It Takes Two to Tango, but Only One to Squirm

By current standards, the needs of a young man-­about-­town in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1921 were few—an occasional pack of straw-­tipped Melachrinos, an evening of canoeing on the Ten Mile River, with its concomitant aphrodisiac, a pail of chocolate creams, and a mandatory thirty-­five cents daily for admission to the movies. My fluctuating resources (most of the family’s money evaporated in visionary schemes like a Yiddish musical-­comedy production of The Heart of Midlothian) often forced me to abjure tobacco and amour, but I would sooner have parted with a lung than missed such epochal attractions as Tol’able David or Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and I worked at some very odd jobs indeed to feed my addiction to the cinema. One of them, I recall, was electroplating radiators in a small, dismal factory that turned out automobile parts. It was an inferno of dirt and noise; half a dozen presses, operated by as many scorbutic girls whose only diet seemed to be pork pies, were kept busy turning out the honeycomb radiators used in several cars at that time, and it was my task to baptize these artifacts in a huge vat filled with boiling acid. The fumes that rose from the immersion were so noisome that within a month I lost eleven pounds and developed nightmares during which I shrieked like a brain-­fever bird. Compelled under parental pressure to resign, I wheedled a job as clerk at the baked-­goods counter of Shepard’s, a department store that dealt in fancy groceries. Overnight, my anemia magically vanished. Cramming myself with cinnamon buns, broken cookies, jelly doughnuts, ladyfingers, brownies, macaroons—anything I could filch while the floorwalker’s back was turned—I blew up to fearful proportions. When not folding boxes or discomposing customers, I transported fresh stock from the bakery on the top floor of the building, a function that eventually led to my downfall. One afternoon, spying a beguiling tureen, I snatched a heaping ladleful of what I thought was whipped cream but which proved to be marshmallow. Just as I was gagging horribly, I heard behind me the agonized whisper, “Cheese it, here comes Mr. Madigan!” and the floorwalker appeared, his mustache aquiver. He treated me to a baleful scrutiny, inquired whether I was subject to fits, and made a notation on his cuff. The following payday, my envelope contained a slip with a brief, unemotional dispatch. It stated that due to a country-­wide shortage of aprons, the company was requisitioning mine and returning me to civilian life.

After a fortnight of leisure, my bloat had disappeared but so had my savings, and, unable to wangle credit or passes from the picture houses, I reluctantly took a job selling vacuum cleaners from door to door. The equipment that graced my particular model must have weighed easily three hundred pounds, and I spent a hideous day struggling on and off streetcars with it and beseeching suburban matrons to hold still for a demonstration. I was met everywhere by a vast apathy, if not open hostility; several prospects, in fact, saw fit to pursue me with brooms. Finally, a young Swedish housewife, too recent an immigrant to peg a tyro, allowed me to enter her bungalow. How I managed to blow all the fuses and scorch her curtains, I have no idea, but it happened in an Augenblick. The next thing I knew, I was fleeing through an azalea bed under a hail of Scandinavian cusswords, desperately hugging my appliances and coils of hose. The coup de grâce came upon my return to the warehouse. It transpired I had lost a nozzle and various couplings, elbows, and flanges, the cost of which I had to make good by pawning the household samovar.

It was more or less inevitable these early travails should return from limbo when, as happened recently, I settled myself into a projection room at the Museum of Modern Art with a print of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Actually, I would have much preferred to reinspect another vehicle of Valentino’s called Blood and Sand, which co-­starred Nita Naldi, down whom it used to be my boyhood ambition to coast on a Flexible Flyer, but the ravages of time had overtaken it. (Miss Naldi, mirabile dictu, is as symmetrical as ever.) The Four Horsemen, however, provided the great lover with a full gamut for his histrionic talents, and a notable supporting cast, containing, among others, Alice Terry, Wallace Beery, Alan Hale, Stuart Holmes, Joseph Swickard, and Nigel de Brulier. It was difficult to believe that only thirty-­two years before—only yesterday, really, I told myself comfortingly—it had kept me on the edge of my chair. Ah, well, the chairs were narrower in those days. You positively get lost in the ones at the Museum.

