He said his father named him Rudolpho Valentino Freeman after the 1920s Hollywood sex symbol and popular Italian actor Rudolph Valentino. Little did his dad know his boy would grow to very much resemble Valentino, so much so that at one point it was difficult to tell the two apart and he’d even audition to play the actor in a 1951 movie called “Valentino,” a role that eventually went to Anthony Dexter because, as Freeman put it, he was too short.
While he played bit parts in films at the beginning of his career, trying to live up to the name he was given, he’d excel in publicity for 20th Century Fox and later in the studio’s editorial department.
At 97 years old, Rudy Freeman, as IMDb and the trades refer to him, couldn’t tell his own story without sharing dozens of other stories of the Tinseltown world that surrounded him.
“They were doing a shower scene,” Freeman told The Signal during a recent sit-down in his Valencia home. He was telling a story about model and actress Marilyn Monroe. “In the shower scenes, to look naked, you wear pink tights, and when you see it through glass, you look naked. Well, there was a little edge that stood out and they couldn’t get rid of it. It showed, and they said, ‘What are we going to do? We’ve wasted half a day.’ She (Monroe) says, ‘Shoot me in the nude.’”
As Freeman’s story unraveled, it seemed to fit nicely among the lore surrounding Monroe, his telling accompanied with studio stills collected in countless albums that he keeps in his home office. He spoke with great enthusiasm, and when he got to another studio still of another star, he had another anecdote to share.
Freeman is a Los Angeles native. Growing up in the movie mecca that is L.A., his mother encouraged him to seek out work as an actor.
“I was 8 then,” Freeman said. “And she (his mom) says, ‘For your namesake, since you were named after him (Valentino), you may want to, as you get older, try to get into the picture business.’ And that’s how it started early.”
He was also extremely curious to learn more about this man he was named after. Freeman said that before he was in his teens, he’d been checking out books from the library on Valentino, people would give him pictures, and he’d find articles about the silent film star.
Freeman stopped his story short and went to a bookshelf in his home office, removing a scrapbook he had put together over the years full of Valentino pictures and articles. There were literally hundreds of clippings in this book. Also, one would find it hard to miss the Valentino biography on the desk nearby. The room itself was adorned with framed images of the Italian star.
But you’d be mistaken if you thought you were looking at Valentino because those pictures were actually of Freeman.
At 18 years old, the young actor began to get work. According to an article from a Fox newsletter that Freeman still has in his home office, a theatrical coach and agent took him, the up-and-coming actress Natalie Wood and another woman named Sally Force out for a day of auditions. By the end of that day, Wood would get a part in a Fox film, Force would get signed to a contract, and Freeman would land a role in the 1946 Michael Curtiz film “Night and Day.”
Freeman would continue to get bit parts on the stage and for the screen, and he’d even do modeling jobs, but it wasn’t enough to make a good living, he said. Just as the real Valentino would struggle in his time to get, as Freeman put it, “real” acting roles — he was a southern Italian immigrant and cast for his exotic-foreigner looks, playing Indian rajas, Spanish bullfighters and an Arab sheik — Freeman said he felt he never got roles for his acting ability, because of his looks, with too close of a resemblance to Valentino.
“By the time I was 18 and 19 and 20, that was when I tried to get an agent,” Freeman said. “And as soon as they saw me in my pictures, they said, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t have you because you look too much like Valentino, unless you want to stick to playing characters like Indians and everything like that.’”
He was falling into the same trap Valentino tried to escape his whole career. Freeman said it was the story of his life. Eventually needing to get paid, he took a job as an usher at the old Panorama Theatre on Van Nuys Boulevard in Panorama City.
“But the hours were killing me,” Freeman said. “I’d go into work at 8 o’clock, 9 o’clock, work ’til 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, go home, wake up, get ready to go to work. It was just too much.”
As fate would have it, Freeman wouldn’t be an usher for long, and it would be someone he worked with who’d help get him out.
“A projectionist, who was working at night, worked at Fox Studios during the day,” Freeman said. “And so, one day, he walked into the theater, and I was standing at the door, and he says, ‘Rudy, you must’ve been an actor.’ And I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He said, ‘I thought so. Are you happy with what you’re doing as a bit player?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s either starve or come and go in this picture business. It’s not what you know, but who you know, really.’ He says to me, ‘I could’ve told you that in the beginning … Would you take a job if it was working in the business end?’”
That conversation took place in 1946, and it led to a mailroom job at 20th Century Fox that lasted about three years, which in turn led to getting a job in publicity at the studio.
Asked to describe the position and his duties, Freeman said, “What a job. It was like you had the keys to the city because you knew everybody — everyone who was in the business, everyone at the papers, the (Los Angeles) Examiner, the (Los Angeles) Times.”
