Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  Luckily, Hollywood’s women filmmakers offered an imaginative escape from the demand of playing the sensual instructor to American men by creating the Latin lover, a glamorous, magical “handsome hero” who could intuit a woman’s every wish and mesmerize her into becoming a heroine who acted on her desires. In retrospect, the rise of the Latin lover appears as a kind of bridge between two sexual ethics. Under his imaginative tutelage, American men and women might learn to ignite a woman’s sensuality so that, together, they could experience erotic bliss. The career of Rudolph Valentino, the actor who both defined and immortalized the type, indicated that many were not ready to make such fantasies a reality. Everything that made Valentino the ideal fantasy lover of millions accentuated his foreign, dark, exotic beauty, his sensual remove from conventional Anglo-American codes of masculinity. Baptized Rodulphus Petrus Philibertus Raphael in Southern Italy in 1895, Valentino’s father was an Italian veterinarian; his French mother was a noblewoman’s companion before her marriage. Valentino’s mother raised her always-mischievous middle child and pet to share her love of languages, poetry, storytelling, and prayer. In 1913, Rodolfo, as friends called him, crossed the Atlantic from Paris to New York in a first-class cabin with a tuxedo in his steamer trunk and the equivalent of $4,000 in his pocket. There the talented dancer found work as a professional tango partner to middle-class women, displaying the qualities that made him such an appealing threat. “Lounge lizards” and “tango pirates,” as the men who performed such jobs were called, were stereotyped as lower-class, new-immigrant Italians and Jews who used “feminine” wiles—beauty, grace, and relentless focus on another’s pleasure—to prey on women. Rodolfo moved up quickly to the more respectable position of exhibition dancer and began making the theatrical rounds in New York, trying to break into the legitimate stage or motion pictures. His implication in a scandal involving a dance partner’s divorce encouraged Valentino to try his luck in the new movie capital, and so he took a job with a dance company and headed west.91

  Valentino arrived in Los Angeles in September 1917, shortly after the United States entered the war, and quickly fell into the orbit of some of the industry’s most powerful women, who intimately supported his professional advance and personal life. D.W. Griffith judged the Italian actor “too foreign looking” for anything but bit parts as “heavies” in low-budget films. But filmmakers like June Mathis, Clara Kimball Young, and Alla Nazimova who were eager to use cosmopolitan, continental aesthetics to explore more daring romances recognized him as a means to help achieve their ends. Always on the lookout for a man who communicated sexual prowess, Young gave Valentino his first break, casting him in one of her company’s “special” features, The Eyes of Youth (1919).92 Playing a “cabaret parasite” hired to entrap Young’s character in a compromising situation, the actor demonstrated, in one short scene, an ability to tempt a woman down morally dangerous paths. The performance caught the eye of June Mathis, the most powerful woman executive working for a major studio in 1918. Another filmmaker who began her career as a child on stage, Mathis had gotten her break in the movies five years earlier after winning a scenario-writing contest in a fan magazine. Mathis quickly rose to head Metro’s scenario department and then to act as the studio’s “artistic supervisor,” writing, casting, and overseeing productions from start to finish until her sudden death in 1926.93 An open devotee of European art, she tackled a challenge most thought impossible by adapting Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s internationally best-selling novel about the catastrophic costs of the Great War, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1919).94 Described as possessing an “indomitable will and dangerous temper,” Mathis overrode the director’s objection to casting an unknown foreigner with a radically different masculine style as the lead.95 Her determination to make the movie with Valentino demonstrated the motivation behind so much of her work: to raise the stature of the American film industry by associating it with continental artists who explored modern cultural currents.

