Vamp by Eve Golden

Author:Eve Golden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vestal Press
Published: 1996-03-13T05:00:00+00:00

Theda’s West Adams Boulevard house. Photo: New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

West Adams Boulevard was a rather stuffy neighborhood, and residents were not thrilled to see an actress — certainly not that actress! — move in, trailed by fans and reporters. At least one neighbor was happy to see her, however. Leatrice Joy, although she’d not yet met Theda, came knocking at her door for dating advice. Believing Theda’s publicity (even though Joy herself was an actress), she felt the famed vampire could help her seduce her then-boyfriend, later-husband, John Gilbert. Theda happily took Joy off to her dressing room and made her up as a Baby Vampire. Puffing some rouge on Joy’s earlobes, Theda gave one of her well-known Theda Bara impersonations: “Zis is for earlobes pulsing vit ze blood of love,” she purred. “Zis means passion.”

Joy’s horrified mother scrubbed her daughter clean before the date in question, but missed the earlobes. When John Gilbert asked Joy if she were getting an ear infection, she laughed, “that’s my seething passion!”

Theda settled somewhat uncomfortably into her new abode, though she preferred the light and airy bungalow dressing-room Fox prepared on the lot for her.

Well before the release, or even shooting, of Cleopatra, the publicity department began gearing up for what would become the biggest — and silliest — promotion of the era. As early as April, Selig and Goldfrap released a statement to the press about an inscription found “on a stone wall in a tomb near Thebes,” forecasting the coming of Theda Bara. The 2,500-year-old prophecy read,

I, Rhames, priest of Set, tell you this: She shall seem a snake to most men; she shall lead them to sin, and to their destruction. Yet she shall not be so. She shall be good and virtuous, and kind of heart; but she shall not seem so to most men. For she shall not be that which she appears. She shall be called . . .

After which the Greek letter “Theta” appeared. It seemed that not only was Rhames a priest of Set, but a Theda Bara fan as well, as he managed to fit the titles of two of her films (Sin and Destruction) into his prediction. According to unnamed scientists and language students, the letters “t” and “d” were interchangeable in ancient Greece, thereby excusing Rhames for misspelling Theda’s name.

Theda also received from an anonymous source “a beautifully illumined card with strange Egyptian hieroglyphics,” which she — suddenly an Egyptian linguist — translated as a tribute from one of Cleopatra’s recently reincarnated servants. Theda played up her press conferences and interviews for all they were worth. At one point she declared herself the reborn spirit of a daughter of Seti, high priest of the Pharaohs, and was photographed at a museum gazing soulfully into the coffin of what she claimed was her own mummy.

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