Monthly Archives: Nov 2017

I discovered someone wrote a fiction article containing 23,500 words about Rudolph Valentino. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this very much and would love to tell the author “LadyLetty” thank you for writing this…

http://archiveofourown.org/works/10356555?view_full_work=true

All women are divided into two classes in the mind of a man. Often they are so mixed up that you do not know which is which until you go down very deep. Then it does not matter, for in an affair of amour a counterfeit is often better than the real thing. In my poor English, let me say that there are what I would call joy-women and duty-women. Now understand, the joy woman may be very good and the duty woman might even be bad. That is just their relation to man. The first kind are the kind that you want to take with you on your joyful carefree wanderings into life’s highways and byways. The other are the women who are possibilities to share the principal things of life – home, family, and children.  For a wife, a man should pick out a woman who is pretty, has a good disposition, and is domestically inclined. They are very rare now, I admit. One is too apt to be deceived by their easy method of comradeship. Let her be your inferior, if possible. Then she will be happy with you. It is much more essential to marriage that a woman be happy in it than a man. I do not mean a butterfly that flits from beauty parlor to beauty parlor. But a good woman who has the old-fashioned virtues. We Europeans do not expect too much of one woman. The difficulty with love and marriage in this country is that the man has let the game get out of his hand. A woman can never have a happy love affair with a man unless he is her superior. It just can’t be done. The love affair where the woman is the stronger in mind and knowledge is always a tragedy or a farce. I do not like women who know too much. Remember, it was from the serpent that Eve was given that apple from the Tree of Knowledge. Just so I would make the Tree of Knowledge of Life today – forbidden to women. If they must eat of it, let them do so in secret and burn the core. Do not misunderstand this that I say. I do not mean this in regards to intelligence, to education, even to position. The more cultured and accomplished a woman is, the more exquisite she is to love, the more like gold that is soft to touch and handle. With her, all is delicate and attractive, all is beautiful and fine, her mind is attuned to beauty – and beauty is of itself a religion. No, when I speak thus of an inferior – a superior – I mean in experience of life, in power to do, in ways to love. The man may be a digger in the ditch, and the woman a teacher in the school, but he is the master of her if he knows more of the world than she does. It is not becoming that a woman should know the world. It is not proper that a lady should of to places or to things where she acquires this knowledge. If she knows these things, she must be clever enough to conceal her knowledge, like the girl who can swim a mile, yet with much grace and helplessness she allows me to teach her swimming. How completely the modern woman in America tries to destroy romance. How ugly and cut-and-dry is has become – love. Either it must be marriage or it must be ugly scandal. The brilliant, absorbing, delightful, dangerous, innocent – sometimes – sport of life, how it goes. She knows too much about life and too little about emotion. She knows all of the bad and none of the good about passion. She has seen everything, felt nothing. She arouses in me disgust.Sometimes a man may feel that he would rather a woman had done many, many bad things – read bad things – and yet been delicate, and quiet and dignified, than to see her common. If the bloom has been rubbed from the peach, let her paint it back on with an artistic hand. Should I try again to find me a wife, I say, let me find one who wishes to have children and who when she has had them, wishes to take care of them. That is the proper test for a good woman who is to share the side of your life. No other woman can ever mean to a man what his children’s mother means to him – if she does not lot herself get fat and ugly and old. No man can love a woman who lets herself get fat, and careless and unpleasant. He must constantly make comparisons of her with the beautiful young girls about. A wife’s first duty is to keep her husband from making comparisons.  Of all the women I have known, the Frenchwomen are the most nearly perfect. No matter what their age or class may be, they have that touch of domesticity, that sweet and gentle something that lends a delicacy even to the wildness of the senses. Thy know how to amuse, how to touch the heart, they have the sixth sense of pleasing a man with their perfection. And they are so very well dressed. All of them.  American women are terribly pretty. Even when they are quite ugly, they are pretty. They are always rather well dressed. And they always behave as though they were beautiful. Which gives them great poise. But they lack softness, they lack feminine charm and sweetness. You cannot imagine them doing their bits of sewing, washing, mending, and what not. They dazzle but they do not warm. They are magnificent when they are dressed up, but I never have seen one who was likewise at ease and delicious and feminine in the kitchen or the nursery. They are so restless, too. Nothing interferes with romance like restlessness. It destroys those subtle shadings that are the very breath of its life. I do not blame the women for all this. I blame the American man. He cannot hold a woman, dominate and rule her. Naturally things have come to a pretty pass. He is impossible as a lover. He cares nothing for pleasing the woman. He is not master in his own house. He picks and nags about little things, and then falls down in big ones.  I love the dainty, little woman, who plays seriously at being domestic. She fascinates me. Everything womanly, distinctly feminine, in a woman, appeals to me. I adore her bird-like ways, her sweet pretenses, her delicious prettiness. I love her almost as one loves a cunning child, and when to this is added the filipe of sex, she becomes perfect. I do not like in her flippant, cold-blooded little tricks, but those soft, lovable ways of a little woman, those melting, helpless little ways of hers — that bring tears to your eyes and fire to your lips. Then there is the silent, mysterious woman who fences divinely. Who knows silently and secretly the secrets of the couquette — that last art of woman, in always leaving herself an opportunity to retreat. Who has always at hand that last weapon of woman — surrender. The greatest asset to a woman is dignity. It is her shield. With it, she may commit indiscretions that a vulgar puritan could never attempt. Dignity in a woman always puzzles a man. He likes it. He admires it. He feels confidence in the woman who displays it. He knows that she will never make a fool of herself or of him.

