On the Death of Rudolph Valentino

Rudolph Valentino being mourned as he lies in state at the 

Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel (August 1926) 

 

 

I.

 

A century on, and the name Rudolph Valentino has now largely been forgotten by movie goers; today, Timothée Chalamet is the young good-looking actor hailed by members of Gen Z as a sex symbol and fashion icon.    

 

Having said that, there are still some fans of the Latin Lover devoted to his memory and insistent on the fact that whilst Rudy may no longer be universally recognised, he remains an iconic figure whose place in the cultural imagination is assured. 

 

For not only do his films continue to be screened, but books and articles (and blog posts such as this one) continue to be written about his life - and, indeed, his death which, as we shall see, caused mass hysteria and revealed just how insane - but powerful - the cult of celebrity was to become in the modern era, driven by the entertainment industry and mass media.  

 

 

II.

 

On August 15th, 1926, Valentino collapsed at a hotel in NYC. 

 

He was hospitalised and, following an examination, underwent emergency surgery for a perforated stomach ulcer mistaken at first for appendicitis [1].  

 

All seemed to go well and his doctor's were optimistic that the young man would make a full recovery. Unfortunately, however, that wasn't to be: first he developed peritonitis (inflammation of the lining of the wall of the abdomen); then he developed pleuritis (inflammation of the lining surrounding the lungs and chest cavity). 

 

Both conditions are extremely painful: and both can be fatal. 

 

As his condition worsened - and sepsis set in - the initial optimism of his doctors was replaced with the growing realisation that he was going to die (although they said nothing to the press and Valentino himself seemed convinced he would soon recover and chatted with the medical staff about his future plans). 

 

On 23 August, Valentino lapsed into a coma and died a few hours later. He was aged 31.   

 

 

III.

 

Valentino's death triggered some extraordinary scenes; over 100,000 people lined the streets of Manhattan to pay their respects on the day of his funeral and there were reports of distraught female fans committing suicide. 

 

There was even a riot in New York the day after his death, as people fought to view the body lying in state with their own eyes (for some believed the story of Valentino's death had, as they say, been greatly exaggerated; others, that it was entirely false). A large number of extra police were needed to restore order.  

 

The Polish actress and singer Pola Negri - a huge star at that time known for her tragic roles and femme fatale persona - perhaps sensing the career opportunity of a lifetime, collapsed crying in hysterics at the funeral. Claiming to be Valentino's secret fiancée, she also had a floral arrangement spelling out her name placed on his coffin, to the irritation of many of his friends [2]. 

 

(It seems that the four actors in black-shirted uniform hired by the funeral home director Frank Campbell to impersonate a Fascist guard of honour - supposedly sent from Italy by Mussolini himself - did nothing to restrain her.) 

 

As Valentino had made no burial arrangements, his friend June Mathis offered a crypt that she had originally purchased for her ex-husband at the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery and it's here he has remained.  

 

And every year, on the anniversary of Valentino's death, a mysterious Woman in Black arrives by chauffeur-driven car to place a bunch of red roses on his tomb and dab daintily at her eyes with a black-bordered handkerchief, before departing [3]. 

  

 

Notes

 

[1] This condition - in which a perforated peptic ulcer causes right lower quadrant abdominal pain, mimicking appendicitis - is now known in the medical world as Valentino's syndrome.

 

[2] It's true that Miss Negri and Valentino had been in a romantic relationship shortly before his death, but there is no evidence they were secretly engaged and, if they were, it was not something he had mentioned to anyone. 

      Interestingly, for the rest of her life - and she died aged 90, in August 1987 - she claimed Valentino had been the love of her life - and not Charlie Chaplin with whom she'd also had a widely-publicised love affair in 1922-23; this despite the fact that D. H. Lawrence insisted that there was greater essential beauty in Chaplin's odd face than Valentino's stereotypically handsome features; see the essay 'Sex Appeal' in Lawrence's Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (CUP, 2004). And see also the post in which I discuss this essay and the relationship between Lawrence and Valentino: click here.     

 

[3] Several myths surround the thickly-veiled Woman in Black. Probably, the idea was originally a publicity stunt dreamed up by Valentino's former press agent Russel Birdwell in 1928, but it is now a rather lovely tradition kept alive by fans, cinephiles, and movie historians.  

 

 

D. H. Lawrence and Rudolph Valentino: the Priest of Love Versus the Latin Lover

Messrs. Lawrence (1885-1930) and Valentino (1895-1926) 

 

Oh Mister Rudolph Valentino / I know I've got the Valentino blues  

And when you come up on the screen / Oh! You're so romantic, I go frantic at the views [1]

 

 

I. 

