May 4, 2022 • 41 mins
Theda Bara is often referenced as the first sex symbol, or the first celebrity to have an entire persona crafted by a PR team. Photos of her are synonymous with the word vamp, and 100 years later, still have a certain mysterious appeal. But what was she really like?
Research:
- “Theda Bara at Quimby’s.” The Times Recorded. Oct. 26, 1915. https://www.newspapers.com/image/284870168/?terms=%22theda%20bara%22%20%22Louella%20parsons%22&match=1
- “Gordon Theater.” Democrat and Chronicle. Jan. 10, 1915. https://www.newspapers.com/image/135289009/?terms=%22theda%20bara%22&match=1
- “An Interviewer Sees Theda Bara, the Mysterious.” Waco Morning News. Nov. 5, 1915. https://www.newspapers.com/image/43896475/?terms=%22theda%20bara%22&match=1
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Theda Bara". Encyclopedia Britannica, 3 Apr. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Theda-Bara
- Wasserman, Suzanne. “Theda Bara.” Jewish Women’s Archive. The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/bara-theda
- Golden, Eve. “Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara.” Vestal Press. 1998.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Today we're
going to talk about someone I love in history, which
is Theda Bara, who is often referenced as the first
(00:23):
sex symbol or the first celebrity to have an entire
persona crafted by a PR team. Photos of her are
pretty synonymous with the word vamp. I know. Tracy mentioned
to me that she didn't have instant name recognition, but
the second she saw a picture, she's like, oh, that
that person, And a hundred years later, pictures of her
(00:44):
still have a certain mysterious appeal. But she was a
very different person I think that most people might know.
And it always cracks me up a little when people
kind of model their look after her, and I'm like, yeah,
but you know, she was actually pretty um So today
I thought it would be interesting to look at how
(01:05):
this early film celebrity was basically created through careful planning
by a PR team, and how the real woman was
a whole lot different from that faux persona that they
made up. You had to start with totally different name,
She was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July
twenty nine five. Her parents were Bernard Goodman and Pauline
(01:28):
Louise Friends was Dick Cope. Bernard was originally from Horzella,
Poland and worked as a tailor. Pauline's father was French,
her mother was German, although she had been born and
grew up in Switzerland and worked as a wig maker.
Bernard and Pauline got married in eighteen eighty two, and
Theodosia was their first child. Then in eight they had
(01:50):
a son named Mark, and then in eighteen nine seven,
Bernard and Pauline had another daughter named Esther, who would
eventually go by Lorie. Theodosia was named after Aaron Burr's daughter,
who we have an episode on. Yeah, she's some versions
of her name. You'll see Burr as a middle name,
and I never was able to verify whether that was
(02:10):
true or maybe a little confused when people noted that
she was named for Theodosia, um Auto completed that middle
name right. Her childhood, though, was a pretty comfortable one.
The good Men's lived in an affluent neighborhood, and Theodosia
Mark and Laurie were all quite close. They had two
women who worked for them as house staff named Anna
(02:32):
Tuson egg and Ida day Birth and Theodosia loved to read,
and she would often opt to do that over any
other activity, but she was not a quiet, bookish child
because she could also be a handful. She frequently pilfered
her mother's closet to create elaborate dress up ensembles, and
she was prone to getting all dressed up in those
(02:52):
and then running away from home. She was so likely
to run off when she was still quite small that
her parents had to have a new tall fence specially
installed around their yard. As she grew up, Theodosia's love
for dress up evolved into a desire to stage tableau
that was a popular parlor entertainment at the time. She
(03:13):
would recreate scene after scene and perform recitations to go
with these scenes. There's no surprise this led her to
want to get involved in acting. Soon she was staging
her own productions in a neighbor's barn. She continued to
act as she grew into her teenage years. She read
everything she could about the actors of the day. She
(03:34):
was really focused on this I find this very charming
as somebody who put on plays in the basement of
the family home. Oh yeah, Oh, I can't teachers into
letting me do full blown like multi act puppet shows
in elementary school. So um. It's interesting because she was
obsessed with the idea of actors and acting at a
(03:56):
time when like stage actors were really the thing, but
there was some transition going onto film, and she apparently
read like every article she could about everything they did
in their day to day lives. Like she was that
kid that was like could tell you everything that like
any given actor of the day, like to eat, like
(04:16):
to where she was that kid. Theodosia, who was known
to her friends largely as Theo, attended Walnut Hills High
School starting in eight She worked on the school paper
and she joined the drama club, and she was known
always for her ambition to go into acting as a career.
After graduating high school in nineteen o three, she attended
(04:38):
University of Cincinnati for two years, but at that point
she was starting to feel frustrated. Glee club, which she
was a part of, did not offer her the theatrical
outlet that she really longed for, and she frankly wanted
more than she felt like Cincinnati had to offer, so
in nineteen o five, at the age of twenty, Theo
decided to pursue a career on the stage. In that effort,
(05:01):
she moved to New York City, and her father was
reportedly not pleased with any of this. Once she got
to New York, Theodosia changed her last name from Goodman
to her mother's maiden name of de Cape. She would
later riff off of this name. She would change out
the vowels, try out different variations. We know that she
(05:21):
lived in Greenwich Village in an apartment just off Washington Square,
but beyond that, we don't know a whole lot in
terms of the specifics of her first couple of years
of New York. The first play she's documented is having
been cast in was the nine eight summer production of
The Devil. She was a minor character in that one.
After that, There's another gap, and then she was part
(05:43):
of the second string touring company for a musical called
The Quaker Girl. She was paid twenty five dollars a
week initially, although after some pretty bad reviews, her salary
was reduced to eighteen dollars a week, and then she
left the troop. Those reviews were quite scathing, things about
how really abysmal her French accent was and how even
(06:04):
like a five year old wouldn't be confused or convinced
they were mean. THEO continued to pursue acting, and she
kept taking parts in touring companies, but that was not
at all to her liking life on the road. The
tight quarters shared with other performers and the decidedly non
luxurious accommodations were things that she would later describe as
(06:26):
quote unpleasant associations. This was just not the acting career
she had envisioned. She left a touring company that was
running a farce called Just Like John in nineteen and
at that point she went back to New York. Her mother, Pauline,
and her teenage sister Laurie soon joined her there, and
just as she was feeling her most frustrated and dejected
(06:49):
over what seemed like a career that would never happen,
another bad thing happened, which is that the apartment she
shared with her mother and sister had a fire, and
it basically was unlivable. It burned out. They were able
to get by thanks to insurance money, but there was
this very real concern kind of looming over the whole thing,
that Theodosia's dreams were just not going to work out.
(07:10):
In late nineteen fourteen, Theo was approached by a man
who asked her if she might want to try being
in movies. The man who approached her was Frank Powell.
Powell hailed from Ontario, Canada, and had become an actor
himself before transitioning into the director's chair. He had worked
for path A Pictures before Fox lured him away from them,
(07:32):
and it was just before he started at Fox that
he saw Theo and saw something in her that he
thought might be great for film. There's no record of
the specific place where the two of them had this
first conversation. This was, of course a time when the
movie industry was in its infancy, but it already had
some established starts like Mary Pickford. A career in film
(07:54):
was not really something Theodosia had been pursuing. According to
her later accounts of being discus covered, she saw herself
as a stage actress. She wanted Broadway, and she was
not particularly interested in jumping into the still fairly new
medium of moving pictures. But at the same time, she
had to acknowledge that her theater career was not exactly
(08:16):
going gangbusters. She was also thirty, so she was starting
to hit the point where she was seen as too
old for most of the lead roles that she wanted. Initially,
she was curvy, and that figure had fallen out of favor.
People were looking more for longer, leaner physique. So she
gambled and she took Fred Powell at his word on this. Yes,
(08:38):
I want to talk about her as a curvy person
in our behind the scenes. Yeah, because I really think
she looks quite thin and most of her pictures. But
the first project that Frank Powell put the O in
was actually a film called The Stain, which he made
while he was still finishing up his contract at path A.
