Valentino - A Dream of Desire by David Bret Robson Books £16.95 in UK
I suspected that this might not be the film book of the year when, like a Victorian single mother, the courier simply left it on our doorstep and fled.
Mind, it is a work that keeps the reader busy. It is Mensa-level stuff, for example, to work out what that subtitle, "A Dream of Desire", can possibly mean. And not one of the chapter headings - "The Caress of Romance", "The History of Love and Its Justification" and "Sanctuary of my Soul", are but a few gruesome examples - has the remotest bearing on what ensues. While slogging through it, however, and as a kind of anti-boggling exercise, I set myself to wondering what would have happened to Rudolph Valentino if he had not died of peritonitis on the August 23rd 1926.
One thinks of John Gilbert, who achieved a posthumous distinction as Ernest Gebler's father-inlaw and was also Valentino's rival and unchallenged successor as a silent screen idol. There are many theories to account for Gilbert's fall when the sound era came in. His voice was shrill, some say, while others insist that the monstrous Louis B. Mayer, who bore Gilbert a grudge, had deliberately sabotaged his career. Actually, and contrary to popular legend, he made ten talking pictures, but his dashing image was made for the silent screen. When he was heard to gasp "I love you, I love you!", it was as if a vandal had drawn a speech-bubble on an El Greco.
He died in 1936 of a heart attack nudged along by drink and an unrequited passion for Greta Garbo, who loved Greta Garbo first, and other women a poor second. Valentino's fall, had he lived, would have been more vertiginous. His voice was deep and pleasant - he may be heard on CD, recycled from a 1923 Brunswick recording, as he warbles Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar - but it would have been quite another matter had he spoken aloud the dialogue of, say The Son of the Sheik: "So, my young charmer," a title went. "Your mission in life is to lure men into lonely ruins - to be robbed and tortured. I may not be the first victim - but, by Allah, I shall be the one you'll remember!"
According to the blurb, the biographer, David Bret (there, I've named him!) "uses much unpublished material to reveal the real Valentino". There is, however, not even one note provided to back up Mr Bret's sources. Even the name "Valentino" does not appear in the index. So when we are told that one of the star's homosexual conquests was the young Gary Cooper, we may perhaps be forgiven for addressing Mr Bret in the imperishable words employed by George Kennedy in Thunder- bolt and Lightfoot when he counselled a small boy to enjoy the amorous favours of a mallard.
The thought occurs that the aforementioned index would have been considerably shorter had the author listed the male Hollywood stars, present and future, who had not - singly, in tandem or in triad - been to bed or shared the tops of motor cars - his favourite mating place - with Valentino. Such was his sociableness that Mickey Mouse was fortunate not to have been born until 1928.
Valentino was born Rodolpho Alfonso Raffaelo Pierre Filibert di Valentina d'Antonguolla near Taranto, Italy, on May 6th 1895. The family was well-to-do, and Rudolpho was a mother's boy. His father, displaying prescient good taste, loathed the sight of him. The young Rudy was a handful; not only did he expose himself in church, but he once - so the author tells us - "attempted to drown a boy who had insulted Gabrielle [Rudy's mother] in the town fountain". As Groucho Marx might have observed, how his mother got into the town fountain, we'll never know.
At any rate, once Gabrielle had been hung out to dry, she was persuaded to let him go to Paris, where he learned the valse chaloupe - the apache dance. He obtained his fare home by selling - or, rather, renting himself - to a middle-aged businessman. Not long afterwards, he was off again , this time to America, where he learned the tango, became a gigolo and essayed a little blackmail on the side.
According to Mr Bret, one of Rudy's male conquests at this time was the "heart-throb actor" William Boyd; but - scattering mud and cliches like rose-petals along the way - he does not say whether this was the actor who would one day be known - which would explain much - as Hopalong Cassidy, or his notorious namesake, billed as William "Stage" Boyd. Accompanied by another lover, the future silent star, Norman Kerry (Kaiser), Rudy went to Hollywood where he became what today would be termed the toy-boy of the star, Mae Murray, she of the bee-stung lips, whose husband, a fair man, liked to apotheosise Rudy as "that damned faggot gigolo".
Between 1918 and 1920, he played walk-ons and bit parts in seventeen films. In The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he danced the tango, flashing his eyes, teeth and much else besides, before planting "a masochistic kiss" on his partner's lips. How a kiss could be masochistic, Mr Bret does not vouchsafe us, but the film, followed by Camille and The Sheik, made Valentino rather more than a star. Women from Dubuque to Dubai swooned in the aisles. They had harboured an unsuspected fantasy of being vicariously ravished by a son of the desert, and Valentino was happy to oblige.
Privately, he continued to prefer men as sexual partners, but the women in his life did not want for colour. There was the lesbian actress, Nazimova, whose conquests included Oscar Wilde's niece, Dolly - ungallantly described as "the only Wilde who liked sleeping with. women". There was Nita Naldi - nee Donna Dooley, who enjoyed baring her breasts. According to Mr Bret, her first words on meeting her Blood and Sand co-star was "Howdy, Rudy! Wanna feel my tits?" And there was Pola Negri, who was born Barbara Apolonia Chalupiec and added a touch of class to Rudy's lying-in-state by covering his casket with a gargantuan quilt of red roses, which had the name "POLA" spelt out in white carnations.
Valentino's sexual preferences did not deter him from marrying twice. His first wife was an actress, Jean Acker, who set a marital record for brevity by slamming the door of the bridal suite in the groom's face. She was a lesbian, Mr Bret tells us helpfully. The second Mrs Valentino was one Natasha Rambova, who had been born Winifred Shaughnessy. A thick Russian accent accompanied her change of name rather like a bib goes with a lobster dinner.
Rambova, like Acker and not wishing to create a precedent, probably did not go to bed with him, either. Instead, she became his Svengali, to ruinous effect, meddling with his career and terrorising his directors She encouraged him to adopt an effeminate on-screen persona - although in such films as The Eagle, he displays an endearing gift for self-mockery. When, at last, the worm turned and Rambova boarded a huff and took herself off in it to Europe and a divorce lawyer, Rudy's career threatened to recover. Then a sneering editorial in the Chicago Tribune described him as a "Pink Powder Puff".
Unwisely, the star did not choose to shrug off the insult. Although in pain from bleeding stomach ulcers, he issued a challenge to the anonymous writer. He even demonstrated his manliness by boxing two rounds with quite another journalist, whose few body-blows failed to rattle Rudy's slave bracelet. A few days later, he was operated on for a burst ulcer and ruptured appendix. He asked "Did I behave like a pink powder puff, or a man?" Then peritonitis and septoendocarditus set in, and he was dead within days.
According to Mr Bret - who, like Arnold Bennett's "Card", is devoted to the great cause of cheering us all up - the funeral was bigger than that of Princess Diana. Certainly, it was funnier. As Valentino lay in state as a kind of coffined joke, "mourners" wept, fainted and elbowed each other away from the cameras. Tens of thousands of hysterical fans screamed and rioted. The author, who, in spite of all else, does have a way with an adverb, says that "fortunately" no one was seriously hurt.
Hugh Leonard is a playwright