New Picture
HI Diddle Diddle (United Artists). Cinemaddicts who may have gambled away $50,000 at cards will learn from this rampageous farce that the way to make good their losses is to fix a roulette wheel and break the bank for $228,000. Luckless loser in Hi Diddle Diddle is birdbrained Mrs. Prescott (Billie Burke) who claims she has disposed of the family fortune just as her daughter Janie (Martha Scott) is about to marry a sailor, Sonny Phyffe (Dennis O'Keefe). Father Phyffe (Adolphe Menjou) is the raffish Samaritan deputed to recoup Mrs. Prescott's family fortune by breaking the bank at a gambling casino.
His torch-singing accomplice is Gypsy Rose Lee's little sister, June Havoc. The comedy is also complicated by Cinemactor Menjou's love life and the fact that each new crisis keeps postponing Sailor Phyffe's shore leave until all that is left for his honeymoon is a matter of minutes.
All this is good fast farce, well cast, well acted. But highlight of Hi Diddle Diddle is the return to the U.S. movies, in a comedy role, of Pola Negri, fabulous vamp of the Rudolph Valentino era. Cinemactress "Negri plays a Wagnerian diva (the soprano voice is dubbed in) married to Adolphe Menjou. Clothed in sumptuous black & white, Pola is as vivacious and comely in comedy as she was as a glamor girl. Slapstick permits her to be as violent as ever. When her accompanist in the picture accuses her of "bellowing like a cow," the temperamental tigress fetches him a slap in the puss. When somebody urges her not to become violent over Cinemactor Menjou's alleged infidelities, she cries: "Violent! I'll show you how to be violent"--and launches into an aria from Tannhaeuser.
When Pola Negri and Adolphe Menjou met 20 years ago on a California set, he was attracted by her toenails. They were painted red. "My God," cried Menjou, who had never seen such a thing before, "you're bleeding!" Pola believes she also introduced another fashion to Hollywood: the white face.
$55 Panties. Last time Pola looked anemic was in 1941, when she left behind her 18 lb., all her money, in then-Unoccupied France, promptly fled to the U.S. She was met by a seven-year-old bill from Manhattan's de luxe Hotel Ambassador. The bill ($2,500) represented the unpaid balance of $8,500 which Pola had run up for cash advances (upwards of $4,500), flowers, beauty-parlor charges, drugs, telegrams, phone calls, etc. But hotel bills were not all. She was also being dunned for $1,705.30 by Couturiere Hattie Carnegie, Inc. for purchases which included $10 handkerchiefs, $425 white satin dresses, a two-piece chiffon lace chemise and panties costing $55. To her creditors Pola simply explained that she had no cash, no jewels, no furniture, and that the last movie she had made was in Berlin in 1938. Since then she had not earned "one cent."
Pola Negri, nee Apollonia Chalupec,* is reported to have been born in 1) Bromberg; 2) Yanowa; 3) Lipno. She was almost certainly born in Poland. Less certain is her birth year--which is variously given anywhere from 1897 to 1899. According to Pola it is 1903. Her father, George Chalupec, is reported to have been a gypsy, a Polish fabric merchant, a wealthy Hungarian farmer who died in 1905, was shipped to Siberia for taking part in the Russian Revolution of 1905, was abandoned by his Polish wife and daughter, killed by Cossacks.
Slave of the Senses. Pola's first starring role was in Love and Passion (or Slave of the Senses'), which she wrote, directed, and produced herself with a secondhand movie camera in her own Warsaw apartment. Pola claims that the picture so interested Max Reinhardt that he brought her to Germany in 1917. She achieved stardom overnight in Carmen and Passion (with Emil Jannings).
When Passion, the story of Madame Du Barry, broke box-office records in Manhattan in 1922, Pola crossed the Atlantic, was met at the boat by Adolph Zukor with a police escort, bands, flowers, photographers. Zukor ordered a dinner for 300, liquor for $5,200. In Hollywood, Pola's fame as a vamp grew with Forbidden Paradise, in which she played with Adolphe Menjou. In six years Pola played in 21 pictures, rose to $300,000 for a single picture.
Hitler Wept. Pola has married only twice.** She wraps her romances in mystery by carefully concealing her fiances' names, carefully dropping hints as to their nationalities, professions, wealth, renown. Rich and renowned men to whom Pola has been rumored engaged: Chicago Millionaire Harold F. McCormick, British Millionaire Lieut. Commander Glen Kid-ston, Cinema idols Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin. Most renowned man with whom Pola's name has been linked is Adolf Hitler (TIME, April 26, 1937). This most sensational of rumors about Pola hit the headlines over half of Europe, is said to have made the Fuehrer weep. Goebbels thought she was Jewish. Hitler had Pola's ancestry investigated, proved her "Polish and therefore Aryan." Pola claims she has never even seen Hitler.
Pola claims the advent of talkies had nothing to do with her leaving Hollywood in 1928. In Europe, she played in one British film, Street of Abandoned Children, in one French film, Fanaticisme, but was soon back again in the U.S., starring in RKO's million-dollar A Woman Commands (TIME, Feb. 8, 1932). During its shooting, Pola collapsed from what she calls a "chronical appendicitis," nearly died. The early '303 were lean years for her. She had been reduced to making a personal appearance tour, playing four shows a day; was twice prevented from leaving the U.S. to visit her mother on the French Riviera, because she owed the U.S. Government $80,000; was banned from acting in Germany.
Last week in a single room at a French-Hollywood apartment house, Pola was studying astrology. Said she: "I just couldn't get along without it. I would not know how to make deceesions."
CURRENT & CHOICE
Lift Your Heads (British Ministry of Information, OWI; TIME, July 12).
Spitfire (Leslie Howard, David Niven; TIME, June 28).
Coney Island (Betty Grable, George Montgomery, Cesar Romero; TIME, June 21).
Stage Door Canteen (Show-business people galore; TIME, June 14).
** In 1919, to Polish Count Eugene Domski, now a Major in the Polish Army in London; in 1927, to Russian Prince Serge Mdivani, killed in a Florida polo game in 1936.
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