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A Week to Remember: Rudolph Valentino

Keith Chaffee, Librarian, Collection Development,
Rudolph Valentino was one of the great stars of the silent film era.
Rudolph Valentino was one of the great stars of the silent film era

On May 6, 1895, Rudolph Valentino was born. The Italian actor became one of the great stars of silent film, a sex symbol who frequently struggled against his own “Latin lover” image.

Valentino was born in the small Italian city Castellaneta. He was a poor student as a child, in part because he was so handsome a child that his teachers and his mother frequently overindulged him. He graduated from agricultural school, but struggled to find work, and left for the United States when he turned 18.

He was processed at Ellis Island in December 1913. Valentino never applied for naturalization, and remained an Italian citizen until his death. As he had in Italy, he initially struggled to find work in New York. He eventually found work as a taxi dancer. That’s an occupation that has virtually disappeared from today’s world; he was employed at a dance hall, where unaccompanied women paid him by the dance to be their partner. His skill at dancing, his good looks, and his European ancestry—he could easily be passed off to the customers as some sort of minor nobility—made him a popular partner.

Among the women Valentino befriended was a Chilean heiress who was in the middle of a difficult divorce. After Valentino testified on her behalf during the divorce trial, her former husband implicated him on vice charges involving a prominent local madam. The charges were almost certainly fraudulent, and nothing much came of them, but Valentino lost his job as a result, and the scandal made it hard for him to be hired anywhere else.

When the heiress shot her husband in 1917, Valentino feared being caught up in another high publicity trial, and decided instead to get out of town by taking a job with a touring musical. Jumping from one tour to another, he made his way to Los Angeles by the end of 1917, and set out to make a career in the new business of motion pictures.

He quickly began to get small movie roles. It was the era of the blue-eyed blond “all-American” leading man, which meant that Valentino, with his olive complexion and darker features, was usually cast as a gangster or some other villain. By 1919, he was working steadily as a bit player, and beginning to get more sizable supporting roles.

His romantic life was less successful. He married actress Jean Acker 1919, rather impulsively. The marriage was a disaster; she regretted it almost instantly, and locked him out of her room on their wedding night. They soon separated, and never consummated the marriage, but didn’t divorce until 1921.

In 1920, Valentino read a novel called The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and thought he’d be well suited to play one of the characters. He contacted Metro, the studio which owned the film rights, only to learn that the screenwriter, June Mathis, had been trying to find him. Valentino had played a small role in one of her earlier films, and she agreed that he was right for this part. It was Valentino’s first starring role, and Four Horsemen was a smash, one of the first movies to gross more than $1 million.

For most of his career, Valentino would turn to Mathis as his preferred screenwriter. Rex Ingram, the director of Four Horsemen was less impressed, though. Ingram and Valentino didn’t get along very well, and Ingram’s lack of enthusiasm made Metro reluctant to use him further. After another few movies, Valentino left Metro and signed a new contract with Famous Players, who were convinced that they could make him a star.

Book cover for The Sheik
The Sheik
George Fitzmaurice, George Melford

His first movie for Famous Players did exactly that. The Sheik solidified Valentino’s media image as a “Latin lover.” (Yes, he was playing an Arab, not a Latino, but the media wasn’t always fussy about that sort of thing a hundred years ago.) Valentino did play a Latin man in his next film, another huge success. Blood and Sand wasn’t an entirely happy experience, though. Valentino had been promised that the film would be shot in Spain—it was made in Hollywood instead—and he didn’t get along with the director.

After filming was complete, Valentino entered into his second marriage, to costume designer Natacha Rambova. Unfortunately, the divorce from his first wife was less than a year old, and California law at the time required that you be divorced for a year before remarrying. Valentino was charged with bigamy, and the trial was a media sensation. Valentino and Rambova were forced to annul their marriage, and to wait a year before they could legally marry. The publicity didn’t harm Blood and Sand at all.

Valentino was still frustrated with his salary. He was earning $1,250 a week, and had been offered a raise to $3,000, but that was still less than other major stars of the era were getting. Mary Pickford made $10,000 a week. Valentino announced that he would go on strike against Famous Players. In September 1922, the studio filed a lawsuit against him, but Valentino refused to back down.

Famous Players was a bit desperate at that particular moment. Their other big star, comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, was caught up in his own scandal at the moment, having been charged with rape and manslaughter (he would eventually be acquitted), and Famous Players had had to shelve several of Arbuckle’s movies during the furor. They offered to raise Valentino’s salary to $7,000 a week.

