented this house to entertain their girlfriends, whoever they may be, and so I'm just one of his girlfriends. God only
knows how many more girlfriends he's gone. Then, while Myla was stewing in her apartment and not working, she realized that she was pregnant and it was Orson Wells's child. And very shortly, like the same day or the next day, she was listening to the radio and they announced that Arson Wells had married Rita Haywarth that morning at city Hall. So Mala's world was plunged into complete blackness, if you can imagine.
The sun was put up for adoption, and up until only very recently, no one knew who the secret child was. But after she gave birth, Mala decided to shake off her grief and focus on her career, and that's when she got her first big break. After an initial string of disasters in Los Angeles, Mala moved to New York City and there she nailed a role in a stage play called Catherine was great with May West.
She got a part as a handmaiden, and Catherine was great, but she irritated May West because she overacted, and May said, as an asside to the director, doesn't have to be so big, because Mala was supposed to scream and fall to the floor and faint as she was informed her husband died and Mala went overboard, and May didn't like it. She didn't want to be upstaged, and eventually May fired Mila after several months on Broadway.
While she was in New York, Mila made another celebrity friend, Marlon Brando.
And yet before this evening is over your mind and give me the brush, you might forget your manners. You might refuse to stay. He was in his first Broadway plate and it was called I Remember Mama. So they were both on Broadway at the same time. And one of the other handmaidens that was in Catherine was Great was dating Marlon Brando, and she was bitching and complaining about what a cad he was. He was there one time for her and then he was missing, and she
just couldn't take it anymore. So Mila listened and listened, thought, you know, give me this guy's address. I'm going to go over here and take care of him. He's just not going to treat you like that. So she did. She went over there about two thirty three o'clock one morning, knocked on the door, and this guy answered, and it was Marlon, and she started reading him the Riot Act and he invited her into his apartment, and she didn't
leave until noon the next day. And her friend from the play never spoke to her again, because obviously Myla enjoyed herself with Marlon Brando. They started well. She never came right out and said it was a romance, but I'm pretty sure it was because she said I have to keep my female side under control, because obviously she found him very attractive. And they dated. I have a photo as an eight by ten and Marlon is in
costume for a movie. It looks like a revolutionary four type uniform and Mala's dressed at the nines like she's going out for dinner. I have it and it's very very important to me.
Then Mala got cast in a horror slash burlesque Broadway show called Spook Scandals.
And it only played for one night, but that one night turned out to be pretty great for my love, because she was inundated with offers from Hollywood by famous directors and producers, and she had her pick of who to choose to go to Hollywood and be interviewed by, and she chose Howard Hawks. He was the man who discovered Lauren Bacall, and he was very, very famous. Everybody knew Howard Haws. He was a big deal. And she
went home. She had a contract with Howard Hawks, and she waited for I don't know how long, maybe it was a couple of days, and the phone never rang. Well. Mila was incensed, and she went back to Howard Cox and sat in his office and took out the contract from her purse and ripped it up into pieces and threw it on his desk and said to him, and she wrote this down, please kindly dispose the piece in
your nearest wastebasket. And out the door she went, thus killing any opportunities she would ever have to be an actress.
Since she was blacklisted from traditional acting roles, Mila decided she would work on doing her own thing, something entirely unique and fringe from Hollywood, and in October of nineteen fifty three, she unveiled a new persona at the bow Karribe Masquerade Ball.
Apparently this val Cared was an annual event right before Halloween. It was a costume ball and it was held at the Moulin Rouge. So he told Mila about it, and he said, you have to come and just put on a costume. Income it's so much fun and they'll be prizes. And Mila thought, wow, maybe I should do that because I'm wanting to get discovered. I want to be on television.
Because she knew the door to movies was shut, so she decided to go as Charles Adams unnamed character at the time from his cartoon strip The Adams Family.
So I went there and I practiced my mctory Marian Kourtchy because I expected to win. But I had lavender makeup, you know, partty with a little lavender looking as I had risen from the grave turned a little blue, you know. Therefooted like that. The lady was flat chested.
She bought some rayon from a fabric store, and she rented a wig from Max Factor and Indian Wig, so it was a long black wig, and then she applied her own makeup. She went barefoot and The dress was low in the back, eye in the front. She did not sins her waist, She just wore it. The dress loose and raggedy. The sleeves were tattered and the hamline was tattered. And she put on tomb like makeup. She said, very very white, with a little bit of purple lavender.
