U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [424]
good.
He got a job as assistant gardener in Central Park
but that kind of work was the last thing he wanted to do; he wanted to make good in the brightlights; money burned his pockets.
He hung around cabarets doing odd jobs, sweep-ing out for the waiters, washing cars; he was lazy handsome wel built slender goodtempered and vain;
he was a born tangodancer.
Lovehungry women thought he was a darling. He
began to get engagements dancing the tango in bal -rooms and cabarets; he teamed up with a girl named
-189-Jean Acker on a vaudevil e tour and took the name of Rudolph Valentino. Stranded on the Coast he headed for Hol ywood,
worked for a long time as an extra for five dol ars a day; directors began to notice he photographed wel . 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 vil as obstructed with bricabrac 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 auto-graphbooks, yanked his buttons off, cut a tail off his admirablytailored dress suit; they stole his hat and pul ed at his necktie; his valets removed young women from under his bed; al 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
mil iondol ar searchlights
of El Dorado:
the Sheik, the Son of the Sheik;
personal appearances.
He married his old vaudevil e partner, divorced
her, married the adopted daughter of a mil ionaire,
-190-went into lawsuits with the producers who were debas-ing the art of the screen, spent a mil ion dol ars on one European trip;
he wanted to make good in the brightlights.
When the Chicago Tribune cal ed 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 pub-lished a smal volume cal ed Daydreams and the whis-pers 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 chal enge 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 sheik 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 ab-dominal cavity contained a large amount of fluid and food particles; the viscera were coated with a greenish-grey film; a round hole a centimeter in diameter was seen in the anterior wal of the stomach; the tissue of the stomach for one and onehalf centimeters immedi-ately surrounding the perforation was necrotic. The appendix was inflamed and twisted against the smal intestine.
When he came to from the ether the first thing
-191-he said was, "Wel , did I behave like a pink powder-puff?" His expensivelymassaged actor's body fought peri-tonitis for six days. The switchboard at the hospital was swamped with
cal s, al the corridors were piled with flowers, crowds fil ed 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