DUCE/DIVO: Masculinity, racial identity, and politics among Italian Americans in 1920s New York City

Journal of Urban History

Volumn 31, Issue 5, 2005, Pages 685-726

  Bertellini, Giorgio ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

Film stardom; Italian Americans; Masculinity; Mussolini; Valentino

Indexed keywords

EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE;

NEW YORK [NEW YORK (STT)]; NEW YORK [UNITED STATES]; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 23344431620     PISSN: 00961442     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0096144205275981     Document Type: Review

References (230)

1. New York Times, August 25, 1926, 1.
2. New York Times, August 26, 1926, 1, 5.
3. On the episode, its interpretation, and even a few conspiracy theories regarding the authenticity of the Fascist guards' identity, see Sciacalli, "Esibizionisti e Bugiardi," and "Profanazione Fascista alla Salma di Valentino," in Nuovo Mondo (New York), August 27, 1926;
4. Il Progresso Italo-Americano (hereafter P1A), August 26, 1926, 3;
5. John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 126-27;
6. Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience (New York: Harper, 1992), 387;
7. New York Times, August 26, 1925, 5;
8. Brad Steiger and Chaw Mank, Valentino: An Intimate and Shocking Exposé (New York: MacFaddenBooks, 1966), 15-16;
9. Emily W. Leider, Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 392.
10. San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1926, n.p., and New York Times, January 9, 1926, 14;
11. Leider, Dark Lover, 352-53.
12. Stark Young, "Charlot in Rome," The New Republic, October 13, 1926, 217-18, reprinted in George C. Pratt, ed., Spellbound in Darkness: A History of the Silent Film (1966; Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 275;
13. and Los Angeles Times, December 7, 1925, 5.
14. For instance, in the fall of 1926, Roman distributors re-released three of his titles at one time: The Sheik (1921), The Eagle (1925), and The Son of the Sheik (1926). James Hay, Popular Film Culture in Fascist Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 86.
15. On film stardom in 1920s and 1930s Italy, see Stephen Gundle, "Film Stars and Society in Fascist Italy," in Jacqueline Reich and Piero Garofalo, eds., Reviewing Fascism: Italian Cinema, 1922-1943 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 315-39.
16. On the ideological competition among models of virility in Italian literature during Fascism, see Barbara Spackman's brilliant Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
17. For a wider discourse on masculinity and Fascist regimes, see George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
18. Throughout this article, I treat and address Mussolini as both a political and a media "star" due to his remarkable and unprecedented mastery of modern media, from radio broadcasting and photojournalism to filmed newsreels. On Mussolini's media performances, particularly his speech and bodily rhetoric, see Ernesto G. Laura, Immagine del Fascismo: La Conquista del Potere, 1915-1925, vol. 1 (Milan, Italy: Longanesi, 1973);
19. Ermanno Leso et al., eds., La Lingua Italiana e il Fascismo (Bologna, Italy: Consorzio Provinciale Pubblica Lettura, 1977);
20. Laura Malvano, Fascismo e Politica dell'Immagine (Turin, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri, 1988);
21. and Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999).
22. A useful discussion of the "media synergy" between Mussolini and the Istituto Luce, the news-making agency created in 1924, is in Sergio Luzzato's L'immagine del Duce: Mussolini nelle Fotografie dell'Istituto Luce (Rome: Editori Riuniti/Istituto Luce, 2001).
23. Charlotte Gower Chapman, Milocca: A Sicilian Village (1935; Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing, 1971), 27,
24. quoted in Silvano M. Tomasi, Piety and Power: The Role of Italian Parishes in the New York Metropolitan Area (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1975), 168.
25. Edward Alsworth Ross, "Racial Consequences of Immigration," Century Magazine, vol. 87, July 1914, 619.
26. E. A. Ross, "Italians in America," Century Magazine, vol. 87, July 1914, 444-45.
27. "Far from symbolizing an individual's rejection of ethnic culture," writes Lizabeth Cohen with reference to Italians in Chicago, "a phonograph in fact helped Italians share in a collective experience as immigrants." L. Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105.
28. On Caruso's career and success on the American opera stage, where his interpretations were often racialized as "vulgar," "excessively exuberant," "plebeian," and thus, contrary to a traditional sense of genteel restraint, see T. R. Ybarra, Caruso, The Man of Naples and the Voice of God (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1953);
29. Stanley Jackson, Caruso (New York: Stein and Publishers, 1972);
30. Howard Greenfeld, Caruso (New York: Putnam, 1983);
31. G. Bertellini, "Southern Crossings: Italians, Cinema, and Modernity (Italy, 1861-New York, 1920)" (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2001).
