A stardom doomed by expectation
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 cliche 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.