Motion Picture Magazine (Aug 1928-Jan 1929)

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THEY had told me it was haunted. They had warned me that no one would enter the house after the sun had departed. They had related weird stories without number about Falcon's Lair — the last home of Rudolph Valentino. Now, I am neither a scoffer nor a believer What is beyond the grave is something no living soul has fathomed. Whether a departed soul can return to communicate with those not yet departed has never been proved, so far as I know, to a point of certainty. I had no idea that I should prove the matter. If Rudolph Valentino returned to his bedroom — the one in which I would be sleeping — I was ready to receive any message he would deliver. If he did not return, I was even prepared to believe that I had not chosen the propitious evening. I did not know whether to believe the stories they had told me or to credit them to over-active imaginations. ISkptln Were the Spectres and Shadows Real? Was There Another Presence There? Of course, I know — we all know — that Valentino himself believed in the return of the spirit. Natacha Rambova, the one woman in the life of the actor, imbued him with this belief. She has communed with him since he departed, if we are to believe what has been printed. THE EERIE MANSION FALCON'S LAIR is the home which he purchased, rebuilt and so luxuriously furnished in the hope that she would return to become its mistress. It is where his hopes reached their zenith, where his despair plumbed its lowest depths. It stands on a jut of land in the mountains and peers down upon Beverly Hills below it as proudly as an eagle lording over the lesser birds beneath its pinnacle of glory. Four sentinel palms cling tenaciously to the steep hillside before it, their dead fronds drooping listlessly close to the mother trunk, even when a mountain wind is blowing. Why this house, so beautifully poised on this picturesque mountain, so well publicized as one of the show places of Southern California during the lifetime of its owner, has never been sold, is an intriguing question. It is said that at the auction of Valentino's effects a New York man bid it in for $164,000 and then refused to complete the transaction. Prospective buyers visit it and go away never to return for a second investigation. They give no reason for it. Stories have circulated around Hollywood of one caretaker who ran down the canyon in the middle of the night yelling that he had seen Valentino. Some even say he is still running. And of the stableman 34