At the height of her fame, Gloria Swanson wore a hat and made 10,000 women copy it the following season. Her handprints were set in cement in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Her fan mail ran to 10,000 letters a week. She was earning $20,000 a week and she spent it on French perfume, on gowns from Paris, on jewelry and silk undergarments, and a retinue of servants and secretaries because the public wanted their stars to live like royalty and Gloria Swanson obliged them completely.
By the time she turned 27, she had racked up three marriages, two continents, and six Cecil B. DeMille pictures that had essentially invented the concept of the Hollywood glamour icon and she was by any measure that mattered to anyone in the 1920s, the most famous woman on Earth. All of it had started eight years earlier when a five-foot-nothing girl in borrowed clothes walked into a studio in Chicago and walked out with a career that would survive a rapist first husband, a forced miscarriage, and an industry that still couldn’t decide
whether she was a comedian or a leading lady. Then a Boston banker named Joseph Kennedy walked into a lunch at the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York on November 11th, 1927 and the next three years dismantled everything she had built. He used her name to give himself prestige, her company to fund his operations, her money to pay for gifts he gave her, and her career as the vehicle for an artistic disaster that left her a million dollars in debt.
And when the reckoning finally came, he stood up from the dinner table and walked out without a word, without a phone call, without a letter and moved on to build one of the most consequential political dynasties in American history. 20 years of wreckage followed. And then, in 1950, Billy Wilder called.
In today’s episode of Old Money Allure, we trace how a girl who started at $3.25 became the most formidable female star of the silent era. How Joseph Kennedy methodically stripped her of her money, her marriage, and her career while building his own fortune and his family’s future. And how she came back 20 years older, $1 million poorer, and more devastating on screen than she had ever been to deliver the greatest performance of her life.
Hello and welcome to today’s episode on Old Money and the history of wealthy families around the world. My name is Elizabeth and I’m your narrator for this episode. And if you’d like even more on the hidden history of wealthy families, be sure to visit the first link in the video description to get access to our free Substack newsletter where we have many years of extra videos and secret content.
That being said, thank you for your time and let us begin. The Lakeview district of Chicago was not the kind of place that manufactured legends, but it was the place that manufactured people who understood from an early age that the world was indifferent to them and that the only solution was to become impossible to ignore.
Gloria May Josephine Swanson was born there on March 27th, 1899, the only child of Joseph Theodore Swanson, a Swedish-American civilian employee of the Army Transport Service, and his wife Adelaide, who was of German, English, French, and Polish ancestry, and who worried constantly that her daughter’s ears were too large, fashioning a rotating selection of hats and muffs to conceal them.
Her father’s work moved him where the Army needed him, so Gloria spent her childhood on the move. Key West, where she was enrolled in a Catholic convent school. San Juan, Puerto Rico, where she saw her first modern pictures and discovered she wanted to be an opera singer. And Chicago again, where her parents eventually separated and her mother moved them to California, a decision that would change the course of film history.
Her aunt took her there because she had a crush on the actor Francis X. Bushman and wanted to see the studio. And the sequence of events that followed was not glamorous. A director noticed the teenager on the tour, offered her a brief walk-on role, and paid her $3.25 for the trouble. School ended that day.
The studio offered steady work at $13.25 a week and Gloria took it, appearing first in The Song of the Soul in 1914 as an uncredited extra, then in His New Job in 1915, directed by and starring a young Englishman named Charlie Chaplin, in which she played a stenographer and later wrote in her autobiography that she had felt like a cow trying to dance with a toy poodle.
It was at Essanay that she met Wallace Beery, a large, physically imposing actor, 10 or 12 years her senior, who co-starred with her in Sweedy Goes to College and who sent her a postcard urging her and her mother to follow him to Hollywood where Mack Sennett was making comedy shorts at the Keystone Studios and the money was better.
Gloria followed. She was 15 years old, newly transplanted to a city that ran on ambition and illusion, and the man who had brought her there was already angling to marry her, but that part of the story belongs to the age-old pattern of older men who mistake proximity for ownership and confuse a young woman’s uncertainty for consent.
On March 27th, 1916, her 17th birthday, not coincidentally, they married at Pasadena City Hall, having failed to elope to Santa Barbara because they couldn’t produce a birth certificate, proof of age, or parental permission. In her autobiography published 64 years later, she described what happened on their wedding night in plain terms without softening or apology.
He raped her. And she stayed. With no money of her own and no understanding of what options even existed, she stayed, discovering over the following months that he was seeing other women, that he had been fired from Keystone, and that the man she had married was not a husband in any meaningful sense of the word.
