The little newcomer says that nearly all the lovely beauties whom we have imagined as dining on lark’s tongues and poetry have appetites like traffic cops.
What they need in New York right now is a new country for the movie stars to be born in. They have a dreadful time trying to get Pola Negri located. Ever since the foreign pictures began to pour in with this Negri lady in the leading part of most of the plays, they have been trying to get her born in some inoffensive place. The press agents have had her in turn an Italian, a Swiss, an Austrian and a Roumanian. As a matter of fact the lady’s real name is Paulette Schwartz. I can’t possibly imagine what her nationality can be!
Similarly worried, the film magnates have finally decided that Josef Schildkraut is part Turkish and part Roumanian.
Well, never mind, they are both great artists. Two of the greatest Europe has ever sent us.
Oddly enough, Pola Negri has reconciled the rival film producers to the horrors of censorship. Only a few weeks ago, they were appealing to high heaven to be saved from the monster. Now it has occurred to them that censorship is the only protection the American film industry has against being swept to destruction by cheap but beautiful German pictures.
The competition is almost murderous. “Passion,” the super film in which Negri first appeared in America and which would have cost at least half a million dollars in the United States, was made for $22,000 in Berlin. Pola Negri gets a salary whose bigness has made Germany open its eyes; in our money it would be only $45 a week. Of course, there could be but one outcome to competition like that. Nearly all the German pictures and particularly all those of Pola Negri are decidedly “rough” in spots. They are very much bedroom, etc. The American censors may save the situation by cutting the gizzards out of them. A big Italian picture recently arrived in New York wherein the extra people were paid four cents a day. It was a very beautiful and very fine picture. There’s no denying it. Only the censors can save the movies.
That long suffering and modest soul, Evelyn Nesbit, has finally retired from the stage after some years spent in a vain attempt to startle the world with her “message” to young girls. She has opened a novelty store in the “roaring fifties” in New York City and will manage it in person.
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Sweet Essence of Prune Juice
From “Rainbow,” a Novel