Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino

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Summary: The life of films first great lover
Review: Although Hollywood has created greater stars than Rudoph Valentino, probably none whose legend has been more frantic or enduring. Valentino is a natural subject for Emily W. Leider, whose Becoming Mae West (1997) is possibly the best celebrity biography of the past ten years.

Dark Lover, like that book, is extremely articulate and gracefully written, thoroughly researched, lively and full of humorous touches.

Leider writes not celebrity biographies so much as cultural histories. Her portrait of the screen's first great lover, who was born in 1895, the same year as silent movies, and died of complications from a perforated ulcer in 1926, at 31, is a portrait of phrase of motion picture history, and of the evolution of the American audience, which makes up it's tastes and it's aversions.

Born Rodolpho Pietro Gugliemi in Castellata in the instep of the Italian boot, Valentino reached Paris in 1914, when the Argentine tango was all the rage. In New York he worked as a taxi driver and as an exhibition dancer, and for years in Hollywood was known as a lounge lizard and a gigolo.

Actresses were the first to spot Valentino's potential and to boost his career. In his early films he played blackguards--devious fortune-hunting counts and cigar chomping gangsters. Buut he caught the eye of June Mathis, Hollywood's most powerful scriptwriter, who cast him in the lead in the 1921 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, where his Argentine tango made him an immediate star.

"Women were ready to respond to a leading man whose face suggested undercurrents of cruelty and whose every gesture promised a new kind of dangerous sensuality." Leider writes of the allure Valentino exercised so strongly on women in the 1920's.

The Shiek (1922) added a term to American argot and gave it's name to one of America's better-known condoms. Valentino himself was derided ("Vaselinos" became a name for men with slicked-back hair) and the degree of his maculinity has remained an open question, one Leider examines in detail but doesn't seem pressured to reslove.

The "famously arousing, sometimes menacing, often hypnotic squint" that melted your grandmother's heart, and smolders from the cover, can be attributed to myopia--a point supported by Valentino's atrocious driving record.

Leider quotes an actor from Four Horsemen: "All he thought about was Italian food. He'd turn those big slumberous eyes on some women, and she'd just about swoon with delight, but he couldn't have cared less. He was usually thinking about the spaghetti and meatballs he was going to have for dinner that evening."

For a writer like Leider, the truth of a matter is only one point to consider; the range of possibilities are what tell the tale. Considering Valentino's height, for example, she notes that he claimed to be 5 feet 10 or 11 inches, but "was probably closer to 5 feet 8 inches." A California rancher who kept Valentino's horses described him as "a little squirt. Not very big. About 5 feet 6 inches."

An "undoctored photograph" of Valentino standing beside Douglas Fairbanks, who "supposedly stood about 5 feet 7," showed the two stars about the same height.

Leider is the kind of thorough but not salicious, scrupulous but not pedantic biographer needed for flamboyant and hyperbolic personalities suchas Mae West and Rudolph Valento. She explains their remarkable impact and the often subtle ways they reflect their audience. Valento, whose life and even more dramatically his death, anticipated later celebrities suchas Elvis and James Dean and Princess Diana, comes into his own in th is excellent and highly readable biography.

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Summary: Another disappointing Valentino biography
Review: Although more thoroughly researched than most of its predecessors, sadly Leider's book joins the long line of failed bios of Valentino. It not only mis-states facts but the interpretations are often just as wrong. Leider's conclusion, "Valentino helped deflower postwar America," must take its place in the purple-prose hall of shame. Michael Morris's 1991 book, Madame Valentino, on Valentino's wife, Natacha Rambova, set a standard with its accurate exploration of their relationship and his historical and critical discussion of the Valentino films. That standard is unmet by Leider, leaving the task of a truly commendable biography of Valentino himself still to be undertaken.

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Summary: Emily W. Leider strikes again!
Review: Anyone can write a biography of a film star. However not everyone's efforts are worth the time to read or the money spent. Luckily, Emily W. Leider is one of a rare breed, a writer who truly respects her subjects. DARK LOVER: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF RUDOLPH VALENTINO doesn't give into the all too easy route of sexy gossip combined with careless writing.

Rudolph Valentino, like Leider's previous subject Mae West, radiated sex, sin and sensuality from the silver screen even to this day. DARK LOVER explores Valentino's youth in Italy, his early years in America, his peak as a Hollywood love god and his tragic death at the age of 31.

Under the costumes and behind the smoldering eyes was a man seeking love and family even as he make some disasterous life choices. Case in point, Valentino's two marriages to women who for their own reasons were light years away from the Madonna of the Hearth Valentino longed for.