When she became pregnant, Beery gave her medication he said was for morning sickness. And after she took it, she became nauseated, lost consciousness, and woke up in a hospital having miscarried. A divorce filing followed. The marriage lasted under three years legally and left marks that her subsequent five marriages and her eventual autobiography would spend the rest of her life trying to account for.
The pattern it established of trusting men who would later use that trust against her would replay itself at far greater cost with a man who would not meet her for another 11 years. The divorce was finalized in 1918 and within a year, she had signed with Famous Players-Lasky at $150 a week, caught the attention of Cecil B.
DeMille, and began what would become the most spectacular ascent in the history of American cinema. She was 19 years old. Cecil B. DeMille called Gloria Swanson Young Fellow throughout their collaboration and was still using the nickname decades later when they were both playing fictional versions of themselves in a film about the ruins of everything they had built together.
He said he thought her braver than any man he had known. She always called him Mr. DeMille. When she arrived at Famous Players-Lasky at the end of 1918, she was a competent comedy performer who had spent three years making two-reel shorts with Mack Sennett. And what DeMille did to her in six pictures over three years was something closer to invention than direction.
He turned her into the defining image of American femininity in the 1920s, the sophisticated woman who led her own life, made her own choices, and suffered the consequences with a composure that the audience found simultaneously thrilling and aspirational. The films came fast. Don’t Change Your Husband in 1919, then For Better for Worse that same year, then Male and Female, which contained the scene Swanson as the lion’s bride surrounded by live animals on a set that DeMille filled with authentic jewels, real furs, and fresh flowers
that made her a star in the modern sense of the word, a person whose face on a marquee meant something specific to the audience before they saw a single frame of footage. DeMille used real luxury on his sets as a deliberate stylistic choice and its effect on Swanson was formative in a way that would eventually prove financially catastrophic.
She absorbed his conviction that authentic things were worth their cost. That the right dress and the right jewel and the right flower were not extravagances but essentials. And she carried this into her personal life with the same total commitment she brought to her performances. Why change your wife in 1920, Something to Think About that same year, and The Affairs of Anatol in 1921 completed the collaboration.
And by the time it was over, Swanson was no longer a studio property in the conventional sense. She was a phenomenon, a performer around whom an entire industry organized itself. Whose fan mail ran to thousands of letters a week, whose marriages and divorces and hats and hemlines were reported in newspapers as matter of genuine public importance.
Her second marriage to Herbert K. Somborn, president of Equity Pictures Corporation, and later founder of the Brown Derby restaurant chain, who opened the original Derby on Wilshire Boulevard in 1926 using $70,000 from their divorce settlement, produced a daughter, Gloria Swanson Somborn, born October 7th, 1920, and a divorce that was among the more spectacular of the decade, one in which Somborn’s lawyers named 13 men, including DeMille and Rudolph Valentino, as co-respondents in his adultery filing.
An accusation that was almost entirely fabricated and that led Paramount to add a morality clause to her contract. The clause was leverage, >> >> and everyone in the room understood it as such. Somborn’s lawyers had named director Marshall Neilan for reasons that were almost certainly legitimate, and the accusation landed hardest precisely because she was one of the most desired women in the world.
The morality clause was an instrument perfectly calibrated to the famous and the vulnerable. When the Somborn divorce was finally concluded, she adopted a 1-year-old boy she named Joseph Patrick Swanson after her father, and in 1923 to film Madame Sans Gêne, where a French translator named Henri Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudray was assigned to accompany her on set.
Henri was everything Beery and Somborn were not, aristocratic, handsome in a diffident European way, genuinely kind, >> >> decorated in the First World War, and broke in the charming manner of minor noblemen who have titles but no income to match them. She conceived his child before her divorce from Somborn was legally final, which would have triggered the morality clause and ended her career.
So she had an abortion in Paris, botched badly enough that she nearly died, and one she would spend the rest of her life regretting. And when the divorce was finalized, she married Henri on January 28th, 1925 at Passy in France. She returned to America as the Marquise de la Falaise de la Coudray, the first Hollywood star to hold a hereditary European title, met at the boat in New York by crowds that lined the streets, then greeted again in Los Angeles, the country receiving her with the adoration usually reserved for conquering generals.
In the years between 1922 and 1927, Gloria Swanson earned approximately $8 million. Most of it Most of it was gone by the end. The accounts from the period read less like a financial record than a fever dream of consumption. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on jewelry, staggering sums per season on gowns and couture, entire retinue of servants and secretaries sustained at costs that would have bankrupted a small country, and she maintained it year after year with the absolute confidence of someone who had been told by the
public, by Paramount, by DeMille himself, that this was what she was supposed to be doing. She turned down Paramount’s offer of $1 million a year to go independent with United Artists in 1925, a decision that cost her more than the money itself, because what she gained in creative control, she surrendered in the one thing Paramount had been quietly providing, financial infrastructure, the network of accountants and lawyers and studio executives who kept the money moving in approximately the right direction.
