Silent film star Rudolph Valentino died suddenly August 23, 1926 at age 31. The Italian actor was practically single-handedly responsible for the exoticization of the “Latin lover” and had starred in movies like Blood and Sand and The Sheik. He had gone into the hospital for surgery for appendicitis and stomach ulcers and died of peritonitis shortly afterward. (Irish punk band Valentino is Dead took their name from the many banner newspaper headlines making the announcement.)

The hysterical grief that greeted the news was intense: attempted and successful suicides, women sobbing and fainting outside the hospital where he died and around 100,000 people swarming and rioting outside the Frank Campbell Funeral Home in Manhattan, where Valentino’s body lay in state.

After a first funeral mass at St. Malachy’s Roman Catholic Church in New York City, his body was shipped across the U.S. to California. Fans waited in train stations across the country just to see the train containing his body go by, while radio stations played the hastily recorded “There’s a New Star in Heaven Tonight, Rudolph Valentino” by singer Rudy Vallée.

Celebrity deaths are not a new thing for our generation. We’ve lived through massive spectacles following the demise of celebrities like Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, Whitney Houston and Frederico Fellini, but before 1926 public mourning following a celebrity’s death hadn’t happened before on that scale. It was a huge deal. My own paternal grandmother, who was a rather cold, inexpressive, emotionally distant woman (e.g., kind of a bitch), would actually get teary-eyed talking about Valentino and how sexy he was.
 

 
Valentino in The Son of the Sheik, released posthumously in 1926

After a second requiem mass at the Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, Valentino’s friend June Mathis allowed his body to be interred, supposedly temporarily, in one of the two plots she and her husband owned in the Cathedral Mausoleum at Hollywood Forever Cemetery near Paramount Studios.

Beginning on the first anniversary of his death, every August 23rd a veiled woman dressed in black has shown up at his crypt and placed red roses there. Photographers hung around the mausoleum trying to get a photo of the lady and identify her. Skeptics dismissed the Lady in Black story as a publicity stunt invented by a studio press agent to keep Valentino’s mystique alive and keep reissues of his films profitable.

The identity of the original “official” woman in black may have been actress Pola Negri, who claimed to be engaged to Valentino and showed up at his L.A. funeral in full mourning regalia, making an outrageous scene wailing, sobbing, and fainting over his coffin. At least she insisted that she was the original mourner. Other weepy ladies included Estrellita de Rejil, who took the job over from her mother (purportedly one of Valentino’s love interests), a Ziegfeld showgirl, and Ditra Flame, who claimed that Valentino was a friend of her mother’s and had visited Ditra in the hospital when she was ill as a child. Ditra said that Valentino had told her that she would get well and outlive him by many years. He asked her to promise to visit his grave and talk to him, so that he would not be alone in death.

Phil Reeves reported in The Independent in 1992:

At least one anniversary has been marred by a fight, in which roses were stomped under foot. Perhaps the most tense gathering was in 1988 when an aspiring actress marched in, escorted by a photographer, and began relating her ‘intimate experience’ with Valentino’s ghost. Ms de Rejil, restrained two years earlier after laying into a rival, confined herself to grumbling loudly about fakes.

Even though the original series of mourners seen in the 1920’s and 1930’s are long gone, dozens of other official (the current one being actress Vicki Callahan) and unofficial dueling young ladies in black, including transgendered women, transvestites, and disembodied spirits, have kept up the macabre tradition.

 

 
The original Pathe News reel reporting Valentino’s death and funerals, 1926, below: