Film Career
Swanson continued to make two reelers for Essanay and it was there that she met Wallace Beery, who would become her first husband and persuade her to move to Hollywood.
Gloria found filmmaking in Hollywood to be more rewarding than it had been in Chicago and she began to take a keen interest in acting as a career. She gained modest success when Mack Sennett teamed her with Bobby Vernon in a series of films together. Gloria longed to do serious dramas, however, and she came to despise the Sennett comedies and felt that they were tasteless. Her chance to escape Sennett came when the Keystone Studios went bankrupt. Although Sennett wanted to retain Swanson and turn her into a second Mabel Normand, Swanson balked and Sennett tore up her contract.
Following her fallout with Sennett, Swanson migrated to Triangle Studios. The executives decided at the very beginning to build Swanson up to star status. They gave the best production values thatthey could for her first Triangle film, You Can't Believe Everything and Gloria clicked with director Jack Conway. Things eventually did not turn out like she thought they would. Conway left Triangle because of creative differences and Swanson found that her scripts kept getting worse with each new project. Soon it seemed that most of her features were spy melodramas such as Secret Code. After eight mediocre films with Triangle, Swanson was released from her contract because the studio was facing bankruptcy.
De Mille filmLuckily for Swanson, one of the greatest Hollywood directors had his eye on her. Cecil B. De Mille, master of the bedroom drama, had noticed Swanson's potential years earlier in a Mack Sennett comedy. Beginning with "Don't Change Your Husband", De Mille transformed Swanson into a glamorous clothes horse who became the envy of women all across America. De Mille's films were expensively mounted soap operas in which his heroines were draped in outlandish costumes and jewelry and indulged themselves in queenly bathing rituals. Also typical would be a sequence in which the characters would be portrayed in another era, thus giving the opportunity for even more elaborate costumes. Swanson made six films with De Mille and it was a very happy and satisfying time in her career.
De Mille's films catapulted Swanson into superstar status. Her every move was followed and reported by fan magazines. They expected to see her dressed to the hilt in the latest fashions and Swanson never disappointed them. Her producers soon learned (after her drab attire in Under The Lash) that she must wear lavish clothes in her films or her films would not be successful. In her private life, she bought a fabulous mansion and lived like a queen.
With Rudolph Valentino in one of her greatest hits, Beyond The Rocks
Swanson was the queen of Paramount Studios and her ilms were getting better and better. She was paired opposite Rudolph Valentino in Beyond The Rocks which was very successful. She also met director Allan Dwan and made some of her best silent films with him (like Manhandled). These films gave her enough clout to work with Dwan in New York at the Astoria Studios where the atmosphere was more productive to her.
In late 1924, Swanson obtained the rights to a French play called Madame Sans Gene and remarkably for the time, she also received permission to film in France. It was during the filming that she met her third husband, the Marquis Henri de la Falaise de Coudraye. Her return to American with her new husband was no less than sensational with thousands of cheering fans lining the streets. Swanson and her Marquis made a cross country train trip to Hollywood from New York and every stop was heralded as a major publicity coup.
Her career with Paramount continued to flourish but she was soon tempted with an opportunity to produce her own films and have them released through United Artists. Many of Hollywood's greatest actors at the time, such as Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, were doing this with great success. Swanson was attracted to the idea of only making one or two films per year as well as having total creative control over them. So, despite a huge pay raise promise from Paramount, Swanson chose to go out on her own.
As Sadie Thompson
She chose to remake a 1919 Clara Kimball Young film, Eyes of Youth (retitled The Love of Sunya) for her first independent production. She was soon cursing herself, however, for turning down a tremendous salary along with the security of a studio to deal with the hassles and the headaches of producing. The Love of Sunya was not a financial success.
Her second production, Sadie Thompson, fared much better but she had an uphill battle with the Hays Office regarding censorship problems. The film paid off in the end with Swanson garnering her first Academy Award nomination.
In 1928, Swanson, with her lover Joe Kennedy (father of John F. Kennedy), teamed with Erich Von Stroheim for Queen Kelly, a project that would never be completed. Von Stroheim's excesses in filmmaking were legendary in Hollywood but he had many masterpieces to his credit, among them Greed (1924). His meticulous attention to detail and endless retakes put the production way behind schedule and Swanson herself finally halted the production. Decades later, the unfinished film was botched together with production stills and photographs and declared a masterpiece by film critics.
Swanson was not one to be done in by one bad experience and she immediately began work on her first sound film called The Trespasser. It was a great success and audiences were happy to hear that Gloria could not only talk but sing as well. She secured a contract with MGM but unfortunately her follow up films did not fare as well as The Trespasser. Her decade of splendor had ended with the depression era audiences and her films were simply out of sync with the public. After the failure of Music In The Air in 1934, she went into semi-retirement.
A comeback attempt was made in 1941 when she was offered a comedy called Father Takes A Wife. It was not a success but Gloria Swanson's film career was not over just yet.
Swanson reunited with Cecil B. De Mille in
Sunset Boulevard
Almost ten years following her last film, Swanson would make the most memorable comeback in film history. The role of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard had been turned down by Mae West but Gloria snatched it up. Her portrayal of a faded silent screen film star who imagines a glorious comeback was inevitably compared with Swanson herself, but it was to be a portrayal that would be forever remembered by film audiences.
Despite giving one of the greatest performances in film history, Swanson's film career did not progress much further. A forgettable comedy, Three For Bedroom C, followed Sunset Boulevard but failed at the box office. An Italian film, Nero's Mistresses, was made three years later but was so bad that it was not released to American audiences until seven years later. Swanson did not return to the screen until the 1970's when she made a memorable television film called Killer Bees and played herself in the disaster epic Airport 75.
