By Steve Starr
In her later years, the still glamorous star, a beautiful relic from the early days of film wrote "...all the puritanical hypocrisy of the 1920's even cost me a baby's life, when I had to abort my child by the Marquis in 1925 to avoid scandal and save my career."
Gloria May Josephine Svensson was born in Chicago March 27, 18 9 9, and grew up on Grace Street. After her parents divorced, Gloria's mother enrolled her in singing lessons, and for a time she attended the Chicago Art Institute. One day in 194, an aunt took Gloria to visit the Essanay Studios on Argyle Street. While there, she asked if she could be an extra in a scenen "just for the heck of it." The director throughout Gloria was vibrant and pretty, and expanded her role in the short film The End of a Perfect Day. Thus her career began. Later that year, Essanay hired the young girl as a stock player - four days work at $3.25 a week. Her fortune lay ahead.
In the tradition of movie stars, Svensson dubbed herself Swanson, and became what was known as a "guaranteed player" someone on call for any role at anytime. She appeared in dozens of short films before her first full length role in 1915, the awkwardly titled The Fable of Elvira and Farina and the Meal Ticket.
In her next film at Essanay, Swedie Goes to College (1915), Gloria met Wallace Beery, a gruff but accomplished actor who first won fame playing a trasvestite comedy maid. In 1916 beery became her first husband, and she traveled with him to California. Wallace brutally raped Gloria on their honeymoon. Later, he gave her a medicine that made her so nauseated and sick that it aborted her child and nearly killed her. They separated within a month.
Beery and Swanson both began working in Mack Sennett comedies. Though she realized later that the split second timing of these comedies improved many of her skills, she found them degrading and vulgar. Amid her loud complaints, Sennett tore up her contract.
Gloria divorced Wallace, and signed with Triangle Pictures. In 1919, after a year of feeling bogged down in silly love stories, she signed with Paramount. That same year she married her second husband, Herbert Somborn, owner of the famed Brown Derby restaurant, with whom they had a daughter, also named Gloria. Soon, Swanson was rising to fame in Cecil B. Demille epics. Always dressed in spectacular gowns and jewels, millions of fans could not get enough of Gloria Swanson. In Male and Female (1919), fearless Gloria allowed herself to be pawed at by a live lion. In You Can't Believe Everything (1g21), the non-swimmer jumped off a pier into deep water to "save" her co-star. Her willingness to risk life and limb for the movies earned her great respect from directors.
In 1922, the stunning Swanson stated, "I have gone through a long apprenticeship. I have gone through enough of being nobody. I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment the star!
Everybody from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it."
Bored with Herbert, Swanson divorced him in 1923. She titillated her fans with statements like "I not only believe in divorce, I sometimes think I don't believe in marriage at all." She moved to New York for a year and worked at the Astoria Studios, where her reputation grew as a good actress... as well as a clotheshorse.
Gloria married her third husband, the handsome Marqui Henri de la Falaise, and she became "Madame La Marquise." However, it was only the name she acquired. The Maarqui had no money, and Gloria put him on her payroll. She soon embarked on an affair with Joseph Kennedy, father of the future president. Joseph became her financial partner, producing the successful Sadie Thompson (1928) and a few ill-fated vehicles which included the famed, never finished, severely over-budget Queen Kelly (1g28), directed by Erich Stroheim. Probably due to family pressure, Kennedy severed their ties by 1930.
In 1931 Swanson married for the forth time to Michael Farmer, divorcing him in 1934. She adapted easily to the coming of sound in movies, making her first talkie, The Trespasser (1929). Yet her greatest film triumphs were behind her. She made only five films in the 1930's, and it was six years before her "comeback" in the disastrous 1941 comedy Father Takes a Wife. In 1946, she married her fifth husband, George W. Davey, a union that lasted just 44 days.
In 1950, nine years after her last film, she made a triumphant return to the screen as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the story of a faded silent movie queen who murders her much younger lover, played by William Holden. Gloria was perfectly cast, still beautiful, and sensational in the part. Her next role in Three for Bedroom G (1952) was a dismal failure. Swanson worked in stage and television throughout the rest of her life. In 1960, the fantastic Eliot Elisofon photo published in Life Magazine of Swanson elegantly gowned and bejewelled, standing dramatically with arms outstretched amid the rubble of the demolished Roxy Theatre in New York was the inspiration for the story of the 1971 Stephen Sondheim musical "Follies." The Roxy had opened in 1928 with the film The Loves of Sunya, which starred Swanson. In 1975, she played herself in Airport. In 19 7 6 she married for the sixth and final time, to William Duffy.
Gloria never tired of promoting her dietary ideas while traveling with her own pressure cooker and assortment of natural bread, herbs, and teas. In 1980-1981 she embarked on a grueling cross-country promotional tour for her autobiography Swanson On Swanson. Her book received phenomenal review - "Sparkling... Movie star's memoirs don't get any better." and "the most revealing book ever written by a movie queen." Swanson said of herself and other Hollywood royalty: "We lived like kings and queens, and why not?"
Gloria Swanson died in her sleep April 4, 1983. The New York Times honored her with an editorial entitled "The Greatest Star of them All."
SOURCES
The Films of Gloria Swanson by Lawrence J. Quirk The New York Times Directory of the Film Gloria Swanson websitesSteve Starr is the author of "Picture Perfect" - Art Deco Photo Frames 1926-1946, published by Rizzoli International Publications. A designer and an artist, he is the owner of Steve Starr Studios, specializing in original Art Deco photo frames, furnishings, and jewelry, and celebrating its 36th anniversary in 2003.
Visit his the studio at 2779 N. Lincoln Ave. in Chicago where adorning the walls is Steve Starr's personal collection of over 950 gorgeous frames filled with photos of Hollywood's most glamorous stars. You may E-mail Steve at SSSChicago@ameritech.net
