Heidi on the 'Bay

[That Ron Dude]

Rereading the thread, I must ad that the magazine is in no way pornographic. It just sort of leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

[RedRaven]

Wow, thanks so much for the backstory on that! I'd love to see if we cant dig up that poem! I'm always thrilled to learn a lil more about Warren mags.

[angelique-migration]

 

Was anybody else there who saw it differently?

 

Yes, me--I'm Angelique Trouvere--sometimes known as "the other Vampirella" since I appeared in my Vampi at the same con/masquerade as Heidi in July of 1973.

Since that time, I've had the unique opportunity to be privy to much of the Saha controversy and I'm glad to share my knowledge at this time to set the record straight.

 

"The way the magazine is often sold is disturbing. The magazine itself, and the memory of Heidi Saha, is even more disturbing.

 

When a copywas sold about a year ago, someone followed it up by trying to sell a photo of her, showing only the upper part of the photo, as though she was naked from the collar bone down. The language in the ad, and I will use that word again, was disturbing."

 

--I saw that ebay ad and thought that the seller was wrong to lead the buyers on like that but then if a buyer bought the magazine strictly because he thought it contained a nude shot of a pre-teen girl, then he got what he deserved.

 

 

"Inside the magazine we find that she was the friend of Forrest J. Ackerman and James Warren. Her father was an SF editor at one of the big New York publishing companies. "

 

---Forry met Art Saha when Art was a young man & SF fan living in Los Angeles back in the 40's. Art and Forry were good friends and when Heidi was born in 1959, Forry consented to be her Godfather.

Later Forry would join forces with James Warren when they

published Famous Monsters in the 50's so there was a link between the 3 men through publishing.

 

"The magazine was produced and sold with the complete knowledge of her father, who used to take her around to the conventions."

 

--actually, it was Heidi's mother, Taimi, who was the driving force behind the magazine & poster. Warren talks about it briefly in "The Warren Companion" where he points out that she came to him with the idea and lots of photos of Heidi in costume. Her parents and again, mainly Taimi, wanted to make Heidi a celebrity or movie star and they felt that the professionally produced mag & poster would be helpful to that end.

Warren then says that he did it because it was "his way of paying them back" for promoting a Warren property when Heidi would wear the Vampirella costume and appear in news articles & cons.

 

"In the magazine, Forest J. Ackerman comes off as less than dignified in the eyes of a modern viewer, in his attitude towards a girl perhaps 40 years his junior. Remember, this magazine came out in the early '70's. People looked at things differently back then. Society wasn't as concerned with the sexual exploitation of youth."

 

--I would like to say that I've been friends with Forry for many years and I can vouch for his intense love for his wife, Wendayne. He was a flirt and a kidder but not unfaithful to her. His interest in Heidi was as a family friend.

 

"James Warren had previously published a poster of her dressed as Sheena the Jungle Girl. At one of the Seuling conventions in NY, Warren produced the program booklet. There was a space inside reserved for Heidi's signature."

 

--this would come back to haunt the Sahas when it seemed to many that Heidi was appearing as Vampirella not as a fan but in a professional capacity.

At one point, Tom Fagan even referred to Heidi as " ...representing the wild world of Warren Comics..." When she won 3rd prize (a $25 savings bond, I believe) for her Vampirella, the crowd jeered her because it seemed to them that as a professional, she should not have been in competion with non-prossional costumers.

 

"Again, to take you back a few decades, fandom at the time was 100% male except for Paty, Irene Vartinoff and Maggie Thompson. Any other woman at a convention was a dealer's wife. As a group we were physically unappealling-- I don't know any other way to put it civilly and accurately. At these conventions, and there were very few at the time, the guys could be themselves instead of high school nerds that still read comics. We were becoming artists, writers, managers and publishers. Most of did pretty well for ourselves over the years but those were tough times for kids who were into comics. Heidi was a physically beautiful teenager who looked 14 or 15. She seemed completely out of place at the conventions. It seemed that her mere presence changed the mood of the entire dealers room. "

 

--indeed! Heidi was stunning! She was tall and built! If you didn't know better, you wouldn't have guessed that she was 13 at the time of Vampirella (1973) and 12 and younger in the magazine. She was essentially a sweet and shy young girl who would rather be hanging out with her friends than parading around in a sexy costume and dealing with leering fan boys (& men).

I was in my very early 20's when I appeared as Vampi at that time and I was not fazed by that sort of thing--I welcomed the attention!

