“Is the Foreign Lover the Perfect Lover?”

I’m already behind in my reading! It’s been a while since I read The Sheikh but it’s just as outrageous as I remember. Everyone wants Diana Mayo, but she’s too boyish and cold to be interested in love! Whatever will happen next?

In other news, I forgot to mention on Monday that this blog is not the only sheikh-related media product to combine sheikhs with summer.  According to the internet there are two (yes, two!) collections of sheikh romances with ‘summer’ in the title: Summer Sheikhs, with stories by Alexandra Sellers, Abby Green, and Marguerite Kaye (http://www.amazon.com/Summer-Sheikhs-Mills-Special-Releases/dp/0263874656) and Sheikhs of Summer, with stories by Susan Mallery, Alexandra Sellers, and Fiona Brand (http://sheikhs-and-desert-love.com/abstracts/abstract65.html). I like those odds!

Now back to business:

The title of this post is the title of an article by Dorothy Donnell in Moving Picture Stories (March 25, 1924).  Here’s a scan of the first page (the man in the picture is Ramon Novarro, an actor from Mexico):

"Is the Foreign Lover The Perfect Lover?" The Lady of Much Experience says Yes!

And the answer is…Yes? 

In the 1920s there was a rash of articles in the movie magazines about this very subject: Why do the ladies love all of these foreign film actors? Can American men (and by this they mean white American men) ever catch up? At a time when immigration was a fraught topic of conversation and when single men were much more likely to immigrate than single women, the notion of an exotic man desired by women fans made good copy.

Here’s some of what Dorothy Donnell had to say:

“American men make some of the best husbands and the worst lovers in the world; at least that’s what I was told the other day by a famous screen beauty who is said to have made a thorough study of husbands – other women’s husbands – and as for lovers…”

Zing!

Apparently, the Puritans are to blame for this, since “their idea of a violent courtship was to sing psalms out of the same hymnbook.”

(1920s movie magazines are pretty much a giant repository of sass and zinginess. It’s wonderful, if at times a bit exhausting. They’re like all the best celebrity blogs, but with more sassy poems and 1920s slang.)

But what about these ‘foreign lovers’? Dorothy Donnell taps Sessue Hayakawa (a Japanese/American actor) as the first in the trend. Voted the favorite actor of a “convention of farmers’ wives in Kansas,” his “way of looking at a woman was mad love making in itself.”

In fact, Sessue Hayakawa starred in a film relevant to this blog’s interests called An Arabian Knight (1920), where he played “Ahmed, a playboy of the East”. Maybe I’ll post about that later…

But it always comes back to Rudolph Valentino – as the first page of the article ends with the suggestion that “it was Valentino who really started the foreign invasion.”

And the movie that made Valentino was The Sheikh, based on E. M. Hull’s novel of the same title – discussed on this blog on Friday (if I finish!).