When in Hollywood about four years ago I learned to know by sight a young man who frequently stood around in the lobby of the Hotel Alexandria. He was very dark and slim, and his eyes had the sombreness of the Latin. I was especially struck by the grace of his walk and of his gestures. Even when he leaned up against a cigar-case he did it with a certain stateliness, and you felt that the column of some ruined temple overlooking the Mediterranean would have been much more appropriate than his present background.

Quite evidently he was looking for a job. In fact, before I was introduced to him I heard him approaching various people in the industry.

“Anything doing to-day?” “Have you finished casting So-and-So?” “When do you start shooting?” These questions, so familiar in the lobby of a Hollywood hotel, were made more touching in his case by a very naÏve manner, by a slightly foreign accent. He always looked so eager when he put the question and so disappointed when he got the answer.

Not long ago when I was in Hollywood I saw this same young man at a near-by seashore resort. On this day he was in a bathing-suit, and he was leading three police-dogs. The dogs were not a protective measure, but certainly the scene that day might have warranted some sort of guard. For as the young man walked out toward the waves, as the sun shone on his swarthy skin, the hundreds of women and girls who had come to Long Beach pressed onward for a more satisfactory glimpse of the bather. And as they did so an awed whisper passed through the feminine multitude.

“That’s he—that’s Valentino.”

In all film history, replete as that is with instances of meteoric success, there has been nothing quite so swift as the rise of this young Italian pantomimist, Rodolph Valentino. The beginning of the breathless ascent may be traced to a reception given one afternoon by a certain Mr. Cole, a painter living in Hollywood. To this reception came Rex Ingram, then lately returned from overseas service in the Flying Corps. Came also in company with Paul Troubetsky, Rodolph Valentino. At this point I shall allow Mr. Ingram to tell the story just as he related it to me one evening last Summer while we sat chatting on the porch of Mae Murray’s and Bobby Leonard’s home at Great Neck.

“I was attracted at once by Valentino’s face and by his remarkable grace of movement,” said Ingram, “and I made immediately a mental note of him. There’s a fellow, thought I, who would be great in pictures, and if I get my job of directing back I’m going to use him. I was pretty confident then, you see, that this experiment was due for the very near future. Little did I think that months—yes, almost a year—would go by and find me just as idle as I was that day when I walked into Mr. Cole’s reception.

“I wasn’t remembering much about Valentino in those days, I can tell you. I was so poor that I had to hock all the civilian clothes I had left behind me in my storage-trunks. This left me nothing but my uniform, and the uniform proved, as it did to so many other ex-service men, anything but a talisman. The only effect it seemed to produce was to prejudice any possible employer against me. At last—of course that’s the way it always happens—I had two jobs offered to me at once. In the meantime, though, I had been obliged to give up my little two-dollar room. In fact, when I got my double offer I was owing two months’ rent for it.

“The job I chose was with the ——. No sooner had I started to work than I discovered Valentino was on the same lot under Holubar. This second contact with the young foreigner deepened my confidence that he would be a great success on the silver-sheet, and when ‘The Four Horsemen’ came along I thought of him immediately.

“Of course it was obvious that he was the exact type for the young tango-dancer hero of the story. Even after I started work with him, though, I had no idea how far he’d go—not at the very first. But when we came to rehearsing the tango, “Rudy” did so well that I made up my mind to expand this phase of the story. I did this by means of a sequence in a Universal picture I had made several years before. The sequence showed an adventurous youth going into a Bowery dive and taking the dancer after he had first floored her partner. Bones and marrow, I transposed this action to South America—yet only a few of my wise Universal friends recognised it.

“This bit of acting not in the book gave Valentino a chance for one of his showiest pieces of work. I rehearsed it very carefully for three days right on the set, and I think the result showed it.”

At this point in the director’s story I asked him if he thought, as so many people do, that Valentino was a mere flash in the pan.

“By no means,” rejoined he promptly; “he’s very ambitious and earnest, and if he doesn’t take what the fans say too seriously he will live a long time as a picture idol—provided, of course, that he is kept in good stories and has a capable director.”

Here at this point I can not refrain from quoting the most famous of directors on the subject of the present-day idol. In talking to Griffith one day I asked him what he thought of Valentino.

“I declare I don’t know,” replied he; “all the time I was looking at him in ‘The Four Horsemen’ I kept asking myself, ‘Is this fellow really acting or is he so perfectly the type that he doesn’t need to act?’”

