Rudolph Valentino, the most famous screen lover of all time, died at a tragically early age (31), and his sudden passing set off the most lunatic orgy of mass mourning in the history of celebrity deaths. Some 30,000 near-riotous citizens turned up outside the funeral home...

Hollywood studios briefly shut down, suicides spurred by grief were reported in London and Paris, and "a small army of women" insisted he had impregnated them. Fans continue to commemorate the anniversary of his death, Aug. 26, to this day.

Nothing like him had ever been seen before, and nothing has been seen since.
And this extreme adulation was all created in a mere 5 years, after his first leading role!!!

Below is a New York Times review by Gewen, that has more substance than the Los Angeles Times by Schickel, who however both follow the author into highly speculative "two-bit" psychological analysis, which often appears to contradict itself, but appears to be "ala mode" to create "buzz" with truth and accuracy being a hapless victim.

Whereas Schickel calls him "a not very bright man", Leider cites how exceptionally intelligent Valentino was; he could, for example, read, write and speak four languages. Mencken called Rudolph "ingenuous" and his conversations "very eloquent".

Shickel says, "Valentino was a louche and feckless man-child of a familiar Mediterranean type: sleek, sleepy, slender males basking in the sun at cafe tables, nursing their espressos and their dreams of casual female conquests". [BIGOT!!!]
Gewen says he was "a directionless layabout and mama's boy".

Basking in the sun: Yet Lieder says Valentino had a drive that stayed with him to the end.

Momma's Boy? Yet he spent all his time from the age of 3 in Military Schools, until he left for a "growing up" in Paris, and the Riviera.

Schickel says: Valentino "always seemed to have a favored male companion around him." But Roger Miller of the Tribune states: Valentino, "was drawn more to women than to men - particularly maternal women who approve, nurture and adore - but he did not necessarily "chase skirts with an eye to removing them."
 

Mike Tribby /American Library Association gets it right when he states thatLieder engages in a..."kind of might-have/must-have/could-have speculation...........
(For example) "Leider does go on about such matters as how Rudy reacted to Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un faune, because, well, who's to say he didn't see it?"...

And, as to one of the persisting questions regarding Valentino's sexual orientation, her descriptions of his relationships is at odds with her conclusions. For instance,
she reports: Valentino's second wife dropped him when he began expressing the desire for a traditional home and family, and he was crushed.

In other places they refer to Valentino as a powder puff, although since he worked out with Jack Dempsey, none dare call him that to his face. the author would have been more insightful had she pointed out that the male audience were drawing a comparison to a swashbuckling John Barrymore, who would rather die than do a love scene.

On one hand he was called too effiminate in his acting, while others commented on  his dark piercing eyes, and sexual brutal scenes.

I was very disappointed by the speculations, pseudo psychoanalysis, errors, "liberties", jealousy, Mediterranean (Italian) bigotry, contradictions, and an Anglo like mentality that is too uptight, and anal, by the author and reviewers, to appreciate or understand the Italian love for La Dolce Vita, that Valentino exuded.

I could go on, but won't, you get the drift. Keep your eyes peeled.
This is either another attempt to castigate" another  Italian American hero, or a misguided attempt to be controversial or sensational to "enhance" their own image.

Immediately following on, will be an Autobiographical Article of Valentino's early life.
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'DARK LOVER': RUDOLPH VALENTINO AND THE DEFLOWERING OF AMERICA

DARK LOVER
The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino.
By Emily W. Leider.
Illustrated. 514 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

New York Times
By Barry Gewen
Sunday, May, 11, 2003

Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me).'' Philip Larkin was off by 42 years. Sexual intercourse actually began in 1921, on Oct. 30 to be precise. That was the date on which ''The Sheik,'' featuring Rudolph Valentino, opened at two movie houses in New York City. Valentino had already become a star some months earlier with his dazzlingly erotic tango in ''The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,'' but it was ''The Sheik'' that launched him into the stratosphere. Crowds mobbed the theaters, breaking attendance records. Across the country, female fans shivered and went limp. Smart young men with an eye for the ladies were soon being called ''sheiks'' -- and looking for adventure with girls called ''shebas.'' Some years later, Sheik condoms went on sale, with a silhouette of Valentino on their packages. What does a woman want? Apparently, in 1921, what millions of women wanted was the fantasy of a swarthy, intense, exotic stranger with flowing robes and piercing eyes sweeping them up and forcing himself upon them.

