Theda Bara – First Creation of Hollywood’s Sultans of Spin

If you’ve ever wondered how a nice Jewish girl from Cincinnati who was named after Aaron Burr’s daughter became what one newspaper described as “the most fascinating though revolting female character ever created,” have I got a story for you about Theda Bara.

A Shy, Bookish Girl
Theodosia Burr Goodman was born in July of 1885 to a middle-class Jewish family. Her father was a tailor; her mother a wigmaker. She was a shy, bookish girl with a keen interest in theater and film. After graduating from Walnut Hills High School, she spent two years at the University of Cincinnati before dropping out, dyeing her hair black, and moving to New York with dreams of becoming the next big thing.

Her first stage role was at New York’s Garden Theatre in a play titled The Devil in 1908, where she appeared under the stage name Theodosia de Cappet, a tweak to her mother’s maiden name, de Coppet. But it would be 10 years after leaving Ohio in pursuit of her dream before she got her breakout movie role and a new name: Theda Bara. Theda was her childhood nickname, and Bara was shortened from the surname Baranger, a Swiss name on her mother’s side.

At 29, when many actresses saw their prime acting years slipping away, Theda Bara blazed onto Hollywood’s silver screen out of nowhere as the star of a 1915 film titled A Fool There Was. It was the first megahit for Fox Film Corporation, shot at their studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, when moviemaking was centered on the East Coast.

But by 1917, Fox Studios and the rest of the film industry had moved to Los Angeles, where Bara made one of her biggest hits — the epic Cleopatra, reportedly the most expensive movie made up to that point. Over the years, Fox Film Corporation would grow to become what today is known as 20th Century Studios.

Overnight Sensation: A Female Vampire is Born
Overnight, Theodosia Burr Goodman from Cincinnati became “The Vampire.” But this was no blood-sucking, fanged creature who slept in dank coffins. Fox’s creature was a defiantly sexual female vampire, or “vamp,” preying on weak, vulnerable men and destroying their lives, her over-the-top appetites draining them of their very essence.

The final line of A Fool There Was became the stuff of legends when Bara uttered, “Kiss me my fool,” while scattering rose petals over the lifeless body of one of her conquests as if to command him to wake for more. In fact, in one of her publicity stills, she hovers over all that’s left of one hapless victim — his skeleton.

As well as Bara performed on screen, the studio realized they had a problem with their overnight sensation. After all, since audiences had never heard of Theda Bara, why would they pay good money to come see her? So, just like that, America’s first movie publicity campaign was born. Create some juicy fake news, throw in an exotic backstory cooked up by the studio’s Public Relations Department, add some over-the-top schmaltz and hire some imaginative hacks to peddle a good story matching her silent screen image. Not only was Theda Bara filmdom’s first overnight sensation and one of the cinema’s first sex symbols — she became the American film industry’s first totally fabricated movie star.

Glamour, Gossip and the Hollywood PR Machine
The Hollywood gossip mill took off along with Bara. The Fox PR machine planted false stories in the media and invented a mysterious history for their newest sensation. As Addison Nugent wrote in Messy Nessy Chic, “they sold the young Jewish-born starlet as an Arabian woman of mystery, born in Egypt in the shadow of the Sphinx.” And to spice things up, they pitched a story that she was born out of a French artist’s scandalous affair with his Arabian mistress. And that “Theda Bara” was actually an anagram for “Arab Death” — quite a stretch from her solidly middle-class Jewish upbringing in Cincinnati.

Dubbed the “Serpent of the Nile,” she toyed with the press by discussing mysticism and the occult in interviews. She was photographed with crystal balls, snakes, skulls and anything that conjured up campy exoticism in keeping with her image as brooding, beautiful, wanton and utterly heartless. Literally shrouded in mystery, her studio contract required her to wear veils in public and go out only at night. She was forbidden to use public transportation or go to the theaters.

Dressed in silks and furs, and fixing reporters with dark eyes that “could peer into a man’s soul,” she vamped her way through hundreds of carefully-staged press conferences. Some film historians now look back at this as the birth of two of filmdom’s best-known phenomena: the sprawling studio PR department and Hollywood’s sultans of spin — the brash press agents.

Megastar & A Motive for Murder
Somehow, it all worked. The “vamp” was a role Theda Bara played to the hilt from 1915 to 1919. Her dark eyes heavily kohled, her hairstyles dark and sultry, the New York Daily Mirror wrote, “Miss Bara misses no chance for sensuous appeal in her portrayal of the Vampire.”

