A Ride with Pola Negri (1924) 🇺🇸

Pola was tired of acting. She said she felt punk; she called it “ponk.” So she invited me to take a buggy ride with her.

by Harry Carr

Her buggy was a big Pierce Arrow landau decorated like a boudoir with brocade and silver. She had a solemn looking chauffeur named Bruno.

As we cut down thru Griffith Park and across the river, Pola began to talk about things — everything from European politics to Mary Pickford — from Bismarck’s “Drang Nach Osten” policy to religion and her love affair with Charlie Chaplin.

Pola has a beautiful voice; it has caressing cadences — the rise and fall of the vowels that makes music as you listen.

I could see that she was low in mind.

“Last year was a terrible (she called it terreeble) year for me — mad pictures, savage criticisms from the papers, and an unhappy love affair.”

“Unhappy?” I asked.

“Well, it was certainly not a restful romance,” she said, with a funny little laugh.

“Sharlie is a wonderful man — a wonderful sensitive mind. I adore talking to him. He appeals to the mother complex that is in every woman. But he certainly is not a restful experience. He didn’t help me in the business of making pictures.

“No woman could be in pictures and be in love with Sharlie at the same time. Being in love with Sharlie is — how do you say it — a job all by itself.”

And thinking about the pictures, she forgot about Sharlie.

“Oh, those pictures,” she said. “You roasted them. You were cruel, but you were right. They were terreeble — especially Bella Donna.

“The other night I asked George Fitzmaurice, my then director, if he had an idea in the world what we were trying to do when we made that picture. ‘Not an idea in the world,’ he said. ‘Me too,’ I said.”

Pola sat in silence as we rolled on thru Glendale; then, she said bitterly, “I won’t do it any more, not like last year. I refuse to be like a slave standing up on an auction block — being bid for by stupid little exhibitors.

“They say I must be beautiful; I must be sympathetic. Well, I won’t be beautiful and I won’t be sympathetic. If they don’t let me tell real stories and be real people on the screen, I am going to tear up my contract and go on the stage.”

We were passing now thru the old Verdugo estate which a Spanish king of old gave to one of his sergeants. I told her how in the old days of the Spanish dons, they used to give great parties that lasted for days on the Verdugo estate; how they used to send vaqueros down to meet the guests, waving zerapes and shouting to scare away the bears. But I don’t think she was much impressed.

She turned back from the glories of California in the baronial days to the iniquities of money-making producers.

“Picture producers,” she said scornfully. “They have two or three little molds into which they pour you. Every story has to be just the same.

“Even if you make them good, they take them into the projecting-room and cut them all to pieces.

“I can’t go on this way — trying to make dramas to the music of an adding machine. I’ve got to be myself. I can’t make this kind of expression because they would like it in Keokuk, Iowa. I can’t do my hair this way to please the exhibitor in Mobile, Mississippi. I’ve got to be myself.

“Oh money — money — money,” wailed Pola. “It is the death of art. I hate money. I don’t want money. I don’t want to hear about money. I am a Bohemian — an artist. What do I care about money?”

I contemplated Pola’s gorgeous Pierce Arrow rolling along like a battleship. I reflected side-wise like upon Pola’s sable coat. I caught the glint of Pola’s five-carat diamond ring — the size of the top of a salt cellar.

Yes sir. Money is certainly a nuisance.

The car turned west thru the Verdugo hills down the old trail of the brown-robed Franciscan Padres as they trod the weary miles along the Camino Real from San Gabriel to San Fernando Mission in the days of old.

Pola began to talk about the stage.

“The actors over here,” she said. “They are good except in Shakespeare. It is amazing! Why do they sing Shakespeare? Do they think it is opera? It’s all wrong. Shakespeare is not what they call high-brow. He was an actor — a practical man. He wrote beautiful plays in a natural practical way. His conversation should be absolutely natural; that is its charm.

“If he went to a modern Shakespeare class and heard all the hidden meanings that were in his own plays. I think (Pola says theenk) he would be paralyzed with astonishment. He theenk he would be drunk with dismay.

