Monthly Archives: Mar 2014

Rumors that Alberto Valentino is being groomed to succeed his late brother, Rudolph Valentino, on the screen have been received. It is stated that-Gugiielmi has submitted to vain operation of plastic surgery. Alberto Valentino’s face, it is said, has been re-modeled on lines resembling those of the late screen idol, his bold and belting nose being altered to a classical shape. Guglielmi came to the US a year ago to attend his brother’s funeral

Mrs. John McMillan is having an affair, unknown to her husband and her stepdaughter Mary, with fortune hunter Count Roberto di San Fraccini. Overhearing a man threaten her husband with exposure for his connection with a murder unless he agrees to pay a huge sum of money, Mrs. McMillan conceives of a scheme with her lover the Count to acquire Mary’s dowry. Roberto informs Mary that in return for her hand in marriage, he will save her father from life in prison. Although desperately in love with Douglas, a young engineer, Mary agrees to the sacrifice, entering into a marriage in name only. Roberto continues his affair with Mrs. McMillan until, during an automobile ride, an accident occurs and she is killed. Roberto, fearing that he may be blamed, runs away. Mary then secures an annulment of her marriage to Roberto, thus freeing her to marry Douglas, the man she loves

The Married Virgin is an American film drama first released in 1918, directed by Joseph Maxwell. The film was scored by Brian Benison. It stars Vera Sisson, Rudolph Valentino, Frank Newburg, Kathleen Kirkham, Lillian Leighton, and Edward Jobson. It has also been released under the title: Frivolous Wives. It is a Maxwell Production, distributed by General Film Company. Film Length is 1 hour and 11 minutes.

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Director Joseph Maxwell, Fidelity Pictures

Screenplay/Story Hayden Talbot

Cast Vera Sisson, Rodolfo di Valentini, Frank Newburg, Kathleen Kirkham, Edward Jobson,  Lillian Leighton

Plot – Rudolph Valentino’s first film as a leading man where he plays Count Roberto di Fraccini, a fortune hunter having an affair with the wife of a wealthy older businessman. In order to save her wealthy father from disgrace and a possible prison sentence, a daughter agrees to marry the gigolo who’s been blackmailing him. What the daughter doesn’t know, however, is that the gigolo is actually in cahoots with her father’s new wife, a conniving schemer who plans to fleece her new husband for everything he has, then flee the country with her lover.

Rudolph Valentino— than whom there is not one more soul stirring— is ‘not’ handsome in the strict sense of the word. The back of his head is too straight up and down, and unless the camera gets him at just the right angle, his nose is too, broad for beauty. Yet he is the screen. idol of the feminine world. Ask half a dozen women why they find Valentino charming, and you will receive half a dozen different answers. A prominent screen artist in Los Angeles recently said: ‘I think Valentino is perfectly fascinating.’ ‘He looks as if you couldn’t believe a word he said to you. ‘Those gorgeous eyes, ‘another will say ‘Dark and enigmatic, like dull coal smoldering, yet ready to leap suddenly into passionate flame. They are undoubtedly part of his lure.’ Sometimes he looks like a small boy who is being abused, so that every woman wants to pat his shiny head and comfort him. Still, she knows perfectly well that he is .not, a small boy, and that it would be rather like patting dynamite-which, of course, makes him very fascinating.

It’s late August 1923, Deauville, France and there is a huge excitement in the air regarding the arrival of Rudolph Valentino and his new bride Natacha Rambova. Seems that they are going to be stopping off in town for a quick visit and everyone is simply talking about them. It is a belated honeymoon they have already seen the sights in London and Paris. They will be arriving in three cars the first for the luggage, the second for secretaries and the last for the Valentino’s and their guests. They are staying in a villa rather than a hotel that is wise for privacy. That night the Valentino’s arrive at the Casino, take drinks, dinner, visit the baccarat rooms and watch the cabaret but are rather aloof and do not mingle much. Needless to say they cause a huge flutter. But gossip spreads like wild fire as usual. People are saying ‘they are in ill humour and not happy with the weather or their accommodation. They are also disappointed with the Casino, upset with the food and rather disdainful of all of us. Mrs. Valentino apparently has her nose stuck in the air and was heard to ask ‘where is the fashionable crowd?’ I can see no smart women and no smart men.’

