New biography sheds some light on the silver screen's dark lover

In a hilarious essay, "It Takes Two to Tango, but Only One to Squirm," S.J. Perelman writes about re-screening in the 1950s a silent film he had first seen in 1921, Rudolph Valentino's "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." The movie that had made Perelman's teenage pulse race and hormones pop was, when viewed in middle-aged repose, a ludicrously overheated story with acting to match.

Emily W. Leider does not refer to it in "Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 498 pages, $35), but Perelman's piece can provide a useful counterweight to some of the attainments she attributes to her subject.

It is true, as she says, that even today Valentino is often viewed as the archetype of the romantic leading man, just as in his heyday he was the source of mysterious attraction to millions of women and men. On the other hand, it exaggerates only slightly to say, as Perelman does, that "nobody in the history of cinema could induce mal de mer as expertly as Valentino when he bit his knuckles to portray heartbreak."

Chewed scenery, in other words, is chewed scenery, whatever the era.

Overall, however, "Dark Lover" is a highly commendable biography of "the screen's first dark-skinned romantic hero," both in chronicling the facts of his life and assessing his long-lasting influence.

He was born Rodolfo Pietro Filiberto Raffaele Guglielmi, in Castellaneta, Italy, on May 6, 1895. He came to the United States in 1913 and took the name Valentino upon beginning to act in Hollywood films, after stints as a taxi dancer and exhibition dancer in New York, and as an extra in films there.

Though an erotic tango scene in "Four Horsemen" is what turned Valentino into a box-office lion, "The Sheik" (also 1921) is the film with which he is most identified. It solidified his reputation for sexy brutality and for combining Oriental mystery and European polish.

The book's title is apt: Though in his earlier films he was usually cast, because of his dark skin and the prejudices of the times, as a villain, it was precisely this dark skin (in frisson- inducing contact with that of a white maiden) that added to his allure. The studios had to walk a fine line here, to "ensure that color boundaries would not be too openly or brazenly breached."

Leider performs a number of useful services in clarifying aspects of Valentino's character and personality that are little known. One is how exceptionally intelligent Valentino was; he could, for example, read, write and speak four languages.

Another goes perhaps even more contrary to his screen image as lover. Valentino, who was married twice, was always drawn more to women than to men -- particularly maternal women who approve, nurture and adore -- but he did not necessarily "chase skirts with an eye to removing them."

With his second wife, Natacha Rambova (born Winifred Shaughnessy, of Salt Lake City), he seemed fairly content in the role of domesticated husband; he was always defensive and protective of her, and when they divorced, he was devastated. (His first, short, totally unsuitable marriage to Jean Acker may never have been consummated.)

The author also skillfully delineates the prevailing, and usually conflicting, moralities, especially sexual, of America, Hollywood and Europe. She discusses at length the many sources and expressions of Valentino's appeal -- that famous menacing stare (which one skeptic thought had more to do with nearsightedness than passion), his "sphinx-like mysteriousness," his androgynous handsomeness, the sensation of his being like a smoldering volcano about to erupt.

The appeal was not universal, especially among men. "Vaselino" -- a reference to his patent leather hair -- was one of the more pointed epithets thrown at him.

The book has minor shortcomings. Leider is given to non- historiographic filigrees -- "Rodolfo's imagination churned" -- that are more appropriate to fictional than to biographical composition. And we get rather too many details of what people wore and how they decorated their houses, and unnecessarily lengthy summaries of movie plots.

Valentino, who more than once had expressed a fatalistic attraction with dying young, died in 1926 at age 31 of complications from a perforated ulcer. It was little more than fours years after his leap into stardom.

The uproar over his death is mind-boggling still. Thousands of mourners in New York rioted, Hollywood studios briefly shut down, suicides spurred by grief were reported in London and Paris, and "a small army of women" insisted he had impregnated them.

Fans continue to commemorate the anniversary of his death, Aug. 23, down to this day.

Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, and a free-lance writer and reviewer for several publications, is a frequent contributor to the Deseret News.

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