A Myth Swathed in Black and Spawned by a Little White Lie : Only in Hollywood would a publicist’s scam evolve into a venerable civic tradition.

Like so many Hollywood stories, this one started with a lie.

An enterprising publicist in the 1930s wanted to promote a movie, so he hired a $5-a-day extra, dressed her in black and sent her to a statue of Rudolph Valentino in Hollywood. He pawned her off to the press and public as a woman who mourned Valentino every year on the anniversary of his death, according to “Valentino,” a biography of the star by Irving Shulman.

The extra enjoyed the attention so much that the next year she rented the same costume, purchased her own flowers and showed up at the same spot. But the extra discovered, to her dismay, that she was not alone.

There was now a second woman dressed in black, who also had been lured by the publicity, mourning Valentino.

Almost 60 years later, on a sweltering summer morning, an old woman dressed entirely in black wanders through the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, enters a large marble mausoleum, stops in front of Valentino’s crypt and announces, her voice echoing in the dim, cavernous chamber: “Hello, Rudy. I’m here.”

The Woman in Black myth continues.

*

Only in Hollywood, where fantasy and reality often are indistinguishable, would a publicist’s scam evolve into a venerable civic tradition.

Every year, on the anniversary of Valentino’s death--next Sunday is the 66th--a new generation of women dress in black and show up at the cemetery. Sometimes they argue among themselves over who is truly mourning Valentino’s death and who is angling for publicity.

Sometimes they fight, grabbing at a rival’s black veil and stomping her bouquet.

But when the anniversary passes, and the photographers and camera crews have gone, only one Valentino mourner remains. For more than 20 years, Estrellita de Rejil has visited Valentino’s crypt almost every day, cemetery officials say. At midmorning she takes the bus from her small Hollywood apartment to the cemetery, deposits two white daisies in the glass vases in front of Valentino’s crypt and returns home.

De Rejil appears convinced that her mother was the original Woman in Black. She says her mother met Valentino only once, in a New York restaurant when she was 13, where he kissed her hand. The mother was so captivated that after Valentino’s death, she dressed in black for the rest of her life and visited his grave every day. On her deathbed she made her daughter promise to continue the tradition.

It is a classic Gothic romance--filled with unrequited love, romantic obsession and thwarted passion. But it is not true, according to cemetery officials and Valentino biographies.

No one accuses De Rejil of lying. But watching her prance across the cemetery, barking at a tree trunk shaped like a dog, and dancing a fandango in front of Valentino’s crypt, you begin to understand the provenance of her Valentino obsession.

*

Perhaps the best known of the women in black, and the one with the most evocative name, was Ditra Flame (pronounced Flah-May). For 30 years she made the trip to Valentino’s grave on the anniversary of his death in a limousine, often carrying a dozen red roses and a single white rose.

She had been near death at age 14, she claimed, when Valentino, a friend of her mother, came by and put a single red rose on her blanket. Valentino promised her that she would live, she often told reporters, but asked her to visit his grave after he died because “I don’t want to be alone.”

When she stopped visiting the crypt because there was so much competition--sometimes up to 25 women in black would show up--De Rejil took her place. Soon, De Rejil began visiting every day, alone.

There have been other colorful mourners over the years. In the 1950s, there was much competition between Flame and the Lady in White, “a woman of mystery” who said she met Valentino “up there,” according to a 1952 story in The Times.

One pretender to the title who left roses at Valentino’s crypt every year was committed to a county mental institution. Another claimed that because she was the only one who had known Valentino “intimately,” she should be the only one known as the Woman in Black. But reporters lost interest when she told them she married Valentino in France, forgetting that she had previously told them the marriage had been in New Jersey.

The publicist who created the myth of the woman in black, Russell Birdwell, received his comeuppance years later when he left the movie business and found a job as a newspaper reporter on the old Los Angeles Herald Express.

On one of his first assignments, his editor ordered him to write a feature story on the original Woman in Black, investigate her background and reveal her identity. He did, but in Hollywood, as is often the case, people preferred the myth to the reality.