“That’s he—that’s Valentino.”
In all film history, replete as that is with instances of meteoric success, there has been nothing quite so swift as the rise of this young Italian pantomimist, Rodolph Valentino. The beginning of the breathless ascent may be traced to a reception given one afternoon by a certain Mr. Cole, a painter living in Hollywood. To this reception came Rex Ingram, then lately returned from overseas service in the Flying Corps. Came also in company with Paul Troubetsky, Rodolph Valentino. At this point I shall allow Mr. Ingram to tell the story just as he related it to me one evening last Summer while we sat chatting on the porch of Mae Murray’s and Bobby Leonard’s home at Great Neck.
“I was attracted at once by Valentino’s face and by his remarkable grace of movement,” said Ingram, “and I made immediately a mental note of him. There’s a fellow, thought I, who would be great in pictures, and if I get my job of directing back I’m going to use him. I was pretty confident then, you see, that this experiment was due for the very near future. Little did I think that months—yes, almost a year—would go by and find me just as idle as I was that day when I walked into Mr. Cole’s reception.
“I wasn’t remembering much about Valentino in those days, I can tell you. I was so poor that I had to hock all the civilian clothes I had left behind me in my storage-trunks. This left me nothing but my uniform, and the uniform proved, as it did to so many other ex-service men, anything but a talisman. The only effect it seemed to produce was to prejudice any possible employer against me. At last—of course that’s the way it always happens—I had two jobs offered to me at once. In the meantime, though, I had been obliged to give up my little two-dollar room. In fact, when I got my double offer I was owing two months’ rent for it.
“The job I chose was with the ——. No sooner had I started to work than I discovered Valentino was on the same lot under Holubar. This second contact with the young foreigner deepened my confidence that he would be a great success on the silver-sheet, and when ‘The Four Horsemen’ came along I thought of him immediately.
“Of course it was obvious that he was the exact type for the young tango-dancer hero of the story. Even after I started work with him, though, I had no idea how far he’d go—not at the very first. But when we came to rehearsing the tango, “Rudy” did so well that I made up my mind to expand this phase of the story. I did this by means of a sequence in a Universal picture I had made several years before. The sequence showed an adventurous youth going into a Bowery dive and taking the dancer after he had first floored her partner. Bones and marrow, I transposed this action to South America—yet only a few of my wise Universal friends recognised it.
“This bit of acting not in the book gave Valentino a chance for one of his showiest pieces of work. I rehearsed it very carefully for three days right on the set, and I think the result showed it.”
At this point in the director’s story I asked him if he thought, as so many people do, that Valentino was a mere flash in the pan.
“By no means,” rejoined he promptly; “he’s very ambitious and earnest, and if he doesn’t take what the fans say too seriously he will live a long time as a picture idol—provided, of course, that he is kept in good stories and has a capable director.”
Here at this point I can not refrain from quoting the most famous of directors on the subject of the present-day idol. In talking to Griffith one day I asked him what he thought of Valentino.