24 Apr 1922 – How to Succeed in Love by Rudolph Valentino

Valentino learned about “women from her” a lesson that he carried to the boulevards of Paris. There he learned love in its casual phase the love that is based on the bubble of the hour, that has now for its patron saint the francs of the stranger, now the art of the artist, and then the heart offering of the poet.  Also, he saw the other side of the picture. The sincere love of the poor native or stranger, who, in the midst of infidelity, of pretense and thoughtless pleasure, clung to a man, and the man to her, with the same simple   love lonely in the midst of a crowd that might have been found in the peasant remoteness of the Midi.  Such formed the basis of the Valentino school.  To him loving is an art a game of finesse. It must not be played with speed or crudeness. There is no place for the quick canvasser or the man who has to catch a train.  It is his doctrine that he would never care to kiss a woman who made it possible at the first, second, or third encounter.  It must be nursed he insists.  Love cannot be forced, deduces this youthful safe of affection from his world study.  It is worthless unless it is given freely and happily, and there can be no joy in what is taken by force or with reluctance.  The bliss of a kiss, he opines, lies in the receiving end of the vibratory combination, and blessed he is who can gradually reaches a state where two souls and two hearts drift in concentric circles toward each other and then whirl into one mad embrace as two floating chins approaching the vortex of a whirlpool might circle and circle and circle closer and closer with each moment, and then take the plunge into that mad torrent side by side.  That is the Valentino theory of love.  His notion of the American is a man who forms instant desire to kiss a woman the first time he sees her; who is too hurried to wait, too crude to conceal from his telltale eyes the purpose that lurks in the mind.  But a kiss is something that tells a story.  When four lips are to join in the greatest of human sentiment that ever comes to a world that was supposedly born in sin and misery then it is the women who gives the kiss!  And the kiss that is given is worth all of the stolen fruit, all of the captured lip trophies that have been recorded in the world from the time of the Queen of Sheba first, felt the magic of Solomon’s touch down to the latest osculatory treasure that marked a belated goodnight at the vestibule of a New York flag. It’s all a game. There you have the rudiments compiled by a master.