On her own, she was brilliant and chaotic in equal measure, spending lavishly on productions that sometimes justified every dollar. Sadie Thompson in 1928 grossed $850,000 and earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and sometimes resulted in films that were merely expensive.
By the end of 1927, she had $65 in the bank. This was not a metaphor. It was the actual balance reported by her accountant, the residue of $8 million earned and spent and lent and lost. The end point of a philosophy of spending that had been encouraged by everyone around her who had a financial interest in her continued willingness to spend.
Living on Sunset Boulevard, not that one, not yet, with maids and secretaries and a French chef, wearing clothes from Paris and jewels from New York, she was one of the most famous people on Earth and one of the most financially precarious. Debts to Art Cinema Corporation, an unfulfilled preferred stock subscription to United Artists.
None of this was visible from the outside. The outside was all managed magnificence. Her imprints were in cement in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Hers was ceremony number eight in 1927. Her third husband, Henri the Marquis, was handsome and kind and thoroughly useless as a business partner, and the marriage that had returned her to genuine happiness, she wrote later that it was “the only real peace and happiness I had ever known”, was operating in conditions it could not survive.
She was the breadwinner, the celebrity, the industry, and he was the title on her calling card. Then she went to New York for a meeting with United Artists, and a man named Robert Kane told her he had someone she should meet, a banker and distributor and Wall Street operator from Boston who might be able to help with the financial situation.
He promised her that they would make millions together. That was the pitch. She had heard something like it before. Joseph Patrick Kennedy was 37 years old when he arrived at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue on November 11th, 1927, and he had already done things that would have satisfied most men for a lifetime.
Graduated Harvard in 1912, borrowed $45,000 to buy control of a Boston bank and become the youngest bank president in the country, made a fortune at the Hayden stock brokerage firm by studying the mechanics of stock manipulation until he understood them better than the men who had invented them, and purchased a movie house chain in New England that had shown him, with the clarity of box office receipts, exactly how much money was waiting to be extracted from the American entertainment industry.
His self-assessment, delivered to a colleague while still at Hayden, Stone, was not modest. “Look at that bunch of pants presses [clears throat] in Hollywood making themselves millionaires. I could take the whole business away from them.” He was not wrong. In February of 1926, he had acquired Film Booking Offices of America, a low-budget studio specializing in cheap Westerns, for approximately 1 and 1/2 million dollars, declared his production philosophy to be the Woolworth and Ford of the motion picture industry rather than the
Tiffany, and proceeded to run it with the efficiency of a man who had never loved a single frame of film and therefore never made the mistake of spending money on art when profit would do. By October of 1928, he had engineered the merger of FBO with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and RCA’s interests to create Radio-Keith-Orpheum, RKO, and had extracted more than $4 million in profit from the transaction, plus $850,000 straight payout for facilitating the deal.
A figure that, combined with his other Hollywood operations, brought his total earnings from the industry to over $5 million. He was also running Pathé Studios. He had done it not because he loved cinema, but because he saw it as another financial instrument, the way he had seen the New England movie houses and the Boston bank, a mechanism for converting other people’s assets into his own.
Gloria Swanson, sitting across from him at the Savoy-Plaza, was 28 years old, broke in a way that was not yet publicly known, and holding a folder of financial proposals from United Artists and Bank of America that she had brought to the meeting to get his professional opinion. He studied them while already planning the takeover.
The mutual acquaintance who arranged the meeting, First National Producer Robert Kane, had told Kennedy beforehand that Swanson “needs handling, needs being properly financed and having her organization placed in proper hands. Which was a way of saying that the biggest female star in Hollywood was financially exposed and that her exposure was, for someone who understood these things, an opportunity.
Kennedy had seven children and a wife named Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, daughter of Boston’s legendary mayor, Honey Fitz, and a family reputation to maintain. And none of this stopped him inviting Swanson and her husband Henri to Palm Beach, Florida, in early 1928, where he arranged for Kennedy aide Eddie Moore to take Henri deep-sea fishing all day and then appeared at Swanson’s hotel room door.
She described him afterward in her autobiography as a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free. Within 2 months of their Savoy Plaza meeting, before the affair had even fully begun, Kennedy had fired her lawyer and approximately a dozen of her retainers, formed a new Delaware Corporation called Gloria Productions Incorporated on January 25th, 1928, with his associate E. B.
