Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up

3. Triangle

36 C H a p t e r 3 Triangle if gloria swanson ever serioUsly Considered leaving movies, her budding fame decided the question: she liked being famous. However , she wanted to make serious pictures. Everyone told her this was unlikely: “In those days, once you were a villain with a black moustache you were branded. Once you played butlers you played butlers for the rest of your life.”1 Swanson determined that her best chance was to approach a studio with both a comedy troupe and a dramatic section; at least she would be nearer to her ambition. Garbed in a bottle-green suit with a squirrel collar for which she had plunked down the last of her Keystone cash, Swanson took the trolley out to Culver City. Triangle had survived the departure of its three founding directors, and film production was humming along.2 Clarence Badger had landed at Triangle, and he immediately offered Gloria a part in his current short comedy. But she was after bigger things—preferably features—and more challenging work than the one-reelers Badger was in a position to provide. To her surprise, her background in comedy led Jack Conway, a Triangle director with ten years’ experience, to offer Swanson the lead in his new feature. He had seen her in The฀Danger฀Girl, he said, and needed just such a spitfire for You฀Can’t฀Believe฀Everything, an action-oriented drama about honor and self-sacrifice. A feisty young woman, Patria, literally fights off unwanted suitors, and is later falsely accused of spending the night with one. She cannot clear her name without betraying the confidence of her crippled friend Jim, whose long illness has left him so despondent that he attempts suicide. Patria’s courageous effort to rescue Jim meant that Swanson—a non-swimmer who was terrified of the water—would have to dive into deep water one dark night to save her costar. The stunt gave Swanson a chance to look good while she behaved heroically. Patria would see her friend go into the water, then rip off her t r i a n g l e 37 evening dress. Under it she would be wearing only a skimpy chemise known as a “teddy bare.” Determined to make a success of her first feature, Gloria was reluctant to tell Conway she was afraid. The suave director’s energetic competence made her want to rise to the occasion— or at least to the surface. So Swanson visited the local YWCA for swimming lessons, then stared at the people splashing about before bolting for home. When the time came, the oily water off the Wilmington docks in San Pedro, where the government was building warships by day, did not calm her fears. Nor did the lack of electric lighting: the scene was illuminated only by flares. A fifteen-foot jump off a dock in the black of night might make for fabulous lighting opportunities, but the young actress needed all her courage to leap off what felt like the edge of the world. Gloria “raced onto the dock as though . . . shot out of a cannon.”3 Finally, she came sputtering up from the depths. Dog paddling frenetically, she clambered into a waiting boat and was quickly bundled into a blanket against the chilly night air. She had passed her first real acting test. She had also developed a serious crush on her director, a married man. Jack Conway, like Gloria, was a high school dropout, but she found him “refined, sensitive, intelligent, and generous . . . he was amusing and unaffected and attractive besides.”4 Though others called Conway “aggressively heterosexual,” Swanson claimed he refused her overtures, unwilling to mix business with romance.5 However, he used her attraction to him to elicit her increasingly skillful performances. Feature films required different techniques than the shorts to which Gloria was accustomed, and since Conway had come to directing from acting, he understood the other side of the camera in a way many directors did not. With his guidance Gloria learned how to modulate her performance for closer shots and how to sustain an emotion throughout a sequence. He also taught her to time her spoken lines so the intertitles used in silent pictures would not break the flow of her performance. Many images were cut in half by the titles, she explained: “You had to convey everything in the first few words of a line and still have something left for the end. You...