The History of Sex in Cinema

Part Five: Sex Stars of the Twenties

For the better part of the decade that began in 1920, the love goddesses of the silent screen were, of necessity, forced to express their more passionate emotions with brooding, heavy-lidded stares, heaving bosoms and anguished clutchings of the throat--their own and others'. It may seem hard to believe now, but our parents and grandparents responded with avidity to the dialogless eroticism of the screen. As Gloria Swanson put it, playing the somewhat autobiographical role of a once-great silent star in Sunset Boulevard, "We didn't need dialog. We had faces!" To a considerable degree, she was right. Her own bizarrely gorgeous face, suggesting willfulness and arrogant challenge to the males who crossed her fateful path, has remained one of the great monuments of the Twenties, as memorably suggestive, in its way, as the more perfectly featured visage of Great Garbo.

But it takes more than a face to make a sex symbol, and bodily charms were possessed in abundance by those glamor queens of the jazz and bathtub-gin era. If they seem slightly lacking in mammary endowment by the standards of later decades, this was only because the brassiere had not yet reached its present heights of architectural ingenuity; the ladies usually wore instead a silken flattening device called a bandeau, in accordance with the unaccountable fashion of the day. But of excellent legs there was no dearth, and airy enchantresses such as Mae Murray, Clara Bow and Louise Brooks enjoyed revealing them--sometimes in the boudoir, and sometimes doing the Charleston or a sinuous adagio atop tables.

It can be argued that no decade in movie history spawned as many sirens as did the Twenties. Some were home-grown--from Kansas and Brooklyn--but many came from distant parts: Garbo from Sweden, Dietrich from Germany, Negri from Poland. When the decade began, the vamp was still enthroned as cinema's sexual prototype--Theda Bara had just reached her high-water earning mark of $6000 a week--but she and her ilk were already beginning to give way before a more sophisticated type, a woman no less predatory in her erotic tendencies, but not necessarily evil in her primal nature. Playing this kind of bad-but-good lady was a specially of the early Gloria Swanson, who must be given credit for popularizing the socially acceptable vamp. Which is to say, she could make love illicitly and still manage to retain a place in respectable society. She expressed (albeit a bit hokily at times) the new, modern, sexually independent woman of the post-World War One era. Due partly to the fact that she came along at a historically propitious moment, when the public was ready to regard sex as one of the less baneful luxuries, and also because of her own ambitious, aggressive, managerial nature, she reached the pinnacle of movie stardom. If a new type known as the flapper soon appeared in her wake, if her appeal was supplanted in public adulation by the mysterious sensuality of Greta Garbo, she nevertheless deserves first place in any conscientious examination of the prominent sex stars of the Twenties.

Swanson was born the daughter of an Army captain, Joseph Svennson, in Chicago on March 27, 1899, only a few years after the birth of the movies. She had an education of sorts, near the Army posts to which her father was assigned, and thought she might like to be an opera singer or an illustrator. But these ambitions faded away when one day she visited the Essanay studios in Chicago. She at once decided she wanted to be a movie star, like the popular Beverly Bayne, Essanay's hottest property at the time. At Essanay she met and entranced one of the studio kingpins, Wallace Beery, who was then starring in a comedy series in which he played, of all things, a Swedish cleaning woman--in drag. Gloria married Beery in 1916, then divorced him two years later when her career began to far transcend her husband's. He was the first of five husbands, all eventually discarded.

Mack Sennett took the diminutive teenage beauty (she stood all of five feet, one inch high) to California, where he displayed her as one of the bathing girls in his Keystone comedies. Short as she was, Gloria looked uncommonly good in a bathing suit; she was vivacious, had flashing, expressive eyes, and she became popular enough to get lead billing, but soon she tired of custard pies and went to Triangle studios, where she could "go dramatic." Inevitably she turned vampish, as the titles of her next pictures suggest: Every woman's Husband and Society for Sale. The costumes of the day made her look dowdy, but Cecil B. De Mille abducted her to his producing unit at Paramount Studios, where he dressed her flamboyantly in what he conceived to be the height of fashion. In her first De Mille film, Don't Change Your Husband, her peacock-feather headdress was startling enough to be pictured on the front pages of newspapers. But De Mille was a good deal more than a modiste, and the more he gilded Gloria and starred her in his high-society epics, the more he built the foundations of her remarkable career. In For Better, For Worse, she was swathed in chinchilla and wore a coiffure never before seen, someone commented, outside a Shanghai brothel. Next, in Male and Female, De Mille disrobed her totally, but always with a robe or towel strategically deployed between his star and his camera. As the haughty Lady Mary, she was viewed in boudoir, bed and bath, and when shipwrecked on a desert isle, was down to wearing only a fetchingly torn negligee and later a revealing homemade sarong. Cunningly, De Mille was developing the image of a haughty beauty turned primitive.

But it wasn't long before Gloria became too big a star for De Mille's then-modest pocketbook, and left his unit to become the queen of Paramount Studios, the biggest in Hollywood at the time. By now, 1923, she was the idol of millions of moviegoers and was rewarded by her studio to the tune of $20,000 per week. For the next three years it was estimated that her earnings came to a million a year--without today's astronomical tax structure.

While still working for De Mille, she had married again, this time Herbert K. Somborn, president of Equite Pictures. Somborn tried to get his wife to work for him, but Paramount refused to release her; and by the time her contract with the studio had expired, so had her second marriage. She met the man who was to be her third husband while making Madame Sans Gène for Paramount in Paris. Thither she had gone, irked by the rise at Paramount of their imported Polish passion flower, Pola Negri. A feud had developed between the two stars, nurtured by Pola's pretensions to nobility--she having been married twice, by her own account, to a Baron Popper and a Count Dombski. If Pola could marry nobility, so could Gloria. Available in Paris was a French-Irish interpreter by the lengthy but noble name of Marquis Henry James de la Falaise de Coudray, described by one journalist as a "docile nobleman with a reckless taste in spats." After interpreting Gloria's innermost thoughts for the benefit of the French director of Madame Sans Gène (in which she played a washerwoman who rose to high status during the Napoleonic era), he became her constant escort, then her husband. And so, overnight, Gloria became a marquise--only to be one-upped the following year when Mae Murray married a Russian prince.