(08:59):
The Nosha was cast in just a tiny roll. This
was really her screen test. Powell made sure that she
was positioned near the camera so that he could see
how she played on screen, and he was very pleased
after that. William Fox, the head of the studio, also
reviewed the footage and liked it, and so sat down
with Theo for an interview. Both men thought that she
(09:21):
was right for a very unusual and difficult to cast
role they were working on, and they offered her a
five year contract at the studio at a rate of
one hundred dollars per week. Theo negotiated that up to
a hundred and fifty dollars per week before she signed,
and that is how an unknown landed a leading role
in the upcoming project called A Fool There Was for
(09:43):
Fox Film Company. The studio, though also knew this was
a gamble. Theodosia's co star in the picture was Edward
Jose who was a famous Broadway actor at the time,
so casting this complete newcomer to film was something that
William Fox, who the head of Fox Films, was concerned about.
So the solution was to construct this really alluring persona
(10:07):
for her, and her name had been the first to go.
She was going by Theodosia to cape or to cop It, or,
as we said, many other variations she tried out. None
of them were really singing, So after considering her nicknames
of Theo and Teddy, which her family members also sometimes
called her, they landed another nickname, Theta, and decided that
(10:30):
was the one. And then for the last name, they
wanted something far easier than any of the variations on
to cop it or to cape, and her maternal grandfather
had been named Francois Barang and that last name was
shortened to Bearra. Is it quick aside. You'll see different
versions of how this played out. How much of it
was her idea versus the studios, Which studio executives kept
(10:52):
credit for which pieces, But I'm calling it a group
effort because there are so many different versions. So her
name was figured out and rendered on that Fox contract.
It was time to get to work and we will
talk about that. After a quick sponsor break. In the
(11:17):
autumn of nineteen, with the contract for Theta Barra in place,
filming for a Fool there was could finally get underway.
The picture was shot in part on location on the
Florida coast at St. Augustine, and right out of the
gate there were some interesting problems. The cast and crew
for the film were sent down to the location along
the Atlantic coast on a steamer that was a German
(11:41):
steamer it was called the Essen. Because World War One
was freshly underway, this raised some concern. They also were
not flying a U. S flag, which apparently was part
of the problem. The British Navy stopped them, and things
got more tricky because Theta's co star, Edward Jose answered
questions that had been posed to him in German by
(12:01):
also speaking German. He was fluent and that was just
the natural way to do it. But this made the
British utterly convinced that they had trapped a boat full,
perhaps of spies or other operatives, and it took a
lot of frantic explaining and finally a cable from the
studio to get things smoothed over just so they could
get to the shooting location. Even once they were on
(12:23):
location and filming started, none of this project was the
glamorous scenario that Theta had envisioned. There was a huge
crowd of onlookers that had come to see a movie
being made at the pier where she shot her first scene.
The early makeup for film was not something that looked
good in real life, so she felt like she was
being gawcked at while also not feeling pretty at all.
(12:47):
The whole thing was harrowing. Bar a later set of
the moment quote, the whole world seemed to have turned
into human eyes. I trembled, I shook, I all but
died right there on the dock. She so had to
wear a bathing suit in the film, and she was
so mortified by that that she almost quit. She didn't
need to be worried, though. Even though she wore this
(13:08):
bathing suit for the shot, there were objections from the
sensors and that led to that scene being cut out. Yeah,
that was a time where there were places you could
still get arrested for wearing a bathing suit because it
was seen as obscene. The entire transition into film acting
was really incredibly stressful for theta She did not get
(13:30):
to rehearse, and a lot of the earliest scenes she
shot are kind of extra pantomimey because of course these
are all silent. You can watch the film online easily
enough and see for yourself. Even after filming, there was
more work and more than theta Bara had expected. As
the film was being edited, Edward Jose got in a
(13:50):
contract dispute with Fox, and he left the studio and
refused to do any promotion. For a fool there was
so suddenly this total newcome or was the only person
they had to promote the film is one of its leads.
The studio had already been working on ways to turn
theta into a sensation, but now all the eggs had
(14:11):
to be in one basket, So the studio created a
whole biography of her. Uh. They had actually been working
on it while filming was going on, and the story
they ended up with was a doozy and it was
completely captivating to kind of everyone but for various reasons.
(14:31):
But they also didn't know if this was going to
work at first. This was such an outlandish tale and
it was so overboard in so many ways as you
were going to see because we'll walk you through it,
that there was concerned that no one would buy it.
It was just too sensational. So the PR department put
together a press conference that was really a big stunt.
(14:52):
So the framing of this bogus events was that it
was for the first run of press before the premiere
of A fool there was the studio was going to
have an event in Chicago and invite us select group
of reporters. The team turned a hotel meeting room into
an Egyptian fantasy just to set the stage for the
introduction of Theda Bara to the world. Al Selig and
(15:15):
John Goldfrapp worked for the studio as its public relations team,
and while mingling with the assembled reporters, they talked about
how Barrow was the toast of Paris and what a
fine she was, and how excited they were to be
debuting her talent in the US. Again, she had never
even been to Paris. According to their story, which was
(15:37):
presented to members of the press before the introduction of
Fox's new thrilling talent, her mother was a French actress
named Theta de Leze, and her father, Giuseppe Barra, was
a sculptor from Italy. To give Theodosia's new persona an
entirely new level of exoticism, she was born quote in
(15:57):
the shadow of the Pyramids. This happened after her mother
had met her father while touring in Egypt. Even the
fake parent meet cute was sort of needlessly, in my opinion, dramatic.
According to it, Deleas had found the sculptor wandering and
lost in the sands of Egypt, disoriented and having abandoned
everything he had as he wandered the desert. G Seppe
(16:21):
was saved by delease and they fell in love, and
they lived in a tent near the Sphinx. So if
this sounds ridiculous. Braced yourselves because this story went even further.
There was a foolish account of Theta's early life in
the desert, with dialogue written as though it had been
captured by the actor. Wistfully remembering her childhood, describing their
(16:45):
tent home as quote like the Garden of Eden, she
described how her mother had taught her about acting while
her father had educated her in art, and after describing
this early, totally fictional homeschooling, she would end with quote
and through the instruction of both, I learned the Symphony
of the Soul. When Theta was still a child. According
(17:08):
to this story, her parents moved from Egypt to Paris.
And just for clarity, this is not her saying these things.
These are pressed people claiming these quotes were from It
was all very ridiculous. According to the studio story, Bara
performed with all of the noteworthy theatrical companies of Paris,
(17:28):
including with actor Jane Hodding at the Grandagno which we
have an entire episode on the Gymnas and the Antoine
Selling and Goldfrapp just gushed to the attending members of
the press that Theota had this massive following in Paris
and that she had been discovered there by Frank Powell.
Since this press event took place in January of nineteen fifteen,
(17:51):
it offered the Fox pr team and opportunity to use
the events of World War One to further elaborate on
Baras arrive in the United States. When Germany had declared
war on Russia, France, and Belgium in August of nineteen
four Powell had quickly moved to escape Paris, and he
took this newly discovered talent with him. After all of
(18:14):
this incredibly thrilling exposition to explain to reporters just who
exactly they were about to meet, this velvet curtain was
opened and there sat the enthralling Theda Bara, making her
debut to the world. She was seated on a chaise
lounge that was covered in tiger skins, and her incredibly
(18:34):
pale skin and jet black hair made her look like
she came from another country or culture, but also a
little bit otherworldly in a more mystical sense, right in
line with this vampiric character she was playing. In a
fool there was although this was a pressor, there was
no Q and a session. Theda Bara gave a series
of statements for reporters to quote, and these statements were very,
(18:57):
very well worded, more more than one might anticipate from
an actor who had only just moved to the United
States and supposedly didn't grow up speaking English. That did
not seem to trouble the attendees, though THETA said things like, quote,
I hope I have succeeded in depicting the complex emotions
of this woman as vividly as they have appealed to me. Ah.
(19:22):
But there was this whole double angle being played by
Selling and Goldfrapp in all of this. Once Theda had
given all of these statements, the press conference ended and
the room was cleared. However, one carefully selected reporter was
allowed to stay like just under the guys, like they
didn't rush her out, and that was Luella Parsons, who
(19:42):
of course would go on to become a very famous
Hollywood gossip columnist. But that day, when she was still
a Cub reporter, they kind of picked her because she
was green, and she got to witness Theota barrow whipping
off all of the heavy velvets and furs and veils
that she had been wearing as part of this act
and running to a window to throw it open, and
(20:03):
dropping the accent she had been using throughout the presser
as she groaned, give me air. This is a genius
move on the part of Fox's PR team. Sell again.
