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173 19 return to UFa Universal wanted to put Negri under contract and do a film in Berlin with UFA, one of its affiliate studios, but Negri had no interest in returning to Germany. Among other things, she remembered Einstein’s descriptions of Hitler as a menace. The head of Universal begged Negri to read the script for Mazurka before she gave him a definite answer. Author A. A. Lewis describes the film’s background: Mazurka was really Madame X under a different name, but the director was the great director at UFA at the time, Willi Forst. The head of Universal, Carl Laemmle, was handling the deal and he said to Pola, “Do it. It will be a great success and Hollywood will come after you. They will want you to make an American film of Mazurka and you’ll be back on top.” So she went to Germany. She did the film and it was indeed a great success worldwide. Hollywood did indeed buy the rights to make an American film, but the American film was made with Kay Francis. It was not a hit for Warner Brothers, who made the film.1 Mazurka tells the story of a woman who commits murder to save her estranged daughter from a cruel heartbreaker—the same man who had ruined her own marriage. Pola, wearing a blond wig and playing the wretched mother, shoots the predator who had seduced her many years ago, when she was drunk. Decades later the same man is making a play for her daughter, although he has no way of knowing that the two women are related. Mazurka lets Negri portray many sides of the character in different phases: a lively young wife, a famed cabaret singer, and an aggrieved, aging mother who is on trial for a murder she had committed to protect the daughter she was forced to abandon at birth. Pola Negri 174 Negri asked the head of Universal to shoot the movie in America. Unfortunately, as required by its producers, Mazurka had to be made in Berlin. Negri really wanted the part, and she also needed the money. This role would pay only twenty-five thousand dollars, much less than she was used to, but she had no other firm offers. It was not a sum to be frowned upon for someone who had tax trouble. In 1929, the New York Times reported: “Three liens have been filed in Federal Court against Apolonia Mdivani, whose screen name is Pola Negri, seeking a total of $68,680.30 in alleged unpaid income taxes for the years 1924, 1925, and 1926. The lien charges that the actress claimed too many exemptions, and failed to list certain income in her reports for those years, stating that she received large sums for working in pictures and profits from business enterprises.”2 Negri never did recover financially from her disastrous marriage to Serge Mdivani and the crash that decimated her stock investments. She now owed plenty of people money. The court permitted her to travel outside the country, but the trip didn’t begin well. On her way by plane to New York to catch the boat for Germany, a blizzard caused a forced landing in Amarillo, Texas. The passengers had to ride a train to Kansas City and transfer to another plane there. It was New Year’s Eve, 1934. Negri always celebrated her birthday on that day, and this time she was spending it in a caboose attached to a cattle train. She sent a fellow passenger out to buy champagne, but all he could find was some cheap rye whiskey. “We sat on our suitcases and made a banquet table out of my trunks,” she wrote later. “It was about as gay a New Year’s Eve and birthday I had ever spent.”3 If Negri was apprehensive about her new role, her employers were a little nervous, too. Director Willi Forst was not sure how Negri would fare with the German language. They, too, thought of her as a silent star and weren’t convinced about her voice. Negri was used to making up her own dialogue in any language—Polish, German, French, English, or Russian— that was appropriate to where the film was being shot. Even though they had no written dialogue, the actors in silent films still spoke to each other during their scenes, and audience members tried hard to read their lips. Actors made up their own dialogue to...

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