|
| |
Nita Naldi: The Tempestuous Temptress of Hollywood's Silent Screen
From: Columbia University
| By:
Columbia University Oral History Research Office |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Born Anita Donna Dooley in New York, silent film star Nita Naldi (1899-1961) began her career as one of the famed Ziegfeld showgirls. She rose to fame quickly, turning to silent film work.
 She starred opposite Hollywood greats including John Barrymore in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920) and Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand (1922) and The Cobra (1928). She became known for her exotic looks and her commanding personality, as well as for her demanding behavior on the set.
Her engaging beauty and expressive character did not survive the arrival of sound in the late 1920s, however. Though she retired from motion pictures, she still continued to appear onstage and, later, on television.
In this excerpt from a 1959 interview conducted by Joan and Robert Franklin for Columbia University's Oral History Research Office's project on the popular arts, Naldi (above) details how she won her role opposite Rudolph Valentino in Blood and Sand. |
Nita Naldi recalls winning her role opposite Valentino in Blood and Sand.
|
Nita Naldi: But how I really got the job is a most amazing story. Of course, everybody wanted to work with Valentino; he had finished The Four Horsemen and The Sheik. He was a great star before I ever went out there. Everybody was fighting to get into a Valentino picture. |
Well, it seems that a friend of my mother, called Maria Barrientos, a great Spanish opera singer, had an apartment on Riverside Drive and 80-some-odd Street, and she invited me to come and visit her for a supper party, so I did. And I came from Mr. Ziegfeld's, where I was working, and there I met Mr. Blasco Ibaqez, the writer, the man who wrote Blood and Sand. He had written several Four Horsemen; he'd written The Cathedral, which impressed me as being violently communistic, but we didn't use the word "Communist" in those days. |
But his theory in The Cathedral was that all the riches and all the things from the vestments to the--oh, all the magnificence inside the cathedral--should be given to the poor. Well, if you give everything away to the poor, nobody would have anything anyhow. As our Lord Jesus Christ said, "The poor are always with us." Unfortunately, myself included. |
Well, it seems that Maria Barrientos had a huge dish of punch in the middle of her salon, and, of course, when I met Mr. Blasco Ibañez, I said, "Well, you monster of iniquity! You sacrilegious lout! Now that you're a success, I suppose you'll change your entire theories for expediency. You've made a fortune selling your thing to the movies." |
And, my dear, the man got so excited trying to deny the fact that he was a Communist, or communistically inspired, that he dropped his false teeth in the middle of my bosom. I had a very low-cut evening gown on. And Maria Barrientos, who knew me from the time I was 4 years old, reached down in my bosom, pulled the false teeth out, put them in the punch bowl, practically sterilized them (much to the edification of the rest of the guests), and stuck them back in Mr. Blasco Ibaqez's face. |
So then he screamed at me, he said, "You are Doña Sol; you are a very evil and very wicked woman." So he decided that I would play the part of this horror, this sadistic demon. And nothing would ever change him. Many others were up for this role, but I got it. He wouldn't have anybody else do it. I kept saying to him all the time, "How dare you insult me? This woman is a monster; she's a sex maniac; she's a sadist, she's a horror, the worst type." |
And he kept answering me back all the time that that would be his revenge. |
And it was. I never outlived it. |
|
| |