They went to the ball and Mila won the costume prize, which was a transistor radio. But she had caught the eye of Hunt Stromberg program manag ABC Channel two, Los Angeles, and he looked for her for five months, from October to March. He finally talked to this guy, the one who had encouraged her the beginning to go to the Bowl thrib and he says, oh, she's easy to find.
So they found me and they told me to come in, and I came in. He said, come in costume. And I came in during the Eyes of March wearing a great Valenciaga cape coat and the winds winds of the Eyes of March were flapping it and people were coming out of a little bummelow saying, oh, there's Hunts vampire there. I had no hair. You just didn't see ladies with crew cuts in those days. But I had all sorts of things women didn't see in those days, you know.
And Mila was interviewed by hunt Stromberg. He told her what he wanted. He wanted her to be the horror host. And she said, well, who else are you going to have? From Adam's family. It was a cartoon that was published in the New Yorker in those days. And he said, oh, well, you know, we can't afford anybody else. We just want you. And Mala said, well, I can't possibly do it then, because you would be ripping off Charles Adams. This particular character is his character. And he says, well, then I
don't know what we're going to do. And she says, well, can I come up with something a little different? And he says, I'll give you four days. So Mila went home and she took her costume from October and turned it backwards.
So then I saw a book by John Willie Bondage and Discipline. I said, ah, that's it. I had been a pinup model. I've been doing cheesecake right at that time. So I took the cheesecake and the Bondage and Discipline, and I sinched to waste.
Her waist she sensed to in those days, nineteen inches, and I.
Put in the fish net hose, I slipped the dress. I changed Mortitio's statement. I gave her Hollywood makeup, and remembering.
Too that there was a.
Bit of Greta Garbo in here in, something a little Dostoevsky, and something just a wee bit spooky like Norma Desmond. Were just turned me on big and Suset Boulevard. I've made up my mind we'll bury him in the garden.
Any city laws against that, I wouldn't know. I don't care anyway.
I want the coffin to be white, and I wanted specially lined with second. Now when you see it, it looks like I'm imitating Norma Desmond, which I was, but I didn't know it, you know, a subliminal.
She wore bust pads because she wanted the bust in the hips to be remarkably larger than this teeny tiny ways. She wanted to look like she was not even human, like she came in parts. Then she glued on some false fingernails that were three inches long and painted the nails. She made them out of margarine tubs, and she got herself a black wig that she from a store downtown. She walked in to an interview with hunt Stromberg four days later, dressed as what we know now as Vampira.
Hunt Stromberg goes forward. Of course, this was exactly who he wanted, and a star was born.
And so Milo was signed to bring her character to live TV on The Vampire Show.
Me Reading that show.
It premiered on April thirty, nineteen fifty four, and then the next night it was on at its regular time midnight. Made first nineteen fifty four. She didn't have the beginning where she walked down the corridor with miasthma of dry eyes. She didn't have that yet. That came a few weeks Slater. But she would just introduce herself. Hellow, I am vampire.
And she had this tiny, tiny waist and this low cut blouse and the tattered sleeves and hemline and like she said, my tall tall shoes, black hair, bizarre makeup with boomerang eyebrows that arch sway up, and an overly pronounced spread lip where she didn't see it because it wasn't colored television, but you could tell it was a different color of lip. And started talking about death and how beautiful death was, and diatines and electric chairs.
You know, I've often been asked why I don't like My attic is electricity.
Everybody knows electricity.
Is the chairs.
And you can imagine what the audience thought in this Eisenhower era, like what is this? Who is that woman that had never seen anything like her?
The idea was that Vampire would host a new horror movie each night. She'd introduce the movie, come back for ad breaks, and close it out when it was finished, all while making clever quote unquote jokes.
Our little fairy tale to night. It's called the thirteenth Guest. The thirteen makes it timely, topical and terrifying. It's about a humorous.
Fellow who dies telling a joke, something of a dead pan comedian. Yes, put me.
Down in the room and we.
Come in. And right from the get go, she was insanely popular. People were writing to the station wanting to know more, more information, and within a couple of weeks they had to bump up the time start from twelve to eleven so more people would be awake. And then Life Magazine called Life Magazine. If you made Life Magazine in those days, you were a star. You had made it, And Life Magazine sent a photographer here down to Los Angeles to film Myla, and that's when the hallway Candelabra
dry Ice entrance mark is beginning. They did that for Life Magazine. I think she had a four page spread. It wasn't just one page, it was four pages. It might have even been five. He took pictures of her in the back of I can't remember what make car it was, but it was a convertible and was an old, tiny Victorian age car, and Myla would sit in the back with a parasol over her head to keep the sun out, but the parasol was all shredded up. And then she would scream at green lights and want the
convertible to go through the red lights. So she was photographed doing that, people staring at her, like in broad daylight, like who is that woman dressed like that screaming. She was a hit. She was a huge hit. It was nineteen fifty four, somebody talking about death AND's beautiful suicides and eyeballs and frog brains and beteens and oh my word, what else is she going to come up with?
