Scandals Of Classic Hollywood

June 29, 2015 7:38 PM

The Gloria Swanson Saga: Part One

Gloria Swanson wasn’t here to make friends. She wasn’t “just like us.” She didn’t take out the garbage or “wear cotton” or go to the bathroom. Lady had a gold-plated bathtub. She married a Marquis. She was 4’11,” wore a 2 ½ in shoes, and had a waist approximately the size of my neck. She looked most beautiful when frowning. And for a period in the 1920s, she was the biggest star in the world. Swanson wasn’t evil, and she probably wasn’t even a bitch, but she just knew how to run that game. She was of a different set of stars — a different breed than Garbo, Dietrich, and other classic idols — that truly lived like demi-gods. And when Hollywood began to change the way it made and distributed films in the late ‘20s, she was one of dozens destined to remain a relic of an earlier time.

The Gloria Swanson Saga: Part Two

So she did what any faded star should: She moved to New York and got in the patent business. But she did it in a roundabout sort of way, starting a company, punnily called “Multiprizes,” which, starting in 1938, made a mission of rescuing Jewish smarty-pantses from Europe, bringing them to America, and then working together with their patents, inventions, science experiments, etc. etc. It’s unclear how exploitative this may or may not have been, but several scientists made it out of Europe (good!) and Swanson failed to make any significant amount of money.

more Scandals of Classic Hollywood

posted by the man of twists and turns (41 comments total)

Hey, it's the pictures that got small.
posted by kinnakeet at 7:48 PM on June 29, 2015 [11 favorites]

There's a reason Hollywood is the Dream Factory, and stories like this are a good reminder that it once was a place of Crazy, Larger Than Life people -- and not today's morass of sequel-churners and soundbites.

Awesome find, tMoT&T!
posted by wenestvedt at 8:01 PM on June 29, 2015 [3 favorites]

I love this bit:

But Gloria Swanson was no Megan Fox — she was a SERIOUS ACTRESS.

[picture of her wearing a bathing costume and standing on the "hood" of a speedboat being "driven" by a dog]

Obviously.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:10 PM on June 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

"Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!"
posted by clavdivs at 8:19 PM on June 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

[Sunset Blvd quote as joke]
posted by shakespeherian at 8:24 PM on June 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

ALSO there's a big ol' antiques store in Lincoln, Nebraska where I saw three different Art Nouveau candy tins with Gloria Swanson's face on them.
posted by shakespeherian at 8:27 PM on June 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

Damn it, I wish Anne Helen Petersen and Karina Longworth would form a a giant Old Hollywood Gossip Voltron already.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:36 PM on June 29, 2015 [7 favorites]

"ALSO there's a big ol' antiques store in Lincoln, Nebraska where I saw three"

THREE!
What are you waiting for, bag them tins, bag em for the cause.
posted by clavdivs at 9:36 PM on June 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

She had a highly successful clothing line! She was on very early NYC TV in some Porto chat show! she never went out in the sun and only ate steamed vegetables! She was .. LA SWANSON -- here she is on the Dick Cavvet show, presenting him with a rose and coming off like she's deeming to visit this plane of existence. One of the very few Silent era stars to cross into the Classic era and not end up penniless! Amazingly screwed businessman and career manager.

Dear lord I hate celebrities that are Just Like Us. what's the point of having them if they are?
posted by The Whelk at 9:59 PM on June 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

She paid all the bills.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:06 PM on June 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

"All creative people should be required to leave California for three months every year."

-Gloria Swanson
posted by clavdivs at 10:07 PM on June 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

A pink chiffon nightgown was worn by Gloria Swanson.
posted by unliteral at 10:08 PM on June 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

gosh, that sure sent me down a really long rabbit hole about things i didn't think i cared about. lots of supplemental googling.

that writer certainly has a schtick.
posted by Conrad-Casserole at 11:22 PM on June 29, 2015

One of the rules to survive being a Film Goddess is in knowing when to get the hell out of Hollywood (Marlene, Bette, Clara) and not end up like poor Marie Provost.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 11:44 PM on June 29, 2015 [4 favorites]

How lucky Dick Cavett was to land Gloria Swanson as a guest on his show. And how lucky he was to have got Janis Joplin. And how cringingly cursed he was to have them on the same show together. Great footage.
posted by rongorongo at 12:46 AM on June 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

The writing style has me completely exhausted, wrung out, but keeping up with the pace.
posted by infini at 2:17 AM on June 30, 2015

Sic transit Gloria Swanson...
posted by Devonian at 2:35 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Bitch please, that is amazing.
posted by infini at 2:39 AM on June 30, 2015

A PhD in Celebrity Gossip?
posted by infini at 2:42 AM on June 30, 2015

Since it doesn't look like we're going to see her early TV show - here she is introducing a showing of Queen Kelly a good decade after Sunset Boulevard. A faded Norma Desmond she was absolutely not - but an equally mesmerizing character. I love how she managed to persuade whoever was doing the scheduling to give her about 20 minutes of (apparently unscripted) air time before, after and *in the middle of* the showing. Part 2. Queen Kelly IMDB; film clip on Youtube.
posted by rongorongo at 2:51 AM on June 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

What a gal! I thought I knew a bit about Swanson, but this is a stunning addition to a consistently stunning series.

Thanks so much, the man of twists and turns.
posted by On the Corner at 4:28 AM on June 30, 2015

She didn’t take out the garbage or “wear cotton” or go to the bathroom.

So, a lot like Ron Swanson then?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:38 AM on June 30, 2015

Sic transit Gloria Swanson...

