CAMP: "A cornucopia of frivolity, incongruity, theatricality, and humour." "A deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavored, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love." "The lie that tells the truth." "Ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical; effeminate or homosexual; pertaining to or characteristic of homosexuals."
Theodosia Goodman grew up in Cincinnati, the child of middle-class Jewish immigrants. Her father was a tailor; her mother kept house. She went to high school, she went to two years of college. She was a middling actress with middling looks, age 30, stuck in the Yiddish theater circuit, with a bit role in the occasional film. She was wholly unremarkable - one of hundreds of women working toward the same end."You say I have the most wicked face of any woman. You say my hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, that my eyes have the cruel cunning of Borgia, that my mouth is the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, that my hands are like the talons of a Circe or the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory. And then you ask me of my soul - you wish to know if it is reflected in my face."
And then, in 1915, totally out of nowhere, she became THE BIGGEST SEX SYMBOL IN THE WORLD. As the star of A Fool There Was, she embodied the cinematic “vamp” - the evil, predatory woman who seduces a man with her dark ways, sucks him dry, and leaves him for ruin.
Her name was no longer Theodosia Goodman, but Theda Bara - an anagram, naturally, for “Arab Death.” Her mother was a French actress, her father was an Italian sculptor, yet she had been born “in the shadow of the Sphinx.” She "dabbled in the Occult"; she "communed with dark spirits". She "had been reincarnated several times" and lunched on lettuce and raw beef... Offscreen, Bara was her cinematic character made flesh: an alluring, vampish creature, occupying the liminal space between this world and the next. Put differently, Bara was the most blatantly absurd and exquisite of the silent-era studios' creations.
She was the larger-than-life actress Vera Charles in the ultimate campfest, Auntie Mame, opposite bosom buddy Roz Russell.Coral Edith Brown (later Browne, 23rd July 1913 – 29th May 1991)
She wore fabulous outfits as Vivien Leigh's gabby confidante in Tenessee Williams's overheated gigolo drama The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.
She was a vicious gossip columnist in a wheelchair in Robert Aldrich's bizarre tale of switching identities, The Legend of Lylah Claire.
She was a predatory lesbian in the Sapphic melodrama about emotional sadomasochists, The Killing of Sister George.
She was a "female heavenly voice" in the ancient-Greece-meets-Malibu musical Xanadu.
And she was married to Vincent Price.
Case closed.
And the fairy came in unto her, and cackled, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Duchess is with thee: fabed art thou among palones.
And when she vardad him, she was troubled at his cackling, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be.
And the fairy cackled unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with Gloria.
And, varda, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and lell forth a homie chavvie, and shalt screech his name Josie.