Unluckily, all this took place in the United States, where the word honor, save when it is applied to the structural integrity of women, has only a comic significance. When one hears of the honor of politicians, of bankers, of lawyers, of the United States itself, everyone naturally laughs. So New York laughed at Valentino. More, it ascribed his high dudgeon to mere publicity-seeking: he seemed a vulgar movie ham seeking space. The poor fellow, thus doubly beset, rose to dudgeons higher still. His Italian mind was simply unequal to the situation. So he sought counsel from the neutral, aloof, and seasoned. Unluckily, I could only name the disease, and confess frankly that there was no remedy – none, that is, known to any therapeutics within my ken. He should have passed over the gibe of the Chicago journalist, I suggested, with a lofty snort – perhaps, better still, with a counter gibe. He should have kept away from the reporters in New York. But now, alas, the mischief was done. He was both insulted and ridiculous, but there was nothing to do about it. I advised him to let the dreadful farce roll along to exhaustion. He protested that it was infamous. Infamous? Nothing, I argued, is infamous that is not true. A man still has his inner integrity. Can he still look into the shaving-glass of a morning? Then he is still on his two legs in this world, and ready even for the Devil. We sweated a great deal, discussing these lofty matters. We seemed to get nowhere.

Suddenly it dawned on me – I was too dull or it was too hot for me to see it sooner – that what we were talking about was really not what we were talking about at all. I began to observe Valentino more closely. A curiously naive and boyish young fellow, certainly not much beyond thirty, and with a disarming air of inexperience. To my eye, at least, not handsome, but nevertheless rather attractive. There was some obvious fineness in him; even his clothes were not precisely those of his horrible trade. He began talking of his home, his people, his early youth. His words were simple and yet somehow very eloquent. I could still see the mime before me, but now and then, briefly and darkly, there was a flash of something else. That something else, I concluded, was what is commonly called, for want of a better name, a gentleman. In brief, Valentino’s agony was the agony of a man of relatively civilized feelings thrown into a situation of intolerable vulgarity, destructive alike to his peace and to his dignity – nay, into a whole series of such situations.

It was not that trifling Chicago episode that was riding him; it was the whole grotesque futility of his life. Had he achieved, out of nothing, a vast and dizzy success? Then that success was hollow as well as vast – a colossal and preposterous nothing. Was he acclaimed by yelling multitudes? Then every time the multitudes yelled he felt himself blushing inside. The old story of Diego Valdez once more, but with a new poignancy in it. Valdez, at all events, was High Admiral of Spain. But Valentino, with his touch of fineness in him – he had his commonness, too, but there was that touch of fineness – Valentino was only the hero of the rabble. Imbeciles surrounded him in a dense herd. He was pursued by women – but what women! (Consider the sordid comedy of his two marriages – the brummagem, star-spangled passion that invaded his very death-bed!) The thing, at the start, must have only bewildered him. But in those last days, unless I am a worse psychologist than even the professors of psychology, it was revolting him. Worse, it was making him afraid.

I incline to think that the inscrutable gods, in taking him off so soon and at a moment of fiery revolt, were very kind to him. Living, he would have tried inevitably to change his fame – if such it is to be called – into something closer to his heart’s desire. That is to say, he would have gone the way of many another actor – the way of increasing pretension, of solemn artiness, of hollow hocus-pocus, deceptive only to himself. I believe he would have failed, for there was little sign of the genuine artist in him. He was essentially a highly respectable young man, which is the sort that never metamorphoses into an artist. But suppose he had succeeded? Then his tragedy, I believe, would have only become the more acrid and intolerable. For he would have discovered, after vast heavings and yearnings, that what he had come to was indistinguishable from what he had left. Was the fame of Beethoven any more caressing and splendid than the fame of Valentino? To you and me, of course, the question seems to answer itself. But what of Beethoven? He was heard upon the subject, viva voce, while he lived, and his answer survives, in all the freshness of its profane eloquence, in his music. Beethoven, too, knew what it meant to be applauded. Walking with Goethe, he heard something that was not unlike the murmur that reached Valentino through his hospital window. Beethoven walked away briskly. Valentino turned his face to the wall.

Legend has it that Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks once raced each other down Hollywood Blvd, with the loser having to pick up the dinner tab at Musso and Frank’s

Years ago, after the closing night of a play I was appearing in, I decided to drive to Los Angeles to see a college friend. I rented a car and took the scenic route south, driving along State Route 1, a highway that rims the Pacific coast. It was a long and thrilling day trip, driving around the scenic mountain curves, ragged rocks, and through stretches of redwood forests. By the time I reached Hearst Castle and finished a tour in the late afternoon, I knew I would not complete the journey to Los Angeles that day, and was recommended a hotel further south in Santa Maria.

