‍Fake hospital pic of Valentino in Evening Graphic

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‍THE DEATH of Silent Screen megastar Rudolph Valentino at the age of 31, on August 23, 1926, rocked the world and sparked an outpouring of emotion from women across Europe and America, some even committed suicide.

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‍ But behind the scenes of this world melodrama a vicious battle was being played out by the tabloid Press.

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‍The New York Evening Graphic was so far ahead of the game with its dirty tricks, that rival cameramen trailed the tabloid’s photographers in fear of getting scooped.

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‍ Every angle was leapt on and twisted from mourning mobs of Valentino fans rioting in the funeral parlour to chasing a life-story manuscript that didn’t exist.

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‍ The Graphic sold out night after night with its coverage and its circulation director reportedly burst into the editor’s office declaring: “We’ve done it, we’ve sold an extra 100,000 tonight!”

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‍ The incredible story of Valentino’s last days and the media circus in 1926 is told by Vanity Fair writer Joe Pompeo.

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‍ A few weeks after the premiere of ‘Son of the Sheik’, a sequel to Valentino’s 1921 classic movie ‘The Sheik’ that propelled him to fame, he fell ill with stomach pains during a visit to New York.

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‍ It was Sunday, August 15, that year, the morning after a party at the Upper East Side residence of Manhattan playboy Barclay Warburton, the founder of the New York Daily Mirror.

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‍ Valentino was “seized with a violent convulsion” a doctor was called who sent him to hospital, where the heartthrob actor found himself on an operating table within the hour.

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‍ Executives from his film company MGM rushed to see him and were told by doctors that he had acute appendicitis, as well as an ulcerated stomach. 

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‍The appendix was removed and “in 75 percent of such cases there is recovery,” they said. And so, the media circus began. The Press went on death watch.

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‍ The Graphic, which had the nickname ‘PornoGraphic’, played every trick in the book, including mock images of Valentino on a stretcher surrounded by medical staff and ran a Page One headline: ‘Rudolph Valentino Dying’, even though doctors believed he would pull through.

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‍ Then the insensitive paper asked the question: ‘Will the cinema hero marry Pola Negri on his deathbed? Find out all for two cents.’ Pola was his latest lover. Circulation boomed. Over the next few days, the paper reported rumours from Broadway that Valentino had already ‘departed his earthly plane’. In truth, he had rallied. Sales rocketed.

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‍ Day after day Valentino graced the Graphic’s cover. ‘Valentino Doped for Pain’ and even ’Rudy’s Battle for Life Attacked as a Publicity Stunt.’

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‍ One night Valentino’s condition did in fact take a turn for the worse. Joseph Schenk, United Artists President visited him. “I didn’t know I was so near death that Sunday,” Valentino told him. “I’m beginning to realise only now how serious my condition was.”

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‍ But early the next day, on Monday, Aug. 23, Valentino slipped in and out of consciousness. By noon he lay drifting into a coma. Father Edward F. Leonard — known as the “actors’ priest” for the stars in his celebrity flock — administered last rites.

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‍ Schenk entered the room and stifled a sob as he watched Father Leonard place a cross on Valentino’s lips.

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‍ The Graphic reported: “As he bent over his dying friend, he asked: ‘Well, Rudy, old boy, how are you?’ Rudy’s eyes darted from those of the priest to Schenk. His mind was clear. The eyes were bright. The corners of his mouth lifted, parted, as if to speak to answer the low, cheery greeting.

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‍ ‘“Don’t worry chief, I will be all right”.’

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‍ ‘Other words were left unspoken. The light died from his eyes and the lids drooped and fluttered. Father Leonard whispered a prayer. The face paled. The smile faded. Death!’

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‍ That quote appeared a few hours later on the cover of the Graphic, alongside a full-length headshot of Valentino. Did he say those embellished words? No one has ever confirmed it.

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‍The Graphic went on to mock up a picture of Valentino’s body on display in his open coffin in the Gold Room at the funeral parlour the next day. Rival photographers rushed to the scene … but Valentino hadn’t even arrived.

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‍DO YOU TAKE THIS WALL TO BE

‍YOUR LAWFUL WEDDED HUSBAND?

‍Do you remember? The Swedish woman who married the Berlin Wall?

