Word: theda
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Until 1926, it was just another pronoun. After that, It became the most provocative two-letter word in the language-all because of her. She was Clara Bow, the ultimate flapper for the movie audiences of the '20s, grown too sophisticated for the synthetic, exotic Theda Bara ("Kiss me, my fool") and Pola Negri. Clara Bow, by contrast, was as fresh and authentic as the girl next door, only more so. She had enormous saucer eyes, dimpled knees, bee-stung lips and a natural boop-poop-a-doop style. She was the cat's pajamas, the gnat...
...film clips that suggests that the sundry excesses of Sweet Charlotte stem from time-honored Hollywood tradition. In The Cheat (1915), villainous Sessue Hayakawa leaves the mark of his desire on Fannie Ward's neck with a hot branding iron. In one of her early forays, Vamp Theda Bara anticipates the living bra by wearing what appears to be a giant tarantula. In Blonde Venus (1932), a gorilla lumbers through a chorus line, yanks off hirsute head and paws and clears its throat for a husky song. The gorilla is Marlene Dietrich, who puts on top hat and tails...
...reigning American sex queen is a middle-aged housewife, but that is the situation now. Hollywood's highest flying skirts and tightest slacks now belong to Carroll Baker. Through simooms of expensive publicity, she occupies the place of Marilyn Monroe and all the Lana Turners, Jean Harlows, and Theda Baras before...
Died. Nita Naldi, 59, who as a girl named Donna Dooley in a New Jersey convent dreamed of becoming a new Theda Bara, was plucked from a Broadway chorus line by John Barrymore in 1919 and within five years was vamping Rudolph Valentino in such passionate pantomimes as Blood and Sand and Cobra; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Billed as a distant relative to Dante's Beatrice, she had an answer for women who asked the stock question: "How did it feel to be kissed by Valentino?" Said she: "He was a real heman, but the poor darling...
...official, he is the youngest of eight children ("I was 13 before I knew that there was anything but a neck to a chicken"). When his family moved to Los Angeles from Vancouver, he was pushed into the movies by his mother, became a moppet movie star, acted with Theda Bara and Pauline White. Newell played in the silents for three years to the delight of neighborhood wise guys, recalls: "I probably had more fights than any other kid in my end of the city." At Loyola University of Los Angeles, Newell was a three-letter man, after graduation spent...