It was an old, historic inn located inland on the hot, dry stretch of a valley at the base of the Sierra Madres. The interior of the hotel lobby and meeting areas were decorated as if it were a pub in the English countryside, with dark wood paneling, somber rugs, oversized chairs, stained-glass windows and brass chandeliers. The management of the hotel had decided to play up its celebrity prestige—guests used to stop here en route to Hearst Castle from Los Angeles—and silent film movie-star memorabilia decorated the walls and the guest rooms were named after many who had stayed at the hotel: Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow and Douglas Fairbanks.

My room on the second floor, however, had been named after a local politician, with a window that opened out onto an interior courtyard that was shared by several rooms. As I drew the curtains closed, I noticed that the window was unlocked, and I bolted and tested it to make sure it was secure.

After a long shower and a change of clothes, I was hungry and headed downstairs to the hotel’s restaurant, but a wedding reception was in progress in one of the banquet rooms, so I settled in at the bar where it was quieter, ordered a drink and something to eat. From where I was seated I could see the other end of the bar and, as the summer daylight stretched its last breath out, the details of one of the customers seated alone near the door became more distinct. He was tall and slender, probably in his late twenties, and he had a sleek, elegant look about him—slicked-back black hair, a light stubble of beard, a strong sloping nose with flaring nostrils, and a prominent chin, and he was wearing a white shirt open at the collar with an unraveled bowtie draped around his neck. Because of his attire, I took him to be part of the wedding party. I shifted and squirmed on my bar stool, hoping he might notice me, but he seemed distracted and vacuous, intent on downing his drink, and I lost sight of him when a gentleman sat beside me at the bar and began to complain about the noise of the piano in the other room.

An hour later I stumbled up to my room, slipped out of my clothes and into a T-shirt and sweatpants. I considered watching television for a while, but I couldn’t find the remote control, so I flipped off the light and pulled back the curtains to look out at the courtyard.

It was empty and unused. The moon was high and strong and it gave my room an eerie blue glow and I drew the curtains together so only a small ray of light came into the room.

I was in a deep sleep when the knock at the door woke me. As I groggily got out of bed, I thought it might be the guy from the bar, come knocking for some companionship instead of handing out more complaints.

I flipped on the light and opened the door but no one was there. I was confused, bewildered and disappointed, the brighter light of the hall was exasperating, and I tried to brush the annoying disturbance away as the immature hijinks of one of the wedding guests. But as I moved to close the door I felt something move through me that felt like an ice-cold wind. A chill ran up my spine and along my arms.

The door closed and I turned back to the room and flipped off the overhead light. The moonbeam fell across the carpet again. That was when I saw him. The slick, black-haired handsome man I had seen earlier at the bar. He was substantive and real and I could not figure out how he had made it around me and into the room without my noticing him. He stood visible in the ray of moonlight and looked as if he were posing for a photograph, his nostrils slightly aflare. As my eyes moved from the window back to the man he began to dematerialize, as if he were on an episode of Star Trek and Scotty was beaming him to another place.

My heart was racing and I sat on the edge of the bed to gather my wits. What would the front desk think of me if I called them and told them I had just seen a ghost? Instead of reporting the incident, I drank a glass of water, checked that the window was secure and the courtyard was still empty, then went back to bed.

I spent the remainder of the night restless, tossing, sweating, fighting an erection as if someone had curled around me, locked me into a hold, and was trying to alternately smother or arouse me. There was a digital clock beside the bed that I watched change minute by minute. Sometime in the early morning I drifted off to sleep, because when I woke the sunlight striped the floor as it split between the curtains.

I rolled over and noticed the curtains were moving. The window was unlocked and opened and a breeze was coming into the room. I sat up in bed and looked quickly around the room to see if anything was missing. Nothing seemed disturbed—my wallet was in place, the car keys were where I left them. But in the center of the floor, exactly where I had seen the apparition the night before and where the ray of sunlight now hit the carpet, was a shiny silver object. I got out of bed and picked it up. It was a ring. Silver with a flat top and an engraved insignia. The sizing was small—it would only fit on my pinky finger. I didn’t immediately associate the ring with the ghostly vision I had seen the night before. At the time I found it, I was more concerned that I might have been robbed while I slept.

I slipped the ring into a small, top pocket of my knapsack I rarely opened, intending to hand it over to the front-desk clerk when I checked out. But that good intention slipped by me because I quickly forgot about it.

The ring stayed in the top pocket of my knapsack for years, forgotten, snug in its upper berth, traveling with me to London, Zurich, Tokyo and other not-so-far-off destinations. I only discovered it again when my boyfriend Kurt and I were in Fort Lauderdale and I was emptying the knapsack so that I could use it to carry a towel to the beach. Kurt looked at the ring, smirked and said, “What Cracker Jack box did this come from?”

