Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino

Rating:
Summary: A Thoroughly Researched Book
Review: I have read many Valentino books. I don't know what new facts can be printed about him, yet he remains as ever present today as he was in the 1920's. This is a thoroughly researched book on Valentino, honest and well written. There are a few mistakes, Natacha's eyes were brown and her second husband's name is/was spelled Urzaiz, but these errors are slight in light of the information the author presents. I would recommend it as a must for the Valentino/Rambova fans, and they still abound most plentifully and I should know.

Rating:
Summary: Leider Has A Few Tricks Up Her Sleeve
Review: I have read so many books on Rudy Valentino that my first instinct was to pass on this. I was sure no one could do much with the life of an actor who has been dead nearly 77 years. Fool that I am, I figured I'd give it a cursory look/see and probably put it down in quick order and move on to better things.
The shocker here is that this is really one of the best biographies I've picked up in a very long time and it has as much to do with the writer/researcher as it does with the subject itself.

This is no rehash of the same tired Rudy V. stories that have been perpetuated since his death. It contains a lot of fresh material and new insights into the personality and public persona of Valentino.
Leider is the rare combination of gifted biographer and tireless researcher. In the process of writing this book, she managed to really get down to the bare bones of her subject. She managed to do this while creating a mood and setting for all the action. In other words, she seemed to really understand the environment under which Valentino and all the other early screen stars worked and flourished in.
Where as other Valentino biographers seem to spit out questionable or unsubstantiated "facts", Ms. Leider to the best of her ability deals honestly with the material given her and attempts to authenticate information to the best of her ability and she deals honestly with rumors and innuendos and labels them as such.
One aspect of Leider's research that I found particularly interesting is that she not only researched her subject, but also the secondary players who interacted with Valentino during his life. She developed full profiles of people such as Pola Negri, Natacha Rambova, George Ullman......people who interacted with Valentino and were important components in the story of his life.
I am a huge fan of Jean Harlow and Clara Bow's biographer David Steen. Now Emily Leider also has my admiration. She and Steen have set a standard for celebrity biographers to follow.

Rating:
Summary: Bravo!
Review: I just finished "Dark Lover" and I have only one thing to say.....WOW!!! I can honestly say that it is the most thoroughly researched book on Rudy to date, and Emily dug deep to uncover every Valentino morsel that could be found. While there are no "smoking guns" (as some folks had hoped for), it is a treasure trove of incidents, insights, and opinions that previously were overlooked. I found many new details I was unaware of, such as the souvenir coins minted for "The Eagle" or Rudy falling off the stage at the premiere of "Son of the Sheik." Also, that Natacha apparently had an affair at the end of their relationship, or the seriousness of Rudy's relationship with Andre. RV's later years have more depth than ever before, but where Emily really scoops is on Rudy's childhood....peeling away the years like the layers of an onion. One can almost feel the hot, yellow sun beating down on Rudy's back as he plays mischievously in Taranto...

I closed the book with regret that I had no more to read.

Emily, you outdid yourself. Well done!

Rating:
Summary: well-researched and engagingly written
Review: I paid a massive overdue fine to my public library because I couldn't bear to return this book until I had finished it. Leider does a great job of investigating the life and death of Rudolph Valentino. She follows his adventures from the cradle to the grave, without ever being boring, and creates a very memorable character study. She is especially successful at clearly describing Rudolph's failings without destroying her portrait of a likable man. I also appreciated her fair-minded view of Rudy's wife Natacha Rambova, who has been characterized by many as a snake who ruined Rudy's life. (The anti-Rambovas somehow don't find it unreasonable that he tried to make her give up her career as a designer.) Leider portrays Rambova more judiciously as a woman who had many faults, but who also had undeniable intelligence and talent. The couple was very much a product of their time, and those interested in the 1920s will enjoy reading about their explorations of "artistry" and spirituality, as well as their everyday lives. I finished the book feeling almost as though I had met Rudolph Valentino personally. This book may not interest readers who are not already fascinated by Old Hollywood, but it will entertain and satisfy most of those who are.

Rating:
Summary: Why bother?
Review: I've heard it said that what makes Valentino such an intrigue is the air of mystery about him. Well, I always liked him, and wanted to know more about him to lessen that mystery. I admired his talent, his handsome figure, his intelligence and cultured life.

Now I say, I was better off leaving him as a mystery.

My grandfather idolized Valentino as a teenager. He wanted to dance the tango like him, and slick back his hair like him. There was just "something" about the man.

He broke down barriers, allowed women to dream and desire. Victorian life never allowed these passionate feelings to be experienced.

