Don Pedro de Cordoba (1919) 🇺🇸

You know what to expect in a motion picture studio, dont you? The lights and the props and the dust and the sound of hammerings, shouts, commands, the grinding of the camera, the shiftings, the inevitably waiting groups of actors, weird or natural, the desultory, staring onlookers, the occasional blasé child. The reek of the grease-paint, the scrambling carpenters, the glimpses of ornate reception rooms, palm gardens and conservatories. These are the things of a studio.

by Faith Service

I went to the Talmadge studio to interview Norma Talmadge’s new leading man, Pedro de Cordoba. Perhaps you have seen him with Farrar [Geraldine Farrar] on the screen and with Elsie Ferguson. Perhaps you saw him with Marjorie Rambeau in Where Poppies Bloom. I saw him in Russian habiliments but with the manifest spirit of old Spain, only I wasn’t certain it was Spain until he told me so.

There is a reason for everything in this world which is essentially reasonable in its fundamentals. There is a very good and sufficient reason for the Castilian atmosphere of de Cordoba, which reminds me that I wish you might hear him pronounce his own name. It is soft, slurring, infinitely musical and magical. You see, Don Pedro’s — I simply cannot dull the magic of his birthright by affixing a horrible mister to him, not after hearing that name in the Spanish tongue — Don Pedro’s parentage was fascinating. His mother was a true Parisienne, dainty, dark, vivacious. His father was a Spaniard, born in Camaguey in Cuba. Spain… and Paris. The deep, dark, splendid glow of ripe old wine, mellow old wine, storied old wine and the swift exquisitude of the champagne of Paris, evanescent and jeweled… and de Cordoba… with both blent within his veins. It made it seem so stupid and phlegmatic to be born just plain, everyday American — so obvious, so sort of monotonous.

Of course, de Cordoba was born here, too. In the shadow of the Opera House, where his infant lullabies were arias from Faust and Marguerite or overtures from Tristan and Isolde. Where, too, his small desire to be an operatic star grew and grew apace with his great abiding love of music. “Concert music now,” he added, “classical music, it is, I might say, my passion.”

De Cordoba looks his parentage. Probably a great deal more the Spaniard than the Parisian. He is too serious for Paris, too slow in his movements, too inscrutable in his smile and his eyes which are sad. Paris speaks occasionally in his smile, his smile which is humorous, even light. More, he has that subtle, inscrutable charm of older civilizations than ours, older legends, older mythologies. He has that instinctive wisdom which has come from beauty touched with decadence. He has that atmospheric richness born of the Old World, specifically of old Spain.

There is an inescapable atmosphere… the bravado of toreadors waving a bunting of scarlet… murmurings and secrecies under lichened cathedral walls… the old cathedral Ibanez has written of… shy doñas draped in mantillas of black lace caught at the breast with a crimson, scattering rose… courtyards where vivid hibiscus flowers come to a flagrant maturity only to die away, and green and orange lizards sun under fountains long ago disused… blood over-ripe … grapes over-ripe… a land supine with its own largesse…

One felt one’s self seeped in the glamor as Don Pedro spoke of his father, of his birth, of his ancestry. Spoke particularly and especially of the ancestor to which he feels himself to be an almost exact reversion. This ancestor — this sounds Chinese rather than Spanish — was named Don Gonzalvo de Cordoba, and he was known as the Great Captain of Spain. A sort of a Don Quixotish sort of person, if we remember our Cervantes, perhaps with just a bit of Don Giovanni. This is mere surmise.

At any rate, the generations have rolled their inevitable filaments about Don Gonzalvo, and Pedro de Cordoba feels that in him flows not only the blood of the Captain of Spain, but also something of the same spirit, something of the same sympathies. Enough, at least, for him to revive the long-ago Captain and make him live for us, an epitome of the romance of Spain, vivid, swarthy, colorful…

To make this even more than a mere probability, there were plays written about the arresting figure of Don Gonzalvo de Cordoba and these plays, in the original Spanish, are even now in the Boston library. Don Pedro has seen them, has even gone into them a bit.

These plays, this Don Gonzalvo, this bringing to America something of Spain that is of it in truth, is what de Cordoba desires to do. But…

“One grows so lazy in New York,” said Don Pedro. “I should be doing these things now… at thirty-seven … I should be at least beginning them. I simply do not get at it. I suppose it is largely a matter of the will growing flabby, the line of least resistance. Inertia. Something of that kind. One is moved along so rapidly from one thing to another… but plans…

“Some day, tho, I shall simply pack my trunks and take my wife and go to Spain and linger there a while, drinking in the old atmosphere, weeding out the old legends, delving into the more intimate records of this great captain of Spain. If I do this I shall feel that I have something to give — that I am ripe — that I am ready. Spain is vivid. It should be made so. It has a wealth of beauty… Of course, they will need not only translating, the plays, they will need adapting. They are very old. In the meantime” — he gave his light smile — “I must make a name popular enough to attract. To attract the crowd. They will come, I know, to scoff; they will remain, I hope, because they will like it.”

The glamor persisted. It was a wrench to come back to the studio, to the insistence of the telephone, to the raucous yells of “Lights 1.” One found one’s self asking why. Don Pedro admitted a greater liking for the speaking stage. Admitted, too, the artistic possibilities of the screen… deplored its great existing commercialism, which will not pass away in his day or ours… Pictures have been kind to him, he admits. He has been fortunate in his leading women, or rather the women he has played the leads to. He has had, no doubt, the best of them in every way. He loves the out-of-doors part of them, the traveling about.

Past and beyond all these things, he is devoted to his home; to his wife, who is little more than a bride; to the inner things which go to the making of life when life is earnest and real and worth while.

One left the Talmadge studio feeling the contact of a personality quite detached from all outer considerations, murmuring to one’s self over and over again that “soft, meandering Spanish name…”

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De Cordoba’s parentage was fascinating. His mother was a true Parisienne, dainty, dark, vivacious. His father was a Spaniard, born in Camaguey in Cuba. Pedro was born in New York, in the shadow of the Metropolitan Opera House. Above is a portrait of de Cordoba and, at the left, is a glimpse of Pedro with Director Chet Withey and Norma Talmadge doing The New Moon at Lake Saranac, N. Y.

Photo C. Smith Gardner, N. Y.

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De Cordoba is a good deal more the Spaniard than the Parisian. He is too serious for Paris, too slow in his movements, too inscrutable in his smile and his eyes, which are sad. There is an inescapable atmosphere of the bravado of toreadors. Right, a scene from The New Moon with Miss Talmadge and Don Pedro

Photo C. Smith Gardner, N. Y.

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Collection: Motion Picture Classic Magazine, June 1919