Derr as president, and obtained full legal authority over her business affairs through Derr. Gloria Productions’ only asset was Swanson herself. He leased a house on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and installed himself and his team there to manage her affairs, communicated with her through coded telegrams split across two separate cable companies, and created the position of head of Pathe Studios in Europe for her husband Henri.
An appointment that sent Henri to Paris for extended stretches and left Kennedy with unencumbered access to his client and his financial instrument. “Joseph Kennedy had taken over my entire life,” she wrote later. Rose Kennedy purchased Christmas gifts for Gloria Swanson’s children. This was not ignorance. No one who has read the available record can sustain a reading of Rose Kennedy as a woman who was deceived.
And she was not, in any case, a woman who was easily deceived about anything. What she was, by every account, was a woman who had made a calculation about her marriage and her family and her position in the world and who had decided, with the cold precision of a practical intelligence operating under genuine religious conviction, that the calculation held under even these conditions.
>> >> Kennedy told Rose that Swanson was in a financial morass requiring his immediate attention and then relocated to California. And Rose, already imagining nine children and the social architecture of an ambitious Irish Catholic family in Boston, received this explanation with a composure that Swanson later found more unnerving than anger would have been.
The four of them, Joseph Kennedy and Rose, Gloria Swanson and Henri de la Falaise, traveled together to Europe in the fall of 1929 for the London premiere of The Trespasser. Because Kennedy had decided that Rose had never seen Europe and that, >> >> as he put it to Swanson, everything would be fine.
A statement that was either the most breathtaking act of audacity in the history of matrimony or evidence of a man so accustomed to managing other people’s perceptions that he had come to believe his own. On the voyage, Kennedy fawned openly over Swanson in Rose’s presence. And Rose was, by Swanson’s account, very kind to Gloria, almost to an uncomfortable degree, complimenting her and expressing concern about her diet and behaving as though nothing was amiss.
A performance that moved Swanson to ask her privately, “I don’t know which of us is the better actress.” The London premiere itself was extraordinary. The Trespasser was the first American sound production to have its world premiere in London. And Swanson, who had filmed it in 21 days, had written a song for it called “Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere” and had sung at a BBC concert before leaving, was mobbed by crowds in the street, recognized as what she was, which was the most famous woman alive.
The film had been made to salvage from the Queen Kelly disaster, which had already consumed a great deal of money and most of Kennedy’s patience. And it succeeded. The Trespasser was a significant hit and earned Swanson her second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. It also gave Kennedy a piece of good news to carry alongside the worst news that was accumulating on another front.
Before any of this, before the London premiere, before the voyage, there had been an afternoon in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, when Kennedy had arranged for Gloria to come aboard a sailboat anchored in the harbor. And his 12-year-old son John had come aboard and discovered the two of them together, jumped overboard and tried to swim to shore.
And Kennedy had to go into the water after him. In the fall of 1929, a Kennedy associate summoned Swanson to a meeting she was not told the purpose of. And the figure she found waiting for her was Cardinal William Henry O’Connell, Archbishop of Boston. He informed her that her relationship with Kennedy constituted an occasion for sin and that she should end the affair.
Swanson, who was Lutheran and not Catholic and who had not asked for pastoral guidance on this or any other subject, was livid. The affair continued. What she did not know yet was that the affair had already served its purpose. The man who had told her they would make millions together had already made his millions and was moving on to other things.
And the letter Kennedy’s office would eventually release to announce his departure from her company, “Gloria Productions Inc. also announces Mr. Kennedy’s retirement from the active management of that company.” A sentence of extraordinary blankness and bureaucratic serenity had already been written. While all of this was happening on the personal front, the affair, the quadrangle, the cardinal, the Hyannis Port sailboat, something else was happening inside the financial structure of Gloria Productions Incorporated, invisible to Swanson, precisely where her trust was
greatest. For years, spending lavishly and earning lavishly had been broadly self-sustaining at Paramount, where the studio’s own infrastructure absorbed the chaos of her personal accounting. But at United Artists and then inside Kennedy’s Delaware Corporation, the math worked differently. Kennedy had settled her existing United Artists multi-picture contract by giving UA outright ownership of two of her unreleased films, Sadie Thompson, which had grossed $850,000 and earned her an Oscar nomination, and The Love of Sonya, both of which
continued to generate revenue after she had surrendered them. Those properties bearing her name, built from her labor, were gone on his advice. He billed to Gloria Productions the luxury bungalow he built for her on the Pathe Studio lot, the mink coat he presented to her as a gift, the car he gave to a writer on one of her projects, and the entire cost of a production that had begun filming on November 1st, 1928, and that would, by the time it was over, consume upwards of $800,000 of Gloria Swanson’s money while producing
approximately zero minutes of releasable American film. Swanson described Kennedy’s accounting mythology with a precision that reflected either genuine insight or the perspective of someone who has been educated very expensively at close range. Joe Kennedy operated just like Joe Stalin. Their system was to write a letter to the files saying one thing and then order the exact reverse on the phone.
