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The rivals NEGRI
Pola Negri, before Hollywood (left) in the German film Sumurun, and after. "I consider my work great, as I am a great artist."
Pola Negri's early life was as exotic as Gloria Swanson's was plain. She was a genuine gypsy, whose father had somehow become involved in Poland's fight for independence from Russia and was exiled to Siberia as a result. After his death there, Pola attended the Imperial Ballet School, achieved theatrical success in Warsaw, and stardom in Berlin under Max Reinhardt. Along the way she married and discarded a count whose chief contribution to her life was a title which she flaunted at every opportunity.
Success in an aptly titled Lubitsch epic, Gypsy Blood, brought her to the Paramount lot as a sort of modified vamp. There she immediately clashed with Swanson (whose activities were transferred first to the East Coast studios, then to Paris, where she acquired a titled husband — a marquis — of her own ) . Negri was soon alienating Hollywood by declaring it a cultural wasteland beneath her contempt and ostentatiously retiring in solitude with her books and music to keep her company.
The public found her pretty silly. It was one thing to affect the queenly manner if it was well known that underneath you were just a Midwestern kid. Everyone knew Swanson was play-acting and everyone thought she had earned the right to her fantasies. Negri was just another foreign pretender — and stuck-up, at that.
When Negri hurtled cross-country to be at Valentino's deathbed it was the beginning of the end. They had indeed been lovers, and there is evidence that among his last words were, "Pola — if she does not come in time, tell her I think of her." But Negri laid on her grief a little too heavily, and shortly it became impossible to sell her films, despite expensive efforts to revamp the vamp's image. She married a prince of dubious standing, returned to Germany, which understood her, continued to make movies and, briefly, was linked with Hitler. "Why not?" she asked. "There have been many important men in my life — Valentino for example."
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