Anagram of Arab death

The studio wrote her a past, and the past is what the audience bought. Theda Bara was born Theodosia Burr Goodman in 1885; the Vamp was assembled at a press conference. When A Fool There Was opened in January 1915 - produced by William Fox, directed by Frank Powell, with Bara billed simply as 'The Vampire' - Fox gave the press an elaborate fictional biography making her an exotic Arabian actress, presented her in a flamboyant fur outfit, and then deliberately leaked that the whole thing was a hoax, which the film's record says may have been one of Hollywood's first publicity stunts. The invented origin ran further than the stunt: the star was said to be Egyptian-born, interested in the occult, the daughter of an Arab sheik and a French woman, born in the Sahara, and the name, per the studio's own account, was 'an anagram of Arab death'. The distance was not a side effect of the star system; it was the product. The film 'popularised the word vamp (short for vampire)', a femme fatale who fascinates and ruins the men she meets, and by her own quoted line - 'I will continue doing vampires as long as people sin.' - the arrangement had her consent. She was Fox's biggest star from 1915 to 1919, paid $4,000 a week at her peak, and made 43 films between 1914 and 1926 before marrying Charles Brabin in 1921 and retiring in 1926. And almost nothing of what the audiences loved is left to check. Complete prints of six of the 43 films survive; the 1937 Fox vault fire took most of the rest. So the object here is manufactured twice over - a real woman under a written biography, sold with a wink, and then mostly lost to fire. The record holds about six honest documents of what the crowds were actually watching, one of them A Fool There Was, entered into the National Film Registry in 2015. The rest of the relationship runs on press materials.