 

The story got out about her dad being an editor and that sort of explained it.

 

"Eventually, Creation Convention published a program booklet with a poem in it to the metre of "Stairway to Heaven" probably called "Taking her to the Convention" written by Manny Maris. It was a viscious, unfair and very funny attack on Heidi. "

 

--actually, I wouldn't call it very funny although, the lines, "There's a girl that I know, who's mom has her for show, and she's bringing her to the convention..."

are amusing.

 

"The last line of it (if my memory serves me well; it was over 30 years ago) was "Seidi... HAHAHAHA". I think that ended her career as the comicon glamour Queen."

 

--indeed it helped. To understand this better you must know that Maris added a cut out from a men's mag (Oui ?) of a very young, half naked blonde girl

(probably not much older than Heidi herself by the look of her). There was a drawn in g-string to cover her exposed privates but the pose was undeniably sexy & salacious. This was supposed to represent Heidi, of course.

I've heard 2 stories about what happened next: one that when Warren heard about it, he ended the promotions because he didn't want to be associated with that kind of attention. The other was that when her father saw it, he hit the roof and finally realized what they were doing to their reluctant daughter and put a stop to the promos immediately. This was in the early part of 1974--ironically right about the same time that a small article on Heidi appeared in Playboy magazine's "Potpourri" section in the back....

btw-Heidi was very happy to see the promotions end.

 

"I would love to be able to read that poem again. Does anyone have it?"

 

--I do have it--Please e me and I'll send a copy to you.

 

"Manny proudly showed it to me in a hotel room. After laughing for about five minutes, I commented that she was just a little kid who didn't deserve the attack. Manny said that she was a public figure, who had a poster of herself being sold in three national magazines (Creepy, Eerie, Vampiraella). Like any other public figure she was subject to satire. "

 

--Phil Seuling was also a friend of Heidi's---she and his oldest daughter were good

friends--was livid when he saw the poem and practically strangled Maris when he saw him. Phil banned Maris from all of his cons from then on.

 

"I recently told my wife about the poem and she was quite upset. Her reaction was, "She was spoiling the party,eh?" When I showed my wife the magazine she realized that it was far more complicated than that. She was being exploited by her family like a would-be Brooke Shields."

 

--Ironically Brooke was 6 years younger than Heidi but as anyone can see, her mother, Terri, was extremely successful at her bid to manipulate her child into the spot light. btw--there's even a "Brooke Book" that really is very shady.

 

" The guys at the conventions didn't want to idolize a kid in Grade Ten for her cuteness. I honestly think we viewed people more than "skin deep" and we wished to be viewed as more than that ourselves. We sure didn't want to be told to put her on a pedestle by Jim Warren, Forry Ackerman and her dad."

 

--true. There's more than a few photos of Heidi taken from angles that emphasize the sexier side of the outfit...

 

 

"The story goes, which I can't confirm, that Jim Warren printed 500 copies of the Heidi magazine as a trial balloon to sell at a convention. When it flopped he decided not to go big with a second printing and pulped the unsold issues. There may be under a hundred of these things out there today. I have seen them go for as much as $1025. The cheapest I have seen one go for is just over $600."

 

--actually, I was told that when Warren's company was being prepped for the liquidation sale in 1983, that her parents quickly removed the remaining posters & mags before they could be sold.

 

If you or anyone else is interested in more of my story, I just completed an online interview about my early costumes & notable people I met in fandom.

Note--there's probably more that you'll ever need or want to know about costumes but that's what I was asked to talk about too.

 

It's at:

www.enjolrasworld.com

just scroll until you see "new interview: "Angelique:..."

I would be very interested in hearing from you all about it.

It was an amazing time!

 

angelique trouvere

atrouvere@sso.org

 

 

 

 

[That Ron Dude]

Thanks for the long commentary on Heidi. It sounds like you were very close to it all, while I learned what I did mostly from rumour and inference. Thanks for the facts on the situation.

 

I went to enjolrasworld.com and read your interview. It was interesting reading your statements about Heidi there as well. I am surprised that she, and all that happened to her, is so well remembered.

 

I went so far as to search Heidi out on the internet but the adult Heidi seems to be gone without a trace.

[The Troll King]

I won't argue the fact that in today's time this all seems a little odd, but you have to remember that the early 70's were very very different than what they are now.

 

Even Carol Resnick (sci-fi author) would show up at these same Worldcon events that Heidi was at and be NUDE in costume.