The Four Horsemen, as any nonagenarian will remember, was based on Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s best seller. It was released on the heels of the First World War, and its pacifist theme was unquestionably responsible for a measure of its success, but Valentino’s reptilian charm, his alliances with Winifred Hudnut and Natacha Rambova, the brouhaha about his excesses and idiosyncrasies were the real box-­office lure. An interminable, narcotic genealogy precedes his appearance in the film, establishing a complex hierarchy of ranchers in the Argentine dominated by his maternal grandfather, an autocratic Spanish hidalgo. Julio Desnoyers (Valentino) is French on his father’s side and the patriarch’s favorite; he has German cousins being groomed as legatees of the family fortune, and the sequence pullulates with murky domestic intrigue. Petted and indulged by the old man, Julio grows up into a sleek-­haired finale hopper who tangos sinuously, puffs smoke into the bodices of singsong girls, and generally qualifies as a libertine. In the fullness of time, or roughly six hundred feet of minutiae that remain a secret between the cameraman and the cutter, Julio’s mother inherits half the estate and removes her son, daughter, and husband to Paris, where they take up residence in a Gallic facsimile of Kaliski & Gabay’s auction rooms. Julio dabbles at painting—at least, we behold him before an easel in the manner of those penny-­arcade tableaux called “What the Butler Saw Through the Keyhole,” sighting off lickerishly at some models dressed in cheesecloth—and, in more serious vein, applies himself to seducing Marguerite Laurier (Alice Terry), the wife of a French senator. The role must have been a nerve-­racking one for Valentino. Not only did he have to keep an eye peeled for the senator but the production was being directed by Miss Terry’s husband-­to-­be, Rex Ingram. No wonder the poor cuss fell apart when he did.

To provide Valentino with a setting for his adagios, the affair gets under way at a fashionable temple of the dance called the Tango Palace, packed with gigolos and ladies in feathered turbans swaying orgiastically; then Marguerite, apprehensive of gossip, makes surreptitious visits to her lover’s atelier. He, intent on steam-­rollering her into the Turkish corner, is oblivious of all else, and there is a portentous moment, embroidering the favorite movie thesis that mankind always exhibits unbridled sensuality just prior to Armageddon, when his male secretary tries to show him a newspaper headline reading, “archduke ferdinand assassinated at sarajevo,” only to have Julio petulantly brush it aside. The symbolism now starts to pile up thick and fast. The secretary, croaking ominously, exits to consult a mysterious bearded philosopher in a Russian tunic (Nigel de Brulier), who, it has been planted, dwells upstairs. No reliable clue to this character’s identity is anywhere given, but he seems to be a mélange of Prince Myshkin, Savonarola, and Dean Inge, possesses the gift of tongues, and is definitely supernatural. His reaction to the murder is much more immediate, possibly because he doesn’t have a girl in his room. “This is the beginning of the end,” he declares somberly. “The brand that will set the world ablaze.” Downstairs, meanwhile, Marguerite’s scruples are melting like hot marzipan under Julio’s caresses, and it is manifest that she is breaking up fast. The camera thereupon cuts back to the oracle extracting an apple from a bowl of fruit. “Do you not wonder that the apple, with its coloring, was chosen to represent the forbidden fruit?” he asks the secretary, with a cryptic smile. “But, when peeled, how like woman without her cloak of virtue!” I don’t know how this brand of rhetoric affected other people of my generation, but it used to make me whinny. I secretly compared it to the insupportable sweetness of a thousand violins.

