The Valentino Affair by Colin Evans

Author:Colin Evans [Evans, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2014-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

If Rodolfo Guglielmi got wind of this latest development he must have shuddered. After almost a year of scuffling around in Hollywood, knocking on agents’ doors, and most of those doors slamming in his face, he had finally landed a part as a dress extra in Alimony. The job paid only five bucks a day, but one casting director at least had noticed the young actor with the elegant moves and the moody good looks.

He was also making useful contacts elsewhere. Among his fellow extras in Alimony was a delicate young beauty named Alice Taafe. The couple hit it off immediately and often went out dancing. In time she would change her name to Alice Terry and become one of the silent screen’s most accomplished leading ladies—but she didn’t forget her young dancing partner. Just a few years later, when cast by her husband, the director Rex Ingram, in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, she mentioned that Rodolfo, with his dark appearance, would be ideal for the leading role. The rest, as they say, is movie history, but for now the last thing that the struggling actor needed was any connection with the most sensational murder trial in a decade.

THE TRIAL, DAY 4

But the bad news kept on coming.

The next morning’s newspapers announced that Deputy County Clerk William B. Selden, of New York, had been served with a subpoena from the Nassau County district attorney’s office, requiring the production in court of all papers and records connected with the divorce action brought by Mrs. de Saulles against her husband. The required papers were sent to Mineola in the custody of a court messenger. Weeks, convinced there was something buried in these documents that would weigh heavily against the defendant, dropped heavy hints to reporters that he might introduce details of the divorce at the conclusion of the state’s direct evidence.

Blanca clearly wasn’t fazed by this news as she entered court that morning. On the contrary, she had a glow about her that acquaintances attributed to the visit of her son the previous evening. At eleven o’clock the eleventh juror, George Siles, sixty-one, a decorator, was selected. When asked if he worried that Siles, unlike all the other jurors, was childless, Uterhart laughed and said that he liked Mr. Siles’s face “particularly well” and was sure he was a man of “human sensibilities.”47 An hour later, the final juror, Alexander S. Norton, a fifty-four-year-old retired firefighter, joined the panel. As he took his seat, Blanca nodded slightly, as if in approval. Although both sides expressed their happiness with the jury’s makeup, a glance at the avuncular, silver-tinged jury and then at the gamine defendant left no doubt in observers’ minds that in the vital battle of jury selection the state had been decisively routed. Some of these men had grandchildren almost as old as Blanca.

After the twelfth juror was sworn in, the court took a lunch break. An hour later, everyone returned to the packed room, and District Attorney Weeks stood to make his opening address.

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