The ground for Valentino had been prepared in the preceding decade -- with bobbed hair and rising hemlines, dance crazes and petting parties, campaigns for birth control and woman suffrage. But you would have to look back to 19th-century celebrities like Byron, Liszt and Paganini to find comparisons, and even those pale: it took the modern media to turn female hysteria into a mass phenomenon. And if a Rudolph Valentino had never been seen before, it is necessary to add that nothing truly like him has been seen since.

Later in the century, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles all attracted followings that were Valentino-like in their frenzy. But there was a difference. The crowds pursuing the singers were made up of girls, not yet enmeshed in the web of interconnections and responsibilities that is adult life. Their sexuality was innocent, prelapsarian, even if it oozed out of every pore. The teeny-boppers lost control of themselves when all the Beatles asked to do was hold their hand. The Rolling Stones pushed into darker realms, but they were promoting the same kind of carefree sexual utopia, ecstasy without complication; ''Midnight Rambler'' was sadomasochism as good clean fun, S-and-M with a smiley face.

Valentino's fans came in all ages, but generally they were older, more mature than the fans of the teen idols who followed him. They had spouses, children, often jobs; so in this sense their open display of sexual energy was much more subversive of the social order, even if that's not what the parents of teenage daughters thought during the Presley and Beatles madnesses. (The one pop star whose audience might be said to bear a resemblance to Valentino's was Tom Jones, but the resemblance is only casual. Jones's women lacked the honest spontaneity of Valentino's hordes. The matrons who threw their underwear up onstage at Jones concerts were self-consciously acting out a ritual.)

Valentino was a one-time-only thing. He stands as an icon of 20th-century American social history, a signpost on the road to the modern woman. Feminists should be erecting monuments to him. In the meantime, Emily W. Leider has erected her own monument, a fluid, accomplished, deliciously readable biography of the individual who, she says, ''helped deflower postwar America.'' ''Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino'' is no exercise in Hollywood nostalgia; it's meant for a readership far beyond film buffs and archivists. This is a book about sex, about the intricate relations between men and women, about changing images of masculinity, about the discrepancies between a superstar's public role and private life, about what can happen to a man who is universally perceived as having power over women. As the author of a study of Mae West, Leider is well equipped to handle these themes.

Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaele Guglielmi was born in 1895 into a family on the lower upper reaches of provincial Apulian society in southern Italy. His father, a veterinarian, died from research he was conducting into the transmission of malaria when the boy was 10. Leider throws out a couple of suggestions that Valentino was a child of destiny, commenting on his ''hypnotic stare'' and intensity, even as a newborn, but this seems a bit much: what the young Valentino was for the most part was a directionless layabout and mama's boy. [RAA NOTE: That is TOTALLY inaccurate!!!]  One of the few steps he managed to take on his own behalf, though it changed his life, was to board a ship for New York in 1913.

Valentino had two things going for him when he arrived in Brooklyn not long before Christmas -- a talent for dancing, at a moment when dancing had become all the rage in America, and a love of luxury. The first enabled him to rise quickly, from disreputable ''lounge lizard,'' guiding lonely women around ballroom floors, to renowned exhibition dancer, ''Signor Rodolfo,'' sharing a bill with Sophie Tucker and performing before President Woodrow Wilson.

The second gave him the drive he seemed to lack in Italy.[RAA NOTE: Too Harsh. Rudolph studied engineering, agriculture, and studied maniacally to receive one of the few available admissions to Venice Naval Academy, and was only excluded because he wasn't muscular enough] It was a quality that stayed with him throughout his short life. Valentino spent extravagantly when he had money, and he spent extravagantly when he didn't. In the years before he became a film star, he traveled first class, drove borrowed Rolls-Royces and promenaded in public with two Russian wolfhounds. Once fame struck there was no holding him back. Leider tells us of sable overcoats, fur-lined bathrobes, gold-plated safety razors, gold corkscrews.

It was relatively easy for him to pirouette from dancing into the movies, first doing cameo roles, then playing tough guys and lowlifes. His big break came when June Mathis, the head of Metro's screenwriting department, spotted him and saw something special in his eyes. He landed the lead in ''The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.'' Four pictures later he was The Shiek.

Before Valentino arrived, leading men were square-jawed, rugged straight arrows like Douglas Fairbanks, who, Leider says, ''would sooner jump from an airplane than play a love scene.'' D. W. Griffith once turned Valentino down for a part with the comment: ''He's too foreign-looking. The girls would never like him.'' But ''foreign-looking'' had become the point. There was nothing familiar or comfortable about the smoldering, dangerous Valentino. As one movie magazine put it: ''He does not look like your husband. He is not in the least like your brother. He does not resemble the man your mother thinks you ought to marry.'' D. H. Lawrence got it exactly wrong when he wrote that ''the so-called beauty of Rudolph Valentino . . . only pleases because it satisfies some ready-made notion of handsomeness.''