The end result is a beautifully researched and fully fleshed portrait. Even buying DARK LOVER for the pictures alone is well worth the cover price for the evolution from gawky Italian boy to Hollywood legend.

If you have an unlimited book budget or save your pennies for books, DARK LOVER is a must have for the Hollywood fanatic.

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Summary: CHARTING A STAR
Review: As with her 1997 biography, "Becoming Mae West," Emily W. Leider explores the phenomenon of a unique star by means of extensive meticulous research and empathetic psychological insight. Again, with Valentino, she gives us the wider picture, setting her flamboyant subject in a social, historical, and artistic context. The particular miracle of this absorbing book is that, without detracting from Valentino's legend, Leider makes him seem real.

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Summary: Exhaustive Doesnt Begin to describe it!
Review: Considering the fact that Valentino was with us for all of 31 years, and the passing of an entire century has obscured his activities for much of that time, I was a bit shocked when I saw the size of this book. I knew he had immeasurable impact on popular culture and all of that, but still!

Imagine my surprise when I read the book! The sources seem to be fairly reliable upon review, and Leider does an admirable job steering us through the obscure (his childhood and early years in the USA were surprisingly informative). However, the book takes a bizarre turn after "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", which made Rudy a star. After that, the details are so thorough it doesnt feel like I'm reading so much a biography as it does an almost daily chronicle of someones' life.

Previous reviews indicated the book was tabloid-like, but i did not find that to be the case at all. Quoting individuals who were present and knew the subject, or referencing publications like newspaper or magazine articles is not gossipy at all. If anything, the author tries to disprove some of the sensational speculation about Valentino over the years...one example was his sexuality- she comes off as biased in this regard and a few others, but fortunately, the book is so massive these instances are rare.

Overall, this book was an enjoyable read, and did help me to appreciate Valentino as a complex, charismatic individual. Just be prepared to do ALOT of reading!

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Summary: Valentino gets his due at last
Review: Emily Leider's well reseached biography of Valentino is most welcome after a drought of over 20 years since the last good biography. This book is well annotated as to sources and offers many new insights to Valentino's early life as well as his life in New York before he became a star in Hollywood. I think that Valentino himself would welcome this book, he is treated with fairness and a level-headedness and without an agenda, other than telling his story. Leider traveled the globe from Castellaneta to Hollywood Forever Cemetery to search out sources for Valentino and the results in the book show!

An easy read, it was a pure joy and I could scarely put it down. This has my highest recommendation as the Valentino biography to read above all others currently in print (and many of those out of print as well!)

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Summary: The dark and the light sides of Valentino
Review: For those of us who know Rudolph Valentino by name and by reputation only, Emily Leider's new biography, "Dark Lover" is a good place to start in order to understand this major silent screen star who died so young. I've only seen Valentino in short moments from some of his films and I bought the book wondering who the man in front of the camera was. To this end, Leider does not disappoint.

The chronological layout is informative, especially when the author ties in Valentino's life directly with his films. The beginning of the book is slow and a little "over the top"...one knew very little about Valentino's youth spent in Italy, so Leider "fills in" a bit. But the narrative comes alive when he reaches the United States and especially after he acquires a certain amount of fame. If this weren't a book connected with Hollywood, the references to so many other stars that Valentino knew would be campy. But Leider knows how to tell a good story and how to use those around Valentino as wonderful (and sometimes hilarious!) props. The author's offerings about Pola Negri are worth the price of the book and made me laugh out loud.

Emily Leider tidies up the end nicely. Many authors of biography often finish their books with the deaths of their subects, but this book ends with a fairly full accounting of those who surrounded Valentino in life and survived him. Many period photographs are included and they add to the text.

As much as I enjoyed reading "Dark Lover", in the end, I wonder if Rudolph Valentino really had enough substance to warrant over four hundred pages. Much of Leider's work revolves around the emotional ups and downs of Valentino; emotional swings that tend to become tiresome toward the end. However, it's an easy read and a pleasurable one, too.

Rating:
Summary: The dark and the light sides of Valentino
Review: For those of us who know Rudolph Valentino by name and by reputation only, Emily Leider's new biography, "Dark Lover" is a good place to start in order to understand this major silent screen star who died so young. I've only seen Valentino in short moments from some of his films and I bought the book wondering who the man in front of the camera was. To this end, Leider does not disappoint.

