Valentino: No Gigolo, No Powder Puff
By: Camille Cusumano
Tags: Movies, Tango, Stars, Valentino, Hollywood

Valentino: No Gigolo, No Powder Puff

Metrosexual, maybe: A man less troglodytic than the average heterosexual man, Rudy was born 125 years ago this May 6.

Rudolph Valentino, born May 6, 1895, was no gigolo, contrary to popular myth. Nor was he a “powder puff” as he was accused during his lifetime. He was a natural at playing romantically sensitive, as well as villainous, roles. His career came of age during an era when Douglas Fairbanks, who disdained love-making scenes (as courting was called in those days), was the symbol of American manhood. Playing the turbaned lead in one of his last films, “The Sheik,” boosted his appeal among women, further perturbing men.

Valentino was ahead of the time when Americans would covet all things Italian. The legendary actor/dancer had a penchant for extravagant dress that blended comfortably among Italy’s or France’s continental populace but raised eyebrows in conventional America. He might fit the contemporary definition of “metrosexual” — a man “who is less troglodytic than the average heterosexual man, more concerned about his appearance and displaying characteristics, such as love of art, culture, and shopping — that are more typically seen in gay men.”

After reading the page-turner Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino by Emily W. Leider, I take issue with much of the two-dimensional image accorded this iconic Italian immigrant/artist through the ages. Leider, with stunningly clean, clear, crisp prose, puts before our eyes a much more complex persona than the simplistic idea of the man most Americans have had.

He was born Rodolfo Pietro Filibert Raffaello Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella in Castellaneta, in the province of Apulia of Italy.

Through her meticulous research, Valentino appears as a Renaissance man. He grew up in southern Italy, in the province of Apulia, with a doting French mother and a strict disciplinarian Italian father. Notably, he was a rapscallion and rebellious youth performing poorly in early school years and full of devilish pranks. As a teen, he performed well in agriculture school near Genoa, a natural in that field, especially with animals. He would later perform his own stunts with horses in his films. In “The Young Rajah” he handles a baby leopard as if it were a house cat.

Casting about for his calling, young Valentino was drawn to artsy Paris for a while, spending above his means as he would do his entire life — money be damned. He arrived in New York at age eighteen in 1913 and divided his energy between taking advantage of the Manhattan’s cultural offerings and trying to make a living. Heedless of practical matters, Rudolph let his finances run out quickly. He slept on park benches and washed dishes until he found he could make a living dancing. (If he was a gigolo for being paid to dance tango, then as a tango instructor, I am a female gigolo.)

The tango and other ballroom dances of the time came naturally to Valentino. People noticed. He was lithe, catlike, and moved with native grace. You can perceive his luscious body language and skillful facial expressions in any of his surviving films. His innate dance ability helped him break into the high society whose respect he badly wanted. Valentino, in contrast to his modest rearing, always thought of himself as an aristocrat, perhaps fudging on his ancestry to that end. He was a born clothes horse, well groomed, and fastidious about his physical appearance.

His boyish good looks were only one aspect of his success. His charm, charisma, and humor appealed to both sexes. He persisted in chasing his dreams. His film career began in the east with his playing uncredited bit parts in silent movies filmed in New Jersey and New York. Respected scriptwriter June Mathis famously discovered Valentino. His senior by about nine years and lifelong mentor, Mathis saw this dark-complexioned bit player as perfect for the starring role in “The Four Horse Men of the Apocalypse.” She had to fight to get her way and lucky for us she did. Valentino’s tango with Beatrice Dominguez in that enduringly wonderful film carved in stone (or celluloid) his image as a tango dancer lover boy. But there is so much more to his acting ability, apparent in this saga based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibanez.

Rudy (he liked that sobriquet given him in his adopted home) would read classical literature that pertained to roles he would play. In addition to learning English well enough to break into Hollywood (a burgeoning backwater that his image helped shepherd into its Golden Era), he learned fluent Spanish and French. He read up on Freud and could discourse on that nascent psychology. He published a book of poetry. Like a Greek Adonis, he honed a beautiful physique, which shows through in surviving photos.