I don’t think Shakespeare could ever pass an examination in Shakespeare. Certainly he wouldn’t know what they were singing about.”

Pola said that Shakespeare is seen best on the continent in Europe. There, they have given and are now giving the finest performances that have ever been seen of Shakespeare since the plays were written.

I asked her if Shakespeare did not suffer in translation.

Pola turned with sudden animation to that which is one of her hobbies.

“Ah, but they don’t always lose in translation. Especially Shakespeare.

“This is a subject in which I am very much interested.

“You see since I was twelve years old I have spoken four languages. Every Polish person must learn languages. Poland is such a little country that no one will bother to learn the languages. So I read in many tongues.

“And this is what I find: it is almost impossible to translate Russian into English. If you read Tolstoy in Russian and then in English, you would never know you were reading the same book.

“The language most readily translated is English into German. There are German translations of Shakespeare that are undoubtedly an improvement on the original. After all, English is only an offshoot of German, mixed with a few other languages.”

I asked her if English was hard to learn. “It is a little difficult to pronounce, but it is very easy to understand. This is because of the simple grammatical construction. I find myself thinking in English because it is to me the most satisfying of all languages. There seems to be a vigorous, pointed, appropriate word for every need.”

I asked Pola if she ever thought of going back to Europe to live.

“Not now,” she said sadly. “Not any more. Europe is not the same. Art is dead there now. Europe has gone crazy. Poland, which I used to love, is strutting around like a gamecock in a barnyard. Never in the most warlike days of the Kaiser was there such a militaristic spirit as now in Poland and France. They have forgotten art and the sweetness of life. It is all army and the next war and political intrigues.”

“The next war?” I repeated.

“Certainly the next war,” she said in a surprised tone as tho I were asking if the sun were in the sky. And in swift, brilliant sentences, Pola showed me how the dismal prophecies of Bismarck are coming to pass. How the Russian Cossacks will, some day, tramp over the dying civilizations of Western Europe with bloody boots.

But Pola said that anyhow she had come to love America — especially New York — and wanted to stay here. She was cynical about the future of our motion pictures, but she is thrilled by the spectacle of our young drama of the stage reaching for its soul. She longs to get into the spoken drama.

And so the talk wound from pictures to the stage and back again, Pola said she regarded Griffith [D. W. Griffith] as the greatest American director, but felt that he was limited by his somewhat cynical attitude toward the public; that he gives them what they want instead of expressing fires that are in his own soul.

Lubitsch [Ernst Lubitsch], she says, is the best of the foreign directors. He is a showman as well as an artist and has a marvelous sense of humor. She doesn’t think so much of Victor Seastrom, the Swede, on account of his lugubrious outlook on life.

“Swedes,” she said, “are not so tragic as they are gloomy. It is their cold, bleak climate.”

She says the American public regards “Passion” as her finest picture; but that she herself has always thought of “Gypsy Blood” as her best work.

I think so too. The Carmen that she plays in that picture was the real gypsy of Prosper Mérimée’s story — the vicious, lustful, primitive little slattern who would slit a throat for a dollar. It was not especially a popular picture. Gave too great a jolt to our conventions. The usual Carmen of the stage is a frolicsome young person in red silk stockings who sometimes isn’t quite a lady. That’s what we expected in Gypsy Blood.

And speaking of this and that, Pola spoke of American girls.

“There are no other such beautiful girls in the world. Once in a long time in Poland you will see a really beautiful peasant girl. She is always natural without make-up, and is lovely beyond rivalry. Your girls are all manufactured beauties; but they are amazing. The first night I went to the Follies my eyes almost popped out of my head. I kept grabbing Mr. Zukor [Adolph Zukor] by the coat sleeve and gasping, ‘Good heavens, there is another one!’ I didn’t imagine there had been that many beautiful girls in the whole world since the world began.”

