by Paul R. Spitzzeri
For much of the Roaring Twenties, the hottest movie star in the world was Italian actor Rudolph (Rodolfo) Valentino (1895-1926), who inflamed the hearts of millions of women and the envy of a like number of men during his brief, but remarkable, career in such films as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle and his last picture, The Son of the Sheik, which premiered just before his death from peritonitis and heart tissue inflammation.
Valentino, who came to America at the end of 1913 and worked as a taxi dancer (a paid partner) and then as an exhibition ballroom dancer, while a controversy involving a woman, who may have been his lover, shooting and killing her husband, for which she was acquitted, led him to leave New York City and head west. The earliest located reference for him in this area was when he appeared as a dancer in a Red Cross benefit, including major film stars Charles Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, at Pasadena’s Hotel Maryland in February 1918.
By May 1919, Valentino was dancing on stage at Grauman’s Theatre and, in September, was briefly mentioned as “the young Italian dancer who created a wave of interest in society circles” as he had a minor role in a Dorothy Gish picture. Two months later, the Los Angeles Times of 6 November, informed readers,
They met two months ago and last Tuesday afternoon he dared her to marry him. She accepted the challenge and now Miss Jean Acker is Mrs. Rodolph Valentino. This is the romance of two picture players as told yesterday. Mr. Valentino met Miss Acker at a party given by [actor] Pauline Frederick in the early part of September. He pressed his case for two long months and after a dare made while they were horseback riding in Beverly Hills, she consented.
He suggested Santa Ana [the Orange County seat apparently being a place for Angelenos to quietly tie the knot]. She demurred and they came to the city [for a] “hurry-up-before-it-is-too-late” kind [of license issue], that are often given after the office closes . . . [and then were wedded at a party thrown by Metro Pictures producer Maxwell Karger].
Mr. Valentino is in picture work here and his bride is with the Metro company. Both will continue their work.
What didn’t continue for much longer was their marriage. It was widely stated later that Acker quickly rued the snap decision and locked Valentino our of their room at the Hollywood Hotel six hours after the ceremony. Valentino wrote to Acker begging her to return and they reunited in early December, but she, again, fled, while he continued to pursue a reconciliation into 1920. When, however, Valentino received starring roles for Metro, such as Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Acker filed a 1921 suit seeking alimony. In return, Valentino sought a divorce, which was ruled in his favor in January 1922, and Acker was depicted in a glamorous pose but claiming destitution and debt.
Her next move, by summer, was to trade on Valentino’s worldwide fame because, four months after the divorce decree, but this was not considered final for a year afterward (that is January 1923), he wedded Natacha Rambova (born Winifred Shaugnessy), a dancer and movie costume designer, in a Mexican ceremony in May 1922. This led to a bigamy charge against Valentino, though this was dropped and a legal marriage ceremony was held in mid-March 1923.
The 9 June 1922 number of the Times reported,
The light of Jean Acker’s talent is not to be hidden under any sort of metaphorical bushel. She is in fact to shine forth on the screen once more under the name of Mrs. Rodolph Valentino [actually adding the parenthetical (The First) to distinguish her from Rambova], appearing in her own productions, backed by eastern capital, according to her own announcement just made.
Unsurprisingly, Valentino was unhappy with this maneuver and, when Acker petitioned in court to legally change her name, the star filed an answer that she only sought to do this so “that she may advertise herself throughout the United States as Mrs. Rodolph Valentino, and thereby secure falsely and fraudulently the patronage of motion-picture houses, which she could not under any other circumstances secure if the pictures were advertised as her own productions.”
By early February 1923, Valentino threatened a law suit, while Acker canceled a vaudeville engagement under her newly intended moniker. A Times article on the 27th observed that both were in Chicago at the same time and that “‘My God!’ was all the heartbreaking Rodolph could say when informed at the Blackstone [Hotel] that his ex-wife had been brought to Chicago to play during the first week of his engagement as headliner at the [Marigold Gardens].”
Acker, however, proceeded to take to the stage under that name of “Mrs. Rodolph Valentino (The First),” with an added (Miss June Acker) and came to Los Angeles in June to star in “a New One-Act Comedy Playlet by Edgar Allen Woolf entitled ‘A REGULAR GIRL.'” Woolf (1881-1943) was a vaudeville actor, sketch-writer, lyricist and musical review book writer best known for his work revising the script for 1939’s classic film The Wizard of Oz.
For the week of 18 June, “A Regular Girl” was staged at the Hillstreet Theatre, an Orpheum Circuit venue that opened in March 1922 as a combination vaudeville and motion picture house recently profiled here. At that engagement, Acker was shown at the bottom of advertisements of the program, with the headliner being the incomparable Fanny Brice and another act being The Littlejohns, a juggling act. There was a fair amount of publicity for Acker, including photos and a feature (though another article concerned her $400 debt to a New York store, which filed suit against her, though she paid the bill as the matter went to trial.)