32. I have examined the effect of Italian historical epics of the 1910s among Italian immigrants and within American cinema and culture in, respectively, G. Bertellini, "Italian Imageries, Historical Feature Films, and the Fabrication of Italy's Spectators in Early 1900s New York," in Richard Maltby and Melvin Stokes, eds., American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 29-45;
33. and G. Bertellini, "Epica Spettacolare e Splendore del Vero: L'influenza del Cinema Storico Italiano in America (1908-1915)," in Gian Piero Brunetta, ed., Storia del Cinema Mondiale: Gli Stati Uniti, vol. 2 (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1999), 227-65.
34. Suffice it to mention here the "Prince of Pulcinellas" Guglielmo Ricciardi, Sicilian actor-playwrights Antonio Maiori and Giovanni De Rosalia, dialect stage divi Mimì Aguglia and Giovanni Grasso (who, although famous since 1908, arrived in the United States only in 1921), and the most popular of them all, Neapolitan Eduardo Migliaccio, known as Farfariello (Little Butterfly).
35. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (1955; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 264 passim.
36. As late as mid-July 1926, Italian Ambassador to the United States Giacomo de Martino informed Mussolini about his American colleagues' negative stereotypes of Italians, "personified by [men with] broken shoes, organ players, and poor, illiterate workers." Giacomo de Martino to Benito Mussolini, July 12, 1926, Serie Affari Politici, Stati Uniti, 1914-1942, Busta 1601, Fascicolo Rapporti Politici, Ministero Affari Esteri, quoted in Madeline Jane Goodman, "The Evolution of Ethnicity: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in the Italian-American Community, 1914-1945" (Ph.D. diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 1993), 276.
37. For a detailed list of newspapers' reports and comments on Mussolini in North America, see Eugenio Coselschi, Universalità del Fascismo: Raccolta di Giudizi di Personalità e della Stampa di Tutto il Mondo, 1922-1932 (Florence, Italy: Vallecchi, 1933), esp. 31-32, 57-8, 65-66, 90-94, 125-27, 161, 213-14, 230-32, and 321-24.
38. See also John P. Diggins, "Mussolini and America: Hero Worship, Charisma and the Vulgar Talent," Historian 28, no. 4 (August 1966): 559-85;
39. and Gian Piero Brunetta, "Il Sogno a Stelle e Striscie di Mussolini," in Maurizio Vaudagna, ed., L'estetica della Politica: Europa e America Negli anni Trenta (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1989), 173-86.
40. The newspaper Catholic Word and the Jesuit journal America were in favor of Fascism; the weekly Commonwealth had more moderate positions, whereas the Detroit-based La Voce del Popolo, edited by Monsignor Giarrocchi, was regularly criticizing Fascist teaching as propaganda. Rosaria Quartararo, I Rapporti Italo-Americani durante il Fascismo, (1922-1941) (Naples, Italy: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1999), 49-53.
41. David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 387-88 and 323;
42. W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (New York: Scribner, 1961), 510.
43. Richard A. Child, A Diplomat Looks at Europe (New York: Duffield and Company, 1925), 152.
44. Child ended up writing the preface to Mussolini's My Autobiography, published in the United States by C. Scribner's Sons in 1928. For a general look at the official political relationships between Italy and the United States, see David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), particularly chap. 6.
45. Issac F. Marcosson, "After Mussolini - What?" Saturday Evening Post, May 29, 1926, 3-4, 135, and 137;
46. quoted, with incomplete references, in Diggins, "Mussolini and America," 564-65.
47. I b i d.
48. Irving S. Cobb of Cosmopolitan reported that it was fairly common to address Mussolini as the Italian Roosevelt; Irving S. Cobb, "A Big Little Man," Cosmopolitan, vol. 82, January 1927, 145-46. It is worth reminding that Roosevelt himself was once described by Henry Adams as "pure act."
49. Child, A Diplomat Looks at Europe.
50. New York Times, July 15, 1923.
51. V. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 205.
52. Quoted in Literary Digest, "Mussolini, Lady Killer," July 31, 1937, 27.
53. See also Marjorie Sheeler, "Mussolini at Close Range," Review of Reviews 68 (October 1923): 395-97;
54. quoted in Diggins, "Mussolini and America," 568.