 

Like many men at the time [2], D. H. Lawrence was not a fan of cinema's greatest male sex symbol of the silent era, Rudolph Valentino, the so-called Latin Lover [3]:

 

"We think ... a handsome man must look like Rudolf Valentino. ... But ... there is a greater essential beauty in Charlie Chaplin's odd face than there ever was in Valentino's ... which only pleases because it satisfies some ready-made notion of handsomeness." [4]

 

 

II.  

 

As the above quote makes clear, Lawrence dislikes Valentino because he thinks the latter reinforces a stereotypical ideal of beauty. 

 

But he also accuses actors cast in the same mold as Valentino of counterfeit emotion and of stimulating such in their audience. In a poem written about his experience at the cinema, for example, Lawrence jeers at the black-and-white feelings and fake ecstasies pretended by those who moan with pleasure when watching close-up kisses on a screen [5].

 

One suspects that, just as he thinks Valentino's sex appeal to be essentialy false, Lawrence might also have cast doubt on the actor's masculinity if given the chance to do so and may even have agreed with the attack upon him by the Chicago Tribune in the so-called 'Pink Powder Puffs' controversy ....

 

 

III.   

 

There had long been those who had called Valentino's manliness and, by unspoken implication, his heterosexuality into question. 

 

Some all-American boys - fair of face and blue of eye - felt threatened by his dark good looks and strange foreign manner; particularly as these things clearly excited the all-American girl. Anti-Italian racism was not uncommon at this time and if wops could also be seen as effeminate as well as criminal and foolish, then that was all the more reason to despise them. 

 

Thus, Valentino's critics repeatedly pointed to his pomaded hair, his dandyish dress sense, and the misogyny that seemed to underlie his treatement of women. 

 

This abuse came to a peak - whilst paradoxically hitting a new low - when an editorial in the Chicago Tribune concerning the installation of a facial powder dispenser in a gentleman's washroom at one of the city's leading hotels, decried the feminization of American men and pinned the blame for this on Valentino and his movies. 

 

The article, published on 18 July 1926, so infuriated Valentino that he challenged the anonymous writer to a fight [6]. As this challenge was not taken up, Valentino sought advice from others, including the writer H. L. Mencken, on how else to respond to such an infamous libel [7].    

 

Unfortunately, however, Valentino didn't get the chance to take matters any further; for he was to die in hospital following surgery the following month, aged just 31.  

 

 

IV.

 

Since his premature death in August 1926 [8], rumours have continued to circulate regarding Valentino's sexuality; was he secretly homosexual; was he bi-curious; or - as the evidence suggests and his recent biographers [9] conclude - was he in fact a genuine lover of the ladies, with no desire to suck cock ...?  

 

Who knows? 

 

And these days, who cares? Thankfully, a man can now present another man with an art deco dildo without everyone rushing to judgement, or speculating as to what such a gift reveals about that person's orientation or sexual preferences.  

 

Even Lawrence, who may not have been a fan of Valentino's - and often addressed questions around gender and sexuality in a way that many might now find problematic to say the least - conceded that the most girlish looking men often have "the finest maleness, once it is put to the test" [10]. 

 

 

Don't you ever stop being dandy  

showing me you're handsome [11]

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from 'Rodolph Valentino Blues', by Jack Frost (published by Jack Mills Inc., 1922). For a recent version of the song uploaded to YouTube by valentinolover70, click here. 

      Note that the spelling of Valentino's first name is not an error; in February, 1922 Life magazine reported that he would henceforth prefer to be known as Rodolph rather than Rudolph. This semi-Italianised styling of the name seems not to have caught on, however.   

 

[2] As the author of the WordPress blog Rudolph Valentino-Connections writes, Valentino was a target of innuendo, racism, and ridicule almost from the start of his career. In the July 1922 issue of Photoplay, for example, which featured Valentino on the cover, the cartoonist and illustrator Dick Dorgan wrote a piece entitled 'Song of Hate' which asserted that all men hate the actor for his foreign features, including his slicked hair and glistening white teeth. 

      Click here to access the post, which also includes the 'Pink Powder Puffs' editorial in the Chicago Tribune (18 July 1926) which we shall discuss shortly and which declares: 'Better a rule by masculine women than by effeminate men.'     

 

[3] Valentino was born in southern Italy, but arrived in New York in December 1913, aged 18. Although eligible - and despite becoming a Hollywood icon thanks to his exceptional good looks, personal charm, and unique talent - he never completed an application for US citizenship. 

       Undoubtedly the role that defined not only Valentino's career but his image and legacy, was that of Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik (dir. George Melford, 1921) - much to his own irritation.  

 

[4] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 145-146. 

