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Remembered today primarily for her campy silent film Salome,
Alla Nazimova was both a highly acclaimed Broadway actress and the most
successful femme fatale of Hollywood’s early
years. Rumors of her bisexuality only added to her on-screen
mystique.
Born Mariam Adelaida Leventon (“Alla” for short) in the
Black Sea resort of Yalta on June 4, 1879, she had a childhood filled with
misery: Her quick-tempered father, a prosperous Jewish pharmacist,
tyrannized his children with beatings and humiliation. When he forbade his
daughter, a violin student, to use the family name at public recitals lest
she embarrass him, Alla adopted the surname “Nazimova” from a
fictional heroine. But her true love was not music but theater, and when
her father became incapacitated after multiple strokes, she went to Moscow
to study acting.
There she became a student of Konstantin Stanislavsky, whose
psychology-based approach to acting would later revolutionize theater.
When she was 22, Nazimova fell in love with the actor-director Pavel
Orlenev; together they created a touring company that ended up in New York
four years later.
In America, their productions received raves, and Nazimova
was proclaimed “a new tragedy queen.” A Broadway producer offered her
a five-year contract, and she readily accepted.
She chose Hedda Gabler for her Broadway debut on November 12,
1906, and two months later added a second play by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s
House, on alternate nights. As an interpreter of Ibsen’s dynamic,
independent women Nazimova had no equal. The future playwright Eugene
O’Neill saw Nazimova play Hedda and later wrote that her performance
“gave me my first conception of a modern theater where truth might
live.”
But in 1917, Hollywood called. Metro Pictures offered her a
deal she couldn’t refuse: a five-year contract with an astonishing
$13,000-a-week salary and creative control. Nazimova was now the
highest-paid actress in motion pictures.
Most of her 11 Metro films were torrid melodramas in which
she played exotic vamps. Short in stature, turning 40, and not especially
beautiful, Nazimova nonetheless had tremendous sexual allure off screen as
well, with her dark hair, strong features, and intense violet-blue eyes.
Although she had several affairs with men (usually half her age), her
interest in young women was one of Tinseltown’s open secrets. Meanwhile,
she falsely claimed to be married to her leading man, Charles Bryant.
Nazimova’s female lovers included the perennially
star-struck Mercedes de Acosta (who went on to woo Greta Garbo and Marlene
Dietrich), script girl (and later director) Dorothy Arzner, and several
starlets. Curiously, two of Nazimova’s “protegees,” actress Jean
Acker and designer Natacha Rambova, both married Rudolph Valentino, who
was himself rumored to be bisexual.
Citing the star’s “whims and vagaries,” Metro refused
to renew Nazimova’s contract, although nearly all her films had been
moneymakers. Undeterred, she poured most of her life’s savings into two
labors of love, both collaborations with Rambova: A Doll’s House (1921)
and Wilde’s Salome (1923). The movies were commercial flops, and while
critics generally praised the Ibsen film, they didn’t know what to make
of the Wilde adaptation.
Ostentatiously decadent, Salome still fascinates as an
avant-garde example of gay camp, with Rambova’s over-the-top sets and
costumes, ladies-in-waiting played by men in drag, and a Syrian guard with
painted nipples. No wonder a rumor circulated that, in homage to Wilde,
Nazimova had cast only homosexuals in the film. As for the star herself,
the 42-year-old actress is at times surprisingly convincing as a petulant
14-year-old nymphet.
Disillusioned and broke after Salome’s failure, Nazimova
returned to the stage. While on tour, she met an old friend who asked her
to be godmother to her daughter, Nancy. The little girl, who became an
actress herself, would eventually enjoy a much different celebrity as the
wife of Ronald Reagan.
Nazimova had hopes of converting her Hollywood villa, “The
Garden of Alla,” into a lucrative hotel. But she entrusted the project
to con artists who left her stranded on the brink of ruin. (It ultimately
did become a hotel, renamed “The Garden of Allah.”) Help came from a
former lover, Eva Le Gallienne, who invited Nazimova to join her Civic
Repertory Theatre in New York for the 1928 season. Nazimova found echoes
of her own experience in the role of the bankrupt Madame Ranevskaya in
Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and gave a triumphant performance at
the Civic that completely restored her reputation as one of the great
actresses of the American stage.
While at the Civic, Nazimova, who had a history of flings
with adoring young actresses, got involved with an apprentice 30 years her
junior. But this was no fling, and Glesca Marshall remained Nazimova’s
lover, manager, and devoted companion for the next 16 years.
Nazimova continued to deliver electrifying performances, most
notably in O’Neill’s epic Mourning Becomes Electra and Ibsen’s
Ghosts, which she also directed. But in 1937, she was diagnosed with
breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. While recovering, Nazimova was
once again tempted by the movies. She spent the last years of her life in
Los Angeles, taking secondary “mother” roles in a handful of films—a
quiet denouement for a woman who had dominated both Broadway and
Hollywood.
Just weeks after her 66th birthday, Nazimova suffered a heart
attack and was rushed to the hospital. She died on July 13, 1945, with
Marshall by her side.
Rawley Grau has won four Vice Versa Awards for his writing
on gay and lesbian culture. He can be reached GayNestor@aol.com.
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