1926

 

“Catnip for women.”

 

July: The Son of the Sheik premiered in New York City, with Rudolph Valentino making a personal appearance at the theater. “Screeching females clawed at him, stole his hat, and tore off his coat pockets. One high-spirited flapper tackled the Latin lover by the ankles, and, frantic for a souvenir, started unlacing his shoestrings,” according to M.M. Marberry. “He had to be rescued by a squadron of police.”

 

*

 

August 15: Valentino collapses in pain, possibly a result of appendicitis. His case takes a turn, and he dies at 12:10 p.m. on August 23. He was 31.

 

H. L. Mencken called the Shiek “catnip for women.”

 

A crowd of mostly females gathered outside the funeral parlor where Valentino’s body was taken. Marberry explains:

 

The frenzied mob rioted and tried to break into the mortuary, shattering a massive plate-glass window. Three policemen, a photographer, and many of the charging women were cut by pieces of flying glass. Mounted police moved in, pushing back the mob with their horses. Some women fainted; others were bowled over and trampled on. All day the riot continued. Ambulances were summoned and more than one hundred police reinforcements were rushed to the scene. Shortly before midnight, when most of the rioters dispersed, the exhausted police were left victors on a field of battle littered with hats, shoes, and torn clothing.

 

Somehow, Valentino had exuded “magnetism” on the screen. Marberry writes, “To millions upon millions of women he was Romance as Romance ought to be, not the way it was in their homes.”

 

Grief drove several women to suicide, including Agatha Hearn, a New York mother. She shot herself, and died clutching “a sheaf of Valentino photographs” in her hand. A Bronx housewife attempted suicide because of what she described as “my love for him” but survived. As far away as London, a 26-year-old dancer named Peggy Scott did away with herself. She left a note: “It is heartbreaking to live in the past when the future is hopeless—please look after Rudolph’s pictures.” It was said, in Japan, that two distraught girls held hands and jumped to their deaths in a volcano.

 

Valentino had been divorced for a second time in 1925; and from that point forward spent much of his time with a young actress Pola Negri. The funeral on August 30 drew huge crowds—lining the streets from Forty-seventh to Sixty-ninth streets. Only 500 invitees were allowed into the service. The hearse arrived “blanketed with pink roses.”

 

Producers of The Son of the Sheik had every reason to fuel wild stories about the death of their star—for the movie was only now going to be released nationwide. Most men, Marberry, says had already soured on Valentino. Some called him a lounge lizard, a pretty boy, a gigolo. Reporters had begun to mock his long sideburns; others referred to him as a “reformed dishwasher.” The Chicago Tribune went so far as to blame the “Powder Puff Hero” for the increasing effeminization of American males.

 

One flack released a statement, quoting Valentino’s last words, “Let the tent be struck!” This reminded fans to go see the movie, including Vilma Banky, his female co-star, known as the “Hot Paprika from Hungary.” There was also the popular song of the day, The Shiek of Araby.

 

In that shocking song, the hero creeps into his love’s tent….

 

These “last words” of Valentino sounded too much like the last words of Robert E. Lee; so other variations were tried. Meanwhile, Valentino’s manager was trying to sell three books, one by the actor himself on How to Keep Fit. A second was a volume of poems, also purportedly written by Rudy. His brother Alberto Valentino now appeared on the scene—reporting that the actor’s real name was Rodolfo Alonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Guglielmi Di Valentina d’Antonguolla. This seemed to prove Rudy was descended from nobility. Alberto also explained that the deceased had been at home in five languages.

 

Miss Negri appeared—having made the four-day train trip from Hollywood. Seeing Valentino’s body for the first time she swooned. She refused to see reporters, made it clear she would fulfill her contract to make a few more movies, and then would spend the rest of her days in a cloister.

 

The body was laid to rest in California; The Son of the Sheik soon smashed box office records. A line formed fifteen hours before the film was to be shown for the first time in London. Valentino had been in debt up until his death—but the success of his last film wiped out all his bills and left an estate of $600,000. Occasionally, Miss Negri made headlines in years to come. She told reporters she might pay as much as $1 million to purchase a well-known oil painting of Valentino dressed as an Argentine gaucho. At a December auction of the actor’s possessions, however, the painting went for $1,550 to another fan. Just before Christmas, Negri’s lawyers sued the estate for $15,000 she alleged she had lent the Sheik.

 

Eventually, Valentino’s second wife, Natacha Rambova, nee Winifred Hudnut, arrived in the States. Through a medium, she told reporters, she had established contact with Rudy up in heaven. She explained what he had said:

 

I have many valuable friends up here and am happy. Caruso likes me. So does Wally Reid and Sarah Bernhardt, both of whom are doing well in the movies up here. Sarah has been particularly kind to me. These spirits do the same thing as they did on earth, but, of course, in a different way: they act with more soul now.

