Nina May — A Jungle Lorelei (1929) 🇺🇸

She may be black but she’s got a blonde soul — and Hollywood says Nina May is a great acting discovery.

by Herbert Howe

She rolled them eyes and she rolled them hips, Um! Um!… Shake that thing! “I ain’t eighteen yet!” she squealed as she rolled a tantalizing eye and a hot marimba movement. Who taught her to say that, who did?

“Oh, you the gentleman from Photoplay Magazine?” Her eyes bulged and her being jelled. “Um-Um! I just love write-ups!”

“Um-Um!” said I. “I just love being a writer-up!”

Nina May McKenney is the little colored spasm of King Vidor’s all-colored “Hallelujah.” Irving Thalberg says Nina is the greatest acting discovery of the age, and I’ll say she certainly acts with every fiber.

It was the “Hallelujah” set with the whole troupe steppin’. Shake that thing! Do it, do it! Come on an’ show your sex attraction!

On the next stage Fred Niblo’s white collegiates were cutting capers, and I’m proud to say that our white boys and girls are not far behind the colored in the back-to-jungle movements.

That evening I was Nina May’s guest at the Apex Cafe in darktown, Central Avenue, Los Angeles. All the colored celebrities were there. It was a most biggety affair.

Nina was togged like Sheba, with a silver turban and a gown that would have passed for her skin had it not been pink. “Sure does crowd my physique, this dress,” she said, hitching it around after each dance.

Nina isn’t black, she’s coppery with a crimson, pagan mouth which she paints like a Christian.

Slicum, erstwhile boot-black on the Metro-Goldwyn lot and now assistant to King Vidor, was interlocutor at the party, presenting me to the various celebrities.

Slicum and Nina May danced. I couldn’t because of the strict etiquette at the Apex: (My complexion was off, but what with my deepening coat of tan and a natural kink in my hair it won’t be long, hey! hey!)

During one dance I went over to the table of Stepin Fetchit, who assured me that Nina was a very nice girl.

“Ya, he proposed to me,” said Nina scornfully. “But he don’t save his money. He says the Holy Virgin will take care of him. I say, ‘Ya?… The Holy Virgin is goin’ to turn on you some day, big boy!’ “

Nina requested a powder puff from her mother, who sat with us. Her mother is a young woman of thirty-two, of light skin, who might have Spanish blood. She spoke very little, but her eyes never left the bedevilling Nina.

“No suh,” said Nina. “When I marry it’s goin’ be for money. Yes suh, I think that’s a good idea.”

“Ah, Nina, you ought to marry for love,” said I white-trashily.

“I can’t,” said Nina. “He’s got a wife. Anyhow what does love get you? No suh, I wouldn’t keep no man like some these girls do — give ‘um fur’coats an’ they go round talkin’ about you… Not me!… I know. I want a man to do for me as much as I do for him… More! Yes suh. I take everything I get. I want furs hangin’ to the ground — an’ dresses like Miss Swanson’s — and diamonds dribblin’ all over my physique — um-um.’”

Nina buried her face in her hands in a spasm of ecstasy at the vision of her physique perspiring with diamonds.

“I’m going to take Paris by storm,” she continued, when she had regained her calm. “I’m going to do what Josephine Baker did — you know, Josephine Baker the colored girl hit of Paris. But I ain’t going to marry no count like she did. No suh, not me!

“I don’t want no title. I want automobiles an’ clothes an’ diamonds an’…” Nina threatened to break down again in hysteria of heavenly bliss.

As a child, Nina May McKenney was a little maid in white cap and apron for a wealthy Carolina family.

They used to send her to the bank to deposit money.

“They trusted me with thousands of dollars an’ I never stole none of it, never did,” avers Nina. But she did grow powerful fond of it.

Her mother wanted her to be a school teacher. Nina wiggled her nose at the absurdity of that. Instead, she went on the stage at the age of fifteen, sang and danced in “High-Flys” in Harlem, then went into the chorus of the Broadway colored musical show, “Blackbirds,” where King Vidor saw her. Her theatrical career to date amounts to nine weeks; she’s a little more than sixteen — not eighteen yet!

“I can’t say enough ‘bout Mistah Vidor,” she said solemnly. “He’s wonderful — never curses at you — makes you feel at home — what he’s done for me and my race — I never can repay.”

All Hollywood is wonderful to Nina. Sure is.

“They invite me to all their parties — I been to Miss Swanson’s an’ Miss Davies’ an’

Mistah Vidor’s an’ John Gilbert’s. Oh Lordy, Mistah Gilbert!…”

Nina again had to stifle her squealing emotion by covering her face.

“I like Nils Asther too — but Mistah Gilbert most of all.”

She adored Valentino and was greatly disturbed to hear that his house is haunted. Someone suggested to Nina that she rent it during her stay in Hollywood. “Not me” gasped Nina. “Ain’t goin’ to get me in no house where rockin’ chairs rock all by theirselves — oh-oh, not me!”

King Vidor reciprocates Nina’s admiration. When he asked her to do a crying scene she burst into a wail that lasted fifteen minutes. All the colored players act with abandon. They continue to act after the camera stops and it sometimes takes half an hour to bring them back to reality. After the colored hero carried his dead brother past the camera and off the set King waited in vain for his return. Calls were of no avail.

When King went out to ascertain the cause of delay he found the two “brothers” in a paroxysm of emotion, weeping and stroking each other.

As for Nina, she never stops wriggling. When forced to sit in a chair she curls up like a tawny jungle cat, stretches, writhes, licks her lips and yawns, wriggles her nose or presses it into her face with her thumb and eventually subsides into purring slumber, to dream, no doubt, of a copper-colored maiden in a shower of diamonds driving Paris mad with the rhythm of the tom-toms beating in her blood.

I shall feel very, very sorry for Miss Peggy Joyce when Nina undulates abroad.

[A]

When you see King Vidor’s “Hallelujah,” watch for the tawny Nina May. Nina longs for dresses like Gloria Swanson’s and “diamonds dribblin’ all over my physique — um-um!” And she wants to go to Paris to be a hit like Josephine Baker. Nina isn’t quite eighteen. She went on the stage at fifteen, in a Harlem negro revue.

[b]

Glenn Tryon is showing Merna Kennedy one of those gay night clubs. The little toy is a model of the big night club set used in “Broadway.” The set is all wired for electricity, it has miniature chairs and tables and, probably, miniature prohibition agents

Every advertisement In Photoplay Magazine is guaranteed.

[c]

[Transcriber's note: Nina May is an aka of actress Nina Mae McKinney]

Collection: Photoplay Magazine, July 1929