Valentino – The First Superstar

This is the real and, until now, untold story of Rudolph Valentino – the most amazing tale you will ever read – and the story Valentino himself said was too 'wild and improbable' for his public to believe…The legendary Latin Lover who was the silver screen's first and greatest male sex symbol was also the first to be attacked in public by his own adoring, hysterical fans fighting to touch their idol or snatch a tiny piece of his clothing or hair as a keepsake. When he died at just thirty-one, he left behind a legion of broken-hearted women and as many unanswered questions.Bestselling author Noel Botham has spent more than twenty-fice years, and travelled over 30,000 miles, searching for, and unravelling, the missing answers which explain Valentino's brief but incredible life, and has spoken to many of the people who shared, at first hand, as they happened, the good – and the bad – times of the cinema's first superstar.He has conducted frank and revealing face-to-face interviews with the movie star of Valentino's time – Carmel Myers, Viola Dana, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, Gertrude Astor and others, enabling him to paint this rounded and unique portrait of th screen's most exciting and enduring legend.By cutting through the rumours and following up previously ignored leads he has uncovered the shameful secrets of Rudolph Valentino's early yearsi n America, which the smouldering-eyed screen idol tried to keep hidden from his fans, and learned the full and shocking truth about his two disastrous marriages.This first-ever intimate and searingly accurate biography explores Valentino's childhood in rural poverty, through his groundbreaking appearance in The Sheik, which made woman audiences swoon for the first time, to his tragic early death, and conclusively shows why he so justly deserved the epithet 'the world's first heart-throb'.