Even before he became enraged about being called a “powder puff” and having his virility questioned, Valentino was athletic, a great swimmer, and loved boxing. Jack Dempsey became a friend and trainer. I’m guessing Rudy knew about carbo-loading for aerobic sports (he loved his pasta) before that was even a concept. It was in the last year of his life that he challenged the journalist who called him a powder puff to a boxing match. The writer never responded.

Rudy was NOT a skirt chaser, much as he loved women. In fact, he was often lonely and bore up under being dismissed as a slick-haired immigrant — “patent leather hair,” they described his look (I dread to imagine what else). He was vulnerable and sensitive in a way men were not allowed to be then (or even now). His loves came to him organically because women were drawn to him. His first wife, Jean Acker, started out as a Hollywood-set friend while others snubbed the not yet famous actor. She listened to his heartbreak when his beloved mother died back in Italy. He had sobbed and brooded for weeks. He and Jean married too impulsively and she rejected him on their wedding night, falling back on her lesbian relationships. It’s not clear whether he knew Jean’s orientation beforehand. Valentino would always be drawn to strong women like Jean, even as he dreamed of a home-body wife.

He was devastated by Jean’s abandoning him but soon Natacha Rambova (a wealthy Utah girl who had studied Russian ballet) became his second wife and the true love of his short life. He never stopped wearing the slave bracelet she gifted him and other jewelry, again projecting a sensibility that was ahead of its time for American men.

Rudy and Natacha, the latter a set and costume designer, enjoyed about five years together, nurturing each other’s artistic and creative talents, living sumptuously. Natacha, high-strung and Waspy cool, has been unfairly called to task for being so opinionated about Rudy’s career and even blamed for anything that went wrong.

But he adored her and respected her ideas. Note that Rudy, even when he became a big box-office draw and unprecedented money-maker for studios, was still paid much less than female stars of his time (whose names you might never even have heard). Natacha tried to help him get his due in artistic control and compensation. Rudy endured discrimination, no doubt, because he was pegged as just an immigrant. (Notably: He had tried to join the military during World War I in Canada, but was rejected for his weak vision; when he had tried in his teens to enlist in Italy, he was sent away for too small of a chest.)

The sad ending to Rudy and Natacha’s marriage hinged in part on his longtime desire for a family. He loved children and was close to his young nephew, Jean, his older brother’s son. Natacha, to her credit, had told Rudy from day one, if you want kids, go elsewhere. She never wavered on that conviction. This and other issues led to their divorce. They tried to keep up a good front for the media hounds. The irony is that Valentino loved and respected women like Natacha who wrote their own script in life. Perhaps they both lived ahead of their times. (Natacha’s set and costume designs for Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” in 1923 was unpalatable to its contemporaneous audience. Today it shows as a darkly magical, sexually-charged modern dance with its Aubrey Beardsley-inspired sets.)

In less than a year from their separation, Rudolph Valentino, with that unbearable loss and career-stress issues, would succumb on August 23, 1926, in Polytechnic Hospital, New York, to complications from a perforated ulcer. He was thirty-one years old. At the time, he was still cresting the peak of his career and fame. The world mourned as never before, and perhaps only since for, say, a Kennedy. Rudy’s final resting place is Hollywood, where he had blossomed into a fully great artist.

There is too much to make of his living years, as Leider shows, to be concerned about the circus around his untimely death, including in the ensuing years. Rudy lived every moment — whether happy or anguished, winning or losing. He lived it all fully, more than most of us ever do in a lifetime two and three times longer. I don’t mourn his life as cut too short but celebrate the accomplishments he has bequeathed us.

There are several other books on Valentino, probing his sex life, including one that is hell-bent on concluding, solely based on circumstances (Valentino had a male roommate once and gay friends), that Valentino was a repressed homosexual. This book has a number of blatant factual errors in it, and is not to be trusted. However, Leider’s work is much more reliable, with impeccable research and numerous footnotes, gratefully rendered at the end, not bogging down the pages. She makes Rudy and other characters come alive on her page-turner. Even though I knew that he would die in his prime, I was moved to tears when that moment came. As an avid tango dancer and instructor with recent ancestry in southern Italy, I feel compelled to restore my compatriot to respect. Rudolph Valentino is a Renaissance man.