  Valentino’s successes in Mathis’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) made him the 1920s symbol of masculine glamour, revealing him to be “the continental hero, the polished foreigner, the modern Don Juan” in Hollywood’s “unsuspecting midst.” Valentino “tangos, makes love, and fights with equal grace,” raved one of the many critics who singled out his performance in the film, displaying how he combined previously incompatible masculine attributes into a new whole.96 Valentino plays Julio, the dissolute heir of an Argentine ranching empire who moves to Paris, where he plays at painting until an adulterous love affair awakens his better side, remaking him into a man driven to sacrifice for his country. Valentino embodied the hero as lover, controlled only by passion, circumstance, and the pulse of his partner. Whether guiding a lower-class woman in a languid, intricate tango in a smoke-filled dive, or oh so delicately seducing a married aristocrat in his Parisian atelier, Valentino adjusted his style and tempo to deliver whatever the woman and the situation required. Hailed as a masterpiece, the Four Horsemen became one of the decade’s most successful films, launching the formerly unknown actor into a stardom that made plain the transformed landscape of women’s sexual fantasies.97

  FIGURE 21. June Mathis, the triumphant adaptor of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Valentino’s persona centered on how his Orientalized, continental glamour granted his fans new erotic license. His distinctly non-Anglo appeal explained why so many American men resorted to using the nonhuman terms reserved for nonwhites to describe him, comparing his sexuality to that of a “panther” who projected “more sheer animal magnetism than any actor before or since.” Like many women, Glyn thought Valentino the very human incarnation of her ideal lover, possessing a technique that appeared at once “masterful and tender” and a confidence that radiated that “he knew everything about love.”98 His performance in The Sheik (1921) crystallized this star image. The film was an adaptation of a then-best-selling novel by E.M. Hull. Like Glyn, Hull was another empire-trotting English author who wrote the book while stationed with her soldier-husband in Algeria. But unlike anything Glyn had written, Hull’s story tracked the sexual education of a young English, New Woman–styled heroine, Diana, at the hands of an older “Arab” sheik, played by Valentino. On vacation in the Middle East with her brother, Diana rejects the attention of several passionless Anglo suitors before setting off to explore the desert with only local “Arab” guides. Enter Valentino’s sheik, ruled by an uncivilized Eastern code that dictates that “when an Arab sees a woman he wants he takes her,” as the film’s ads proclaimed. The sheik needs only to spy Diana from a distance to understand their mutual desire. After orchestrating her kidnapping, he sweeps his “white gazelle” off to his sumptuous tent, where he unleashes her dormant sexual desires.99 The film abounded with racist stereotypes that revealed much about the “West” and little about the “East.” Despite the constantly stressed superiority of the West, here tied to Englishwomen’s freedoms and their beautiful white skin, only the dark cover of the East and an Orientalized man can liberate Diana’s passion.

  FIGURE 22. Rudolph Valentino as the Latin lover. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  Valentino’s triumph as the ideal lover in this passionate melodrama spoke to the desire of female fans to act the independent sensual adventuress, their fears about the part, and the seeming impossibility of lovers acting on such desires within the context of Western civilization.100 Moreover, this ambivalence duplicated the same erotic tension produced by watching heroines like Diana oscillate between aggression and subservience, pleasure and pain.101 “Oh, what a Lucky Girl to have enough money to take a trip like that—a trip across the wild desert with only Arab guides in her company. Oh, how daring! If it were only I!” recalled a Chicago moviegoer. “The more I saw the picture the more I fell in love with the handsome hero—I rese
nted him for his abrupt and brutal manners but still I used to care for him,” another fan recalled of Valentino’s effect on her in The Sheik. Variety called The Sheik “preposterous” but admitted that it “won out” because “it dealt with every caged woman’s desire to be caught up in a love clasp by some he-man who would take responsibility and dispose of the consequences.” “Seems like an ordinary picture,” remarked one exhibitor, “but as a lady patron remarked, ‘How that man can love!’ ”102