When Gloria returned from Paris, with a print of Madame Sans Gène and her new husband in tow, her motorcade from New York to Los Angeles took on the stature of a triumphal procession. She wired ahead to Adolph Zukor in Hollywood: "ARRANGE OVATION," and Zukor was happy to comply, meeting her with two bands, and seeing to it that several legions of fans were there to pelt her with flowers. One bouquet unfortunately landed too close to target and blackened one of her lustrous eyes. The marquis was installed in her 22-room Beverly Hills mansion, and, in keeping with her new title, when Zukor tiptoed up with a fabulous new contract from Paramount, she spurned the filthy lucre. Henceforth, she announced, Swanson would produce her own pictures, and to this end she joined Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and others at United Artists, buying heavily into the firm.

Her first production on her own was called The Love of Sunya. In it, a story of reincarnation, she played three different lives, and for a bonus added a prolog that took place in the old Egypt so beloved by silent-movie fans, in which she jumped into a fiery furnace rather than surrender her body to a lecherous pagan priest. To atone for her sacrifice, the priest became an immortal, wandering through the centuries, until one night he happened upon Gloria's parlor--in Pittsburgh, of all places. Reincarnated as a moony flapper, Gloria was unable to decide what kind of life to lead. The priest gave her three choices, lasting about 20 minutes each. In one she became an opera singer, living in sin with a dirty old impresario who made her the toast of Paris and blinked blandly at her retinue of gigolos and (continued on page 244)Sex in Cinema(continued from page 176) Japanese manservants, one employed solely to manicure her toenails. (The latter detail could be regarded as a gibe at Pola Negri, who had popularized painted toenails.) In the end, of course, virtue triumphed--as she prepared to settle down to wedded respectability with poor but honest John Boles.

Stardom not withstanding, acting was never regarded as Gloria's forte. As one critic commented: "Whatever the emotion, she conveyed it by pursing up her lips and looking as though she had swallowed something." The New Yorker's summation was, "Her greatest achievement is her own face in repose." With pictures turning talky, Gloria remained silent, doing Somerset Maugham's Rain under the title of Sadie Thompson, the change made at the behest of motionpicture czar Will Hays, who thought the Maugham title had "risqué associations." Nevertheless, the story itself went through little change. Gloria played a loose woman, playing the world's oldest profession in the tropics, who is given a sense of shame by a religious fanatic (Lionel Barrymore), is then wickedly seduced by him and finally goes on to reform herself. For a silent film, the picture did well. But her next venture was the most disastrous of her career. This was the ill-fated Queen Kelly, for which she hired and then fired, as director, the unpredictable Erich von Stroheim. (See The Twenties--Hollywood's Flaming Youth, Playboy, June 1965.)

In 1929 she attempted to turn herself into a talking--and singing--star, but was only sporadically successful, partly because she had to compete with new and potent sex queens such as Garbo, Dietrich and Harlow. At her fabulous peak, however, she had been the epitome of the screen's silent duchesses, living in what passed for real life much as De Mille had portrayed her in her movies. It took $10,000 a month just to pay her living expenses--which included the unkeep of her Beverly Hills mansion, a penthouse atop the Hotel Park Chambers in Manhattan and a country estate near Croton, New York, plus the employment of four secretaries, a full-time press agent, several business managers and a host of butlers and maids. For relaxation she would retire to her bathrooms of black marble, complete with golden plumbing, basins and bathtubs.

The director Robert Flaherty was once asked to name his favorite screen actress. Without hesitation he answered, "Gloria Swanson." When urged to explain why, he said, "Gloria has courage." She had that, undeniably. If you should happen to see one of her old movies, Male and Female, and notice her in a Babylonian torture pit, her headdress being munched by a lion, you should know that it was a real lion, only slightly tranquilized, and Gloria wasn't faking it.

An entirely different breed of cat was a smiling, mysterious, monosyllabic Pole called Pola Negri, who went to Hollywood in 1923 and quickly became Swanson's most formidable rival. But she was not too ostentatious at first, her retinue being made up merely of a personal maid, a secretary, a cook, a housemaid, a gardener and a chauffeur. Even so, when her name was put up on a dressing room at Paramount, one jealous female, aware that Pola had gained her fame in Berlin, penciled across the door in large letters: Down With The Hun. On her first day of shooting at the studio, cast and crew stood around all morning awaiting her appearance. A call to her home elicited the information: "Miss Negri do not feel like today to work ..." When at last she reported for duty, she saw cats slinking around the premises and gave vent to cries of horror. Cats, she screamed, were omens of evil. They must be removed. Coincidentally, it seems that Gloria Swanson was the self-appointed mistress and guardian of all the felines in the studio--including the lions--and before the impasse was resolved it was agreed that Gloria's filming would be shunted to Astoria, Long Island, thus leaving Pola in full sway at Paramount's Hollywood branch.

She was a woman reputed to be artful in the ways of love as well as a proponent of artful expression in acting. Just how she managed to give the latter impression is difficult to understand today. But tastes in movie sexuality were changing, and Pola came to epitomize the woman who was knowing and restless, oversexed and peremptory in her physical demands, ultracivilized, supersophisticated and disillusioned.

Although she was careful not to reveal her birth date, confident authority has it that she was born in Janowa, Russian Poland, on December 12, 1894. She claimed that her origins were shrouded in mystery, that her father had been a Hungarian gypsy, her mother a Russian noblewoman, and that her true name was Appolonia Chalupez. In anti-Semitic Berlin, rumors spread that her real name was Paula Schwartz. In any case, she spoke of Cossacks looting and setting fire to her country house; of her father, a revolutionist, being exiled to Siberia; of her brother dying of the black plague; of her mother's two years of insanity. Separating her self-perpetuated myths from fact is difficult, but it seems likely that she went to school in Warsaw, where she learned four languages and fell in love with the works of the Italian poetess Ada Negri, upon which she decided to call herself Pola Negri. She made her acting debut in Warsaw, after having received training at the Imperial Ballet School. Soon enamored of the movies, like the young Swanson, she rented her own camera, wrote, produced and starred in Love and Passion.

