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

Leider, Emily W.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374282390 ISBN 13: 9780374282394

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003

Synopsis

From the author of Becoming Mae West—an in-depth look at the Silver-Screen legend who forever changed America’s idea of the leading man

Tango pirate, gigolo, powder puff, Adonis—all have been used to describe the silent-film icon known as Rudolph Valentino. From his early days as a taxi dancer in New York City to his near apotheosis as the ultimate Hollywood heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino (often to his distress) occupied a space squarely at the center of controversy. In this thoughtful retelling of Valentino’s short and tragic life—the first fully documented biography of the star—Emily W. Leider looks at the Great Lover’s life and legacy, and explores the events and issues that made him emblematic of the Jazz Age. Valentino’s androgynous sexuality was a lightning rod for fiery and contradictory impulses that ran the gamut from swooning adoration to lashing resentment. He was reviled in the press for being too feminine for a man; yet he also brought to the screen the alluring, savage lover who embodied women’s darker, forbidden sexual fantasies.

In tandem, Leider explores notions of the outsider in American culture as represented by Valentino’s experience as an immigrant who became a celebrity. As the silver screen’s first dark-skinned romantic hero, Valentino helped to redefine and broaden American masculine ideals, ultimately coming to represent a graceful masculinity that trumped the deeply ingrained status quo of how a man could look and act.

About this title

About the Author

Emily W. Leider is the author of Becoming Mae West (FSG, 1997). She lives in San Francisco.

Reviews

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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374282390
• ISBN 13: 9780374282394
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 592