Vampire Books Online / To be or not to be a Vampire

Mary Pickford | The Morning Leader | 1916

This little story begins with a confession—all my stage career I have longed to play the part of a vampire!

I confided this to a friend the other day, who told me it was just about as funny as Charlie Chaplin longing to play a romantic Romeo. Not that Charlie Chaplin could not be the handsome Romeo, just as Shakespeare would have had him, but do you think the public would ever take him seriously? No, indeed, not even if he were to appear before us as the most sombre-lined Hamlet who ever strode across the screen.

"What would you do with your curls?" my friend asked me, amid gales of laughter. "Who ever saw a vampire with a tumbled curly head?"

Of course I was quite indignant, and, seeking consolation, I talked with all the polite ingenues in the studio.

"If you could choose your favorite role, which would it be?" I asked them.

"I'd like to be a vampire like Theda Bara," lisped one little round-eyed wisp of a girl, who looked as delicate and frail as a wild flower. "I'd like to wear snake bracelets, brush my hair right back, and wear long earrings," she added. "Then I'd have dresses with long trains, patterned after the old Pharaoh's daughters—perhaps just the very type of wore!"

"If I were a vampire," observed the little ingenue who has never been allowed to play anything but the most tempered of dramas, "I would have a Louis Fifteenth boudoir and dress like Mme. Du Barry. I would have kings and princes fall in love with me instead of justnice young brokers or old men with lots of money!"

We are all alike—wanting to play parts for which we are not fitted is just as natural as wanting to wear clothes which are not becoming to us. It would amuse you to know how many women who are the representative vampire types dream their little dreams, just as we do, when they think of themselves. Their dreams never picture them in clinging, alluring gowns, but in simple little frocks, with their hair in curls and sunbonnets tied under their chins in the most ingenue fashion!

Some say that the day of this vampire is over. So much the longer will be seen upon the screen the woman who lures and wantonly breaks all hearts. It may pass as a general wave of screen change across the country; at the same time, it may be interesting to know that was most respect housewives seem to enjoy these dramas the most.

Some said it was because it was an article or phase of life of which they knew nothing, but others that there is an instinct in every woman which makes her enjoy seeing at a distance the life of a type of woman she instinctively fears. Curiosity and love of adventure attract many colorless women whose lives have never known romance, and some very young women, trying to assimilate the characteristics drawn in the pictures, are pathetically amusing. In fact, after Theda Bara appeared in "A Fool There Was," a vampire wave surged over the country. Women appeared in vampire gowns, pendant earrings, and even young girls were attempting to change from the frank, open-eyed ingenues to the almond-eyed, carmine-lipped woman of subtlety and mystery.

In our grandmothers' time the lady who was not very courageous used to be the lady quite in vogue. She would blush at the least provocation and faint at opportune moments, dramatically, naively and with finesse. How often our own mothers—that mother who was quite out of fashion with her rosy cheeks and bright blue, dancing eyes.

"Oh, how I did long," she confessed, "to be pale and interesting, and it just seemed as if I could never lose my color. When your grandmother wasn't looking, I would go to the flour bin and powder my cheeks until I was white as a ghost, then I would steal out of the house and sit on a neighboring doorstep, trying to look forlorn, sad, an interesting figure, one which would excite pity.

A few years ago the athletic girl was all the rage, but today is the day of the vampire, and alas! we ingenues wring our hands in "awful jealous" despair!