  If women in audiences across America “raved” over Valentino, as exhibitor after exhibitor noted, men were “divided in opinion” about the star. Critical commentary impugned the star’s virility, seizing on how the film dramatically toned down the novel’s brutality by having the sheik awaken the heroine’s sensuality with passionate kisses rather than rape. “He is a soft, sapless sort of Sheik beside the character delineated by Edith M. Hull,” scoffed one review.103 Younger men aped the actor’s dress and admitted to studying his lovemaking techniques, but their elders lambasted Valentino’s feminized manliness as not just unsuitable but fundamentally “un-American.” Unquestionably beautiful and always attired to highlight his sinewy physique, Valentino was a glamorous male subject whose power lay in his ability to trade on women’s desires. However forceful his erotic technique appeared at times, his performances displayed a single-minded focus on eliciting the pleasure of heroines who needed an encouraging hand. Indeed, male critics’ charges that his technique was too gentle displayed the tendency of both sexes to conflate terror with sex under Victorian conventions. It also suggested that men might need to resort to ever more brutal methods to retain the traditional balance of power between the sexes if women began to pursue their desires more aggressively. Men also complained about the actor’s nonwhite, foreign appeal. “All men hate Valentino,” declared a male writer in Photoplay. “I hate his Oriental optics. I hate his classic nose; I hate his Roman face; I hate his smile; I hate his patent leather hair; I hate his Svengali glare; I hate him because he dances too well,” and, finally: “I hate him because he’s the great lover of the screen . . . too apt in the art of osculation.”104

  June Mathis introduced Valentino to Alla Nazimova, the artist whom he credited with teaching him to act.105 When remembered at all, Nazimova appears as the first in a line of more familiar European female stars who followed her, including Pola Negri, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. Her first Metro studio biography hailed the Russian actress “as the last of the great stage artistes to heed the call of the screen,” but Nazimova was actually the first real stage star to use her “artistic temperament” to justify her unconventional femininity and demands, including lending her support for woman suffrage and the Equal Rights Amendment.106 The words “genius,” “intense,” “dominant,” “mysterious,” “exotic,” and, finally, “Russian” consistently modified the name of early Hollywood’s original “Madame.” This was a “Russian Crimean superwoman” “who made New York like [playwright Henrik] Ibsen, who actually startled the American theater into newness of life.”107 Such publicity accurately reflected her theatrical status.108 A small, lithe figure with a mop of short, black curls and large blue eyes, she was among the first actors exposed to the techniques of the Moscow Art Theatre’s famed director, Constantin Stanislavski. Nazimova stayed in New York after a tour with a Russian company in 1905. The next year she commandeered the direction of her triumphant English-speaking debut in Hedda Gabler, which resulted in Ibsen’s first U.S. success.109 Her Hedda was a woman turned feral inside the cage of a respectable, middle-class marriage.110 Over the next three years she solidified her stature by playing Ibsen’s other “modern,” “soul-harassed” wives who, “hell-bent on independence,” refused to remain trapped in a “doll’s house” (the title of Ibsen’s play).

  From the start, her publicity emphasized the qualities that Hollywood seized on in the postwar period. “A hint of the Slav, a hint of the Oriental, a hint of the Parisienne, a hint of the woman of the theater,” as one critic summed up her persona. Detractors called her Hedda “a bit of feline and voluptuous Orientalism,” but more lauded just these qualities.111 “Our English-speaking actresses lack often the emphatic and expressive temperament. It is Madame Nazimova’s by birthright as a Slav,” observed one. Another declared, “Our actresses hesitate to ply the appeal of their sex, except, needless to say, in musical plays,” but on “the continental stage . . . the wise actress counts it as a telling resource, a ready tool, and cultivates it accordingly. It is strong in Madame Nazimova.”112 Just as the success of Glyn’s Three Weeks helped to change assumptions about literary tastes, Nazimova’s theatrical triumphs altered the landscape of New York theater by shifting the opinion of the powerful producer Charles Frohman about what women wanted to see. Previously Frohman had declared there was no audience for the “erotic and the decadent.” After Nazimova’s triumph he announced “sex conflict” the order of the day. Nazimova increasingly played these roles in less high-art, more melodramatic plays like Bella Donna (1912), an adaptation of Robert Hichens’s best-selling novel, which, like his incendiary The Garden of Allah (1904), featured passion-starved Anglo heroines awakened under the cover of Orientalist escape.113