 

At first the Sheik was unhappy with the small parts he received up in heaven; but he was now serving an apprenticeship and would soon become a star, as he had been during his earthly days. “On earth,” he told Rambova, “the clever artiste could portray any part given him by a director. Not so, here in heaven. All is sincerity.”  American Heritage (August 1965)

* 

August: H.L. Mencken captures perfectly what life was like on a hot night, before air conditioning. He and a group of reporters, seated in a restaurant, are doing their best to stay cool, and come to grips with the story of Valentino. “We perspired horribly for an hour, mopping our faces with our handkerchiefs, the table napkins, the corners of the tablecloth, and a couple of towels brought in by the humane waiter,” he wrote. “Then there came a thunderstorm, and we began to breathe.” 

As for Valentino, he had been stung by a recent story, that put his reputation at risk, as Mencken explains:

 

The trouble that was agitating Valentino turned out to be very simple. The ribald New York papers were full of it, and that was what was agitating him. Sometime before, out in Chicago, a wandering importer had discovered, in the men’s wash-room of a gaudy hotel, a slot-machine selling talcum-powder. That, of course, was not unusual, but the color of the talcum-powder was. It was pink. The news made the town giggle for a day, and inspired an editorial writer on the Chicago Tribune to compose a hot weather editorial. In it he protested humorously against the effeminization of the American man, and laid it lightheartedly to the influence of Valentino and his sheik movies. Well, it so happened that Valentino, passing through Chicago that day on his way east from the Coast, ran full tilt into the editorial, and into a gang of reporters who wanted to know what he had to say about it. What he had to say was full of fire. Throwing off his 100% Americanism and reverting to the mores of his fatherland, he challenged the editorial writer to a duel, and, when no answer came, to a fist fight. His masculine honor, it appeared, had been outraged. To the hint that he was less than he, even to the extent of one half of one percent, there could be no answer save a bath of blood. (49/171)

 

* 

“The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle – a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.” H.L. Mencken

 

*

Summer: Arnold Hano is four year old and living a block from the Polo Grounds, home to the New York Giants baseball team.  His grandfather Ike, a New York City police lieutenant gives the boy his season pass for a seat in the grandstand above first base. 

Long after, Hano, who goes on to be a baseball writer, remembered, “It was a simple matter for my mother to get me off her hands by teaching me to cross streets by myself.” That season he attend a handful of games by himself; and the following season he started spending money he earned to buy 50 cent seats in the bleachers. He was hooked on the sport for the rest of his life. 

The boy had heard that people sitting in the bleachers had the most fun. According to The New York Times, “He began spending Saturday afternoons on those long narrow planks that passed for seats some 500 feet from home plate, growing to love the wide view of that cavernous, horseshoe-shaped ballpark that they afforded and to enjoy the characters he encountered there.”

 

* 

October 31: Harry Houdini, the great escape artist proves that even the great escape artist cannot escape death, succumbing from appendicitis. He leaves precise instructions on how he will communicate from beyond the grave with his wife and friends, if it can be done. No one has heard from him since.

 

*

 

Harry Houdini had been famous for many years, although his act had eventually grown stale. In 1903, for example, he had escaped from the “Siberian Transit Cell,” as The New Yorker explains, “a metal safe on wheels that was used to haul political renegades to prison.” (Houdini might just have made up the name.) Houdini, himself, was Jewish and had come to America with his parents in 1874, from Hungary. He once explained the lure of his act, saying that risk,

 

attracts us to the man who paints the flagstaff on the tall building, or to the human fly, who scales the walls of the same building. If we knew that there was no possibility of either one of them falling or, if they did fall, that they wouldn’t injure themselves in any way, we wouldn’t pay any more attention to them than we do a nursemaid wheeling a baby carriage. Therefore, I said to myself, why not give the public a real thrill?

 

David Denby, writing about Houdini, gives his background:

 

He was born Erik Weisz (later Americanized, sort of, to Ehrich Weiss) in Budapest on March 24, 1874. When he was four, he immigrated to this country with his mother and his brothers. His father had left Hungary two years earlier and settled in Appleton, Wisconsin, a mill town near Lake Winnebago, where he found a job as a rabbi. He was no longer young, though, and he didn’t speak much English. The fifteen German Jewish families of Appleton fired him after a few years, and the family moved to Milwaukee, where they were often hungry, and then to Manhattan – to a cold-water flat on East Seventy-fifth Street (at the time a slum) and to jobs in the garment industry, cutting the lining of neckties. In New York, Ehrich, watching his father slide into despair and ill health, vowed, like many immigrant children, never to be poor – and, even more important to him, never to allow his mother, Cecilia, whom he adored, to want for anything. Like Al Jolson and Irving Berlin, who were also children of Jewish clergymen, he launched into show business as the way out of ghetto jobs like stitching garments and rolling cigars. It was the first of his escapes.

