I guess I could have been called a nerd as a teenager. I loved history and one history teacher really left a mark. If I remember correctly her name was Mrs. Reichman. She was German and lost her husband to a concentration camp. She told the story thusly.
She was in America during World War Two and knew he was in a camp. I do not remember which concentration camp. She received a letter from him in which he wrote he knew how much she loved to collect postage stamps. Mrs. Reichman did not collect stamps and wondered.
She knew all of his letters were read and censored by the camp officers and recognized the odd message from her husband. She removed the postage stamp from the envelope to read his message printed in tiny letters: “I am starving to death.”
That was the most powerful history lesson I ever learned and from that moment on I reacted dramatically to evil being exacted on innocent people. I was radicalized historically. I seemed to henceforth notice to an extreme degree the desperate messages from the doomed. I was probably traumatized by my history teacher's experience and should have been. It has ever since seemed instinctual for me to champion the historically persecuted.
I did not set out to write about Rudolph Valentino being persecuted and of course he was not dying in a concentration camp. But as I wrote about his life and confronted the evil his legacy was and is being subjected to, I began to champion his struggle.
We learned from the first-hand witness, Spanish journalist Baltasar Cue how Rudolph struggled to have his true history be known to his public. He began working with Cue on a book during the last months of his life and gave Cue a stack of letters and articles for his use which would ultimately change a great deal about the Valentino history.
Cue's book, The True Story of Rudolph Valentino would be published in a serialized format by a Spanish fan magazine after Rudy's death. Cue would fill in the blanks so to speak on many aspects but his account of Rudy's life in Falcon Lair the last months of his life and those documents Rudy himself gave him would become valuable pieces of evidence.
My dearly departed husband Renato translated Cue's serialized account from the original Spanish to English and published it in book format. And oh brother did that book add to the cult's headaches.
Because Cue had Valentino's own documents as proof of some very important corrections in his subject's life. Like a stamp in hand, it was tangible historical proof of just what was actually going on.
Through Cue we read of Rudy's ache to dispel the lies being told about him and his anxiety of being remembered for who he was not. I admit this inspired my instinct to defend Valentino's doomed history.
This... because in the name of Rudolph Valentino, a group of people desperately loyal to collectors of Valentino relics...continue to spread the same lies Rudolph Valentino was about to dispel when he died.
They contort his history to suit their personal agendas, with complete disregard for intellectual honesty. Acting as an totalitarian authority, they run massively followed Facebook sites about the man where they censor and lie not only about Valentino and his inner circle but about us and our well-documented books.
Savagery is there also inflicted on the legacy of Valentino by the suppression of the truth. And a great deal of that truth is contained with the pages of Affairs Valentino.
Anyone I praised in the book for their documented loyalty to Valentino, came under the cult's knee-jerking attacks and by anyone I mean all, as in every single one, of the people we discovered to be true heroes of Valentino's brief life... his actual loved ones.
Because I discovered proof of these heroes roles in the history...the cult's magus, his rank and file of adminions, fellow collectors and general sycophants set out to vilify them as sensationally and as fast as they could.
Their defamatory posts about these folks... such as Valentino's godfathers, his wife Natacha Rambova, etc. would be amateurishly contrived based on any remote piece of trivia they could twist into something to make them look evil. This was the same strategy they were and are using against us.
The cult, or “mainstream Valentino world” as they call themselves also used this tactic conversely. When I presented documentation Valentino's handyman was involved in the theft of and disappearance of the second page of Valentino's will, the cult sanctified him. They were and are fond of their alleged “debunking” of these people's very true roles in Valentino's life and of our life's work.
Renato and I spent years citing and sharing our documentation and invited people to fact check it all for themselves. This made no difference to the main stream cultists because they can and do concoct ridiculously mean and absurd things to say with the reckless abandonment of any intellectual honesty.
The cult's staggeringly less than bold and beautiful responses were akin to just sniggering and drawing horns on them like children. Because a world of people appreciating Valentino go logically on Facebook to join the two largest forums in his honor, the cartoon-like vilifying of these people and us is soup du jour.
I have hard drives of proof the cult wields those Facebook forums to bully nonsensically. It is also there they maintain the false narrative with fanaticism and force. If you post something positive about us or dispute their edicts you are deleted, forbidden to return unless you use an alias which many people do.
