Power of Glamour

Gloria Swanson When people meet me, they expect me to bite them, I guess because they expect me to be Norma Desmond," Gloria Swanson once said about her memorable role in Sunset Boulevard as a faded silent-screen actress. "A lot of people thought Norma Desmond was the story of my life. I'm not a recluse, nor am I out of the past. . . . It's amazing to find so many people who I thought really knew me could have thought Sunset was autobiographical. I've got nobody floating in my swimming pool." She had a point. Norma Desmond had waited twenty years for a comeback. Gloria Swanson never waited for anything in her life. Instead, she seized her opportunities as they presented themselves and when they had played themselves out, she cut her losses and moved on, consistently reinventing herself as she went along. "When you put them all together and add them up, Gloria Swanson comes out the movie star of all movie stars," observed Cecil B. DeMille, decades after the actress's rise to stardom in the twenties. "She had something that none of the rest of them had." What Gloria Swanson had was glamour, written in big capital letters in large sparkling lights. And it was Swanson's dazzling persona in the 1920s that put "glamour"--then a rarely used word--into common usage, making it synonymous with Hollywood. It all started in 1919 when DeMille tapped Swanson to star in a series of lavish films that depicted upper-class folk embroiled in domestic entanglements. Swanson was magnificently gowned and dripping in real jewels. The characters she played were young women with exciting, high-voltage problems. They had to wrestle with sexuality and infidelity--either their own or their spouses'. In these six films Swanson did such unconventional things as divorce her husband for a rake, then remarry the husband. Or she was a bland wife, rejected by her husband, who transformed herself into a beauty and won him back. In another film she played a woman who had two fiances. Although Swanson was only twenty when she started making the movies that established her as an icon of glamour, she was eager to make the transition from reality to illusion. "I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment a star," she said. "Everyone from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it." Off-screen she also liked to be swathed in luxurious fabrics and significant jewels and wear them against a backdrop of splendor. In life as well as in films, she indulged in dramatic love affairs and serial marriages. She entertained on a scale that would have impressed Marie Antoinette. For a movie-crazed public desperate to live vicariously through its movie stars, Swanson's filmic and off-screen lives seemed to merge. And Swanson fed the myth. "The public didn't want the truth," she commented years later. But behind this saga of conspicuous consumption, there was another story being played out: the very public education of a practical, down-to-earth woman, who, at twenty-six, recognized that she was a prisoner of fame. She saw with unusual clarity that stardom was an impediment to a good marriage and a contented personal life. She understood that stars were victims. And yet she not only struggled to keep her values intact, she continually stood up to the industry titans who were out to exploit her. Swanson's career is like a capsule history of the movies. The tale of the pint-size pipsqueak who became a Napoleon in skirts is a miniature portrait of the progress of women in this century. "I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents. They may spend a whole lifetime trying to figure out the reasons for their choice, but nothing in any human story is accidental," Gloria Swanson wrote in her memoirs, Swanson on Swanson. But aside from the fact that she was a clotheshorsTapert, Annette is the author of 'Power of Glamour' with ISBN 9780517703762 and ISBN 0517703769.