Rudolph Valentino had a very powerful film presence. Yet his personal life really perplexed me as I read through this book. "The Great Lover" was hardly that in real life-which I read up on before. A disaster of a marriage to Jean Acker-a lesbian-that only lasted a few hours-and was never consumated-would make anyone ask: "What were you thinking?!" Why she ever accepted his proposal, knowing her sexual preferences, and the short time they knew each other, makes you wonder. I understand they were lonely, but Valentino acted so foolishly-and it haunted him for the rest of his life.

So he marries Natasha Rambova(really Winifred Hudnut)and makes another blunder! Acker filed for divorce when she learns of Natasha-which he should have taken care of right away. The divorce not fully cleaned off the slates, he is arrested for bigamy. He has to tell the court he and Rambova never consumated the marriage (they actually lived together before they wed). The Great Lover--impotent? Gay? He did not do anything to help the wild rumors.

And Natasha Rambova-notorious for being icy and controlling-(it is even written in the book that she may have aborted Rudy's babies-3 times!)is hardly the angel he thinks of her as. Valentino claimed to have wanted a submissive wife, and none of his women, from Acker to Rambova to Pola Negri were anything like that.

To die over Natasha Rambova! She did not seem worth it, to me. (Well, she can't be blamed for it all.) Many think that is why he died in the first place-from a broken heart when Natasha left him. And he tells reporters that it would be idiotic to "die an old man". He acutally said that hewould have been happy leaving this world by forty. Well...he got his wish-in the most agonizing way. Death at 31-what a waste! His death wish-brought on by excess in drinking, lack of self-care, and the like came to fruition. And it was all for the love of a woman that he put on a pedestal, blind to things that others clearly saw. Naive and believing in Hollywood love, he wore rose colored glasses when he should have worn real ones.

He ignored his horrible stomach pain, and even delayed emergency surgery, when all hell broke loose in his body. For me, I wished I could have leaped in the pages, and just shook some sense into him. There were repeated warnings that he was in grave danger-as reported by many witnesses-but Valentino ignored them like he had a death wish to fulfill. Oh, well...we all have flaws; nobody is perfect. But his were so fatal you really wish there was a way he could have redone everything.

I think many people who liked him wish they could have got a " happy movie ending". I know I would have loved to read of a man who could have gone so much farther-gotten the lady and children he wanted, furthered his career.....but Valentino proved to be a tragedy because he made himself a tragedy. Like so many others celebrities, that people put on pedestals, he fell off and fell hard.

And that is a shame.

Rating:
Summary: Lite hot
Review: Rudolph Valentino didn't look like anyone's father or brother, and he didn't act like them either. This was one tabloid writer's summation of what attracted the woman of the 1920s with her short skirt and bobbed hair to the cult of the former Rodolfo Guglielmi, a mild-mannered guy from a little town in southern Italy. Emily Leider's biography is huge, but there really isn't much to tell about Valentino's life. He was easy-going and lazy, he flunked out of school, and he was a beautiful dancer. He smoldered on film for a brief period, but wasted what would be a short career in stupid legal battles that kept him off screen for two whole years before dying at the age of 31. The extraordinary sensuality that radiated off him on screen was almost completely absent in real life. He was not very deep or complex, but men and women alike found him polite and nice.

Obviously, what would make the biography of such person interesting would be a discussion of the social forces that switched the public's appetite for leading men from wholesome all-American-looking guys to such an unmistakably foreign "dark lover." There's the angle of why studio executives- a venal crew if ever there was one-would squander such a hot commodity by underpaying and disregarding him, thus losing millions of dollars when he stayed off-screen to protest. What about him frightened them so much?

Emily Leider covers some of this, but not enough to give her big bio more weight. Since so little is known about Valentino's early life, she can only speculate about what might have influenced him: he might have seen Nijinsky and been influenced by his sensuous dance, she imagines, but, considering what a lightweight Rudy was, I would bet the guy was more likely to be found happily munching peanuts at a Keystone comedy.

Still, "Dark Lover" is an entertaining read. Sometimes Leider's prose reads like silent movie title cards, which is pretty fun, and you do get a sense of how revolutionary the 1920's were with the country taking on a whole new sense of looking, feeling, and reacting in the crazy economic bubble that followed the horrors of World War I. It's satisfying, entertaining and goes by fast. Just don't expect too much of it.