The feature by Eleanor M. Barnes of the Los Angeles Record, in its 22 June edition, included Acker’s claim, “I believe I am entitled to still use the name Valentino—why shouldn’t I? I loved him!” Barnes wrote, “in the eyes of Mrs. Valentino THE FIRST came tears that trickled through the mascarilloed black lashes” while “with a well manicured left hand, on which glistened many sparkling rings, she wiped the truant black from her face” as she insisted,
I didnt’ [sic] love Rody for his money. I loved him for himself. I wanted him to get out and work so we could get ahead. But, when we were married, during that year, I was supporting him, he didn’t try to do his best.
I know, in the first, I was entirely wrong—I deserted him—I know I made the first mistake—but, I was sorry for everything. He knows that I loved him. He was a nobody then. I was fairly successful.
This passive-aggressive posture is notable as Acker went on that “I am far from being a well woman” and couldn’t afford $1.50 for medicine, while she claimed she asked “Rody” for assistance and was ignored. After bemoaning the fact that what was made public was Valentino’s side of the matter, Acker told Barnes, “nobody knows what I went through . . . . or what I’m going through now . . . . but, I am going to work hard, save enough money to buy a little real estate, and make a comfortable home for my mother.”
As for her performance in the playlet, the Times of 19 June observed that Acker “looks very pretty, very modish, very smart,” but, along with the view that “A Regular Girl” was not up to Woolf’s standards, the piece “isn’t particularly suited to Mrs. Valentino” and that, in a climactic scene of “rather mawkish hokum,” the actor “lacks the power to put this over.” Instead, it offered, “in a play full of wistful sweetness, or in a frothily sophisticated role, she would doubtlessly shine.”
Despite this negative review, there must have been enough tickets sold, perhaps many to curiosity-seekers eager to get a gander of the first Mrs. Valentino, to encourage another run, which leads us to the program from the Museum’s collection that is featured here. The front panel, trumpeting the venue, situated at Hill and 8th streets, as “THE PRIDE OF LOS ANGELES” and adding the there were “CONTINUOUS VAUDEVILLE-PHOTOPLAYS” from 12:45 to 11:30 p.m., featured a photo of Acker with a headdress that looked like it was from India and which covered all but a small portion of her bobbed hair, while she held a string of pearls in her right hand.
The back panel features a photograph showing the two principal elevations of the structure, with office space above the theater and a distinctive domed corner tower surmounted with a tall flag pole. A panel below informed patrons that there was a nursery and playroom so that they could “BRING THE KIDDIES,” for 15 cents for children. The inside pair of panels listed prices of 28-40 cents for matinees, 40-55 cents for evenings and Saturday matinees, and 55 cents for Saturday evenings and Sundays.
Daily showtimes for movies were at 1, 4:30, 8 and 10:30, while the vaudeville performances were at 2:45, 6:30 and 9:00. As noted above, Acker, now the headline, and The Littlejohns were holdovers from a previous run and they were joined by four new acts. These included the Bernivici Brothers and Company, with assistance from Jack Gold in “Moments Musicale;” the team of Bill Bailey and Lynn Cowan, songwriters and vocalists with saxophonist Estelle Davis in the “second edition” of “The Little Production;” Billy DuVal and Merle Symonds presenting “Their First Quarrel;” the dance team of Florence Tempest, lately partnered with a sister, Marion Sunshine, but now with Homer Dickinson, whom she soon married as “Broadway’s Smart Couple” and accompanied by George Harriss on piano.
Closing the program was the film “A Beautiful Liar,” originally released in December 1921 and starring Katherine MacDonald (1891-1956), who had her own production company until then, earned large sums for her films, but who only made two pictures after 1923. MacDonald went on to operate a successful cosmetics business through the 1930s and, though her career ended somewhat early, she does have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
There was a goodly amount of publicity for this run of shows in the Los Angeles press, including a Times feature on Acker in the 15 July issue, titled “JUST A PLAYTHING OF FATE” and which began with the remark that the New Jersey farm girl went from country life to the mad whirl of Manhattan and “into a vortex of mad love for a young Italian Adonis.” This, however, devolved into “tragic disillusionment” as well as “vast notoriety through her divorce from the popular screen idol and his hasty remarriage.”
On her emotional rollercoaster, Acker, it was commented, “in the course of a few years . . . encountered trouble which might easily have embittered her for life.” Here she was, however, treading the boards to earn her bread (and provide for her mother) and the paper accounted her as “a regular girl,” who “looks for all the world like a charming, unsophisticated little school girl” and “has a simple, straightforward manner, [and] an absolute lack of affectation, which give added appeal to her lovely looks.”