 

There is a photo of him as a skinny, angry-looking teen-ager. Like Theodore Roosevelt, the contemporary avatar of self-transformation, he built himself up; he ran, boxed, swam (in the East River), lifted weights, and became both strong and astoundingly flexible. There’s no record that he was aware of the Zionist agitation in Europe at the time, but he came to represent Max Nordau’s ideal of Muskeljudentum, or muscular Judaism, with its rejection of male bodies enfeebled by endless study. He spent little time in school and worked at odd jobs; he may have learned the secrets of locks while employed at a locksmith shop. As a child, he had played at conjuring and had dreamed of becoming a trapeze artist. When he was in his late teens, he acquired a used copy of the memoirs of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the French watchmaker who became the great magician of the nineteenth century. Ehrich was so excited about Houdin that he changed his name to Houdini. He thought, Begley says, that the final “i” signified that he was “Houdin-like.”

 

…By 1906, he was throwing himself, chained, into inhospitable bodies of water, dropping twenty-five feet off the Belle Isle Bridge, for instance, into the freezing Detroit River. In 1915 and after, thousands of onlookers saw him straitjacketed and hanging upside down from a scaffold above the streets of Kansas City, Minneapolis, and many other cities. He’d pull himself up, wriggle free, drop the straitjacket, and spread his arms. The reference to Jesus did not go unnoticed.

 

He taught himself to speak in advanced elocutionary English, and to write in the ornate tones of period ballyhoo; sometimes he used a ghostwriter, but he also composed or dictated stories about himself, proclaiming his greatness in leaflets, flyers, books, and pamphlets. He appeared in a few silent movies in the nineteen-tens and twenties, although he was a terrible actor. 

 

In 1920, he became friends with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The creator of the most logical man in popular literature was, paradoxically, devoted to Spiritualism. Doyle was convinced that he had communicated, in séances, with his son Kingsley, who was wounded in the Great War and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. In between writing stories about Sherlock Holmes, Doyle wrote books announcing that humanity had entered into “new relations with the Unseen”; he believed that Harry Houdini, for one, possessed supernatural powers. Houdini was flattered but disavowed any special help. The friendship proceeded in an amiable manner until June of 1922, when Doyle and Lady Doyle, who was a practicing medium, invited Houdini to their suite at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. Lady Doyle seated the party around a table, rapped three times, and began communicating with Houdini’s adored mother, who had been dead for nine years. (Hearing of the death while in Europe, Houdini had fainted.) She wrote out fifteen pages of messages in English, a language that Cecilia never spoke. Houdini sat there quietly, thanked his hosts, and departed.

 

He wanted to reach his mother, but he knew that Spiritualism was a con. In the eighteen-nineties, he and Bess had dabbled in it themselves, researching names at local graveyards the night before summoning the dead in public. In the wake of the Atlantic City disaster, Houdini, now thoroughly enraged, decided to expose the entire movement. He took on famous mediums and began lecturing on “Fraudulent Spiritualistic Phenomena.” He testified before Congress about the Spiritualist menace. Travelling all over the country, he interrupted séances, sometimes in disguise (beard, hump), shouting, “I am Houdini!” He flipped over tables and demanded that the lights be turned on, trashing the event for performers and hopeful listeners alike. Why did he care so much? He and the Spiritualists were both engaged in show business. But the Spiritualists, he thought, preyed on the emotions of people in mourning. 

 

The climber, it has been said, assaults the mountain “because it’s there.” But for Houdini nothing was there, except the extinction that he teased and eluded with more and more bizarre feats. For him, a failure of nerve might have been worse than any calamity. Begley lays to rest the legend that Houdini’s death, in October, 1926, resulted from a punch to the stomach, though there were punches that month, administered in a Montreal hotel room by a McGill student who (with Houdini’s consent) sought to test the popular myth that the great man could withstand any blow. But Begley convincingly argues that Houdini was ill beforehand. A couple of days after the Montreal incident, he took the train to Detroit and, refusing to go to the hospital, performed his opening-night show in feverish agony. He died, of a burst appendix and peritonitis, at the age of fifty-two, on October 31st.