Vamp: The Rise and Fall of Theda Bara

Theda Bara became an overnight superstar with her film debut in the scandalous 1915 hit, A Fool There Was, and for the rest of that decade stayed at the top of the heap, along with Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. Despite her fame and notoriety as the movies' first "sex symbol, " no biography of the original Vamp has ever been written, even though Bara threatened to pen her own "because nobody ever wrote a true word about me." Finally, someone has. Bara had one of the most bizarre and colorful careers of the silent era, starring in Cleopatra, Salome, and scores of other hit films before vanishing mysteriously from the screen. Now, read for the first time how a nice Jewish girl from the Midwest became "Satan's Handmaiden, " scandalized a nation, and abruptly fell from the heights.