To thoroughly dissect this aspect of the sordid story would involve me talking for hours. This has been going on for two decades, a year and counting and today I only share two pieces of documentation as proof of Valentino's closest friend and trusted business manager, George Ullman's integrity and loyalty.
You don't have to listen to or read the cult's posts for long at all before realizing how fervently they hate George Ullman... almost as much as they hate me. Its hard to decipher which person the cult more wrongly and strongly demonizes. But George Ullman might be on the top of the list and they put him there after Affairs Valentino.
Because of their zealous behavior to ruin me, George Ullman's memory has suffered. During his lifetime he was highly-respected, credited with having managed Valentino's return to the movies after a long strike. Ullman was a hero until I revealed the documented truth about what actually happened to him as a result of his role as executor of Valentino's estate.
I had no opinion about Ullman before I began researching his involvement in Valentino's life. I decided to see if he left an archive and located and worked with his two children who were in their seventies when I met them. They are both now deceased. George Ullman did leave an archive which had never been accessed or referenced and this inspired the revised story of Valentino's life as told in Affairs Valentino; a story in which Valentino's brother Alberto's halo gets nicked, the handyman implicated and so on.
I remember the moment, vividly... when I picked up my phone to see the name, “Robert Ullman” on the caller ID. As much as the cult lurched into action to demean that moment, it was monumental and my life and Valentino's history was never the same. George Ullman's archive changed the Valentino story to such an extreme level I am still blown away.
What a headache for the cult... because they then had to work non stop trying to make all of George Ullman's archive look bad. A 100% worthless debunking ensued. They were telling the world I was a thief, wanted by the police, a drug addict, a liar and forger, etc., and because I documented Ullman's heroism, they portrayed him as an arch villain with a litany of slurs as permanent taglines such as “shyster”. They drew the horns on heavy where George Ullman was concerned.
In denying our documentation and even claiming we forged documents, they twist Valentino's truth in every possible way. Most all of our documentation was publicly housed and available for anyone's review but still the cult's hand was to do everything they could to discredit and eliminate it entirely from Valentino's history. This is no where more the case than with their treatment of George Ullman
For the record I share the following documented point:
In the thousand page case file of Rudolph Valentino's probate records I recovered, under the category of “Baskerville Audit”, the estate ordered audit of Valentino's estate, it is cited the estate reimbursed George Ullman the sum of $18,515.00. The court approved the transfer of funds on January 20, 1927, five months after Valentino's death. This was recorded in the “Registry of Actions”, a court record which, last I checked, was still publicly available,
I knew why the Valentino estate owed this money to Ullman because I photographed the Valentino archive in 2003, then housed in Campbell's Funeral Church in New York City. I knew from those records Ullman personally paid for Valentino's funeral before he left New York on the funeral train. He paid Campbell's $11,000.00 and change from his personal bank account with the balance due paid a few weeks later when he returned to his office in Los Angeles. This is the invoice from the Campbell's registry:
This is significant because it has long been cult-claimed Ullman never paid for the funeral at all. Bear in mind this is but one small example of their twisting of Valentino's history.
No “thief” or “shyster” would pay, out of pocket, for his friend's funeral. Yes he was reimbursed, but imagine laying out what by today's exchange rate (times 15) amounted to $270,000.00 for your friend's funeral. Still, with this documentation presented to them, the cult pounds away with their lies defaming George Ullman. In this way Valentino's dream of vanquishing the lies about him dies a little more and his history is further wounded by cult falsehoods.
So if someone tells you Ullman never paid for Valentino's funeral and that he stiffed Campbell's for the entire bill and they drop the word, “shyster”, know you are dealing with the cult.
I hope I have made my point in these audio notes that I am not just referring to the wounding of Valentino's legacy but the legacies of all those defamed by a determined few, myself included.
I am determined to right this wrong.
The truth will be heard; uncensored and courageously because I believe history is established by tangible documentation. Perhaps it seems trivial to some to even care about the truth of a long deceased movie star's history. I believe it is not trivial at all.
For today thank you for listening and reading and find all of our well-documented and entertaining books online.
Fiat Justicia Ruat Caelum.... and arrevederci!
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