Customer Reviews

Madam Valentino: The Many Lives of Natacha Rambova

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This biography is a fascinating read of the woman that was Rudolph Valentino's second wife, and love of his life (it has been said her leaving him led to his death, due to stress and increased drinking, which may have led to worsening his ulcer).
Anyone who wants to know more about Valentino, and about the way certain artists of the more 'Bohemian' set were crushed by the glove of Hollywood, needs to read this book. An astoundingly beautiful woman, Natacha's life reads like the epitome of Art Deco elegance; a schooling in Europe, a career as a ballet dancer with a Russian troupe (and a stormy love affair with its leader), and finally as confidante to the power Alla Nazimova and Hollywood art director.
Valentino fell under her spell before he catapulted to fame, they wed, and spent their time indulging their passions; animals, spending sprees (which led into major debt) on antiques and clothes, love of art and culture, and study of spiritualism.
Natacha's own independent personality and adherence to the aesthetic tenets of 'high art' led the Hollywood execs to like her less and less. The final straw, when Valentino signed his United Artists contract *banning* Natacha from the set, led to her leaving him and his subsequent heartbreak. She wanted a career; Valentino wanted a career and a family.
After his death, Natacha's life did not cease to be interesting, with her continued study into Spiritualism, and her endeavors in Egyptology, along with her second, also doomed (though this time in divorce), marriage to a spanish rebel.
The photographs in the book are numerous, some rare, and still pictures show her as a radiant, almost unnaturally beautiful woman; I could imagine what she must have been like in real life!
A well researched, well written, engaging biography that I read cover to cover with much interest.

This book could have been so deliciously tacky. It could also have swung the other way and made its subject saintly. Michael Morris found just the right balance.

I first encountered Rambova in Kenneth Anger's book, "Hollywood Babylon." She intrigued me the way Yoko Ono and Courtney Love intrigue some John Lennon and Curt Kurbain fans. You wonder, 'What's Sooooo special about her?' So I approached the book with that attitude. Afterall, Rambova was married to Rudolph Valentino, a man known to this day as 'the world's greatest lover.'

But I read the last sentence of the book with great regret that the book had ended and that the experience of reading it was over. It was that good.

Michael Morris did a top-notch job on this biography and I regret that he didn't do Mae Murray, Barbara LaMarr, Corrine Griffith, etc. the same favor.

Morris went into great detail in all the right places. After I finished the book, I didn't feel like I'd read a biography about a movie star's wife who was striving to be a 'personality' in her own right. Rather, I felt that I'd read a book about a person who, like so many of us, was searching her way through life and trying to figure out why in the hell she was here. She just went about her 'search' a bit differently because she had all the right connections, the money, and the energy to do so.

But it's money in the end.

The author of this bio did not discover She-Who-Became Valentino's wife in the usual fashion, and his perspective on her is wonderful as a result. Where most people who know of her at all only experience the harpie images given by Hollywood mudrakers, Morris learned of Winifred/Natcha through her art. His interest in Natcha is the whole of her life, not just the bit with Valentino. The result is a thoughtfull, well-researched and facinating account of a remarkable life -- and one of my favorite biographies.

A book about the fascinating Natacha Rambova is long overdue. Well known as the much-maligned wife of early Hollywood heart-throb Rudolph Valentino, she was also a dancer, set designer, mystic, and art collector to name just a few of her talents. However, the author's excessively rosy view of his very complex subject makes this a good book, not a great one.

Morris works hard to reverse the numerous unflattering stereotypes and rumours built around Natacha during her life. By refusing to at least explore them, he weakens the book considerably. All negative claims are swiftly - perhaps a little too swiftly - shot down. The bare details are subtly poked and prodded into a much more pleasant picture than was strictly the case. In particular, very little is made of `Monsieur Beaucaire', the notorious flop which nearly ended Valentino's career and his rough, mysterious image. This movie represented a major crisis in the marriage of the couple, as Rambova has convinced Valentino and his studio to make the film in the first place.

The end (and for that matter, much) of the Valentinos' marriage was far more acrimonious than Morris leads us to believe, and thus the portrait of Natacha he paints remains disappointingly bloodless. One topic of which more exploration is needed by further biographers of Natacha (and I hope that more is written of her) is made evident by the numerous references to her ability to work all day having had nothing to eat, and by the stomach ailment that eventually killed her. Natacha was quite obviously anorexic, and exploration into her affliction might have told us much more about her.

Natacha was not the wilful but essentially benign artiste that Morris portrays here, but nor was she the cold-hearted, ruthlessly ambitious lesbian of other historical accounts. The truth, presumably, was somewhere in between - a person far more interesting than either cliched extreme. What cannot be denied is that Rambova was an interesting, talented, and ambitious woman whose story is very worthy of telling, and the book is worth reading for that alone.

What a shame that, even after Morris' attempt to bring her out from under the shadow of her famous husband, the book must still be titled `Madame Valentino'.

In this book we get treated to a fascinating portrait of an really amazing woman who really deserved a full biographical treatment. Natacha Rambova was a woman who was born in the wrong time and place, and had to struggle against that as she made her own way in the world. As I've found out more about her, I've come more and more to feel that there are striking parallels between Natacha Rambova and Yoko Ono. Both women have been unfairly demonised for being driven strong independent women with artistic visions ahead of their time, and both are women you either love or hate for it. Both have also been accused, by their detractors, of wielding too much control over their husbands and nearly destroying their careers because of it, and both also too often are only known about in relation to the men they married. As we find out in this book, Natacha was a lot more than just Madame Valentino, particularly since that role only lasted not even six years. Mr. Morris says he became a fan of hers after seeing the costumes she designed for Alla Nazimova's ambitious art film 'Salome,' not because he was a fan of her most famous husband first, the way most people seem to become interested in Natacha. He also provides generous family background so we can see where she came from and why she became what she did. More than just Madame Valentino or an unfairly demonised woman, Natacha was also a ballet dancer, a designer of costumes and sets for films, an art collector, an Egyptologist, and a spiritualist. She also was in Spain during the time of the Spanish Civil War in the Thirites, when she was married to her second husband, and ended up taking part in that event as well. Never a woman to let her identity rest on the men she was married to, Natacha made her own name in the world, creating her own path, even at a time when not a lot of women did that. There are also a lot of great photographs.

My only complaint about the book is that it wasn't long enough! This was such a fascinating woman that the reader is left wanting more information and details, although given that this is really the first serious scholarly biography on her, it's not that big of a deal. It's a fine start. I also agree that the title is kind of disingenious. Mr. Morris goes to so many pains to prove that Natacha was an interesting capable person in her own right, even though she's most famous for her role as Madame Valentino, so why use that as the title of the book? It might mean the book sells better, but if people are to become interested in her in her own right, a better title might have been 'Madame Rambova.'

This book has many positive qualities as listed in the 4 and 5 star reviews above. However, the author fails to provide documentation for the quotes he attributes to those mentioned in the book. There is a general list of sources at the end, but none specific to a given quote. So much of what has been said about Valentino and Rambova has been suspect it would have been nice to know where some of these statements came from.