The German films of the immediate post-World War One era were characterized by what one critic has termed "a childish sexuality." While there was little of outright nudity, lewdness or perversion about them, there was a considerable amount of sexual teasing, in which Negri excelled. She loved to flaunt her body, to play the coquette, the woman desired. Inevitably, with her irrepressible drive and magnetism, she was soon starring in just such roles--The Polish Dancer, Carmen, Madame Dubarry, the latter released here under the suitably descriptive title of Passion. By the time Paramount obtained her coveted signature on a contract, she was the most highly paid star in Europe. Meanwhile, she had accumulated two divorces. Her second marriage, to Count Dombski, she revealed had taken place while returning to Berlin from Warsaw, where she had gone, after World War One, to visit her mother. On the return trip she was told at the Polish-German border that she could not take her jewels out of Poland. Indignant, she demanded to see the commandant, who turned out to be Dombski. He obtained Pola for a wife and she, presumably, obtained her jewels.

Naturally, so fiery a personality was awaited here with anticipation. Shortly before her arrival her Carmen was released in the United States as Gypsy Blood, in which she turned the soulless dancer with a rose between her teeth into a national cliché. She announced to the country that "Great men have always loved me," casually dropping such names as Ernst Lubitsch, Max Reinhardt and Charles Chaplin. She had first encountered the great comedian in Berlin, and, not quite the linguist she had cracked herself up to be, had fondly called him "little jazzboy Sharlie." Little jazzboy asked an interpreter how to say to her "I adore you," and was given the German words for "I think you are a piece of cheese." On this note, a romance began.

Chaplin, in his Autobiography, is not altogether gentlemanly in his scanty references to Miss Negri, saying it was she who made all the advances. Perhaps so; but not long after her arrival in Hollywood, there was much gossip about them both, some of their own making. An irresistible force seemed to draw them together, they said--or perhaps it was a publicist at Paramount. But certainly a press agent did not invent the incident that took place on a sunny day on Hollywood Boulevard: Chaplin was seen dashing out of a café, buying a laundry basket full of violets, then heading back to the café, where he threw the blossoms at Pola's feet as she sat at lunch.

When asked if they were engaged, he archly asked her, "Are we?" and she answered, "Yes, my Sharlie." Sharlie would be seen driving down the street kissing her hand--and endangering pedestrians. But sometimes her legendary temperament would flare up, and she would be prostrated for days on end, during which her adored Sharlie would not be permitted to see her. It is not known if he really wanted to.

In the pictures she made abroad, she was usually an unregenerate scarlet woman, and her own publicity intimated that in real life she was not unlike the women she played: "a Carmen cultivated by society and tempered by experience in pain." Then she changed her mind and said she was a "Goya woman," referring to his famous painting of the voluptuous nude maja. Her last picture in Europe, The Flame of Love, had shown her as a Parisian demimondaine who fell in love after a life of amorous adventure. In Hollywood it was thought necessary to cool off her sizzling image. Her first American picture was Bella Donna, in which an attempt was made to turn her into a sympathetic sinner. She played a married woman having an affair with an unscrupulous Egyptian. The lovers plan to dispose of the husband with a dose of poison, but Pola sees the light in time and unselfishly administers the dose to her lover instead. In spite of her reformation, the further appeasement of the censors demanded that she be killed off accidentally at the fade-out. Consequently, not even the puritanical Pennsylvania State Board of Censors complained about Bella Donna--but the reviewers did. They had hoped for more potent passion from Pola. As one said: "A passion flower has been fashioned into a poinsettia."

Fear of the censors had as much to do with the dissipation of Pola's large following as did the later arrival of another foreign enchantress, Greta Garbo. In such movies as The Cheat, Flower of the Night, Loves of an Actress and Woman on Trial, Pola portrayed a worldly female who might find true love, but would not be allowed to enjoy it for long. Either she sacrificed herself at the end out of remorse or an avenging deus ex machina abruptly and arbitrarily removed her. An effort was made by Paramount to embellish their expensive import and promote her as a genuine artist. She was photographed ever more carefully, sleeked up, gowned ever more lavishly, but as a sex symbol her reign was ending. By 1927, when she made her best Hollywood movie, Hotel Imperial, Paramount was ready to drop her; what had kept her going was her sensationally publicized romance with the incomparable Rudolph Valentino, for whom she had managed one last gesture: a crosscountry orgy of faints, hysterics and interviews en route to Rudy's bier. She later married a prince, but it didn't help.

Nevertheless, this Polish passion flower did bring a refreshing exoticism to the Hollywood scene, and she was symptomatic of the burgeoning freedom of womankind in the Twenties. Besides introducing painted toenails to Hollywood, she was the first of many to announce that she wore nothing whatsoever under her evening gowns, and she confessed, too, that she slept in the nude--with a revolver under her pillow to dispatch unwanted interlopers. When she wrote what passed for an autobiography, she called it Love Was My Undoing. Undone or not, she could say smugly, "I have had every experience in life any woman could dream of." More important, perhaps, was what she had neglected to say--that she had helped millions of people fantasize erotic adventures they wouldn't have dared to live.

There were those who said that it was her own image that killed Pola at the box office, that she did not keep pace with the jazz age. Nor did she foresce that a strange new species of native American sex symbol was burgeoning beneath the Southern California sun: The flapper was coming into her own. First of the new breed was Colleen Moore, who was about as sexy as a Shirley Temple doll, and her own fault, too, because she had as beautiful a body as any of the sex stars who came after her. It was her acting alone that made her popular--that, and the creation of the film flapper, a liberated young lady of vast appeal to the movie millions. The flapper got her name because of her peculiar habit of wearing unbuckled galoshes; this slapdash disregard for convention symbolized the kind of girl whose spirit was free and who was willing to kick up her spiked heels in the uninhibited pursuit of pleasure. Colleen Moore helped give a name to the new generation when, in 1923, she made a picture called Flaming Youth. Overnight she was a flaming star.

It was perhaps fortunate that Technicolor had not arrived during her heyday, for she was born with attractive but mismatching eyes of blue and brown. The public was titillated by the roles she played--usually that of a jazz-mad Jezebel who defied society only to learn, in the final reel, that the eternal verities alone brought happiness. Flaming Youth set the pattern for dozens of flapper films that followed--all featuring wild parties and much guzzling of bootleg booze, and sometimes a midnight nude badiing scene which, to avoid censorship, showed female forms only in tantalizing silhouette. Colleen's Dutch-boy bob set a national feminine style, and she became the prototype of John Held, Jr.'s famous drawings of the birdbrained flapper. It was not long before dozens of imitators flooded the movie screens, among them Betty Bronson, Sue Carol, the young Joan Crawford--and the most charismatic of them all, Clara Bow, the "It" Girl.

