Part 2 - Valentino, 'El Vasco' and the Tango in New York
'Shocking' to some New Yorkers, 'delighful' to others: an illustration from the International Herald Tribune (New York), 1914.
Popular history attributes the exodus of Argentinians from Paris to New York to the arrival of World War I, a cataclysm which - as depicted in Ibañez's 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse - brought the French tango craze to a standstill. In fact, the departures had already begun before the war. There was a glut of expatriate Argentinians jostling for jobs in Paris. Rumours abounded that the tango was about to catch on in New York. Aín and his company were amongst the first to be tempted across the water, arriving on 15 November 1913. The arrival of this 'real' tango dancer and orquestra was reported all over America.
Mrs William Astor Chanler's home at East 19th Street was at the centre of Gramercy Park's bohemian life. Minnie operated a sculpture studio in her home. Next door lived her eccentric brother-in-law, Robert Chanler, a celebrated interior decorator who had transformed his home into a flamboyant headquarters for the local artistic community that he called the 'House of Fantasy'.
A 'tango tea' at the Hotel St Denis, the sort of soirée Valentino - and Casimiro Aín - would have attended during their early months in New York.
A week after their arrival, Aín and his orquestra tipica made their debut at an invitation-only thé dansant or 'tango tea' at the Hotel Vanderbilt, organised by Mrs E. Roscoe Matthews, whom some publications credited with bringing Aín to New York.
Aín performed several exhibition dances, then offered participants instruction in the 'authentic' Argentine tango. 'Everyone who danced with Mr Aín declared afterwards that he was perfectly wonderful - almost as wonderful as his dance,' declared one observer.
Amongst those in attendance was actress turned interior designer Elsie de Wolfe, step aunt and close confidante of Valentino's future wife, Natacha Rambova. At another such event were Mr and Mrs Cornelius Bliss, who would shortly play an important role in Valentino's life in New York.
Advertisement from a theatre program of 14 January 1914, shortly after Aín's arrival in New York.
Aside from his teaching duties, Aín quickly found work as an exhibition dancer. He appeared sometimes as 'Casimiro Aín', sometimes as 'Casimir Aín', sometimes even as 'Professor Argentino', going so far to describe himself as 'inventor of the tango' - a stretch, to be sure; but not so much as some other claimants to the title.
Though the authenticity of the experience was emphasised, so too was a paradoxical insistence on propriety. Like Parisians, New Yorkers wanted a tango that was true enough to be exotic, but not so sensual as to be scandalous. The version Aín performed reflected this paradox; described on one hand as 'authentic' but on the other, as 'quite as stately and formal as the old time minuet.' Tango instruction manuals, which began to appear in New York in their dozens during 1914, talked of a 'new tango' that had been cleansed of its unsavoury elements (as well as of its indisputably Black origins) and rendered appropriate for the upper class.
As a professional, Aín himself saw no contradiction. His first priority was a dance that was lucrative to teach and attractive to watch.
Valentino in New York
Times Square in 1914, as Valentino would have seen it upon his arrival in New York.
As Aín and his orquestra were settling in to New York, Rudolph Valentino was on the ship from Paris, arriving on 23 December 1913. Official records show that he gave the address of an Italian-born Manhattan bookseller, Ernesto Filomarino, as his initial residence. Much as Aín and company likely stayed with Mrs Chanler until other accommodation could be found, Valentino may have roomed with the Filomarinos briefly before moving to Giolito's, an Italian boarding house on West 49th street, in the thick of the city's entertainment district.
At around this time, Valentino also made the acquaintance of an Italian musician, Domenico Savino, who had emigrated to America from Valentino's own hometown of Taranto. Some sources go so far as to claim that it was actually the Savinos who had drawn Valentino to New York in the first place. According to this version, Valentino had known Savino's sister in Taranto and, hearing of her brother's prosperity in New York, suggested that he too might make a success there.
Had Valentino somehow avoided the tango in Paris, there is no way he could have missed it in New York. 'All New York Now Madly Whirling in the Tango', proclaimed the front page of the New York Times on 4 January 1914. Alone in a foreign country, unable to speak English and desperate for company, social dance would have been an ideal way to find it. It was in this way, he said, that he met his first friends in America, George Ragni, Alex Salm and his brother, Otto.
The notion that these three bons vivant had introduced Valentino to the tango appeared as early as 1920, when Motion Picture Classic published their first major profile on 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse and its star.