In spite of the prior poor review, the Times stated that Acker’s “venture into the vaudeville world has been a decided success,” again, perhaps of the notoriety and the Valentino name, but she purported to disdain any ambitions other than “to earn enough money to buy a little house in the country outside of Hollywood, for me and my mother to live in.” Moreover, she claimed that all she wanted to do was “sit in California sunshine and do nothing at all!,” while concluding that “perhaps someday I’ll marry.”
The Los Angeles Record of the 14th, however, ran a headline of “Mrs. Valentino Says ‘No More Sheiks!'” as she was quoted as promising, “my next husband is going to be just a plain ordinary business man,” while it was added that the actor, deemed “uncommonly attractive, with black hair cut in a straight bob, very white skin and a slender little figure,” was “perfectly willing to go on with her career without [a spouse].”
In addition to the headliner, the Times, also in its issue of the 15th, remarked that “those who remember the girl team of Tempest and Sunshine” would be happy to see her with Dickinson as “their songs, dancing and repartee combine to make excellent entertainment.” Baily and Cowan, the paper noted, “radiate personality” as “one adds a few extra notes to the measure on the banjo and the other sings two bars of music to everyone shown on the score,” as Davis “plays a nifty saxophone.” The Littlejohns, the paper went on, “will give a dazzling exhibition of juggling” along with the exhibition of “a million rhinestones and jewels. The Bernivici troupe combined mirth and music, while Du Val and Symonds “will offer a breezy act with songs and dialogue interspersed.”
As for reviews, the Times of the 17th advised readers,
If you like serious dramatic sketches, if you like jazz, if you like comedy, you will find an act to headline the bill that opened yesterday at the Hillstreet, for there is a topnotch offering of each class playing at that theater this week.
It was hardly a rave review for Acker, however, as it was remarked that her billing “may not add any to her ability as an actress” even as the Valentino name “probably means a lot to the fans.” The play got lukewarm notice as it was described as “a fine playlet if you like that sort of thing” and, with only half the performers adjudged as possessing “more than ordinary ability,” the performance “is not uninteresting to watch.”
Bailey, Cowan and Davis were “jazz hounds” and the latter’s red hair was a focus of some comedic attention, though, after an opening that was somewhat pedestrian, the rest of the performance “swings into a fast pace of its own, and holds to it.” For Tempest and Dickinson, though, the ridiculous was not matched by the sublime and their comedy was accompanied by only “a little serious effort at song and dance.”
Du Val and Symonds only managed to put over “a routine matrimonial spat” while the Bernivicis offered a range of violin music, while The Littlejohns delivered a “brilliant juggling act . . . while rolling around the stage on large balls” so that “the act has color and sparkle, to say the least.” Lastly, the offering of “The Beautiful Liar” refers to “the talents of Katherine MacDonald,” but is merely descriptive, rather than analytical about the film.
The Record was more appreciative of Acker and the play, recording that she “was heartily welcomed” in the “cleverly done” piece and “she was presented with a beautiful basket of flowers.” Almost nothing was said about MacDonald’s picture, but the other acts were praised, with the jugglers described as “dazzling in their makeup and stage settings and do brilliant stunts.” Du Val and Symonds, the paper noted, “are funny, and keep the audience in an uproar,” while the musicians of Bailey, Cowan and Davis “also are interesting, and receive their share of applause.”
Oddly, it was commented that the audience could not tell if the Bernivicis were “from Italy or Jerusalem,” but whether this meant Jewish is not clear. In any case, “their violin playing is wonderful” and the Venetian setting “is very attractive.” The act of “Broadway’s Smart Couple” was determined to be fascinating and original and Tempest and Dickinson scored with the audience in their dancing and singing.
Acker, however, soon dropped the Valentino moniker and advertising for the late 1923 film, Her Own Money, included the billing as “Jean Acker (Mrs. Rodolph Valentino).” She worked on several other silent films and then returned to the stage and vaudeville, but work from 1933 to 1955 was sporadic and almost always found her uncredited. She claimed to have amassed a fortune of $300,000 that was wiped out by the stock market crash and the Great Depression.
Notably, Acker buried the hatchet with Valentino, was at his deathbed and funeral and occasionally joined fans at Hollywood Forever Cemetery to pay respects at his tomb, placing his favorite flowers, red roses, there. As for remarriage, it is widely reported the Acker was a lesbian and was the partner of a former Ziegfeld Follies dancer, Chloe Carter, though, while it has been stated that the couple were interred side-by-side at the Catholic Holy Cross Cemetery, Acker’s obituary recorded that her ashes were scattered at sea.
In any case, this program, a rather humble little item, has some fascinating associations with early Hollywood and one of its most famous, and enduring, legends.