Adolph Zukor said of Clara, "She danced even when her feet were not moving." Some part of her was in motion in all her waking moments--if only her great rolling eyes. She was a redhead, born in Brooklyn on July 29, 1905. While in her junior year at Bay Ridge High School, she won a beauty contest, for which she was awarded an evening gown, a silver trophy and a screen "contract" which entitled her to play a small role in an honest-to-goodness film. As fate would have it, she was immediately cast in a whaling epic for a small independent company called Arrow. The producer, B.P. Schulberg (Budd's father), was prescient enough to sense her potential, and he starred her in a series of pictures in which she was unabashedly billed as the "Hottest Jazz Baby in Films." Although her first screen appearance was in 1923, it took her several years to rise to the top of the flapper contingent--in which ascendancy she was aided immeasurably by her appearance in It, a Twenties euphemism coined by producer, B.P. Schulberg (Budd's familiar form of animal magnetism known as sex appeal.

Clara's comment was: "The 'It' that Madame Glyn attributes to me is something of which I am not aware. I think it must be my vivacity, my fearlessness and perhaps the fact that I'm a tomgirl; one doesn't think of men much; maybe it's my indifference to them. I really don't care particularly about men ..."

Clara must have had tongue in cheek when she said that, for according to actress Louise Brooks, she was very fond indeed of men, and knew very well the selling power of sex on the screen and off. "The extraordinary thing about Clara Bow," Miss Brooks recalled, "was that when she was a kid in Brooklyn, determined to become a movie star, she would see every Colleen Moore picture over and over and had figured out the lacking element in her screen image. Colleen didn't have the gift for attractive display of her body. This was a mistake Clara determined not to make. Clara also knew that she had 'bandeau bosoms,' a somewhat oversized bottom and rather large thighs. So she created the illusion of a beautiful body by exposing beautiful flesh. It was Billy Wilder who said that Clara's sex was the sex of sensuous touch--you could feel her flesh on the screen."

When It grossed more than a million dollars--then a staggering figure--Clara was hailed as "the screen's most piquant star," and for the rest of her career was ballyhooed as the "It" Girl. In several of her pictures, she attempted to enhance this image of the wild but basically good girl out on the town. She also made one, Red Hair, that seemed designed as a vehicle for illustrating the passionate nature of redheads as a type. In it, Clara played a manicurist courted by three male admirers--one of whom sees her as a demure young miss, another as a sultry vamp and the third as a vixen given to mad displays of temper. In the final, daring scene, which takes place on a boat, Clara divests herself of her furs and silks, all presents from her three admirers, and, down to a scanty slip, flounces off with still another man.

Like Swanson and Negri, Clara more than matched her screen personality in real life, going through well-publicized affairs with Gilbert Roland and Gary Cooper, among others. A poet, Robert Savage, slashed his wrists out of unrequited desire for her, but managed to recover. Clara's reaction: "Men don't commit suicide by slashing their wrists. They use pistols." On trial later for attempting to take his life, Savage testified that Clara had once kissed him so fervently that he was laid up with a sore jaw for two days. A more embarrassing trial, for Clara, occurred later, in 1930, when she brought suit against her ex-secretary, Daisy De Voe, for embezzling $16,000 from a special account on which the secretary had been allowed to sign checks. Clara declared that her suit was provoked by the girl's efforts to blackmail her. Miss De Voe then told a sorry tale, never proven, that she had used the money to pay for men, liquor and even dope--all for Clara. Unconvinced, the jury found her guilty, and the ex-secretary spent a year in jail.

But there was more to come for Clara. The publisher of a weekly Hollywood tabloid, The Coast Reporter, printed anecdotes about her supposedly dictated by Daisy De Voe after the trial, only to be charged himself with sending obscene matter through the mails. After this case was tried, Clara promptly had a nervous breakdown, and was replaced by another actress in her next film. Clara's sad plaint was that being "a sex symbol is a heavy load to carry, especially when one is very tired, hurt and bewildered," and the ghost of Marilyn Monroe might well agree with her. When she recovered, Clara married the cowboy actor Rex Bell in December 1931, had two sons by him--but eventually retreated to a sanatorium. In 1951, still in the sanatorium, she fondly remembered the Twenties, when she was its greatest sex symbol: "We had individuality. We did as we pleased. We stayed up late. We dressed the way we wanted. I'd whiz down Sunset Boulevard in my open Kissel, with seven red chow dogs to match my hair. Today, stars are sensible and end up with better health. But we had more fun."

The Twenties were also rich in male sex symbols, ranging all the way from the bounding, balletic Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., whose approach to romance was along the lines of a grown-up boy scout, to the elegant lecheries of bulletheaded Erich von Stroheim, "the man you love to hate." Fairbanks, who began his screen career in 1915 as a cleanshaven, all-American optimist, added the mustache in 1920 for The Mark of Zorro. It remained his trademark through a long series of swashbuckling romantic comedies during the Twenties--The Feast of Bagdad, Don Q, The Black Pirate--in all of which Fairbanks wooed and won such fair maids as Julanne Johnston, Mary Astor and Billie Dove with acrobatic gusto instead of tender passion. Everyone's adored big brother, he exemplified for an entire generation such noble ideals as clean living, good sportsmanship and a quaintly Victorian regard for women.

Erich von Stroheim's appeal was of another sort entirely. Catapulted to prominence by his repeated portrayal of Prussian villains in the films of World War One, Von Stroheim saw room for an extension of the character in the post-War European scene. He appeared, in a series of pictures that he both wrote and directed, as a Continental roué whose handkissing, heel-clicking good manners were the finished veneer of an arrogant and sadistic cad who used and abused his women. Aware of all perversions, he managed to insinuate into his pictures Krafft-Ebing refinements that eluded the more simple-minded censors--along with many that did not. Nevertheless, both his films and his screen character enjoyed considerable success among the sophisticates of the Twenties, with Foolish Wives (1922) which ran for almost a year on Broadway, and The Merry Widow (1925), which he directed but did not appear in, one of the most profitable pictures of the decade.