Valentino turned all the stereotypes inside out. Ph.D. theses could be written on his coloration alone (and probably will be). At a time when the Ku Klux Klan was at its height, Valentino and his makeup men had to perform delicate balancing acts: his skin needed to be dark enough to suggest the exoticism of Arabs or Latins, but not so dark as to remind white filmgoers of blacks. For ''The Sheik,'' Valentino was presented as white, but his hands were brown, so that when he touched the heroine's face, the contrast was accented. Valentino was always careful to stay out of the sun because he tanned so deeply. As he said, ''I become like a Negro.''

IF the women were thrilled by Valentino, the men were threatened. ''I hate Valentino! All men hate Valentino,'' one columnist wrote. ''I hate his classic nose; I hate his Roman face; I hate his smile; I hate his patent leather hair,'' and on and on. Inevitably, questions were raised about Valentino's sexuality, and his flamboyant, dandified lifestyle didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that he endorsed a brand of cosmetics, or that he cried in public, or that he always seemed to have a favored male companion around him. The questions have continued down to the present. Leider does her best to sift through the evidence. The problem is that there isn't any. She takes one biographer to task for leaping too quickly to the conclusion that Valentino was gay, but she is careful to hedge her bets.

As for his relations with women, ''complicated'' is probably too simple an adjective. Valentino was married twice, the first time to a confirmed lesbian. Not surprisingly, that union was a disaster from beginning to end, though it is not really accurate to speak of a beginning since the marriage appears never to have been consummated.

His second wife was a strong-willed, domineering working woman who helped him with his films and business affairs but dropped him when he began expressing the desire for a traditional home and family. (It almost goes without saying that rumors have persisted about her sexual orientation.)

Valentino's companion at the time of his death was the combustible film actress Pola Negri, whose career went into decline with the arrival of the talkies and who spent her later years living with a wealthy Texan named Margaret West. Other women seem not to have intruded much into his life. Information is hard to come by, but the picture Leider paints is of a man who was not particularly active sexually. Women who were close to him describe him as behaving like an older brother or, more often, like a little boy. One actor recalled that ''all he thought about was Italian food.''

In 1926, a month after the release of ''The Son of the Sheik,'' the 14th film in which he played the lead, Valentino became violently ill and was taken to a hospital. He never came out. Appendicitis and perforated ulcers led to peritonitis and pneumonia. He died on Aug. 23, at the age of 31. The commotion that surrounded his death -- mobs besieged the funeral home; at least two women committed suicide -- merely added to the mythology that had grown up around him. Cutting through the legends, Leider gives us a Valentino with childish shortcomings but a very human vulnerability. He was undeniably weak-willed and irresponsible. You would never drive with him; he would crash the car into the nearest retaining wall. You would never lend him money; he would rush out and buy a gold corkscrew.

But Valentino was sincere about wanting to make good movies, not just production-line divertissements that cashed in on his popularity, and he understood that he was caught up in something much bigger than he was. ''The whole thing is false and artificial,'' he said. ''You can't go on and on with it.'' Marcello Mastroianni, who knew something about being typed as a Latin lover, once said of Valentino's predicament, ''If people tell you you're a great lover, how can you make love with this heavy baggage on your back?'' Toward the end, Valentino became increasingly open about his frustration and unhappiness. Little more than a week before his death, he dined with H. L. Mencken, an observer who can be counted on not to be taken in by phoniness or self-pity, and Mencken deserves the last word here. He describes someone who was ingenuous yet troubled, boyishly disarming but afraid. Mencken was touched by the young actor (whose movies he had never seen). ''His words were simple and yet somehow very eloquent,'' Mencken writes. ''I could still see the mime before me, but now and then, briefly and darkly, there was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly called, for want of a better name, a gentleman.''

Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.
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Actor - Filmography

Rudolph Valentino played roles under 18 variations of his name.

