As I mentioned last week, I’ve found some
wonderful online archives of movie fan magazines up at the Internet Archive archive.org
. This is a fabulous resource for academics,
enthusiasts and those of us who just really like finding old ads for underarm
hair removal:
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| It's Off because it's Out! |
I’ve been looking through some issues of Photoplay from the early 1920s and
finding a lot of wonderful material. Today I’ll just post one photo-spread of
Rudolph Valentino in his new house, waiting for his new wife.
And this little tidbit. Valentino, the star
of the movie version of The Sheik, generated
a lot of press, both positive and negative. The stereotype was that women loved
him and men hated him (and thought he was too ‘feminine’). Thus this short ‘Song
of Hate’:
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| http://archive.org/stream/photoplayvolume222chic#page/26/mode/2up |
What are ‘oriental optics’? Eyes? Looks? I do love the phrase ‘apt in the art of
osculation’.
And here is the man himself, Rudolph Valentino, looking very
serious, from the September 1922 issue of Photoplay:
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| What more can be said of this Latin lover of the film? |
These movie fan magazines had much of the same kind of
content that Hollywood celebrity magazines have today (gossip about stars,
spreads of their homes, interviews, reviews), as well as short fiction, ‘behind
the scenes’ industry information, and so on. The following is a photo-spread of
the home that Valentino was going to live in with his second wife after his
divorce was final, described as “romance in silhouette against futuristic
background”:
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| Photoplay September 1922 |
The spread, if you want to look at it more closely is at:
Their marriage was a bit of a scandal. According to the
article, Valentino was not fully divorced from his first wife Jean Acker when
he and Natacha Rambova (aka Winifred Hudnut) married in Mexico. There was even,
I believe, a bigamy trial? The article says that Rudolph and Natacha designed the
house together, but Valentino was living in it alone until they could marry
legally in California while Rambova was living with her father Richard Hudnut (“millionaire
perfume manufacturer”) in New York.
What a contrast in names! From Winifred Hudnut to Natacha
Rambova! She was certainly going for the ‘exotic vamp’ image… Rambova had been a ballet dancer and was at the time an artistic and costume designer. There were constant
rumours in the film press about her relationship with Valentino and the amount of
control she exerted over his artistic and business decisions (e.g. the notorious
platinum ‘slave bracelet’ she bought him).
This was common film star gossip (divorces and
romances), but also inflected with the anxieties around changing gender
relations which marked Valentino’s career. Was he manly enough or was he
being controlled by his wife? Were women too
sexually attracted to him? Was his foreignness the source of a suspicious sensuality?
More prosaically, though:
The picture of Valentino on the bottom left would be even
more arresting in colour, because the caption describes his lounging suit (“from
the Chinese”) as bright orange!
And the object on the bottom right is Natacha’s dressing table,
apparently designed by Valentino himself with some ‘exotic and unique’ features,
including an electric perfume burner. A nod, I suppose to both her exotic image
and her father’s manufacturing interests?
Friday, we move forward in time to a sheik romance from the 1970s…
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