Dagmar Godowsky — Salome on Fifth Avenue (1924) 🇺🇸

The stellar sisters of the celluloid sorority are, for the most part, attractive girls ranging from pretty all the way to beautiful, who, when you are introduced to them informally, in many respects remind you of your sister or the girl next door.

by Charles Henry Steele

Often this comes as a shock, not only to the reader, but to the writer as well. To discover that a screen Circe’s favorite author is Harold Bell Wright and her life work the completion of a knitted sweater, is disconcerting. To come upon a saucer-eyed beauty who films like Helen of Troy and talks like one of Helen’s Babies, is benumbing. But these matter-of-fact things happen regularly, a true report is duly turned in to these pages, and another layer of glamour peels off.

In the past six months I have met so many of the film fair who were “another of those nice young girls,” the sort we all know so well, that unkind friends have suspected the sincerity of my reports.

So it is with especial pleasure that I announce the return of an exotic to the cinema: Dagmar Godowsky is unlike any sister you have ever had or met.

A few years ago she arrived in Hollywood with a flock of trunks and announced her intention of becoming a star; and, more positively still, a great star. She had mingled with celebrities and she had been wooed by geniuses; accordingly her enthusiasm was as boundless as a press agent’s.

“I want to make a name for myself!” she cried in those days. “I want to be known ever‑r‑ry‑where as Dag‑mar Godowsky, star of movies, not merely as daughter of the great Leopold Godowsky.”

Then she fell in love with a movie actor and conventionally married him. Heeding his wishes, she temporarily bade farewell to her screen aspirations.

Now that matrimony has gradually lost its first’ rosy rapture, as matrimony must, Dagmar is back — back looking for the will‑o’‑the‑wisp, Fame, but with her equipment, safe to say, not in the background.

Despite her infrequent and comparatively unimportant celluloid appearances, La Godowsky possesses a personality rivaling that of some of our most individual stars. She is petulant, whimsical, vain, extravagant, exotic, luxurious. If the idea of stardom ever seizes her with sufficient intensity, the chances are that a new star will shine.

She is young, but a lifetime of travel has made her worldly wise. Travel is not the only way to achieve such wisdom, but certainly it is one of the surest ways. There is an air of Continental frankness about her, subtly masked by American repression. She will say something startling with demurely downcast eyes; one of her most effective tricks is to appear utterly guileless as she twists a well-intentioned phrase just enough to lend it a touch of paprika. Her eyes are restless ovals of sophistication; her smile is a silent symphony, now of sardonic mockery, now of naïve delight. When she entered pictures three years ago I called at her Hollywood bungalow, to find an Oriental, slumbrous-eyed maiden in flowing-sleeved jacket and Chinese trousers, hopping about in Mephistophelian sandals with curved tips, a figure as foreign as a Ming vase or a scimitar.

I found a change when I ascended to the vast Godowsky suite in the Ansonia.

Dagmar entered the room after an effective stage wait had been covered up by Mrs. Godowsky’s recital of the events coloring her husband’s most recent world tour. Dagmar was still Dag‑mar, to be sure — the olive skin, the eloquent eyes, the shining black hair drawn tight about her head and coiled at the nape of her neck — but instead of a properly sophisticated gown of slinky stuff, she was decked out in a crinkly, crisp, young frock, suggestive of Jessie Wilcox Smith, St. Nicholas covers, and the annual lawn social and strawberry festival of the Peoria M. E. Church.

Here was a brunette eye-opener in Kate Greenaway patterns, as appropriate as the Queen of Sheba in a mother hubbard, Nita Naldi playing Little Eva, or Gilda Gray dancing a minuet.

The potent green eyes were unchanged; her lips were as full and as red as ever; her figure had retained its sinuous slenderness. Why the Elsie Dinsmore dress? Was the siren switching to ingénues? I asked, astonished.

“No, I am still Dagmar. But people here in New York say that I am so wick-ed that I must dress this way to show they are wrong. Don’t you think it is becoming? I like it. Every one does.”

As I failed to display the proper enthusiasm, she pouted prettily. “Well, I look in‑no‑cent and so that is why I wear it.”

