|
Advice and Quotes from Nita Naldi Nita may have played a vamp, but based on these quotes it seems she was a bit of a vamp herself. Nita Naldi had a penchant for speaking her mind, showing her intelligence; things neither admired, desireable, nor fashionable in women at the time. She had wicked sense of humor and the self-confidence to laugh at herself. She was utterly charming.
This is Nita in her own words:
On the vamp matter, I just don't happen to look like an ingenue and that's why they cast me for the vampire, which is wrong again, because the real vampire is the little baby doll with the liquid eye. Every time. A man is scared to death of a woman who looks as if she might have a couple of thoughts. He wants to know it all. That's Men. The girl with the curls is the real vampire. I found that out when I was in the chorus. It was the blond cutie that did all the damage to the front row.
You know yourself that the way to lose a man is the way the film wives treat them. Be nice to a man and he's as good as gone. Cater to him, run after him, spill a few tears over him at the breakfast table, call him "Dearie" and you'll have him falling into the arms of the first vamp who throws him a red rose and a cruel word now and then, when she thinks of it.
Don't nag. If he doesn't get you the second time, it's hopeless anyway.
They used to put me in boudoir scenes wearing ermine tails and paradises in my hair and a couple of snakes coiled around my shoulders. A man would run 20 miles if he ever stumbled on a woman really looking like that.
Girls like Marilyn Monroe are tremendously more sexy than I ever could be. They look like human beings. I looked like something buried for 2,000 years and just dug up!
When I went out to the coast, some of the people on the Lasky lot tried to Ritz me. I heard a group of people say, "Oh, she's only a showgirl." Do you know what I said? God made showgirls and Paramount made actresses.
I'm a lazy devil. I prefer reading to anything in the world. From detective stories to Flaubert and Dickens. I'm mad about psychological murders. Sort of a frustration, I suppose. I was a one-woman crime wave on the screen.
I like earrings. I don't think I could vamp successfully without them.
Don't make him feel as if his home is a prison. Let him go out with the boys once in awhile and always see to it that you've got something amusing to do yourself those evenings, so he'll worry about you. He'll come home earlier.
Don't forget that man, being a polygamous animal, can't be content with merely a wife. He's got to have a sweetheart as well and the smartest thing a wife can do is be it.
| 
Email Article
Print Article
Discuss This (4 Comments)
Del.icio.us
Furl
Technorati
Yahoo! My Web
Reddit
Column Archives
Column RSS Subscription
