Eddie Polo — The Prowess of Polo (1918) 🇺🇸
The news photographer at Universal City was strolling up and down the vast outdoor stages, looking for things to immortalize. The abnormal is so commonplace at the film capital that it needs a special kind of training to enable one to pick out the real high spots. However, when he saw, over in the corner of a set, a man in a serge suit lift an acrobat dressed in the tights and sandals of his profession, raise him on one hand and slowly elevate the extended body over his head and hold it there, the photographer, exclaiming “Eureka!” slipped in a plate at once.
by Lillian Conlon
“Who is the strong gink?” asked the interviewer, who was slinking along behind the photographer, to take advantage of his trained news instinct.
“Him? Him in the serge suit? Why, don’t you know — that’s Eddy Polo [Eddie Polo].”
“Do you suppose he’ll tell me how he does it?”
“Well, seeing that screen-player doesn’t care for publicity any more than he cares for his breath, I dare say he will, if you ask him nicely and say please.”
So the interviewer sugarcoated his voice and said please half-a-dozen times, and Eddy Polo complied.
“Meet my old pupils, the Azard brothers,” he began. “Oh, didn’t you know that I had been a teacher of stunts like this? Well, of course, I was mainly identified with circus life before the movies got me, but there are lots of gymnasiums scattered about the country, in which my name used to be revered as athletic instructor, and some of the boys that I started on the road to fame have won big prizes. Here are two of them, and they are headliners wherever they show. This fellow here weighs a cool two hundred, and he had an idea that the movies were a softening profession compared to the life of an acrobat. Just to prove that a screen-player is no slouch, I tried some of the old stunts with him. He was all up in the air over it.”
“How does it feel to fight ten or a dozen men at once, as you’ve had to do so often in your serial career?” asked the interviewer, in tones of oozey honey.
“Well, it partly depends on the director of the picture,” answered the strong man. “Some directors are satisfied with a sort of impressionistic fight, but the Universal serial producers can’t be fooled. Jacques Jaccard, who did Liberty, and Stuart Paton, who has just finished The Gray Ghost, insist upon a fight as is a fight. They are both the sort that inspire their players, and when I meet a dozen men for a big scene in one of our serials I know I’ve been up against something when it’s over. They scrap as if they meant it, and I have to use all I know of the noble arts of boxing and wrestling to come out victorious, as the script demands.”
“What about eighty-foot dives into the ocean? Does that give you heart failure beforehand?”
“Well, eighty feet doesn’t look so much to a fellow who has been a balloonist and parachute-dropper, after all, you know,” he answered, modestly. “I once caused a slight ripple in Paris by circling the Eiffel Tower in an airplane and then dropping in a parachute, a distance of more than a thousand feet. Sometimes I think that the big show over there” — he pointed in the general direction of Europe — “will get me. My people have done wonders, and it seems as if there might be a bit that I could do for them.”
“Your people, Mr. Polo? Who are they? Aren’t you an American?”
“I’m an American in sympathy and by adoption, but I was torn in Italy. They begin young over there. I started my training when I was three. By the time I was four I could walk on my hands. I can’t remember when I began to learn to make falls and turn somersaults in the air, and I believe I could swim by nature, as a dog does. By the way, I was the first man to catch a fellow-acrobat after a triple somersault in the air. You might put that in your interview. It doesn’t sound much to the layman, but the men in the profession will know what it means. The first time I tried it, I misjudged the tumbler, and he got me square in the mouth and knocked out about half my teeth.
“Since then I have experienced some of the most terrific falls that have ever happened to a man — and still come off alive. They say my falls off sheer precipices in Motion Pictures have made me famous — pshaw! it’s all in the day’s work.”
Polo has become an international favorite thru his work in The Broken Coin, Liberty and The Gray Ghost. Wherever pictures are shown, Universal serials are sure to follow, and Polo has been the life of three of them. So popular has his name become that he is to be the star of a brand-new one, which is under way at present. But I forgot — that’s a secret, or tried be.
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The inner man Polo’s wonderful physique isn’t apparent in his clothes
Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, February 1918
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Eddie Polo is just about looking for a soft place to rest a day or two after finishing the eighteenth episode of The Bull’s Eye, a serial of Western ranch life. Quite Poloesque, and very good, Eddie.
Collection: Picture Play Magazine, July 1918