Gold Wrapp knew that a lot of the old school
reporters in the room would never buy this whole yarn
they had spun regarding Barre's backstory. Some reporters even recognized
(20:25):
her as Theodosia to cop it from her days in
the theater, but simultaneously ensuring that world would get out
that this was all in act, they kept Theota's name
in the papers. Some papers ran straight stories that relayed
the outlandish details they've been told that day as though
they were fact, while others mocked the papers that did that,
(20:47):
And yet others wrote pieces pondering what the truth really was.
So she became a celebrity before anyone even saw her film.
So smart, so manipulative, but so smart. As an aside,
this type of revising and rewriting of a person's life
to create essentially a new character that they played as
their public persona was actually pretty common. It was a
(21:10):
very successful way to drum up public interest in stars
and consequently to drive box office numbers up. But it
was also done obviously with zero consideration or awareness of
things like cultural appropriation. We mentioned earlier that this was
really a play on like this penchant for exoticism that
people had, where they really were not thinking about cultures
(21:32):
as anything but kind of things they could pick and
choose from as points of interest. And just as Theta
Borrow was allegedly a blend of French and Arab characteristics
as plucked not from reality but from the imaginations of
studio executives, a lot of other actors had that same transformation.
For example, Josephine M. Workman, a young woman from California,
(21:55):
was re christened as Princess Mona Dark Feather by Bison
Motion Pictures. While Workman's paternal grandmother was House Pueblo, it
does not appear that any real cultural connection was ever
integrated into that fictional persona of Dark Feather, although Workman
became the go to choice when a film needed to
fill Native American roles for women. This is just one example,
(22:18):
but there are so many similar stories in early film history.
So while Theta Borrow was one of the biggest stars
to have such a transformation, she was really not an
outlier in the least. The title card for bars debut
film reads William Fox presents a fool There was a
psychological drama by Porter Emerson Brown, And then the next
(22:41):
card features a poem that reads, a fool there was,
and he made his prayer even as you and I
to a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.
We called her the woman who did not care, but
the fool. He called her his lady fair, even as
you and I. So that the author is not mentioned,
that poem is the opening of a piece also called
(23:04):
The Vampire, which was written by Rudyard Kipling. It was
quite famous at the time, and that poem was written
to a company a painting that had been made by
Kipling's cousin, Philip Burne Jones, which was also called The Vampire.
The painting, which was inspired by bram Stoker's Dracula, shows
a dark haired woman sitting on the edge of a bed,
leaning over a man who appears unconscious with his limbs
(23:26):
splayed out, and that painting led to the poem, and
then led to a play and a book by Porter
Emerson Brown, and then to the screenplay and the cast
is introduced one by one in the opening credits at
a pace that most modern viewers would find almost confusingly slow.
I know, I've watched a couple of very old films
(23:49):
lately where I've been like, man' this is taking so long. Yes,
it's like, uh, they introduced the fool and Jose's character
and then it's like a full minute behalf of his character,
like on a boat waving. That's seems a little a
little pokey by our usual editing today. Yeah. So, Miss
(24:10):
Theoto Bara is introduced as the Vampire in her first shot,
the one that was so challenging for her to film.
She's wearing a striking outfit consisting of a black blouse
and a dramatic striped skirt and an angled hat. She's
paler than anyone else in the film. But though her
character is called the Vampire, and based on that description
(24:31):
that Tracy just gave, it might seem that she was
being portrayed as an actual vampire. And though her victim
goes just as mad as Renfield, this is not an
actual vampire tale. Rather, it is the story of a
woman who is so powerfully attractive and so void of
compassion or morality that she drains men dry before moving
(24:55):
on to the next to illustrate just how cold her
character is. In one scene, a former lover she has
recently left shows up where she is and dies by
suicide in front of her. That actual death is not
shown on screen. The film cuts abruptly, and then it's
followed by a scene where two men are discussing how
(25:16):
the woman laughed demonically when this young man took his life.
The main plot of the film features a character who's
a lawyer and a diplomat who has known both as
the Full and by his character's named John Skyler, who's
a good family man until he's lured away by the vampire,
who steals him from his family in a calculated scheme.
(25:37):
Skyler has chosen to be envoy to Great Britain, and
his wife was set to go with him until her
sister became ill in an accident. The successful man was
now traveling alone. When the vampire reads at this important
trip being undertaken by an important man, she arranges the
sail on the same ship, and that's where she draws
(25:59):
him in. So the audience doesn't actually see anything especially
sexual here, although for a time, there's some flirting that
was probably borderline scandalous at the time. Instead, after the
two of them meet, the film jumps forward two months
in time to see them living as a couple in Europe,
and the plot plays out from there, with Skylar's dutiful
(26:21):
wife learning of this affair and Skylar very visibly losing
his vitality and losing everything in his life, his job,
his family, et cetera. Unable to tear himself away from
the vampire, he has shown drinking more and more heavily
until he is barely recognizable as the man from the
beginning of the sixty five minute picture. Sita is cool
(26:45):
and glamorous throughout the picture, even as she does progressively
uglier and uglier things. And her large eyes were rimmed
with a halo of coal, and this was a look
that became her trademarks throughout her career. And for all
of this she was dressed exquisitely. We'll talk about the
public and critical reception to the film and theta after
(27:06):
we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed
in history class going. When a Fool There Was was released,
audiences loved Theda Bara. She intrigued them, She scared them,
(27:27):
She enthralled them. It seems just as her character, the
vampire had enthralled John Schuyler and critics were also very
enthusiastic about this newcomer. The film was called bold and
relentless by the New York Dramatic Mirror, and The New
York Morning Telegraph wrote of Theda Bara that she had
created quote the most revolting but fascinating character that has
(27:49):
appeared upon the screen for some time. Another paper touted
ahead of its run of the film, quote, it is
said that her seductive beauty gives to the role a
realism that is powerful to the extreme. She already had
a degree of celebrity in the weeks leading up to
the film's release, but once it was out, she was
undeniably famous. The film also saved Fox Film Studio, which
(28:14):
went from hosting a debt at the end of fiscal
year nineteen fourteen to making several million dollars in nineteen
fifteen and then clearing the year with more than half
a million after expenses. Not everyone, we should point out,
loved this new style of screen star, and there were
definitely some complaints to the National Board of censorship about
(28:34):
this powerful woman who was using sexuality as a weapon.
There were also complaints about some of her very revealing
costumes and subsequent pictures. That's something that seems a little
bit funny given out trepidations she was to wear a
bathing suit in her first film. If you go looking
for photos of her online, there are some that are
incredibly revealing. Um. And then there were also people who
(28:56):
just could not really separate film from reality and leave
she was actually a professional home wrecker that had just
you know, been using her natural abilities to be caught
on film rather than being a very good actress. And
after she received a letter to that effect from one viewer,
she wrote back that if she were that type of woman,
she would not have to work as an actor. She
(29:18):
also told the press quote, the vampire that I play
is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. You see,
I have the face of the vampire, but the heart
of a feminist. Theta start in forty films over the
next four years, which is incredible to me. This included
salom A, Cleopatra, Sin, the Serpent, and Destruction, among many others.
(29:44):
Her specialty became the so called vamp role, which was
a woman who would lead men to their ruin. That's
still how the word is used today, and it was
really Theta Bara who gave rise to that use. The
first known use of a noun describing such a woman
was in ninet team, so that just was right in
line with Bara's career. The pr team at Fox continued
(30:06):
to feed stories about her to the press to maintain
the mystique of the character of Theta Bara. For example,
they planted a story that her name was an anagram
for the words Arab death. This kind of sensationalism sometimes
clashed with her real life, which was actually quite stable
and pretty conventional. As her fortunes had improved, her brother
(30:28):
Mark moved to New York to live with Theda Lori
and their mother Pauline. Their father, Bernard, stayed behind in
Cincinnati to keep the tailor business going. But the problem
here was that the studio couldn't have pressed you any
interviews at Theta's apartment. It was not nearly dramatic enough.
