Description:

Valentino Rudolph 1895 - 1926 Rudolph Valentino defends his heritage and name and vows to pummel the offender in an emotional and revealing letter: "I plan on giving you the beating you deserve ... may snap a real fist into your sagging jaw. .. I assume that your muscles must be flabby and weak, judging by your cowardly mentality"
Rudolph Valentino Typed Letter Signed on tissue stock, 6.75" x 9.5", with handwritten annotations. Written "To The Man Who Wrote The Editorial Headed "Pink Powder Puffs" In Sunday's Tribune", signed by Rudolph Valentino in full signature as 'Rudolph Valentino". Small mounting pieces on the verso along the corners. Accompanied by a matt black and white portrait photograph of Valentino additionally signed in full with photo having a stamped signature "Sincerely / Rudolph Valentino", 6.5" x 8" with some leftover adhesive staining to the white outer margin. Soft vertical crease, mostly imperceptible.


The reader just knows when an actor takes to writing a letter to an editor of a newspaper and starts with "To The Man Who Wrote The Editorial Headed "Pink Powder Puffs"", that this would be heated and would illicit an upset angry response to what was no doubt a slurring editorial. And Valentino's response was indeed fraught throughout with incredible high level emotional discourse. An intense and revealing letter which can only be appreciated when read in full as below:

"TO THE MAN (?) WHO WROTE THE EDITORIAL HEADED "PINK POWDER PUFFS" IN SUNDAY'S TRIBUNE

The above mentioned editorial is at least the second scurrilous personal attack you have made upon me, my race, and my father's name.

You slur my Italian ancestry; you cast ridicule upon my Italian name; you cast doubt upon my manhood.

I call you, in return, a contemptible coward and to prove which of us is a better man, I challenge you to personal test. This is not a challenge to a duel in the generally accepted sense -- that would be illegal. But in Illinois boxing is legal so is wrestling. I therefore, defi you to meet me in the boxing or wrestling arena to prove, in typically American fashion, (for I am an American citizen) which of us is more a man. I prefer this test of honor to be private, so I may give you the beating you deserve, and because I want to make it absolutely plain that this challenge is not for purposes of publicity. I am handing copies of this to the newspaper simply because I doubt that anyone so cowardly as to write about me as you have would respond to a defi unless forced by the press to do so. I don't know who you are or how big you are but this challenge stands if you are as big as Jack Dempsey.

I will meet you immediately or give you a reasonable time in which to prepare, for I assume that your muscles must be flabby and weak, judging by you cowardly mentality and that you will have to replace the vitriol in your veins with red blood - if there be a place in such a body as yours for red-blood and manly muscle.

I want to make it plain that I hold no grievance against the Chicago Tribune, altho it seems a mistake to let a cowardly writer use its valuable columns as this "man" does. My fight is personal - with the poison-pen writer of editorials that stoop to racialize and personal prejudice. The Tribune, through Miss Mae Tinee, has treated me and my work kindly and at times very favorably. I welcome criticism of my work as an actor -- but I will resent with every muscle of my body attacks upon my manhood and ancestry.

Hoping I will have an opportunity to demonstrate to you that the wrist under a slave bracelet may snap a real fist into your sagging jaw and that I may teach you respect of a man even though he happens to prefer to keep his face clean, I remain with

Utter Contempt

Rudolph Valentino

P.S. I will return to Chicago within ten days. You may send your answer to me in New York, Care of United Artists Corporation, 729 7th Avenue"

Valentino was responding to a snarky editorial titled "PINK POWDER PUFFS" , written just few weeks before his death. The Chicago Tribune editorial ranted against the effect that the star's "masculine cosmetics, sheiks, floppy pants, and slave bracelets" were having on once-manly men and their women. The attack on his masculinity enraged Valentino, who had to constantly endure taunting by the press and other magazines throughout his short lived career. Such other examples are below:

Dick Dorgan opined, in Photoplay magazine, opined that , "the Sheik is a bum Arab, that he is really an Englishman whose mother was a wop or something like that."

Valentino's "Roman face," his "patent leather hair," and his ability to make women dizzy."

"The movie boys haven't been the same," Howe wrote. "They're all racing around wearing spit curls, bobbed hair and silk panties.... This can't keep up. The public can stand just so many ruffles and no more."

"Pink Powder Puffs" that blamed Valentino for the installation of a face-powder dispenser in a new public men's room on the city's North Side: A powder vending machine! In a men's washroom! Homo Americanus! Why didn't someone quietly drown Rudolph Guglielmo , alias Valentino, years ago?... Do women like the type of "man" who pats pink powder on his face in a public washroom and arranges his coiffure in a public elevator?... Hollywood is the national school of masculinity. Rudy, the beautiful gardener's boy, is the prototype of the American male.

"This man calls me a 'spaghetti-gargling gardener's helper.'... As for being a gardener's helper, I specialized in college in landscape gardening because in Italy, that is as fine an art as architecture or painting."

However ridiculous the other editorials were, NONE measure up to the Chicago Tribune Editorial. That specific incredible editorial write up and Valentino's response to it became a phenomenon and were so publicized that to this day, almost 95 years later, references to the Chicago Tribune editorial are still described all over the internet. This incredible TLS letter is Valentino's original typed and signed response to the editor, a response of which became so famous that it too is quoted all over in conjunction with the editorial.

Regrettably Valentino only lived a few weeks after this event, having succumbed to pleurisy. But nearly a century after he arrived on these shores, his very name remains tantamount to a male seducer of women. In that sense, his work outlasted the biases of his time.

Provenance: An important letter from the autograph collection of Howard Goldman, this particular lot last sold at auction with the Charles Hamilton Galleries in 1980 for a whopping $888.00!

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