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The first sexual intercourse in movies?

Posted by clarkjohnsen (R) on May 12, 2003 at 13:08:18

'Dark Lover': Rudolph Valentino and the Deflowering of America

The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino.
By Emily W. Leider.
Illustrated. 514 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

By BARRY GEWEN

"Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was
rather late for me).'' Philip Larkin was off by 42 years. Sexual
intercourse actually began in 1921, on Oct. 30 to be precise. That was
the date on which ''The Sheik,'' featuring Rudolph Valentino, opened
at two movie houses in New York City. Valentino had already become a
star some months earlier with his dazzlingly erotic tango in ''The
Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,'' but it was ''The Sheik'' that
launched him into the stratosphere. Crowds mobbed the theaters,
breaking attendance records. Across the country, female fans shivered
and went limp. Smart young men with an eye for the ladies were soon
being called ''sheiks'' -- and looking for adventure with girls called
''shebas.'' Some years later, Sheik condoms went on sale, with a
silhouette of Valentino on their packages. What does a woman want?
Apparently, in 1921, what millions of women wanted was the fantasy of
a swarthy, intense, exotic stranger with flowing robes and piercing
eyes sweeping them up and forcing himself upon them.

The ground for Valentino had been prepared in the preceding decade --
with bobbed hair and rising hemlines, dance crazes and petting
parties, campaigns for birth control and woman suffrage. But you would
have to look back to 19th-century celebrities like Byron, Liszt and
Paganini to find comparisons, and even those pale: it took the modern
media to turn female hysteria into a mass phenomenon. And if a Rudolph
Valentino had never been seen before, it is necessary to add that
nothing truly like him has been seen since.

Later in the century, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and the Beatles all
attracted followings that were Valentino-like in their frenzy. But
there was a difference. The crowds pursuing the singers were made up
of girls, not yet enmeshed in the web of interconnections and
responsibilities that is adult life. Their sexuality was innocent,
prelapsarian, even if it oozed out of every pore. The teeny-boppers
lost control of themselves when all the Beatles asked to do was hold
their hand. The Rolling Stones pushed into darker realms, but they
were promoting the same kind of carefree sexual utopia, ecstasy
without complication; ''Midnight Rambler'' was sadomasochism as good
clean fun, S-and-M with a smiley face.

Valentino's fans came in all ages, but generally they were older, more
mature than the fans of the teen idols who followed him. They had
spouses, children, often jobs; so in this sense their open display of
sexual energy was much more subversive of the social order, even if
that's not what the parents of teenage daughters thought during the
Presley and Beatles madnesses. (The one pop star whose audience might
be said to bear a resemblance to Valentino's was Tom Jones, but the
resemblance is only casual. Jones's women lacked the honest
spontaneity of Valentino's hordes. The matrons who threw their
underwear up onstage at Jones concerts were self-consciously acting
out a ritual.)

Valentino was a one-time-only thing. He stands as an icon of
20th-century American social history, a signpost on the road to the
modern woman. Feminists should be erecting monuments to him. In the
meantime, Emily W. Leider has erected her own monument, a fluid,
accomplished, deliciously readable biography of the individual who,
she says, ''helped deflower postwar America.'' ''Dark Lover: The Life
and Death of Rudolph Valentino'' is no exercise in Hollywood
nostalgia; it's meant for a readership far beyond film buffs and
archivists. This is a book about sex, about the intricate relations
between men and women, about changing images of masculinity, about the
discrepancies between a superstar's public role and private life,
about what can happen to a man who is universally perceived as having
power over women. As the author of a study of Mae West, Leider is well
equipped to handle these themes.

Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaele Guglielmi was born in 1895 into a
family on the lower upper reaches of provincial Apulian society in
southern Italy. His father, a veterinarian, died from research he was
conducting into the transmission of malaria when the boy was 10.
Leider throws out a couple of suggestions that Valentino was a child
of destiny, commenting on his ''hypnotic stare'' and intensity, even
as a newborn, but this seems a bit much: what the young Valentino was
for the most part was a directionless layabout and mama's boy. One of
the few steps he managed to take on his own behalf, though it changed
his life, was to board a ship for New York in 1913.

Valentino had two things going for him when he arrived in Brooklyn not
long before Christmas -- a talent for dancing, at a moment when
dancing had become all the rage in America, and a love of luxury. The
first enabled him to rise quickly, from disreputable ''lounge
lizard,'' guiding lonely women around ballroom floors, to renowned
exhibition dancer, ''Signor Rodolfo,'' sharing a bill with Sophie
Tucker and performing before President Woodrow Wilson.

The second gave him the drive he seemed to lack in Italy. It was a
quality that stayed with him throughout his short life. Valentino
spent extravagantly when he had money, and he spent extravagantly when
he didn't. In the years before he became a film star, he traveled
first class, drove borrowed Rolls-Royces and promenaded in public with
two Russian wolfhounds. Once fame struck there was no holding him
back. Leider tells us of sable overcoats, fur-lined bathrobes,
gold-plated safety razors, gold corkscrews.

