Gloria Swanson

A biography of “The Queen of Hollywood” and her decades of successes and comebacks in film, art, fashion, and journalism

Most people remember Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, the mad silent-film queen in Sunset Boulevard who hungered for her return to the spotlight. Though she had one of Hollywood’s most famous exit lines—“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close up”—the real Gloria Swanson never looked back. She had many lives, from film star to pioneer in television, fashion, and theater. A passionate and feisty woman who took lovers and husbands at whim, she refused to answer to anyone for her choices or to apologize for her ambition.

Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up shows how a talented, self-confident actress negotiated a creative path through seven decades of celebrity. It also illuminates a little-known chapter in American media history: how the powerful women of early Hollywood transformed their remarkable careers after their stars dimmed. This book brings Swanson back into the spotlight, revealing her as a complex, creative, entrepreneurial, and thoroughly modern woman.

Swanson cavorted in slapstick short films with Charlie Chaplin and Mack Sennett in the 1910s. The popularity of her films with Cecil B. DeMille helped create the star system. A glamour icon, Swanson became the most talked-about star in Hollywood, earning three Academy Award nominations, receiving 10,000 fan letters every week, and living up to a reputation as Queen of Hollywood. She bought mansions and penthouses, dressed in fur and feathers, and flitted through Paris, London, and New York leaving passionate love affairs making headlines and causing scandals.

Frustrated with the studio system, Swanson turned down a million-dollar-a-year contract. After a wild ride making unforgettable movies with some of Hollywood’s most colorful characters—including her lover Joseph Kennedy and maverick director Erich von Stroheim—she was a million dollars in debt. Without hesitation she went looking for her next challenge, beginning her long second act.

Swanson became a talented businesswoman who patented inventions and won fashion awards for her clothing designs; a natural foods activist decades before it was fashionable, an exhibited sculptor; and a designer employed by the United Nations. All the while she continued to act in films, theater; and television at home and abroad. This full-length portrait of Gloria Swanson tells a mesmerizing story: how an unpolished girl from Chicago, who started in movies as a slapstick extra, became and remained one of the most famous women of the last century, modeling the way of the future for women in media.

Tricia Welsch, Brunswick, Maine, is associate professor on the Marvin H. Green, Jr. Fund and chair of the film studies program at Bowdoin College. Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film Quarterly, Film Criticism, the Journal of Film and Video, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Griffithiana, and Genre.

352 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, 70 b&w photographs, filmography, bibliography, index