Free You Must Remember This by Robert J. Wagner Page B

roof and stucco walls that were also painted taupe. The house was decorated rather like a set from one of Valentino’s own larger-than-life romantic movies. The doors were imported from Florence, and there was a life-size portrait of the owner dressed in the costume of a Saracen warlord from the Crusades. The floor in the entry hall wastravertine. The drapes were all of Genovese velvet, and the curtains in the master bedrooms were hand-loomed Italian net.
    The house was primarily decorated with antiques—Turkish Arabian, Spanish screens, Florentine chairs, a French walnut chest from the fifteenth century. Valentino had thousands of books, and there were weapons and armor scattered throughout the house.
    If all you saw were the main rooms, you might think the place looked like a museum of medieval artifacts. But in his bedroom Valentino indulged himself with an exotic range of colors. The king-size bed had gold ball feet, while the headboard was lacquered a dark blue. The sheets, pillowcases, and bedspread were crocusyellow, as were his Japanese silk pajamas. There was an orange lacquer pedestal table at the foot of the bed that had a perfume lamp on it—when the lamp was turned on, the room would fill with fragrance.

    A rear view of Rudolph Valentino’s Hollywood home, Falcon Lair, which was built into the side of a high hill. Notice the aviary at bottom left.
    Bettmann/CORBIS
    The interesting thing about Falcon Lair was that the rooms were actually rather small. My wife Jill shot a movie there about ten years ago, and she walked around the house and grounds during the shoot, surprised at its modest scale. As she put it, “It was not a mansion; it was a very comfortable large house.” Valentino’s taste for ornate decoration made the place feel slightly crowded. On top of his taste in décor, he filled his closets with clothes—thirty business suits, ten dress suits, four riding outfits, ten overcoats, thirty-seven vests, a hundred twenty-four shirts, and on and on. His jewelry box contained thirty rings.
    Falcon Lair also came equipped with all the extras—there was a stable for Valentino’s four Arabian horses and a kennel for his Great Danes, Italian mastiffs, and greyhounds.
    It sounds colorful and over-the-top gorgeous, but that was typical of the time. (Unfortunately, there are no surviving color photographs of the house.) Whatever their particular style, in this period and for the next quarter century it was the detailing—the materials that are often considered of peripheral importance, such as brass fittings, parchment, walnut veneers, wallpaper imported from China, whatever—that made Hollywood houses special.
    It was a sybaritic environment that would have seemed over-the-top for Norma Desmond, but Valentino himself was an odd combination of aesthete and auto mechanic. His greatest pleasure, besides riding horses or playing with the dogs, involved stripping and reassembling car engines and transmissions. I’ve always thoughtthat the house and its decoration must have involved a sense of performance for Valentino, but I would see that in a number of the great houses I would visit.
    Valentino was making good money at this point in his life—Joe Schenck was paying him a hundred grand per picture plus a percentage of the profits (and this was in the mid-1920s!)—but there was no way he wasn’t outspending his income by a factor of three or four.
    When Valentino died of peritonitis in August 1926, he was deeply in debt. It was thought that Falcon Lair would sell for somewhere between $140,000 and $175,000, with his possessions worth as much as $500,000. In other words, the best-case scenario was that the house would be worth about half of what Valentino had invested in the place. If the estate hadn’t been so far in the hole, it would have made sense to wait, but Valentino couldn’t afford to.
    When the estate auction was held, Valentino’s possessions brought less than $100,000, and the house itself