Gloria Swanson 1941.jpg
Swanson in 1941
Born Gloria May Josephine Swanson[1]
March 27, 1899
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Died April 4, 1983 (aged 84)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Cause of death Heart ailment
Resting place Church of the Heavenly Rest
Nationality American
Other names Gloria Mae
Miss Gloria Swanson
Education Hawthorne Scholastic Academy
Occupation Actress, producer
Years active 1914–1981
Religion Lutheran
Spouse(s) Wallace Beery
(m.1916–1919; divorced)
Herbert K. Somborn
(m.1919–1922; divorced)
Henri de la Falaise
(m.1925–1930; divorced)
Michael Farmer
(m.1931–1934; divorced)
William Davey
(m.1945–1946; divorced)
William Dufty
(m.1976–1983; her death)
Children 3
Gloria May Josephine Swanson[1] was born in a small house in Chicago in 1899 to Adelaide (née Klanowski) and Joseph Theodore Swanson, a soldier. She attended Hawthorne Scholastic Academy. Her father was from a strict Lutheran Swedish American family, and her mother was of German, French, and Polish ancestry.[2][3]
Born in Chicago, but because of her father's attachment to the Army, the family moved frequently and Swanson ended up spending most of her childhood in Puerto Rico, where she learned Spanish. She also spent time in Key West, Florida. It was not her intention to enter show business, but on a whim one of her aunts took her to a small film company in Chicago called Essanay Studios for a visit and Swanson was asked to come back to work as an extra.[4] After a few months as an extra working with others like Charlie Chaplin, and making $13.50 a week, Swanson left school to work full-time at the studio. Her parents would soon separate and she and her mother moved to California.[5]
Swanson and Walsh set about writing the script,[17] and discreetly placed an ad announcing the film, thinking no one noticed, as Charles Lindbergh had just completed his historic transatlantic flight. However, the press picked up on it and sensationalized the story.[12] United Artists received a threatening two-page telegram from the MPAA signed by all its members, including Fox (Walsh's studio) and Hays himself. In addition, the rest of the signers owned several thousand movie houses, and if they refused to screen the film it could be a financial disaster.[18] This was the first time Swanson had heard the name of Joseph P. Kennedy, with whom she would later have an affair, and who would arrange financing for her next few pictures, including Queen Kelly(1929).[19]
Swanson was angered by the response, as she felt those very studios had produced questionable films themselves, and were jealous at not having the chance to produce Rain.[20] After another threatening telegram, she decided to first appeal to the MPAA, and then the newspapers.[21] She only heard back from Marcus Loew, who promised to appeal on her behalf, and since he owned
Main article: Sunset Boulevard (film)
After Mae West, Mary Pickford and Pola Negri all declined the role,[41] Swanson starred in 1950's Sunset Boulevard, portraying Norma Desmond, a faded silent movie star who falls in love with the younger screenwriter Joe Gillis, played byWilliam Holden. Desmond lives in the past, assisted by her butler Max, played by Erich von Stroheim. Her dreams of a comeback are subverted as she becomes delusional. There are cameos from actors of the silent era in the film, including Buster Keaton, H. B. Warner and Anna Q. Nilsson. Cecil B. DeMilleplays himself in a pivotal scene. Some of the lines from the film have become pop-culture mainstays, including "The Greatest Star of them all"; "I am big; it's the pictures that got small"; "We didn't need dialogue, we had faces"; and "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." She received her third Best Actress Oscar nomination, but lost to Judy Holliday for Born Yesterday.[42]
Swanson received several subsequent acting offers but turned most of them down, saying they tended to be pale imitations of Norma Desmond. Her last major Hollywood motion picture role was the poorly received Three for Bedroom "C"in 1952. In 1956, Swanson made Nero's Mistress, which also starred Alberto Sordi, Vittorio de Sica and Brigitte Bardot. Her final screen appearance was as herself in Airport 1975. Although Swanson only made three films after Sunset Boulevard, she starred in numerous stage and television productions during her remaining years. She was active in various business ventures, traveled extensively, wrote articles, columns, and an autobiography, painted and sculpted, and became a passionate advocate of various health and nutrition topics. The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York honored Swanson in 1966 with a career film retrospective, A Tribute to Gloria Swanson, which screened some of her films over a few days.[citation needed]
Personal life[edit]
Swanson became a vegetarian around 1928 and was an early health foodadvocate who was known for bringing her own meals to public functions in a paper bag. Swanson told actor Dirk Benedict about macrobiotic diets when he was battling prostate cancer at a very early age. He had refused conventional therapies and credited this kind of diet and healthy eating with his recovery.[45]In 1975, Swanson traveled the United States and helped to promote the bookSugar Blues written by her husband, William Dufty.
In early 1980, Swanson's 520-page autobiography, Swanson on Swanson, was published by Random House and became a national best-seller. It was translated into French, Italian and Swedish editions. That same year, she also designed a stamp cachet for the United Nations Postal Administration and chaired the New York chapter of Seniors for Reagan-Bush.[citation needed]
Religion[edit]
Swanson was a long-time member of the Lutheran church; her father was ofSwedish Lutheran descent.[46] In 1964, Swanson spoke at a "Project Prayer" rally attended by 2,500 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The gathering, which was hosted by Anthony Eisley, a star of ABC's Hawaiian Eye series, sought to flood the United States Congress with letters in support of school prayer, following two decisions in 1962 and 1963 of the United States Supreme Court, which struck down the practice as in conflict with the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.[47] Joining Swanson and Eisley at the Project Prayer rally were Walter Brennan, Lloyd Nolan, Rhonda Fleming, Pat Boone, and Dale Evans. Swanson declared, "Under God we became the freest, strongest, wealthiest nation on earth, should we change that?"[47]
Marriages and relationships[edit]
Throughout her life and her many marriages, Swanson was always known as Miss Swanson. Though she legally took the names of her husbands, her own personality and fame always overshadowed them. Her first husband was the actorWallace Beery, whom she married on her 17th birthday. In her autobiography Swanson on Swanson, Swanson wrote that Beery raped her on their wedding night. He also impregnated her in 1917. Not wanting her to have the child, he reportedly tricked her into drinking a concoction that induced an abortion and although they still worked together at Sennett, they separated and finally divorced two years later.
