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.