Before very long, Marguerite’s husband ferrets out her peccadillo, wrathfully announces his intention of divorcing her, and challenges Julio to a duel. The scandal never eventuates, happily; in response to a general mobilization order, the senator joins his regiment, the Fifth Calvados Fusiliers, and his wife, seeking to make atonement for her guilt, enrolls as a nurse. “The flames of war had singed the butterfly’s wings,” explains a Lardnerian subtitle, “and in its place there was—a woman, awakening to the call of France.” Excused from military service because of his nationality, Julio dawdles around Paris making an apathetic pitch for Marguerite, which she priggishly rejects on the ground that venery is unseemly while the caissons roll—a view diametrically opposed to that of another nurse in the same conflict described in A Farewell to Arms. Throughout the preceding, the soothsayer in the attic has been relentlessly conjuring up double-­exposure shots of the apocalyptic horsemen and their sinister baggage, and a funereal pall descends on the action—not that it has been a Mardi Gras thus far, by any means. Julio’s father (Joseph Swickard) has been taken prisoner at his country house by a detachment of uhlans commanded by Wallace Beery, who proceeds to stage one of those classic Hearst-­Sunday-­supplement revels with bemonocled Prussians singing “Ach, du lieber Augustin,” girls running around in their teddies, etc. At the height of the debauch, a frosty-­eyed general (Stuart Holmes) enters and is revealed as Desnoyers’ own nephew; i.e., a cousin of Julio’s from the Argentine. Touched by the old man’s plight, the officer displays unusual clemency and has him confined to a small, airy dungeon all his own; then, unbuckling his sword, he broaches an especially choice jeroboam of his uncle’s champagne for the staff. Julio and Marguerite, in the meantime, continue their marathon renunciation in, of all places, the grotto at Lourdes, where she is nursing her husband, now blind and, of course, totally unaware of her identity. With a tenacity verging on monomania, Julio still hopes to con his sweetheart back to the ostermoor, but she is adamant. At length, he sickens of the whole enterprise—a process one has anticipated him in by a good half hour—castigates himself as a coward unworthy of her love, and rushes off to enlist. And just in the nick, it may be added, for what scenery hasn’t been blasted by the foe has been chewed beyond recognition by the actors. Next to Mary Miles Minter laundering a kitten, nobody in the history of the silent screen could induce mal-­de-mer as expertly as Valentino when he bit his knuckles to portray heartbreak.

The ensuing sequence is a bit choppy, occupying itself with Julio’s heroism under fire and his parents’ vicissitudes, though the only indication we get of the former is a shot of him, in a poilu helmet, fondling a monkey at a first-­aid station. (However, the animal may conceivably have been afflicted with rabies.) Papa Desnoyers eludes his captors and visits the young man at the front with news that Marguerite pines for him but is devoting herself unsparingly to the senator, which can hardly be classified as an ingenious plot twist. There obviously remains but one situation to be milked to dramatize the irony of war—a battlefield encounter between Julio and his German cousin—and, blithely skipping over the mechanics of how a general falls into a shell hole in No Man’s Land, the scenario maneuvers the relatives into a death grapple. I rather suspect that at this point a hurried story conference was called on the set to debate the propriety of allowing Valentino to be strangled. No doubt it was argued that the spectacle might cause mixed emotions in the audience, and a compromise was evolved wherein, before the outcome is resolved, we whisk to Marguerite’s bedroom as she prepares to abandon her husband for Julio. Suddenly her lover’s image materializes, suffused with an unearthly radiance, and she realizes the issue is academic. The rest of the picture is a lugubrious wash-­up of the incidentals, climaxed by a graveside meeting between the elder Desnoyers and Julio’s former upstairs neighbor, the apparition in the fright wig. Their conclusion, as I understood it, was that things were going to be a great deal worse before they became any better, but confidentially I found it hard to keep from whistling as I raced the projectionist to a bourbonnerie, around the corner from the Museum. After all, come sunshine or sorrow, it was extremely unlikely I would ever have to see The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse a third time.

With the fatuity of middle age, I imagined I had exorcised the ghost of Valentino for keeps, but in some inexplicable fashion his aura must have clung to my person or otherwise put a hex on me. An evening or so later, my wife exhumed from the attic a Spanish shawl and several filigree combs she had been hoarding until she could get the right offer from a thrift shop. As she was executing an impromptu fandango to the strains of “Siboney,” employing a pair of coasters as castanets, I was jealously impelled to demonstrate my superior co-­ordination. “Watch this, everybody!” I sang out, flourishing a roll of shelf paper. “My impression of a matador winding himself in his sash, as created by the immortal Rudy Valentino in Blood and Sand!” I wrapped one end of the paper around my midriff, ordered a teen-­age vassal to pay out some twenty feet and steady the roll, and, with a wild “Olé!” spun gyroscopically in her direction. Halfway, I ran full tilt into a peculiar blizzard of white specks and, to weather it, grabbed at a student lamp for support.

I got the lamp, all right, and plenty of time to regret my impetuosity. Lazing around the house with my tweezers, subsequently, probing for slivers of glass, it occurred to me all at once that maybe Valentino used a double in moments of hazard. Maybe I should have, beginning way back around 1921.