But by far the most electrifying male star of the period was a young Italian immigrant with the impressive baptismal name of Rodolfo Raffaelo Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla; he rose to fame only after he regretfully cut it down to Rudolph Valentino. Probably no man before or since caused such female flutters as he did. There are still veiled admirers who visit the somewhat phallic monument erected to his memory in De Longpre Park in Hollywood.

Valentino came to America in 1913 as a boy of 18, worked as a waiter, busboy, garage mechanic, gardener, and then as a dancing partner at Maxim's in New York City, where he did fairly well from the five- and ten-dollar tips fervently pressed into his palm by smitten partners. When World War One came, Rodolfo tried to volunteer in the Canadian Air Force and was rejected because of an eye defect. So he headed West as a chorus boy in a musical, hoping to someday own and farm a piece of land to which he could bring his mother from southern Italy, where she was undergoing hardships because of the War. An actor friend suggested he try Hollywood, where the movie industry was burgeoning, and there he secured some bit parts and supplemented his income with more dancing. Though he visited the casting offices day after day, and was under the eyes of directors constantly, one and all were singularly myopic when it came to recognizing him as star material. Mae Murray was perspicacious enough to give the Latin dancer small roles in two of her vehicles, but for the most part Valentino was mired in villainous "heavy" roles, the only kind felt suitable for a slick-haired Latin type such as he. He came into his own only with the end of the War and the emergence of the new morality of the Twenties. A male counterpart to the vamp was needed, and Valentino had the masculine magnetism and the proper soupçon of hot-eyed exoticism to fill the need.

Whatever his appeal, it wasn't intellectual. Chaplin described him as being "just like a child." When he studied for a role, more likely than not lie would act out the role in real life, sometimes to the point of becoming obnoxious. But perhaps because of the childlike sincerity he brought to his parts--exaggerated, even ludicrous, as it appears to us now--he was something completely fresh and compelling in film stars. The Latin lover became a leading man--and the living legend of the Twenties--when he was cast in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the last word of which Valentino could never pronounce). His discoverer, June Mathis, scenario adaptor of the Blasco Ibáñez popular novel, had brought him to the attention of director Rex Ingram, who in turn was responsible for fattening Valentino's part when he sensed in the rushes the mesmeric impact of the heavy-breathing histrionics and tango-dancing done by Valentino; he played an aristocratic Argentinian turned Parisian playboy who meets his death on a World War One battlefield at the hands of his own German cousin. When the film opened in 1921--at ten dollars a seat in its New York premiere--he became a major star. Upon seeing the picture, D.W. Griffith commented: "I keep asking myself: Is this fellow really acting, or is he so perfectly the type that he doesn't need to act?"

For a man capable of arousing such passionate yearnings in the women who watched him on the screen, Valentino was less fiery as a lover in real life. It was rumored that Blanca de Saules, a wealthy Chilean, had shot her husband for love of him, but it was more likely that Blanca was jealous of her wayward husband. Valentino's first marriage, to dancer Jean Acker, lasted exactly one night. As he described it, "After the ceremony we had supper and danced until two a.m. Then we parted." Soon after, Metro cast Valentino as Armand opposite Alla Nazimova's Camille; as a result, he met Nazimova's scenic designer, the exotic Natacha Rambova, as she called herself. After a long courtship, to which she remained indifferent a good deal of the time, they were married, and Natacha took over the management of his career.

Natacha, who pretended to be Russian, had actually been born Winifred Shaughnessy in Salt Lake City, and was the stepdaughter of Richard Hudnut, the cosmetics tycoon. Not a little eccentric, she had mystical inclinations, and believed herself guided by supernatural forces. In otherworldly fashion, when she at last decided to marry Valentino, she chose to ignore the fact that his interlocutory decree from Jean Acker was not final, and married him in Mexicali. Charged with bigamy on his return to Hollywood, Rudy issued a statement to the American public: "I will say that the love that made me do what I have done was prompted by the noblest intention that a man could have. I loved deeply, but in loving I may have erred innocently."

Natacha had meanwhile led him from Metro to Paramount, where, for a salary of $500 a week, he made The Sheik. The story has a haughty English girl running across Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan (Valentino) while visiting a sand hole called Biskra in Algeria. The moment her eyes meet his, her soul is tossed by raging crosscurrents of desire, and acting problem Agnes Ayres solved by looking as though the sheik had just stunned her with a two-by-four. Later that night he appeared beneath her window and sang in subtitles:

I'm the Sheik of Araby

Your love belongs to me.

At night when you're asleep

Into your tent I creep.

This promise was kept later in the picture when Agnes was swooped down upon by the sheik's caravan and carried off into captivity. A dread bandit called Omair then abducted her from the sheik, carried her off into countercaptivity, and would have brutally ravished the helpless creature had not the sheik appeared in time to rescue her. Later on in the picture, it is discovered that the sheik isn't Arabian at all, but is of English and Spanish descent, and presumably therefore more acceptable matrimonial material in the home market.

The Sheik electrified the ladies as no other picture had before. Theaters in which it was shown were mobbed, and the word sheik came into the American vocabulary. Slick hair, long sideburns and balloon trousers came into fashion. With disappointing results, some men tried to emulate Valentino, while others sulked with jealousy over his reputed animal magnetism. What was this extraordinary power over the opposite sex? Newspaper and magazine writers attempted explanations. "You have heard of various animals hypnotizing others by the slow, rhythmic motions of their bodies," one theorized. "Just so does Valentino charm all those who come under his influence by the wonderful perfection of his every movement....There are his eyes: exotic, passionate eyes that have equally potent hypnotic powers. A woman cannot help herself as his eyes look into her very soul, not if she is human." Actually, Valentino was merely nearsighted.

But there is no question that the graceful Latin stimulated women erotically; and many were to admit later that their early erotic fantasies had to do with being swooped down upon by a burnoosed Arab, lifted to his pommel and borne off on a white steed to the accompaniment of exquisite palpitations. Valentino also signified a retreat from puritauism by women, for he absolved them of the necessity to suffer erotically induced guilt: Their surrender to him was caused by an animal force they were powerless to resist. Thus the ex-tango artist was responsible for a pronounced switch in movie morals, for until he came along, if a man pounced upon a shrinking lady with no other justification than the most carnal of desires, grave retribution was eventually meted out to him; but in The Sheik the heroine fell genuinely in love with the "magnificent animal," as he was called, and married him in the last reel.