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‍ Eija-Ritta Mauer, 25, fell in love with the concrete barricade between East and West and officially married it in front of guests in a holy ceremony in 1979, the Telegraph reported.

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‍ Eija-Rita, who suffered from a condition called ‘Objectum-Sexuality’, claimed she had been having a full “intimate and loving sexual” relationship with it for years, finding long, slim things with horizontal lines “very sexy”. She used to straddle the wall and hug it.

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‍ When the wall was taken down in 1989, she was devastated, crying: “They’ve mutilated my husband!”

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‍ But things got better for her. Sometime later she fell in love again with a garden fence near her home in Liden, Sweden.

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‍ Eija-Rita died in a house fire in 2015.

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‍SECRET TACTICS OF THE PENNY LINERS AS THEY HUNT STORIES

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‍I read a fascinating article in The Press and Colonial News from the 1860s last week.

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‍ It was the story of the rise in penny-a-line reporters all over Britain a few years before the Press Association was formed and dominated the news gathering operation for the national and regional titles in 1868.

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‍ The magazine was a sort of forerunner to Press Gazette, circulating to owners and managements of newspaper and magazine organisations.

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‍ At the time, newspapers used private riders, stagecoaches, the railways and even pigeons to transport written dispatches from all over the country, often taking days, sometimes weeks to arrive. Most other items were lifted from newspapers that were days old.

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‍ But many small events and other news stories were not reported at all. And so, the penny-a-liners were born all over Britain.

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‍ In an article under the headline: ‘Pen and Pencil: Sketches of Press Characters’, a penny writer (anonymous) from over 150 years ago, says: “We all know that great events from trifling causes spring. And I was lucky that I had a cousin who was a First-Class guard on the South Western Line.

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‍ “We were in the habit of meeting him and his railway mates in a pub on the Waterloo Road, near the station to hear titbits about his day and journey and what he had heard. And what a pot of gold it was.

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‍ “A par or two could be made up out of this discourse.”

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‍ The writer gives some examples. “An engine had run into a coal truck and knocked down a shed at Woking; a portmanteau full of valuable property had been stolen from a First-Class waiting room at Guildford; the captain’s gig (shore launch) of HMS Victory had been upturned in the harbour at Portsmouth and two seamen drowned.

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‍ “A little girl, five years of age, fell clean out of the First-Class window, as we were slipping along at 50 miles an hour and rolled headlong down the embankment into a furze bush just as we passed Kensington Station. The mother would have jumped after her but was held back by a gentleman. We telegraphed back at Woking, and I heard that the child was safe!”

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‍ The writer says that scores of incidents like these used to ‘ooze out between the whiffs of tobacco from their pipes’ as the guards sat with their beers each evening.

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‍ “We were not long in turning them to good account,” he says. “We wrote them out in rough and a messenger would collect them each evening and take them to the newspapers for a small remuneration.

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‍ “We got hundreds of lines each week from our railway friends and the best of it was that we were always a day or so in advance of any other communication.”

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‍ The writer tells how he and a few other penny liners invented the shipping news, which became a regular service in all the newspapers.

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‍ He says: “We took a stroll one afternoon noon down to the East India Docks near Poplar in the eastern extremity of London, as our companions in the Press sat with their hands in their pockets and their pipes in their mouths, waiting for copy.

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‍ “After roaming about for some time amongst the forests of masts and grim figure-heads of vessels, which presented themselves to our view, we pulled up at an old shed, where on a large board was a list of ships then in dock with the dates and times of their arrivals and destinations, along with cargo and the like.

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‍ “Thinking that this would be very useful to the daily newspapers, we proceeded at once to copy it in the rough. And then away we went back to town to draw up our first shipping list in a neat, comprehensive and tabular form.

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‍ “We then hopefully dropped our copies of it into four editorial boxes before lying our heads on our pillows that night. Next morning we were swamped by requests from the newspapers for contracts. We were in profit!

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‍ “So, in summary, the daily newspapers would be very deficient in many interesting particulars if it were not for the poking, grubbing, prying and scrambling of the poor itinerant penny-a-liner!”

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‍DAM THESE PEOPLE!

‍From the newspaper The Richmond Climax in Kentucky,  July. 1913.

‍“Pestered by phone calls and sarcastic letters Mr Orlando Dammit is seeking to have his name changed. He is fed up being addressed as O.Dammit!”

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‍*****

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍2 March 2026