Wait, Agnes Ayres was a popular star? (A supplemental post)

I found The Sheik so extraordinarily offensive that I was compelled to do some casual online research. While looking deeper into this objectionable film, I found something that shocked me: Agnes Ayres was famous!

I knew Rudolf Valentino was a big star, but Agnes Ayres shares billing with him, and even has versions of the movie poster dedicated featuring just her image.

But look at this woman. She looks like she didn't know when the picture was going to be taken. She looks like one of the dowdy girls they saw when they were trying to find Clara Bow. And I don't mean to pick on her for not being "glamorous." What I mean is that I don't see (and didn't see in The Sheik) any of what we're discussing in class as "charisma."

I can't imagine she would be a star if she were born today, so what made her a star in the 1920s? What did she have that appealed to that decade?

Biographically Agnes Ayres was a midwestern girl who got her first break when silent film star Alice Joyce discovered her. Her career was bolstered by Jesse Lasky, her lover and the founder of Paramount Pictures. But this assistance from established power players doesn't seem enough to explain stardom; she must have had something to offer to stay in the limelight. We can all think of examples of would-be stars that Hollywood tried to push onto America, but the consumption side just wasn't there and so stardom never sticks.

So I went back to the contradiction idea we've discussed in class and speculated what contradiction Agnes Ayres could embody for the post WWI world. The great social divisions I can think of this time period are liberalization vs. tradition and the question of women's expanding roles in society. Looking at Ayres' character in The Sheik, I think Ayres may have answered the latter issue. Lady Diana Mayo isn't quite a flapper, although she certainly heralds those ideas of female independence and good times, and yet she is a Lady (with a capital L). Her sense of adventure (like a flapper) seems unrelated to men or sex (unlike a flapper). Maybe this role in The Sheik points to a socially relevant fault line that Ayres was able to straddle for audiences?

Ayres was also known as "the O. Henry Girl" because she played so many heroines in adaptations of O. Henry shorts. As O. Henry was a writer with his finger on the pulse of the society problems of the day, I consider this further evidence that Ayres draw came in part from social relevance.

I propose that Agnes Ayres lived on a plane that was very resonant in the 1920s--social freedom vs. moral respectability.

Does anyone have any other theories?