That offer, unfortunately, leaked to the press, which reported it as a new contract before the deal had been finalized. Valentino was furious, and began looking for work elsewhere. The studio held firm, exercising its option to extend Valentino’s contract, preventing him from accepting acting jobs for any other studio.

Book cover for Blood and Sand
Blood and Sand
Rudolph Valentino

So for the next year, Valentino returned to his earliest reliable means of support—dancing. He spent much of 1922 and 1923 touring the United States and Canada, doing dance shows and judging local beauty pageants on behalf of Mineralava beauty products.

When he returned to the United States in 1924, Valentino and Famous Players worked out a deal with Ritz-Carlton Pictures, who would eventually take over his contract. Ritz-Carlton offered him $7,500 a week, creative control over his films, and filming in New York, which he preferred to Hollywood.

Valentino’s films for Ritz-Carlton were not successful, and the studio was frustrated by how much money Valentino and Rambova, who he had finally married after their waiting period was up, were spending. He was released from his contract.

Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks were eager to snap him up, though; their studio, United Artists, offered him $10,000 a week to make only three movies a year. They did require, though, that Rambova not be present on the set of his movies. Valentino’s acceptance of that provision put a strain on his marriage, ultimately leading to a divorce.

For the opening of his first United Artists picture, The Eagle, Valentino went to London. He spent several months there and in France, spending recklessly while his divorce was going through. By the time the spree was over, it was 1926, and Valentino desperately needed to make a movie in order to pay off his debts. And so, despite the fact that he’d always hated being trapped in the sheik image, he agreed to make Son of the Sheik.

Valentino was preparing for the release of the movie on August 15, 1926, when he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. He underwent surgery for appendicitis and perforated ulcers. After the surgery, Valentino developed peritonitis, and he died on August 23, only 31 years old.

Book cover for The Valentino Collection
The Valentino Collection
George Melford, James Vincent, Paul Powell , Phil Rosen

More than 100,000 people lined the streets at the funeral home, where there was a full-on riot on the 24th. More than 100 New York police officers were called in to restore order. The scene inside the funeral home was nearly as dramatic. Actress Pola Negri collapsed over the coffin, claiming to be Valentino’s grief-stricken fiancee. The funeral director hired four actors to play an Italian Blackshirt honor guard, supposedly sent in tribute by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.

Valentino is interred at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He had made no final burial arrangements, and his old friend, screenwriter June Mathis, offered to let him be interred in the crypt next to hers, which she had bought for the husband from whom she was now divorced. Over the years, the tradition of the “woman in black” has developed. Each year, on the anniversary of his death, Valentino’s crypt is visited by a woman carrying a single red rose.

Valentino did not make a lot of movies, and as is true of so many silent films, much of his work has been lost. Kanopy offers a selection of his short films, as well as three of his major starring roles: The Sheik, Blood and Sand, and Son of the Sheik.


Also This Week


May 10, 1872

Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to be nominated to be President of the United States, as the nominee of the newly-formed Equal Rights Party. The candidacy was probably not legal, as Woodhull would have been several months younger than the minimum Presidential age of 35 on Inauguration Day, and she didn’t get many votes in November. Mary Gabriel’s biography of Woodhull is called Notorious Victoria; Neil Katz turns her life into a 2-volume novel in Outrageous and Scandalous.

May 8, 1877

The first Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show was held. The show has been held every year since, including during the Depression and the World Wars; the only American sporting event with a longer uninterrupted history is the Kentucky Derby. The first show drew 1200 dogs, so many that the event took four days instead of the scheduled three; the extra day’s proceeds were donated to the ASPCA to create a home for stray and disabled dogs. Josh Dean follows Jack, an Australian Shepherd, as he prepares for Westminster in Show Dog.

May 8, 1910

Mary Lou Williams was born. Williams was a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, and one of the first women to be successful in jazz. In her fifty-year career, she wrote hundreds of songs and performed on dozens of albums. Among her best known compositions were “Camel Hop,” written for Benny Goodman,” and “In the Land of Oo-Bla-Dee,” for Dizzy Gillespie. A variety of Williams’ own performances are available for streaming or download at Freegal.

May 8, 1970

Naomi Klein was born. Klein is a Canadian writer and activist; in her early books No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, she argues against the dangers of capitalism and consumer culture. In the last few years, she has shifted her focus to the climate crisis in This Changes Everything and On Fire, which makes the case for the “Green New Deal.”


 

 

 

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