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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
One imagines how it might have been--without the sudden death, in New York, at thirty-one; without the riotous mourners outside the Frank E. Campbell funeral home; without the subsequent female-fan suicides, or the "lady in black"showing up at the tomb every year.
One imagines a spring night in 1971, fifty years after the release of "The Sheik."Inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a career-highlights film ends, and the silent, smoldering screen caliph gives way to the televised elderly gentleman, rising from his seat. He is tanned and toupeed (he'd been hiding a bald spot as far back as 1923) and quite heavy now (he still eats snails by the dozen with the six-foot-long pasta he likes to cook). Sophia Loren hands him his honorary Oscar.
He'd never made the transition to talkies: a nice baritone voice, but the accent, if no thicker than Sophia's, had sometimes been a problem back then. He has lately been showing up in TV cameos: an aging rancher on "Gunsmoke,"the guest villain on "Batman."(Even now, he needs the money, his youthful spending habits having persisted.) After the standing ovation, he rejoins his latest wife--let's say a status-seeking blonde of about fifty--somewhere backstage. In the wider television audience, one or two surviving wives from his middle years--rich women, then as now a little older than him--are feeling pleased that he's at last got his due. After all, almost no one who has met him, not even H. L. Mencken, has ever thought Rudy anything but a decent fellow.
But instead of all this we have the brief existence--from 1895 to 1926--described in "Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino"(Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $35), Emily W. Leider's long and pleasingly overwrought biography of this star who came into the world the year that the Lumi?re brothers projected the first motion picture. Growing up in the Southern Italian village of Castellaneta, Rodolfo Guglielmi idolized his mother and irritated his father, a former Army officer and research veterinarian whose fatal illness, in 1906, provided "a heart-stopping, melodramatic deathbed scene,"complete with clutched crucifix and the extraction of pledges to madre and to Italia from Dr. Guglielmi's two boys. None of it was lost on the already theatrical Rodolfo, then only ten.
After a poor showing at an agricultural college, he took the first steps toward his eventual vocation during several feverish weeks in Paris, where, as he racked up gambling debts, he also learned to dance and dress. Late in 1913, on the theory that America would help cure his wastrel ways, Gabriella Guglielmi bought her son a second-class ticket to New York on the S.S. Cleveland. Once aboard, he traded up to first class and wore a tuxedo every night to champagne suppers.
Lounge-lizardry suited the new Manhattanite better than stints at car-washing and landscape...
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