25 Jul 1943 – A Bookman’s Holiday By Charles Collins

It was said, that Rudolph Valentino’s book of verses, “Day Dreams” was ghost writed by Gordon Seagrove, former Chicago Tribune reporter and thereafter advertising stylist, it was slightly off the track. The truth in a nugget is that Mr. Seagrove nearly wrote “Day Dreams”. The inside story, in his own words, is better than the original.  “I didn’t write one line of ‘Day Dreams’ says the erstwhile skipper of the yacht Vanadis,” and if I did I would be glad to atone for it on the scaffold. But..when the great lover was becoming a biological urge I saw him in a dancing exhibition, I think in the Bismarck Gardens. When he ended his program countless frustrated mommas took off their wrist watches, rings, etc and threw them on the stage.  That did something to me. How, I pondered, could Seagrove get some of those coconuts? So he hatched up a scheme for a deluxe volume of love poetry by Valentino, to be written and published by himself (Gordon Seagrove), and submitted to the Great Lover who said “Yes”. A serious accident in the Mackinac yacht race delayed the ambitious Seagrove, but after he had been patched up in the hospital ‘all bound with woolen string and wires” he began to write the poems. “It was Eddie Guest with allot of hot Italian background says Seagrove, “a whiff of the desert and a dash of ‘pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar”.  All in all, it was good, heart-mellowing stuff, calculated to knock the matrons not into one loop but three.  In due course, the verses were sent to Hollywood and approved.  “But here the dirty hand of romance smote me.  Valentino had met and fallen in love with Winifred Hudnut, also known as Natacha Rambova. This lady, who was a pallid kind of poet of the E.F. Cummings incoherent school, took one look at my meaty efforts and vetoed them forthwith.  She substituted her own stuff, which now appears in Day Dreams – a new love in versification, in my opinion..  Rudolph Valentino was also the alleged author of a volume of memoirs called “My Private Diary” issued by the Occult Publishing Company, Chicago in 1929. It’s ghost writer has not yet confessed but I can tell you Rudolph Valentino did not write this book.