Free The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People by Sylvia Wallace, Irving Wallace, Amy Wallace, David Wallechinsky

he and his wife had never had sex, he won an interlocutory decree of divorce which became final at the end of a year, in March, 1923.
    But late in 1920, while at work on Uncharted Seas , Valentino met Natacha Rambova (her real name was Winifred Shaughnessy), stepdaughter of cosmetics tycoon Richard Hudnut, the woman who became the moving force in his life.
    As a strong-willed, ambitious teenager, she had run away from home to join Kosloff ’s Russian ballet company. When Valentino met her, she was working on another set with Russian actress—and purported lesbian—Alla Nazimova as a costume and set designer. In Natacha, Rudy found his greatest love; she made him “touch ecstasy,” he once said. They were married before his divorce became final. The groom was promptly arrested on charges of bigamy and jailed for several hours until bond could be posted. Valentino was once again forced to admit in court that his marriage hadn’t been consummated, and the charges were dropped. Though he and Natacha lived apart until they could legally remarry, she became a part of his life and his career. He trusted her judgment and bowed to her decisions. Especially after his great success in The Sheik , she envisioned him as another Douglas Fairbanks, appearing in epic films rather than in the “small, trifling, cheap, commercial pictures” Paramount gave him. For almost two years—late 1922 to early 1924—he made no movies because of contract disputes in which he protested, at her instigation, the parts he was getting and the studio’s treatment of Natacha.
    Rudy and Natacha legalized their union in March, 1923, and the newlyweds earned a living by dancing for the Mineralava Company, promoting beauty clay. To further supplement their income, the Valentinos wrote a book of poetry called Day Dreams . The contract problems ended when an independent filmmaker agreed to shoot Valentino’s films and let Natacha act as consultant.
    She became involved in every facet of his pictures, provoking the press to say that she wore the pants in the Valentino family. They snickered at the platinum slave bracelet she gave him. Her mistake, she said later, was to go overboard in incorporating “beauty” into his films. It was beauty that hurt his career; in the films in which Natacha “meddled,” Valentino seemed effeminate. In Monsieur Beaucaire he wore powdered wigs and a heart-shaped beauty spot on his face.
    The publicity became vicious: Photoplay ran an article stating that “All men hate Valentino,” and the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial called “Pink Powder Puffs,” which blamed Valentino for the fact that a powder-vending machine had been installed in the men’s room of a Chicago ballroom. Finally, the independent filmmaker refused to work with the Valentinos and scrapped a film they had already begun. United Artists approached Valentino with a lucrative contract, but the company banned Natacha from its sets. Valentino tried to assuage her feelings by backing her in her own endeavor, a movie called What Price Beauty? It failed miserably, and critics thought they detected lesbian-fantasy scenes in it. Once she no longer shared his career, Natacha wanted no part of Rudy’s bed. Valentino insisted that what he really wanted was a homemaker, not a business partner. He told the press, “Mrs. Valentino cannot have a career and be my wife at the same time.” They were divorced in 1925.
    The “Great Lover” was a bachelor again. Detectives herded him home if he got too friendly with strange women, because the studio didn’t want more bad publicity if Valentino should turn in a less-than-successful amorous performance. But no one could keep him away from Pola Negri. He met the actress through Marion Davies, the mistress of publisher William Randolph Hearst. As Pola wrote in her autobiography, “Valentino’s true sexuality reached out and captured me.” She was fascinated, she said, by “the way in which he used his body,” and