No one, they thought, wanted to see the devil woman
of the screen surrounded by her loving, close knit family
(30:50):
in a tastefully decorated apartment in Los Angeles, Though, the
studio arrived for her to have a house on West
Adams Boulevard, which was decorated in a style to match
her concocted persona. She allegedly hated that house and sold
it as soon as she could. Yeah. She was no fool, though,
and she played the part when she gave interviews. When
(31:11):
a reporter visited the set of Carmen during filming, Bara
allegedly went full bore in a scene that involved a
fight with another actress, causing a nurse to have to
attend to the co star. It's not clear if this
conflict was staged for the press. The reporter asked questions
about Bara's past, and the actor replied, quote, I live
(31:32):
under the shadow of a tragedy. I want to forget it,
and I want the world I once knew to forget it.
That is the reason I wish the to Barra to
be unknown save for her pictures. Having learned every tick
in the book from Fox pr she told the same
reporter quote, it is predicted I shall die Ino. She's
(31:53):
very good at doing her her uh public persona. She
did not die inwo but in nine her contract with
Fox ended and amid rumors that negotiations were going quite poorly.
The decision was made that it would not be renewed.
You will see that reported as her decision or their decision,
(32:14):
probably both. She did take a role in a stage
play in nineteen twenty called The Blue Flame, which opened
on Broadway in March of that year, but that play
was very, very hokey, and it had flopped. Reviews of
her performance were brutal. Critic Lewis Reid wrote that her
performance was quote not really worth fifteen minutes of time,
(32:34):
and said the play was quote the most terrible play
within the memory of the writer. This play was not
a comedy, but people started going just to laugh at it,
which felt terrible for everyone involved. Theta never managed to
have the theatrical career that she had always dreamed of.
In one Theta married English director Charles Braven in secret.
(32:56):
They did not even publicly acknowledge the marriage for months.
They went to Canada for their honeymoon. They fell in
love with Nova Scotia, and later on they bought land there.
Theta had been in the middle of a vaudeville tour
when the two of them snuck away for the wedding
and then she did not sign up for another one.
Charles and Theta did not always mesh when it came
(33:17):
to their careers. Charles did not think that Theata should
keep working, and he also hated attending public events with her.
But they did seem to have a pretty good understanding
of one another, and they respected one another's needs and
their established careers. Often they would spend weeks at a
time apart as one or the other traveled or worked,
(33:37):
and then they would come back together and live quite happily,
and that was a system that seemed to work really,
really well for their dynamic. After the honeymoon, Theto was
ready to get back to work, but she had a
hard time finding roles without a studio contract, and with
the heyday of her Vamp persona having passed in favor
of more conventional screen stars, bar I just couldn't get
(33:58):
a gig. Finally, after several false starts on other projects,
she made The Unchastened Woman, but the comedy drama about
married life didn't do very well in n s. The
made her last film, which was Madam Mystery. This was
a short directed by Richard Wallace and Stan Laurel. Theoto
(34:20):
was actually quite good at comedy, it turned out, and
producer how Roach wanted her for more in a series,
but Charles didn't like the To doing these films, and
she didn't like it when she saw it. So that
was that. With the contract canceled, Theto was officially retired
from acting, although she did a couple of radio plays
in the nineteen thirties. You can still find Madam Mystery
(34:43):
to watch online and see for yourself. She's got pretty
good comedic timing. It's kind of a pity to me
that she didn't like it, because I I can only
assume after having done a bunch of dramatic stuff, it
just didn't feel right for her to see herself doing
silly things. But she's quite good. You can also find
a Fool there was online easy to watch. However, beyond
(35:05):
that you're going to run into some problems because most
of her films are lost. That's due to a fire
at the Fox Film vault in seven. Compared to most
celebrities of her time, Theta's private life was pretty uneventful.
She never had any affair scandals, never any public mishaps
where she drank too much and did something embarrassing. She
didn't blow all of her fortune. She was financially stable
(35:28):
her entire life after her fame sort of tapered out.
She seemed to love her husband and they seemed genuinely
pretty happy together, even though others found their periods of
separation unconventional. After her retirement, she did as she pleased.
She traveled, sometimes with Charles, sometimes with her mother and
her siblings. Yeah, there's not a lot of info about
(35:49):
her retirement life because she was just kind of chill.
And then she passed on April seven. She died of
stomach cancer. Charles two years later. To sum up the
incredibly powerful allure of Theda Bara and not how much
of it really was just great acting skill, Holly wanted
(36:09):
to close with a quote from Luella Parsons, which she
wrote in late nineteen fifteen, when Theta's fame was really cemented.
Her hair is like the serpent's locks of Medusa. Her
eyes have the cruel cunning of Lucretia Borgia, till now
held up as the world's wickedest woman. Her mouth is
the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, and her hands
(36:30):
are those of the blood bathing Elizabeth Bathory, who slaughtered
young girls that she might bathe in their life blood
and so retain her beauty. Can it be that fate
has reincarnated in Theda Bara the souls of these monsters
of medieval times? Scientists have questioned this most extraordinary of
women to secure fresh evidence to support their half proved
(36:53):
laws of transmigration of souls, but the result has only
been to prove that though Ms Vera is grey eist
delineator of evil types on the stage or screen today,
she is in real life a sweet, wholesome woman who
detests the abnormal. I love that quote so much. When
I stumbled across it, I was like, there's no way,
(37:13):
this isn't how this episode lands. Um It's It's a
great way to sum up exactly what was going on there,
because people did call her the wickedest woman alive, and
the studio, of course, wanted to keep all of that going.
She's a fun one. Do you have listener mail to
take us out? I do. I'm so enjoying the fact
(37:34):
that so many people are writing us about microwaves and cookies.
We've gotten a lot of microwaves and a lot of
cookie emails, and this one is the combo of the two.
This is from our listener Jennifer, who writes Dear Holly
and Tracy. Like many, I have listened to the show
for years and often find myself searching for past episodes
if I want to know more about something I'd come
(37:55):
across in real life. I just listened to your episode
on the history of microwaves and chocolate chip cookies, and
it reminded me of when I was thirteen. My family
and I moved into a house without a stove and
went about a month before we had one. As the
oldest of four children, this was a challenge. My parents
bought a hot plate, but at the time we also
(38:15):
found cake mixes designed to be cooked in the microwave
in special plastic baking pans that were included in the
box along with the mix. Being curious children, we decided
to see what else we could cook in the microwave,
and guess what. My brother figured out how to make
chocolate chip cookies. He reduced the butter in the recipe
and somehow it worked. They weren't the texture we know
(38:38):
as oven baked cookies, but to the four of us kids,
we did not care. We just cared that it meant
our mom couldn't yell at us for eating raw cookie
dough since technically it was cooked, if a bit wet
and chewy. Hearing this episode with both the microwave and
cookies reminded me of that fond memory. So thank you.
My husband swears our six month old will have her
PhD in history since I often list in with her
(39:00):
in the car or while cleaning house. I also want
to thank you for the effort you make to correctly
pronounce names and places in foreign languages. We have friends
from all over the world, and to someone who is
not a native English speaker, they often remark on how
respectful they find it when people make the extra effort
to correctly pronounce something. I hope you'll have a great
rest of your week whenever this may reach you, and
I look forward to the many different topics you will
(39:22):
cover next. As a sidebar, we mess up pronunciations all
the time. We know because people tell us, but we
are always trying our best. It is never because we
just didn't try. We just cavalierier like I don't care, no,
But I love this because it's the perfect combination of
microwaving and cookies. I too have been known to pop
(39:45):
a little dough in the microwave because I just want
warm in addition to sweet. And it's delicious because when
you're uh, you know, hitting like your sugar junkie moment,
you really don't care. Yeah, I don't anyway, I don't know.
