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Local Ghoul Makes Good VAMPIRA’S OUT OF THIS WORLD AS HOLLYWOOD TV HOSTESS The problem of what to do about those late late late shows has recently been solved, with a rather loud explosion, by KABC-TV in Los Angeles. The gimmick employed is one Vampira, a girl straight out of a Charles Addams cartoon. She introduces the station's weekly horror film at 11 on Saturday nights and cuts in six times to comment appropriately on its more grisly aspects. The viewers may never remember the pictures, but they can hardly forget the girl. Girl?? Born Maila Nurmi 31 years ago in Finland (her uncle is Paavo Nurmi, the former one-mile*record hold¬ er), Vampira is the wife of TV writer Dean Reisner. She is a self-admitted ec¬ centric who delights in shocking people because, she says frankly, "I hate them. I expect people to be good and wise and kind and idealistic and they're not." The Vampira bit was bom when Maila showed up at a costume ball several months ago as the Addams-created ghoul of cartoon fame. Hunt Stromberg, Jr., an ABC-TV producer, spotted her and Vam¬ pira was born on the spot. She has be¬ come something of a Hollywood sensa¬ tion, to put it mildly. Of her own volition, she wandered into the recent Miss Rhein- gold try-outs, throwing them into a tail- spin. "I was looking," she explained haughtily, "for Mr. Rheingold's bier." Not even her ABC pr'ess agent, an otherwise quite normal individual, has ever seen her in anything but her Vam¬ pira get-up, which includes a long black wig (she is an exceptionally attractive blue-eyed blonde) and an acute hour¬ glass figure. (For those interested in statis¬ tics, she's 5 feet 8 , weighs 115 pounds, has a 38-inch bust, 17-inch waist, 36-inch hips.) She has to be waited on hand and foot. Who can do anything with five-inch fingernails? ("When I take the nails off," she says, "I get the rather gruesome feeling that my hands have suddenly been stunted.") She affects black Eng¬ lish cigarets in a black holder approxi¬ mately a foot long and drinks only Bloody Marys (tomato juice and liquor) at lunch. "It's almost bedtime, you know," she says artlessly at high noon. She recently discovered, to her own horror, that a number of children, aged seven, watch her show regularly. One of them even offered to send her a test- tubeful of her favorite cocktail—from the Children's Hospital. When not being Vampira, which isn't very often (she gets a large charge out of playing the role, on or off camera), she spends her time being lazy at home. "I'm very lethargic," she says. "I can never stick to anything for any great length of time. I get bored. Vampira should last for several years, but not with me. I'm already beginning to speak of myself in the third person. Besides, my husband is beginning to cringe a little." Her next project will be to open a small night club in Los Angeles called The Bar Sinister. "I think," she says lazily, "the name speaks for itself." She also intends to buy and train a seal to dance with her. "I think people would just naturally come to see a girt dance with a seal, if only once." Her favorite author? Ralph Waldo Em¬ erson. "I really should hate him, you know," she says, "After all, he's a Gemini." Vampira is a Sagittarian herself, which will come as something of a shock to the rest of the clan. 11