Urban Bar: Blood and Sand
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| Photo: Eric Diesel |
When Rodulphus Alfonso Petrus Philibertus Rafaele Guglielmi di
Valentina d'Antonguella arrived in the Hollywood movie colony during the height
of the silent era, everyone from Jesse Lasky to Nazimova took notice of the
dashing young man with the black patent leather hair and the indecipherably thick
accent. He was originally cast in bit roles as an "exotic," the racist practice of the time of casting Caucasians as
people of other ethnicities. Rudolph Valentino rose to prominence because audiences
reacted passionately to his graceful, compelling screen presence. He was a very
skilled dancer, which infused his image with a balletic quality that
contrasted with the prevailing two-fisted masculine ideal of Teddy Roosevelt
and Douglas Fairbanks. And if he had always been known as jaw-droppingly
handsome and in fact had survived on his looks, he was ever so much moreso when
his image was captured on film.
The intersection of cultures is the crux of Rudy's
personhood, tracing back to his beginnings as half-Italian and half-French, a
lad sensitive and intelligent but also ill-behaved and troublesome. His ability
to inhabit dichotomy was his stock in trade as a film actor. He was a white man
whose greatest success was playing an Arab; his audience's ideal romantic male
even though all that made him that was the very opposite of the manhood of the
time. We would rightly call it gendered thinking nowadays, but the fundamental
paradox in Valentino's legend is the masculine/feminine one: seductive but
romantic, of a time and generation that so beatified women that society
couldn't reconcile the adoration with the realities of sexual congress. His
magic, even to people who are not attracted to men, is undeniable, and if there
was a threat, that is where it resided.
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| Photo: Eric Diesel |
Blood and Sand was released in 1922, just as Rudy was ascending
the height of his career. The Sheik had been released to an avalanche of
ticket sales, capitalized upon in the Hollywood way by the successful pairing
of Rudy with Gloria Swanson in Beyond the Rocks. Blood and Sand was the first
picture Rudy was expected to carry himself, not with the wait-and-see receipts
of his earlier films but as a bona fide movie star who was expected to deliver
big numbers at the box office. In Blood and Sand, Rudy played a bullfighter,
and the title referred to both the danger of the profession and the arena in
which it was played. Paramount Studios -- the very studio built on land donated
by Hollywood Forever, just on the other side of the fence -- had a hit, and one
of the ways blood and sand became elements of a night on the town was by rendering
the symbolism of the title into the contents of a cocktail glass.
The Blood and Sand is rightly reckoned as a Prohibition cocktail, for it speaks to the speakeasy just as eloquently as it
speaks to the silver screen. Doctor Cocktail gives it a place in Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, and no less an authority than Dale DeGroff includes it
in his pivotal The Craft of the Cocktail, where he notes that it is one of the
few cocktails built with Scotch. But my favorite, and to my knowledge one of
the earliest, draft of the recipe for the cocktail comes from the venerable,
leather-bound chapbook Old Mr. Boston De Luxe Official Bartender's Guide. My copy dates to 1935, and the Blood and Sand is included, as matter-of-factly as
the page numbers and the line illustrations of hooch bottles, between the
Blarney Stone (whiskey, Absinthe, Curacao, Maraschino and bitters) and the
Blood Bronx (gin, French vermouth and blood orange juice).
If you want the truest of Blood and Sands, your
destination is The Dresden Room, where it has been the house cocktail for as
long as anyone remembers. One rumor, or, if you prefer, myth, has it that the
Dresden started featuring the Blood and Sand as a response to a Brown Derby and
a silent movie theatre being just up the street. As befits the space, the Dresden's
Blood and Sand is the classic, ultimate version, sweet and smoky at the same
time, swathed in doxie's rose-gold and arriving in a crystal coupé.
If a cocktail can be dapper, seductive, and
mythological, it is the Blood and Sand. It is the very soul of the Jazz Age, created
to honor one of silent cinema's most mythological presences. Rudy's legend lives
today, in public and in private from film festivals to ceremonies at his crypt.
He is the paradox redoubled, an immortal of the screen whose mortality
guaranteed his legend. In our urban home, we celebrate Rudy's birthday
with a red rose at the cemetery, a screening of one of his films, his favorite
meal of long spaghetti, and a toast of blood and sand.
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| Photo: Eric Diesel |
Cherry Heering is a cherry liqueur available at most liquor stores; you also need it to build a Singapore Sling. I use the Lagavulin or the Balvenie in my Blood and Sand, but blended Scotch is true to the history of the drink. Serve your Blood and Sand in a stemmed cocktail glass
to showcase the drink's gorgeous rose-gold hue.
1 shot Lagavulin or Balvenie whisky, or 1 shot blended Scotch, such as Ballantine, Cutty Sark or Dewar's
1 shot Cherry Heering
1 shot orange juice
1 scant shot sweet Vermouth, such as Vya or Maurin
- Fill a cocktail shaker with crushed ice.
- Measure the ingredients into the shaker in the order listed.
- Place the cover on the shaker. Shake the cocktail until the shaker is too cold to touch.
- Strain the cocktail into a cocktail glass.
- Garnish with a preserved cherry and serve.
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