      What Valentino thought of Lawrence's looks is not, as far as I know, on record. But, interestingly, Clark Gable - the actor promoted as Valentino's successor after the latter's untimely death in 1926 - named Lawrence as his favourite author. See the article 'Will Gable Take the Place of Valentino', by Gladys Hall, in Movie Classic (November 1931), which can be read on the Clark Gable archive site dearmrgable.com: click here.   

 

[5] See the poem 'When I went to the film' in D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol. I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 385.  

 

[6] Although Valentino didn't get to fight the writer of the Pink Powder Puffs editorial, he did box sports writer Frank ONeill from the New York Evening Journal, who volunteered to fight in place of his colleague from the Chicago Tribune. Valentino - who had been trained by world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey - won the fight. Afterwards, Dempsey described Valentino as the most virile and masculine of all the actors he had worked with.

 

[7] Mencken, who found Valentino very likeable, advised the latter to simply let the whole thing fizzle out. After Valentino's death - just a month later - Mencken published a sympathetic piece in the Baltimore Sun, in which he claimed that it was not the Chicago episode that really upset Valentino, but the grotesque futility of his life as a famous film star. See H. L. Mencken, 'Valentino', in A Mencken Chrestomathy, (Vintage Books, 1982), pp. 281-284.   

      

[8] Valentino died on 23 August 1926 from infections following surgery for perforated gastric ulcers. A post discussing the extraordinary circumstances surrounding his death and his posthumous life can be read by clicking here.

 

[9] See, for example, Emily W. Leider's biography Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (Faber & Faber, 2003).    

 

[10] D. H. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 126. 

 

[11] Lyrics from 'Prince Charming' by Adam and the Ants, a single release from the studio album Prince Charming (CBS, 1981), which reached number 1 in the UK charts. The video for the song, directed Mike Mansfield, famously ends with Adam singing the chorus refrain - ridicule is nothing to be scared of - in the guise of several iconic male figures, including Valentino as Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan. Click here to play on YouTube.  

 

 

Notes on Charlie Chaplin's Closing Speech to 'The Great Dictator'

Charlie Chaplin as the Jewish Barber and 

Adenoid Hynkel in The Great Dictator (1941)

 

 

I. 

 

There's probably only one thing worse in the modern political imaginary than a great dictator and that's an evil tyrant. But even the former is bad enough in the eyes of those for whom power should belong to the people and not held by a single individual who, it is believed, will be invariably (and absolutely) corrupted by its possession. 

 

Any positive associations that the term may have had were lost once and for all during the 20th-century. Thanks to figures such as Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao [1], dictators are now viewed by those within the liberal-democratic world as violent megalomaniacs who oppress their peoples and bring death and chaos in their wake [2]. 

Having said that, it seems they can also inspire laughter as well as moral hand-wringing and hypocrisy, as illustrated by the 2012 film starring Sacha Baron Cohen, The Dictator (dir. Larry Charles) and, seventy years prior, the equally unfunny work of satirical slapstick that many regard as Chaplin's masterpiece, The Great Dictator (1940) ...

 

 

II.  

I don't know why, but I've never liked Charlie Chaplin: this despite the fact that, according to Lawrence, "there is a greater essential beauty in Charlie Chaplin's odd face, than there ever was in Valentino's" [3]. For even if this gleam of something pure makes beautiful, that doesn't mean it makes good and true; and it certainly doesn't guarantee to make humorous. 

 

Chaplin is mostly remembered for playing an anonymous tramp figure - a character whom I regard as the antithesis of the bum as hobo-punk given us in the songs of Haywire Mac; for whereas the latter celebrates his life on the road and railways, the former is keen to improve his lot and dreams of one day living a comfortable middle-class existence.

 

But in the feature-length anti-fascist film of 1941 - which Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, and starred in - he plays both the nameless Jewish Barber and the Great Dictator of Tomainia, Adenoid Hynkel (a parody of Adolf Hitler that some find hilarious and uncannily accurate, others, like me, a bit lazy in that it perpetuates the idea that the latter was just a buffoon and an imposter).

 

Probably the most famous scene is the five-minute speech that Chaplin delivers at the end of the film [4]. Dropping his comic mask and appearing to speak directly to his global audience, he makes an earnest plea for human decency and human progress, encouraging people to rise up against dictators and unite in peace and brotherhood, whatever their race or religion. 

The thing with such romantic moralism is that it flies in the face of history and relies heavily on emotion and rhetoric for its effect, rather than argument - ironically, in much the same manner as fascist propaganda. 

 

"We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery We don't want to hate and despise one another." 

 

Is there any evidence for this ultra-optimistic belief that the "hate of men will pass"? 

 

I doubt it. 

 

I would dispute also that our cleverness has made us "hard and unkind" and what we need is to think less and feel more; again, such irrationalism and anti-intellectualism is ironically central to fascism.