I explained how I came to find the ring. Kurt thought my ghost sighting was hogwash. Kurt was all numbers; he managed a brokerage office and was also something of an elitist snob, but he could accurately assess the financial value of any item and he dismissed the pinky ring as cold, cheap steel. We were in the last throes of our relationship and to annoy him, I slipped the ring on my small finger and wore it for a few days, until we returned to New York and I noticed the metal had made my skin turn a sickly greenish-black. I placed the ring in a small ceramic bowl in the bedroom of my Chelsea apartment where I kept a set of formal cufflinks and shirt studs and only discovered it again one night when I was dressing for a formal-attire Halloween dinner party. I slipped on the pinky ring and during cocktails that evening, I told a small group of men my story of finding it only after witnessing a ghost the night before.

A young man said, “You might be the last person to boast that he slept with Rudolph Valentino.”

I laughed and replied that that was highly unlikely, but he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellphone and took a picture of my hand with the pinky ring. I had never associated my ghost and cheap treasure with a celebrity phantom, but the young man said that Valentino had often been a guest at Hearst Castle and my description of the ghost seemed to match the actor’s. I found this young man charming and throughout the evening, in the various positions we found ourselves, he asked me in his most delightful bedroom voice about the name of the inn, the room number I had stayed in, what time of year I was visiting and on and on.

A week or so later, the young man emailed me evidence of Rudolph Valentino wearing the ring in several movie stills and publicity photos. I downloaded the pictures to my computer and saw it was a perfect match to the pinky ring I had in my possession. The engraving was unmistakable. Valentino is wearing the ring in photos with actresses Gloria Swanson and Agnes Ayres, in a portrait with his dog and beside a camel on the set of The Son of the Sheik, his final film. Valentino died at the age of 31, roughly the same age as the ghostly man I had seen. And the legendary actor in the photos looks exactly like the phantom I had seen in the bar and in my hotel room. The young man who had helped me discover this was a blogger and he said he wanted to write about my night with the ghost of Valentino. He contacted the owner of the hotel where I had stayed years before and discovered that several other guests had reported seeing a ghost in the room I had stayed in and that Valentino had been a frequent visitor to the inn. The blog post about the gay man who had slept with the ghost of Valentino went viral. I was more famous than I could possibly imagine, though I gratefully remained unnamed in the post.

Flash forward a few more years to when a reality TV producer contacted the blogger about Valentino’s ghost and the blogger gave the producer my name as the source of the haunting. When the producer called, I told her there wasn’t much to say about the ghost. I saw him; he disappeared. I shivered and sweated through a night with an erection that would not end. I could not even admit if Valentino—or his ghost—was a good kisser.

But the producer pressed on and asked if I would consider loaning the ring to film an episode of the TV show. I told her I no longer had it. And that was true. One morning not long ago I noticed it was gone—it wasn’t in the ceramic bowl. I remember looking around to see if anything else was missing from my apartment, but nothing was. Since I had last seen the ring I had had many visitors to my apartment: boyfriends, tricks, dates, even a hustler or two. Now, discovering and wearing the ring seems like a feverish dream I might have made up in my youth, and I wonder if my night with Valentino was something I had cooked up just to get attention. Only I am not that sort of guy. Instead, I imagine another man wearing that ring now—someone handsome, sleek, elegant, then one morning finding the ring cheap and tawdry and tossing it away. Something for the next man to find.

Source:

http://www.nextmagazine.com/content/my-night-rudolph-valentino

Silent Film Actress Claire Windsor gave an audio interview in which, she talked about a time where she had a date with a little known actor.

The year was 1921; and both were extras in the film industry. One night, Claire Windsor and her escort had a date for dinner and dancing at a popular night spot called the Running Country Club in Los Angeles. During that time period, this was where the rich and famous liked to dine. During the course of the evening, she made eye contact with a very dreamy handsome man whose name was Rudolph Valentino. Rudolph Valentino was on the dance floor dancing with an older woman while she was dining with her dinner date and yet he continued to maintain eye contact with her throughout his dance. Rudolph asked Claire out for a date. So for their date, they travelled by street car to a hotel restaurant downtown where they had dinner and went dancing. Claire noted he was a very good dancer. Rudolph evidently did not have enough money so they walked all the way to his place where they went to see his ‘etchings’. He lived in a one room apartment where they had to walk down 4 flights of stairs to get to. He must have thought she was not ignorant of what he meant by this invitation. Once they arrived he proceeded to chased her around the apartment which ended with her crying and asking for him to take her home in which he did. To listen to this great the link is referenced below in the source

Source:

http://www.frequency.com/video/claire-windsor-interview-claires-date/114425009