Motion Picture Classic (Jan-Jun 1929)

Leave Us Alone? To Gary Cooper, Sheik's Lament dumb," he confided uneasily, "but, you see, I didn't understand just what they wanted me to say. They looked at me so queerly. Say» tell me: what did they expect?" When Rudolph Valentino was at the height of his amazing career — when girls were tearing off their engagement rings and flinging them at his feet in public — he asked H. G. Mencken to have lunch with him, and unburdened his soul. "I want advice," he told the man they call the leader of the intellectuals. Perhaps Rudy thought that only such a one could appreciate his grotesque comic-tragedy. " In God's name, what am I going to do.' How did this happen to me.' I did not ask for all this worship, and I cannot escape from it. They will not leave me alone in peace, these women. They think I am like the parts I play. And I am not. There is a Valentino on every street corner in Italy. I want to live like other people. I cannot be always playing the sheik. In God's name, what am I to do.'" Mencken did not laugh. He realized that this was a very real sufFermg he saw before him, a man crushed by the Juggernaut of his own fame. But all he could say was, "Wait. And remember. This, too, will pass." Can One Be Kind and Single? A\ interviewer was talking with y~\ Gary Cooper not long ago, after he nad made a hit in "The Legion of the Condemned." In the course of their conversation Gary confessed to his bewilderment at the position he found himself in. "Maybe you could tell me; isn't there some way to keep from hurting people's feelings and still not get married.'" A friend of Maurice Costello, when " Dimples" was the screen sheik, told nu that he was stampeded by romancehungry women wherever he went. "The letters that man gets," he said, "are unbelievable, shameless and yet pitifu And many of them come from intelligent women, aiid supposedly happy wives. They would all ol them hesitate to speak of themselves so intimately to their best friends. They would be horrified at the very idea of saying such things to a strange man whom they might meet in their everyday lives, nut they write to Costello as to a lover. That's what he means to a million women — a lover." Costello, behind his handsome exterior, was a family man, living the life of a suburban householder, with his wife and two bains. Hi They've had all women crazy for them; they're funny that way. From the top and downward, they are: Wally Reid, Rudolph Valentino, Gary Cooper, Nils Astlier and Maurice Costello romantic hero r6le on the screen made his fortune, and lost him his family. The wife of a screen sheik has woman for a rival, instead of a woman. When Wallace Reid began his sensational career of screen lover, he was an out-of-doors chap, devoted to intensely mascuhne pastimes: fishing, hunting, camping. He had a lodge in the mountains and spent much time there with men friends. But the romantic glamour of his screen r6lcs, and the hysterical worship of women fans changed his nature entirely. For years before Wally Reid died he was the society man, more accustomed to the hothouse air of the drawingroom than to that of the out-ofdoors. His mountain cabin was abandoned, his guns rusted. He became what he was expected to be by the women who surrounded him with their adoration. .^ Waylaying Wally PI: R HAPS not even Valentino appealed to hearthungry women as Wallace Reid did. His fan letters were a sad commentary on American life, many of them being from middle-aged women whose husbands were too busy to pay them any attention, or from inhibited spin{Continued on page Uk) 31