Rating:
Summary: Life and Death of a Tango Pirate
Review: Rudolph Valentino was Hollywood's first Latin lover, and the prototype for all who came after. This detailed bio by Leider traces his boyhood in Castellenata, Italy, where young Rodlpho Guglielmi was a poor student, myopic, with a love of technology and gadgets, costumes and daydreams. He responded well to the nurturing of his mother, Gabriella, but not to the authority of his father, Giovanni. Restless and full of energy, as a child he was nicknamed "Mercurio," for the wing-sandaled messenger of the gods.

This olive-skinned, kinetic boy sailed to America (type "Rodolfo Guglielmi" into a search box at ellisisland.org and you will see the ship's manifest and view his entry, where the 18-year-old listed himself as an agriculturist at a height of 5'9") and eventually became "The Sheik," whose cinematic exploits were filled with adventure, violence-tinged sex, and plenty of hot tango dancing. Leider points out that Valentino's brand of European sexiness, where men wear jewelry and are not afraid of showing their emotions, grated on the nerves of post-WWI American men, who were annoyed by giddiness he inspired in their shingle-haired shebas and decried him as effeminate. Sexuality was beginning to be more pronounced in the 'Teens and 'Twenties, and Rudy's romantic but slightly dangerous style fit in beautifully.

Alas, Rudy's real life was not so serendipitous. Always seeking the nurturing control of mama, he married two women who were controlling but little else. Jean Acker was an actress and lesbian who slammed the door in her bewildered husband's face on their wedding night with no explanation. The exotic-sounding Natasha Rambova (really Winifred Hudnut from Salt Lake City, Utah), probably the love of Valentino's life, was reserved and icy, and eventually alienated Rudy's friends, co-workers, and studio bosses. His most consistent mother figure was undoubtedly June Mathis, the screenwriter who adapted the Vicente Blasco Ibanez novel "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" for the screen and insisted on the lithe Valentino for the part of Julio, which made him a star. He smoldered on the screen for five scorching years after that in such monster hits as "The Sheik," "Blood and Sand," and his last film, "Son of the Sheik" before his untimely death from peritonitis at the age of 31. Fans were so upset at this dreadful occurrence that a few committed suicide surrounded by his photos.

Although his wives may have had ambiguous sexuality, Leider (who seems touchingly besotted with her subject), consigns to the dustbin of history the notion that Valentino was bisexual, the much-ballyhooed slave bracelet be damned. Ironically, the screen's great lover lamented, "...In every love union there is one who loves more than the other...In my romances...that one has been I."

I would recommend this book to any lover of early cinema and Hollywood lore. Leider also includes postscripts on his two wives, both of whom exploited him shamelessly after his death, and his brother who attempted to fashion himself in the same mold but came up short.

Up to the very last page, I was able to still see in the heartsick, twice-divorced screen idol the dreamy-eyed Italian boy who came to America to seek fame and fortune, and blazed such a trail he still resonates 77 years after his death.

Rating:
Summary: Adequate but not great
Review: The basic life story of Valentino is told, but it is the telling that is off-putting. A curious style of unscholarly writing together with the misuse of terms (e.g., "hoi polloi" is used to refer to the "elite" when in fact it means the "common") detracts from the narrative. And, as to one of the persisting questions regarding Valentino's sexual orientation, her descriptions of his relationships is at odds with her conclusions. Not the definitive text this subject needs.

Rating:
Summary: As ever, Valentino just out of reach...
Review: This is a surprisingly dry book about one of the most colorful performers of the golden age of silent film. Leider's obvious bias against delving into the homosexual side of Valentino's complex personality is the book's fatal flaw. Only one indisputable homosexual affair is begrudgingly admitted, and its impact on Valentino's marriage to the (bisexual) Natasha Rambova, which fell apart shortly thereafter, is downplayed. Hey Emily, the guy married a lesbian and a bisexual, can you say "beard"? Apparently not. The details of Valentino's film work are interesting for buffs, but there sems to have been little attempt to corroborate the many rumors of Valentino's gay life, while no attempt to discredit same is overlooked. I can only guess that Leider feels that the mystique of Valentino would be tarnished by acknowledging what seems fairly obvious - he swung both ways. This is homophobic. Valentino's bisexuality enhances his allure, which continues to attract fans over 80 years after his (tragic, stupid and preventable) premature death. Reading this book will give you good insights into his career, his talent, his lack of business sense - but Valentino the man remains, as ever, just out of reach...

Rating:
Summary: Special Book
Review: This is a well researched and beautifully written biography. Emily Leider has lovingly painted a portrait of a man/star whose life has been clouded in mystery. Because of her, Rudolph Valentino's complex personality, warmth, generosity, talent, and sense of humor has become known for the first time. Beautiful photographs, including his last formal portrait before his untimely death, are included. I prefer this biography to others of Valentino I have read.