In 1926 the most famous man on earth stood on a New York hotel roof learning to box from Jack Dempsey, determined to fight a newspaper editorial that had blamed him for a pink talcum powder dispenser in a men's restroom. This episode traces Rudolph Valentino from a naval academy rejection in Italy, through a first-class steamship bluff with a fake family crest, to sleeping on Central Park benches and working as a taxi dancer in New York cabarets.

The discussion covers the high-society divorce scandal that drove him west, the typecasting that made him a screen villain until screenwriter June Mathis insisted he lead The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the tango craze and The Sheik, his one-man strike against a 350-dollar weekly salary, and the United Artists contract that gave him creative control. It also examines his chaotic marriages to J ...