Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [31]
Gloria Swanson possessed none of Talmadge’s reticence or Pickford’s innocence: she was hungry for fame and all the delights success would bring her. Her big break came in 1919 when Cecil B. deMille cast her as his heroine in Don’t Change Your Husband. Soon afterwards, the twenty-year-old Gloria gave an interview to Motion Picture Magazine, cementing her image as a modern sophisticate. “I not only believe in divorce, but I sometimes think I don’t believe in marriage at all,” she declared, and would prove her sincerity by going on to divorce five husbands. In 1923, fearing scandal would affect her popularity, Paramount forced Swanson to settle her second divorce out of court because her estranged husband was accusing her of committing adultery with fourteen men. Her popularity was unaffected, or perhaps enhanced, by these allegations. In the same year, she was receiving ten thousand fan letters a week.
Glamour and extravagance were essential parts of her persona. On screen, Swanson was usually shown in magnificent gowns, often with trains, wearing turbans or feathered headdresses, draped in fur and jewelry. She deliberately cultivated her image as a magnetic, mysterious star. In her hands a cigarette holder became the most dramatic of accessories. As deMille said, “She knew how to lean against a door.”
Mary Pickford may have been the first woman to have made a million in Hollywood, but (so the saying went) Gloria Swanson was the first to spend it. Photoplay reported that her annual expenditure in 1924 included nearly $10,000 on silk stockings, $6,000 on perfume, $50,000 on dresses . . . and an unspecified amount on jewels. “In those days they wanted us to live like kings and queens . . . so we did,” Swanson remembered. “And why not? We were in love with life. We were making more money than we ever dreamed existed, and there was no reason to believe that it would ever stop.”
Like Pickford, Swanson had ambitions as a businesswoman. If she was to be packaged as a commodity, she wanted to reap the rewards herself. In early 1928, having made a disastrous attempt to set up her own production company under the aegis of United Artists, her lover Joseph Kennedy helped her form Gloria Productions (still in association with United Artists). Kennedy was one of the major forces behind the transition to sound in movies. Swanson was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar (her second) for her role in the first talkie they produced together, The Trespasser, but the end of her affair with Kennedy and the financial strain of producing her own films took their toll on her career in the 1930s.
Swanson’s great rival in the femme fatale stakes was Pola Negri, billed by her studio as a “wildcat.” Negri adored the trappings of celebrity and played up to her image as an exotic bird of paradise whom men could not resist. Each day the floor of her dressing room was strewn with orchid petals. She wore only black or white, always with scarlet nails. Chinchilla was her fur of choice. She could often be seen on Sunset Boulevard taking her pet tiger for a walk, or being driven around flanked by two white wolfhounds. At the funeral of her lover, Rudolph Valentino, in 1926 Negri appeared heavily veiled and fainted several times over his coffin.
Like Swanson, Negri made a virtue out of being single. “I do not believe in marriage. It is not for me. I am selfish, no, not selfish, for I have sacrificed everything for love. I am independent. Freedom comes before anything. I am a gypsy . . .” This brand of intensely independent, highly sexualized glamour looked to many women like emancipation. With their gaze fixed on the immense profits to be made, Hollywood studio bosses were only too glad to sell women liberation and modernity for