I didn't know Gloria was sick!
posted by KingEdRa at 5:38 AM on June 30, 2015

The glory days when Metafilter was the place I get my Scandals of Classic Hollywood updates. Honestly, if not for this post, and subsequent posts, the amount of Old Hollywood trivia I'd have on hand for dinner parties would stand at near zero.

(Anne Helen Petersen is clearly a Mefi favourite.)
posted by cendawanita at 6:09 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

A PhD in Celebrity Gossip?

She's talked about it a few times! It's a PhD in how celebrities images are managed, via the studios constructing reality and changing names to outright cosmetic surgery and then how they released and des emanated that reality via articles, puff perceives, and the back and forth conversation with fan magazines -- basically how the star's constructed persona would talk to the audience -- too how they dealt with scandal or things that ran contrary to the set narrative of Who This Person Is -- to counter narratives like gossip rags and blind items promising to give you the "real story", which was often just as manufactured as the "good" press, and how they deal with a celebrity who refuses to go along or has things happen that fuck up thier public persona. So the whole thing is a study of constructed reality and mass media, I feel read all these articles and even her more dense academic work (which isn't as glib, naturally) and I always felt like I came away understanding more about how media works and how fandom work and how scandals work and how, if you're savvy or lucky enough, you can turn potential negatives into positives or survive almost anything that could damage your repetition. it really is a master course in image making and mass media.
posted by The Whelk at 7:58 AM on June 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

If y'all like this, you might want to check out You Must Remember This, a podcast about the last 100 years of hollywood that mixes serious analysis and biography with not-so-serious gossip.
posted by signal at 8:03 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Although right now it's covering the Manson Murders so it's a bit more ....serious and journalistic then the show is usually.
posted by The Whelk at 8:23 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Don't forget, Gloria Swanson also played herself on the Beverly Hillbillies. The pictures got very small indeed.
posted by Man-Thing at 8:40 AM on June 30, 2015

She didn’t take out the garbage or “wear cotton” or go to the bathroom

. . . or play baseball, or "wear sweaters", or play drums. Wasn't much of a dancer. And was never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with oriental womennnn



yeah.
posted by Herodios at 9:11 AM on June 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

I hate this kind of smirky, self-referential, ain't-I-clever writing. Gloria Swanson deserves better.
posted by Sassenach at 9:20 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I hate this kind of smirky, self-referential, ain't-I-clever writing. Gloria Swanson deserves better.

I, on the other hand, would be happy to read nothing else but Anne Helen Peterson's celebrity babbling forever. I do have a sense that maybe La Swanson might have been a little too self-important to appreciate the tone.
posted by padraigin at 10:02 AM on June 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

I recently re-watched Sunset Boulevard, and for the first time realized just how much Madeline Kahn was channeling Norma Desmond in some of her iconic comedy roles (the Mel Brooks films, Clue) in addition to Marlene Dietrich, of course.
posted by Atom Eyes at 10:08 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

The scariest thing in sunset Boulvard are Swanson's hands. They move like sea creatures.

(Also how bad Joe is at being a kept man)
posted by The Whelk at 10:13 AM on June 30, 2015

> I hate this kind of smirky, self-referential, ain't-I-clever writing. Gloria Swanson deserves better.

I totally disagree; I think the style suits the subject, and Swanson would have loved it. Thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 11:32 AM on June 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

Anne Helen Petersen is great! I keep thinking I should do a FPP on her specifically but as noted above her work has been linked repeatedly on Metafilter before. Last spring she left academia to write for Buzzfeed and talked about why at the Hairpin.
posted by Wretch729 at 11:35 AM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is fantastic. You can read Photoplay magazine online, and absorb the fan culture of a tenderer time, together with ads that show you what performing femininity was like. It's fascinating. I know someone will be saying the same thing in 70 or 80 years about Us Weekly and so forth, but it's hard to imagine.

Parenthetically -- Janis looked so young, God. She looked like someone I could have known.
posted by Countess Elena at 12:14 PM on June 30, 2015

This is metafilter.
posted by infini at 12:28 PM on June 30, 2015

I've only read a little bit of Part 1, but I feel like I should be smoking in a much darker room than I'm currently sitting, illuminated only by light coming through the slats of my blinds. I blame LA Confidential and a few other things for this.

But I can already tell I'm gonna love the rest of part 1 and like part 2 even more.
posted by sparkletone at 12:40 PM on June 30, 2015

She is so good in Sunset Boulevard. It's easy to get lost in William Holden's struggle between his soul and comfort and see her as a constricting dampening force acting upon him, but her performance is strong and subtle, even when Norma is at her most monstrous.

I had no idea about how she reinvented herself (while remaining true to who she was) after her Hollywood career. Too often she's presented as the silent film star who bagged Kennedy, Sr. and had a brief comeback in which the actress and character are elided into one entity.

Here she is at eighty-one. 81! (This is my favorite picture of her from the 1920s.)
posted by julen at 6:02 PM on June 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

I think of her whenever I ride past her palatial house in Englewood, N.J., which was a gift from Joe Kennedy. Not that she couldn't buy her own damn house, thank you very much.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 7:27 PM on June 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

When Charlie Chaplin was becoming the biggest celebrity on certain sections of the planet, and before he helped found United Artists, he signed with a Chicago-based studio and asked their powers-that-be to send him some pretty girls on staff. He needed a cast.

One in particular was very photogenic, he wrote in his autobiography, but "Oh my god, I could not get a reaction out of her." Gloria Swanson told him years later that she was that girl but she hated slapstick comedy so was deliberately uncooperative. Apparently she had a sense of destiny and purpose even before she hit the big time.
posted by goofyfoot at 8:21 PM on July 1, 2015 [2 favorites]