55. See also New York Times, July 27, 1928,
56. and Irene di Robilant, "The Role of Women Under Fascism," Survey 57 (March 1, 1927), 708.
57. Ida Tarbell, All in the Day's Work (New York: 1939), 383;
58. Diggins, "Mussolini and America," 576.
59. What made viable and easier the comparison between Mussolini and modern film stars and athletes was also the Duce's constant and insisted exhibition of youthfulness - an utter novelty for a political leader in Italy. Decades later, novelist Italo Calvino noted, "No one then had ever heard of a Prime Minister who was only forty. Nor had anyone ever seen in Italy a statesman without a beard or a mustache, and this in itself was a sign of modernity" See "Il Duce's Portraits: Living with Mussolini," trans. Martin McLaughlin, New Yorker, January 6, 2003, 34 (originally appeared as "Cominciò con un Cilindro," La Repubblica, July 10-11, 1983).
60. The image, now apparently lost, appeared in Gary Carey's Anita Loos: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1988), 65. I wish to thank Mr. Carey for productive conversations. Unsuccessful attempts have been made to contact the Anita Loos Estate regarding rights.
61. Mathis had insisted to cast Valentino as the protagonist of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921), which she had written. She was also the author of the scripts of other Valentino's films, such as Camille (1921), The Conquering Power (1921), Blood and Sand (1922), and The Young Rajah (1922). Marion, one of Hollywood's highest paid screenwriters, wrote The Son of the Sheik (1926), Valentino's last picture.
62. Gary Carey, Anita Loos, 119;
63. On Loos's, Marion's, and Mathis's touristic attraction to, and filming experience in, Italy, see Giuliana Muscio, "Il 'Grand Tour' Cinematografico: Produzione Americane in Italia negli anni Venti," in Michele Canosa, ed., A Nuova Luce: Italian Silent Cinema (Bologna, Italy: Clueb, 2000), 89-101.
64. Mary Pickford, "The Last Time I Visited," New York Times, March 24, 1934.
65. Initially blocked by the Fascist authority who clearly had no intention of supporting a film that favored Socialist characters, the script was rearranged to such an extent that in the new version, the "good" protagonists were the Fascists. Fitzmaurice had old ties to Italy and imminent ones with Valentino: between 1919 and 1923, he had completed in Italy a series of love melodramas, and in 1926, he directed Valentino's last film, The Son of the Sheik.
66. See also a seven-reel film titled Mussolini Speaks, released by Columbia Pictures in 1933.
67. Upon his return to the United States, Hullinger wrote a long account for Photoplay about his experience as the first filmmaker to actually capture the domestic and everyday dimension of Italy's national leader, paired to "a movie star" and whose "attraction among the flickering marquee lights above the box office" made him comparable to Clark Gable and William Powell; Edwin Ware Hullinger, "Mussolini Movie Star," Photoplay 52, no. 8 (August 1938): 87.
68. Gaetano Salvemini, Italian Fascists Activities in the United States, edited and with an introduction by Philip V. Cannistraro (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977);
69. and Philip V. Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy (West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1999).
70. See also the bibliography in Stefano Luconi, La "Diplomazia Parallela": Il Regime Fascista e la Mobilitazione Politica degli Italo-Americani (Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli, 2000), 11, note 9.
71. On the Fascist League and its relationship with both Italy's Fascist Party and the U.S. government, see Cannistraro, Blackshirts, chap. 4.
72. See Jean McClure Mudge, The Poet and the Dictator: Lauro de Bosis Resists Fascism in Italy and America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 74. The role played by the Casa Italiana at Columbia University headed by Giuseppe Prezzolini between 1930 and 1940 (he had been teaching at Columbia since 1923) has been source of harsh debates. Diggins, Salvemini, and Cannistraro, among others, have not shied away from alleging that the cultural activities of Prezzolini and the Italian department at Columbia were disturbing examples of loyalty to Fascism.
73. Prezzolini repeatedly and vehemently rejected the charge in a number of venues, including Prezzolini sul Fascismo (Milan, Italy: Pan, 1975)
74. and The Case of the Casa Italiana (New York: American Institute of Italian Studies, 1976).
75. Stefano Luconi and Guido Tintori, L'ombra Lunga del Fascio: Canali di Propaganda Fascista per gli 'Italiani d'America' (Milan, Italy: M&B Publishing, 2004).
