SON OF THE SHEIK

I’ve always loved Rudolph Valentino.  Four years ago I decided to take up the mantle of “Lady in Black.”  I wasn’t doing it for attention or press or anything like that.  My motives were simple.  From the first time I saw his image flashing on the screen, I was somehow in love.  Silly to fall in love with a man who died almost 50 years before I was even born, but there was just SOMETHING about him that grabbed a hold of me and never let go.  Besides I love history with a passion and I saw being the “Lady in Black” as a way to keep Valentino and his film legacy alive for a whole new generation of people my age and younger.
So every year on August 23rd I show up at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with my black vintage dress and roses and I speak at the memorial service about the women in black of the past.  I’ve also introduced his films at the Silent Movie Theatre and the Old Town Music Hall.


Valentino was a unique screen personality that has never seen an equal.  He was lightening in a bottle….a brief flash of something powerful and wildly unique.  He was sexual, exotic, romantic, alluring and valiant all at the same time. 


Sitting in the balacony of the Orpheum seeing his image flicker once again on the big screen transported me right back to the 20s.  It was a place in time where silents were golden and as Norma Desmond / Gloria Swanson famously declared, “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces. There just aren’t any faces like that anymore!”


Indeed.

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