Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1927)

From the Beyond? Natacha Rambova tells of the Spirit Messages she claims to have received from Valentino piness as New York mobs fought for a view of his body. He realized his great popularity as he had never realized it and knew what he had lost b\' being taken. To him it was wonderful but cruel. " He w'as lonely, too. He could not reach his friends. He could not touch I heir sorrow. He tried to talk to them but they could not hear. "Of course, he felt the loss of adulation. Soon, however, the interests of the astral world began to hold him. Now he is radiantly happy, an.xious to begin his work there." ]Vln'»i lias he mcli' "He has named Wallie Reid, Barbara La JMarr and little Olive Thomas. He has been mo.^t interested in meeting and talking with Enrico Caruso. Caruso, of course, was the idol of all young Italians. When Valentino first came to America, to make his living as best he could, Caruso was at the apex of his operatic career. To Rudy he represented all success and all greatness. You can imagine, then, his joy at meeting the great tenor over there. Caruso has taken Rudy to the opera and to hear astral concerts. Rudy, too, has met the personal friends with whom we used to communicate by means of automatic writing." 117/(1/ /lave they said? "They have e.xplained the astral world to him. He is slowly coming to comprehend the sublime qualities of the new Ufa about him." Docs Valentino know of the sorrow that swept the world at his death? "Naturally, he was conscious of the world's sorrow. It w^as visible all about him. It tortured him in those earthbound days." Valentino has referred to the opera and the spoken drama on the other side. Ca n he tell more vf this? " Opera and drama, sublime things of radiating tones, moods and colors, he says, are presented in massive theaters built of thought-substance." Valentino has said there are no viovics. Why? " Because the films are a mechanical perversion of the drama. In the astral world there is nothing mechanical. There is a point here I want to make clear. All inventions are created first in the astral plane. As earthpeople perfect themselves and achieve the point where they can reach across, they snatch these inventions from the astral. Everything earthly is a materialization of something conceived in the astral plane. Motion pictures, on the other hand, require mechanism for presentation. Mechanism is material and consequently not of a part of the astral scheme of things." What earthly successes docs Valentino remember now? "He remembered all, at first. Rudy wandered the film theaters where his last film was being shown to sorrowing One of the last portraits of Rudolph Valentino. Natacha Rambova, his former wife, claims to be in receipt of a number of spirit messages from Rudy via a trance medium audiences. He walked his old haunts on Broadway, particularly around 47th street, where he used to spend many hours of his old penniless dancing days. He suffered because his old friends used to pass him by, unknowing. Yes, he tried to speak to them, without avail. He shouted 'I am Rudolph Valentino' but they did not hear. It was hard for him to understand. He was just as alive, but in a different vibration. As Rudy has grown in astral knowledge, however, these earthly recollections have lost their appeal. The old glamour of the earth-people is passing. Our world is growing fainter." Has Valentino any message for his old host of worshippers? "Yes. He has a message for ( co.xtinued on p.ige 104] 39