Lottie Cruze — Ask Lottie — She Knows (1924) 🇺🇸

“Ask Lottie,” they say on the Pola Negri set at the Paramount studio, where the sleek, polite little foreigner, Dimitri Buchowetzski, is putting the dynamic Pole through her dramatic tricks.

If one wishes the meaning of a German word, if Buchowetzski [Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy] desires to know aught of American ways or thought, unfailingly it is, “Ask Lottie.” So greatly does the latest Continental importation depend upon this Lottie person that the other day when a visitor, not recognizing him, asked him who was directing the picture, the director urbanely replied, “Ask Lottie.”

Seven years ago Lottie Cruze and her mother came to America from Hamburg, Germany. Aspiring to act before the camera, though she spoke English very haltingly, Lottie managed for two years to carry out this wish.

“But I got too — er — plump and they wouldn’t let me act any more,” she explained. “So when Pola came over here I was engaged to translate the script into German for her and to act as interpreter and confidential secretary.”

“Nein, nein,” in paternal fashion, Buchowetzski soothes Lottie’s wails for an acting rôle. “In Eu-rope maybe you could act, but nod in America, be-cause here on-ly skinny do dey like dere heroines. You stay here, papa Buchowetzski see you get nize sal-a-ry und you got no vorries. You don’t even got to reduce!”

So Lottie has resigned herself to answering questions, realizing that the rôle of the beauteous and dramatic heroine is not for her.

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Collection: Picture Play Magazine, August 1924