Among Freeman’s tasks, he would escort winners from the television game show “Queen for a Day” around the lot and around town. “Queen for a Day” would start with the host Jack Bailey asking a mostly female audience why one of them should be queen for a day. Winners typically had fallen on financial or emotional hard times, and as queen for the day, they were pampered.
Once a week, Freeman would take a lucky winner to lunch, introduce her to actors and actresses, even take them to the famous Ciro’s nightclub on Sunset Boulevard.
“It was a ball, believe me,” he said.
Other duties included placing publicity pieces in the trade magazines and newspapers, and putting together film stills (which he still has in albums in his Valencia home) for the Hays censorship office to pore over and decide whether certain scenes in movies obeyed the motion picture production code.
He also entertained quite a number of people. Before he could explain who, Freeman went into a story about doing work on movie premieres, in particular one event that promoted a new innovation at the time called CinemaScope, which is a film format used to create widescreen pictures. But before he even got to that story, he went to another part of his home and uncovered a genuine CinemaScope 55 movie camera in his collection, the same one used in the filming of the 1956 musical “Carousel.”
That led to the uncovering of an old Moviola film viewer that he used for years as an editor while with the studio. He was getting ahead of his own story, though.
He had others to tell about famous people he’d brushed up against in his career, their stories seemingly his own story.
For example, in September 1955, he said, he’d been at a Porsche dealership (presumably Competition Motors in Hollywood) when he saw actor James Dean purchasing a car (presumably the 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder known as “Little Bastard”).
“I’m looking at the cars,” he said, “and then I hear this, vroom, vroom, vroom. And I say, ‘Jeez, that sounds like that high-performance Porsche.’ I go in the back, and there was James Dean inside the car. He didn’t notice anything but the car and the man talking, and even then, he didn’t pay much attention to him.”
Freeman said Dean raced off the lot, and the next time he heard about the 24-year-old Hollywood star was in a report indicating that he’d been killed in a nighttime head-on collision at the rural town of Cholame, about 19 miles east of Paso Robles – after having stopped at the then-Tip’s diner at Castaic Junction, where he ordered a slice of apple pie and a glass of milk, according to a Signal report in the 1960s.
Asked to get back to his own story and explain how he got into the editorial department at Fox, Freeman began, but he quickly sidetracked to other stories about Hollywood legends Groucho Marx, Jack Palance and Marlon Brando, some accounts not quite fit for publication.
But while Freeman enjoyed the publicity department, he knew he wanted more in life. He sought out a pathway to directing film, knowing the best way to get in was through the camera department or through being an editor. Unable to get in the cinematographer’s union for various reasons, he said he took a detour through Fox’s film library, which then led him straight into the editorial department.
According to that Fox newsletter article about him, Freeman worked his way up through the ranks from apprentice editor to assistant editor, and in the 1950s, he met the production manager and editor James Blakeley, working with him in the editorial department on TV shows like “Peyton Place,” “The Green Hornet” and “Batman.”
Freeman worked with Blakeley up until Blakeley’s death in 2007, when Freeman was 81 years old. Freeman retired a year later.
“James and I were the oldest people on the lot,” Freeman said. “But near the end of the year of 2008, my wife fell down and broke her hip. Well, you know what that means.”
Freeman said he retired from 20th Century Fox soon after to take care of his wife, but he didn’t say much more about it. Needless to say, he’s a widower, but before the mood could sour, he got into another story.
Freeman’s daughter, Deborah Christine Freeman, who’s now in her early 50s, told The Signal that her dad always reveled in his stories.
“Every time we see him, there’s always a new Hollywood story,” she said, adding that he rarely repeated any.
She recalled her dad taking her to the studios to meet cast members of “The Brady Bunch” and “Little House on the Prairie,” and even going to Hollywood parties together when she was younger. When it came time for her dad to retire, she worried.
“He gets bored,” she said. “He can’t stand just staying home.”
So, retired life isn’t something Freeman talked much about. He said he used to go swing dancing out in Thousand Oaks, but he stopped doing that somewhat recently because it’s too far of a drive. For the most part, he said he enjoys spending time with people, running old films for them (from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s — the best ones, he said) and sharing stories about his past.
He never did get to direct, he said, just as he never broke out as a movie star or even an IMDb-credited film editor. He almost told his story in a book, but the author he was going to work with, he said, died before the two could get started. Those were the breaks.
Freeman’s daughter admitted that her dad never really dwelled on the heartache or hard times in his life, though Freeman did tell The Signal that the business could be unfair at times. To succeed, he said, you had to be the right person who knew the right people at the right time. If you were the wrong type of person, he added, the system would “push you off” and “give you the wrong kind of jobs.”
But before Freeman could go into anything that sounded any more like a gripe, he paused, a smile returning to his face as he recalled a moment from his past … and he began his next story.