  Nazimova traveled to Los Angeles in 1916 as the “First Femme Fatale of the American theatre,” “a dark enchantress from the East.” Her first foray into what she called the “photodrama” was an adaptation of War Brides (1916), a hit antiwar play in which she starred.114 The New York Times declared that the actress not only “screen[ed] well” but reached “a tragic height never before attained in a motion picture.” Though nearly forty, her success convinced Metro’s East Coast head of production that she could offer a better interpretation of a modern vamp than prewar stars like Theda Bara.115 Nazimova signed a five-year contract with Metro in 1918 that included a starting salary of $13,000 a week and the right to approve her director, costars, and scripts. As with Glyn, the authenticity of her exotic glamour as both a “foreigner from that most foreign of all countries” and an artist certified by both New York and European critics was key to her promotion. Photoplay described her estate, “The Garden of Alla,” as “a three-and-a-half acre compound on Sunset Boulevard filled with the faint pervasive fragrance of the Orient.” This “aristocrat of the arts” was called a “rebel” and a “revolutionary” who was such a consummate performer that one could not tell if she was “always acting—or she never acts.”116

  A year of “superlative” box offices hits landed Nazimova at the center of the industry’s celebrity culture in 1919, where her star was held aloft by her “seemingly overwhelming appeal for the feminine sex,” according to Motion Picture Magazine.117 The protagonists she played highlighted her exotic glamour, including a cabaret singer in the Latin Quarter, a gypsy, the daughter of an Arab sheik, and a “half-caste Eurasian” caught up in the Boxer Rebellion in The Red Lantern (1919), a film June Mathis adapted for the actress.118 Nazimova and Mathis teamed up for several productions, creating passionate melodramas whose heroines ran “the gamut between Vice and Virtue with dazzling effect.”119 Publicity about her real life depicted her as an androgynous figure who preferred to act the boy among the bevy of talented young protégés she kept around her. Fans offered a peek inside Alla’s Garden encountered a figure who “abjures makeup” and preferred the “costume of a Chinese boy.” This decidedly epicene character wore her “short hair clipped with boyish brevity” and “slightly touched with grey.” Extolling her “boyish” charms, fan magazines reported her claim that “most of my friends are young girls,” protégés who called her “Peter and sometimes Mimi.”120 More knowing readers would have recognized such references as cues that indicated her sexual preference for women. Among Hollywood insiders Nazimova’s taste for the ladies was as well known as the cosmopolitan salon she hosted and the all-girl pool parties she often threw, whose regulars included the Talmadge sisters and June Mathis.121

  FIGURE 23. The Epicene Girls, Alla Nazimova and Natacha Rambova loung
e in pajamas at the Garden of Alla. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

  The total control Nazimova demanded on the set made her notorious for alienating male directors, but she worked smoothly with women like Mathis and designer Natacha Rambova. After completing Four Horsemen, Mathis sought to associate her protégé Valentino with Nazimova’s brand of continental artistry. Nazimova and Mathis cast Valentino as Armand, the male lead in their production Camille: Paris 1921.122 “Why not a Camille of today?” asked Mathis’s opening intertitle in this “modernized version” of the melodrama that in important senses helped to make possible these women’s performance of modern womanhood.123 Their highly stylized, decidedly nonnaturalistic Camille blatantly aligned itself with the avant-garde expressionist films then transforming Berlin’s cinematic scene, becoming perhaps the first domestically produced “art film.” The film’s futuristic, Art Deco costumes and settings created by Nazimova’s protégé designer Rambova overshadowed the production. Although the film was a commercial disaster, Valentino felt new freedom inside these women’s circle of influence, and a romance between the actor and Rambova led to marriage. Rambova, whose real name was Winifred Shaughnessy Hudnut, was a former dancer who had learned how to mobilize continental glamour to get ahead from her godmother, Elsie deWolfe, the interior designer who so clearly articulated at the fin de siècle how such strategies offered new means for women to get ahead.124