I'm discerning. It kind of made me think about when
I was in massage school. I think that's come up
(40:06):
a couple of times on the show. Lately. I was
staying in this cabin that belonged to family friends, and
I was only there a couple of days a week,
but my options for cooking were a hot plate and
a microwave, and also there were bears, so I couldn't
leave anything uh that might attract bears to bash through
(40:27):
the tour into the thing. It was a very particular
style of food that I hate while I was there. Yeah, yeah,
if you would like to write to us and shared
the many recipes you perhaps invented for the microwave as
a child, listen, this is how we got that amazing
meat loaf recipe. I'm down for it. Everybody sent us
(40:48):
your weird cookie recipes. I feel like I've just doomed
us to an avalanche. But that's great, best kind. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You
can also find us on any social media platform as
Missed in History And if you have not subscribed to
the show, you can do that right this minute if
you want. Wherever you are listening the I heart radio
(41:09):
app or any other podcast listener, you can just subscribe
right there. We hope you do, and uh, we'll see
you next time around. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Frying and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Today we're
going to talk about someone I love in history, which
is Theda Bara, who is often referenced as the first
(00:23):
sex symbol or the first celebrity to have an entire
persona crafted by a PR team. Photos of her are
pretty synonymous with the word vamp. I know. Tracy mentioned
to me that she didn't have instant name recognition, but
the second she saw a picture, she's like, oh, that
that person, And a hundred years later, pictures of her
(00:44):
still have a certain mysterious appeal. But she was a
very different person I think that most people might know.
And it always cracks me up a little when people
kind of model their look after her, and I'm like, yeah,
but you know, she was actually pretty um So today
I thought it would be interesting to look at how
(01:05):
this early film celebrity was basically created through careful planning
by a PR team, and how the real woman was
a whole lot different from that faux persona that they
made up. You had to start with totally different name,
She was born Theodosia Goodman in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July
twenty nine five. Her parents were Bernard Goodman and Pauline
(01:28):
Louise Friends was Dick Cope. Bernard was originally from Horzella,
Poland and worked as a tailor. Pauline's father was French,
her mother was German, although she had been born and
grew up in Switzerland and worked as a wig maker.
Bernard and Pauline got married in eighteen eighty two, and
Theodosia was their first child. Then in eight they had
(01:50):
a son named Mark, and then in eighteen nine seven,
Bernard and Pauline had another daughter named Esther, who would
eventually go by Lorie. Theodosia was named after Aaron Burr's daughter,
who we have an episode on. Yeah, she's some versions
of her name. You'll see Burr as a middle name,
and I never was able to verify whether that was
(02:10):
true or maybe a little confused when people noted that
she was named for Theodosia, um Auto completed that middle
name right. Her childhood, though, was a pretty comfortable one.
The good Men's lived in an affluent neighborhood, and Theodosia
Mark and Laurie were all quite close. They had two
women who worked for them as house staff named Anna
(02:32):
Tuson egg and Ida day Birth and Theodosia loved to read,
and she would often opt to do that over any
other activity, but she was not a quiet, bookish child
because she could also be a handful. She frequently pilfered
her mother's closet to create elaborate dress up ensembles, and
she was prone to getting all dressed up in those
(02:52):
and then running away from home. She was so likely
to run off when she was still quite small that
her parents had to have a new tall fence specially
installed around their yard. As she grew up, Theodosia's love
for dress up evolved into a desire to stage tableau
that was a popular parlor entertainment at the time. She
(03:13):
would recreate scene after scene and perform recitations to go
with these scenes. There's no surprise this led her to
want to get involved in acting. Soon she was staging
her own productions in a neighbor's barn. She continued to
act as she grew into her teenage years. She read
everything she could about the actors of the day. She
(03:34):
was really focused on this I find this very charming
as somebody who put on plays in the basement of
the family home. Oh yeah, Oh, I can't teachers into
letting me do full blown like multi act puppet shows
in elementary school. So um. It's interesting because she was
obsessed with the idea of actors and acting at a
(03:56):
time when like stage actors were really the thing, but
there was some transition going onto film, and she apparently
read like every article she could about everything they did
in their day to day lives. Like she was that
kid that was like could tell you everything that like
any given actor of the day, like to eat, like
(04:16):
to where she was that kid. Theodosia, who was known
to her friends largely as Theo, attended Walnut Hills High
School starting in eight She worked on the school paper
and she joined the drama club, and she was known
always for her ambition to go into acting as a career.
After graduating high school in nineteen o three, she attended
(04:38):
University of Cincinnati for two years, but at that point
she was starting to feel frustrated. Glee club, which she
was a part of, did not offer her the theatrical
outlet that she really longed for, and she frankly wanted
more than she felt like Cincinnati had to offer, so
in nineteen o five, at the age of twenty, Theo
decided to pursue a career on the stage. In that effort,
(05:01):
she moved to New York City, and her father was
reportedly not pleased with any of this. Once she got
to New York, Theodosia changed her last name from Goodman
to her mother's maiden name of de Cape. She would
later riff off of this name. She would change out
the vowels, try out different variations. We know that she
(05:21):
lived in Greenwich Village in an apartment just off Washington Square,
but beyond that, we don't know a whole lot in
terms of the specifics of her first couple of years
of New York. The first play she's documented is having
been cast in was the nine eight summer production of
The Devil. She was a minor character in that one.
After that, There's another gap, and then she was part
(05:43):
of the second string touring company for a musical called
The Quaker Girl. She was paid twenty five dollars a
week initially, although after some pretty bad reviews, her salary
was reduced to eighteen dollars a week, and then she
left the troop. Those reviews were quite scathing, things about
how really abysmal her French accent was and how even
(06:04):
like a five year old wouldn't be confused or convinced
they were mean. THEO continued to pursue acting, and she
kept taking parts in touring companies, but that was not
at all to her liking life on the road. The
tight quarters shared with other performers and the decidedly non
luxurious accommodations were things that she would later describe as
(06:26):
quote unpleasant associations. This was just not the acting career
she had envisioned. She left a touring company that was
running a farce called Just Like John in nineteen and
at that point she went back to New York. Her mother, Pauline,
and her teenage sister Laurie soon joined her there, and
just as she was feeling her most frustrated and dejected
(06:49):
over what seemed like a career that would never happen,
another bad thing happened, which is that the apartment she
shared with her mother and sister had a fire, and
it basically was unlivable. It burned out. They were able
to get by thanks to insurance money, but there was
this very real concern kind of looming over the whole thing,
that Theodosia's dreams were just not going to work out.
(07:10):
In late nineteen fourteen, Theo was approached by a man
who asked her if she might want to try being
in movies. The man who approached her was Frank Powell.
Powell hailed from Ontario, Canada, and had become an actor
himself before transitioning into the director's chair. He had worked
for path A Pictures before Fox lured him away from them,
(07:32):
and it was just before he started at Fox that
he saw Theo and saw something in her that he
thought might be great for film. There's no record of
the specific place where the two of them had this
first conversation. This was, of course a time when the
movie industry was in its infancy, but it already had
some established starts like Mary Pickford. A career in film
(07:54):
was not really something Theodosia had been pursuing. According to
her later accounts of being discus covered, she saw herself
as a stage actress. She wanted Broadway, and she was
not particularly interested in jumping into the still fairly new
medium of moving pictures. But at the same time, she
had to acknowledge that her theater career was not exactly
(08:16):
going gangbusters. She was also thirty, so she was starting
to hit the point where she was seen as too
old for most of the lead roles that she wanted. Initially,
she was curvy, and that figure had fallen out of favor.
People were looking more for longer, leaner physique. So she
gambled and she took Fred Powell at his word on this. Yes,
(08:38):
I want to talk about her as a curvy person
in our behind the scenes. Yeah, because I really think
she looks quite thin and most of her pictures. But
the first project that Frank Powell put the O in
was actually a film called The Stain, which he made
while he was still finishing up his contract at path A.
(08:59):
The Nosha was cast in just a tiny roll. This
was really her screen test. Powell made sure that she
was positioned near the camera so that he could see
how she played on screen, and he was very pleased
after that. William Fox, the head of the studio, also
reviewed the footage and liked it, and so sat down
with Theo for an interview. Both men thought that she
(09:21):
was right for a very unusual and difficult to cast
role they were working on, and they offered her a
five year contract at the studio at a rate of
one hundred dollars per week. Theo negotiated that up to
a hundred and fifty dollars per week before she signed,
and that is how an unknown landed a leading role
in the upcoming project called A Fool There Was for
(09:43):
Fox Film Company. The studio, though also knew this was
a gamble. Theodosia's co star in the picture was Edward
Jose who was a famous Broadway actor at the time,
so casting this complete newcomer to film was something that
William Fox, who the head of Fox Films, was concerned about.
