The Wickedest Woman in Larchmont

S. J. Perelman (1904–1979)
From Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film

Interesting Links

Video: A Fool There Was, complete, with the text of the title cards (WikiSource)

“Cloudland Revisited by S. J. Perelman review—the humorist who broke the mould” (Stephen Smith, The Guardian)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Cloudland Revisited: Rock-a-Bye, Viscount, in the Treetop,” S. J. Perelman
• “Alla Nazimova,” Djuna Barnes
• “The Jest,” Dorothy Parker
• “Melodrama,” Rollin Lynde Hartt

Buy the book
Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film
The Classic Comedy Collection
Introduction by Adam Gopnik | Includes all 22 selections from the series that appeared in The New Yorker
Paperback | 308 pages
List price: $15.95
Web store price: $11.95

Publicity still of Theda Bara as The Vampire and Edward José as John Schuyler in A Fool There Was (1915), directed by Frank Powell. The legend reads, “WILLIAM FOX presents / ROBERT HILLIARD’S Greatest Success / ‘A FOOL THERE WAS’ / With EDWARD JOSE and THEDA BARA.” Hilliard, a matinee idol, played Schuyler in the hit play but was not associated with the movie. (Wikimedia Commons)

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“I'm resuming the Cloudland Revisited series, but this time on some of the old movies,” S. J. Perelman wrote to Leila Hadley the day after Memorial Day in 1952. During the previous four years, he had written a series of pieces for The New Yorker in which he revisited a dozen books, from Leonie of the Jungle to The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, that he had loved as an adolescent—to the mortified bemusement of his middle-aged self. (His reappraisal of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes was a previous Story of the Week selection.) He now planned to turn his attention to the silent movies that had equally enchanted him as a kid. The humor and success of the formula for the series springs from the “collision of young Sid with old Sid,” Adam Gopnik writes in his introduction to a new book that brings together, for the first time, all twenty-two columns. “Young Sid, who is evoked in his wide-eyed absorption of the old movies . . . is still infatuated with the stuff, while Older & Wiser Sid shakes his head retrospectively at the sheer intuitive surrealism of the story.”

“I've spent almost all the past two weeks at the Museum of Modern Art projecting ten films I plan to write about,” Perelman wrote in an update a month later.

The Museum's film division was extremely co-operative; I'd been trying to set up this scheme for about two years and had been at some pains to figure out where I could uncover the particular films I wanted, as they’ve largely disappeared. MGM finally tipped me off that the Museum has an enormous library of 14 million feet which it shares with the Eastman Foundation in Rochester, and through Monroe Wheeler, who's an old friend, its facilities were extended to aid this work. I worked with a tape recorder while the films were being shown, talking into it and describing the contents of each scene and the subtitles. I now have the secretary in the adjoining office transcribing the tape, and thus am accumulating a sizable bale of information from which I can draw quotes and descriptions of the action. A somewhat bulky method, but the only feasible one and I'm hopeful that it may result in some good material.

One of the movies Perelman mercilessly dissects is the 1915 blockbuster A Fool There Was, starring newcomer Theda Bara, whose performance launched the femme fatale archetype of the silent film era. The film was an adaptation of a hit play by Porter Emerson Browne, which was in turn inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Vampire,” the opening line of which provides the title. As a fake newspaper clipping from one of the film’s title cards notes, Bara plays “a certain notorious woman of the vampire species” who lures, emasculates, and discards a married American diplomat, who turns out to be only the latest in a series of her victims. Bara’s debut as a film star popularized the use of the word vamp for the type of character she would play for the rest of her brief career in the movies.

To promote the film, the studio employed two New York World reporters to host an elaborate press conference in Chicago, at which they introduced the exotically costumed Theda Bara as an up-and-coming actress from Paris who was born in Egypt to the French actress Theda de Lyse and the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Bara and raised in a tent in the sands of the desert near the Sphinx. The publicists then arranged for Louella Parsons, not yet a famous gossip columnist, to “expose” this ludicrous hoax after some of the more gullible cub reporters had fallen for it. The notoriety of the ploy and the success of the movie doomed Bara, a Cincinnati native whose real name was Theodosia Goodman, to reprise the role in various guises—as Cleopatra, as Salome, as “the Vixen”—in more than forty films over the next five years.

Meanwhile, in Providence, Rhode Island, 11-year-old Sid Perelman had fallen for Theda Bara just as readily as the gaggle of cub reporters. Nearly forty years later, he sat in the comfort of the Museum of Modern Art’s spotless projection room “to ascertain whether my inflammability to Miss Bara had lessened over the years,” and the result is one of the more hilarious (yet wholly accurate) summaries of a silent film and its title cards ever written.

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Notes: Little Egypt was the stage name of American dancer Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, who popularized belly-dancing with performances at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. In the fifteenth century, Dominican friar Tomás de Torquemada became the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition. H. B. Warner was an English actor famous in the silent film era for his portrayal of Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927) and best known in the talkie era as Mr. Gower, the druggist in Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s Wonderful Life. Zira was an American brand of cigarette made from Turkish tobacco. The Golden Hind was an English galleon remembered for its privateering circumnavigation of the globe from 1577 to 1580. Blanchisseuse is French for laundress. In Greek mythology, lotus-eaters are the inhabitants of an island who eat the leaves of the lotus tree, which induces a blissful lethargy and forgetfulness. Heimweh is German for homesickness. Written between 1899 and 1909, the tragedies of the Italian novelist, poet, and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio rely on his characteristic high rhetoric rather than dramatic action.

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If you were born anywhere near the beginning of the century and had access at any time during the winter of 1914–15 to thirty-five cents in cash, the chances are that after a legitimate deduction for nonpareils you blew in the balance on a movie called A Fool There Was. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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