There was a moment at a dinner with friends when Swanson noticed a change to her personal accounts, a car billed as though it were a company expense, and mentioned it, framing it lightly, not accusing, just noting. Kennedy stood up from the table and left without a word. He did not call. He did not write. He did not return.
He simply removed himself from her life in December of 1930 with the exact same efficiency he had brought to every other extraction he had ever performed, cleanly, completely, with no residue of sentiment or obligation. And when the auditors came in and went through the books of Gloria Productions Incorporated, what they found was debts totaling upwards of $1 million, for which Gloria Swanson, as the corporation’s only asset and its principal, was solely responsible.
She had paid for the mink coat. She had paid for the car. She had paid for the bungalow. She had paid for everything. Kennedy’s parting words on the matter of Queen Kelly, delivered before the dinner exit and the silence that followed, were characteristically brief. “I’ve never had a failure in my life.” The story of Queen Kelly is, in some ways, the story of two men, a Boston banker who saw a film as a financial instrument, and an Austrian director who saw every film as a monument, meeting in a project that could only have ended in
catastrophe. Erich von Stroheim had been one of the most visionary directors in Hollywood, a man whose films were characterized by grotesque, unflinching realism, whose Greed, in 1924, ran to approximately 9 or 10 hours in its original cut, before MGM ordered it reduced to two, >> >> and gave the excess footage to a studio employee to destroy.
A loss that film historians still refer to in the tone usually reserved for acts of war, and whose The Wedding March, in 1928, had been seized from him by its producer after he shot enormously over budget. By the time Kennedy approached him about a story he had been developing, originally called The Swamp, about a convent girl who falls into the orbit of a dissolute European prince, >> >> and eventually ends up managing an African brothel.
Von Stroheim >> >> was in weak professional standing, with a family to support and no offers from studios that would let him retain creative control. He agreed to waive that control, stipulating in writing that he could be fired if he went over budget or schedule, and Kennedy announced the deal to the press with what can only be described as self-satisfaction.
“I can handle him.” The script ran to hundreds of scenes, and Robert E. Sherwood of Life magazine called it “the best story ever written,” an opinion that encouraged exactly the wrong kind of confidence. Production began on November 1st, 1928, as a silent film. The Jazz Singer had already opened in October of 1927, >> >> and had demonstrated, with the irreversible clarity of a box office figure, that the silent era was over.
But here was von Stroheim shooting in sequence, as was his expensive and methodical practice, working through every scene in order, from the first to the last, building the visual architecture of a 5-hour epic that nobody would ever see. By January of 1929, 10 weeks into production, $400,000 had been spent, and only 1/3 of the scenario had been filmed.
The crisis came when von Stroheim directed actor Tully Marshall, playing a grotesque creditor in the African brothel sequence, to allow tobacco juice to drool from his mouth onto Swanson’s pale hand as he placed a ring on her finger in the marriage scene. And Swanson walked off the set and called Kennedy. “Our director is a madman.
” She had also discovered something else. The script had described her character arriving at a dance hall, but the rushes made unmistakably clear that it was a brothel. And Swanson, who was not a prude, but who was acutely aware that her screen image was the primary financial asset of a corporation that bore her name, was not going to play the madam of a brothel in a film financed entirely with her own money.
Von Stroheim was fired. He did not speak to Gloria Swanson again for 21 years. Kennedy committed an additional $60,000 to commission a Queen Kelly waltz from Franz Lehár, composer of The Merry Widow, as part of a plan to salvage the production as some kind of musical hybrid, a plan that was eventually abandoned, like all the other salvage plans, and then declared, with his characteristic refusal to absorb responsibility, “I’ve never had a failure in my life.
” The total cost of Queen Kelly >> >> exceeded $800,000. Vanity Fair’s accounting placed it at $860,000, and the film was never released commercially in the United States during Swanson’s lifetime. In 1932, Swanson released a truncated, part-sound version in Europe and South America only, with an alternate ending in which Kelly drowns rather than marries.
American audiences did not see a single frame of Queen Kelly until 1950, when Billy Wilder used actual footage from it in a film about a faded silent movie star who had made an unfinished picture with her director, and was now living in delusion inside the wreckage of her career. And the man playing that director was Erich von Stroheim, and he would be sharing the set with Gloria Swanson for the first time in two decades.