So the solution was to construct this really alluring persona
(10:07):
for her, and her name had been the first to go.
She was going by Theodosia to cape or to cop It, or,
as we said, many other variations she tried out. None
of them were really singing, So after considering her nicknames
of Theo and Teddy, which her family members also sometimes
called her, they landed another nickname, Theta, and decided that
(10:30):
was the one. And then for the last name, they
wanted something far easier than any of the variations on
to cop it or to cape, and her maternal grandfather
had been named Francois Barang and that last name was
shortened to Bearra. Is it quick aside. You'll see different
versions of how this played out. How much of it
was her idea versus the studios, Which studio executives kept
(10:52):
credit for which pieces, But I'm calling it a group
effort because there are so many different versions. So her
name was figured out and rendered on that Fox contract.
It was time to get to work and we will
talk about that. After a quick sponsor break. In the
(11:17):
autumn of nineteen, with the contract for Theta Barra in place,
filming for a Fool there was could finally get underway.
The picture was shot in part on location on the
Florida coast at St. Augustine, and right out of the
gate there were some interesting problems. The cast and crew
for the film were sent down to the location along
the Atlantic coast on a steamer that was a German
(11:41):
steamer it was called the Essen. Because World War One
was freshly underway, this raised some concern. They also were
not flying a U. S flag, which apparently was part
of the problem. The British Navy stopped them, and things
got more tricky because Theta's co star, Edward Jose answered
questions that had been posed to him in German by
(12:01):
also speaking German. He was fluent and that was just
the natural way to do it. But this made the
British utterly convinced that they had trapped a boat full,
perhaps of spies or other operatives, and it took a
lot of frantic explaining and finally a cable from the
studio to get things smoothed over just so they could
get to the shooting location. Even once they were on
(12:23):
location and filming started, none of this project was the
glamorous scenario that Theta had envisioned. There was a huge
crowd of onlookers that had come to see a movie
being made at the pier where she shot her first scene.
The early makeup for film was not something that looked
good in real life, so she felt like she was
being gawcked at while also not feeling pretty at all.
(12:47):
The whole thing was harrowing. Bar a later set of
the moment quote, the whole world seemed to have turned
into human eyes. I trembled, I shook, I all but
died right there on the dock. She so had to
wear a bathing suit in the film, and she was
so mortified by that that she almost quit. She didn't
need to be worried, though. Even though she wore this
(13:08):
bathing suit for the shot, there were objections from the
sensors and that led to that scene being cut out. Yeah,
that was a time where there were places you could
still get arrested for wearing a bathing suit because it
was seen as obscene. The entire transition into film acting
was really incredibly stressful for theta She did not get
(13:30):
to rehearse, and a lot of the earliest scenes she
shot are kind of extra pantomimey because of course these
are all silent. You can watch the film online easily
enough and see for yourself. Even after filming, there was
more work and more than theta Bara had expected. As
the film was being edited, Edward Jose got in a
(13:50):
contract dispute with Fox, and he left the studio and
refused to do any promotion. For a fool there was
so suddenly this total newcome or was the only person
they had to promote the film is one of its leads.
The studio had already been working on ways to turn
theta into a sensation, but now all the eggs had
(14:11):
to be in one basket, So the studio created a
whole biography of her. Uh. They had actually been working
on it while filming was going on, and the story
they ended up with was a doozy and it was
completely captivating to kind of everyone but for various reasons.
(14:31):
But they also didn't know if this was going to
work at first. This was such an outlandish tale and
it was so overboard in so many ways as you
were going to see because we'll walk you through it,
that there was concerned that no one would buy it.
It was just too sensational. So the PR department put
together a press conference that was really a big stunt.
(14:52):
So the framing of this bogus events was that it
was for the first run of press before the premiere
of A fool there was the studio was going to
have an event in Chicago and invite us select group
of reporters. The team turned a hotel meeting room into
an Egyptian fantasy just to set the stage for the
introduction of Theda Bara to the world. Al Selig and
(15:15):
John Goldfrapp worked for the studio as its public relations team,
and while mingling with the assembled reporters, they talked about
how Barrow was the toast of Paris and what a
fine she was, and how excited they were to be
debuting her talent in the US. Again, she had never
even been to Paris. According to their story, which was
(15:37):
presented to members of the press before the introduction of
Fox's new thrilling talent, her mother was a French actress
named Theta de Leze, and her father, Giuseppe Barra, was
a sculptor from Italy. To give Theodosia's new persona an
entirely new level of exoticism, she was born quote in
(15:57):
the shadow of the Pyramids. This happened after her mother
had met her father while touring in Egypt. Even the
fake parent meet cute was sort of needlessly, in my opinion, dramatic.
According to it, Deleas had found the sculptor wandering and
lost in the sands of Egypt, disoriented and having abandoned
everything he had as he wandered the desert. G Seppe
(16:21):
was saved by delease and they fell in love, and
they lived in a tent near the Sphinx. So if
this sounds ridiculous. Braced yourselves because this story went even further.
There was a foolish account of Theta's early life in
the desert, with dialogue written as though it had been
captured by the actor. Wistfully remembering her childhood, describing their
(16:45):
tent home as quote like the Garden of Eden, she
described how her mother had taught her about acting while
her father had educated her in art, and after describing
this early, totally fictional homeschooling, she would end with quote
and through the instruction of both, I learned the Symphony
of the Soul. When Theta was still a child. According
(17:08):
to this story, her parents moved from Egypt to Paris.
And just for clarity, this is not her saying these things.
These are pressed people claiming these quotes were from It
was all very ridiculous. According to the studio story, Bara
performed with all of the noteworthy theatrical companies of Paris,
(17:28):
including with actor Jane Hodding at the Grandagno which we
have an entire episode on the Gymnas and the Antoine
Selling and Goldfrapp just gushed to the attending members of
the press that Theota had this massive following in Paris
and that she had been discovered there by Frank Powell.
Since this press event took place in January of nineteen fifteen,
(17:51):
it offered the Fox pr team and opportunity to use
the events of World War One to further elaborate on
Baras arrive in the United States. When Germany had declared
war on Russia, France, and Belgium in August of nineteen
four Powell had quickly moved to escape Paris, and he
took this newly discovered talent with him. After all of
(18:14):
this incredibly thrilling exposition to explain to reporters just who
exactly they were about to meet, this velvet curtain was
opened and there sat the enthralling Theda Bara, making her
debut to the world. She was seated on a chaise
lounge that was covered in tiger skins, and her incredibly
(18:34):
pale skin and jet black hair made her look like
she came from another country or culture, but also a
little bit otherworldly in a more mystical sense, right in
line with this vampiric character she was playing. In a
fool there was although this was a pressor, there was
no Q and a session. Theda Bara gave a series
of statements for reporters to quote, and these statements were very,
(18:57):
very well worded, more more than one might anticipate from
an actor who had only just moved to the United
States and supposedly didn't grow up speaking English. That did
not seem to trouble the attendees, though THETA said things like, quote,
I hope I have succeeded in depicting the complex emotions
of this woman as vividly as they have appealed to me. Ah.
(19:22):
But there was this whole double angle being played by
Selling and Goldfrapp in all of this. Once Theda had
given all of these statements, the press conference ended and
the room was cleared. However, one carefully selected reporter was
allowed to stay like just under the guys, like they
didn't rush her out, and that was Luella Parsons, who
(19:42):
of course would go on to become a very famous
Hollywood gossip columnist. But that day, when she was still
a Cub reporter, they kind of picked her because she
was green, and she got to witness Theota barrow whipping
off all of the heavy velvets and furs and veils
that she had been wearing as part of this act
and running to a window to throw it open, and
(20:03):
dropping the accent she had been using throughout the presser
as she groaned, give me air. This is a genius
move on the part of Fox's PR team. Sell again.
Gold Wrapp knew that a lot of the old school
reporters in the room would never buy this whole yarn
they had spun regarding Barre's backstory. Some reporters even recognized
(20:25):
her as Theodosia to cop it from her days in
the theater, but simultaneously ensuring that world would get out
that this was all in act, they kept Theota's name
in the papers. Some papers ran straight stories that relayed
the outlandish details they've been told that day as though
they were fact, while others mocked the papers that did that,
(20:47):
And yet others wrote pieces pondering what the truth really was.