76. Luconi, La 'Diplomazia Porallela, 19.
77. In the late 1920s, Mussolini started limiting and even outlawing the practice of emigration and came to address past emigrants as "Italians abroad." Beginning in 1928, Mussolini understood that to better foster future Fascist causes in North America, the Italian American community had to be permitted to acquire American citizenship. G. Salvemini, Italian Fascists Activities in the United States, 59.
78. For a discussion on radio broadcasts during Fascism, see Luconi, La 'Diplomazia Parallela, 77.
79. Much research on Italian radio broadcasting before World War II still needs to be systematically undertaken. For an initial discussion, see E. Aleandri, The Italian-American Immigrant Theatre of New York City (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1999), 101-28.
80. Philip V. Cannistraro, "Fascism and Italian Americans," in Silvano M. Tomasi, ed., Perspectives in Italian Immigration and Ethnicity (New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977), 54;
81. John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 78.
82. Emilio Gentile has shown how the Fascist adoption of religious metaphors and collective rituals legitimized the regime. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy, trans. Keith Botsford (1993; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
83. Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, Edoardo and Duilio Susmel, eds., vol. 31 (Florence, Italy: La Fenice, 1951-1963), 114;
84. quoted in Alberto Traldi, Fascism and Fiction: A Survey of Italian Fiction on Fascism (and Its Reception in Britain and the United States) (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1987), 66-67.
85. On the "nationalization of women" in Fascist Italy, see De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women.
86. Earlier studies have approached the political and institutional dimension of his popularity, but as usual, the realm of popular culture remains one of the most elusive ones for historians of immigration.
87. For an initial overview of the links between American cinema and new models of masculinity, see Joan Mellen, Big Bad Wolves: Masculinity in the American Film (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 27-79.
88. On American discourses on gender, see Tom Pendergast, Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000).
89. Goodman, The Evolution of Ethnicity, 211.
90. An excellent essay succinctly detailing the diffidence and the power difference between the prominenti and the manifold Fascist organizations operating in America is Matteo, Pretelli, "I Fasci negli Stati Uniti: Gli Anni Venti," in Emilio Franzina and Matteo Sanfilippo, eds., Il Fascismo e gli Emigrati: La Parabola dei Fasci Italiani all'Estero (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2003), 115-27.
91. Lost in continuous internal antagonism and resentment, the radical and anti-Fascist opponents of Mussolini in New York never unified. Resonating with the ongoing divisions that were also straining the American Left in the 1920s, the panorama of Italian radical newspapers and periodicals published in New York is tellingly diverse, as it included socialist, communist, syndicalist, anarchist, and antifascist publications. M. J. Goodman, The Evolution of Ethnicity, 188-89;
92. Rudolph Vecoli, "The Italian Immigrants in the United States Labor Movement from 1880 to 1929," in Fondazione Brodolini, Gli Italiani Fuori d'Italia: Gli Emigrati Italiani nei Movimenti Operai dei Paesi d'Adozione (1880-1940), ed. Bruno Bezza (Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli, 1983), 257-306;
93. and Fiorello B. Ventresco, "Crises and Unity: The Italian Radicals in America in the 1920s," Ethnic Forum 15, nos. 1-2 (1995): 12-34.
94. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, p. 79.
95. All too rarely, however, famous and established performers interpreted their plays. An exception was the famous Sicilian actress Mimì Aguglia who in 1916, at the Broadway Gaiety Theatre, played the protagonist in Giovanniti's political drama Tenebre Rosse (Come era nel Principio) ("Red Tenebrae: As It Was in the Beginning"). In general, however, the awareness that popular and educational entertainment required large funding went hand in hand with misogynist correlation of popular amusements with loose womanhood. On August 25, 1911, activist Abele Fanchi in an essay titled "Cinema as a Factor of Civilization," published in Il Proletario, acknowledged the unprecedented value of moving pictures. He called for an engagement with the medium but also acknowledged how moving pictures had been looked down on by political activists as a "feminine" and "infantile" craze.
96. M. Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant (New York: Scribner, 1988), 17.
97. In the past ten years, a series of contributions has addressed the historiographical relationship between immigration studies and gender. See, for instance, D. R. Gabaccia, ed., Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), xi-xxvi;
98. Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820-1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994);
99. and Gabaccia, "Italian Immigrant Women in Comparative Perspective," in Frank Sorrentino and Jerome Kruse, eds., The Review of Italian American Studies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2000), 183-98.
