Douglas Messerli | The Valentino Phenomenon [essay]

the valentino phenomenon

by Douglas Messerli

 

None of Rudolph Valentino’s films that I’ve seen are truly gay or even LGBTQ oriented with the exception of Camille (1921), which has a brief lesbian scene. Yet his films appear, time and again, on lists of gay cinema, most notably the Mubi-oriented list compiled by Matthew Floyd, “Homosexuality in Pre-Stonewall Cinema.” They also appear on MundoF’s Letterboxd list of “In the Closet: A List of Minor Interest LGBTQ+ Films” and others. But interestingly, Vito Russo in The Celluloid Closet mentions Valentino only in passing, and he is referred to even less by Richard Barrios in Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall. Russo talks more about the 1977 film Valentino directed by Ken Russell than the actor himself.

      Russell’s film was a response, in part, to the rumors, mostly false, surrounding Valentino’s own sexuality. In the first place, Valentino seldom appealed to heterosexual men, many of whom apparently walked out of his movies disgusted with the sight a carefully coiffed male costumed impeccably often in outfits in which no American man would be seen. He was most definitely not Douglas Fairbanks, the masculine man who leaped across US screens. Journalists mocked his perfectly greased-back hair describing him as “Vaselino,” and many reported on his macaronic clothing, his treatment of women on film, and what was perceived of as his effeminate manners.          

      In fact, Valentino was discovered and marketed as a different kind of lover by screenwriter June Mathis, who had toured with the famous female impersonator Julian Eltinge before becoming a writer. As head of Metro Pictures story department, she had enormous authority, and it was she who not only cast Valentino in the role of Julio Desnoyers in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but coached him on the sidelines. One might argue that working with Eltinge had taught her a great deal about turning a man into a woman and perhaps a somewhat effeminate dancer into a strapping lothario.

      Director Rex Ingram (a macho substitution for his real name Reginald Hitchcock) did not at all like the thin young neophyte, and it was only Mathis’ presence that kept the movie flowing. As Daniel Eagan has written, “...the plot to Four Horsemen is a ramshackle, unholy mess, with war, rape, adultery, cross-dressing, tangos, fire-breathing dragons and Death as the Grim Reaper, tinted green and seated atop a horse. Even Christ, disguised as a ‘stranger’ in a third floor garret, puts in an appearance.”

      But fortunately, he realized along with Mathias that Valentino needed to be their major focus. A tango was added, the notorious dance Valentino performed with Mexican-American actor Beatrice Dominguez, he dressed in Argentinean gaucho pants—both the dance and pants becoming a quick-lived fad. And both Mathis and the director worked to make Valentino the most masculine presence in the room during each of his film appearances, giving him, as Eagan notes, a gay friend and putting spectacles on his rival German cousins. They kept him away from actor Wallace Beery.

     In short, they constructed what was perhaps the first real male Hollywood heartthrob, a pretty boy the likes of dozens of later such actors as Ramon Navarro, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, and Alain Delon, all of whom, with the exception of Delon perhaps, were gay. And all of whom were also irresistible to women, perhaps because they did not look like most straight men. Did women also have a “queer” eye on him? Certainly homosexual men had, immediately adding to the speculation that Valentino was gay.

      With regard to the journalistic speculations, Valentino did not take them with humor, reacting very much like the hot-headed Latin Lover into which he had been transformed. When in 1926 the Chicago Tribune reported that vending machine dispensing pink talcum powder had appeared in an upscale hotel’s men’s washroom, an editorial argued in response that it had to do with the feminization of women as represented in Valentino and his films. Valentino challenged the writer to a boxing match—dueling being illegal—and when he didn’t respond consulted the Baltimore Sun news writer H. L. Mencken about how to deal with the incident. When New York Evening Journal boxing writer offered to fight in other’s place, Valentino took him on and won the bout on the roof the New York’s Ambassador Hotel. But the struggle surely led to his death.

     From the moment, shortly after his boxing bout, of his early death in 1926 of appendicitis and gastric ulcers leading to peritonitis and eventually sepsis, stories of Valentino’s homosexuality begin to gather like storm clouds in the background of the funeral which attracted over 100,000 people, followed by the bizarre behavior by several of women followers who declared they loved him, including aging actor Pola Negri who regularly visited his grave, she claiming that they had been engaged to be married, and the legendary “woman in a black veil” along with her many copycats, the first visitation being a stunt cooked up by press agent.

