“Gloria Swanson and Her Circle in the Twenties” was originally published in the July 1950 issue of Vogue.
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In her sixty-third movie, Gloria Swanson has become for the first time in her thirty-seven-year-old career, a magnificent actress, playing the part of a handsome, ageing, rich star of the silent movies who wants above all to taste again the winy exhilaration of acting under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille, of hearing again the magic of "lights, camera, action, close-up." This new movie is Sunset Boulevard, the producer is Paramount, and the heartbreak scene is one on a set with Cecil B. DeMille. Although her own life has no parallel with the plot, much of the movie is meshed with the real Swanson story, for Sunset Boulevard, Paramount, and Cecil B. DeMille are part of her life along with D. W. Griffith, Adolph Zukor, the Talmadge sisters, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks.
They all glowed with a violent glamour in the nineteen twenties. Dark glasses were for eye treatments, not for disguise. Only Lillian Gish was shy. And the big stars, especially Gloria Swanson, were caparisoned like a Saracen’s horse and the fan magazines labelled them the best-dressed women of the world. It was fun for the stars and more fun for the public.
An early star, first with DeMille and then with Paramount Pictures, Miss Swanson by the late twenties had drawing power of such suction that it whirlpooled her into the fabulous position of an actress who could buy into the United Artists Corporation as an equal owner with Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Joseph M. Schenck, and D. W. Griffith. Of all the women in the movies then, only Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson had their own producing units. Miss Pickford had the assistance of Douglas Fairbanks; alone Miss Swanson battled for her dollars.
She persuaded Wall Street bankers to finance her unit. Tied to her by a monetary thread were the vice-president of the unit, her production manager, her scenario manager, her press agent, and her four secretaries. It was a mad organization set into the tumultuous life of a woman whose temperamental sympathies were fluid, running in channels dammed by her assistants.
Everyone and everything influenced her. She listened and she wept. She hired and fired and shot situations that were never used, ordered sets and countermanded them. She paid for subtitles and threw them out, announced that she would not bother with details and then insisted on licking the stamps for the fan mail. Finally, she seemed to strangle in the tentacles of her troubles, her responsibilities, her enormous debts, her file of lawsuits. But she saw it all merely as a gag, part of the drama of her life, for her smallest action was then, and still is, translated into movie terms.
The present excitement over Sunset Boulevard is another cliff hanger in the perils of Gloria. Now she is off on a three-month tour of the country to thirty-two cities as a build-up for the movie. She appears on television shows, looking miraculously young in soft black dresses and shadowy hats. She talks to exhibitors, answers the banalities of radio interviewers with charm, goes to chic parties in Washington, Chicago, the coast, flirts with the exhibitors, flashing her strong, square smile, quirking her blue almond-shaped eyes. She is back in the business again.
When Miss Swanson, spit-curled and tightly wrapped in satin, first starred in Cecil B. DeMille s society dramas with drawing rooms cosy as a reservoir, she and DeMille ignored the jibes of the sophisticates, accepting their laughter as compliments. Broad-shouldered, preposterously healthy, his bull-dog face burned a dark red-brown, DeMille wore on the set green or purple velvet suits, his legs wrapped in leather puttees. (In Sunset Boulevard, he still wears the puttees.)
Somewhat later than the days when he made Male and Female with Miss Swanson were his Biblical pictures, of which the latest is Paramount s Samson and Delilah. In those days at least he publicly announced that he believed himself divinely inspired. To illustrate heaven s cooperation, he used to mention an incident during the making of The Ten Commandments. The company had gone to the desert for the massed and beautiful scenes of Moses on the rocks. Thousands of extras had been transported to the desert, all were ready in their Israelite robes. But the day was dark. Facing a loss of time and money, a less inspired assistant director dismissed the extras. As they turned away, DeMille suddenly ordered them to remain. He grouped the horde, stationed assistants on the rim, placed Moses in position. Everyone waited. In fifteen minutes the sun squeezed through, throwing a baby spotlight over the shaggy head of Moses on the rocks. "Camera." shouted DeMille. When Will Rogers heard of this divine collaboration, he said, "I like the part God wrote best."
In Sunset Boulevard, the last shot of all is a massive close-up of the almond-shaped eyes, the squared mouth and the shining teeth of Gloria Swanson. The man who invented the close-up was David Wark Griffith. The face of Griffith, who died two years ago, stretched long and thin, with a high, curved nose breaking over an under-lip which protruded into a natural shelf on which he rested innumerable cigarettes. His grey eyes picked up details like a vacuum cleaner. Beneath a large grey hat, his hair, long and thin, spiked gently over his collar. His clothes were as unlike those of other Hollywood men as his direction was unlike that of other directors. He was an original.
