O.O. McIntyre
Dayton Daily News/March 28, 1920
O. Henry missed a colorful tale when he failed to invent the romance of the Fair Sari, the “One Hundred Million Dollar Virgin of Stamboul.” Manhattan, blasé and cynical, fairly bubbled with excitement over the hunt for Sari in this bedizened Bagdad after a search through all the cities on the European continent.
There appeared at one of New York’s leading hotels one day last week Sheik Ben Mohammed, turbaned and silk bloomered, with five aged, wrinkled Turks and agroup of servants. A long distance phone call from Toronto to the hotel fixed the reservations for a “Turkish exposition” in good faith.
There “Commission” arrived in a platinum lined limousine, properly crested and strung with Turkish flags. When the Turks had been installed in their $150 a day suite a notice was sent to the newspaper shops and the pick of reporters slid down their brass poles at the alarm and romped off to the hotel.
Here they met with a gentle rebuff. They must produce cards and Sheik Ben would scrutinize them. Finally they were admitted by salaaming servants to his presence. Sheik Ben sat on silk cushions with his friends about him and puffed smoke through rose scented water from the Turkish narghiles.
Yes, he was real. Every reporter knew it. And so he told of coming to New York to search for Sari—the Virgin of Stamboul—and the greatest aggregation of Mohammedan dignitaries that Sir Richard Burton ever organized in the original and unexpurgated edition of the “Thousand and One Arabian Nights” bowed their assent at every word.
Sari was the light of her palace in Constantinople. She was to have been wed to the Amir of Hedjaz and the Amir was inconsolable when she vanished, Ben Mohammed said as pencils raced across vagrant copy paper. The Amir of Hedjaz, Sari’s fiancé, was Big Ben’s friends and he had sent him out to scour every far flung corner of the globe for Sari.
So, without a clue or a trail of flour from a bag tied on her back, as in the old Grimm fairy tale. The delegation of Mohammedan dignitaries swooped down upon New York. All the great detectives were called in and the only sad note in the story was when a snooping reporter noticed that Ben Mohammed wore a white collar under his costume made in Troy, N.Y.
But the reporter was a gentleman and would not talk back to a Sheik. After two days the search ended—presto and prestissime. The Virgin of Stamboul was found in a Kenmare street tenement, degraded to the humble position of dishwasher in a restaurant. The reason for her drop in the social scale? Why, of course, an American officer—a devil dog of a marine, with whom she had eloped from her palace in Stamboul and had almost blasted the hopes of the Amir of Hedjaz, and who afterward deserted her.
Sari was taken from the tenement to the hotel suite and again the reporters were called. Sari was in hysterics and tore the bed covering and muttered the name of her fiancé, the Amir. One young cub reporter fainted as the doctor jabbed the hypodermic needle into Sari’s arm to quiet her. Two other reporters cried.
The next day it was learned that Sari will soon make her debut in the movies. But it all was good fun and New York enjoyed it and Big Ben went back to his little cafe in the Turkish quarters with his servants, and Sari returned to her studio.
Philip Gibbs is the only author of best sellers in America who illustrates his own stories. He loves to write and loves to paint and torn by two masters he conquered both. He has been called the American Oppenheim which is scarcely fair for he is as distinct as any author writing today. I have just finished his “The Street of Adventure” and it is one of the finest transcripts from life in the great fascinating mill of newspaper manufacture that has been written.
Book sellers declare that the demand for adventure and mystery stories in New York since the armistice is amazing. The most mediocre novel of this type has a good sale. All the bookstore windows are filled with them. The movie fans are demanding melodrama along with the theater patrons. Everybody was surfeited with war articles and war stories and the reaction has been for the dazzling type of fiction—the silk hatted crook, the raven locked adventuress, the scheming financier, the lovely blonde heroine and the nerveless detective. Those are the ingredients with the appeal this year. The man who can write them well can have his own twin six and everything.
Roy Andrews and his wife are back from their second Asiatic expedition into Mongolia. Andrews is curator of the Museum of Natural History. Since their marriage the Andrewses have spent only one year out of five in the United States. In 1916-17 they went to Yunnan, China, and the desolate reaches of far western Tibet. In May, 1918, they started with their eight months old son and a trained nurse on a second Asiatic expedition. They left the baby in Peking, China, when they started out on their trip. When they returned they were greeted by a hearty two-year-old son.
A certain newspaperman has been having trouble with his eyes. Street corners had an uncanny knack of occurring where he didn’t expect them, and those that he turned with elaborate carelessness merely led him, with a decidedly uncomfortable impact, against the wall of abutting real estate.
That performance became after a bit, a matter of routine and comparatively insignificant. That is, compared with the business of boarding a bus. It was a tremendous step he was about to take as he stood on Fifth Avenue, watching a hazy, indistinct procession whirling past. Finally he gripped his sight in both hands, as it were, and swumng into what he sincerely believed to be a Riverside Drive bus.
It wasn’t. It was Mrs. W.A.R. Profiteer’s new Nile green limousine, and the glance he got through a haughty lorgnette was not a courteous one. Mrs. Profiteer called a policeman and the scribe was about to get another ride in a vehicle that was not green when he saluted the police officer as a naval officer of his acquaintance and proved his case.
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