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The Best Thing That Ever Happened to Rudolph Valentino

 Well for those who harp on and on how Natacha Rambova was bad for Valentino, ruined his career, etc.... I would ask them to contemplate this “home” she provided for him on the French Riviera. 

Natacha provided Rudy with a backdrop of extreme luxury, a castle in fact, the family chateau at Juan les Pins...dripping in class and prestige. She set the stage and how she elevated him in doing so. George Ullman admitted Rudy owed Natacha a great deal in this regard and her style, her education, her worldliness brought him an added allure and sophistication which he did not have pre-Natacha. Michael Morris articulates this in Beyond Valentino. He referred to her as the “Woman Behind the Myth”.

From the section of Beyond Valentino he titled, “The Creation of a Hollywood Icon”:

“Of all her lovers, Natacha Rambova exercised her greatest influence on silent film icon Rudolph Valentino. She would transform him from the mustachioed villain of his earliest films, prior to their meeting in 1920, into the pomaded leading man he became. Natacha's influence over Valentino catapulted him into the paragon of style and costumed elegance thereby defining his legacy and ensuring his role as a Hollywood icon. Valentino's polished image and screen pageantry was an inevitable consequence of his passionate relationship with Natacha Rambova.”

And how did she ruin anything? When he died he was making a fortune. I believe his weekly paycheck from United Artists during Son of the Sheik was around 18,000 a week (by today's currency exchange rate this would be @ $239,000) and with his new contract signed he was set to become a millionaire in the next year. What was ruined professionally because of Natacha? He was on the top of his game. 

And Rudy and Natacha did reunite in his last days and hours. This according to Ullman, Baltasar Cue, George Wehner and those in the Juan les Pins chateau when Valentino died. More on that aspect of this story in Astral Affairs Rambova.

The trenchant vilification of Natacha for me is not just analysis of their marriage and divorce and reunion but represents a heavy sexism and misogyny which actually destroyed her career.

She was the bigger star in Hollywood when Valentino met her. When they met she was working as an art director for Cecil B. DeMille and Alla Nazimova. Not bad for a woman in her twenties. It is no wonder she was and always will be, Rudolph Valentino's Queen.

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