Sandra says that Mila felt more comfortable as vampire than she did as.
Herself, especially at the beginning. I think that was her alter ego because sometimes she would just put on vampire makeup. She had short blonde hair, and she would just leave her short blonde hair and put on her Mala clothes and go down to Googie's with a vampire face. I think there's a quote in the book something about hiding behind the makeup. She could be more aloof, she could feel more powerful, she could be more distant if she had her vampire face. Some vampire gave her permission to
be how she wanted to be. It was that little bit of the evil queen persona. She liked it. Mala claimed that she herself was very, very shy. She said that several times. I don't see that. I don't see Mala as being shy, but she claims that she was. Maybe she was when she was younger. I don't know. But she enjoyed being vampira. She enjoyed every moment of it. She loved her. She's I love vampire irishoes my child. I brought her up and I fed her and I
took care of her. And now when Mila was older, she would say, now it's time for her to take care of me.
As Vampire became more popular, Mila was invited to join Bella Lagosi on the Red Skeleton Show.
I think there's somebody cold as it's my sister, the Vampire.
Yeah.
The Vampire Show was eventually canceled in nineteen fifty five, but Mala briefly took the show over to KHJATV, where she retained rights to the Vampire character. Meanwhile, Mala started hanging out among the Hollywood elite.
Schwabs was the celebrity hangout drugstore. Everybody went to Schwabs. That's where they got their medicine, their pills and their narcotics and everything else that they needed to function and is oftentimes standing lonely, and so Mila hung out there too. But then a new coffee shop was built next door. In fact, they shared a common wall Schwabs and Googies. Googie's was a coffee shop. You walked in and to the left there was a horseshoe type counter, probably with
a Fike case in the middle. So the people like Mila started hanging out in Googies. It was the place to be in Hollywood if you were just starting out in the movies. If you hope to be an actor or an actress, if you were a rebel, if you were a free spirit, if you were young, you went to Googie's. The old school stayed at Schwabz, and Mila often said that there almost was a battle between the Schwabieros and the googie Items, and every once in a
while they'd back and forth. Maryland and Rowe would come from Schwabz and come over and hang out at Googie's once in a while, and so would Shaja Kabor, and a few of the others would drop in to say hi. But mostly it was the young rebel type people.
One of those rebels was perhaps the most famous rebel of all time, James Dean.
You're tearing me abar what you say? One thing, he said another and everybody changes back again. She didn't know who he was. So Mala's sitting there with another guy, and a motorcycle drives up, and that was James Dean, and into goog Ese he comes, and she said, she jumped up out of her boot and banged her crazy bones.
And the guy with Jack and her said he thought Mala had a stroke because she was just mess prized, just staring with a peculiar look on her face that didn't change, and he said, what what myla and Malasen? Is that guy right there, right there, right there that came in the door, who is that? I must meet him? And the guy turned around and looked. He said, oh, that's James Deen. I was just in a movie with him. I want to meet him. I've got to meet him
right now. They were introduced over by the cigarette machine. Anyway, that very same day he asked her to go on his motorcycle up to his apartment. They became thick and fast friends after that very platonic relationship because I think from the get go this is nothing, Mila wrote. Jimmy became the son she had to give up for adoption,
and Mila became Jimmy's surrogate mother. She was always giving him advice because she was eight years older than he was a lot of years, but she was more mature and wise, and she was always giving it, don't do that, don't do that, do it this way, do it, you know, and usually he just ignored her, but he listened and they were good friends. And then here's the bizarre part. Jimmy was an unknown when they met. He had just completed East of Eden, which was his very first movie.
He only ate three. In East of Eden, his character name was Cal spelled with the C, and Mila had given her adopted son a name so she could talk to him even though he wasn't there, and she named him Cal with the key. So I wonder what Mala thought when she went, Oh, he's Cal Prass and I have a col. So this is the Great Universe telling me you're not alone. Your surrogate son is here. That's my thoughts.