Her explanation would have sufficed; unexpectedly she continued.

“If you do an‑n‑nything in New York, oh! how you are crit‑i‑cized. Heaven forbid” — her eyes rolled heavenward in a most seductive manner — “that I should be talked about. What would Frank say?”

Her sense of humor is to be vouched for. I have met her husband, doughty hero of many a Universal thriller, Frank Mayo.

It was easy to gather from her vivacious conversation that she was having’ a good time in New York, “vacationing,” as she called it. Her evenings meant dining at the Ritz or Pierre’s or the Biltmore; theater, preferably something simple, like Little Nelly Kelly or Polly Preferred; then supper-clubbing at Montmartre or Rendezvous or some kindred salon of syncopation, followed by an early-morning sandwich at Ruben’s, delicatessen of a thousand and one bejeweled nights. (It is at Ruben’s that the lighters of the gay White Way congregate to assimilate a final sandwich before calling it a night. After 2 a. m. celebrities are as common as silver pocket flasks.)

Dagmar is one of those who look infinitely more alluring off the screen than on. This in itself is unusual, for high lighting and baby spots and a judicious arrangement of reflectors often go to make a screen beauty out of a fairly good-looking girl. Lily painting is one of the things the man behind the camera does nothing else but.

Nazimova [Alla Nazimova] can thank the photographer’s art for moments of genuine beauty on the silver sheet; Alma Rubens at tea at the Plaza looks not at all like the gleaming Countess of “Enemies of Women;” Miriam Cooper and Betty Blythe and myriad others do not impress you as much away from the Klieg lights and gauze screens as they do beneath the magic hocus-pocus of the studio. Some stars, of course, register beauty as effectively one place as another; Pola Negri could block traffic at any given hour in the ambassador lobby; Bebe Daniels is another resplendent example; Mary Minter [Mary Miles Minter] another. But these are exceptions. And Dagmar takes her place among them.

She said something about the uselessness of this earthly existence, whereupon I intimated that she had grown cynical.

“Why not?” she demanded, shrugging her slim shoulders only as eloquently as one educated in a Parisian convent can. “Have I not been married two years?”

Although her husband has insisted upon doing the acting for the family, Dagmar contrives to appear occasionally.

“I persuade him,” she explained, with a wink that spoke volumes. “I have just done a picture. ‘Red Lights.’ He will let me do pictures as long as I am on the same lot as he is.” She paused to light a gold-tipped cigarette. “So he can see whom I am lunching with,” she concluded.

Her sense of irony is never lacking. Dagmar knows, too, the value of a stressed syllable to color her remarks. She is capable of making the merest “How do you do?” a veritable invitation.

“I should like to be a Broadway star,” she murmured. “My name is so long. It would attract attention in electric lights. But I suppose Frank would insist upon a divorce then. He is not original. He for‑bids my going on the stage. So I shall do more pictures with Goldwyn.”

The stage would be the richer for having this unusual hothouse belle. Besides filtering her beauty, the camera fails to record her inimitably arresting accent — a Franco-Russian-Italian entente that smites the ear unforgettably.

Box-office statisticians would look at her and diagnose her magnetism as sex appeal, but it is more than that. Her vivid type appeals most strongly to the imagination. She is straight from the “Arabian Nights;” out of a Kipling tale of India; the rajah’s favorite; one of Pharaoh’s best-loved dancing girls. Were she to lay aside her Kate Greenaway costume for something savoring more of the Tut-Ankh-Amen period, she would call to mind nothing so much as Salome on Fifth Avenue.

—

Although to be her husband, Frank Mayo, wished her retirement from the screen permanent, Dagmar Godowsky fluttered back in “Red Lights.”

—

At Last— A Girl Who is Worthy

For some time Malcolm Oettinger has been meeting the foremost beauties of the screen, analyzing them and describing their personalities to you. There have been charming ones, pert ones, alluring ones — but never one that he felt was worthy of his most glowing adjectives. At last, though, he has found her. He will tell you about her in the next number of Picture Play.

Collection: Picture Play Magazine, January 1914

Charles Henry Steele, Picture Play Magazine, 1910,s 1914, Dagmar Godowsky, Frank Mayo