Movie Actress weds Egyptian Prince! Or does she?

Friday is the exciting conclusion of The Sheik but since it’s Wednesday today is 1920s day!  Join me in a journey into the Entertainment Weekly’s and People Magazine’s of the past…

Right now I’m working from scans of photocopies from microfilms (three levels of blurriness), but I’ve just discovered some digital archives that didn’t exist when I was doing my original research, so we might be getting some higher quality pictures up in here! Do people like the photos? I’ve put this one in at the ‘extra-large’ setting, but I suspect the text may still be too tiny to read.

Now to business:

 

“Movie Actress forsakes films to wed Egyptian Prince” actually has very little to do with mummies

This is an article from Movie Weekly July 21, 1923, right in the midst of the craze for all things Oriental (where Oriental is a fuzzy and expansive category encompassing Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Japan, and more!). Plus an actress marrying royalty is always compelling (Grace Kelly, anyone?).

Movie Weekly has spruced up this page with what I can only assume are intended to be ‘Egyptian’ details.  What I can’t figure out is why they’ve divided ‘Egyptian Prince’ into ‘Egyp’ dot ‘tian’ dot dot ‘Prince’ dot. It seems like the least natural place to put an ornamental dot!

Or maybe I’m just picky. In any case, the article is about Pearl Shepard, an American actress who appeared films with fabulous titles like Why Leave Your Husband? (1920), The Wages of Sin (1922) and Go Get ‘Em, Hutch (1922). 

Her ‘Egyptian Prince’ is Prince Mohammed Ali Ibrahim, whose uncle was the King of Egypt, according to the article. His father is the Khedive of Egypt, which Encyclopedia Britannica tells me was a position equivalent to that of Pasha and was replaced by the title Sultan in 1914, when Egypt became a protectorate of the British who, according to Wikipedia, deposed the Khedive at the time. But Movie Weekly was still using the title and I do not have enough knowledge about 20^th century Egyptian politics to figure this thing out. More knowledgeable opinions are welcome! Also, if any of my students are reading: Wikipedia is not an acceptable source for a paper! Do as I say, not as I do!

The article really plays up the romance and exoticism of their story:

“From the silver land of make-believe a young girl has gone into the mosqued East, where desert suns and the religion of Allah have made strange history and customs along the winding Nile.  She has set out to determine for herself whether or not a woman of white civilization can mate with a man born to the mystic laws and veiled tradition of a race centuries older in culture than her own, and fulfill the tender dreams of love she once spun under the soft light of western stars.”

It also plays up the adjectives.                 

Love, as in all fictional sheik romances, is imbued by the writer with the power of bridging the presumed barriers of race and civilization; apparently, Pearl “can see no barrier of race, color, religion or traditions thrusting shadows across the dawning light of her love.” She’s even planning on giving up her film career!

The picture at the top left of the article is of Pearl Shepard herself and the picture in the middle left is of Prince Ibrahim and his secretary, mystifyingly enough, ‘Blink’ McCloskey, a former boxer. The Prince is described as a popular visitor to the New York social scene, “descended of a long and powerful line of exalted sheiks.”  He saw Pearl dancing at Zittel’s Casino in Central Park and then, perhaps “an Eastern instinct about women and love that is strong with men of the Orient, prompted him to realize that at last he had met the one girl.”

He pursued her, but was then called away on family business. They corresponded. Months passed and gossip spread that “Pearl’s experience with the Prince had only been one of those ‘affairs’ that come several times in life nowadays as against the one true passion of the old-fashioned days.” People were always more chaste in the old-fashioned days!

And then…Prince Ibrahim returned! And took Pearl on an ocean liner trip (accompanied by her mother, of course) to get permission to wed from his father.

But the path to true romance was not smooth…They could not marry in the US because of “some law that will not permit of the marriage here.” Movie Weekly is a little coy here, but this is presumably a reference to anti-miscegenation laws, although not necessarily. The racial status (in law) of Arabs was a contested topic in the 1920s and not everyone agreed. There could also, I suppose, have been a law against American movie actresses marrying foreign princes? But Movie Weekly says there might also be trouble on the Egyptian end, where they will need “the Khedive’s influence to smash several Egyptian laws and traditions in order that this romance may be consummated.”

What happened next? Well, Pearl Shepard’s IMDb page says that she married Prince Ibrahim and retired from acting. However, 'Looking for Mabel' (which seems to be a site about Mabel Normand, another American actress who Prince Ibrahim romanced) says that they in fact did not marry, implying that it was Pearl’s Jewish heritage (her real last name was Ginsburg?) that set the Khedive against her. As a side note, the ‘Looking for Mabel’ website looks fascinating, if you’re interested in silent film history. And its homepage has floating butterflies! 

Some very light googling turned up a reference to Pearl Shepard as Pearl Ginsberg (spelled with an ‘e’, but then again, the movie magazines spelled everyone’s names in a million ways. Rudolph Valentino got Rodolph, Rudolph, Rudolf, and so on) in  Time and in an archive of Los Angeles Examiner photos and clippings at USC, so her real name was almost definitely Ginsberg. 

But the definitive answer on if she married Prince Ibrahim or not, well that’s beyond me right now, I’m afraid! Another matter for the experts…

Up next: will Diana and the Sheik ever resolve their differences? What is the mystery in the Sheik’s past?