Hollywood mourns loss of this young starlet11/25/2023 ![]() But he still made the nightclub rounds, and it was on a ballroom floor that he met Blanca de Saulles-the unhappily married wife of the blue-blooded playboy Jack De Saulles. Valentino soon moved up the ranks from “lounge lizard” to exhibition dancer. ![]() He also gave private lessons, which perhaps included sex-a fact Leider neither confirms nor denies. Here, the graceful Valentino danced with upper-class women for money. This skill would save him in New York City, when he found himself sleeping on benches and washing beneath a fire hydrant after quickly blowing his inheritance.Īccording to Leider, Valentino soon found work as a taxi dancer at the glamorous Maxim’s Restaurant-Cabaret. ![]() On the ship, he became a popular dancing partner. Cleveland, equipped with $4,000 and calling cards stamped with a fake family crest. That said, the impression of Valentino as impetuous was borne out by his first few months in America. “I feel,” Valentino once said, “quite unreal.” If Leider takes too much time on Valentino’s filmography, perhaps that’s fitting for a man whose celluloid presence eventually overpowered his sense of self. Despite her almost academic reserve, the drama and tragedy of Valentino’s brief life burst through the pages as Leider exposes Valentino as an imaginative, naïve dreamer thrust into a role he could not control. Leider painstakingly extracts the documented facts from a life story mired in myth. In the even-handed, meticulously researched Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino, author Emily W. To this day, Valentino’s ghost is said to haunt countless tourist spots in Los Angeles.īut lost in the legend was the real man. His girlfriend, the screen vamp Pola Negri, dramatically collapsed on so many occasions it damaged her career, while his ex-wife Jean Acker released a commemorative song to cash in on his death. In both Europe and America, women reportedly killed or attempted to kill themselves over the news. The sudden death in 1926 of silent screen superstar Rudolph Valentino caused an outpouring of anguish.
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