The sudden death in 1926 of silent screen superstar Rudolph Valentino caused an outpouring of anguish. In both Europe and America, women reportedly killed or attempted to kill themselves over the news. His girlfriend, the screen vamp Pola Negri, dramatically collapsed on so many occasions it damaged her career, while his ex-wife Jean Acker released a commemorative song to cash in on his death. To this day, Valentino’s ghost is said to haunt countless tourist spots in Los Angeles.

But lost in the legend was the real man. In the even-handed, meticulously researched Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, author Emily W. Leider painstakingly extracts the documented facts from a life story mired in myth. Despite her almost academic reserve, the drama and tragedy of Valentino’s brief life burst through the pages as Leider exposes Valentino as an imaginative, naïve dreamer thrust into a role he could not control.

If Leider takes too much time on Valentino’s filmography, perhaps that’s fitting for a man whose celluloid presence eventually overpowered his sense of self. “I feel,” Valentino once said, “quite unreal.”

Rodolfo Guglielmi was born May 6, 1895, in the southern Italian town of Castellaneta. While the hyperactive, handsome little boy respected and feared his strict veterinarian father, Giovanni, he worshipped his dreamy, accomplished French-born mother, Gabriella.

The young Valentino was nicknamed “Mercury,” after the wing-footed trickster god. According to Leider, when not riding horses, taming donkeys and exploring ancient caves, Rodolfo was plotting his future exploits. “I became to myself an imaginary figure of great excellence, daring and glamour,” he later recalled.

These idyllic days ended abruptly in 1906, when his father died of malaria. Valentino’s goth-tinged rebelliousness became a concern to his proper Catholic family, who sent him to a boarding school and then agricultural college. At 17, the starry-eyed Rodolfo escaped to Paris and Monte Carlo, where he became a rogue, learning the scandalous tango, mingling with high society, and losing every penny he had.

In 1913, the Guglielmis decided Rodolfo needed a fresh start. Although Leider is too careful a biographer to state it outright, Valentino comes off as a rather foolish, careless man whose dreams of grandeur far outweighed his common sense. She seems to view the charming Valentino with the rose-colored glasses of a fan, giving him the benefit of the doubt much like his family and friends would throughout his life.

That said, the impression of Valentino as impetuous was borne out by his first few months in America. Valentino was sent aboard the S.S. Cleveland, equipped with $4,000 and calling cards stamped with a fake family crest. On the ship, he became a popular dancing partner. This skill would save him in New York City, when he found himself sleeping on benches and washing beneath a fire hydrant after quickly blowing his inheritance.

According to Leider, Valentino soon found work as a taxi dancer at the glamorous Maxim’s Restaurant-Cabaret. Here, the graceful Valentino danced with upper-class women for money. He also gave private lessons, which perhaps included sex—a fact Leider neither confirms nor denies.

Valentino soon moved up the ranks from “lounge lizard” to exhibition dancer. But he still made the nightclub rounds, and it was on a ballroom floor that he met Blanca de Saulles—the unhappily married wife of the blue-blooded playboy Jack De Saulles. The two developed a close relationship, though it is not clear if it was ever sexual.

In 1916, Blanca, fed up with Jack’s well-known indiscretions, sued for divorce and custody of their son. Eager to be a hero, Valentino publicly testified against Jack in court, claiming that the playboy and Valentino’s ex-dancing partner Joan Sawyer were involved in a long-term affair. (As proof, Valentino claimed to have seen Sawyer’s douche bag when on a trip with the couple.)

It appears the well-connected Jack then decided to seek revenge. On September 5, 1916, Valentino was arrested at a brothel on Seventh Avenue, accused of being a pimp. He was jailed, and pilloried in the press, which taunted him as a corset-wearing, “bogus count or marquis.”

Charges were soon dropped, and Valentino high-tailed it to the West Coast. It was a fortuitous escape—in August 1917, Blanca murdered Jack during a custody dispute.

In 1917, Valentino arrived in Los Angeles, determined to make it in the movie business. Soon, his otherworldly stare—which a friend claimed was the result of near-sightedness—and animal magnetism enraptured Hollywood.

Valentino also caught the eye of actress Jean Acker, the lover of the decadent Russian-born screen siren Alla Nazimova. Another foolish decision on Valentino’s part occurred when he dared Acker to marry him. They eloped on November 6, 1919. That night at the popular Hollywood Hotel, swarming with movie industry elite, Valentino attempted to enter his new wife’s room. Although he pounded on the door, it remained locked.

According to Leider, years later Acker would say that she had refused to sleep with Valentino because he admitted he had gonorrhea. Whatever the cause, the spell was broken and the two soon separated.

It was a move Acker, who would spend the rest of her life capitalizing on her Valentino connection, appears to have regretted. Her estranged husband soon catapulted to superstardom as the “Latin Lover” in epics like 1921’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik.

But in the most enjoyable part of the biography, Leider gives countless amusing examples of how Valentino’s smoldering status was somehow lost on many in Hollywood. Valentino’s co-stars saw him not as a sex symbol but as an “overgrown little boy,” who loved cooking for friends, fast cars, and rather tacky clothes. In fact, one wishes Leider spent more time exploring these stories and less in exhaustively retelling the plot of every movie in which he ever starred—a common trap of the diligent biographer.

