Silver Screen (Nov 1930-Oct 1931)

OVELORN Pola ]N[egn Returns — Witli Her Heart Broken Once Again Pola Negri isn't weeping over the failure of her marriage to Prince M'Divani. It's Over Another Love THE "new" Pola Negri, who has just returned to Hollywood, is no different from the "old!" To know Pola is to pity her. There is something so infinitely tragic and appealing about her. And she has such high courage. To a woman of her temperament, love must always stand supreme. Pola is always either falling in or out of love. And she is always getting hurt in the process. Right now she has been through it again. I remember vividly my first meeting with her. She was recovering from the shock occasioned by Valentino's death. She was working on a closed set making "Barbed Wire." Tension was in the air. Everyone was going around on tip-toe. La Belle Negri was suffering and everyone else was suffering with her. Pola is like that. She can no more help sharing her griefs and sorrows than she can help breathing. She drooped on the bench before her dressing table while she talked to me. Like a wilted poppy. The heavy folds of yellow taffeta that framed the long, beveled mirror made a glittering backdrop for her dusky loveliness. Her beauty was breathtaking. Glossy, black hair. Brooding eyes. Full, red lips. Tapering fingers curled like petals in her lap. Like most persons of genius, Pola dramatizes herself. She is always the actress. Perhaps this is the secret of her courage. She bears up under blows that would 18 crush an ordinary person, because she views her tragic moments and her climaxes as glorious parts to be played. And how she plays them! She talked to me in pitiful, little broken sentences about Valentino and how much he had meant in her life. I was so sorry for her. But it wasn't long before she married Prince Serge M'Divani and was being universally quoted that he was the one great love of her life. And now they are divorced and Serge is married to Mary McCormick. So I wondered what she would say about her wrecked marriage, when I called upon her at the beach home she has taken for her second invasion of Hollywood. I heard her coming down the stairs. Quick, tripping little steps. The door opened and she came across the room, her hands outstretched in friendly greeting. A more beautiful, more vital Pola than the one I remembered. Black, bobbed hair drawn back from her face and held in place by a scarlet silk kerchief, knotted gypsy fashion over her forehead. The same brooding, wistful, gray eyes, fringed with h.ea.\) lashes. Small toes peeping out from little brown sandals. Nails gleaming rose, the same high shade as her fingertips and her brightly louged lips. I will never again think of feet as being ugly, now that I have seen Pola's. They are as distinctive and beautiful as her face or her figure. And nothing could be more luscious than Pola's figure in the form-revealing, brown hostess pajamas she was wearing when I interviewed her. Practically every time I have seen Pola alone, she has been wearing something brown. When I mentioned it, she insisted that she loathes color. That she much prefers greens and golds. Tate Sydka did a portrait of her in a warm green wrap and gown. It is a real masterpiece and hangs in her li\'ing room at her beach home. Pola is as proud as a peacock of it. She drew all the curtains and adjusted the lights, showed me the proper way to stand to get the full effect of the eyes, the gown and the [Continued on page 79] Silver Screen