The Silent Type: Rudolph Valentino

Each month, Visual Film Diary profiles the lives of five actors, directors, producers, and/or major players in film history to chronicle foremost contributions to cinema. This month we will be profiling five men who rose to legendary status during the silent film period and helped to define key aspects of performance, cinematic technique, and modern celebrity that are still celebrated today. Join us for the second installment of our July theme, The Silent Type.

Silent film leading man Rudolph Valentino was perhaps the first celebrity to become larger than life on the occasion of his death. Setting a precedent that would continue with the untimely deaths of James Dean in 1955 and the infamous "27 club" members in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Valentino's shocking death at the age of 31 in 1926 led to episodes of mass chaos so over-the-top that there were various reports of female fans attempting suicide, effectively skyrocketing the deceased actor from mere mortal to cinematic God. His few major screen roles helped create the stock character of the Latin Lover, and like many female stars of foreign birth (many of whom are discussed in our Evil Women season), he was touted by studios as mysterious and exotic, often cast as villains of varied ethnicities. However, Valentino was not so much an actor as a celebrity. For this reason, episode two of our July theme, The Silent Type, will be examining the life- and legend- of Rudolph Valentino, from his impoverished upbringing in Italy to his death from a ruptured ulcer in Manhattan.

The man who would later be known simply as Valentino was born Rudolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguella in Castellaneta, Kingdom of Italy, on May 6th, 1895, to a French mother and an Italian father. Young Rudolfo had three siblings, one of whom died in infancy; his father, too, perished of malaria when Rudolfo was only eleven years old. Because of his playful nature and his striking good looks, Valentino was constantly indulged by his overbearing mother and quite popular among his chums at school, although he was never a successful student. He spent his young adulthood mulling about Europe, earning a certificate in agriculture in Geneva and later living in dire poverty in Paris. Unable to find work in Europe, he decided to move to New York City, where he arrived at Ellis Island on December 23rd, 1913.

His early days as an immigrant were not successful. Unable to find substantial work in Manhattan, Valentino juggled various odd jobs, at times working as a waiter, a dishwasher, a gardener, and even as a taxi dancer, which was basically a man hired by women to dance with them at nightclubs; he eventually found a reasonably steady job as a vaudevillian dancer and entertainer. In the mid 1910s Valentino befriended a Chilean heiress and socialite named Blanca de Saulles. de Saulles was in a torturous marriage with a businessman she would later murder over a custody dispute, and Valentino was called to the stand in a pre-murder divorce hearing in which he testified that John de Saulles had be unfaithful to his wife. John de Saulles, in a bout of revenge, had Valentino arrested on vice charges. The case was sensationalized by New York gossip papers, and, following the murder, Valentino feared having to be further entangled in the case, and decided to flee the East Coast.

In 1917 he arrived in California with a traveling musical company. Upon a meeting with Norman Kerry, he was encouraged to try his luck at silent film acting. Valentino and Kerry both moved to Los Angeles, becoming roommates and indulging older female patrons who would shower them with luxurious gifts and cars in exchange for their company. Valentino's success as a dancer led him to a part in a film called Alimony (1918), which in turn led him to be cast in bit parts in various films, usually as a nefarious gangster. Much like his contemporary Theda Bara, Valentino was of a dark complexion, a far cry from the Hollywood standard of beauty, which encouraged fair skin and light eyes. For this reason, both Bara and Valentino fell into a pattern of being cast either as mysterious villains or as exotic spectacles. This greatly infuriated Valentino, who disliked having to portray men of interchangeable ethnicities. Once, asked by a reporter if he thought his love interest in the film The Sheik (1921) would have actually fallen for a "savage," Valentino replied, "People are not savages because they have dark skin. The Arabian civilization is one of the oldest in the world... the Arabs are dignified and keen-brained." Despite his best efforts to distance himself from these portrayals, Valentino would be known for playing a "Latin lover," or a vaguely-ethnic, exotic hero, forevermore.