Mala and James Dean developed a passionate friendship lasted for years, but it was also a friendship that would end in disaster for both of them. On September thirtieth, nineteen fifty five, James Dean died in a tragic car accident, and it blew apart Mila's world.
I don't think Mila ever loved anyone in this world as much as she loved James Dean. She never got over his death ever. She loved him like a mother would. She couldn't believe that twenty four years in his life was snuffed out. She had to leave town because there were too many memories of Jimmy here. She was going to go to New York. Marlon heard she was going to go to New York, and he offered to give her some money to get to New York, and she
wouldn't take it. She had a couple hundred bucks, and so off she went to New York and about herself an apartment. And as soon as she got back to Los Angeles, here was Whisper magazine on the newsstand. And Whisper Magazine was the lesser cousin of Confidential magazine. It was the gossip magazine of all the stars. And on the cover was a picture of Vampire and Jamesteen, and the headlines screamed something about that Vampire had caused the death of James Den because she put a curse on him,
and Mala contemplated suicide. That was it. That was the straw that broke the camel's back, the person that she loved more than anything in the world, she was accused of killing him.
With her show canceled and her best friend killed, Mala fell out of work in Hollywood. However, in nineteen fifty six, she got an offer from director Ed Wood to play a part in one of his movies.
Can Your Heartstand The Shocking Facts about Grave Robbers from Out a Space.
She didn't leave a lot of information behind about Edward movie, but I know that she had met Edwood at a birthday party for Bela Lagosi's son. He had said something to her, well, you're going to have to be in one of my movies sometimes, and Mila said to herself, not a check, are you kidding me? She thought he was pathetic. One way to kill your career is star with ned Wood movie. So then he sent one of his people over to Mala's apartment to ask her to be in his movie. Mila had lost her job as
a vampire due to creative differences. Let's say Jimmy was dead and she said, na I don't think so, and he says two hundred dollars, And boy did that look good for my law because she was almost like a cat food, like she said, and she had all these cats to be so well, maybe just leave the script here, but I don't know.
At first, Mila decided to leave Edwarod hanging and instead took a few other gigs.
A few months later, Liberaci came calling.
The Las Vegas Hilton takes great pleasure in presenting the Liberacci Show and starring.
Liberaci because Bella Lagosi was supposed to be co starring with Liberacci in Las Vegas, but Bella became very very ill and couldn't d opt out, so he suggested my law. So Liberacci took him out upon it, and he asked Mila to be his co star in Las Vegas for two weeks, and she jumped at the chance because Liberacci was the highest paid celebrity at the time. That's where she went, and that's where she met Elvis. Mila would
keep running into these people. I'll tell you. Elvis was starring at exactly the same type across the street at the Old Frontier, and Mila was across the street at the Riviera. So they formed a romance.
But when she got home, Mala found waiting at her doorstep the script for Edward's new movie, then called Grave Robbers from outer Space.
Reading is my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember, my friend, future events such as these will affect.
You in the future. Mila never touched it. It just sat there, and then finally Edward's friend came back and said, we're going to start filming here in November. You know, are you on? And she says, well, I've looked at the script now, and the script is so inane. I can't say any of it. I can't bring myself to say a word. It's so stupid. And this guy apparently said, well, we don't care. We only want your name anyway, and so that's why she didn't speak the word during the entire movie.
Vampire's role in the eventually titled Plan nine from Outer Space was entirely silent, but her presence was a huge part of the film.
I was initially offered some lines, but the fact is that the character, although I was built as vampire, the character wasn't Vampire as I had conceived her. Empire as I had conceived her was giddy, outrageous, and this was a different kind of a She was in a trance, and I just thought it would better if she was in a trance, and I asked her please do it mutely.
Still, Mila was embarrassed to have done it.
She didn't think anyone would see it. She was hoping that nobody would see it or a recognize her or think about it. And I don't think she saw the movie in its entirety until like nineteen eighty four, but she was shocked surprised that it had become a cult favorite. And it was also voted the worst movie of all time. And I used to like to think about Citizen Kane orson Well's the best movie of all time, Planned nine the worst movie of all time, and they had a baby.
For better or worse. Plan nine is considered one of Vampire's most famous and iconic roles. When the movie had a cult resurgence in the nineteen eighties, Vampira also had a new boost in popularity. Then Tim Burton made a nineteen ninety four biopic called ed Wood, where actor Lisa Marie portrayed Vampire in the film, pardon me, miss Vampire.
Yes you don't know me, but I'm Edwood.