100. For specific studies, see Wallace P. Sillanpoa, "The Poetry and Politics of Arturo Giovanniti," in Jerome Krase and William Egelman eds., The Melting Pot and Beyond: Italian Americans in the Year 2000 (Staten Island, NY: American Italian Historical Association, 1987), 175-89;
101. Michael Miller Topp, "Nationalism and Masculinity Splinter the FSI," in M. Miller Topp, Those Without a Country: The Political Culture of Italian American Syndicalists (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 135-73;
102. and Robert Ventresca and Franca Iacovetta, "Virgilia D' Andrea: The Politics of Protest and the Poetry of Exile," in D. R. Gabaccia and F. Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 299-326. D' Andrea was an anarchist, syndicalist, and poet.
103. For a wider perspective, see Joan Wallach Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-class History," in Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 53-67.
104. Clara Zara, "Alle Krumire della Liptzin & Co.," L'operaia, October 24, 1914;
105. quoted in J. Guglielmo, "Italian Women's Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment Trades, 1890s-1940s," in Donna R. Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Women, Gender, and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, 264-65.
106. On this point, see Elisabetta Vezzosi, "Radical Ethnic Brokers: Immigrant Socialist Leaders in the United States between Ethnic Community and the Larger Society," in Donna R. Gabaccia and Fraser M. Ottanelli, eds., Italian Workers of the World: Labor Migration and the Formation of Multiethnic States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
107. Biographies of the Italian divo tend at times to be rather celebratory and even sensationalist, but one still may find them very useful. Some examples include the following: Robert Oberfirst, Rudolph Valentino: The Man Behind the Myth (New York: Citadel Press, 1962);
108. Brad Steiger and Chaw Mank, Valentino: An Intimate and Shocking Exposé (New York: MacFadden Books, 1966);
109. Irving Shulman, Valentino (New York: Trident Press, 1967);
110. Alexander Walker, Rudolph Valentino (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976);
111. Jack Scagnetti, The Intimate Life of Rudolph Valentino (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 1975);
112. Vincent Tajiri, Valentino: The True Life Story (New York: Bantham, 1977);
113. Noel Botham and Peter Donnelly, Valentino: The Love God (New York: Ace Books, 1977);
114. and recently, the detailed and more systematic work by Leider, Dark Lover.
115. See also Michael Morris, Madam Valentino: The Many Lives of Natacha Rambova (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991).
116. Some of these films are The Foolish Virgin (1916), Alimony (1917), A Married Virgin (1918), A Society Sensation (1918), All Night (1918), Virtuous Sinners (1919), Eyes of Youth (1919), The Cheater (1920), Passion's Playground (1920), Once to Every Woman (1920), Stolen Moments (1920), and The Wonderful Chance (1920).
117. The titles range from The Black Hand (1906), In Little Italy (1909), The Detectives of the Italian Bureau (1911), and D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) to The Criminals (1913) and The Padrone's Ward (1913). See G. Bertellini, "Black Hands and White Hearts: Italian Immigrants as 'Urban Racial Types' in Early American Film Culture," Urban History 31 (2004), 374-98;
118. and Bertellini, "Black Hands and White Hearts: Southern Italian Immigrants, Crime, and Race in Early American Cinema," in Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield, eds., Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 207-37.
119. Beban's film career began in 1915 with the two hits, The Italian and The Alien, but continued until 1926.
120. In the five years of his exceptional fame, Valentino played the roles, among others, of an Argentine tango dancer turned hero, a naval officer, a young student, a penniless aristocrat, a sheik, a Spanish torero, a young rajah, a French duke, and a Cossack lieutenant. For a useful industrial, social, and aesthetic overview of the American cinema of the 1920s, see Richard Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
121. On movie palaces, see Robert Berger, The Last Remaining Seats: Movie Palaces of Tinseltown (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1997);
122. and Robert S. Sennett, Hollywood Hoopla: Creating Stars and Selling Movies in the Golden Age of Hollywood (New York: Billboard Books, 1998).
123. "A Latin Lover," Photoplay 20, no. 4 (September 1921): 21.
124. See also Pantomime, September 28, 1921;
125. Ann Jordon, "R Stands for Rudy and Romance," Movie Magazine, September 1925, 40;
126. Dick Dorgan, "A Song of Hate," Photoplay 22, no. 1 (June 1922): 26.
127. Gaylyn Studlar has been the most perceptive about the connection between Valentino's fame and the exotic and Orientalist dance culture (or "madness") of the 1910s; G. Studlar, "Optical Intoxication: Rudolph Valentino and the Dance Madness," in This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 150-98.
128. "I hate Valentino! All men hate Valentino"; Dick Dorgan, "A Song of Hate."
