4
The Hooded Falcon
“It looks like a dream, doesn’t it?”
Menzies was showing off the bamboo wharf where the Prince of Mongols goes in search of treasure rare enough to win the hand of the Caliph’s daughter. The water surrounding the Island of Wak had been tinted the color of black ink, its latticework and colonnades a riot of interlacing colors, tile roofs set awry, streets shooting skyward. “No,” he lamented. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever get a chance like this again. But I’m going to do the sets for a picture by Schenck and I’m going to try to get away with a goofy tenement. Perhaps I can.”
He had come to regard what he did as “staging” a movie. More than straight architecture, it was a way of prepping a film for the director and the actors, setting the scene for the story to come by enhancing the tone and texture of its individual parts. Neorealism wasn’t in Hollywood’s vocabulary, certainly not in Menzies’. What he was seeking instead was a kind of graphic truth, layered and nourishing and equal to the formidable capacities of the screen. “Oh, this is the realm of the pictures, isn’t it? This is the thing they can do—if they’d only see it. Realism is so unnecessary when we have at our disposal all the resources of the camera to produce effects that can only be rivaled by dreams.”
He had been kept on the payroll over the long months it took to commit The Thief of Bagdad to film, even as he found himself with little to do in the waning days of production. Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall had gone on without him—the sets were designed by Harold Grieve—and all he had in the way of new work were the settings and costumes for Eddie Knoblock’s new play, a colorful tragedy of nineteenth-century France called The Lullaby. Knoblock would remember pulling an all-nighter with Menzies as they designed approximately sixty costumes. “I had a heap of different samples of materials by my side and pinned the appropriate ones on each design as Menzies drew it with lightning speed. He then made the sketches for the scenery—ten sets of them. I don’t know at what hour we finished. But we got the work done. I have never come across a more inventive or facile artist than Bill Menzies.”
Fairbanks was generous in sharing credit for Thief, and items trumpeting Menzies’ contributions began appearing long before the picture was ready for release. The film’s souvenir program highlighted its design in a section titled “Translating Fantasy into Pictures.” Halfway through its premiere showing the audience was applauding every new set as it came across the screen, and the New York Sun described the experience as “a sort of orgy of rapture.” In January, George Fitzmaurice wired:
HEAR ALL KINDS OF GREAT STORIES ABOUT YOU THAT WILL PROBABLY BOOST YOUR SALARY WAY OUT OF REACH, BUT IF YOU STICK TO EARTH MIGHT TAKE YOU TO VENICE AND PARIS LEAVING EARLY MAY.
What Fitzmaurice had in mind wasn’t clear, and Menzies, by May 1924, was at work instead on a brace of pictures for actress Norma Talmadge and another for her sister, Constance. The Talmadge girls were under contract to Norma’s husband, producer Joseph M. Schenck, who based his West Coast operations at United Studios, where he owned a controlling interest. Schenck had lost his staff art director, Stephen Goosson, to First National, causing him to seek a replacement. Menzies accepted all three Talmadge assignments on a freelance basis, dispensing with a picture called Fight on a Friday and commencing work on the untitled Constance Talmadge comedy the following Monday. Her Night of Romance, as it came to be known, was a farce in the Lubitsch tradition, set in England and pairing the youngest of the three Talmadge girls—Natalie, the middle sister, was married to Buster Keaton—with Ronald Colman as a dipsomaniacal nobleman. The third picture of the group, The Lady, proved the most challenging, its last-minute choice of director, Frank Borzage, striving for mood in the settings as well as the camerawork, Norma Talmadge rising to one of the best performances of her career as Polly Pearl, the long-suffering heroine of Martin Brown’s popular play.*
Then Menzies was on to grander things, the chance to do another picture of Thief-like proportions, this time working with his wife’s old friend Rudolph Valentino under the aegis of Valentino’s new production company. The move was the work of Valentino’s wife, a hard-driving woman of Irish descent named Winifred Shaughnessy. At the age of seventeen, “Wink” (as she was known to her family) reinvented herself as the exotic Natacha Rambova, the turban-wearing consort of Theodore Kosloff, Russian-born ballet star and teacher. Soon, Rambova was distinguishing herself more for her designs than for her dancing, and she landed the job of costuming Cecil B. DeMille’s The Woman God Forgot when she was scarcely twenty. That assignment led to others for DeMille and, eventually, to a stretch as both set and costume designer for Alla Nazimova. It was ahead of Nazimova’s production of Camille that Rambova initially encountered Madam’s choice for the role of Armand. At first, their association generated more tension than synergy, but it was Rambova who was seen on Valentino’s arm at the West Coast premiere of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the film that would effectively make him a star.