In his two following pictures for Paramount, inevitably, Valentino was undressed in a few scenes, for the studio was not unmindful of his physical appeal. In Monsieur Beaucaire, a French period drama which had him wearing silks and wigs, time was yet found to show him being ceremoniously dressed, from the skin, by a legion of valets. In Blood and Sand, based on the famous Blasco Ibáñez novel, he returned to his Latin-lover role; and women were again granted the opportunity to gaze upon his torso as he demonstrated in exquisite detail the matador's ritual dressing in "the suit of lights." Otherwise, the film might just as well have been titled Latin Lover Meets the Vamp. In it, Nita Naldi played a baneful, aristocratic temptress who takes her pleasure with the young Spaniard and tosses him aside.

He made two more films for Paramount, and then starred in The Eagle for United Artists--which was a success less for its plot (Valentino was a Cossack in Catherine's Russia who masquerades as a masked bandit and then as a mincing French tutor, all to defeat the enemies of the Empress) than for the publicity that surrounded his romance with Pola Negri; he and Natacha had separated. His next film, Son of the Sheik, was to be his last. Teamed with Vilnia Banky, he played two roles, that of the old sheik and of his look-alike son. Rudy rode, rolled his eyes, was sadistically flogged by the villainous Montagu Love, and raped Vilma in a tent, thinking she had betrayed him to his Bedouin enemies. The original script graphically described that scene: "Passionately she denies everything, but Ahmed is not convinced. Consumed with hate and the desire for revenge, he is blind to her love, and she encounters only his cold fury and brutal passion. She struggles, pleads, sobs and tries to escape, but her efforts are futile.... Night finally envelops the small oasis."

Valentino's last year was darkened by the "Affair of the Pink Powder Puff." Many young men, about this time, were retiring to washrooms at dances to surreptitiously whiten their faces with powder puffs supplied for the purpose, and a Chicago Tribune article implied strongly that the example of white-faced Valentino was behind the curious custom. To counter this vile derogation, Valentino set out to prove his manhood by--curiously enough--boxing an exhibition match with Jack Dempsey on the roof of the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago.

Then, on a trip to New York in 1926, Valentino was taken in great pain to the Polyclinic Hospital, where he was operated on for appendicitis; but peritonitis set in. The newspaper reported that he had spent the previous evening with a Follies girl, Marion Kay Benda, who achieved a brief measure of fame because of her story: She told the papers that he had proposed to her and promised to let her play opposite him on the screen. It was not a promise he could keep, for on August 23, 1926, at half past the noon hour. Valentino died. Hysteria followed. Pola Negri, after her well-publicized dash across the country, fainted repeatedly during the funeral. In New York a woman shot herself and fell across a heap of Valentino's photographs. In London, a female dancer committed suicide. Thirty thousand women gathered at Campbell's Funeral Home at Broadway and 66th Street when it was announced that his body would lie there in state. Rioting ensued, windows were smashed and, in an attempt to control the hordes of grieving women, mounted policemen were mobilized en masse. Other Latin lovers were well along in development at the time of Valentino's death, and more were rushed in to fill the gap. One was Ramon Novarro, about whom MGM said in a release, "He has the body of Michelangelo's David and the face of an El Greco don." Novarro came to fame in the huge 1926 version of Ben Hur--from which a well-circulated publicity still showed him stripped and chained to an oar, an airbrush delicately fuzzing the photo at the point that might have barred it from the mails. Antonio Moreno, Ricardo Cortez (who was of Jewish extraction). Swedish Nils Asther, Hungarian Rod La Rocque and the Mexican Gilbert Roland were among the many hopeful contenders for Valentino's crown. But not until Marlon Brando and James Dean arrived, a quarter of a century later, did another male star so fundamentally alter the pattern of movie love for the American female.

Although the period of John Barrymore's ascendancy as a handsome leading man roughly coincided with the era of Valentino's supremacy, he appealed largely to the more sophisticated segment of the movie audience. Graced with a classic profile and a handsome physique, he was also the most gifted stage actor of his time.

And in his so-called private life, he far outshone Valentino as a lover, embroidering his four marriages with a vast extracurricular career. He also developed an insatiable thirst for the demon rum, a failing which was to account for his grotesque and untimely decline through the last half of the Thirties. So great was his authority in his prime, however, that when he happened to encounter a young bit player, Dolores Costello, in the Warner's lot, he imperiously announced to Jack and Harry Warner, "She is the girl." She was immediately starred opposite him in The Sea Beast, a production rather remotely based on Melville's Moby Dick. Mary Astor, in turn, with whom Barrymore was dallying at the time (although married to a beautiful poetess, Michael Strange), was replaced in his affections by Dolores, who a few years later became his wife. Their famous kissing scene in The Sea Beast was largely the work of the film editor, who strung together four separate takes into one of the longest and steamiest clinches yet seen on the screen. Warner's announced that Dolores had fainted dead away in the midst of it.

Barrymore's playing of his love scenes was in market contrast to the Valentino method. He made the audience aware that courtship was a prelude to sexual conquest, and he implied (especially in Don Juan) that virginity was an ugly word to a genuine male, that fidelity to a single woman was an inordinate strain on his masculinity, and that women were inclined to be as erotically avid as men. Since the movie public was not yet ready to accept this forthright view of the relationship between the sexes, he fell in popular favor, although he always brought prestige to any vehicle in which he appeared.

More in the standardized groove of movie heroes was John Gilbert, whose personal story has more of the tragic about it than almost any other in Hollywood history. After Valentino died, Gilbert became the number-one lover of the screen, the virtual king of the movies. Always a high-strung youth, he demonstrated his intense ambition, impatience and an incurable inferiority complex, throughout his career. Changing his name from John Pringle, he became a featured player at Fox in 1921; already imitative of Valentino, he appeared as a sheik, in 1922, in Arabian Love. He was brought to Metro in 1924 by star maker Irving Thalberg, as part of the search for a substitute Valentino, and it was there that he was transformed into a screen lover with the quality of "It." In His Hour, playing a Russian nobleman, he made passionate advances to Aileen Pringle. Possessor of "a new, impetuous, intense style of lovemaking," as one writer put it, he had "flashing dark eyes, even teeth and a mustache which helped audiences forget his oversized nose."