129. "Valentino with his small eyes, his flat nose and large mouth, fails to measure up to the standard of male beauty usually accepted in this country"; Adela Rogers St. Johns, "What Kind of Men Attract Women Most?" Photoplay 25, no. 5 (April 1924): 110.
130. Gordon Gassaway, "The Erstwhile Landscape Gardner," Motion Picture Magazine, July 20, 1921, 92;
131. quoted in Mark Lynn Anderson, "Twilight of the Idols: Make Film Stars, Mass Culture, and the Human Sciences in 1920s America" (Ph.D. diss., University of Rochester, 1999), 188.
132. Miriam Hansen, "Valentino and Female Spectatorship," Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 243-94;
133. Gaylyn Studlar, "Discourses of Gender and Ethnicity: The Construction and De(con)struction of Rudolph Valentino as Other," Film Criticism 13, no. 2 (1989): 18-36;
134. and Studlar, "Optical Intoxication: Rudolph Valentino and the Dance Madness." On the topic of female identity and gender conflicts in the 1920s,
135. see Estelle B. Freedman, "The New Woman: Changing Views of Women in the 1920s," Journal of American History 56, no. 2 (September 1974): 372-93;
136. Peter Filene, Him/Her Self: Sex Role in Modern America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975);
137. and Angela Latham, Posing a Threat: Flappers, Chorus Girls, and Other Brazen Performers of the American 1920s (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000).
138. Steiger and Mank, Valentino, 13.
139. The disregard of non-English sources has privileged analyses of the film experience of native, white, middle-class women, and it has also affected the perception of immigrant women's film reception as an index of their progressive and inevitable Americanization. See Janet Staiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
140. Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998);
141. and Shelley Stamp, Movie-struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000);
142. E. Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars, Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890-1925 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985);
143. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986);
144. Cohen, Making a New Deal. Similarly, studies on New York entertainments tend to focus on American or would-be American patrons and consumers.
145. Consider, for instance, Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981);
146. and David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books, 1993).
147. Valentino's Italian origins were widely known to audiences in America through fan and film magazines, although, after 1921, only in Cobra (1925) did he play the role of an Italian character.
148. Ewen, Immigrant Women, 67.
149. Ewen's interview with Filomena Ognibene (March 1975), quoted in E. Ewen, "City Lights: Immigrants Women and the Rise of the Movies," Signs: Journal of Women and Culture and Society 5, no. 3, supplement (Spring 1980): S58.
150. Ewen, Immigrant Women, 67.
151. On female moviegoing in New York, see also Louise C. Odencrantz, Italian Women in Industry: A Study of Conditions in New York City (New York: Russell Sage, 1919), 235;
152. and on female moviegoing outside New York, see Sharon Hartman Strom, "Italian American Women and Their Daughters in Rhode Island: The Adolescence of Two Generations, 1900-1950," in Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi, eds., The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America (Toronto, Canada: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1978), 191-204.
153. See my discussion of the link between Italian films and Italian immigrant spectator in New York in G. Bertellini, "Shipwrecked Spectators: Italy's Immigrants at the Movies in New York, 1906-1916," The Velvet Light Trap 44 (Fall 1999): 39-53.
154. Sumiko Higashi, Virgins, Vamps, and Flappers (Montreal, Canada: Eden Press, 1978), 55-62;
155. Lucy Fisher, "Greta Garbo and Silent Cinema: The Actress as Art Deco Icon," in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra, eds., A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 476-98;
156. Diane Negra, Off-white Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom (New York: Routledge, 2001), 25-54, 55-83.
157. Sharon Hartman Strom, "Italian American Women," 196.
158. For an initial orientation on the literature on masculinity in 1920s America, see Bill Osgerby, Playboys in Paradise: Masculinity, Youth and Leisure-style in Modern America (New York: Berg, 2001);
159. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993);
160. see also Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
161. Richard De Cordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 107 [italics in original].
162. Anderson, Twilight of the Idols, 131.
163. Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 261-62.
164. R. W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 145. It must be noted that Valentino's raced diversity was not registered or perceived in the same way among black performers and filmmakers. In 1928, race-film director Oscar Micheaux, whose work never achieved any popularity outside black audiences, referred to Lorenzo Tucker, the film star of his newly released Ages of Sin, as the "colored Valentino." In a 1985 interview, the light-skinned Tucker commented on Micheaux's publicity gimmick: "If you really want to know, I was even lighter than Valentino himself."
