Free Speed Kings by Andy Bull

‘a woman’ in your and Jay’s lives, I want to dance, to make my own living and live my own life.”
    She was doing exactly that. The great impresario Florenz Ziegfeld—“Ziggie” to Mae—had just signed her up to perform in his famous Follies, “a salad of sex and art,” as one of his biographers put it; the front-row seats sold for one hundred dollars each. And Adolph Zukor, who had just founded Paramount, was trying to persuade her to move to Hollywood. Jay was besidehimself, “tortured and jealous, in a constant state of depression.” He couldn’t stand having all these rivals for her affection.
    Enter Rudolph Valentino. He was only twenty then and still using his real surname, Guglielmi. “He was a magnificent specimen of humanity, and had a disposition which matched his physical beauty,” Mae said. “Just to see his expressive hand lying on the back of a chair was art.” She was utterly smitten. As was everyone else. Which explains why she was so ready to admit, “We were attracted to each other from that first afternoon. Call it sex, if you will, but I call it a dancing friendship.”
    As enraptured by Valentino as Mae was, she was beginning to realize that she was still obsessed with Jay. She noticed that he didn’t come to her opening night at the Follies. Her big number was an “oriental love dance” in the Elysium scene, set in a Persian harem. Each night she looked out into the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Each night she tore open the envelopes bearing notes from her admirers, hoping to find one signed by him. He never came, and never wrote. Heartbroken, Mae ended her affair with Valentino—who promptly fell in love with Jack de Saulles’s long-suffering wife, Blanca.
    We shall step back here, just for a moment. Mae’s memoirs, which were serialized by the Hearst Corporation, were considered sensational, in more than one sense, when they were first published in 1942. Her friend Anita Loos called them “one long Valentine.” Even then people wondered how reliable they were. Years later, we can be sure that she twisted the truth for the sake of the tale and her sales. Jay’s own version of their affair, you suspect, would have read very differently had he ever written it. If, however, her account sometimes seems unbelievable, we should remember that Mae’s life was an incredible one, and her world was extraordinary. Nothing better illustrates that than this little side story.
    Blanca de Saulles, now in love with Valentino, was, understandably, desperate to get a divorce from her husband. Valentino agreed to testify that Jack de Saulles had had an affair with his dancing partner so that Blanca could secure her divorce and keep custody of her child. Jack, in turn, arranged to have Valentino arrested on vice charges by falsely alleging that the actor had been having an affair with a brothel madam. “This,” Mae wrote of the way de Saulles had Valentino arrested, “was a terrible and vicious thing to do, and Jack was to pay, for Rudy never deserved such treatment.” Soon after the de Saulleses’ divorce was finalized, Blanca drove to their country house in Westbury and demanded that Jack give her custody of their son, as the court had stipulated. When he refused, she drew a gun and pointed it at his head. When he tried to disarm her,she shot him dead. She was acquitted of murder, essentially on the grounds that de Saulles deserved it. It was, the
New York Times
said, “a popular verdict,” but one that had “no justification” other than the “emotional” one that she was a young, comely mother and he had been “dissolute, led an evil life, and had wasted her estate.”
    So the truth was sometimes even stranger than Mae made it seem. Remember that, as we move on to the most extraordinary chapter of her story.
    By the time of Valentino’s