Rudolph Valentino - 19 September 1997

The bad night in Paris still reverberates not only among gossip hounds or even among her long-time admirers or detractors, but among ordinary people who had no preconceived views about the Princess but who have, in however mild a form, the feeling that comes over you after a death in the family, so that getting back to work, to the normal affairs of life, feels like a sort of convalescence.

It’s a weird phenomenon, which with the passage of time will no doubt be analysed more truly than is being done now by the great media fuss of arguing and speculating and sermonising and amateur psychoanalysing.

One old, thoughtful man, intending no slight to anyone involved, recalled in 1926 the death of one of the earliest film stars, a silent one at that: Rudolph Valentino. There was point to this recollection. Until then, there had been in this country no public demonstration like it, and there hasn’t been in the 70 years since; for a motion picture star, that is.

Valentino was a poor Italian immigrant who came through Ellis Island at the age of 18 with no qualifications of education or trade, nothing but an urge to get away from a short nightmare existence in Paris where he was reduced to begging for coins on street corners.

He was helped here by other Italian immigrants to become a gardener, but quickly showed he knew nothing and he went on to dishwashing, table waiting, and petty theft.

Dazzled by the bright lights of Broadway, he there discovered there was a brisk market for one thing he could do – dance; to be one of those hired dancers in cheap Broadway dance halls. They were known, among other things, as taxi dancers. Valentino had a superior talent and, to his own astonishment, he soon broke into a Broadway musical and became a lead musical dancer.

After another little brush with the law, he beat it out of New York, bummed his way to San Francisco, and inevitably thereafter tumbled or drifted down to Los Angeles where for three years he got miniscule parts in minor movies, often as a small-time hoodlum, sometimes as an exotic dancer in a single short episode.

He could have gone on in this way for a lifetime, but he was spotted by a screenwriter who, over the protests of his studio, begged that Valentino should try out for the star part in a new movie, which, like many more at the time, 1920, was a dramatisation of a biblical theme. It was called The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse.

It was a box-office bonanza both in Europe and America, and within two years he was his own romantic legend playing sheikhs, playing then a matador. This lean, handsome, sensual Latin was more famous to more humans than all the theatre matinee idols of any given country lumped together.

His appeal to women was fairly obvious and at the time fairly unmentionable. Certainly in the cinemas of every city where his films were shown, women fainted; and in several European and American cities, nurses were hired to be on hand for any outbreak of hysteria or the vapours.

Men (in America at any rate) tended to resent him for monopolising their wives’ fantasies, and then within a year or two mocked him because, under the influence of a strange and bossy wife, he more and more took to roles that were called at the time “effeminate”.

This reputation, which was enlarged on and deplored by the press, greatly disturbed him; and on a trip to New York, he very nervously decided to seek the advice of a writer who was then at the peak of his fame – as, you might say, America’s George Bernard Shaw. Certainly the initials HLM for Henry Louis Mencken meant as much to Americans as GBS.

HL Mencken has left us an unforgettable account of the dinner they had together and I’ll quote from the body of it. It was August New York, 1926.

"The night being infernally warm, we stripped off our coats and came to terms at once. We perspired horribly for an hour, mopping our faces with our handkerchiefs, the table napkins, and a couple of towels brought in by the humane waiter. The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out to be very simple. The ribald New York papers were full of it, protesting against the effeminisation of the American man and laying it light-heartedly to the influence of Valentino and his sheikh movies. Valentino felt that his masculine honour had been outraged.

"I advised him to let the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion. He protested that it was infamous. Nothing, I argued, that is not true is infamous. A man still has his inner integrity. We sweated a great deal and we seemed to get nowhere. And suddenly it dawned on me that what we were talking about was not what we were talking about.

"I began to observe him more closely. There was some obvious fineness in him. He began talking of his home, his people, his early youth. His language was simple, but eloquent. I could still see the mime before me, but now and then there was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly called a gentleman.

"In brief, his agony was the agony of a man relatively civilised, thrown into a situation of intolerable vulgarity. It was not the trifling effeminacy charges that were riding him; it was the whole grotesque futility of his life. He had achieved out of nothing a vast and dizzy success, a success that was hollow as well as vast. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled, he felt himself blushing inside. The thing at the start must have only bewildered him, but it was now revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid. Here was a young man who was living daily the dreams of millions of other young men. Here was one who was catnip to women. Here was one who had wealth and fame. And here was one who was very unhappy."

A week after this meeting with Mencken, Valentino is in the hospital with a perforated ulcer and then suddenly he was dead. He was 31. The funeral was held at a Broadway funeral chapel. Over 150,000 people (mostly women) packed Broadway. Twenty of them were injured, three women committed suicide – to be followed by others, both in this country and in Europe.

Valentino clubs appeared on both continents, and for many years the anniversary of his death was commemorated with various rituals and services and so-called “mourning sessions”.

As a human being, Valentino was no more unique than any of the other superstars we’ve come to know. He was simply the first exemplar of what a new medium, the cinema, can do to magnify a famous face to the point of hypnotising the audience and frightening the victim.

And most recently and most pitifully we’ve seen what two new media tabloids and television can do to trap one human being in a publicity circus so dazzling that it becomes impossible to see and judge the human being inside the huge created idol.

So after these melancholy thoughts, we try to go back to normal.

I suppose because the colonisers of this country who came to be dominant – not the French, not the Spanish – because they were English, one or two English customs still hold. One or two is about right since we Anglos are declining down and down as even representative, let alone dominant Americans. In New York City, we are six in every hundred New Yorkers.

Well now, the surviving custom I’m thinking of is that of making early September the end of summer. With people over their holidays, families who have a summer cottage up in the mountains, near a beach, beside a lake have closed it up, children go back to school, and we all then await the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. But that was written by an English poet, and he was undoubtedly talking about the English autumn, to which the American fall bears little resemblance.

The beginning of the fall, with its brilliant, hot days and the scarlet of the maples and yellow and golds of the oaks pouring through the New England forests, this is all more than two weeks away; and October can be across the whole country a marvellous holiday month.

But the puritan men of Massachusetts, who decided these things more than 300 years ago, followed the customs and morays of their homeland and announced that come the first Monday in September summer was over. No more fun and games, lads. No more flirting and giggling, girls. Life is real, life is earnest, and the pursuit of happiness is not its goal in spite of what that mad Tom Jefferson, that lazy Virginian would propose as the purpose of American life, if you please.

So Congress is back in session; and, after a gap of three weeks, during which he enjoyed the longest presidential holiday I can remember, so is Mr Clinton. Absolutely no news came out of him except the flash one day that he’d just played golf and shot 79.

The figure alone is highly suspicious. A man says he shot 76 and you believe him. 82, yes. But 79, just under the wire. “I broke 80,” a familiar boast of cheats and egotists. There’s got to be an explanation, usually a sneaky one.

And sure enough, the disgraceful truth came out and ran like a prairie fire through the locker rooms of every club in the country where Republicans play golf. The President took three mulligans on the first tee.

A mulligan is a friendly concession to allow a man the option of a second drive from the first tee only, and one only, never allowed in competition. The British edited Encyclopaedia of Golf comments icily, "Largely an American habit".

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