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Gloria Swanson (1899): Sunset Boulevard
- University of Wisconsin Press
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43 Gloria Swanson Sunset Boulevard Edward Field Igrew up during the era when the movie studios built up their movie stars into gods and goddesses—but especially, for me, the goddesses, figures like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth , Ava Gardner, Ingrid Bergman, Greta Garbo, and of course, Judy—a pantheon that dominated the fantasy lives of the whole country. The plots of their movies were inextricably part of the legends of these ladies, as well as their social and love lives, including their marriages, most of which were largely invented for them by the studios’ publicity departments. It was a world of supreme fiction that engaged the imagination totally. 44 As a child, I wasn’t allowed to go to the movies, and still I was captivated. My friends and I endlessly played the game of giving each other initials and we had to guess the names of movie stars. Of course, as soon as I got a paper route and earned some money, I haunted the movies, where the sexual possibilities in the darkness became an equal attraction. It’s all mixed together in my mind. And in my book of movie poems, Variety Photoplays, I recreated memorable movies in the form they became in our subconscious minds—American legends. The movie goddess with her grandiose fantasies was epitomized for me in Sunset Boulevard (1950), which brought out of retirement the very much out-of-this-world actress Gloria Swanson, star of the ’20s, the “real life” embodiment of the heroine of the movie, who, when she said, “We didn’t need voices, we had faces,” was perfectly believable. If this was acting, it was like a time machine had restored to life a historic, even mummified, actress to the screen. I had barely been aware of her. Perhaps I’d heard her name as just another silent movie star of yesteryear. It was as if she emerged from the remote past where she’d been relegated to an L.A. bungalow colony and card games with old cronies, waiting for the call from the studios. In an age of naturalistic action with Marlon Brando and The Method, her style of acting was tinged with silent movie exaggeration—I knew it well from silent films at the Museum of Modern Art where the audience sometimes broke the worshipful atmosphere and laughed—which made Gloria Swanson, in her comeback movie Sunset Boulevard, an absolutely believable heroine. But still she made me uncomfortable, at first, with her mannerisms, her affectations. After she made this comeback, I saw her on a TV talk show where she behaved in the same unreal manner, with that affected voice, discussing her obsession with health food to stay young, and when a handsome young actor joined the panel, she ran her forefinger around his manly jaw in admiration, and you could see her as the man eater she probably was—she’d gobble him up in a Glor ia Swanson [35.175.212.5] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:33 GMT) 45 minute! A true sign of the diva! I was certain that all through the years of neglect, she’d watched her own movies over and over again and had completely identified with her performances on screen. So Sunset Boulevard was perfect typecasting. A poem I wrote called “Whatever Happened to May Caspar?” is about a similar over-the-hill movie star, who lived in a shabby hotel off Times Square, living out her leftover tawdry life after the public had turned away from her and the studios dropped her, which robbed her of her glamour, for her magic depended on the worship of the fans, just as gods lose their power when the worshipers no longer believe in them. But in the case of stars, if they fall out of sight, there is always the possible miracle of the “comeback .” May Caspar, in my poem, is rediscovered, as Gloria Swanson was in real life, but for May it was too late—too late for the miracle of plastic surgery and pills to restore her to the perfection the camera demands. And when a close-up is called for, with the merciless camera thrust in her face, she collapses. In a later poem of mine, “Comeback,” the Gloria Swanson figure I call Connie is closely based on Sunset Boulevard, but I simply leave out the William Holden character, the hustler stud, as peripheral to the greater drama of the plot...