The chronological layout is informative, especially when the author ties in Valentino's life directly with his films. The beginning of the book is slow and a little "over the top"...one knew very little about Valentino's youth spent in Italy, so Leider "fills in" a bit. But the narrative comes alive when he reaches the United States and especially after he acquires a certain amount of fame. If this weren't a book connected with Hollywood, the references to so many other stars that Valentino knew would be campy. But Leider knows how to tell a good story and how to use those around Valentino as wonderful (and sometimes hilarious!) props. The author's offerings about Pola Negri are worth the price of the book and made me laugh out loud.

Emily Leider tidies up the end nicely. Many authors of biography often finish their books with the deaths of their subects, but this book ends with a fairly full accounting of those who surrounded Valentino in life and survived him. Many period photographs are included and they add to the text.

As much as I enjoyed reading "Dark Lover", in the end, I wonder if Rudolph Valentino really had enough substance to warrant over four hundred pages. Much of Leider's work revolves around the emotional ups and downs of Valentino; emotional swings that tend to become tiresome toward the end. However, it's an easy read and a pleasurable one, too.

Rating:
Summary: Recommended
Review: I came to this book as a feminist and as a student of American racism.

A pernicious and powerful form of racism took root in the US during the time of the c. 1880-1924 immigration of Eastern and Southern Europeans. Scientists, academics, journalists and politicians in the US, during this era, decided that Eastern and Southern Europeans were different and lesser peoples than those of Northwestern Europe, whom they labeled "Nordics."

This racism was so powerful that these Eastern and Southern Europeans, along with East Asians, became the only immigrants in American history whose numbers were limited by the US Congress on the basis of their racial inferiority.

It is more than ironic, it is utterly fascinating, that the most desirable man in America at this time, a man whose very name has come to signify romance, and whose film role, "Sheik," has become the name for a brand of prophylactics, was an Italian immigrant, once so poor he had to sleep outdoors, and his consorts were Natacha Rambova, a WASP who took a Slavic name, and, then, Pola Negri, a Polish-born actress.

Emily W. Leider does an excellent job of presenting the popular press reaction to the racial and sexual threat Valentino posed. I wish she had had presented more and wider background on the racist literature of the day, but readers can find this literature elsewhere, in, for example, Higham's "Stranger in the Land."

I also came to this book as a feminist. Valentino may have been unique. He was a star of the first order whose career was built on his ability to arouse women. Valentino had other talents - he was a dancer, and, as his performance in "The Eagle" shows, a fine comic actor. He was no bimbo; Leider notes that copies of Proust, in the original French, were among his possessions. He could converse in several languages.

But his career was ultimately about his ability to please women erotically. That cost him. The press hounded him. Men criticized him. Panic can be sensed in some reactions to him. Would his career, his willingness to wear such a feminine item of apparel as a *wristwatch,* cause "matriarchy" to break out? This panic is, again, fascinating.

We are missing the point if we consider ourselves to be more advanced than those in Valentino's day. No star has taken up the mantel that was dropped when Valentino met his untimely death. And attractive male stars today have to work to prove themselves to men by, for example, fighting and damaging their prettiness, as Brad Pitt did in "Fight Club."

I came to this book for an in-depth discussion of issues of race, class, gender and eroticism, issues that have, by no means, been settled in our own day. I got that discussion, and so much more. I found Leider's style to be distant and careful. She dots her i's and crosses her t's; her sources are cited and she is careful not to cross the line into intense psychoanalyzing, or into fervent or even just highly detailed critiques of the Valentino filmography.

But I was unexpectedly moved by the Valentino I met in these pages. Leider quotes H.L. Mencken's account of his encounter with Valentino, shortly before the star's death. I came away from Leider's book feeling similarly to how Mencken felt after his real life encounter with Valentino. I felt as if I had crossed paths with a tender, boyish, charismatic, uniquely gifted/cursed, somewhat lost young man, whom I would never forget, and whom I couldn't help but, however distantly, cherishing.

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Summary: 400-500 Page Tabloid
Review: I have read 6 books about Rudolph Valentino and after a long waint I am disappointed with Ms. Leider's book. There is nothing enlightening or literary about it. Ms. Leider states on page 8 that if "Valentino could be precisely definged, his appeal would diminish. I did learn more about his troubled childhood, his close friends, events of the Mineralava Tour and the details of his business negotions. Ms. Leider has done extensive research but some of theses sources could be slanted or erroneous. So we have a chatty, gossipy book about what everyone had to say about him. To the Amazaon com reveiwer who called Rudy a lightweight; Mr. Valentino was fluent in 3 languages, he had a large library of books, he was a sportsman, an accomplished horseman, and had tastes for art and history.`He was somewhat of the dilletante Ms. Leider's book is a book for the nineties in which people were defined by their faults and weaknesses, rather than their disposition or motivations.