Portland Maine was the scene of a recent auction featuring a very famous ring by Silent Film Star Rudolph Valentino who has been dead for more than 40 years, but he has not been forgotten. Mrs. Homer Strong, Rochester, NY purchased the ring he wore in the movies for $1000. A clerk said the ring, containing a black intaglio of a man on horseback on a heavy hand hammered platinum mounting, would be worth about $250 without the Valentino connection.

Rudolph Valentino announced yesterday he would present each year a handsome gold medal to the motion picture actor or actress who gives the best performance of the year.

Rudolph .Valentino dressed as an Argentine Gaucho cuts in on a couple on the dance floor, knocks the man down and sweeps the girl into his arms for a slow tango, followed by a kiss. Later, as a sheik he wraps his arms around the woman he enslaved and carries her off to his tent in the desert. Only a few here still recall the scenes, but no matter Valentino was the most famous son of this town of 16,000 in southern Italy. Recently the locals got together in a movie theater to mark the anniversary of his death of 31 to see him again in “The Sheik” and “Blood and Sand” and to defend him against suggestions that the great lover was not really a great lover. The mayor, Gabriel Semeraro, announced a program of grants for students who want to help clear up any doubts about Valentino. He made it clear that people in Castellaneta were not too happy with some of the things being said about the local boy who made so good. “Some writers and others, are again casting aspersions and are trying to denigrate him by questioning his virility” said Michele Gravina, a city official”. “They won’t succeed. If people are still talking about Valentino 50 years after his death there has to be something to the myth”. It is difficult not to talk about Valentino here, even if his name is not a household word among the young. There is a ceramic statue of him, dressed as a sheik, that sits along the promenade; the Valentino Bar; the plaque on the house on Via Roma, where he was born; the Valentino laundry; the Rudy Bar; and the Valentino movie theater now showing an adults-only epic called “The Niece of the Priest”. Moreover, there is the couch in the apartment of Rita Maidarizzi. She is 72 and remembers when young Rudolph Guglielmi as he was known then, used to visit her family in the second floor apartment on Via Ospedale where she still lives. And she remembers a day in 1925, when he returned for a brief visit to sip some coffee, eat some biscuits, and talk about his success in the 12 years since he immigrated. “He used to drink out of these cups”, she said as she poured coffee for visitors. “He used to sleep in that bed over there, because he always had trouble with his father and liked to come over here. And he often sat on that couch. “When he died 50 years ago, women came from all over to sit on that couch and weep. Sometimes they went on like idiots”. Miss Maidarizzi, who keeps a file of newspaper clippings on Valentino said the number of tourists have declined over the years. Few come now and ask permission to go through her house. Mr. and Mrs. Vito Staffieri, who lived in the home in which Valentino was orn, also are untroubled by visitors, despite the plaque outside. “We bought the house 15 years ago,” said Staffieri a farm worker. “An American knocked on the door a couple of years ago and asked to see Valentino’s bedroom. We let him in”.