Alex and Otto Salm and 'George Ragni'
Count Otto Salm at a tennis match, circa 1914 (Library of Congress)
Count Otto and Count Alexander Salm-Hoogstraeten, to use their full names, were born in Reichenau, Austria. It appears that they arrived in New York at almost the same time as Valentino (to date, their immigration records have not been uncovered, but the earliest available newspaper reports place them in New York on 28 December 1913). It was not tango that bought the pair to America, but tennis. Both of the Salms played at a competitive level - a third brother, Ludwig, was even more accomplished, competing in the 1912 Olympics and at Wimbledon in 1913 - and would soon contest various titles in America, including the Davis Cup.
And 'George Ragni'? Biographers have not been able to discover much about him, for no such person existed. In fact, he was Georges (or George) Tibor Aranyi - Otto Salm's best friend and doubles tennis partner, a Hungarian-born French national. The fact that Valentino repeated the name phonetically is a good indication that the trio were genuine acquaintances rather than important-sounding names he plucked from a newspaper.
Illustration from a tango instruction manual, 1913. Numerous teachers and dancers published such manuals in the early teens - including Valentino's future dance partner, Joan Sawyer.
But - could they dance? Newspaper columns reveal that both Salm brothers danced at an amateur society charity function, The Merry Whirl, in early 1914. Alex Salm's performance in a whimsical pantomime dance, 'The Riding Lesson', was especially praised in reviews. Their station would require them to be better-than-average social dancers, and tango was now part of the expected repertoire. Possibly, the Salms introduced Valentino to the newly standardised and codified formalities of salon tango, giving names to moves he had attempted only haltingly and instinctively in Paris.
New York dance teachers, eager to tame a dance that was too complex for the tastes of many students, had isolated a few basic steps as necessary to the tango. It is easy to imagine the Salms explaining to Valentino which step was called the Promenade, how to do the Ring, and so on. Perhaps, Valentino scraped together enough money to buy one of the popular tango instruction manuals currently flooding bookstalls, many of which contained pointers that remain useful today - "Do not hold the arm straight out. It should be bent at the elbow ... never accentuate movements of the shoulder or hips ... keep elbows still." Valentino apparently absorbed these lessons well, contributing his own talent and genuine feeling for the dance that would see him turn professional in an extraordinarily short space of time.
Clipping from unidentified Austrian newspaper announcing the death of Alex Salm, 1918.
By the middle of 1914, Valentino's acquaintance with Aranyi and the Salms was largely over. He had raced through his allowance and was no longer able to keep up with his wealthy friends. They, meanwhile, had more weighty matters on their mind, their fates containing sad echoes of 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Much like the grandsons of Julio Madariaga, the Frenchman Georges and Austrian Otto became doubles partners on opposite sides of a World War, though their professional and personal allegiance endured. Alex was called back to Austria, where he served as a lieutenant in the Thirteenth Dragoons. He died in battle at Cittadella, Italy in 1918, at the age of 28. Georges and Otto remained in America, where both were married in 1916. Otto and his wife, the former Maud Coster, settled at Tuxedo Park, where her family had a large estate, but divorced in 1936. He died in Rapallo, Italy in 1941 at the age of 51. Georges Aranyi and his American wife eventually settled in Paris. Neither are known to have discussed their friendship with Valentino, though there is evidence that Otto remained in touch after Valentino had gained fame. it is likely to have been Otto who provided Valentino with an introduction to his brother Ludwig during his European tour of 1923.
'El Tano' Meets 'El Vasco'
After several months partying beyond his means, reality settled in. Valentino badly needed to learn English, and to find a proper job. Mr and Mrs Cornelius Bliss - the same society pair who had learned the tango from Casimiro Aín - took a shine to him and employed him as a gardener. The shine gradually wore off after a series of mishaps that included a crashed motorcycle, though the couple continued to help support him financially. An attempt to gain a permanent position with the city foundered over his immigration status. Other job prospects came to nothing.
Soon, Valentino found himself dangerously close to destitution - a period he referred to in My Private Diary as 'my real Gethsemane'. He found an inexpensive room, 'little more than a broom closet at the top of a dingy rooming house' according to one biographer. 'Some days he sold something - a cigarette case, cuff links and so on - to pay for a meagre meal.' At the same time, Aín and his orquestra were staying at what Carlos G. Groppa called 'a meagre room on 10th Avenue.' The New York tango boom was not paying off as handsomely as expected, and they were biding their time as they contemplated their next move (ultimately, they would return to Buenos Aires later that year).
Casimiro Aín poses with Valentino's trunk in an undated interview from 'Mundo Argentino'.
