Did Pola really love Rudolph Valentino?
Absolutely! In every picture or home movie I have ever seen of Pola and Rudy together, Polas countenance is like that of a little girl in a candy store. Pola was clearly infatuated with her Rudy, and because Rudy died before the honeymoon (so to speak) was over, Pola continued to have a vision of Rudy as the perfect mansomething she never completely got over. I’ve been told by a gentleman who knew Pola personally that much later in her life she said privately that she didnt really like Rudy at the time and that she thought that he was common, but this was after she had adopted a somewhat revisionist view of her own role as a film star. And these statements dont explain the surviving scrapbook she kept of her star days in Hollywood that has a healthy portion of it dedicated to Rudy, one of the items being a typed transcript of an interview conducted in 1978 (nine years before her death) where she again speaks briefly about how much Rudy meant to her.