She married Herbert K. Somborn (1881–1934), then president of Equity Pictures Corporation and later the owner of theBrown Derby restaurant, in 1919. Their daughter, Gloria Swanson Somborn (October 7, 1920 – December 28, 2000),[48]was born in 1920. Their divorce, finalized in January 1925, was sensational and led to Swanson having a "morals clause" added to her studio contract. Somborn accused her of adultery with thirteen men including Cecil B. DeMille, Rudolph Valentino, and Marshall Neilan. During their divorce Swanson wanted another child and in 1923 she adopted a baby boy, Sonny Smith (1922–1975), whom she renamed Joseph Patrick Swanson.
Swanson's third husband was the French aristocrat Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, whom she married on January 28, 1925 after the Somborn divorce was finalized. Though Henri was a Marquis and the grandson of Richard and Martha Lucy Hennessy from the famous Hennessy Cognac family, he was not rich and had to work for a living.[49] He was originally hired to be her assistant and interpreter in France while she was filming Madame Sans-Gêne (1925). Swanson was the first film star to marry European nobility, and the marriage became a global sensation. She conceived a child with him, but had an abortion, which, in her autobiography, she said she regretted.
Later Henri became a film executive representing Pathé (USA) in France through Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., who was running the studio. Many now assume he was given the position, which kept him in France for ten months a year, to simply keep him out of the way.[50] This marriage ended in divorce in 1930[51] Soon after, Henri remarried, to actress Constance Bennett. While still married to Henri, Swanson had an affair with the married Joseph P. Kennedy for a number of years. He became her business partner and their relationship was an open secret in Hollywood. He took over all of her personal and business affairs and was supposed to make her millions. Unfortunately, Kennedy left her after the disastrous Queen Kellyand her finances were in worse shape than when he came into her life. Two books have been written about the affair.[52]
After the marriage to Henri and her affair with Kennedy were over, Swanson married Michael Farmer (1902–1975) in August 1931. Because of the possibility that Swanson's divorce from La Falaise had not been final at the time of the wedding, she was forced to remarry Farmer the following November, by which time she was four months pregnant with Michelle Bridget Farmer, who was born in 1932. Swanson and Farmer divorced in 1934. After her divorce she was overheard to have said, "if I ever have any more children I would name them, Sami, Megan, Jason and Jacob." [53] This was in reference to her favorite book which mirrored her childhood. In 1945, Swanson married William N. Davey and according to her after discovering Davey in a drunken stupor, she and daughter Michelle, believing they were being helpful left a trail of Alcoholics Anonymous literature around the apartment. Davey quickly packed up and left.[54] Swanson-Davy divorce was finalized in 1946.[55] For the next thirty years Swanson would remain unmarried and able to pursue her own interests. She joined the ranks of celebrities to have been stalked and in the early 1950s was pursued by a World War IIveteran, Samuel Golden, who claimed the two were destined to be married and would give her 2/3 of his children as well as divulge secrets about the Navy's computer systems if she would run away with him. Recent declassified FBI documents disclose J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with seeing Golden tried for treason, but Golden dropped out of sight, apparently in the Greater Boston area.[citation needed]
Swanson's final marriage occurred in 1976 and lasted until her death. Her sixth husband and widower, writer William Dufty(1916–2002), was the co-author of Billie Holiday's autobiography Lady Sings the Blues, the author of Sugar Blues, a 1975 best-selling health book still in print, and the author of the English version of Georges Ohsawa's You Are All Sanpaku.
Dufty was a book ghost-writer and newspaperman, working for many years at the New York Post, where he was assistant to the editor from 1951 to 1960. He first met Swanson in 1965 and by 1967 the two were living together as a couple. Swanson shared her husband's deep enthusiasm for macrobiotic diets and they traveled widely together to speak about sugar and food. They promoted his book Sugar Blues together in 1975 and also wrote a syndicated column together.[56] It was through Sugar Blues that Dufty and Swanson first got to know John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Swanson testified on his behalf at his immigration hearing in New York to become permanent resident, which he eventually became.[57] Dufty ghost-wrote Swanson's best-selling 1980 autobiography, Swanson on Swanson for her and with her help. They were prominent socialites having many homes living in many places, including New York City, Rome, Portugal, and Palm Springs, California. After Swanson's death Dufty returned to his former home in Birmingham, Michigan. He died of cancer in 2002.[58]
Death[edit]
Shortly after returning to New York from her home in Portugal, on April 4, 1983, Swanson died in New York City in New York Hospital from a heart ailment, aged 84.[59][60] She was cremated and her ashes interred at the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue, in New York City, attended by only a small circle of family.[61]
After Swanson's death, there were a series of auctions from August to September 1983 at William Doyle Galleries in New York of the star's furniture and decorations, jewelry, fashion collection, career and personal memorabilia.