165. Richard Grupenhoff, The Black Valentino: The Stage and Screen Career of Lorenzo Tucker (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1988), 66.
166. G. Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 57.
167. Ibid., 72.
168. Ibid., 74.
169. I b i d.
170. In his remarkably researched The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993), Robert Aldrich discusses the literary works of Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and E. M. Forster; the paintings of Hans Von Marées; and the photographs of Wilhelm Von Glöden, with their scenes of arcadian beauty, classicist poses, but also sensual abandonment and sexual seduction between Northern European artists and intellectuals and Southern Italian peasants, often set amid ancient ruins and landscapes.
171. Carlo Bertelli, "La Penisola Ermafrodita," in C. Bertelli and Giulio Bollati, ed., Storia d'Italia. Annali 2/1 L'Immagine Fotografica 1845-1945 (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1979), 84-86. The same contention was shared by scholars and commentators active in Fascist Italy. In 1934, writing about the Abruzzi, the Central Italian region where decadent Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio was born, established literary critic and historian Mario Praz contended that it was a "remote and ignorant" land whose inhabitants practiced a primordial and instinctive (sexual) life;
172. C. Mario Praz, La Carne, la Morte e il Diavolo nella Letteratura Romantica (1930; Florence, Italy: Sansom, 1976), 309.
173. For a general discussion on homophobia in Fascist culture, see Dario Petrosino, "Traditori della Stirpe: Il Razzismo contro gli Omosessuali nella Stampa del Fascismo," in Alberto Burgio and Luciano Casali, eds., Studi sul Razzismo Italiano (Bologna, Italy: Clueb, 1996), 89-108.
174. Chauncey, Gay New York, 33.
175. On photojournalism and urban ethnography, see Peter B. Hales, Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839-1915 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984);
176. and Maren Stange, Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
177. On the convergence of urban realism and racial discourse, see Cathy Boeckmann, A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892-1912 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000);
178. Michael Davitt Bell, The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993);
179. and Joseph P. Cosco, Imagining Italians: The Clash of Romance and Race in American Perceptions, 1880-1910 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
180. The popularity of Valentino within past and recent gay culture is addressed in Kenneth Anger, "Rudy's Rep," Hollywood Babylon (New York: Dell, 1981), 155-170;
181. Anger, "Valentino Remembered, Valentino Discovered," in Eva Orbanz, ed., There Is a New Star in Heaven ... Valentino (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1979), 19-22;
182. quoted in Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 263. Hansen also mentions as a source the interviews collected in Before Stonewall (Archive for Gay and Lesbian History, New York).
183. La Follia di New York (FdNY) published poems in Neapolitan that dealt with Valentino's terrible illness and sudden death but also that joked about his amazing appeal to all women, Italian and not, young and mature; Ernesto Castellucci, "A Rodolfo, Valentino," FdNY, August 29, 1926, 4.
184. In early September 1926, FdNY published other, more-serious poems, composed in Neapolitan and Sicilian, celebrating his talent and memorializing with great affection his tragic destiny. Pasquale Buongiovanni, "Povero Valentino," FdNY, September 5, 1926, 4 [Neapolitan];
185. Giovanni De Rosalia, "Rodolfo Valentino," FdNY, September 9, 1926, 4 [Sicilian];
186. Francesco Amodio, "'A Morte'e Valentino," FdNY, September 19, 1926, 4 [Neapolitan].
187. In the city's Italian ghetto, eulogistic records ("Povero Valentino") were sold, and filmed footage about his funeral was widely and repeatedly exhibited at the local movie theatres; FdNY, September 5, 1926, 3.
188. After his death, his last movie, The Son of the Sheik (United Artists, 1926), broke all box office records.
189. See Moving Picture World, September 11, 1926, 2;
190. and MPW, September 18, 1926, 172. Italian papers also advertised the re-release of Valentino's films and their enormous success;
191. PIA, August 29, 1926, 3.
192. PIA, August 31, 1926, 3. The New York requiem mass, held at the St. Malachy Roman Catholic Church on Forty-ninth Street (the so-called actors' church), was co-celebrated by Father Giuseppe Congedo of the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary, who was also Valentino's child friend in Castellaneta and who had heard his confession on the day before his death. The music accompanying the mass was performed by two Italian soloists, Guido Ciccolini of the Chicago Civic Opera and Demitri Onofri of the San Carlo Opera Company.
193. See PIA, August 25, 1926, 3.
194. On the Chicago Memorial, see PIA, September 1, 1926, 3;
195. and PIA, September 5, 1926, 2.