They weren’t married until 1923, delayed by Valentino’s inability to obtain a quick divorce from his first wife, the actress Jean Acker. In the meantime, Rambova increasingly involved herself in Valentino’s professional affairs, designing his costumes for Beyond the Rocks and progressing to art direction on The Young Rajah. The latter film particularly displeased her. “Instead of letting the actor who does fine work go on doing it,” she raged, “they give him cheap material, cheap sets, cheap casts, cheap everything. The idea then is to make as much money from that personality as possible with the least outlay.” At Rambova’s urging, Valentino broke his contract with Famous Players-Lasky and the studio promptly suspended him. To earn a living over the time he was enjoined from acting onstage or in movies, he embarked on a seventeen-week promotional dance tour with Rambova that would cover forty cities at a salary of $7,000 a week.
Peace came nearly a year later, with Valentino obligated to Famous Players for two additional films. He would then be free to join a new enterprise, Ritz-Carlton Pictures, the brainchild of one J. D. Williams, formerly the general manager of Associated First National. Working out his commitment in New York, first in Monsieur Beaucaire, then A Sainted Devil, Valentino and his wife made elaborate plans for his first independent production. “I was conceited enough,” Rambova later wrote, “to imagine that I could force the producers into giving Rudy the kind of production which our artistic ambitions called for—productions such as Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, or The Black Pirate.” Indeed, it was seeing Thief at the Liberty Theatre that convinced her that Menzies was “the cleverest dramatic architect in the business today.” On April 18, 1924, S. George Ullman, Valentino’s manager, wired Menzies in care of the Fairbanks studio in Los Angeles:
ARE YOU AVAILABLE AND WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED TAKING CHARGE ART WORK ON RUDOLPH VALENTINOS FIRST INDEPENDENT PICTURE STOP SPANISH ABOUT FIFTEENTH CENTURY ANSWER SIX WEST FORTY EIGHT STREET.
Menzies spent the summer in New York, conferring with Ullman and the Valentinos while Rudy’s two final pictures for Famous Players were filmed at the company’s Long Island studio. Working from an original story called The Scarlet Power, Menzies envisioned the Moorish Kingdom of Granada as a sleek reinterpretation of Bagdad, tiled and marbled spaces dominated by pools and fountains, symmetrical where Bagdad was anything but, vast in their area and peopled by the elegantly garbed figures of the Muslim aristocracy. As with Thief, his renderings were outsized and colorful, and as with Fairbanks, he portrayed Valentino’s figure of a young noble throughout.
A full-page ad in the trades announced him as the “creator” of the sets for Valentino’s first Ritz picture, which would eventually become known as The Hooded Falcon. “Menzies is the magician who designed the famous sets for the wonder scenes of Fairbanks’ Thief of Bagdad,” the copy blared. “In our first Valentino-Ritz, the exotic sumptuosity of the most extravagant era of human society gives Menzies the opportunity for the chef d’oeuvre of his entire artistic career. We want the industry to know that this will be Menzies’ masterpiece.” Casting was already under way, with actress Nita Naldi, who was Valentino’s leading lady in Blood and Sand and A Sainted Devil, set for the part of a Moorish princess. Toward the end of production on Sainted Devil, the Valentinos also invited director Joseph Henabery onto the project, giving the former Griffith assistant his first chance to make “a big picture—a costume production.”
With both Beaucaire and Sainted Devil out of the way, the Valentinos left for Europe in high spirits, intent on researching ancient Spain and gathering antiquities that would lend authenticity to Menzies’ fanciful designs. A full script was being written by June Mathis, who, as the scenarist of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Conquering Power, and Camille, had played an important role in Valentino’s ascension. In August, Menzies had a wire from John Considine, Jr., Joe Schenck’s general manager, offering him the new Constance Talmadge comedy. After pausing to consider his options, Menzies left for home on the 15th, grateful, perhaps, for a small job against the difficult business of an upcoming spectacle.