 

Perhaps most interestingly, Chaplin echoes Oliver Mellors with his diatribe against "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts". But even Mellors knew that such people now make up the vast bulk of humanity, not just those who govern; that it is the fate of mankind to become-cyborg with rubber tubing for guts and legs made from tin; motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes sucking the vitality out of us all [5]. 

 

Chaplin rightly foresaw that the age of the great dictators would soon pass - in Western Europe at least - but has the triumph of liberal democracy resulted in a life that is free and beautiful and where science and progress "lead to all men's happiness" ...? 

 

Again, I don't think so. 

 

And, like Mellors, I increasingly find comfort not in the dream of a new human future, but in a post-human world: 

 

"Quite nice! To contemplate the extermination of the human species, and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else." [6]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] For an earlier post on these three great dictators (and one mad poet), click here. 

 

[2] Unless they happen to be allies, in which case they are said to be strong leaders providing stability in their region of the world, but we won't get into that here.  

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Sex Appeal', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 146.

 

[4] Click here to play this scene (I would suggest having a sick bag at the ready). Even some fans of Chaplin's concede that this spoils the film as a work of art. 

 

[5] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 217. 

 

[6] Ibid., p. 218. 

      This is similar to how Rupert Birkin felt in Women in Love; see pp. 127-128 of the Cambridge Edition (1987), ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen. 

 

 

Musical bonus: Penetration, 'Don't Dictate', (Virgin Records, 1977): click here for the studio version and here for a fantastic live performance of the song at the Electric Circus, Manchester (August 1977). 

 

   

Film Kills (1): At the Pictures with D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence: Close-Up (Kiss), 1928

Cinema is the production of icons and the proliferation of moving images. From a biblical perspective, it is clearly sinful. 

But if the authors of Exodus are primarily concerned with the making of graven images of God and the worship of pagan idols, there seems to be something else, something deeper, troubling them too; namely, a genuine concern with the very notion of representation as it relates to questions of reality, truth, and appearance. 

We find the same concern amongst the ancient Greeks - Plato providing an obvious example. His insistence on presence and authenticity makes him suspicious of most art forms and his critique of writing as a pharmakon can easily be made also of film. Indeed, it's central  to D. H. Lawrence's criticism of cinema: because the actors on-screen are not physically present before us, this invalidates both their performance and our response to it. 

As a matter of fact, Lawrence says very little about the cinema, but when he does it's uniformly negative and hostile. In the poem 'When I Went to the Film', for example, Lawrence suggests that cinema is essentially - in its very form and function - an obscene and pornographic medium and that the content of the film is, therefore, in large part irrelevant. 

This is because, for Lawrence, film sensationally stimulates false feeling and counterfeit emotion. It is both ideal and ecstatic; projecting shadows of people as if onto the wall of Plato's cave on the one hand, whilst provoking masturbatory thrills on the other. It is the art form par excellence of what he refers to as sex-in-the-head: i.e., a desire on the part of hyper-conscious, visually-fixated individuals to experience everything in their minds and to exchange the sheer physical intensity of life lived in the flesh for a new piece of knowledge and a bucket of popcorn. 

Lawrence's concern is not that this results in a loss of soul, but in a denial of the body and corporeal reality: "The amazing move into abstraction on the part of the whole of humanity", he argues, "means we loathe the physical element ... We don't want to look at flesh-and-blood people ... We don't want to hear their actual voices" [1]. Rather, we wish only to interact with them mediated via technology.

In his novel of 1920, The Lost Girl, Lawrence privileges the dying art of the music hall over that of the newly emergent cinema, prioritizing live speech and presence over celluloid sensation. It's much the same argument as he makes in his poetry: film is cheap and easy and it costs the audience nothing apart from the price of a ticket: no feeling of the heart, no appreciation of the spirit is necessary - just wide open eyes and a desire to be titillated.

Whatever we might think of this critique - and it's far from convincing - there is no denying that our curiosity towards images is always erotically charged. Sex might not be the origin of the world as Courbet suggested, but it's certainly the origin of cinema and our insatiable will to knowledge. The faces of Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino "plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy ... one literally lost oneself in the human image" [2].

This cinematic jouissance - brilliantly theorized by Patricia MacCormack [3] - is a major concern for some people. For others, what matters is the violence that is done to the real; i.e. the fact that the production of images results in the murder of objects, not that it causes audience to moan from close-up kisses and simulated sex. I'll say more about this in part two of this post.

Notes: 

[1] D. H. Lawrence, 'Men Must Work and Women as Well', Late Essays and Articles, (CUP, 2004), p. 283.
[2] Roland Barthes, 'The Face of Garbo', Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Paladin Books, 1973), p. 62.

[3] See Patricia MacCormack, Cinesexuality, (Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2008).