196. PIA, August 25, 1926, 2;
197. and PIA, August 27, 1926, 3.
198. I have used the English version of the quote as it appeared in MPW, September 11, 1926, 1.
199. See also PIA, September 3, 1926, 3.
200. Quoted in George S. Ullman, Valentino as I Knew Him (New York: A. L. Burt Company, 1926), 183-84.
201. I am here obviously borrowing the term double consciousness from W. E. B. Du Bois, The Soul of Black Folk (1903; New York: New American Library, 1969).
202. Rodolfo Valentino, "To the Man (?) who wrote the editorial headed 'Pink Powder Puffs' in Sundays's Tribune," The Chicago Herald-Examiner, July 19, 1926,
203. now in Ullman, Valentino, 187-88. This response was quickly flashed over wires and cables to other newspapers and periodicals.
204. Valentino's sister-in-law continued to defend Valentino's virility after his death: see "Dichiarazioni della Cognata di Rodolfo Valentino," PIA, August 28, 1926, 1.
205. See I. C. Falbo, "Rodolfo Valentino," PIA, August 24, 1926, 1;
206. PIA, August 25, 1926, 1;
207. FdNY, August 29, 1926, 1.
208. PIA, August 24, 1926. 3.
209. Totò Giurato, "Rodolfo Valentino," Il Grido della Stirpe, August 28, 1926, 1.
210. PIA, August 26, 1926, 3.
211. See also footnote 1.
212. PIA, August 25, 1926, 2.
213. Mosquito, "Cronache d'Arte: In Morte di Valentino," Il Carroccio, September 1926, 283.
214. I b i d.
215. I. C. Falbo, "Il Trionfo del Cinematografo," PIA, August 26, 1926, 1. The hostility toward the media was a position shared and articulated by several American prominent intellectuals.
216. H. L. Mencken, "On Hollywood - and Valentino," in Prejudices: Sixth Series (New York: Knopf, 1927), 290-311;
217. and John Dos Passos, The Big Money (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936).
218. Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in Tania Modleski, ed., Studies of Entertainments: Critical Approaches to Mass Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 188-207.
219. At the turn of the twentieth century, the interest for the modern crowd was a shared subject of study among a number of European and American social theorists. See, for instance, Scipio Sighele, I Delitti della Folla (1891; Turin, Italy: Bocca, 1903);
220. and Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des Foules (Paris: F. Alcan, 1895),
221. trans. in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Viking, 1960), 38-39.
222. In America, the most popular work on the subject was Robert E. Park, The Crowd and the Public and Other Essays (1904; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972).
223. Ironheart (alias Riccardo Cordiferro), "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi," FdNY, September 5, 1926, 1.
224. PIA refused to start raising money for a memorial monument for Valentino because another, implicitly more important, fund-raising regarding Italy's war debts was under way; PIA, August 31, 1926, 3.
225. Riccardo Cordiferro, "Genio e ... Miseria," FdNY, August 29, 1926, 8. Ironheart, "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi," 1.
226. Mosquito, "Cronache d'Arte," 284-85.
227. This derogative gendering of mass culture was not an exclusive feature of Italian American patriotic criticism. The most advanced form of Italian leftist criticism reproduced the same masculinist allegations. In his 1917 review of the film-acting style of Italian silent film diva Lyda Borelli, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci explicitly opposed the feminine realms of sexual enticement and spectatorial craze to the dominion of masculine rationality and artistic restraint allegedly achieved over centuries of intellectual progress. Quite interestingly, in an article about Valentino published in fall 1926, Fascist commentator Ornello N. Simone employed the same dystopian reference to the Thracian poet and musician Orpheus and even the same wording used by Gramsci nine years earlier. O. N. Simone, "L'Arte di Rodolfo Valentino," Il Grido della Stirpe, October 2, 1926, 6;
228. and A. Gramsci, "In Principio era il Sesso," L'Avanti, February 16, 1917,
229. now in Gramsci, Letteratura e Vita Nazionale (1977; Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991), 330.
230. By the late 1930s and early 1940s, the increasing political and military antagonism between Italy and the United States, not to mention the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 1941), ended the somewhat unproblematic coexistence of Fascism and Americanism. World War II was also the period in which the modern Italianness of Valentino could be recaptured as it occurred in literary fictionalizations of Valentino's life in the Italian American community such as Cav. D. M., Vita Amorosa di Rodolfo Valentino (New York: Italian Book Company, 1944).