Rudolph Valentino

flashback

This is the last photograph of Valentino (for whom Valentine's Day could have been named), taken two weeks before he died at thirty-one of a perforated ulcer. He wouldn't have been surprised by the unprecedented female frenzy that met his cross-country funeral cortege: after five years as the silent-screen sheikh of Babylon and a failed marriage to the ambiguous Natacha Rambova, he was so agonizingly lost in the mores of America that he sought guidance from H. L. Mencken. The two met, on a stifling New York night a few days before the end, to sweat out his latest indignity. A Chicago Tribune editorial headlined PINK POWDER PUFF had blamed the effeminizing of the American male (and the dispensing of pink powder in a Chicago men's room) on the "painted pansy" movie star. Valentino had challenged the writer to a duel and wound up a tabloid laughingstock. But Mencken found him a finer man than his sensational image suggested, a man "of civilized feelings" made a "hero of the rabble" and revolted by his grotesque fame. Perhaps, he wrote, this ex-waiter was lucky to have escaped.