So she became a celebrity before anyone even saw her film.
So smart, so manipulative, but so smart. As an aside,
this type of revising and rewriting of a person's life
to create essentially a new character that they played as
their public persona was actually pretty common. It was a
(21:10):
very successful way to drum up public interest in stars
and consequently to drive box office numbers up. But it
was also done obviously with zero consideration or awareness of
things like cultural appropriation. We mentioned earlier that this was
really a play on like this penchant for exoticism that
people had, where they really were not thinking about cultures
(21:32):
as anything but kind of things they could pick and
choose from as points of interest. And just as Theta
Borrow was allegedly a blend of French and Arab characteristics
as plucked not from reality but from the imaginations of
studio executives, a lot of other actors had that same transformation.
For example, Josephine M. Workman, a young woman from California,
(21:55):
was re christened as Princess Mona Dark Feather by Bison
Motion Pictures. While Workman's paternal grandmother was House Pueblo, it
does not appear that any real cultural connection was ever
integrated into that fictional persona of Dark Feather, although Workman
became the go to choice when a film needed to
fill Native American roles for women. This is just one example,
(22:18):
but there are so many similar stories in early film history.
So while Theta Borrow was one of the biggest stars
to have such a transformation, she was really not an
outlier in the least. The title card for bars debut
film reads William Fox presents a fool There was a
psychological drama by Porter Emerson Brown, And then the next
(22:41):
card features a poem that reads, a fool there was,
and he made his prayer even as you and I
to a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.
We called her the woman who did not care, but
the fool. He called her his lady fair, even as
you and I. So that the author is not mentioned,
that poem is the opening of a piece also called
(23:04):
The Vampire, which was written by Rudyard Kipling. It was
quite famous at the time, and that poem was written
to a company a painting that had been made by
Kipling's cousin, Philip Burne Jones, which was also called The Vampire.
The painting, which was inspired by bram Stoker's Dracula, shows
a dark haired woman sitting on the edge of a bed,
leaning over a man who appears unconscious with his limbs
(23:26):
splayed out, and that painting led to the poem, and
then led to a play and a book by Porter
Emerson Brown, and then to the screenplay and the cast
is introduced one by one in the opening credits at
a pace that most modern viewers would find almost confusingly slow.
I know, I've watched a couple of very old films
(23:49):
lately where I've been like, man' this is taking so long. Yes,
it's like, uh, they introduced the fool and Jose's character
and then it's like a full minute behalf of his character,
like on a boat waving. That's seems a little a
little pokey by our usual editing today. Yeah. So, Miss
(24:10):
Theoto Bara is introduced as the Vampire in her first shot,
the one that was so challenging for her to film.
She's wearing a striking outfit consisting of a black blouse
and a dramatic striped skirt and an angled hat. She's
paler than anyone else in the film. But though her
character is called the Vampire, and based on that description
(24:31):
that Tracy just gave, it might seem that she was
being portrayed as an actual vampire. And though her victim
goes just as mad as Renfield, this is not an
actual vampire tale. Rather, it is the story of a
woman who is so powerfully attractive and so void of
compassion or morality that she drains men dry before moving
(24:55):
on to the next to illustrate just how cold her
character is. In one scene, a former lover she has
recently left shows up where she is and dies by
suicide in front of her. That actual death is not
shown on screen. The film cuts abruptly, and then it's
followed by a scene where two men are discussing how
(25:16):
the woman laughed demonically when this young man took his life.
The main plot of the film features a character who's
a lawyer and a diplomat who has known both as
the Full and by his character's named John Skyler, who's
a good family man until he's lured away by the vampire,
who steals him from his family in a calculated scheme.
(25:37):
Skyler has chosen to be envoy to Great Britain, and
his wife was set to go with him until her
sister became ill in an accident. The successful man was
now traveling alone. When the vampire reads at this important
trip being undertaken by an important man, she arranges the
sail on the same ship, and that's where she draws
(25:59):
him in. So the audience doesn't actually see anything especially
sexual here, although for a time, there's some flirting that
was probably borderline scandalous at the time. Instead, after the
two of them meet, the film jumps forward two months
in time to see them living as a couple in Europe,
and the plot plays out from there, with Skylar's dutiful
(26:21):
wife learning of this affair and Skylar very visibly losing
his vitality and losing everything in his life, his job,
his family, et cetera. Unable to tear himself away from
the vampire, he has shown drinking more and more heavily
until he is barely recognizable as the man from the
beginning of the sixty five minute picture. Sita is cool
(26:45):
and glamorous throughout the picture, even as she does progressively
uglier and uglier things. And her large eyes were rimmed
with a halo of coal, and this was a look
that became her trademarks throughout her career. And for all
of this she was dressed exquisitely. We'll talk about the
public and critical reception to the film and theta after
(27:06):
we hear from the sponsors that keep stuff you missed
in history class going. When a Fool There Was was released,
audiences loved Theda Bara. She intrigued them, She scared them,
(27:27):
She enthralled them. It seems just as her character, the
vampire had enthralled John Schuyler and critics were also very
enthusiastic about this newcomer. The film was called bold and
relentless by the New York Dramatic Mirror, and The New
York Morning Telegraph wrote of Theda Bara that she had
created quote the most revolting but fascinating character that has
(27:49):
appeared upon the screen for some time. Another paper touted
ahead of its run of the film, quote, it is
said that her seductive beauty gives to the role a
realism that is powerful to the extreme. She already had
a degree of celebrity in the weeks leading up to
the film's release, but once it was out, she was
undeniably famous. The film also saved Fox Film Studio, which
(28:14):
went from hosting a debt at the end of fiscal
year nineteen fourteen to making several million dollars in nineteen
fifteen and then clearing the year with more than half
a million after expenses. Not everyone, we should point out,
loved this new style of screen star, and there were
definitely some complaints to the National Board of censorship about
(28:34):
this powerful woman who was using sexuality as a weapon.
There were also complaints about some of her very revealing
costumes and subsequent pictures. That's something that seems a little
bit funny given out trepidations she was to wear a
bathing suit in her first film. If you go looking
for photos of her online, there are some that are
incredibly revealing. Um. And then there were also people who
(28:56):
just could not really separate film from reality and leave
she was actually a professional home wrecker that had just
you know, been using her natural abilities to be caught
on film rather than being a very good actress. And
after she received a letter to that effect from one viewer,
she wrote back that if she were that type of woman,
she would not have to work as an actor. She
(29:18):
also told the press quote, the vampire that I play
is the vengeance of my sex upon its exploiters. You see,
I have the face of the vampire, but the heart
of a feminist. Theta start in forty films over the
next four years, which is incredible to me. This included
salom A, Cleopatra, Sin, the Serpent, and Destruction, among many others.
(29:44):
Her specialty became the so called vamp role, which was
a woman who would lead men to their ruin. That's
still how the word is used today, and it was
really Theta Bara who gave rise to that use. The
first known use of a noun describing such a woman
was in ninet team, so that just was right in
line with Bara's career. The pr team at Fox continued
(30:06):
to feed stories about her to the press to maintain
the mystique of the character of Theta Bara. For example,
they planted a story that her name was an anagram
for the words Arab death. This kind of sensationalism sometimes
clashed with her real life, which was actually quite stable
and pretty conventional. As her fortunes had improved, her brother
(30:28):
Mark moved to New York to live with Theda Lori
and their mother Pauline. Their father, Bernard, stayed behind in
Cincinnati to keep the tailor business going. But the problem
here was that the studio couldn't have pressed you any
interviews at Theta's apartment. It was not nearly dramatic enough.
No one, they thought, wanted to see the devil woman
of the screen surrounded by her loving, close knit family
(30:50):
in a tastefully decorated apartment in Los Angeles, Though, the
studio arrived for her to have a house on West
Adams Boulevard, which was decorated in a style to match
her concocted persona. She allegedly hated that house and sold
it as soon as she could. Yeah. She was no fool, though,
and she played the part when she gave interviews. When
(31:11):
a reporter visited the set of Carmen during filming, Bara
allegedly went full bore in a scene that involved a
fight with another actress, causing a nurse to have to
attend to the co star. It's not clear if this
conflict was staged for the press. The reporter asked questions
about Bara's past, and the actor replied, quote, I live
(31:32):
under the shadow of a tragedy. I want to forget it,
and I want the world I once knew to forget it.