Here is what the audit found, that the corporation called Gloria Productions Incorporated, a Delaware entity formed on January 25th, 1928, with E. B. Derr as president and Gloria Swanson as its only asset, had, in the approximately 3 years of its operation under Kennedy’s management, accumulated debts totaling upwards of $1,000,000, every cent of which had been borrowed in Swanson’s name, and was owed by Swanson alone.
She had been earning and spending lavishly for a decade, but the specific damage done by Kennedy was not the spending she knew about, the gowns, the jewels, the houses, the production costs she had consciously approved. It was the spending she did not know about, the gifts billed to her company as expenses, the car she thought he had given a writer, but which Gloria Productions had paid for, the mink coat that had cost her company money she had believed was affection.
She had also, on Kennedy’s advice, surrendered the distribution rights to Sadie Thompson, her most commercially successful film, the one that had earned $850,000 and an Oscar nomination, to Art Cinema Corporation, a transaction that continued to generate revenue for other people long after she had signed away her interest in it.
The total picture assembled by accountants after Kennedy’s departure was this. She had sold her most profitable asset >> >> on his instruction, run up production debts of $800,000 plus on a film that would never be released in America, paid for her own gifts, and was now solely liable for the remainder.
She was Gloria Productions’ only asset, and the men who had structured the corporation, Derr as president, Kennedy as the intelligence behind it all, had built the liability to face in exactly one direction. By December of 1930, when Kennedy stood up from that dinner table and walked into the night, she carried the full weight of a million-dollar debt, and between her $65 in 1927 and that reckoning was the entire Kennedy episode, which had promised her millions and delivered the arithmetic of extraction.
Kennedy moved on. Within 4 years, he was the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, appointed on June 30th, 1934, a coincidence of timing that the more darkly inclined historians of the period have noted without fully elaborating. And within 8 years, he was the United States ambassador to the Court of St.
James, appointed January 7th, 1938, bringing his family to London and cultivating the reputation of a dynasty that his money and his maneuvering and his absolutely unsentimental view of other people as resources to be managed had made possible. His nine children, among them a future president, a future attorney general, and a future senator, would carry the Kennedy name into American history with an authority assembled in part from the wreckage of Gloria Swanson’s finances and the burned-out shell of a production
company that had never been anything more than a vehicle for someone else’s ambitions. If you want the full accounting of what Kennedy took from Swanson, the specific documents, the paper trail of Gloria Productions, the question of what he knew and when he knew it, that material is on our Substack, where we go deeper than this channel can.
The debt was hers. The marriage that had given her the only real peace and happiness she had ever known, Henri de la Falaise, who divorced her in 1930, the same year Kennedy walked out, could not survive the weight of what had happened to it, and her career had stalled at exactly the moment when the industry it had been built on was being dismantled around her.
The talkies had come, and with them a new set of questions about which voices matched their faces, which stars could survive the translation, and which had been so thoroughly identified with silent cinema magnificence that the microphone revealed something audiences had not previously been asked to consider.
Swanson could sing. The Trespasser had already that, and the conditions were against her anyway. Gloria Swanson kept working. This is the part of the story that is easiest to pass over. It lacks the dramatic architecture of what came before and after. No Kennedy, no von Stroheim, no DeMille on the set waving her toward the camera with an affectionate diminutive.
Yet it requires accounting, for it was real, and the person who did it was the same person who had done everything else. Someone who refused, as a matter of character, to stop. What a widow in 1930, directed by Allan Dwan, was the last film under Gloria Productions and was coolly received. Indiscreet, in 1931 and Tonight or Never, that same year, were made for Feature Productions under United Artists.
And Perfect Understanding in 1933, filmed entirely at Ealing Studios in England, and co-starring a young Laurence Olivier, was panned by critics and failed at the box office, ending her relationship with United Artists definitively. There was also, during this period, The Fourth Marriage. She had met Michael Farmer, Irish, described variously as a sportsman and an adventurer and a man of independent financial means, though the means were of uncertain provenance, in Paris in 1931 while being fitted by Coco Chanel for her wardrobe in
Tonight or Never, and the relationship that followed was one you enter only when your defenses have been depleted by accumulated damage. Farmer’s method of proposing marriage was to tell her that he would go public with news of her pregnancy unless she agreed to become his wife. She did not want to marry him.
Her friends uniformly told her not to. She married him in 1931 in a ceremony that may have been legally invalid because her divorce from Henri was not yet finalized. Remarried in November of that year, had a daughter, Michelle Bridget Farmer, and then divorced him in 1934, adding another name to the list that Herbert Somborn’s lawyers had begun constructing a decade earlier.
