Antique Rudolph Valentino Cigar Band 🚬 Quality Cigar Label 1900s - 1920s New Old Stock Collectible Silent Film Era Tobacco

Why Was a Cigar Named for Rudolph Valentino? 🎬 The Rudolph Valentino Quality Cigar Band, 1920s

Size: 2 3/4" x 1/2"

How many movie stars get their name on a cigar? This little band was made to wrap around a Rudolph Valentino cigar, and it never got used. RUDOLPH VALENTINO is lettered in cream on a black oval in the middle, with gold scrollwork on either side, QUALITY across the top and CIGAR across the bottom in gold on red. One end has a little TEAR HERE tab, and the other end has a tiny printed C. Turn it over and the back is plain cream paper, blind-embossed with the whole pattern of the front.

🌹 The Great Lover

Valentino was born Rodolfo Guglielmi on May 6, 1895, in Castellaneta, in the south of Italy, and landed in New York two days before Christmas in 1913 with a bank draft worth about $4,000 in his pocket. He danced for a living, first as a taxi dancer and then in ballrooms, until The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921 made him a star overnight and got America doing the tango. The Sheik came out that same year and made him the Latin Lover for good, and Blood and Sand (1922), The Eagle (1925) and The Son of the Sheik (1926) followed. That is also why this band can only date from the 1920s. Before 1921 hardly anybody knew his name.

Then it all stopped. On August 23, 1926, Valentino died in New York of peritonitis at just 31 years old. His body was taken to the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, and an estimated 100,000 people lined the streets of Manhattan to pay their respects, windows were smashed as fans tried to get in, an all-day riot broke out on August 24, and it took more than 100 mounted police to restore order. Suicides of heartbroken fans were reported. His friend June Mathis offered him a spot in the crypt she had bought for herself, she died the very next year, and the two of them still lie side by side at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

And here's the legend. For decades a mysterious woman in black has come to his crypt with a red rose, usually on the anniversary of his death. The first one seems to have been a publicity stunt dreamed up by press agent Russel Birdwell in 1928, but the tradition stuck, and there's still a woman in black today, the film historian Karie Bible. The story is even said to have inspired the song "Long Black Veil."

🚬 The Little Paper Ring

The cigar band has its own legends. One says Catherine the Great wrapped her cigars in silk so they would not stain her fingers, and another says bands were put on cigars shipped to England to keep gentlemen's white gloves clean. Cigar historians give the credit to Gustave Bock, a Dutch-born cigar maker in Cuba, who in the 1830s had paper rings with his signature put on every cigar he exported to Europe. By 1900 Americans were going through about 2 billion cigar bands a year. Printers shipped them precut in bundles of 100, and the cigar maker put each one on by hand with a dab of plant-based glue.

A Rudolph Valentino cigar label is part of the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, so this little band is in very good company. Kids used to save bands like this and paste them into scrapbooks, and collecting them even has a name, vitolphilia.

It would look great framed with a still of Valentino in The Sheik, or tucked into a silent film collection. A perfect little gift for any old Hollywood fan.