For four short years, she was Fox Studio’s megastar. At the height of her career, she earned $4,000 a week (roughly $95,555 in 2020 currency) and ranked in the Hollywood hierarchy only behind Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford during the World War I years. Billed by Fox as the wickedest woman in the world, some fans believed Bara truly WAS her fictional character. Women wrote accusing her of being a home wrecker. And one poor soul, on trial for murder, claimed he killed his mother-in-law after seeing one of Bara’s films.

Clothes Make the Vampire
Although the character of the vamp and her history were made out of whole cloth, Bara embraced it all — right down to the psychology of her on-stage wardrobe. She once wrote, “Dress a woman in a long-trained gown that suggests every line of her figure and bares more of her back than proper society allows, and she is immediately stamped as someone to be shunned. The psychology of the long, clinging, revealing robe suggests the sinuous serpent, the patron reptile of the human vampire!”

Period stills show her posed in exotic, risqué outfits that must have had society matrons clutching their pearls and their husbands breaking out into cold sweats. Her long skirts flowed about and between her legs; her bodices were sometimes no more than sequined circles of cloth covering her breasts; and some of her sheer gowns were carefully crafted to cover only the naughty bits. What the public didn’t know, according to Joan Craig’s 2016 memoir, Theda Bara, My Mentor, was that Bara, having learned pattern making from her tailor father and wig making from her mother, designed and created most of her own costumes, including those in Cleopatra. After the Hays Production Code was enacted in 1930, requiring that motion pictures be “wholesome” and “moral,” outfits like Bara’s were banned from the silver screen.

Victim of Her On-Screen Image
Despite the fame and fortune that came her way from playing the wanton woman, Theda Bara eventually grew tired of the charade and of playing the same role time and again. But when she tried to spread her wings and challenge herself with other roles, the movie-going public couldn’t accept her as anything else.

Fox Film Corporation decided not to renew her contract after 1919 when Bara had a falling out with management. By that time, the movie industry had grown to reach a larger audience. And savvy filmmakers like Cecil B. DeMille took advantage of that, cleaning up the vamp image to gain broader audience appeal. Before long, the fabricated Hollywood temptress who lived to drain men of everything they had became the victim of her own successful screen image. As the lure of the vamp disappeared at the close of World War I, Bara vanished from the silver screen.

Outed: “The Vampire-woman I am not”
Long before the dawn of social media, popular fan magazines fed moviegoers’ hunger for celebrity glamour and gossip. And the most popular fan magazine of its day was Photoplay. When a 1920 issue “outed” Bara with the truth of her real-life origins, she confessed, writing, “Always I have been a Charlatan. I became famous for the Vampire-woman I am not,” admitting all the fabulous stories about her were pure fiction, and joking about how they must have required teams of writers working through the night to keep them going.

She abandoned the exotic, erotic costumes and props from earlier publicity photo shoots, opting instead for softer, more feminine outfits and poses. But by 1920, she had parted ways with Fox and her star was fading. Bara took a brief run at the Broadway stage before officially retiring from the movies in 1926 at the age of 41.

Though she wholeheartedly embraced her silent-screen persona of the bad girl who appealed to men’s basest instincts, Theda Bara was, in real life, a fine, upstanding woman who remained happily married to the same man, British film director Charles Brabin, for 34 years. The couple, who owned a summer home overlooking the Bay of Fundy in Nova Scotia, eventually retired to California, where Brabin could continue his work as a director.

It was in late 1954 when Bara began complaining of abdominal pain. After a long stay at California Lutheran Hospital in Los Angeles, she died of stomach cancer in April of 1955 at the age of 69. Her remains lie in a niche in the Great Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Legacy
A good part of Theda Bara’s legacy, much like her carefully curated film persona, remains shrouded in mystery. She never appeared in a talking film. And almost all her silent films are lost, having gone up in flames in a fire that tore through the Fox Company film vaults in 1937, destroying most of its silent film archive. As a result, only a few precious seconds of her most famous film, the 1917 Cleopatra, survive. It was last seen in 1934, when Cecil B. DeMille viewed it for his remake starring Claudette Colbert.

Theda Bara once said, “To be good Is to be forgotten. I’m going to be so bad I’ll always be remembered.” Her debut in A Fool There Was made her one of Hollywood’s first movie stars. Today she is thought of as one of the best actresses in silent film and one of Hollywood’s first sex symbols.

She was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. In 1994, the US Postal Service issued a series of stamps depicting the glamour of the silent-film era, with caricaturist Al Hirschfeld immortalizing Bara on a 29¢ stamp. And New Jersey’s Fort Lee Film Commission dedicated the corner of Main Street and Linwood Avenue, one-time location of the Fox Studios where Bara made many of her greatest films, “Theda Bara Way” in 2006.