Music in the Air for Fox in 1934 was her last feature for a major studio in the 1930s, and by the middle of the decade she was, for all practical purposes, unemployable by the studios that had once competed for her. She moved to New York City in 1938. This was not a retreat, exactly, but it was an acknowledgement that Hollywood had moved on without her.
In New York, she did stage work, radio, the beginnings of television, business ventures that included fashion and health food advocacy. She had been a proponent of macrobiotics since the late 1920s, a conviction so far ahead of the culture that it would take another 40 years to catch up. And she patented inventions, an exceptionally practical intelligence who had never been defined entirely by the camera.
Father Takes a Wife for RKO in 1941 was a one-off return to film that failed. After that, nine years passed in which she made no feature films at all. She was 50 years old. And then, in 1949, director Billy Wilder asked his friend George Cukor who might be right for the role of Norma Desmond in a film about a faded silent star living in a Hollywood mansion with her butler and her delusions and a script she believed would bring her back.
And Cukor gave him a name that made the entire project inevitable. Billy Wilder and his co-writer Charles Brackett had submitted their script to Paramount under the title A Can of Beans to prevent the studio from interfering before they had finished it, which tells you everything you need to know about the relationship between the Hollywood system and the people trying to make serious art inside it.
And when the script was finally complete and the studio had read it and understood what it was, the question of casting became the central question of the production. Greta Garbo had refused outright. Mae West had been offended. She maintained, at whatever age, that she was a sex symbol, not a has-been, and the part required someone willing to look directly into the camera and embody obsolescence, which West was constitutionally unable to do.
Mary Pickford had been approached, but the storyline, an aging star conducting an affair with a man half her age, was considered an insult, and the meeting ended before the plot was fully explained. Pola Negri’s accent was too heavy for a dialogue-intensive sound film. Norma Shearer had retired and found the script distasteful.
Cukor’s suggestion was not obvious from the outside. Swanson had not made a major feature in nine years and had not been anybody’s first thought >> >> when the conversation turned to prestige casting. But Cukor understood something about the material that made it, once he said it, inevitable. The role required someone who had actually been a silent film star.
The role required someone who had made a film with a difficult director that had ended in disaster. The role required someone who had lost her footing in the transition to sound and rebuilt her life in the margins of the industry that had discarded her. Swanson objected to doing a screen test on the entirely reasonable grounds that she had made 20 films for Paramount and did not see why she should audition for the right to make another one.
And Cukor’s response to this objection has entered the history of cinema. “If they ask you to do 10 screen tests, do 10 screen tests or I will personally shoot you.” She did the test. Her contract paid $50,000 against the $20,000 a week she had been earning at her peak, a comparison the film would eventually make explicit in ways she may not have fully anticipated when she signed.
And she arrived on set >> >> to begin playing a character who was described by her biographer Lon Davis as someone Swanson resembled and did not resemble in equal and specific measure. Her biographer Lon Davis put it directly. Swanson was not Norma Desmond. Unlike her delusional screen counterpart, Swanson was fiercely realistic, lived in the present rather than the past, and pursued many interests with passionate zeal.
Davis added, with appropriate dryness, that she was also a good actress. And judging by the number of people who think she was Norma Desmond, maybe a little too good. What Wilder understood, what the entire production turned on, was that the performance would work with Swanson’s exact specific history, giving every scene its second meaning, the layer of biography underneath the fiction that the audience could feel even when they couldn’t articulate it.
The film cast Cecil B. DeMille as himself, directing Samson and Delilah on the Paramount lot, greeting Norma Desmond with the warmth and carefully managed evasion of a man who cannot bear to be the one to tell her the truth. And DeMille greeted her on the set with his old nickname, >> >> young fellow, because that is what he had always called her, in real life and now in this.
The film cast Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling, Norma Desmond’s devoted butler, who had once been her director and her husband, and who now screened her old films for her in the private projection room of her crumbling mansion. The film that Max screened was Queen Kelly. The casting of Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling is one of the greatest decisions in the history of cinema, and it was almost certainly not made for the reasons that make it great.
Von Stroheim was available. He was an actor as well as a director. He had the specific look and manner, a European authority that the role required. And he was the right age. But what he brought to the part that no casting call could have specified was the 21 years of silence between himself and the woman he was playing opposite.
The two decades since the day in January of 1929 when she had walked off his set and called his producer and had him fired. The weight of that history pressing through every scene in which Max looked at Norma Desmond with the absolute devotion of a man who has organized his entire life around a single catastrophic love.