 

I doubt you're gonna walk into Wizard World or SDCC and see someone standing on a stage with their boobs completely exposed but this is exactly what was going on back then at these shows.

[precodekeith]

I went so far as to search Heidi out on the internet but the adult Heidi seems to be gone without a trace.

 

Very cool info. I love reading about the early fandom days. So, does anyone know "whatever happened to" Heidi?

[heinlein99]

Welcome, Angelique! And thanks for the information.

[awe4one]

Posts like Angelique's is why I continue to hang out on this Forum...

 

jim

[Jarren]

welcome to the boards Angelique

[The Troll King]

Yeah it is absolutely cool that she found this thread and posted!

[That Ron Dude]

If my memory serves me well, the nudity in the costume shows peaked in about 1975 at the World SF Con in Washington. It seemed that most of the costumes had at least some degree of female exposure that wouldn't be accepted on a woman who was just walking down the street.

 

Eventually, at the 1975 costume show, a guy came out in a simple costume without an element of theatre or nudity. He might have been dressed as Flash Gordon. He went up to the mike and said, "I thought this was a costume show. If I'd known it was going to be like this I would have brought my girlfriend with her +1+s painted green." That's what he said, but I had to use +!+s for breasts because of the level of prudity on this board. Angelique might remember it more closely but I have the key words right. The audience cheered in approval.

 

I am pretty sure that the audience didn't dislike the nudity but was probably sad that the costume show at the World SF convention seem to centre on it. Again, if my memory serves me well, the World SF convention banned nudity in costume shows the next year. Certainly the one I attended in 2003 had no nudity whatsoever.

 

Irony abounds. Right now, in Toronto, a woman or man can walk down Yonge Street exposing everything but their genitals and it is perfectly in keeping with the law. Should Toronto ever hold a world con again, which seems unlikely, there will be no nudity on stage. I can't quote a word that every five year old knows on this board because "spoon" will be written in its place but the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation often (perhaps always) leaves far harsher words in when broadcasting interviews with men and women on the street.

 

Those were the days in a certain way. Was it a flowering of culture when we were naive about the value of the literature of the fantastic? It was our own little corner of the world. Fantastic Four #1 wasn't yet worth more than any first edition by Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald. Comics and SF hadn't overwhelmed the movie screen. Comic books and books on comics hadn't won Pulitzers. It was our little sub-culture and no one elses. We made the rules.

 

Or is the golden age of everything, whatever is going on when you are twelve? Will the kids today get the same sort of thrill that I did over comics and SF or see them as a commodity to be bagged, boarded and speculated on? Certainly I describe the extremes but we are far closer to the "commodity" end of the continuum.

 

 

[angelique-migration]

Rereading the thread, I must ad that the magazine is in no way pornographic. It just sort of leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

 

Before I comment I have to make a correction on yesterday's comment:

at one point I said that Heidi was 13 when she did Vampi but I was wrong: she was 14 (and 13 when she did Sheena.)---gotta keep these things straight...

 

Now, on to the comments:

 

--When I first read it I was either laughing or feeling bad for Heidi after all, what 14 year old wants their baby pictures published in a magazine? Or a silly and obviously fictional story about putting their "po-po nappie" on their 3 day old head and saying in "perfect Finnish", "Look, ma, I'm the Big Diaper!" ? sheesh!

 

The funny stuff? To those of you familiar with Forry's style of writing, you'll see that he went into high gear as he wrote lines like this: "...blonde reed of womanhood, bending in the wind of the sighs of her would-be wooers, ...delightful, full-of-life dweller on the pink cloud of fantasy..." ad nauseam......

 

btw--I do have a magazine--a gift from a friend who wanted to commemorate my first masquerade but it has since suffered severe water damage in a fire some years ago. However, if anyone is interested, I can offer a photocopy of some of it.

e me about it.

 

I think what upsets me about the whole Heidi thing was that she was going through terrible emotional turmoil at that time but felt helpless to do anything about it. Her mother once forced her to dance in front of a gathering of comic professionals at a private party like some trained animal. Friends who witnessed that said that her discomfort was obvious to everyone except Taimi who was too busy playing the cassette recorder she brought with her and shushing the audience.

Heidi had alot of potential but her parents desire for her stardom really messed with her head--and let's just say that we're lucky that she didn't die on us.

 

 

[angelique-migration]

Thanks for the long commentary on Heidi. It sounds like you were very close to it all, while I learned what I did mostly from rumour and inference. Thanks for the facts on the situation.