Dora et la lanterne magique (1978) (archive footage) .... Le fils du Sultan
... aka Dora and the Magic Lantern (1978) (USA)
 

Son of the Sheik, The (1926) .... Ahmed, the Sheik's Son/Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan
Cobra (1925) .... Count Rodrigo Torriani
Eagle, The (1925) ...Lt. Vladimir Dubrovsky, aka The Black Eagle/Marcel Le Blanc
Sainted Devil, A (1924) .... Don Alonzo Castro
Monsieur Beaucaire (1924) .... Duke de Chartres/Beaucaire
Young Rajah, The (1922) .... Amos Judd
Blood and Sand (1922) .... Juan Gallardo
Beyond the Rocks (1922) .... Lord Bracondale
Moran of the Lady Letty (1922) .... Ramon Laredo
Sheik, The (1921) .... Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan
Camille (1921) .... Armand
Conquering Power, The (1921) .... Charles Grandet
... aka Eugenie Grandet (1921) (USA)
Uncharted Seas (1921) .... Frank Underwood
... aka Uncharted Sea (1921) (USA: copyright title)
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The (1921) .... Julio Desnoyers
Stolen Moments (1920) (as Rudolph Valentine) .... Jose Dalmarez
Wonderful Chance, The (1920) .... Joe Klingsby
Once to Every Woman (1920) .... Juliantimo
Cheater, The (1920) (uncredited) .... Extra
Passion's Playground (1920) (as Rudolph Valentine) .... Prince Angelo Della Robbia
Adventuress, An (1920) (as Rodolph Valentino) .... Jacques Rudanyi
... aka Isle of Love, The (1922) (USA: reissue title)
Eyes of Youth (1919) (as Rudolfo Valentino) .... Clarence Morgan
Nobody Home (1919) (as Rodolph Valentine) .... Maurice Rennard
Rogue's Romance, A (1919) (as Rudolph Volantino)
Big Little Person (1919) (as M. Rodolpho De Valentina) .... Arthur Endicott
Delicious Little Devil (1919) (as Rudolpho Valentina) .... Jimmie Calhoun
Virtuous Sinners (1919) .... Bit Part
Homebreaker, The (1919)
Married Virgin, The (1918) (as Rodolfo di Valentini) .... Count Roberto di San Fraccini
... aka Frivolous Wives (1920) (USA: review title)
All Night (1918) (as Rudolpho di Valentina) .... Richard Thayer
Society Sensation, A (1918) (as Rudolpho De Valentina) .... Dick Bradley
Alimony (1917) (uncredited) .... Dancer
Patria (1917)
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Film on Paper

A STARDOM DOOMED BY EXPECTATION

Dark Lover, The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino.
Emily W. Leider, Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 514 pp., $35

Los Angeles Times
By Richard Schickel
May 11, 2003

This much almost everyone knows about Rudolph Valentino: He died at a tragically early age (31), and his sudden, shocking passing set off the first (and still perhaps the most lunatic) orgy of mass mourning in the history of premature celebrity deaths. Some 30,000 near-rioutous citizens turned up outside the funeral home when his body was placed on view. There were suicides, conspiracy theories, grieving collapses (notably by Pola Negri, who insisted that she was the last and truest of his loves).

There were, naturally, many who claimed to be in spiritual communion with Valentino's shade. His death has entered the popular histories as one of the defining events of the Roaring '20s, a prime example of how the new mass media drove certain impressionable, if not contemptible, levels of society into potentially dangerous realms of celebrity frenzy.

In "Dark Lover," Emily W. Leider's exhaustive but tone-deaf biography of Valentino, she suggests his death was not merely shocking but stupid as well. He had been suffering abdominal pains for weeks before they attained an unbearable crescendo in the early morning hours of Aug. 15, 1926, after some mild carousing the night before. He was admitted to a hospital suffering acute appendicitis and perforated gastric ulcers. She thinks that Valentino delayed the operation for several crucial hours (allowing peritonitis to gain a grip on him) because he did not want the surgeon's knife to mar his perfect, widely displayed and admired body. She suspects, as well, that a common curse of his region -- "May you die in a hospital" -- was on his mind. In his native southern Italy, real men (and people had been questioning his masculine credentials for years) did not surrender to soft pillows and tender nursing. Life and death was a matter of fate, which medicine was powerless to affect.

I suspect that Leider is right about these matters, especially because in his final illness Valentino kept asking people if he was behaving well under the impress of pain. And because she has completed quite a persuasive portrait of an agreeable but not very bright young man, living always in and for the moment. Unable satisfactorily to define his own character and therefore unable to assert or defend himself, he achieved, to his own astonishment, movie stardom as something he was not: a rapacious and dashing seducer operating in exotic climes and times. In fact, Valentino was a louche and feckless man-child of a familiar Mediterranean type: sleek, sleepy, slender males basking in the sun at cafe tables, nursing their espressos and their dreams of casual female conquests. They are dangerous largely to Anglo women who have not encountered their cautionary fictional representations in hundreds of novels and screenplays. Valentino (born Rudolpho Guglielmi) thought vaguely of joining the army but flunked the physical. He considered landscape gardening, but nothing much came of that, either. He drifted to New York, became a taxi dancer -- he had a natural, sinuous grace -- and possibly something of a gigolo. By 1914 he was working in the movies, mostly as a heavy, since swarthy sorts were not, in those days, permitted to be leading men.