In 1925 he played Danilo in Von Stroheim's The Merry Widow opposite Mae Murray's waltzing Kitty, and was something to behold in a series of resplendent uniforms and a crewcut. Von Stroheim made him the romantic straight man in the movie, surrounding him with several lecherous companions, among them a moronic, sex-obsessed crown prince and a foot-fetishistic old roué. One of the many daring moments that managed to escape the censors showed Mae Murray dancing onstage, while her three admirers studied her through opera glasses. The old roué concentrated on her feet, the crown prince on the juncture between her thighs, while lovesmitten Danilo watched only her face.

By the time he was assigned to Flesh and the Devil, Gilbert was at the top of his career. His leading lady, a featured player, was Greta Garbo, and their mutual attraction, in spite of the difference in star status, was instantaneous, according to director Clarence Brown, who said: "In their scenes together I was working with raw material. They were in that blissful state of love which is so like a rosy could that they imagined themselves hidden behind it, as well as lost in it." Of course, it was Metro policy to encourage the affair, and Brown's statement may have been slightly overblown. At any rate, that peculiar something which Hollywood terms "chemistry" occurred. Gilbert and Garbo together achieved a stunning popularity that neither might have reached alone. He remained in favor until sound came rushing in; then not even further pairings with Garbo could save him, for his voice, pleasant and modulated though it was, sounded high, harsh and strained when heard through the primitive recording and sound equipment. Contrary to popular belief, however, he survived the sound era for a few years; then poor vehicles and bad acting, as well as a swollen sense of pride which refused to deflate, led to his precipitous decline. He died a year after making a last picture with Garbo (Queen Christina), felled by excessive drinking and a heart attack--and perhaps by his inability to realize that as a screen lover he had simply gone out of fashion.

But not Garbo. Her star remained in the ascendancy long beyond the Twenties, and many still deem her the greatest femme fatale of them all, as well as a magnificent actress. Born Greta Gustaffson in Stockholm, in 1906, she made her film debut in commercial shorts when she was 16, after a brief tenure preparing shaving lather in a barbershop; and she was also a buxom bathing beauty, clad in a black, form-fitting swimsuit in a long-forgotten Swedish comedy. It was director Mauritz Stiller who saw her potential and cast her as a countess in his film version of The Saga of Gösta Berling. Greta, her last name now changed to Garbo, played a widow whose "cold, repressed exterior masked her passionate Italian soul." Garbo and Stiller became a kind of Trilby-Svengali pair. Not long afterward, Garbo was cast by the German director G. W. Pabst in his The Joyless Street, made in Berlin. She played the daughter of an impoverished professor in post-War Vienna; momentarily tempted by prostitution, she is rescued in time by her own pure nature and an American Red Cross lieutenant. In the brothel sequence, however, although unbesmirched, she was not unrevealed: Her flimsy evening gown, cut to the navel, was altogether inadequately secured by a single string just below the bosom.

In Berlin, Stiller met that inveterate talent scout L. B. Mayer, and was prevailed upon to join MGM in Hollywood. According to Stiller, it was he who insisted that Garbo come along, while Mayer later claimed it was Garbo he was really after. Yet when Stiller and Garbo came off the boat, they were left to cool their heels for a few months in New York City. The truth seems to be that Metro regarded Garbo as just another starlet, for they put her through the routine publicity paces, even posing her next to Leo the Lion. Although nominally ever on the alert for potent box-office sex, the Hollywood studios often seem strangely unable to recognize it even when it is right there on the list of their own contract players.

For Garbo's first American picture, The Torrent, it was necessary for Stiller, as director, to request her for the part of Leonora, a Spanish girl who becomes a famous prima donna. His request was granted; but Stiller was destined never to direct the film, for his slow European pacing was anathema to the studio, and Monta Bell replaced him. Garbo's magic was almost at once apparent as out of the hackneyed material she created an enchanting figure on the screen. She was billed under Ricardo Cortez, but the reviews singled her out. One critic wrote: "Greta has a delightfully youthful figure and a face that is strangely attractive, though not at all beautiful."

Again Stiller was replaced as director of her next picture, The Temptress, in which she played a highly experienced married woman who falls in love with another man--in this case, Antonio Moreno, portraying an Argentine engineer. When he discovers she has had many affairs, and has not hesitated to employ her body to advance her husband's career, he leaves for his native country. Years later he finds her again in Paris, where she is a streetwalker, and dying in poverty to boot. Metro, after releasing the film that way, substituted another ending, in which Garbo and Moreno are seen standing happily, arm in arm, at the fade-out.

Garbo's face, in this film, took on the fascinating allure that was to haunt the film public for years to come. The burgeoning star, though, was bearish about the roles given her by MGM. "I do not want to be a silly temptress," she said, scornfully. "I cannot see any sense in getting dressed up and doing nothing but tempting men in pictures." But she was even more tempting in her third American movie, Flesh and the Devil, her first of four opposite John Gilbert. Offscreen, Gilbert at once made a play for the exotic Swedish dish, and the studio cannily leaked out word of the hot romance between the two as shooting progressed. This helped skyrocket the box-office figures for Garbo's previous film, The Temptress, bad as it was.

In Flesh and the Devil, Garbo was the unfaithful wife of an elderly count who is dispatched in a duel with her lover, Gilbert. When the lover is forced to flee the country, Garbo is too restless to wait for his return and marries his best friend. Needless to say, she pays for her heartlessness: On her way to stop a duel between the lover and her new husband, she abruptly falls through the ice and drowns. The picture was a sizzler less for its dueling scenes than for two scenes of lovemaking, both prolonged and passionate. One developed after Garbo met Gilbert at a ball. Instantly and madly in love, the two steal out to the garden, there to indulge in feverish kisses and lingering embraces. The other was a horizontal scene, and has become one of the most famous in all film history. The lovers have taken refuge in a glasswalled kiosk in a château garden. Gilbert, tempted beyond all endurance, responds to the sight and touch of Garbos in a nearly transparent sleeveless dress. Garbo seems lost in ecstasy as Gilbert nuzzles her ears, nose, and neck in an incendiary outburst of passion. The censors passed it--barely.

