Vera Kholodnaya: How a housewife became a queen of the screen and passed away at 25
Odessa. February 1919. A piercing wind from the sea chills you to the bone, but the streets are packed with people. The crowd stands in a dense wall, silent, ignoring the cold. Trams have stopped. All theaters and illusions are closed. The city is saying goodbye. Tens of thousands of people came to see off a twenty-five-year-old girl on her last journey. Not a politician, not a commander, not a savior of the nation. An actress.
Her name was Vera Kholodnaya. And she ruled this disappearing empire through a black and white screen, without uttering a single word.
Pointe shoes in the stove and the right life
It all started quite ordinary. Poltava, then moving to Moscow. Little Vera Levchenko dreamed of the stage. She had a natural gift for dancing, she easily entered the ballet school of the Bolshoi Theater. It would seem - here it is, the path.
But the grandmother intervened. Ekaterina Andreevna was a lady of strict rules, one of those who keep their backs straight even when alone with themselves. "Dancing? In a noble family? Never." The ballet shoes went into oblivion. The dream was broken over the knee for the sake of decency.
Vera resigned herself. She was generally docile. In 1910, at the graduation ball at the gymnasium, she met Vladimir Kholodny. A young lawyer, a passionate race car driver. They got married. That very "right" life began, the one her grandmother dreamed of: dinner parties, playing the piano, tennis on weekends, the birth of her daughter Zhenechka. A cozy, warm, safe little world.
And then August 1914 came. The little world collapsed.
Despair as the engine of art
Vladimir goes to the front. Vera remains in Moscow alone, but this loneliness is of a special kind - when there are a lot of people around who depend on you. A little daughter, an adopted daughter Nona, a mother and two younger sisters are in her arms. Savings are melting before our eyes. War devours everything.
She needed money. Just money for food and firewood. That is why, in the autumn of 1914, Vera crossed the threshold of the film studio. No ambitions to become a star. Only fear for the family.
Director Vladimir Gardin glanced at the timid, stunningly beautiful brunette. He gave her a tiny role as a wet nurse in "Anna Karenina." And he was disappointed. On the set, she was constrained, wooden. She didn't know how to wring her hands and roll her eyes dramatically - and that's exactly what silent cinema demanded at that time.
In order to somehow get rid of the importunate petitioner, Gardin gives her a letter of recommendation to Evgeny Bauer at the Khanzhonkov studio. He thought he was sending her nowhere. He was wrong.
Bauer was a genius. He was the first to understand that cinema is not theater filmed on film. Cinema is the magic of close-ups. And when Vera stood in front of the camera in the film "Song of Triumphant Love", Bauer saw the main thing. Her eyes. "Bottomless eyes". She didn't need to fuss in the frame. It was enough to just look.
The success was not just loud. It was deafening.
Queen of the screen and tall Pierrot
In just one year, she starred in thirteen films. People went to the cinemas not for films, they went "to Vera Kholodnaya." Queues lined up in the cold. In Kharkov, once they had to call mounted police - the crowd stormed the cinema, knocking out all the windows.
She became an icon of style. Ladies copied her hairstyles, hats, and the way she held a cigarette. But Vera herself remained surprisingly down-to-earth. When Vladimir was seriously wounded near Warsaw in 1915, she quit filming, broke contracts and rushed to the front. She nursed her husband in the hospital for a month. She pulled him from the brink.
And then Alexander Vertinsky entered her life. The acquaintance was accidental - a soldier brought her a message from her husband from the front line. Along with the letter came a tall, awkward, then unknown young man. Vera, using her influence, helped him get a job at the Miniature Theater. This is how the legendary Pierrot was born.
Vertinsky was fascinated by her. Hopelessly and forever. He dedicated songs to her. One of them - the very one about the fingers smelling of incense - he brought to her in Moscow. Vera read the text and was frightened.
- What have you done? - she said, looking at the lines about death. - Why are you burying me? Remove the dedication!
He took it off. But the song turned out to be prophetic.
Last take in cold Odessa
The Russian Empire crumbled to dust. Revolution, red terror, blood on the streets. In 1918, the film expedition went south, to Odessa. They were escaping from the cold and hunger of Moscow, hoping to wait out the turmoil.
Odessa did not welcome them kindly. The city was ruled by the French, then the Whites, then the bandits. But the filming continued. Outdoor scenes were filmed in any weather. In February 1919, Vera caught a cold. An ordinary thing, it would seem.
But it wasn't a cold. It was the "Spanish flu" - the pulmonary plague of the twentieth century, which killed millions. The disease burned in her in a matter of days. The temperature is under forty. Delirium. The doctors shrugged - there was no medicine.
Vera passed away on February 16, 1919.
Her death spawned hundreds of rumors. They said that she was poisoned by French spies. That she was strangled by a jealous lover. That she was kidnapped by the Bolsheviks. It was unbearable for people to admit that the goddess of the screen could die from a banal virus.
When Vertinsky learned of her death, he returned the dedication to the song. "Your fingers smell of incense, and sadness sleeps in your eyelashes..." He outlived her by decades. Became a world legend. Returned to the USSR. But until the end of his days, closing his eyes, he saw that young Vera - a symbol of the forever disappeared, fragile Russia, which dissolved in the smoke of history, leaving behind only the flickering of old film.