After years of farcical romantic entanglements, Valentino finally found a woman as extravagant, dramatic and spoiled as he. The fascinating set and costume designer Natacha Rambova, born Winifred Shaughnessy of Salt Lake City, was a former ballerina and niece of the famed designer Elsie de Wolfe.

Another protégé of Nazimova, Rambova was initially not impressed with Valentino, whom she met during the filming of the 1921 film Camille. “I thought him plain dumb,” she recalled, per Leider.

Yet the two were soon passionately in love; Valentino even wore a slave bracelet

she had given him. Although his divorce from Jean Acker was finally granted in 1922, California law stated that divorcées had to wait a year to remarry. Always impulsive, Valentino threw caution to the wind and married Rambova only two months later. L.A. law enforcement charged him with bigamy.

Valentino found himself in jail yet again. When the journalist Adela Rogers St. John visited him there, writes Leider, a sobbing Rudy grasped the cell bars while shouting, “I rot here before I deny our sacred marriage. She is my wife, my wife.”

The trial was a sensation, held amid numerous Hollywood scandals which Leider deftly places in context of the oversized reaction to the Valentino hearing. A court reporter said it was “like a gangster funeral, with armed guards…to keep the flappers from literally crushing Rudy to death.” The women who crowded the courtroom were treated to a romantic melodrama when their hero took the stand. “I loved deeply,” he explained. “But in loving I may have erred.”

After a period of enforced separation, the lovers were reunited at Rambova’s family vacation home in the Adirondacks. When an intruder invaded the estate, Leider writes, Valentino ran to get a shotgun while Rambova screamed, “Don’t do it! You may be killed or disfigured. Remember you belong to the screen—the public!”

Though Valentino played a misogynist in the press, stating women “like to have a masterful man,” he was soon overpowered by the sophisticated and savvy Rambova. “From the start,” Leider writes, “Natacha used Valentino as her personal manikin, turning his head and body into her art.”

The pair now gave the impression of two witchy theater kids. Rambova introduced Valentino to the occult and they often attended seances, with Valentino believing his spirit guide was an Indigenous American named Black Feather. Their film collaborations and demands irked Hollywood honchos, and Rambova was accused of destroying Valentino’s career.

Perhaps as a consequence, by the mid-’20s, the marriage was on the skids. According to Leider, Valentino may have had an affair with the actor Andre Daven as well. Rambova definitely strayed, frustrated by Valentino’s insistence that she quit working. She left him in 1925; Valentino was devastated. “I have often thought to myself, ‘The great lover—loved by all, but his loves.’”

Throughout Valentino’s career, he was disparaged for his exotic looks and perfumed silk pajamas by everyone from the media to Douglas Fairbanks.

Leider deftly explores the shocking vitriol spewed at Valentino in the press, particularly their obsession with his lack of “manhood.” Valentino’s frustration with this abuse would boil over in 1926, during a promotional tour for Son of the Sheik.

While passing through Chicago, he was infuriated when the Chicago Tribune printed an editorial titled “Pink Powder Puffs.” The editorial, allegedly written by John Herrick, blamed Valentino for the feminization of the American male, personified by a powder vending machine in a Chicago men’s restroom.

“Homo Americanus!” it read in part. “Why didn’t someone drown Rudolph Guglielmi, alias Valentino, years ago.”

An incensed Valentino immediately issued a challenge to the writer in the Chicago Herald Examiner. He accused the paper of slurring his heritage and manhood, and challenged the essayist to a boxing match. He signed the challenge off with a bombastic flourish: “hoping I will have an opportunity to demonstrate to you that the wrist under a slave bracelet may snap a real fist into your sagging jaw.”

Herrick did not respond. But according to Leider, Valentino was determined to prove his masculinity. So in New York City, he instead boxed sportswriter Buck O’Neil in front of a group of reporters. Jack Dempsey served as referee. Valentino suspiciously knocked down the much larger O’Neil instantly, and the sportswriter exclaimed: “That boy has a punch like a mule’s kick!”

As his career soared, Valentino was increasingly unmoored. Leider beautifully describes the last, frenzied days of his life, filled with parties, paparazzi, and pathetic press stunts. “I have everything—and I have nothing. It’s all too terribly fast for me,” he told a reporter, per Leider. “A man should control his life. Mine is controlling me.”

Valentino’s next flame, Pola Negri, claimed he would often double over in pain. While partying in New York City on August 15, 1926, he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. Valentino was immediately wheeled into surgery for both appendicitis and perforated ulcers. When he awoke, Leider writes, he asked, “did I behave like a pink powder puff or like a man?”

Crowds of fans swarmed outside the hospital, and daily bulletins updated the public on his health. The star seemed to rebound, only for an infection to set in. He lapsed into a coma and died on August 23. He was 31 years old.

His fans and Hollywood threw themselves into a frenzy of mourning. His brother, Alberto, “spent 13 minutes gazing at what remained of Rudy,” Leider poignantly writes. Overcome, he was overheard saying,“My brother, my brother, what a disaster.”

Indeed it was a disaster—for the Guglielmi family, for silent Hollywood, and for Valentino’s beloved dog Kabar, who is said to haunt the halls of his former mansion Falcon Lair. One wishes that rather than settling for this deliciously detailed yet sometimes dry biography, we could have gotten the story of Valentino from his own lips—silent no more and ready to speak.

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