At sunset we left the car and we were standing on a hill watching the dying day. The distant peaks of the Santa Susanna range glowed like coral in the distance with the Santa Inez peaks seen faintly thru the haze. Far away on the sky line we could see the snow cap of old San Antonio; while nearer, Sister Elsie Peak and the cross of good San Ysidro looked down upon the fading day like a benediction. On the slopes of the hill where we stood the acacia trees flamed with golden blossoms and the mountain sage filled the air with a faint musty fragrance.

Solemnly the rose glow faded. A wave of pure violet color that changed to amber and dun and then to the color of old sherry wine swept across the precipices of the Big Tujunga in royal pageant.

It was a sight to fill the soul. Pola began to talk of religion.

“For four years,” she said, “I have studied theosophy. It has changed my outlook on life. When you understand that we are only passing thru a phase when we live and suffer in this life, then we realize that nothing matters. It is all a moment in a life of thousands of years. You know, en passant.

“Without this philosophy I should not have been able to have endured life.

“I have several times given what I called the story of my life to various American publications which seem to have a taste for such things. But believe me — no. I have never told the real story. And I never shall. It is too bitter and too sad.

“My life has been just one long tragedy. They say that one has to suffer to become an artist. Well, then, I should be a great artist.

And so we went back down the hill and Bruno started the car and we went whirling out of the day that lay dying in the last faint glow of lavender shadows — back to Hollywood which was just beginning to stir and feel frisky in preparation for the evening.

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Photo by: Eugene Robert Richee (1896–1972)

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“I have never told the real story of my life,” said Pola Negri. “It is too bitter and too sad — if suffering makes you great I should be a great artist.”

Below Miss Negri is seen with Dimitri Buchowitzke [Dmitriy Bukhovetskiy], whom she had brought from Europe to direct her “Men”

All photographs by Eugene Robert Richee

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“Picture producers,” she said scornfully. “They have two or three little molds into which they pour you. Every story has to be just the same.”

Above is the Pola Negri of “Passion,” who took America by storm and secured the fabulous salary she now draws, while she fights to maintain her own personality.

To the right, a new portrait and below a scene from “Men”

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Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, July 1924

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Well, They Wouldn’t Starve

Even if they lost their movie jobs and the Hollywood real-estate boom blew up, some of them could still keep the wolf from the door.

by Harry Carr

• Milton Sills could earn his living, even if he weren’t rich already: he is a teacher by profession — a professor of psychology.
• Rodolph Valentino [Rudolph Valentino] could earn his living in several ways if the screen were suddenly abolished. He is a dancer, a riding-teacher, and a designer of women’s clothes.
• Ramon Novarro is a dancer and a singer. Before getting into the films, he earned his living as a cabaret singer.
• Mary Thurman was a school-teacher — and a very successful one as a young girl in Utah.
• Mary Pickford could go back to the stage, as could Lillian [Lillian Gish] and Dorothy Gish and Viola Dana and Mary Miles Minter.
• Renée Adorée was a bareback rider with a circus, and Pat O’Malley a tightrope walker. They both say they haven’t forgotten how.
• Etta Lee, the Chinese-American girl, was a school-teacher in Hawaii.
• Barbara La Marr was a cabaret dancer. Marguerite de la Motte and Julanne Johnston were both interpretative dancers, as was Carol Dempster.
• Rex Ingram was a sculptor.
• Malcolm MacGregor [Malcolm McGregor] has two lines open for him. He is an architect and worked himself up to an executive job in his father’s woollen mills.
• Ralph Graves was an official in a steel company before becoming an actor.
• John Bowers was a lawyer.
• Erich von Stroheim was a newspaper writer and a riding-master and could still work at each job.
• Frances Marion, the scenario writer, was a successful designer of advertising posters.
• Robert Frazer was a famous portrait photographer, just as Ford Sterling was a famous landscape photographer.
• Monte Blue, Will Rogers and several others were skilled cowboys and could still work at the trade.

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Collection: Motion Picture Magazine, July 1924