It was relatively easy for him to pirouette from dancing into the
movies, first doing cameo roles, then playing tough guys and lowlifes.
His big break came when June Mathis, the head of Metro's screenwriting
department, spotted him and saw something special in his eyes. He
landed the lead in ''The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.'' Four
pictures later he was the sheik.

Before Valentino arrived, leading men were square-jawed, rugged
straight arrows like Douglas Fairbanks, who, Leider says, ''would
sooner jump from an airplane than play a love scene.'' D. W. Griffith
once turned Valentino down for a part with the comment: ''He's too
foreign-looking. The girls would never like him.'' But
''foreign-looking'' had become the point. There was nothing familiar
or comfortable about the smoldering, dangerous Valentino. As one movie
magazine put it: ''He does not look like your husband. He is not in
the least like your brother. He does not resemble the man your mother
thinks you ought to marry.'' D. H. Lawrence got it exactly wrong when
he wrote that ''the so-called beauty of Rudolph Valentino . . . only
pleases because it satisfies some ready-made notion of handsomeness.''
Valentino turned all the stereotypes inside out. Ph.D. theses could be
written on his coloration alone (and probably will be). At a time when
the Ku Klux Klan was at its height, Valentino and his makeup men had
to perform delicate balancing acts: his skin needed to be dark enough
to suggest the exoticism of Arabs or Latins, but not so dark as to
remind white filmgoers of blacks. For ''The Sheik,'' Valentino was
presented as white, but his hands were brown, so that when he touched
the heroine's face, the contrast was accented. Valentino was always
careful to stay out of the sun because he tanned so deeply. As he
said, ''I become like a Negro.''

IF the women were thrilled by Valentino, the men were threatened. ''I
hate Valentino! All men hate Valentino,'' one columnist wrote. ''I
hate his classic nose; I hate his Roman face; I hate his smile; I hate
his patent leather hair,'' and on and on. Inevitably, questions were
raised about Valentino's sexuality, and his flamboyant, dandified
lifestyle didn't help matters. Nor did the fact that he endorsed a
brand of cosmetics, or that he cried in public, or that he always
seemed to have a favored male companion around him. The questions have
continued down to the present. Leider does her best to sift through
the evidence. The problem is that there isn't any. She takes one
biographer to task for leaping too quickly to the conclusion that
Valentino was gay, but she is careful to hedge her bets.

As for his relations with women, ''complicated'' is probably too
simple an adjective. Valentino was married twice, the first time to a
confirmed lesbian. Not surprisingly, that union was a disaster from
beginning to end, though it is not really accurate to speak of a
beginning since the marriage appears never to have been consummated.
His second wife was a strong-willed, domineering working woman who
helped him with his films and business affairs but dropped him when he
began expressing the desire for a traditional home and family. (It
almost goes without saying that rumors have persisted about her sexual
orientation.) Valentino's companion at the time of his death was the
combustible film actress Pola Negri, whose career went into decline
with the arrival of the talkies and who spent her later years living
with a wealthy Texan named Margaret West. Other women seem not to have
intruded much into his life. Information is hard to come by, but the
picture Leider paints is of a man who was not particularly active
sexually. Women who were close to him describe him as behaving like an
older brother or, more often, like a little boy. One actor recalled
that ''all he thought about was Italian food.''

In 1926, a month after the release of ''The Son of the Sheik,'' the
14th film in which he played the lead, Valentino became violently ill
and was taken to a hospital. He never came out. Appendicitis and
perforated ulcers led to peritonitis and pneumonia. He died on Aug.
23, at the age of 31. The commotion that surrounded his death -- mobs
besieged the funeral home; at least two women committed suicide --
merely added to the mythology that had grown up around him.

Cutting through the legends, Leider gives us a Valentino with childish
shortcomings but a very human vulnerability. He was undeniably
weak-willed and irresponsible. You would never drive with him; he
would crash the car into the nearest retaining wall. You would never
lend him money; he would rush out and buy a gold corkscrew. But
Valentino was sincere about wanting to make good movies, not just
production-line divertissements that cashed in on his popularity, and
he understood that he was caught up in something much bigger than he
was. ''The whole thing is false and artificial,'' he said. ''You can't
go on and on with it.'' Marcello Mastroianni, who knew something about
being typed as a Latin lover, once said of Valentino's predicament,
''If people tell you you're a great lover, how can you make love with
this heavy baggage on your back?''

Toward the end, Valentino became increasingly open about his
frustration and unhappiness. Little more than a week before his death,
he dined with H. L. Mencken, an observer who can be counted on not to
be taken in by phoniness or self-pity, and Mencken deserves the last
word here. He describes someone who was ingenuous yet troubled,
boyishly disarming but afraid. Mencken was touched by the young actor
(whose movies he had never seen). ''His words were simple and yet
somehow very eloquent,'' Mencken writes. ''I could still see the mime
before me, but now and then, briefly and darkly, there was a flash of
something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly
called, for want of a better name, a gentleman.''

Barry Gewen is an editor at the Book Review.

• http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/11/books/review/11GEWENT.html?pagewanted=all&   (Open in New Window)

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