The Valentino Affair

March 31, 2014
This meticulously reconstructed account of a 1917 murder trial features a lurid cast and copious melodrama. Almost as soon as Chilean heiress Blanca Errázuriz married New York real estate mogul Jack De Saulles in 1912, she suffered terrible humiliations. The rakish De Saulles schemed to get access to his wife’s family fortune to finance his business deals and taste for luxury, and was notorious for his philandering. The birth of their son, Jack Jr., failed to put things right, and after muddling along for four years, Blanca filed for divorce in 1916. Less than a year later, she shot and killed De Saulles in front of several witnesses during a custody dispute; she was acquitted during a sensational trial in 1917. As the marriage fell apart, De Saulles’s liaisons with actresses and Broadway stars, including the dancer Joan Sawyer, pulled Sawyer’s dance partner, a struggling tango dancer named Rudolfo Guglielmi (who became silent film star Rudolf Valentino), into Jack and Blanca’s orbit. While Valentino provides modern readers with a reference point, his rumored connection to Blanca is an aside in Evans’s (Blood on the Table) work, which documents one in a string of the era’s “wronged women” cases that all ended in acquittals of the killers. B&w photos, illus. Agent: Roger Williams, New England Publishing Associates.

June 1, 2014
Prolific true-crime writer Evans (Slaughter on a Snowy Morn: A Tale of Murder, Corruption, and the Death Penalty Case that Shocked America, 2012, etc.) examines the murder trial of Chilean heiress Blanca de Saulles ("The Flower of the Andes") in a narrative reminiscent of the background melodramas of The Great Gatsby or the musical Chicago."From an early age," writes the author, "Blanca knew the power of her personal magnetism and her place in the world." Yet, she miscalculated by marrying Jack de Saulles, a Yale football hero (and Broadway rake)-turned-fortune hunter: "de Saulles ran through money like air." The marriage quickly soured, and although they agreed to share custody of their young son upon divorcing, this proved the fatal flash point: Blanca shot Jack in August 1917 at his Long Island summer home. What seemed a sure murder conviction fell apart due to now-familiar complications: a chaotic media circus, a showboating, high-end defense attorney and a prim prosecutor outmatched by the wealthy defendant's resources. Crucially, Evans argues that there existed an "unwritten rule" that certain female defendants could not be convicted of murder, as patriarchal juries seemed swayed by sheer femininity: "[O]nce again a wealthy female defendant had escaped the electric chair for killing her husband. Such homicides were now becoming a national epidemic." Evans presents this sordid narrative in such brisk, entertaining fashion that readers may not notice his own bait-and-switch: Although the impetuous immigrant seducer later known as Rudolph Valentino did testify to de Saulles' infidelity during the divorce trial and may have been set up for a vice charge in its aftermath, he does not actually appear during the more sensational murder trial.A well-researched tale of a distant-seeming era and crime, echoing our own time's obsession with celebrity transgression and capacity for justifying violence.

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May 15, 2014
Though there's not much Valentino to be found here, this is the gracefully told true story of a Jazz Age Chilean heiress, the American cad who married and then ignored her, and one Rodolfo Guglielmi, who would with luck and looks transform into Rudolph Valentino, one of silent film's most adored stars. When older playboy Jack de Saulles married Blanca Errzuriz, he thought she had more money than she did, and he spent what she had, some of it while charming other women, which resulted in Guglielmi-Valentino giving testimony in their divorce. The de Saulles' young son, Jack, however, kept the couple in touch, for better or worse (and it was worse). By carefully sketching the contemporaneous political situation, weaving in the wayward husband's greedy ambitions, and quoting from the lonely wife's letters, Evans skillfully builds the enormous train wreck these three people's lives created once their paths crossed, however briefly. Evans not only re-creates an era but does so novelistically, making the characters despicable, real, and lovely and making the book itself a page-turner. For true-crime fans and history buffs alike.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)