Call it Hollywood

Wayne Koestenbaum

• Dark Lover: The Life and Death of Rudolph Valentino by Emily Leider
  Faber, 514 pp, £8.99, November 2004, ISBN 0 571 21819 9

Rudolph Valentino, according to his first-rate biographer, Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly cauliflowered’ left ear. Most photographs hide this ear, as did his protective cinematographers, so I must struggle to imagine it. If I were to write a brief memoir about my relation to Valentino or to his legacy, I might entitle it ‘In Search of Valentino’s Slightly Cauliflowered Left Ear’. Ear, queer: the proof of Valentino’s heterosexuality that Leider amasses in her elegantly worded, richly detailed chronicle does not persuade me, and so I fabricate an underground, chimerical story of Valentino’s queerness. As a contrarian category, queerness may be passé, and yet, reading Dark Lover, I feel nostalgia for the notion that gorgeous, sexually ambiguous movie stars provide grist for the gay mill. ‘Outing’, however morally dubious, thrills a reader who twists received stories for the pleasure of twisting. And Valentino’s tale doesn’t need much manipulation.