Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino - Hardcover

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Although today's moviegoers may not have seen Rudolph Valentino on screen, "they've probably seen his silhouette on packs of Sheik condoms," Leider says, exuding what screenwriter June Mathis called the "smoldering quality" of "a brutish cabaret parasite." In Leider's sprawling biography, Valentino retains the carefully crafted and projected aura of mystery he enjoyed during his mercurial career--and then some. Born Rodolfo Guglielmi in a little southern Italian town, Valentino had a largely undocumented childhood, which Leider fills out, along with the rest of Valentino's early days, with the kind of might-have/must-have/could-have speculation that Edmund Morris applied to Ronald Reagan. No imaginary friends are introduced, but Leider does go on about such matters as how Rudy reacted to Nijinsky's L'Apres-midi d'un faune, because, well, who's to say he didn't see it? Later she deals with Valentino's gender-bending celluloid masculinity, his highly dramatic relationships with the likes of notorious Blavatskyite Natacha Rambova, and his flair for the occult. A comprehensive, if not necessarily crystal-clear, portrait of the great screen lover. Mike Tribby
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Leider exhaustively details the life of one Hollywood's first heartthrobs, who was born Rodolfo Guglielmi in 1895 in Apulia, Italy. After being dismissed from several schools for poor grades, Valentino left for Paris in 1913; months later, he found his way to New York: "unlike most of his emigrating countrymen, he not was escaping chronic family poverty but rather his own track record and the sense of defeat it had helped create." Valentino became a "taxi dancer," teaching society women how to dance, before beginning his career as a film actor. In 1917, fleeing New York to again redefine himself, Valentino went to Los Angeles. Leiter explains, with particulars that greatly inform but sometimes overwhelm, how Valentino-after a disastrous marriage to lesbian actress Jean Acker-landed his first feature in 1921, The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. His persona of the smoldering, exotic lover took hold with this film, and later that year with The Son of the Sheik. In 1936, after undergoing surgery for acute appendicitis, Valentino died from infection at age 31. Leider subtly discusses Valentino's sexuality without exploiting it, and wonderfully weaves in his voice (in separating himself from Sheik's portrayal of Arabs, Valentino says: "People are not savages because they have dark skins"). Photos.
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