The Garbo-Gilbert real-life romance became comic operatic as time wore on. Rumor had it that The Great Lover tried to climb up Garbo's balcony one evening, only to be pushed back down by Stiller, who was visiting his protégée at the time. Gilbert later confided to reporters that "I would rather spend an hour with Flicka than a lifetime with any other woman." (He called her Flicka, her Swedish nickname; she called him Yackie, for Jackie.) After much pleading, Flicka was persuaded to elope with Yackie, and he drove her at breakneck speed toward a marriage-license bureau near the Mexican border. Halfway there, she asked her fiancè to stop at a garage. She went into a ladies' room, climbed out the window and, while he went in hopeless search of her, she got aboard a train bound for Los Angeles.

Recoiling from all personal publicity, fighting for more financial recognition from MGM, she retreated into silence. "I vant to be alone," she said, meaning that she wanted to be left alone by her public. Her Hollywood career encompassed 24 pictures in all, and she will enter this chronicle again when the Thirties are taken up, but by the end of the Twenties she was aloof, mysterious, ineffably glamorous and intriguing to a public altogether willing to regard her as the supreme star of films.

But it must also be admitted that Garbo, as delineated by Hollywood, made sex suggestive and imaginative rather than realistic. Toward the end of the Twenties, sex was less ethereally, more earthily embodied by a star far less illustrious than Garbo: Louise Brooks. Always more popular in Europe than here while making her films, she emerged, like a beauteous ghost from the past, 30 years later, when she was suddenly rediscovered by Henri Langlois, head of the Cinémathéque Françhise. In the notes he prepared for a French exhibition called "60 Years of Cinema," he exclaimed, perhaps too enthusiastically, "There is no Garbo! There is no Dietrich! There is only Louise Brooks. Those who have seen her can never forget her. It is sufficient to see her to believe in beauty, in life, in the reality of human beings; she has the naturalness that only primitives retain before the lens..."

But she wasn't as primitive as all that. Kansas born and bred, she became a dancer with Ruth St. Denis, then appeared on Broadway as one of the loveliest Follies and Scandals girls, not at all averse to revealing her slightly plump but voluptuous body in showgirl deshabille. She entered movies in 1925, appearing mainly as a delectable, piquant little flapper. None of her American films were taken seriously in their day; and if some of them have since been subjected to critical reappraisal, it is due solely to the fact that a Louise Brooks cult sprang up years after her retirement.

The cult developed mainly because she went to Berlin and made two films for the famed German director G. W. Pabst. Pabst, in 1928, had in mind a film, Pandora's Box, which would express the essence of feminine fatality--in the shape of his heroine, Lulu. He embarked on a search for the perfect Lulu, and he found her when he happened to see Louise Brooks in a picture made with Victor McLaglen called A Girl in Every Port. He sent for her, although he knew nothing at all about her. She was known in Hollywood for her wit, if not her talent, and her combination of beauty and intellect had made her the pet of California's café society and of the rich roués who sought her out. She accepted their homage with happy-go-lucky gaiety, and in the same spirit also accepted Pabst's offer.

Hardly reading the script, she gave a subtle, sensuous portrayal of nymphomania in Pandora's Box. She played the amoral young Lulu, who, unaware of the evil she does, uses men as instruments of her pleasure. She marries her richest admirer only to be near his sexy stepson, then, when the old man catches her in a most compromising position with his stepson, shoots him dead still clad in her disarrayed wedding dress--while struggling for his gun. But her amorality leads her to run away with an obvious Lesbian and eventually, having caused the death of this perverse admirer, she repairs to London where she becomes a derelict prostitute. One night in Soho, Lulu picks up a young man and takes him to her garret for a paid hay roll--but the man is the maniac Jack the Ripper, who stabs her to death while they're making love. Her face, in that last moment, is transfigured with pleasure and agony; it was the first time the orgasm had been shown on the popular screen.

Sound had come in by the time Pandora's Box was released in the United States, however; and this--along with the heavy censor cuts that invariably attended a Pabst film--caused it to make no impression on the general public, although it has been frequently revived for the edification of the studious ever since. Her second film for Pabst, Diary of a Lost. One, was also brutally mutilated by the censors before its exhibition in this country. In that one she played the daughter of a druggist who allows herself to be seduced by her father's assistant. Finding herself pregnant, upbraided by her dad, she is sent by her mother to a reform school, where her baby is taken from her. In this picture, the perversity of sexual impulse was shown again by Pabst when a harsh female overseer exercises the girls in their shifts, revealing her Lesbian tendencies as she works herself toward orgasm by swaying in time to the rhythm she beats with her stick. Eventually the lost girl takes a job in a fancy brothel, where she meets and lightheartedly marries a young disinherited baron. When he kills himself because of her insincerity, she becomes accepted by society--as a baroness--and turns to doing good works. This ironic and realistically told tale was too much for the sensibilities of the censors, who had a field day with it.

After making one more European film, The Beauty Prize, Louise returned to Hollywood, swimming in foreign adulation--whereupon her career began to peter out. The studios called her uncooperative when she refused to help turn one of her silent Paramount pictures, The Canary Murder Case, into a talkie without additional compensation. "Paramount," she once said, "got together with the other studios and they stuck the knife in me and they've never taken it out." She was hardly 25 years old when she disappeared from the screen in 1931. Still very much alive, she is currently writing her memoirs and has no doubt at all that it was the portrayal of sex on the screen, whether fantastic or realistic, by the enchanting stars of the Twenties, that kept the studios in business. Like many others before and since, she has never been able to understand why the studios invariably attempted to whittle down and bend to their executive will those godlike figures who embodied the source of their wealth and power.

But the human race is various, even in Hollywood, and its capacity to create and enthrone new forms and types of beauty is seemingly infinite. As sound revolutionized the art as well as the industry known as motion pictures, vocal cords became an additional prerequisite for any girl who aspired to stardom or sex symbolism. The cool Germanic accents of Marlene Dietrich were already being heard as the decade ended, and soon to be beheld were the drawling Mae West and the tough-talking Jean Harlow. In the Thirties, the movies would find new ways of demonstrating the sexual nature of mankind, and the forces of censorship would find new methods of attacking its irrepressible expression on the screen. But that's quite another story.

This is the fifth in a series of articles on "The History of Sex in Cinema." In the next installment, authors Knight and Alpert examine the effect on American films of the concurrent arrival of talking pictures and the Depression, the emergence of such worldly sex symbols as Jean Harlow and Mae West, the rise of the Legion of Decency and the results of its repressive measures--a new screen emphasis on sadomasochistic violence.