When Schenck assumed responsibility for his sister-in-law’s career, the year was 1919 and “Dutch” Talmadge was known as a light comedienne, first for Fine Arts, under which she most notably appeared for D. W. Griffith, later for Selznick’s Select Pictures Corporation, where she made as many as eight movies a year. Schenck turned her over to the husband-wife writing team of John Emerson and Anita Loos, who conceived a five-reel version of an old Clyde Fitch comedy called The Virtuous Vamp. Astonished at the film’s success, Schenck rewarded them with a check for $50,000. “Thus began a series of comedies for Dutch,” Loos wrote, “in which her career paralleled Norma’s and one success followed another. Our pictures were filmed under the happiest circumstances; because the entertainment empire ruled by the Schenck brothers was centered in New York, we worked there instead of Hollywood. Our productions were a family matter, in which Joe’s main interest was to keep his mother-in-law happy.”
Their collaboration continued after the Talmadge productions moved west, both actresses settling into a comfortable output of two pictures a year. Over time, Emerson and Loos fell away, and the brown-eyed blonde hit a critical and commercial slump. For all its pretensions, Her Night of Romance was a box office flop, and again the Emersons were called to the rescue. The result, Learning to Love, would be Dutch Talmadge’s last genuine hit, a slender twist on The Virtuous Vamp, pitting her flirty Patricia Stanhope (aka Pat the Petter) opposite Antonio Moreno, Johnny Harron, and Wallace MacDonald, among others. There was nothing terribly challenging in what Menzies was required to do for the show, as the work of director Sidney Franklin focused on the boisterous interplay among Pat’s various suitors, the closing scenes in Paris lending the picture its only real color.
While the Valentinos were away, Joe Henabery met with Adolph Zukor to give notice. He had been with Famous Players, releasing through Paramount, since 1920, and had at all times considered it a pleasant association. Zukor couldn’t understand why he would leave the security of a Famous Players contract for a start-up like Ritz-Carlton. Costume pictures hadn’t been doing well at the box office, yet Henabery seemed to relish the challenge. “Let me tell you something,” Zukor said finally. “We are putting up the money for J. D. Williams’ Ritz-Carlton Pictures, and we will release the Valentino pictures.” Henabery was thunderstruck. “You could have knocked me over with a feather,” he wrote. “I knew the Valentinos would be furious when they discovered they were still tied up with Paramount.”
Williams, it seemed, had turned to the only source of financing open to him. And in doing so, he immediately brought to Ritz-Carlton the same financial constraints that had caused the Valentinos to leave Famous Players. Program pictures were to cost no more than $100,000, while no Valentino epic could cost more than $500,000. Yet the new picture, as visualized by Rambova, Valentino, and Menzies, had been estimated at $850,000 to $1 million. This was, of course, cheaper than Fairbanks’ picture, but then Fairbanks largely financed his own productions, and if he wanted to spend $1.7 million on a movie, there was no one to tell him he couldn’t. Moreover, the Valentinos were famously profligate with money, unable to manage their own affairs, much less those of a company. And where George Ullman brought fiscal restraint, he also brought a grinding tension between himself and the headstrong Rambova.
Williams’ short-term solution was to find another property for Valentino, one that could be filmed quickly and cheaply. Impulsively, and without the knowledge of the Valentinos, he purchased the screen rights to a modern-dress play titled Cobra, which had enjoyed a brief run at the Hudson Theatre with Louis Calhern and Judith Anderson in the leads. The role of Jack Race would be retooled for Valentino, who would play Count Rodrigo Torriani to Nita Naldi’s Elsie Van Zile. When Rudy and Natacha docked in New York, Valentino sporting a reddish goatee he had grown for The Hooded Falcon, Williams informed them of his duplicity. Not only would Falcon have to be made for considerably less than its estimate, but it would have to be made in California.
“The Valentinos,” wrote Henabery, “were truly babes in the woods in business, because they signed a contract with a promoter without any knowledge as to how and where he was going to get the required finances. I’m sure that had I known the situation earlier, and what it would lead to, I would not have left Paramount.”
