Dark Lover: the life and death of Rudolph Valentino Emily W Leider Faber & Faber, 498pp, £20 ISBN 0571218180

Rudolph Valentino changed the face of romance. According to the Los Angeles Times, he was the man who "overnight . . . made the Latins the lovers of the world". Emily W Leider's entertaining biography tells the story of an Italian - baptised Rodolfo Guglielmi - who arrived in America at the age of 18 and became (to quote one headline) the "World's greatest kisser".

Valentino was born in 1895, the son of a vet. An unruly child, he was a persistent truant and was eventually withdrawn from school. His one great ambition was to become a soldier, but this was thwarted by myopia and his narrow chest. After a stint at agricultural college (where he showed no aptitude for farming) he was sent by his family to America.

Valentino spent four louche years in New York, where he was employed at Maxim's restaurant-cabaret, under the name "Signor Rodolfo", as a "taxi dancer" (that is to say, a man who is paid to dance with the female clientele). He was a natural on the dance floor and claimed in later years to have taught Nijinsky to tango. However, he turned against New York when he became involved in a celebrity divorce as a witness and the press vilified him as a gigolo.

Escaping to Hollywood in 1917, Valen-tino started work as an extra, earning $5 a day, and from there graduated to minor roles as a suave villain or a heavy. He might never have gone further, because many directors in Hollywood regarded him as too foreign-looking to play the romantic lead. Valentino was the antithesis of the Anglo-Saxon Douglas Fairbanks, at that time Hollywood's most bankable heart-throb.

It took a woman - the scriptwriter and producer June Mathis - to spot Valen-tino's explosive sex appeal. It was she who insisted on casting him as the male lead in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. On the film's release in 1921, the critics immediately recognised a new star. Life applauded the way he "tangoes, makes love and fights with equal grace", while Photoplay Magazine hailed the arrival of the first "Continental hero".

Later that year, Valentino's performance in The Sheik caused hysteria. Women of all ages fell for his smouldering sexual menace and his hypnotic gaze (attributed by some to his myopia). From then on, wherever he went he was mobbed by adoring girls. But the success of The Sheik also provoked a backlash among envious American men. In some parts of the press he was lampooned as effete and dubbed "Vaselino". These attacks gained plausibility when, in the course of Valentino's divorce from his first wife, Jean Acker, in November 1921, it was revealed that the marriage had never been consummated.

In fact, Valentino was not unmanly, but a naive idealist and unlucky in love. He had married Acker in 1919 at the age of 24. The marriage was a disaster. Acker - it transpired - was a lesbian. She had come to California as the lover of one actress and left Valentino the day after their wedding for another.

Valentino's second marriage, to the costume and set designer Natacha Rambova in 1923, was more successful. Valentino was mad about the dazzlingly beautiful Rambova (born plain Winifred Kimball Shaughnessy in Salt Lake City, Utah) and for some years they lived a life of happy excess, indulging their shared passion for art, spiritualism and dogs. Valentino desperately wanted children, but Rambova was interested only in her career. They divorced in January 1926. Valentino well understood the irony of his position: "I have often thought to myself, 'The great lover', loved by all but his loves."

Months after his second divorce, on 15 August 1926, Valentino was suddenly taken sick. He was rushed to hospital, where he was diagnosed with an acute perforated gastric ulcer and general infection. America held its breath. In little more than a week, he died. News of his death provoked hysteria; some fans committed suicide. In New York, a riot broke out amid the 50,000-strong crowd that flocked to view his body lying in state.

Valentino's early death undoubtedly contributed to his enduring legend. The World's Greatest Lover remained for ever young. More significantly, his reputation was never tarnished by the disaster that overtook many stars of the silent screen at the end of the 1920s - the advent of the talkies. Dark Lover illuminates the man behind the legend and Leider tells his often lurid story with restraint and, above all, compassion.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website