| Earlier this month, People magazine announced its “Sexiest Man Alive” for 2023, bestowing the title on the actor Patrick Dempsey. The honoree, probably best known for playing Dr. Derek (McDreamy) Shepherd, on “Grey’s Anatomy,” follows in a long line of Hollywood heartthrobs, a designation that stretches back at least as far as the silent-film star Rudolph Valentino. In 2003, the New Yorker contributor Thomas Mallon revisited the legacy and legends surrounding Valentino—whose brief career was viewed, in its time, as a threat to sexual propriety and American masculinity. Born Rodolfo Guglielmi, in Italy, Valentino immigrated first to Paris and then to New York, where he performed as a “taxi-dancer” before moving, again, to California. His defining role, as the title character in the 1921 film “The Sheik,” proved a box-office smash, but “prompted many humbled American males to walk out of the theatre.” The actor’s scandal-filled life lasted only a few more years, but fascination hardly diminished, and perhaps even intensified, after his early death. Fifty thousand visitors viewed his open casket in a single day, Mallon notes, and no less than Mae West attempted to commune with him, by séance, in the afterlife. | 
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