A screenwriter named June Mathis thought this nonsense. She insisted on casting him as an Argentine playboy who tangos his way to a redemptive death in World War I in "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." He was a sensation, and as Leider says, he opened the way for alternative versions of movie heroism. Valentino seemed to take a sensuous pleasure in his own beauty and to offer women a new kind of sexual adventure, something at once more playful, dangerous and mutually pleasurable than his more stolid screen competitors (or his fans' husbands) provided.

Yet there was a disconnect between his screen image and the real Rudy. The early '20s were a great age of historical romance in the movies, and it suited the studios to locate him well away from contemporary life, where his example might be too dangerous for women to bear. But this often trapped him in roles more muscular, more up-and-doing, than suited his nature -- all those sheiks and matadors -- and he frequently became comically popeyed under the strain of being someone he wasn't.

Worse, as the press avidly reported the details of his private life, it became clear that he was anything but sheik-like. His first marriage was likely unconsummated, his second a wimpish surrender to the talented but wildly pretentious designer Natacha Rambova, who famously gave him a "slave" bracelet, which he proudly wore to the sneering contempt of American males everywhere. They sensed in him a powerful androgynous strain -- he was always, it seems, a better pal to women than he was a lover -- something languid and passive that played out, as well, in the way he managed (or failed to manage) his career.

He had justifiable complaints about the way his studio, Famous Players-Lasky, underpaid him, but when he went public with them, it sounded like whining. Meantime, he and Rambova spent wildly, childishly on cars, clothes, antiques, which put him in still deeper thrall to the studio. Just weeks before he died, the hairy-chested Chicago Tribune famously called him a "pink powder puff," and though he publicly challenged the anonymous author of the slur to a boxing match (he would have won, since he sometimes sparred with his friend, Jack Dempsey), few go-getting American males would have disagreed with it.

Except, interestingly, H.L. Mencken, who was persuaded to dine with Valentino in the period between the Tribune assault and his final illness. Mencken perceived in him an untutored "fineness" and a "flash" of something else -- the air of a "gentleman" -- qualities not necessarily antithetical to the seductive charmer he had so recently been. To Mencken he was a treasurable anti-boob, but, even so, he thought Valentino lucky to have died young. He foresaw him going the way of many another actor, "the way of increasing pretentiousness, of solemn artiness, of hollow hocus-pocus, deceptive only to himself." Probably so.

On the other hand, in her superb essay on Valentino in "Silent Stars," film historian Jeanine Basinger correctly perceived "that Valentino, like all the really great lover/sex symbol/adventure stars -- like Errol Flynn, Burt Lancaster and Clint Eastwood -- carries within himself and his performance his own critique, his own self-mockery." She wonders, contra-Mencken, if he might have found his way, eventually, not to "solemn artiness" but to romantic comedy, as another ill-educated, naturally athletic, foreign-born actor -- Cary Grant -- so triumphantly did.

About that, we will never know. What we do know is that in its early, primitive days the star system was much more crushing to most of those caught up in it than it is today. You had to be a truly determined individualist like Charlie Chaplin to assert yourself against the vulgar, exploitative weight of the all-knowing studio bosses, flush with their own recent and astonishing riches. I'm not certain that ever-accommodating, ever-distractible Rudolph Valentino had the gumption for that.

We also, alas, know this: that books like Leider's are the worst way to get at a movie star's life. She loves and trusts her prodigious research and dutifully buries her subject under its tonnage, borrowing such simple critical insights as she offers mainly from the reviewers of the time. With a life and stardom like this, you must either make it fascinating, in and of itself, or poignantly relevant to a different age, ruled by entirely different movie conventions. She fails on both counts.

Much better to take the approach of Basinger, aware of what has been written about Valentino but determined to confront his work with a fresh eye, shrewd and sympathetic, in a style jazzed with an infectious pleasure in her own insights. Action, the cliché holds, is character. And action -- not ancient gossip, not self-serving recollections, not travel itineraries -- is what movie actors most significantly leave behind them. Find the truly telling details in their performances and you will find -- and reanimate -- them. Valentino somehow comes to life, wayward, innocent and even touching, in Basinger's few pages as he never does in Leider's endless ones.

Richard Schickel is the author of, most recently, the memoir, "Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip." His film biography of Charles Chaplin, "Charlie," will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival later this month.

A stardom doomed by expectation
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