The stars (1962)

In The Sainted Devil he managed an unwonted hardness. portant, there is the insinuating gracefulness of his movements when they are unencumbered by period costumes. It is not the grace of an athlete — it is quite un-Fairbanksian — it is the grace of, frankly, a seducer, perhaps even a gigolo. It is grace directed toward a single end — the smooth transfer of a woman from an upright to a reclining position. To waste such grace on a high jump or a pole vault would have been madness. To use it as he did was an insult to all the Anglo-Saxon traditions of male-female relations, refreshing to women, despicable to men. He was, in short, that infinitely attractive thing — a boy in man's clothing and a boy, what's more, with an obvious talent for sensuality, a talent which any woman might wish first to test and then to develop to a man's full-scale sexuality. There has never been a movie star in whose presence women more wanted to be, no star they more wanted to touch. There seemed to spring in his fans an eternal hope that one of them would awaken the real forces that slumbered (as they thought I within him. They could see the strain which posing as a man of action caused him, they knew the gap between the pretenses his scenarios forced upon him and the real Valentino, and all of them thought they just might be the woman — if only he would just notice — through whom he could bridge the gap. Undoubtedly they sensed the truth about the real man, that he was fatally attracted to women stronger than he was. The one he chose as his wife very nearly succeeded in wrecking his career before his sudden death in 1926 ended it. She was a Salt Lake City girl named Winifred Shaunessy, stepdaughter of cosmetician Richard Hudnut. She was a designer and actress and in pursuit of these professions chose the cognomen Natacha Rambova. She began supervising Valentino's pictures and she emphasized the softness of his character, putting him into foppish items like Monsieur Beaucaire, presenting him with a slave bracelet that he wore to the great derision of the masculine American. It was at this point that the Chicago Tribune called him a "pink powder puff" and suggested that he was setting a terrible example for American youth. Even the women began to desert him. For what Natacha didn't realize was that it was essential for Valentino to continue his brave attempts at strongly masculine behavior in his films. They served to remind his audience that there was a man within, a man waiting for release through love. The obligatory moment in his films where he threatened to — and sometimes actually did — take his heroine by force was, for his fans, a moment of high deliciousness. Beneath his demands, they sensed his gentleness. Once he had broken down resistance by its use they knew he would be gentle and kindly, a perfect lover. Without the tension between this fraudulent force and this real gentleness, Valentino was just a pretty profile, and that was what Natacha was reducing him to before they separated 44 It was pictures like this which ruined Valentino.