(This post now is in video form on Youtube.)
The intense media interest in the death of Rudolph Valentino finally reached its end on September 7, 1926 when his 2nd funeral was held in Los Angeles and he was finally interred in the crypt at Hollywood Cemetery (now called Hollywood Forever Cemetery).
The day was in marked contrast to the out-of-control days in New York City when his public viewing was held. Originally planned to continue until Friday, August 27, it was cut short after the viewing deteriorated into an uncontrolled, mob-like event.
In an article under the headline “Premonition of Early Death,” John W. Considine, Jr., who produced Valentino’s pictures, revealed that “Valentino several times remarked to me, “I shall die young. I know it, and I shall not be sorry. I would hate to live to be an old man.” (The Tribune, Scranton, Pennsylvania, August 24, 1926, Page 2 (Dateline: Los Angeles, August 23, Associated Press).
He got his wish, but much sooner than he would have anticipated. And one of his wishes as he fought for his life was that he would have a public viewing in the event he died.
Tuesday, August 24, 1926, Page 9
Valentino had suffered greatly and had wasted to a shadow of the image he projected on the screen. The morticians who received his body at Campbell’s Funeral Church had a difficult job to do. A “secret embalming process” supervised by W. H. Hull, claimed Valentino’s body would stay in it’s final state “practically forever.” It was the same process used to embalm Enrico Caruso, who had died in August 1921 in Italy.
The Miami Herald (Miami, Florida) Tuesday, August 24, 1926, Page 8
Dateline: Los Angeles, August 23rd, A.P.
In The Times Union (Brooklyn, New York) dated Wednesday, August 25, 1926 (Page 15), reporter Ted Le Berthon recounted what had transpired the day before (August 24) in an evocative piece entitled “VALENTINO RIOTS A MORBID ORGY.”
...Rudolph Valentino's cold, lifeless image, waxen and unreal, laying like a flat, smashed thing, beneath a glass cover, on the second floor of Campbell's Funeral Church, was the goal of this stubborn, screaming crowd....[About 2 P.M.] By now, reporters and cameramen had been permitted to view the dead Rudy in his last personal appearance. Peering through the glass coffin cover was like looking through a glass case in a museum. “He only weighed 102 when he died,” one employe of the undertaking firm whispered. His nose was sharply defined, a little ridged; he face, pitifully small, and inclined, for some reason, to one side. Those eyes, that had “burned to the cores of women’s beings,” were closed. That face, that wore make-up so often in the bustling multi-colored cinema studios, was delicately powdered. The thin, sunken lips were thinly rouged, the brows penciled. It did not seem possible that this was Rudolph Valentino. From the eyes of those standing about, one sensed a sickening desire to be away, quickly. The heavy smell of flowers suggested great fields of death. One wondered if some substitution had not been made. Surely this mashed body, with claw-like hands was not the ardent lover, in whose veins had coursed fiery blood, consuming a romance-hungry world in its glow, made ubiquitous by the universal markets of the cinema.
Source: Bing.com Images
Le Berthon describes how at “About 3 o’clock [on Tuesday, August 24], it was decided to admit the first line of the city’s mourners.” It was raining and the line went up a winding staircase to the room where Valentino lay. Le Berthon relates the mood of the visitors:
…disappointment about his burial clothes, giggling, and surprise over his thin hair…
The following day, on Wednesday, August 25, the body had been relocated to the ground floor to help keep the lines moving more efficiently. The reporting by United Press described how the bier was placed in the center of the room and how the crowd circled and exited through a side door through a florist shop adjacent to the Campbell’s Funeral Chapel. Although there were still “giggling girls of high school age” waiting to enter when the doors opened at 9 A.M., the United Press story commented that “While yesterday the throng was perhaps a bit inclined to be unexpectedly gay, today the attitude seemed change. There was more showing of reverence…The scene was more somber–an atmosphere heightened by dull, drizzling fog” (The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, August 25, 1926, Page 2).
When the doors opened at 9 A.M., the first two people on line were two tourists from Terre Haute, Indiana, who had arrived at 6 A.M. Margaret Kenley and Josephine Attman had planned to leave the day before but “We couldn’t return without seeing Valentino…We were going home yesterday but we simply had to stay” (The Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Wednesday, August 25, 1926, Page 2).
Another visitor was a woman who said she had seen Valentino two years before:
Wednesday, August 25, 1926, Page 2
United Press Story, syndicated in many newspapers
The early reports of “more reverence” on Wednesday were soon revised in late editions of papers like The Brooklyn Daily Times:
The Dayton Herald in Dayton, Ohio came to this conclusion in their Wednesday edition (Page 4):
“excited curiosity…laughing and chatting…”
George Ullman’s full comments were reported by the Associated Press:
"This has gone far enough," Ullman said. The lack of reverence shown by the crowds, the disorder and rioting since the body was first shown, have forced me to this decision. Tonight at midnight the doors will be closed to the public and the body placed in a vault here in the funeral church until Monday. It will be viewed only by friends and associates." (A.P. syndicated report from the Fort Worth-Telegram, Fort Worth, Texas, Thursday, August 16, 1926, Page 4.)
Ullman was still shaken by what he had seen. On Thursday, August 26, he was quoted in a United Press report: “I loved Valentino so,” he said, “that I thought the whole world would reverence him” (Courier-Post, Camden, New Jersey, Thursday, August 26, 1 926, Page 14). From the same newspaper:
“normal decorum and dignity now prevails…”
Among those in the mobs, there were surely some who truly mourned Rudolph Valentino…possibly those who wept as they filed past his funeral bier. But perhaps the purest demonstration of distress came from his beloved animals. The story about his beloved dog, Kabar, howling at what seemed to be the moment of his master’s death, is well-known. But there was another–Yaqui, the horse Valentino rode in his final film, The Son of the Sheik.
At the end Valentino’s animals mourned him, without judgment...
Yaqui and Valentino in The Son of the Sheik
Kabar and Valentino, returning from Europe on the Leviathan, January 1926
Sources: As cited within the text
Rudolph Valentino--Connections 