That is the reason I wish the to Barra to
be unknown save for her pictures. Having learned every tick
in the book from Fox pr she told the same
reporter quote, it is predicted I shall die Ino. She's
(31:53):
very good at doing her her uh public persona. She
did not die inwo but in nine her contract with
Fox ended and amid rumors that negotiations were going quite poorly.
The decision was made that it would not be renewed.
You will see that reported as her decision or their decision,
(32:14):
probably both. She did take a role in a stage
play in nineteen twenty called The Blue Flame, which opened
on Broadway in March of that year, but that play
was very, very hokey, and it had flopped. Reviews of
her performance were brutal. Critic Lewis Reid wrote that her
performance was quote not really worth fifteen minutes of time,
(32:34):
and said the play was quote the most terrible play
within the memory of the writer. This play was not
a comedy, but people started going just to laugh at it,
which felt terrible for everyone involved. Theta never managed to
have the theatrical career that she had always dreamed of.
In one Theta married English director Charles Braven in secret.
(32:56):
They did not even publicly acknowledge the marriage for months.
They went to Canada for their honeymoon. They fell in
love with Nova Scotia, and later on they bought land there.
Theta had been in the middle of a vaudeville tour
when the two of them snuck away for the wedding
and then she did not sign up for another one.
Charles and Theta did not always mesh when it came
(33:17):
to their careers. Charles did not think that Theata should
keep working, and he also hated attending public events with her.
But they did seem to have a pretty good understanding
of one another, and they respected one another's needs and
their established careers. Often they would spend weeks at a
time apart as one or the other traveled or worked,
(33:37):
and then they would come back together and live quite happily,
and that was a system that seemed to work really,
really well for their dynamic. After the honeymoon, Theto was
ready to get back to work, but she had a
hard time finding roles without a studio contract, and with
the heyday of her Vamp persona having passed in favor
of more conventional screen stars, bar I just couldn't get
(33:58):
a gig. Finally, after several false starts on other projects,
she made The Unchastened Woman, but the comedy drama about
married life didn't do very well in n s. The
made her last film, which was Madam Mystery. This was
a short directed by Richard Wallace and Stan Laurel. Theoto
(34:20):
was actually quite good at comedy, it turned out, and
producer how Roach wanted her for more in a series,
but Charles didn't like the To doing these films, and
she didn't like it when she saw it. So that
was that. With the contract canceled, Theto was officially retired
from acting, although she did a couple of radio plays
in the nineteen thirties. You can still find Madam Mystery
(34:43):
to watch online and see for yourself. She's got pretty
good comedic timing. It's kind of a pity to me
that she didn't like it, because I I can only
assume after having done a bunch of dramatic stuff, it
just didn't feel right for her to see herself doing
silly things. But she's quite good. You can also find
a Fool there was online easy to watch. However, beyond
(35:05):
that you're going to run into some problems because most
of her films are lost. That's due to a fire
at the Fox Film vault in seven. Compared to most
celebrities of her time, Theta's private life was pretty uneventful.
She never had any affair scandals, never any public mishaps
where she drank too much and did something embarrassing. She
didn't blow all of her fortune. She was financially stable
(35:28):
her entire life after her fame sort of tapered out.
She seemed to love her husband and they seemed genuinely
pretty happy together, even though others found their periods of
separation unconventional. After her retirement, she did as she pleased.
She traveled, sometimes with Charles, sometimes with her mother and
her siblings. Yeah, there's not a lot of info about
(35:49):
her retirement life because she was just kind of chill.
And then she passed on April seven. She died of
stomach cancer. Charles two years later. To sum up the
incredibly powerful allure of Theda Bara and not how much
of it really was just great acting skill, Holly wanted
(36:09):
to close with a quote from Luella Parsons, which she
wrote in late nineteen fifteen, when Theta's fame was really cemented.
Her hair is like the serpent's locks of Medusa. Her
eyes have the cruel cunning of Lucretia Borgia, till now
held up as the world's wickedest woman. Her mouth is
the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, and her hands
(36:30):
are those of the blood bathing Elizabeth Bathory, who slaughtered
young girls that she might bathe in their life blood
and so retain her beauty. Can it be that fate
has reincarnated in Theda Bara the souls of these monsters
of medieval times? Scientists have questioned this most extraordinary of
women to secure fresh evidence to support their half proved
(36:53):
laws of transmigration of souls, but the result has only
been to prove that though Ms Vera is grey eist
delineator of evil types on the stage or screen today,
she is in real life a sweet, wholesome woman who
detests the abnormal. I love that quote so much. When
I stumbled across it, I was like, there's no way,
(37:13):
this isn't how this episode lands. Um It's It's a
great way to sum up exactly what was going on there,
because people did call her the wickedest woman alive, and
the studio, of course, wanted to keep all of that going.
She's a fun one. Do you have listener mail to
take us out? I do. I'm so enjoying the fact
(37:34):
that so many people are writing us about microwaves and cookies.
We've gotten a lot of microwaves and a lot of
cookie emails, and this one is the combo of the two.
This is from our listener Jennifer, who writes Dear Holly
and Tracy. Like many, I have listened to the show
for years and often find myself searching for past episodes
if I want to know more about something I'd come
(37:55):
across in real life. I just listened to your episode
on the history of microwaves and chocolate chip cookies, and
it reminded me of when I was thirteen. My family
and I moved into a house without a stove and
went about a month before we had one. As the
oldest of four children, this was a challenge. My parents
bought a hot plate, but at the time we also
(38:15):
found cake mixes designed to be cooked in the microwave
in special plastic baking pans that were included in the
box along with the mix. Being curious children, we decided
to see what else we could cook in the microwave,
and guess what. My brother figured out how to make
chocolate chip cookies. He reduced the butter in the recipe
and somehow it worked. They weren't the texture we know
(38:38):
as oven baked cookies, but to the four of us kids,
we did not care. We just cared that it meant
our mom couldn't yell at us for eating raw cookie
dough since technically it was cooked, if a bit wet
and chewy. Hearing this episode with both the microwave and
cookies reminded me of that fond memory. So thank you.
My husband swears our six month old will have her
PhD in history since I often list in with her
(39:00):
in the car or while cleaning house. I also want
to thank you for the effort you make to correctly
pronounce names and places in foreign languages. We have friends
from all over the world, and to someone who is
not a native English speaker, they often remark on how
respectful they find it when people make the extra effort
to correctly pronounce something. I hope you'll have a great
rest of your week whenever this may reach you, and
I look forward to the many different topics you will
(39:22):
cover next. As a sidebar, we mess up pronunciations all
the time. We know because people tell us, but we
are always trying our best. It is never because we
just didn't try. We just cavalierier like I don't care, no,
But I love this because it's the perfect combination of
microwaving and cookies. I too have been known to pop
(39:45):
a little dough in the microwave because I just want
warm in addition to sweet. And it's delicious because when
you're uh, you know, hitting like your sugar junkie moment,
you really don't care. Yeah, I don't anyway, I don't know.
I'm discerning. It kind of made me think about when
I was in massage school. I think that's come up
(40:06):
a couple of times on the show. Lately. I was
staying in this cabin that belonged to family friends, and
I was only there a couple of days a week,
but my options for cooking were a hot plate and
a microwave, and also there were bears, so I couldn't
leave anything uh that might attract bears to bash through
(40:27):
the tour into the thing. It was a very particular
style of food that I hate while I was there. Yeah, yeah,
if you would like to write to us and shared
the many recipes you perhaps invented for the microwave as
a child, listen, this is how we got that amazing
meat loaf recipe. I'm down for it. Everybody sent us
(40:48):
your weird cookie recipes. I feel like I've just doomed
us to an avalanche. But that's great, best kind. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History podcast at iHeart radio dot com. You
can also find us on any social media platform as
Missed in History And if you have not subscribed to
the show, you can do that right this minute if
you want. Wherever you are listening the I heart radio
(41:09):
app or any other podcast listener, you can just subscribe
right there. We hope you do, and uh, we'll see
you next time around. Stuff you Missed in History Class
is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.