Author Archives: 1926Rudy

When Natacha Rambova beautiful but practically unknown dancer and costume designer, became the bride of Rudolph Valentino at a hurry-up wedding on the downside of the Mexican border a couple of years ago, she was probably the most envied woman in America. “Imagine being the Sheik’s wife” said feminine movie fans. “Some women have all the luck and who is she anyway”? They heard she was a society girl interested in a career, Winifred Hudnut, stepdaughter of the perfume maker. They also heard that she had taken over the business end of Rudy’s work and was doing a very good job as adviser and general manager. Then word went out the Sheik and his wife had separated. She’d gone to Paris for a divorce. The most romantic marriage in America was all over. “Professional Jealousy” said the fans then. Each of them was afraid of losing prestige to the other and there you are! But professional jealousy was only a contributing cause; it was one of the pinpricks that widened the rent in the fabric of the Valentino’s marital relationship. The rent, says the exotic Natacha, was decreed by destiny. It’s part of an amazing story she tells; a story of ancient associations in a bygone century; the mystic doctrine of reincarnation; of the inexorable law of karma. “Rudy and I separated” she said, “because our time together in this life had run out. We came together because there was something some problem, perhaps left over from a past life to be worked out. I was necessary to him and possibly he was necessary to me. “I have no idea what the problem was. It was not given to us to know the details in this scheme of fate. But I do know that it is over. The problem was solved for all time. I do not believe that we will ever meet again in any future existence. Mrs. Valentino talked with curious oriental calm, her long dark eyes shining. She was tall and slender flowing in black satin, embroidered with mauve and pearl gray. A twist of black silk was wound around her head, turban-wise. She was like a figure from a Chinese vase in an incredible setting of black and orange. Black rugs; a black taffeta divan; orange silk against the windows and the sun coming over New York roofs. A figure of Krishnu against one wall opposite an antique Virgin and Child across the room. Leda and the Swan in porcelain, almost life-size; queer Chinese prints. The only modern touch in the room was a big sheaf of American beauty roses. And the girl who calls herself “Natacha” because she resents the commonplaceness of “Winifred” rested against black taffeta and told of the life she lived with her Sheik seven hundred years ago!  Perhaps Rudy was a real Sheik then. She doesn’t know. It was in the Iberia of the Moors, before the Spaniards came down from the North and spread oppression over the land. “We lived in the south of Spain, where even today stands relics of Moorish domains” Mrs. Valentino explained. “The Moors really were Arabians, you know. I visited Spain last summer and wandered through the South. It was vaguely familiar; I felt that I was not in a strange land. You know the feeling that comes over you sometimes that you’ve been in a place before. It’s something you can’t explain by any logical means unless of course, you understand the theory of reincarnation, the progress of a spirit from life to life, working out destiny in new bodies under new conditions and environment. “What we are today is what we have worked out in the past. What we gain in each life is credited to the next, but the problems we do not solve go over to a future existence. That is Karma, the law of eternal balance. “I don’t know what my status or conditions were in medieval Spain. But I know I was a girl who was somehow in subjection”. Mrs. Valentino does not clearly remember herself in yashmak and trousers awaiting, behind harem walls the pleasure of a dark-skinned sheik resembling the handsome film hero she is divorcing. But she has a feeling of having known him at that period. “Sometime when we are ready to know everything is revealed to us” she said. I don’t know that I was married to Rudy then. But it seems likely, doesn’t it? Mrs. Valentino is astonishingly familiar with medieval Spanish and incidentally Moorish history. She declares all culture in Europe originated with the Arabs the Moors she asserts, maintain marvelous colleges in the 13th and 14th centuries and all the learned and brilliant minds of the time were Moorish. “In the day of Pedro el Cruel they were called barbarians by people who could neither read or write” she went on. “And that was when Arabic was the court language everywhere”! It is not only medieval Spain that Mrs. Valentino says she remembers however, There was an earlier existence that comes back to her through her artistic leanings and love for color. Once so long ago that she cannot guess at the century she wandered in the rose gardens of ancient Persia. “Our likes and dislikes” she explained, “are something more than just casual results of training and environment. Those things give no satisfactory reason for a very modern person preferring for example, Greek architecture to the up-to-date style of building that we have now. My own education has nothing to do with my liking for the brilliant color and bizarre mannerisms in clothes and architecture that were a part of old Persia. I have never been in the Near East, and yet I feel at home there. And I have adopted some of the customs, especially those having to do with dress, because they are perfectly natural to me. She mentioned the twist of silk she wears on her head in place of a hat. It has been two years since I have worn a hat. And a striking feature of her house costume is a long loose-fitting coat of heavy satin, embroidered in the design of peacocks and other fanciful designs associated with Persia. “Besides” she added, “I have other information about my life in Persia. It comes to me in dreams and sometimes when I am sitting quietly alone from another plane”. Like most theosophists, Mrs. Valentino believes that discarnate intelligences, known as adepts, that is, souls have worked out tall their early problems and live in a sort of lower heaven or Nirvana on the astral plane impart information to students eager to progress toward metaphysical understanding. Her special teacher, she said, is a Persian scholar who knew her when she lived in the land of Cyrus and Omar Khayyam. She says she has another and more mysterious instructor, a scholar of ancient Egypt. But she has not as yet traced her existence back to the time of the Pharaohs. “I do not associate Rudy with my Persian life” she stated thoughtfully. “Perhaps he was not incarnate at that time. Some of us have lived longer than others, you know. And, anyway, relationships change. I might have known him then, but not as a husband or lover. “I believe that my mother, in an earlier life was my sister, even now we are more like sisters than mother and daughter. She lived; I am sure in the 18th century. She has the high forehead and aquiline nose of the Bourbons. And the 18th century atmosphere is the only one she cares for or is comfortable in. A third life, which the astonishing Natacha Rambova says she remembers quite well, was the one she lived a mere 300 or so years ago in Russia. That was when she was a dancer at the imperial court and when the romantic Rudy probably was a member of the blood. Natacha has never been to Russian, but she says she understands the Russians and likes them. It was partly because of her life in Russia she said that she threw off her American name and adopted the singular one she uses professionally. She has always thought of herself as “Natacha”. And in England, a few years ago she met a young Russian dancer, Marusha Rambova who became her friend. When the girl died, she took her surname adding it to the one which she believed expressed her own personality. She explained how she was won over to the belief in reincarnation and other occult doctrines of the East. I don’t feel the slightest sadness when I think that we never, at any time or under any conditions. will be together again. I have only a sense of completion, for our karma is worked out, our problem is solved whatever it was, and our time together is over. That is why we separated.