Valentino Forever

In August 1926 the world responded to the untimely death of the thirty-one year old silent screen actor Rudolph Valentino with shock, disbelief and an enormous outpouring of emotion that had been prodded by sensational tabloid newspaper headlines.   The tens of thousands in the crowd cramming the streets during Valentino’s lying-in-state at Campbell’s Funeral Church on Manhattan’s west side became so unruly that plate glass store windows were shattered, cars overturned, and mounted police had to be summoned to the scene. Women fainted and several suicides, said to be prompted by Valentino’s death, were reported.   At the two Valentino funerals that followed, one on August 30th at St Malachy’s Church in New York and a second on September 7th in the Beverly Hills Church of the Good Shepherd, the throngs that gathered to pay their last respects were far more subdued than those in front of Campbell’s, but full of grief.  Such sustained demonstrations of mourning on behalf of a screen actor were unprecedented, and served as a testament not just to Rudolph Valentino’s special place in the affections of everyday people but also to the extraordinary influence motion pictures had come to exert during the American 1920s.

Tracy Terhune, a long time Valentino aficionado and collector who heads the Yahoo Valentino e-group, knows perhaps better than anyone else that as one Valentino saga came to a tragic end on August 23, 1926 with the Italian-born actor’s passing, another soon began in its wake: the tradition of commemorating the anniversary of Valentino’s death with a memorial service conducted each year at 12:10 pm in the place of his interment, the Cathedral Mausoleum at the Santa Monica Boulevard cemetery that used to be called Hollywood Memorial and is now known as Hollywood Forever.

Every year since 1927 some sort of Valentino memorial service has taken place, and in all but one instance that event was held in the mausoleum where the remains of Valentino rest in the June Mathis family crypt. For more than seventy five years, the custom of ritualized tribute and commemoration, involving song, prayer, recollections, poetry and floral offerings, has developed and been sustained. That tradition is the subject of VALENTINO FOREVER.

Tracy Terhune’s research benefits from his own thoroughness and dedication as well as that of the other collectors, who provided him full access to their treasured documents and photographs.  A cast of colorful characters, the habitual attendees of the memorials, emerges on these pages, including several rival claimants to the title, The Lady in Black.  More than any other, Ditra Flame, the first, most devoted and most long-tenured Lady in Black, commands the spot-light, for she documented many early memorials and left scrapbooks filled with her clipping collection and correspondence. She competed, in time, with two rival claimants to the title of the Lady in Black, one-time Ziegfeld Follies beauty Marion Benda, who had actually dated Valentino shortly before he died, and drama queen Estrellita del Regil. At times the competition between Ditra Flame and Estrellita Del Regil, a fixture of the services in the 70s and 80s,takes on a MOMMIE DEAREST aspect, as hissy fits are thrown and the roses deposited in the crypt’s urns by one Lady are replaced by white daisies or thrown to the ground and stomped upon by the other. The Los Angeles press habitually paid far more attention to the various Ladies in Black than they did to the departed Valentino. They provided better photo-ops.

If in past decades the doings of a parade of “second rate talent, publicity seekers, fringe showbiz characters, crackpots and faux mourners” produced a carnival atmosphere that enraged Valentino’s brother Alberto and nephew Jean, the memorials in recent years often possess the poignancy that comes with deep feeling and true respect. So many movie fans continue to be moved by, and to care about, Rudolph Valentino. The former silent players such as James Kirkwood and Mary MacLaren who used to be regular participants, and the Hollywood historians who stand in for them nowadays, participated in the memorials out of a wish to honor not just Rudolph Valentino, but the glory days of early Hollywood.     

If this saga has a hero, he is Tyler Cassity, since 1998 the owner (with his brother) of Hollywood Forever, who restored the buildings and grounds from the deterioration and neglect they had suffered and brought new dignity and thoughtful planning to the memorials.  Tracy Terhune honors him here as he narrates a chapter of Hollywood history never told before, and very much worth telling.