I can’t find a single snapshot of Jack and Blanca together. I have scrounged old archived newspapers for blurry images that were often doctored (manually) in the days before Adobe Photoshop, cropped and glued and painted over. I contacted an archivist at the Library of Congress who so sweetly retrieved an un-indexed box and sent me old marked up proofs from a newspaper that went out of business. No one before me has seen these black and whites of Blanca in court!! I have contacted other reference librarians at several places, and obtained rare photos of Jack de Saulles from college yearbooks and forgotten crumbling football manuals that are more than 100 years old. I drove to Stanford and walked the dimly lit aisles of the third floor to get my hands on a Chilean poet's fictional memoirs of Blanca, which has a fabulous rare portrait photograph of her on the cover.
I have photos of Jack. I have photos of Blanca. I have photos of little Jacky Jr. with either his dad, or his mom, but never together. No portrait of the smiling couple, even at their wedding. No portrait of the 3 as a family. It's not really that surprising, I mean ask yourself, how many photos of your great-grandparents do you own right now? I should feel lucky to find so many photos already.
But, compare them to a mutual "friend" Mr. Rudolph Valentino who happily posed with his beautiful wife Natacha every time a camera sauntered into view. Dozens and dozens of photos of them on steamships, in posed portraits, on the street, on movie sets, always stylish, always side by side. I wonder if Rudy was affected by his observation of the de Saulles's relationship. I wonder if he thought, "If I had a gorgeous wife like that, I would never ignore her..."
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