It was now, it seems, that El Vasco met 'El Tano' - a fellow agriculturalist, a fellow son of French-Italian ancestry and of course, a fellow dancer. The evidence that he met Valentino is persuasive, and the portrait he paints exactly matches Valentino's own recollections of this time.
"Valentino used to frequent the bohemian Latino boarding house where I lived, and he was always asking for coffee with milk," recalled Aín to interviewer Arturo Silvestre in the magazine Mundo Argentino. "I can still see him, poorly dressed and with a hungry face, asking me for a few cents for the Automat ... He would put his hand on his belly and say [in Italian] "Hear that? There's nothing inside. Give me ten cents for a cafélatte." ... Once I bought from him the trunk he was carrying for seven dollars, and I gave him my raincoat."
Indeed, this lost trunk even makes an appearance in Valentino's recollections, though he remembers it being held by a landlady in lieu of unpaid rent. Another friend, Dickie Warner, would later tell Screenland magazine that Valentino henceforth carried his few possessions in 'a strange looking travelling bag of foreign make.' Without money - with few changes of clothes - he knew that his next home might be a bench in Central Park. Under the circumstances, a secondhand raincoat would have been a wise investment.
Now, he must do something - anything - to pull himself out of poverty. It was to this period that George Ullman dated Valentino's decision to turn to professional dancing. "When his money gave out in America, and he had tried many forms of work, failing gloriously in most of them, his thoughts turned to the one thing he could do well, namely, dance."
He had previously avoided becoming a taxi dancer and rarely discussed it later. He had no desire to associate himself with the 'tango pirates' of Broadway, popularly assumed to prey upon wealthy, unattached woman whilst simultaneously being accused of effeminacy - contradictory claims, similar to those that would be aimed at Valentino himself later in his career. Somebody convinced him to swallow his pride. But who?
Maxim's as it was when Valentino knew it, during a performance of the notorious Danse Apache.
Some sources credit a mysterious elderly Italian tramp, who appeared from the shadows, set Valentino on the right path, and disappeared just as oddly as he appeared. He seems a clear literary invention, and probably an amalgamation of more likely candidates.
Domenico Savino painted by Arturo Noci, date unknown.
A far stronger candidate is Domenico Savino, who was almost certainly the unnamed 'Italian musician' who helped gain Valentino a position at Maxim's, the fashionable restaurant whose large, circular ballroom he had already occupied as a social dancer. As Valentino told Movie Magazine in 1923: "The orchestra leader [at Maxim's] was a friend of mine - one of the few - and I had called to see him in hope of some suggestion that might help me out. He said to me: “Why not become a dancer here?” “What do you mean?” I asked.” Well, there are always women who wish to dance and have no partners. There are many who would like to take lessons. Now possibly you could work into something like that. You have a good appearance - when you’re eating regularly. You look well in evening clothes. I know you’re a fine dancer. Why not?”
Valentino agreed to swallow his pride, while Savino lent him a tuxedo so he would be presentable for the job. By the end of that year, Valentino had brokered a professional dance partnership with Bonnie Glass and, after her retirement, with the celebrated Joan Sawyer. It was a stunning turnaround for a young man who had been sleeping on park benches only months earlier. Within a few years, he would rise to world fame, dancing the same dance that had helped deliver him from perdition.
But did Casimiro Aín also play a part in changing Valentino's mind about the propriety of a dancing career? Did Valentino's secondhand raincoat arrived with a gentle suggestion: There is no shame in dancing well. Why not show the ladies how to dance a real tango, and make money in the process? Who wouldn't jump at the opportunity? As George Ullman would later say: "It was one of his traits never to be satisfied with mediocrity. In whatever line of effort he was constrained to appear, it was always his ambition to excel." If he was to be a taxi dancer, he should at least be the best. He later recounted playing certain steps over and over in his head as he went to sleep, sometimes leaping out of bed to practise them. It is easy to imagine Valentino begging Aín to show him a few different moves - ones that did not exist in the limited repertoire of the Salms or the sanitised manuals of Irene and Vernon Castle; elements of the real Argentine tango, or what passed for it in New York in 1914.
New York's newspapers were currently full of advertisements for lessons in both 'Parisian Tango' and 'Argentine Tango', indicating that there was general awareness of the difference between the two - but when even Argentinians such as El Vasco boasted of the modesty of the tango they performed, did this 'Argentine Tango' much resemble the tango criollo? Probably not, although it is likely to be a good deal closer to it - and to the evolving style of the guarda vieja - than anything else being taught in New York at the time. We can make some inferences based on Valentino's style of dance, of which more later.