Introduction
摘要
When I was growing up in Poland, Pola Negri was a household name. My mother introduced me to her at a very young age, even though we were not able to see any of her films. At the time, during the 1960s and 1970s, Polish people did not have access to American films, which is where Negri really made her name, and none of her German works were available either. She was a countrywoman who had made good in the magical, faraway land called Hollywood. How did she do it? Books about Hollywood stars were banned in postwar Poland, where I grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The Communist rulers felt they needed to protect the people from the moral decay of the glamorous, decadent West. To a young man like me, that made the allure of the great stars even stronger. I had never seen...