I'm a film producer and I'm currently in production on a science fiction piece with Bella Legosi and Swedish wrestler Tord Johnson.
I don't understand. Do you want my autograph?
No?
I think my film is perfect for you.
You want me to show it on my TV program? Well, I have nothing to do with that. You should call the station Managret Channel seven.
No no, no, no, no no. I don't want you to show the movie. I want you to be in it.
Look I'm with some friends and we're about to eat.
Please it would just take one second. Come on over a meet the backers. There is a really nice dentist from Oxnark.
Look, buddy, I've got real offers from real studios. I don't need to blow some dentists for a part.
Forget it.
She went out to lunch with Lisa Marie and she liked her because she was fellow Sagittarian. They both had, you know, November December birthdays. The one thing she didn't like that Lisa Marie did is she says, when I posed as Vampira, I crooked my elbows and put my hands on my abdomen so you could see my tiny waists. That was very, very important to the character. And Lisa Marie would put her hands on her hips. That is not the way it's done. And I told her before
she did it how to pose herself. Mala was very particular about her character and that's one thing she did not like. I didn't think it was that true to Vampira. I thought it showed Mala as Mala. She had long blonde hair. Mala had short blonde hair always and sort of a gloomy guss. Mila really was a funny person. She cracked jokes. She his very personable. In the movie, she was just sort of angry. That's how I looked at it, So I didn't think it was accurate.
Mala didn't do much acting or make too many vampire appearances after Plan nine. She instead ran an antique store called Vampire's Attic, on top of a few other odd jobs. But when she got a second wind of fame from the ed Wood hype in the eighties and nineties, she reveled in the spotlight.
I think it did have an effect on her. I think she loved it because then on top of being in demand, she was able to sell her artwork on eBay and support herself. That made her very excited, and so she did a lot of drawings and paintings, and I don't think she ever did any pros. She did some sketching that were very good. She did a pencil sketching of Arland Brando. She did Jimmy very well, and then paintings. I have one of her paintings. A fan of hers sent it to me and I'd treasure it.
And she was able to sell photographs, and she went to conventions, horror conventions, and she was able to sell her photos for twenty dollars a piece autographs, so that put money in her coffers and she desperately needed it.
Fifteen silent minutes, which has given me an entire new career. Thank you, mister Wood.
You're listening.
With such renewed interest in Vampira. KHJTV decided they wanted to resurrect the Vampire show, so in nineteen eighty one, they asked Mila to return to TV, but it didn't quite go as planned.
They had done a lot of talking to Mila. They wanted to revive the Vampire's show, and Mala finally said, okay, but I'm not going to appear on camera. I'm too old. And they finally talked her into making appearances as Vampire's mother, and she said, well, vampire doesn't have a mother. She just evolved. And eventually she says, okay, I'll appear on camera briefly once in a while and mostly in voice only. But you will hire a vampire of my choice, and they agreed to it, and they had a contest to
select a vampire. Mila wasn't too keen on that because she wanted Lola Falana to be vampire, which wasn't going to happen because Lola Falana was a big deal in Las Vegas at the time. They requested if she had anything from the original show, and she said, yeah, she had some scripts and she had pictures of the set.
She would bring those over to Cage Jay so that they could peruse them so they would know how to set up this new show and how to make the set look like her set original set that was such a success for poison bar or marble coffee table, rolled the spider, the death's head pouch, the color of the sofa red. And she didn't hear from them anymore, and she tried to contact them and tried to contact them nothing.
So she finally went to the studio and says, hey, but gifts, well, such and so's on vacation and such and so's sick and blah blah blah. And then she finally what she found out was if you come back here, we've selected a Vampiro and we'd like for you to meet her. Mala thought, now, wait a minute, you told me I was going to be able to pick the new vampire. But she thought, well, the least I can
do is go and take a look at her. So she went to back to the station and Cassandra Peterson had not arrived yet, and she eventually showed up late, and she was wearing a red wig and some kind of a full black skirt, and Mala thought, oh brother, what is this. And one of the bosses of Katee Say said to her, this is the new Vampira, and we gave her the rights. It's between you two girls. You fight it out. And Mila lost her stuff right
in and air. You did what you gave her, the rights, My rights, she said, some exploitive deleted Let's just say out the door she went, and that was the end of that. They started production the first day, calling it the Vampire Show, and Mila had a CS and de SIS letter sent to them, you stop right now or I'm going to sue your butt saw and they changed the name to Alvira, Mistress of the Dark. But she
was a ripoff, Mila. Milah said, the only thing that was different between them was the big boobs and the top nod on her head. Other than that, they were the same.