      Anyone who has lived close enough to Los Angeles to know that Hollywood is a creation of the mind rather than location on the map knows there is sexual gossip about nearly every actor and filmmaker who ever became famous enough to deserve it, much of it true but a great deal of it also pure nonsense. Although I love Kenneth Anger for his films, I have to dismiss book his book and movie Hollywood Babylon for which he made up gossip that he couldn’t discover any in the columns. One of his most notorious tidbits was his claim that Valentino had a sexual relationship with Ramón Novarro, despite Novarro’s insistence that they barely knew one another. Upon Novarro’s murder, so Anger reports, the police discovered Valentino’s gift of an art deco dildo stuffed down his throat. Novarro was murdered by two brothers who had called and made an appointment offering their sexual services, as others from the same agency had done in the past. But their goal was to rob the actor, and after beating him in order to find his money, Novarro died of asphyxiation, having chocked on his own blood. There was no gift of a dildo, and none found in his mouth at the time of the murder.

      Anger and other writers like him claimed also that Valentino had had affairs with his roommates Paul Ivano and Douglas Gerrad, as well as Norman Kerry and the openly gay French theater director and poet Jacques Hébertot, despite the fact that Ivano claimed that he and Valentino were both heterosexual. And Valentino’s biographers Emily Leider and Allan Ellenberger basically agree that the actor was primarily heterosexual.

      Documents belonging to Valentino’s friend Samuel Steward also seemed to indicate that they were sexual partners. However, Steward’s claim of a sexual encounter in Ohio, it was later found, could not have taken place since on the same day Valentino was in New York.

       Of course, given the anti-homosexual laws and attitudes of the time, it’s little surprise that those suspected of having sex with the actor, any actor, might wish to deny it. And friends and biographers have long been known to keep information from their readers that might have involved queer behavior—or they simply fail to explore such information in any depth.

       And, if nothing else, it does appear that both of Valentino’s marriages, first to Jean Acker and later to Natacha Rambova were probably “lavender marriages,” marriages made to cover up the actual sexuality of the individuals—but in this case that the women, not necessarily Valentino.

      On November 6, 1919, Valentino married actress Jean Acker. Acker was a lesbian involved with silent actor Grace Darmond and Alla Nazimova in a love triangle that was beginning to arouse public interest. Valentino met Acker at a party two months prior to their wedding. They soon began to see each other socially before marrying. Valentino was unaware of Acker’s sexual orientation, discovering himself locked out of his hotel room on his wedding night by his bride before the marriage could be consummated. Valentino tried in vain to regain her love through letters before abandoning such attempts and filing for divorce.  The couple remained legally married until 1921, when Acker sued Valentino for divorce, citing desertion. The divorce was granted, with Acker receiving alimony. She and Valentino eventually renewed their friendship, and remained friends until his death.

      Valentino first met Rambova, the set designer, art director, and protégée of Nazimova on the set of Uncharted Seas in 1921. By the time the two worked together on Nazimova’s production of Camille, they were already romantically involved, despite the fact that at the same time Rambova is presumed to have been Nazimova’s lover. 

      Valentino and Rambova married in Mexicali, Mexico in May 1922, whereupon he was arrested for bigamy since at the California law demanded that a full year pass after a divorce before a new marriage. The two, accordingly, were forced to live in separate apartments each with their own roommates until they remarried in March 1923. By that time Nazimova’s famed Salomé premiered, also with sets and designed by Rambova. The gossip columnists were filled with speculation that Nazimova was furious with Valentino for having turned down the role of John the Baptist.

      He had chosen instead to act, of course, in his next great film Blood and Sand in the role to which he eventually claimed he felt the closest kinship and ow which he was most proud.

      Clearly, accordingly, Valentino did not have wonderful relationships with the women in his life. As he told gossip columnist Louella Parson: “The women I love don't love me. The others don't matter.” For being such a sex symbol, his own sex life was clearly unrewarding.

      Does it really matter, accordingly, whether or not Valentino was gay or heterosexual? His sex life was a fantasy of the screen not the bedroom. As I have already noted June Mathias had created in him a new concept of a Hollywood lead: a face that held within a mix of softness, sentimentality and yet masculine cruelty, a golden mannequin whose power over the hearts of his viewers was neither his voice nor his actions but his beauty. Did it even matter that he had a penis?

      Ultimately, Valentino was just not that interesting as a human being as I think even Ken Russell’s film proves, particularly since the director has long been known to go to extremes to create scandalous events around the figures in his movies, but finds nothing much to even create a stir in Valentino unless a fellow prisoner’s quick masturbation on the star during his overnight stay in the clink is a complete shock to anyone. Other than a pretty boy with what Russell reports was rumored to be a “wee willie winkie,” there was not much to the man. After all, Valentino’s dream was not to be a Hollywood legend but to own an orange grove and to settle down with an old-fashioned Italian wife.

 

Los Angeles, May 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2022).