Griffith, the son of Colonel "Roaring Jake" Griffith of the Confederate army, was born on a Kentucky farm, had the early nickname of "Sugar" and eventually acted, wrote, and starved continuously and gracefully until he anchored at the Biograph Studios, where he informed everyone that the direction was all wrong. There followed fame and a heavy undergrowth of eccentricities keeping pace with his development of new techniques. To point a scene, he introduced close-ups. He brought in cut-backs and later fade-outs. He invented hazy movie photography by throwing layers of chiffon over the lens to make more angelic the innocent hair of Lillian Gish. He spilled forth the corked talents of Mary Pickford, the Gishes, and the Talmadges, when he made his films of hokum, honey and horror, The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, and Way Down East.
On the set, his big grey hat firmly on his head, he always sat in the same position, leaning back, his right leg thrown over the left, his arms forming a pattern. The left one hooked on the right, which was lifted vertically as though he were a candlestick bearer. His voice was deep and slow with the resonance of a nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor. All was deliberate, as though he were watching himself in a slow-motion film. Not only did he direct, but he wanted to cut and edit, write the subtitles, and arrange the musical score. He never willingly wrote finis to a movie. There was always time for one more close-up.
Few producers made more money from close-ups than Adolph Zukor who signed Gloria Swanson to an elaborate Paramount contract after she made six films for DeMille. In five years or so she made twenty-one movies, including Madame Sans Gene, Bluebeard s Eighth Wife, Zaza, The Humming Bird, and Manhandled. In those days, Adolph Zukor, president of Paramount Pictures, appeared frequently at public dinners, company dinners, and movie conventions, where he always cried, strangling appreciative words. (He always cried at the sight of his own success.) Those tears were the overflow of a man terribly enjoying himself. When the exhibitors first knew him they knew him as shrewd, but with a vein of sentiment. Within a few years that vein was publicly varicose.
Beneath a creamy top, and a soft slow voice, lay rock which nothing shifted. Although he may well have been the visionary that his own press agents called him, he was obviously the outstanding executive genius of the early movie days. Before the others were out of the nickelodeons, he had stretched out for big productions. When others economized, he paid out, commercially courageous. At executive meetings, he sat, a sad-eyed icicle, in the midst of arguments. Afterwards he would propose one of his bargain-sharp decisions. It floated in, a gumshoe notion. Such were the delicately worded propositions which often resulted in the suffocation of competitive companies, of many tender exhibitors. He amalgamated, he congealed and he was called "Anaconda Adolph."
In those days of the twenties, when Gloria Swanson was swinging high, the Talmadge sisters, Norma and Constance, were important too. Constance developed into a deft and fluttering comedienne, the best in the business, while Norma brought a warm, moody darkness to movie romance. Behind them both stood their mother. Mrs. Talmadge had a sense of fundamentals as sharp as a bread knife. It was one of the official secrets just after the publication in 1925 of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, that Anita Loos had reaped the stack of worldly wheat, disseminated by the character Dorothy, from the mouth of Mrs. Talmadge. At one time Frank Sullivan, reviewing a book, signed by Mrs. Talmadge and called The Talmadge Sisters, wrote: "She analyzes them coldly and scientifically and comes to the conclusion that there are no better film stars starring than they. What could be fairer than that?"
But no matter what the book showed of Mrs. Talmadge s maternal ebullience, she really knew exactly how good they were and how bad. And her girls knew. There was no bunk about them. Disconcertingly witty and hard-boiled, the Talmadges were impossible to impress. Around them shimmered noise and laughter and the sound of the phonograph, and in the centre moved Constance, who always acted as though she had swallowed an arc light for breakfast.
Partners with Miss Swanson in United Artists at one time were the great Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. By 1927 they both wore halos, cut for them by a devoted public, halos a trifle binding, a fraction cocked, which Douglas Fairbanks industriously kept shining. To preserve that glitter Fairbanks worked. Miss Pickford did nothing. She stood for sanity. Hers was a snicker of sense in the midst of treble hysteria. In a business where everyone, including her own husband, collected eccentricities, she remained simple, a trifle dowdy, old-fashioned, her skirts too long, her hair piled in those golden, unconvincing curls so admired in 1915 when Biograph s Little Mary was growing into "America s Sweetheart."
Extremely shrewd in business, Mary Pickford aided Fairbanks in the publicly encouraged fallacy that he had no head for business. Actually he was pretty coony. At directors meetings of his various interests, he would sit apparently a blank at the table and then, the words straining in a submerging flow of synonyms and explanatory phrases, he would offer an acute suggestion. He loved to play dead because he made such a smart ghost.
At Pickfair, high on a Hollywood hill, they received the world. Everyone came to see them. And after dinner they showed, as Hollywood still shows, a movie for entertainment. Slumped in a deep chair, Fairbanks, the king at ease, home from the studio, and Mary, the grave queen, home from a cornerstone laying, would slip back their halos and chew peanut brittle.
That was in the silent movie period so beloved of the ageing handsome character, Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, whose definitive comment after watching an old film was: "Still wonderful, isn t it? And no dialogue. We didn t need dialogue. We had faces. There just aren t any faces like that anymore. Maybe one—Garbo." It is through Norma that Gloria Swanson, who began in the movies as an extra in 1913, is a star again in 1950, playing with the exaggeration, the intensity and some of the extraordinary technique invented by those pioneer directors, D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.