Undoubtedly, Valentino's breakthrough was in the 1921 film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The film was a massive success and a smash hit with audiences, and became one of the first silent films to gross $1,000,000. Valentino was shot to stardom, but faced several difficulties as a new celebrity. For one, he found himself with very little freedom, constantly mobbed with female fans and reporters wherever he went, which had a serious impact on his personal life and relationships. More seriously, he found himself in a legal battle with his studio, the Famous Players, over financial compensation for his acting roles. While actors like Mary Pickford were being paid $7,000 a week for their films, Valentino was paid only $1,250, an amount he found insulting when contextualized with his marketability for the studio. The dispute led to a strike, a counter lawsuit, a failed "Letter to the Open Public" encouraging moviegoing audiences to sympathize with Valentino despite their own average incomes of only around $2000 a year, and, finally, a resolution when he left the studio and- for a time- acting.

During his break from film acting, Valentino embarked on a dance tour with his girlfriend Natacha Rambova. The pair ran into trouble when they were married in 1923, less than one hundred days after Valentino's divorce from his gay first wife, Jean Acker, whom he had married as an act of friendship to help her escape a lesbian love triangle. Due to bigamy laws, Valentino was arrested. The first marriage had not exactly ended well, despite the lack of romantic relationship between the two, and Acker was less than sympathetic to Valentino's plight. When he was released on bail, he managed to continue his dance tour, eventually remarrying Rambova in a (legal) ceremony.

Valentino's marriage to Rambova was productive in many ways; their artistic partnership allowed both actors to create legitimately good and successful films, sometimes together. However, Rambova was disliked by many of Valentino's friends and co-workers for being overly controlling, and she was eventually contractually barred from sets once Valentino joined United Artists in 1924. The couple eventually divorced, and a bitter Valentino left his ex-wife a whopping $1 in his will.

In 1926, tragedy struck. 31-year-old Rudolph Valentino collapsed at the Hotel Ambassador in Manhattan, and after being rushed to the hospital was misdiagnosed as having appendicitis. In an operation it was revealed that he did not have appendicitis, but instead deep, perforating gastric ulcers that were presenting as appendicitis (a condition now referred to as Valentino's Syndrome). During surgery he developed peritonitis, infection of the membrane lining the abdomen, and his condition worsened considerably. Although his doctors knew he was going to die, they did not tell him- a common practice of the day. He slipped into a coma for several days, and eventually died on August 23rd.

The news of Valentino's death was disastrous. Thousands of fans lined the streets of the hospital and later mobbed his funeral procession, putting out full displays of public mourning. The best word to describe the scene is probably hysteria- fans threatened to kill themselves, and broke down at his casket. There was looting and rioting. Pola Negri, star of the last Evil Women feature, claimed that she and Valentino had been engaged at the time of his death and caused a stir after she repeatedly fainted at his funeral, and had the flowers near his casket rearranged to spell out the word "POLA." For years after his death- and still today- a mysterious woman in black would show up to his grave at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles on the anniversary of his death, slip a red rose onto his headstone, and disappear.

Valentino, as previously mentioned, was by no means a groundbreaking or important actor of the time. His work defining cinema was less of a service to the acting profession and more of a contribution to the formation of celebrity- his image helped to define the idea of a star in a way that no one before him had been able to do. During his life his image was frequently called into question- men often complained of his effeminate nature and branded him as a homosexual or simply as a dandy, while women defended him as the "Great Lover" and made him the paragon of a sex symbol. Although Valentino didn't exactly meet the standard of manliness in the 1920s- a standard basically defined by Douglas Fairbanks- he was by no means a pansy. I've watched many candid clips of Valentino as well as portions of his films and the majority of his onscreen presence usually involves baring his toned arms and smoking a cigarette. There's nothing inherently effeminate about his performances- believe me, if there was, I would be even that much more into him.

Join us next week as we explore a very different star of the silent screen, a man whose comedic legacy, while not as well known today as some of his big-name contemporaries, made a lasting mark on silent film and on comedy itself.