J. Gordon Edwards | The Queen of Sheba / 1921 [Lost film]

the peacock

by Douglas Messerli

 

J. Gordon Edwards (screenplay, based on a story by Virginia Tracy), J. Gordon Edwards (director) The Queen of Sheba / 1921 [Lost film]

 

Fox Studio’s 1921 production of The Queen of Sheba, the biblical story of the King of Israel Solomon’s ill-fated romance with Sheba, is a lost film, so, except for the few frames we still have we’ll never know whether or not it was as fabulous and sexually risqué as Hollywood legend has imagined it.

      Certainly, the revealing costumes of which we have numerous pictures of the film’s Queen of Sheba (Betty Blythe) suggests that it might have been one of the most grandly salacious movies of the day.

      Fritz Leiber, who starred as King Solomon, performed as a Shakespearean actor on the stage before appearing in films beginning in 1916, when he played Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet with Francis X. Bushman playing Romeo and Beverly Bayne as Juliet. With his piercing eyes and shock of white hair, Leiber was cast in dozens of roles over the years as priests, professors, musicians, and religious fanatics, playing opposite Theda Bara as Caesar (1917), appearing as Franz Liszt in the 1943 remake of Phantom of the Opera, and acting with his son, Fritz Leiber, Jr. (later a science fiction and fantasy writer) in Greta Garbo’s Camile (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939).

      The Queen of Sheba also features Gorge Siegmann as King Armud of Sheba, George Nichols as King David, Genevieve Blinn as Beth-Sheba, and Pat Moore as Sheba’s son.

      Directed by J. Gordon Edwards, the film also included female topless scenes, but they were shown only in Europe.

       Since this film is lost, we have no real evidence that, in the manner of Cecil B. DeMille’s scenes of decadence there were any gay or lesbian references in Edward’s film, although it would unlikely, given the subject and the sexual intonations one gathers were in the script, that there would have been no LGBTQ figures, particularly since the cast also included one of the most remarkable female impersonators of the day, Frederick Kovert as “Peacock.”

       Presumably the character name of Peacock is a reference to his famed Peacock dance, some of which he also performed in the 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz. And since in all eight other feature and short films in which Kovert appeared he performed as a female impersonator, in and out of drag, we can presume he appeared in drag in this movie. I believe the picture below of the outrageously large peacock crown Kovert wears must be from The Queen of Sheba.

       Kovert appeared in some films I’ve written on in this volume and others which now appear to be lost, unavailable, or difficult to procure. They include An Adventuress (1920), the current film, I Am Guilty (1921), The Reel Virginian (1924), The Wizard of Oz (1925), the Stan Laurel film  Chasing the Chaser, in which performed as an in-drag detective (1925), Starvation Blues (1925), The First Night (1927), and The College Vamp (1931).

       Through these roles Kovert became very popular, comparing in fame to Julian Eltinge—with whom he acted in An Adventuress along with Rudolph Valentino—and the other noted crossdresser, known like Kovert for his dancing roles, Bothwell Browne.

     When Kovert quit the movies, presumably because of the rising power of Breen and the Hays Code, he became one of the first of the male physique photographers, using the name Kovert of Hollywood. Bob Mizer, the so-called king of the physique magazines and movies, apprenticed under Kovert in the 1940s. Given that, unlike Mizer’s early photography, Kovert shoots most of his models in the nude, his work was obviously a target for the Los Angeles Police Department vice squad, and in 1945 his offices were raided and he was arrested, forced to plead guilty for the possession of obscene materials. Four years later, Kovert, taking up a gun, committed suicide.

     For specific discussions of his work, see my entries on An Adventuress, The Wizard of Oz, and Starvation Blues.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022