Elvirus first show called el Virus Movie macob ran from nineteen eighty one to nineteen eighty six.
Hello Darling, Yes, sire is Lilo may that gell with a shape that drives me el viras Mistress of the Dark.
It was a huge success, and the entire time Mila was attempting to sue Elvira khjatv for taking the rights to her character. She never won that lawsuit.
It impacted her the rest of her life. She says, she's going to the bank with my money and she's buying fancy, million dollar homes. I don't even have electricity. I can't afford to feed my dog. And you can't blame her. You can't blame Mila for feeling that way. I would too. That was supposed to be her show. She was supposed to be making the money. There was no al Vira at the beginning. There was only Vampira. I'm bitter about it too.
Still, Mala had acquired enough fame from the nineteen ninety four Edward biopic that she was doing pretty well. She started to appear in a number of documentaries about wood.
And this man said that he yearned, he had planned to have a hope to have vampire in his production. I thought he was to grab a hold of my heels and pull me back down into the you know, Nicholson dimes Meyer from which I had clawed my way up, and.
I was insensed.
I thought I wouldn't work for that idiot. How dare he to aspire to me?
Right?
And she was successfully selling her art and memorabilia to fans across the world.
Things went very well until I think around the turn of the century she got evicted from her house. She lived in a converted garage. She eventually, in two thousand and five moved right off Sunset Boulevard and she was much happier there, and that's where she passed away, off Serrano of Sunset in Los Angeles.
Mila Ermie passed away of natural causes on January tenth, two eight, at the age of eighty five. This is when her niece Sandra collected her writings and started to catalog Mala's life. I asked Sandra what she admired most about her aunt.
The fact that she never sold out. That has impressed people a lot. Here she had this character that she created and she was offered lots of money to sell her rights. KBC wanted to syndicate the show. Mala said, no, no, no, I would rather be poverty stricken than lose control of my character Vampira and her honesty. Mila was brutally honest and like I said, never sold out, never gave up. She lived for over sixty years, most of those years as a disabled woman and a single woman, and she
served Hollywood, which is a cutthroat town. Let me tell you, I've learned that those things really impressed me about my love.
Finally, Sandra set out to find her long lost cousin the child of vampire and Orson Wells, and eventually she did. In twenty twenty one. He was identified a seventy six year old David Putter.
Through DNA ancestry dot com and they matched my daughter and David as first cousin once removed or something. So he called her on the phone and I had been at the grocery store and I walked in and my daughter had this smug look on her face and she says, I know who mylassen is. I know his name, I know where he lives, and I have his phone number. I said, come on, get out of here. You know that's not even funny. She said, no, I'm serious. I know his name. And I looked at her and I said,
give it to me now. So she did, and I was on the phone within one minute. I mean I was calling, that's how anxious I was. And I got him on the first call. He asked me, you know who my mother is? And I said, oh my god. Because I had not sold my book yet, it was not quite finished. I had another chapter and a half, maybe the finish, and then I was going to be done. And I said, you're talking to the only person in the world that can tell you everything you'd ever want
to know about your mother. I'm writing a book about her life. Really, I said, yes, your mother is Mila Normie, aka Vampire. And he was silent, and he says, oh my god, I've waited seventy five years to know who my mother was and I find out she's a vampire. Just cracked up. I was so happy. I have not met him in person yet, but he's sending for my daughter and I to come visit him in Vermont from Oregon, and he apparently has his mother's eyes, and so I'm
very anxious to meet David in person. He'll be the closest thing I'll ever have to a brother. David's adopted mother died when he was only three, so he's never known a mother. And I've sent him a vampire a statue which he proudly displays in his home. And he feels his mother around him. Now he knows who she is. He talks to her and calls her mom. It just touches my heart. He thinks that Mila's there around That makes my heart happy. Who can come.
In here is to go home.
I can have a.
Nice little.
Step on the cat's tale.
I don't being a cat, but we don't have a cat a gy tale.
This episode of Ephemeral was written and produced by Trevor Young, with producers Max and Alex Williams. Sandra Nimi is author of Glamour Cool, The Passions and Pain of the Real Vampire Myla Nurmi. Big thanks to Farrell House Publishing for coordinating the interview. And we want to hear from you. Are you a vampire fan? Who are your favorite characters from the horror Universe. Let us know on social media.
We're at Ephemeral show and For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Halloween,