The existing impression that this famous novel afforded Valentino his first part in pictures is erroneous. Not only had the young Latin worked with Holubar, as Ingram mentioned, but he had been cast with Mae Murray by Bobby Leonard. And, of course, he had rounded out his experience as an extra. Had it not been, however, for Rex Ingram and for the materialisation of a story so exactly adapted to his type, Valentino might still be standing around in the lobby of some Hollywood hotel—one of the thousands of young men and women whose hearts are suffocating with that one cry, “The chance! If only they’d give me the chance!”

“Hail, Czar of Hollywood!”—thus some woman addressed Charlie Chaplin not long ago.

“Oh, no,” smiled Charlie, “that no longer. Valentino is the present ruler.” And then he went on to say, “I like the fellow, you know. He’s got a lot of colour and charm. I went around to see him the other day and it just delighted me to see him stepping about on his thick beautiful rugs among his gorgeous bric-À-brac and his incense-burners. They seemed to suit him, you know, and he was so pleased with all his new splendour—just like a child.”

There is Chaplin for you—always delighted with the colourful, the pictorial, the thing which sets his imagination going.

In line with Charlie’s approval come the words of another man I know, a man well-read, cultured, and charming. “Any one who thinks Valentino is an illiterate young foreigner with a handsome face and a talent for dancing is mistaken”—so protests this witness. “I know him well and I am always interested in his comments on life and work. You’ve got to remember that ‘Rudy’ doesn’t come from the lower classes in Italy. His father was a scientist and his family connections are with professional people.”

“The Four Horsemen” carried not only Valentino high into the ether of popular success. Although Rex Ingram had made successful pictures before this, he had never so thoroughly demonstrated his capacity for that difficult union of finely knit narrative and sweep of vision as did he in IbaÑez’s masterpiece. To my mind the skill with which the personal element is presented against the background of great epic disaster places Ingram in the very foremost rank of screen directors. As for Alice Terry, her rÔle of the wife in the story afforded her the first satisfactory avenue for that exquisite something which differentiates her.

The story of Alice Terry has the same fairy-tale quality as Valentino’s own. Like him, she had worked hard as an extra for many years, and the hard work had resulted in little recognition. However, discouraging as had been her experience, it was not without results. For Rex Ingram happened to see her in New York when, as a girl still in her mid-teens, she played with Bessie Barriscale in “Not My Little Sister.” The promise which she gave impressed the young director almost immediately. When, indeed, he moved from New York to the Coast he welcomed the fact that she, too, had shifted from East to West. Had it not been for the War, in fact, Alice Terry would probably have been his leading lady some years before.

When Ingram on his return from overseas service finally located the job which put a roof once more over his head and civilian clothes again upon his back, he was to resume his slight acquaintance with Miss Terry. For she came to his office then and applied for a position as script girl, the functionary who, working on the set, chalks off the scenes as they are made and notes the new ones extemporised.

He looked at her in amazement. “What,” cried he, “you don’t mean to say that you’ve given up acting, do you?”

She looked at him somewhat sadly. “Oh, dear, yes,” she replied. “I did that some time ago. It was too discouraging—I wasn’t getting any place, you see. No matter how hard I worked nothing seemed to come of it. And of course being an extra or getting some bit now and then doesn’t keep you. So I decided I’d just get a regular job.”

“And what have you been doing since?” inquired Ingram.

“I’ve been working in the cutting-room,” replied she, “and that was fine—I mean it was fine—knowing just what you were going to get each week. But the ether commenced to get into my lungs and that’s why I’m looking around for something else.”

Ingram promised to give her the desired position in the picture following “Shore Acres.” However, something changed his plans and instead he cast her for a wild and woolly Drury Lane melodrama called “Hearts Are Trumps.” To his surprise she seemed loath to accept this chance of returning to the screen.

“Oh, no, I don’t want to try—I’ve given it all up, you see,” she kept protesting in a way that showed how completely previous discouragements had shattered her self-confidence.

But he finally succeeded in overcoming her fears, and since then she has been his leading woman in every story except “Trifling Women.” It was not, however, until the appearance of “The Four Horsemen” that Alice Terry, the girl who, heartsick from her discouragements on the set, had wanted to retire to the comparative obscurity of script work, won the wide recognition which her beauty and her screen personality had so long deserved.

All this I have just related I heard from Miss Terry, now Mrs. Rex Ingram, on the same evening when Ingram told me of his experience with Valentino. On this same occasion she and her husband mentioned that her next appearance will be in John Russell’s “Passion Vine.” In this her support will be Ramon Navarro, another dancer from whom Ingram predicts a success which may even duplicate that of Valentino.

Anent both Valentino and Navarro, Ingram made an interesting observation. “A good dancer,” said he, “frequently makes a good screen actor. Why? Because he has both poise and repose, and I don’t know any better start than these.”

In this connection do not forget that Chaplin is one of the most graceful of dancers. Although not a professional, he might easily have become so.