Williams was behaving as if the film could still be made, and Ullman wired Menzies on the 13th of November:
ARRIVING HOLLYWOOD TWENTIETH VALENTINO TWENTY SECOND
STOP START CHIEF DRAUGHTSMAN ON SALARY TWENTY SECOND
On the way out by train, Valentino, Rambova, and Henabery read June Mathis’ screenplay, which was admittedly written in haste, as Mathis had committed to a string of Colleen Moore comedies for First National. They all agreed the script wouldn’t do, and their early days in Hollywood were complicated by a collective effort to fix it. Menzies, meanwhile, assembled a crack team of illustrators, Paul Youngblood, Park French, and Bill Flannery among them. He followed the same technique he had devised for Thief, constructing his set visualizations in miniature so as to attain the same qualities of illustration on-screen as they had on paper. “Much could be said about what we did,” he later said, “but the most important of all the things we did was the devising of a scheme whereby the artist’s design could be projected, to the smallest detail and shadow effect, into the finished set.… It was accomplished by reproducing to scale in every detail a model from the artist’s original drawing, and from this model cutting templates which were scaled up to the actual size of the set.”
The art team assembled for The Hooded Falcon poses with one of the models made to test the “playability” of a set. From left to right: Menzies, Paul Youngblood, Fredric Hope, Bob Lee, Park French, Paul Crawley, and Bill Flannery. In 1937, Fred Hope’s untimely death would bring Menzies to Selznick International.
Plans went forth until the year’s end forced a shift in priorities. “One particularly tough problem confronted us,” recalled Joe Henabery, “because the actors and people under contract would soon have to be paid salaries. If we didn’t get started soon on the new picture, a lot of money would go down the drain.” Valentino was unhappy—not only at the substitution of another story but at the alienation of the woman who “opened the door of opportunity” for him with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—June Mathis. “I cannot tell you how sorry I was not to be able to accept her script,” he lamented, “but it just would not do, and we were wasting so much time. So we just had to postpone that production. I shall make this modern picture, Cobra, while the script … is being rewritten.”
Menzies and his crew were sent scrambling, and in short order there was a new set of renderings in charcoal and watercolor, interiors distinguished by the richness of their design, opening up the play in their imaginative use of depth and detail. Urged on by Rambova, who was effectively the film’s producer, Menzies created settings that were, in Henabery’s opinion, too elaborate for the kind of picture they were making. “Mrs. Valentino had great taste and she was a perfectionist,” he said, “and expense didn’t seem to worry her. In Cobra, we had a nightclub set that was larger than any I had ever seen in real life. It required something like 150 Kleig lights, spotlights, and Cooper Hewitts to illuminate it. Even today, few producers would go for such an expenditure.”
Shooting got under way in the ancient palace of the Torriani, as settings for the Café del Mare and the later New York segments of Cobra were still under construction. The set for an early flashback was simplified considerably, and the mortar simulating Menzies’ flagstone floors never completely dried in the cold seasonal air. Valentino later confessed that he despised every minute he worked on Cobra. “He didn’t like it,” said his friend and employee Luther “Lou” Mahoney, “but said it gave his wife a chance to prove her abilities as a head of film production, and as a person who understood such problems that come up in pictures.”
With Cobra in the can, Ritz-Carlton returned once more to the matter of its original project. Bored “to tears” with a modern story, Rambova was still absorbed in The Hooded Falcon when all other resources had turned to Cobra. Joe Henabery wanted Anthony Coldewey to do the rewrite, Coldewey having adapted Cobra to the screen. Nita Naldi dropped out of the picture, replaced by actress and former Ziegfeld beauty Sally Long. Henabery, who came down with pleurisy during Cobra and had to work with his chest taped, dropped out as well, his place taken by actor-director Alan Hale.
The Valentinos fled to Palm Springs with the completion of Cobra, leaving J. D. Williams to prepare it for release. No one seemed satisfied with the film, its awkward mix of light comedy and tragedy unlikely to appeal to any particular demographic. Said Joe Henabery, “The female lead was the best part in the play—a vamp. Neither of the two principal parts could be made attractive to audiences—they were both heels.” Menzies kept with The Hooded Falcon, and sets were reportedly under construction, but then Williams began cutting back on staff, seemingly unable to bring the budget into line with the resources at hand. Arthur Edeson, who shot Thief of Bagdad, was contracted as cinematographer, but never officially started. Long’s casting was announced in late February 1925, just days before the picture folded.
