Voices in Time

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He hung around cabarets doing odd jobs, sweeping out for the waiters, washing cars; he was lazy handsome wellbuilt slender good tempered and vain; he was a born tangodancer.

Lovehungry women thought he was a darling. He began to get engagements dancing the tango in ballrooms and cabarets; he teamed up with a girl named Jean Acker on a vaudeville tour and took the name of Rudolph Valentino.

Stranded on the coast he headed for Hollywood, worked for a long time as an extra for five dollars a day; directors began to notice he photographed well.
He got his chance in The Four Horsemen
and became the gigolo of every woman’s dreams.

Valentino spent his life in the colorless glare of klieg lights, in stucco villas obstructed with bric-a-brac, Oriental rugs, tigerskins, in the bridalsuites of hotels, in silk bathrobes in private cars.

He was always getting into limousines or getting out of limousines,
or patting the necks of fine horses.

Wherever he went the sirens of the motorcyclecops screeched ahead of him,
flashlights flared,
the streets were jumbled with hysterical faces, waving hands, crazy eyes; they stuck out their autographbooks, yanked his buttons off, cut a tail off his admirablytailored dress suit; they stole his hat and pulled at his necktie; his valets removed young women from under his bed; all night in nightclubs and cabarets actresses leching for stardom made sheepseyes at him under their mascaraed lashes.

He wanted to make good under the glare of the milliondollar searchlights
of El Dorado:
the Sheikh, the Son of the Sheikh;
personal appearances.

He married his old vaudeville partner, divorced her, married the adopted daughter of a millionaire, went into lawsuits with the producers who were debasing the art of the screen, spent a million dollars on one European trip;
he wanted to make good in the brightlights.

When the Chicago Tribune called him a pink powderpuff
and everybody started wagging their heads over a slavebracelet he wore that he said his wife had given him and his taste for mushy verse of which he published a small volume called Daydreams and the whispers grew about the testimony in his divorce case that he and his first wife had never slept together,
it broke his heart.

He tried to challenge the Chicago Tribune to a duel;
he wanted to make good
in heman twofisted broncobusting pokerplaying stockjuggling America. (He was a fair boxer and had a good seat on a horse; he loved the desert like the sheikh and was tanned from the sun of Palm Springs.) He broke down in his suite in the Hotel Ambassador in New York: gastric ulcer.

When the doctors cut into his elegantlymolded body, they found that peritonitis had begun; the abdominal cavity contained a large amount of fluid and food particles; the viscera were coated with a greenishgray film; a round hole a centimeter in diameter was seen in the anterior wall of the stomach; the tissue of the stomach for one and onehalf centimeters immediately surrounding the perforation was necrotic. The appendix was inflamed and twisted against the small intestine.

When he came to from the ether, the first thing he said was, “Well, did I behave like a pink powderpuff?”

His expensivelymassaged actor’s body fought peritonitis for six days.

The switchboard at the hospital was swamped with calls, all the corridors were piled with flowers, crowds filled the street outside, filmstars who claimed they were his betrothed entrained for New York.

Late in the afternoon a limousine drew up at the hospital door (where the grimyfingered newspapermen and photographers stood around bored tired hoteyed smoking too many cigarettes making trips to the nearest speak exchanging wisecracks and deep dope waiting for him to die in time to make the evening papers), and a woman, who said she was a maid employed by a dancer who was Valentino’s first wife, alighted. She delivered to an attendant an envelope addressed to the filmstar and inscribed “From Jean,” and a package. The package contained a white counterpane with lace ruffles and the word “Rudy” embroidered in the four corners. This was accompanied by a pillowcover to match over a blue silk scented cushion.

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