 

--I'm glad to help

 

I went to enjolrasworld.com and read your interview. It was interesting reading your statements about Heidi there as well. I am surprised that she, and all that happened to her, is so well remembered.

 

--she has become the stuff of legends...like Bettie Page? Actually, she and her times are so well remembered because of her Warren one-shot selling for hundreds of dollars on ebay....

 

I went so far as to search Heidi out on the internet but the adult Heidi seems to be gone without a trace.

 

--yeah--she's a happy recluse these days.

[angelique-migration]

I went so far as to search Heidi out on the internet but the adult Heidi seems to be gone without a trace.

 

Very cool info. I love reading about the early fandom days. So, does anyone know "whatever happened to" Heidi?

 

Thanks.

 

Heidi is living in seclusion with her husband of 7 years. She's kinda ambivalent about the old days--sometimes she's ok and others, she just wants to forget them.

[That Ron Dude]

Yeah, that's what I thought she would be doing and it makes perfect sense to me. She would have had a couple of very intense years there where people were trying to turn her into an underage sex symbol and she had little control over the situation.

 

I imagine that once in a while she sits down with a friend and says, "I am going to tell you something-- you won't believe it," then spills the whole bizarre story.

 

I respect her privacy.

 

But maybe this fan thing will one day grow so big that the San Diego Convention begins to look like the New York Convention of old. Everybody will read Spider-man. Bill Clinton will have a comic book collection. Stan Lee will be on university courses. There will be a statue of Jack Kirby, thirty feet high, in the Bowery. At that point Playboy will search around and find Heidi Saha and do a special interview. There will be a made for TV movie starring some emerging model called, "The Heidi Saha Story". It will be promoted as "a special tale of one girls struggle against an adult world she can not understand". In it the comic fans will not be overweight, short or acne ridden but will look like Horshack, Epstein and Barbarino. Then they will dig her up and interview her, in silhouette, on Sixty Minutes.

 

 

[heinlein99]

But maybe this fan thing will one day grow so big that the San Diego Convention begins to look like the New York Convention of old. Everybody will read Spider-man. Bill Clinton will have a comic book collection. Stan Lee will be on university courses. There will be a statue of Jack Kirby, thirty feet high, in the Bowery. At that point Playboy will search around and find Heidi Saha and do a special interview. There will be a made for TV movie starring some emerging model called, "The Heidi Saha Story". It will be promoted as "a special tale of one girls struggle against an adult world she can not understand". In it the comic fans will not be overweight, short or acne ridden but will look like Horshack, Epstein and Barbarino. Then they will dig her up and interview her, in silhouette, on Sixty Minutes.

 

 

Sounds like a dynamite episode of 'Behind the Panels.'

[The Troll King]

This is one of the greatest threads on the forums right now... too bad most probably aren't reading it! Ron, you're posts are fantastic about what was going on back then and Angelique, yours are giving a great first hand look to the story.

 

Stage mothers (fathers) are a horrible thing when it comes to kids, my ex-wife had done stage musicals for many years while she was young under the watchful eye of her "stage mother" and it definitely f-ed her up even now more than 20 years later.

 

It's one thing if kids show an interest in things like this, but anytime they're forced into participating in something they don't like or are led to believe that it's "best" for them, then a horrible wrong is being perpitrated.

[That Ron Dude]

Thanks for the kind words Buffy Fan. I remember Angelique as being a huge comic/SF celebrity back then, so much so, that I recognized her name immediately though it hadn't come up in 30 years and seemed way out of context on my computer. It's good of her to come forth and clarify this bizarre situation from maybe, 35 years ago.

 

This is one of the lonely corners of the message board. I agree, others would like to read about all this if they knew it was here.

[thecollectron]

That was an interesting interview, and welcome to the boards!

I always enjoyed the costume shows in the '70's.

[angelique-migration]

Hi Red Raven,

 

You gave a link for something on ebay that sold for $86.--I opened it but the item was no longer displayed--what was it?

 

 

"http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300091587246&ssPageName=ADME:B:SS:US:1

 

So, who's going to drop $400 on this little gem?

 

 

I thought about it but my zeal for completing a Warren run aint what it once was. I've been more into DC war comics (Enemy Ace!!!) than mags for a couple years now. I wouldnt have gone higher than $250 for Heidi,which means Ill probably never own one. "

_________________________

 

Btw--if you're interested I'd be happy to send you a photocopy of the Heidi mag--just so you can see what all the fuss is about.

angee