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Outside of Valentino no star but Clark Gable, above, has appealed
to so many women. Below: Warner Baxter, Dick Powell and John
Boles — is their appeal too specialized?
Valentino was a dancer. How different is the nimble dancing of bubbly
Fred Astaire! Below: Jimmie Cagney, Ronald Colman and Gary Cooper,
too, show how times have changed.
COULD THE "SHEIK" WIN
The Great Lover, they called Rudolph Valentino. If he came back today, would he instantly outshine the other men of the screen? Or would he find himself outmoded, a man whose day was done? • By IRENE KUHN
IF Rudolph Valentino could come back today from that unknown world beyond the grave, would he be remembered? Would he at once regain his magnificent stardom, snatched from him nine years ago by death, jealous of his ardent, avid life? Would he be the screen's great romantic lover? Or would he be just another of the current favorites whose appeal is, in no single instance, the all-in-one quintessence of male magnetism and mysterious glamour that made Valentino?
Would Valentino today learn that the fickle feminine public no longer wants one man on the screen to have all their worship, but chooses to divide it among the reigning stars with voice appeal (Crosby and Powell); with dance appeal (Astaire); with drawing room appeal (Menjou) '; and with all the other varieties of male appeal possessed by so many talented young men today, each with his particular flair, each with his special following.
Almost a decade has gone since there passed from the lives of screen fans their great romantic idol, Valentino, the man who had everything, who was all things to all women, who moved as mysteriously and swiftly into death as he had into spectacular fame, who died at the height of his popularity.
Perhaps a million women, to guess conservatively, women of all ages, from all walks of life, of varying degrees of intelligence and susceptibility, took Valentino's passing as a personal loss.
Fifty thousand of them, in New York City alone, beseiged the doors of the coldly commercial funeral parlors where the "Sheik" lay in state. They clawed and fought to get inside. Mounted police, perspiring in the August heat, were forced to charge the crowd of hysterical women, weeping for a man whose voice they had never heard, whose face they had never seen, except in its shadowy black and white image on the silent screen.
TO this writer, who saw the ghostly smile on Valentino's face as he lay in his expensive casket in that palm-studded, flower -banked funeral room, who heard the weeping of women filing past his bier, and the unbelievable clamor of others outside, the cries and pleas of assorted women fighting to break police lines to look upon the dead face that had epitomized the most important thing in the world to them — romance — it seemed then, as if Valentino knew that his oft-uttered prophecy was a true one.
For, more than once, this svelte, swarthy tango dancer with that intangible male magnetism that carried him so swiftly to fame and fortune, to public adulation such as is given to few men, had been quietly sure of his unique place in the movie world. He seemed to be sure with a confidence that was almost prescience, beyond argument and dispute, that attempts to find a substitute for him would
14
The New Movie Magazine, July, 1935