Hollywood (1936)

Features for September 1926— Valentino's Memory Fades— 1936 Today, Ten Years after his death, Rudolph Valentino apparently is Hollywood's Forgotten Man! His crypt in Hollywood Mausoleum is barren of flowers. A statue erected to his memory in DeLongpre Park, in the center of the movie city, is surrounded by reeds. August the twenty-third, 1926, was a long time ago; the public, fickle in its tastes, has moved with the calendar — and forgotten! The entire world was mourning Rudy's sudden demise in New York, where he had gone for a holiday, at the very apex of his success. Pola Negri, then one of the silversheet's most glamorous stars, announced that she was the beloved Rudy's betrothed, donned widow's weeds and rushed eastward to implant a farewell kiss on his cold lips. Meanwhile, milling throngs gathered outside a Gotham mortuary, where his remains rested in state, for the mere privilege of paying homage at his bier. Other thousands lined railroad station platforms as the special train bearing all that was mortal of the departed celluloid sheik paused momentarily in cities and villages dotting its transcontinental route to Hollywood, where he had carved his niche, and where half a million worshippers, men and women alike, lined the thoroughfares as his bronze and silver casket was toted from a Beverly Hills church to a Hollywood cemetery. But that was ten years ago . . . Only Falcon Lair Remains • When Death Reached out its hand, Rudolph Valentino supposedly was a super-rich young man. Now all that remains of his estate is Falcon Lair, the hilltop mansion he built for his second bride, exotic Natacha Rambova, and which has long since been dubbed the "haunted house" by tourist guides and Ten, twenty, and fifty years from now The Sheik will still be remembered as Rudolph Valentino. But, in terms of flowers at his crypt, Rudy has already been forgotten by his admirers the "white elephant" by realty brokers. It is a matter of record in the Los Angeles courts that what little Rudolph left in the way of material wealth was dissipated before it reached the heirs for whom it was intended — his brother and sister. It is also a matter of record in these same tribunals that the world-wide fund raised for the erection of a suitable memorial to him went the same way. Rudolph Valentino's last will and testament, naming George Ullman, his manager, as executor, his brother, Alberto Valentino, and a sister living in Italy as his beneficiaries was merely another gesture, for he was aware when the Reaper closed his soulful eyes that he had little or nothing to bequeath. Fate, however, smiled upon Rudy Valentino in death. A Fortune After Death 9 He Had Risen to his supreme moment in Four Horsemen and Son of the Sheik. The latter, a sequel to The Sheik, was completed only a few days before he left Hollywood for New York. Son of the Sheik, in which he had a profit-sharing interest, did a record-breaking business because of the extensive newspaper space devoted to his passing. Immediately on its heels, his earlier productions were re-issued. They, too, reaped a golden harvest. So it was that Destiny built a fortune for Alberto and his sister — a fortune they never received. In recent years, Alberto, his wife and his son have made their abode in the servants' quarters above the garage at Falcon Lair. The residence itself has gone untenanted until the last few months, for Alberto, on his meagre income as a talkie extra and part-time bookkeeper, never felt himself able to pay the upkeep on the many rooms. What Alberto has saved through modest living, he has expended on his son's college education. Some day you will hear of Rudolph II as a surgeon. Ullman, the man who engineered Rudy's rise to the throne of popularity, is no longer the affluent individual he used to be. He is an actors' agent, but his list of clients contains no Valentino successor. Too, Ullman has heard himself raked over the coals of legal fire on more than one occasion. A Los Angeles Superior Judge, Hon. Walton Wood, ousting Ullman as administrator, ordered him to repay to the estate the sum of $25,849, and named a Los Angeles bank to take over the executor [Continued on page 63] K i& 'I'^^ft^^B ,,r~ . ■ A t, / Aspiration . . . the monument to Valentino's memory is surrounded by reeds. Few people, indeed, know to whom the monument is commemorated SEPTEMBER, 1936 For years flowers like these surrounded his last resting place. Rudy's thousands of admirers did not forget their greatest of screen idols. They came in throngs to his crypt But today, 41 years after his birth and ten years after his death, Rudy's crypt has no flowers, and only his faithful family pause a moment and pass on by 31