Biography: Not many years ago, a friend and I were returning from a first night at the Abbey and stopped at a certain chipper on the way home.
There was a queue of locals waiting to be served, and one of them, not the best for wear, was mightily intrigued by our appearance - it was the time when one still wore collar-and-tie to the theatre. He pointed at us and executed a small dance. "Hey," he said, "will yiz look at the two f***in' Rudolph Valentinos!"
Valentino had already been dead for two generations but the image, ludicrous as it was, defied age or parody. A perforated ulcer had spared him from old - even middle - age and the vagaries of fashion. "Good career move," the merciless Gore Vidal said when Truman Capote died, and as much might have been said of Valentino. There is no reason to doubt that in death he will continue to survive even the prose - the title, Dark Lover gives us a clue - of Emily W. Leider.
On the back of the dust jacket, there is a picture of the author's hero, dressed as the Sheik and wrenching his upper garments apart as if imploring Mr Maurice Nelligan to tell him the worst. This is accompanied by such encomia as "It's a sad story . . . and Leider tells it with grace, wit and empathy." Really, there must be a special nook in purgatory for publicists who invent such porkies.
Fair dues, however; Leider's research is as thorough as her writing is woeful, and at least a complete picture of Valentino does emerge. He was born at Castellaneta in the province of Puglia and christened Rudolphus Petrus Filibertus Raffaele Guglielmi. His father, a vet, died when the boy was nine. As the author says with a flash of unoriginality, the budding Valentino was "born to dance", and his other passion, which later became a mania, was for motor cars. His father's death, she says with a fine disregard for linguistic joinery, "unhinged" him.
Within a few years the young Rudy headed for Paris where he "might have noticed Claude Debussy dragging on a cigarette or a clothes-conscious Marcel Proust adjusting his woollen muffler around his neck" - the lad, although undoubtedly not the brightest, was heterosexual, so presumably Proust's own neck was the one in question. With money sent by his widowed mother he went to Monte Carlo, where he gambled and lost. In 1913, the lady stumped up again, and he went to America.
He found work as a jobbing gardener. He haunted the fringe of the New York theatre district. It was the era of Vernon and Irene Castle; he was dim, but he cashed in on the craze. He became a taxi dancer: the male equivalent of a dance hall hostess. Women gave him "presents". One female friend shot her estranged husband five times in the head, and Rudy was implicated. He left town and went to the west coast.
In Hollywood, still on the make, he played bit parts in more than a score of films. Meanwhile he fell in love with an actress named Jean Acker. Jean was a lesbian and on the wedding night she locked him out of their love nest, but after his death she wrote a ditty in his memory entitled We Will Meet at the End of the Trail.
It was a screenwriter named June Mathis who "discovered" Valentino, as he would eventually call himself. The film was The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and both it and its young star - this was 1921 and Rudy was 26 - were stunning. Eighty years later, when one sees The Four Horsemen or The Sheik or The Eagle the effect of one's first glimpse of Valentino on film is chastening. His performance is low-key and even subtle, with, for good measure, an element of self-mockery. One could say that he earns his money; one comes away either disappointed because robbed of one's prey, or charmed.
At any rate, all at once he was a star. It says much for the innocence - or idiocy - of the age that female worshippers could with hardly a gulp swallow such hokey names as Pola Negri (born Barbara Apolonia Chalupiec), Nita Naldi (Anita Donna Dooley) and Natacha Rambova (Winifred Shaughnessy Hudnut).
His stardom lasted for five years. Meanwhile, he married Rambova, a designer, and off-screen the couple became a double-act, posing for photographs, with her profile hiding what his profile revealed: a cauliflower ear. She turned him into a clothes horse, usually posing with one foot on the running board of his latest passion: a custom-made Isotta Fraschini town car. Perhaps he could handle cars better than women: behind the piercing eyes of the Sheik there was an insecure paisano who believed his own legend even to the degree of living in a Hollywood mansion he called Falcon Lair .
He made 13 films after The Four Horsemen. The Eagle showed signs that his audiences were thinning. There were two more films, Cobra and The Son of the Sheik. Then, in a Chicago Tribune editorial, the bubble threatened to burst; the phrase "pink powder puff", was used, bringing delight to a million long-suffering American husbands.
Valentino challenged the writer to a fist-fight. It cannot have been more than a tragic coincidence, but it was as if the gods had withdrawn their favour. Within days, he was operated on for acute appendicitis and a perforated ulcer. He was dead shortly afterwards - the author is not hot on dates.
Like an army consisting wholly of generals, the funeral was a circus where the clowns ran the show. Outside the undertakers where the body was on view, a hundred women were injured and five fainted. A car was overturned. Two plate-glass windows were shattered. Pola Negri was a kind of mourning doll - one wound her up and she kept collapsing.
As they say in Italy, you can take the ragazzo out of Castellaneta, but you can't take Castellaneta out of the ragazzo. Poor Valentino. Poor reader. Poor me.
- Hugh Leonard
Dark Lover: The life and Death of Rudolph Valentino By Emily W. Leider Faber and Faber , 514 pp. £20
Hugh Leonard is a playwright, novelist and columnist