They had not spoken since the Queen Kelly shutdown. On the first day of shooting their scenes together, Wilder reportedly watched the two of them and said quietly that for a moment Swanson and von Stroheim are simply playing themselves. The footage that Max screens for Norma Desmond, the silent film that flickers on the projection room screen while the modern world waits impatiently outside, is actually footage from Queen Kelly, which means that the most famous symbol of Norma Desmond’s obsolescence is the actual symbol of Gloria Swanson’s worst
professional catastrophe. And the man running the projector is the man who caused it. This is not an irony that could have been invented. The film was released in August of 1950, and it was immediately and without significant debate a masterwork. A film that critics recognized on contact as the thing they had been waiting for, dense and dark and funny and genuinely strange with a performance at its center that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would have to reckon with at the ceremony held on March 29th, 1951.
Swanson was nominated for Best Actress. Her competitors that year were Anne Baxter and Bette Davis, both nominated for All About Eve, Eleanor Parker for Caged, and a 34-year-old comedian named Judy Holliday for her role in Born Yesterday, a romantic comedy about a gangster’s girlfriend who turns out to be smarter than everyone around her.
Judy Holliday won. Swanson, who had been expected to win, who had given one of the defining performances of her generation, who had taken 20 years of real loss and real regret and real survival and compressed it into 2 hours of screen time, did not go home with the Oscar that night. And the industry that had made her and discarded her and called her back to perform its own history for it, chose instead, on that evening, a comic actress in her first major film role.
And left Swanson with a nomination and a film that would outlast every other Best Picture nominee of that year and most of the decade. She had already won. The loss simply didn’t register against the scale of what she had built. She was 50 years old when Sunset Boulevard opened. And she had 33 more years to live, filled with the same restless intelligence that had taken her from $3.
25 at SNA to the pinnacle of silent cinema and back to Paramount for the greatest comeback in Hollywood history. She did a television series, Crown Theatre with Gloria Swanson, >> >> in 1954 and 1955. She designed clothes. She continued her health food advocacy with increasing intensity, appearing before congressional committees, both recognized in 1958 by Congressman James J.
Delaney for that work, and prompting her sixth husband, William Dufty’s 1975 book Sugar Blues, an exposé of refined sugar as a dietary poison that became a best-seller and was still in print decades later, with the conviction of a woman who had decided the democratization of macrobiotic eating was the most important project she could apply her celebrity to.
Her final film appearance came in Airport 1975 in 1974, playing herself, a cameo that placed her in a disaster movie as the image of permanent survival, the woman who had been through every kind of disaster the industry could generate and was still in the frame. She married William Dufty in February of 1976, her sixth husband, the one who had ghostwritten her autobiography and who had been her companion for nearly a decade, accepting his proposal when he told her he would be her first organic husband.
Swanson on Swanson, published by Random House in 1980, was her final word on everything. On Biery and the wedding night, on DeMille and the marble bathtubs and the live lions, on Henri and the happiness she described as the closest thing to real peace she had ever known, on Kennedy and the Palm Beach hotel room and the Delaware Corporation and the million dollars and the silence that followed, on the years in New York and the phone call from Wilder and Von Stroheim’s face when they saw each other
for the first time in 21 years. She died on April 4th, 1983 at New York Hospital of a heart ailment at 83 years old. Rose Kennedy outlived her by 11 years. Joe Kennedy had died in 1969, >> >> having spent his last years incapacitated by a stroke, surrounded by the dynasty he had built, a president assassinated, an attorney general assassinated, a senator who would spend decades in the chamber, and whether, in those silent final years, the man who had once declared, “I’ve never had a failure in
my life,” ever returned in whatever part of his mind was still working to the Savoy Plaza and the Delaware Corporation and the dinner table he had left without a word, no one alive can say. Probably not. This is not the kind of accounting he specialized in, but she had written it all down in a book published 3 years before she died with the precision and the lack of self-pity of a woman who understood that the record mattered.
The record was the one thing that could not be billed to a dummy corporation and charged to someone else’s account. Here is what the record shows, that in 1926, at the peak of what Hollywood could offer a performer, Gloria Swanson was earning $20,000 a week and spending it on silk undergarments and French perfume and jewels and gowns and houses, because the public wanted their stars to live like royalty and she was the queen, the most famous woman in the world, the one whose handprints were in the cement at Grauman’s, the one who had made six
films with DeMille and come back from Paris as a marquise to find crowds in the streets, $3.25 at the beginning and then everything. And the distance between them was called a life. And at the end of it, after Biery and Kennedy and Von Stroheim and the debt and the silence and the Oscar that went to someone else, she stood in a ruined mansion on a fictional Sunset Boulevard under the lights that had been shut off and turned back on and she looked at the camera with the authority of someone who had survived everything the 20th
century could think to do to a woman who had the audacity to be magnificent on her own terms. And she said, “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
