We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
and he began his much publicized affair with Pola Negri.
Valentino himself sensed the discrepancy between his screen self and his real self, and as false film followed false film he complained, "I am beginning to look more and more like my miserable imitators." Many of them were indeed better at playing the Valentino character than was Valentino. Perhaps he so willingly followed Natacha's suggestions because he oould no longer bear his pretense. He was, in any case, neither a stupid nor an insensitive man — despite the counterlegend his detractors created in the attempt to debunk him. He came from a relatively prosperous and educated provincial Italian family. He had a diploma from a college of landscape architecture, and he had come to America not as an immigrant seeking relief from oppression, but out of curiosity. He was a natural dancer, danced for pleasure in the hours after work as a gardener, then turned professional, taking over from Clifton Webb as Bonnie Glass's partner, touring with her until the act broke up in Los Angeles, where he found work as a minor movie player. Screen writer June Mathis sensed his appeal and brought him to Rex Ingram, who took a big chance by putting him into his arty super-production, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at Metro, which, with notable lack of foresight, signed him only for that picture. Zukor picked him up before Metro quite realized what it had. The first film was a solid hit; The Sheik, made for Paramount, was a sensation, and the mold was cast.
You could not say that Valentino was an intellectual, but he did have a natural sensitivity, which was his undoing. Lacking the strength to assert himself, even to be cynical, he buried his resentments inside himself, devoted himself with a surprisingly professional attitude to trying, somehow, to make himself believable. Of his physical strength he was more sure, but it was not enough, especially when the attacks on his masculinity reached their late heights. Some of his personal idiosyncrasies, his foppish dress, the womanish quality of his temper, served his enemies better than they did Valentino. More and more, toward the end, he talked of the tragic heroes he wanted to play — especially Pirandello's men in search of identity. "A man should control his life," he said once, "mine is controlling me. I don't like it." The screen role he loved best was the one in The Four Horsemen. "Julio was a man who allowed his weakness to dictate his circumstances — myself," he once said. His death, creating the awesome outburst of madness which marred his memory irrevocably was caused by a perforated ulcer, that classic affliction of a man in debt to circumstance and unable to live with the debt.
Valentino as he saw himself. "A man should control his life," he said. "Mine is controlling me." Searching for identity himself, he wanted to play a Pirandello hero.
Valentino as women saw him. The film is The Conquering Power.
47