“When the Valentinos got word The Hooded Falcon was to be called off,” Henabery wrote in his memoir, “they rushed home upset by the change in plans. It must have been contractual obligations that forced the Valentinos to accept the situation, although I believe J. D. Williams soft-soaped them that The Hooded Falcon was far from ready for production, but that it would be made after Cobra. I feel sure he was fighting for time to solve his problems and did not tell the Valentinos the full story about Paramount’s position and Zukor’s objection to the costume pictures.”
On March 5, 1925, the Los Angeles Times reported that George Ullman was in talks with Joe Schenck, who had recently concluded a six-picture deal to bring Norma Talmadge to United Artists and now proposed to do the same for Valentino. “Although nothing definite has been settled yet, Mr. Schenck and I have just been in conference and negotiations are proceeding favorably,” Ullman told the paper. “I think a definite announcement may be forthcoming by the end of this week.” The item doubled as an obituary for The Hooded Falcon, which faded into obscurity, its only legacy being Falcon Lair, the name given the eight-acre estate the Valentinos had purchased in Beverly Hills. “If for no other reason than to have given the public a glimpse at the remarkably beautiful creations of Bill Menzies,” Rambova wrote, “it was a pity that this film was never produced.”
Menzies returned to Schenck, where he designed the opulent settings for Her Sister from Paris, the new comedy for Constance Talmadge, and the considerably more streamlined backgrounds for sister Norma’s basilic romance, Graustark. He was, by now, in solid with John Considine, and writer Frank Daugherty could remember Considine earnestly introducing Menzies as a “genius.” Wrote Daugherty: “As we chatted, I talked a little of Chaplin’s sets, if ‘sets’ they can be called—naming a launch dock in San Pedro, a cobbled street, cheap frames on a studio backlot—and saying I admired their simplicity more than the gaudy and meaningless monstrosities most of the studios are producing. I was a little surprised to find that he agreed with me and could tell me what I was not aware of myself, why I liked them, for he pointed out how the old-fashioned photography to which Chaplin has given grim allegiance accentuates their values and makes them ‘realistic’ in the best sense of that term.”
On July 20, 1925, after fulfilling an assignment for producer Sam Goldwyn, Menzies signed a one-year agreement with Considine and Joseph M. Schenck Productions. The deal called for a weekly rate of $350, whether or not he was actually working on a picture, and half of anything Considine could get for his services on outside productions. Recognizing the logjam logistics of most any production entity, the rate would jump to $400 a week whenever Menzies was required to work on two pictures simultaneously, $500 when his services were needed on three. The total value of the deal could be upward of $20,000, bringing Menzies, as he approached his twenty-ninth birthday, an unprecedented level of security in a notoriously insecure industry. Within weeks, he had purchased a plot of land in Beverly Hills for $1,500 and was set to build a house entirely of his own design.
Menzies always said that he followed Valentino to Schenck and United Artists, and in a sense he did. Schenck, now a partner in UA, was in the process of ramping up production, and his deal with Valentino represented a significant expansion of his filmmaking activities, which had, up to then, been limited to the pictures of his wife, his sister-in-law, and his brother-in-law, comedian Buster Keaton. George Ullman handled the negotiations, which, at first, had Natacha Rambova’s complete approval. The deal would establish the Rudolph Valentino Production Company, and all monies would flow into it. Valentino would receive $7,500 a week and a percentage of the profits from three pictures per year. The principal sticking point turned out to be Rambova’s own obsessive involvement in the production of her husband’s pictures. Schenck, and particularly Considine, wanted her out of the way. “When the contracts were ready to sign,” wrote Ullman, “the Valentinos returned from Palm Springs, and Natacha then discovered that, in order to obtain this contract, Rudy was obliged to promise that she was to have no voice whatsoever in the making of any pictures which it called for.”
Ullman credited Rambova with “a great deal of common sense” in yielding “with considerable grace” to the inevitable, “realizing what it meant to her illustrious husband thus to be taken into the fold of United Artists.” Lou Mahoney remembered a much different reaction: “That contract was the breaking point for the Valentinos. It was arranged by Mr. Ullman that Mrs. Valentino would have nothing to do with the pictures that were to be made by the Schenck organization. She was entirely shoved out. She was very much upset with Mr. Valentino for signing that contract.”
The Valentinos attended a dinner Schenck gave for United Artists president Hiram Abrams in April, and Rudy’s first picture for UA was announced the following month. The Untamed was a modernization of an Alexander Pushkin novelette, a vehicle devised for Valentino by Rupert Hughes and scripted by Hans Kraly. The picture, Schenck declared in a statement, was to be made “on an elaborate scale,” an assertion supported by the evocative designs issuing forth from Menzies’ studio, moody charcoal-and-wash drawings that portrayed the dashing figure of a Tartar bandit in the Czarina’s reign, a lieutenant of the Imperial Guard turned a Russian Robin Hood by principle and fate.
A Viennese nightclub for the Constance Talmadge comedy Her Sister from Paris (1925). Framing the action through a window or a doorway would become a favorite way of suggesting an elaborate interior with what was essentially a partial set. (AUTHOR’S COLLECTION)
Energized by the Zorro-like character—a riff on Fairbanks’ similarly masked creation—and the complementary boldness of Menzies’ illustrations, Valentino could not wait to begin filming. “There is so much color, so much fire to the part that I hope to make of my role in The Untamed the most interesting and vivid of any kind that I have ever played,” he enthused, looking forward to a July start date. “The story deals with a people, and conditions, with which we are almost entirely unfamiliar. Just the mere mention of ‘Tartar bandit’ is enough to conjure all manner of romantic and wildly exotic visions.”
Mercifully, Rambova was also at work on a project, and Menzies found himself allocated to that production as well. In an attempt to ameliorate his wife’s sense of betrayal, Valentino reluctantly agreed to underwrite a picture for her. “I had previously had a long talk with Rudy, during which we discussed the matter pro and con, realizing its inadvisability,” Ullman remembered. “But Valentino assured me that, in the cause of peace and of rest for himself, he must give in and do as she wished.… Before I left, it was decided to allow Natacha to try her hand at an independent picture, which she declared could be produced for approximately $30,000.” There was surprise all around that Rambova had written a comedy, since she was, in Ullman’s words, “almost totally devoid of a sense of humor.” Still, he had to concede that What Price Beauty was an excellent job, making “clever fun of the agonies women undergo, the time and money they spend in beauty parlors.”
What Price Beauty went into production before The Untamed, and was “all but completed” by the 24th of June. Menzies, who was admittedly “very fond” of Rambova, indulged her whims while doing his level best to keep the settings within budget. Using draperies and black-lacquered floors and artfully frosted mirrors, he accomplished as much with suggestion as hard scenery, permitting the costumes of twenty-two-year-old Gilbert Adrian to assume an unusual prominence. “We did everything we could to save money,” said Lou Mahoney, who was helping Menzies with props. “If we needed a prop, I would grab a truck and run and get the prop and even return it the same day to save some of the rental fee. It was just impossible to make the film properly for less than what was spent.”
Kyrilla’s fortresslike estate in a remote Russian province, where much of the action in The Eagle (1925) takes place. As with Cobra, Menzies designed sets that were substantial to the point of excess. (MENZIES FAMILY COLLECTION)
Whatever budget that remained went toward a futuristic dream sequence depicting various types of womanhood. “Natacha dubbed me ‘the intellectual type of vampire without race or creed or country,’ ” remembered actress Myrna Loy, who made her debut in the film. “Adrian designed an extraordinary red velvet pajama outfit for me, with a short blond wig that came to little points on my forehead, very very snaky.” Rambova intended What Price Beauty to show that she could make a commercial picture “at a very small cost” as well as an “artistic” success. When the movie wrapped, however, its cost, according to Ullman, had climbed to nearly $100,000.
What Price Beauty was as ethereal and “bizarre” (as Myrna Loy judged it) as The Untamed, retitled The Black Eagle, The Lone Eagle, and, finally, just The Eagle, was solid and earthbound. But where Cobra, under Rambova’s supervision, was overdesigned, given its featherweight story line, The Eagle carried the weight and flair of a Fairbanks picture, a franchise to which Valentino clearly aspired. Filming began on July 19, 1925, the tension with Rambova and the cost overruns on her picture having had a telling effect on its star’s well-being, presaging his untimely death from a perforated ulcer. “I remember he had something very wrong with his stomach,” director Clarence Brown said. “His breath could knock you over and he was mortified by it, but there was nothing he could do.”
The Eagle was at once both ornate and chilly from the deliberate lack of color in Menzies’ elegant renderings. Appropriately, it was the picture in production when the Valentinos announced a “marital vacation.” Rambova left Hollywood for New York and Paris prior to its completion. She and Valentino, as it turned out, would never see each other again.