Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  Without a doubt, DeMille's films launched Swanson as “a sophisticated clotheshorse,” who reveled in wearing the best that money could buy, but this reveals little about why Swanson, as opposed to any other well-dressed actress, emerged as a singular personality: the “screen's first real glamour queen.”32 Understanding what these films meant to fans demands a fuller sense of what made their stars both attractive and controversial. “She looked like she knew what life was all about, and in those days that was a sin for which you could be burned as a witch,” one contemporary remembered in describing the effect created by Swanson's performance in Why Change Your Wife? (1920). Indeed, Swanson's success as a new kind of sexually sophisticated glamour queen circumvented Lasky's intention to use the films as a cost-cutting measure to subvert the star system. Although Lasky publicized the pictures as “ALL-STAR” productions, he gave no actor above-the-title billing, hoping to attract the public without conceding the privileges such a designation entailed.33 Yet Swanson quickly emerged as a star. “We do not hesitate to proclaim Gloria Swanson one of the distinct acquisitions of the silent play, not only pictorially, but dramatically,” declared Motion Picture Magazine after Don't Change Your Husband appeared (1919).34

  Swanson's image set new trends by wrapping her adult sensuality in a cosmopolitan, non-Anglo package. The first to forgo the rage for tiny Cupid's bow lips, she “emphasized the generous outline” of her mouth and wore “her straight dark hair” around “her head, turban fashion, while nary a feminine curl dangled on her forehead to disturb the chiseled contours of her face.” As comfortable in Parisian couture as an “Oriental headdress,” she made fashion choices that associated her with the famed sensuality of both the French and the “Far East.” Her image communicated what the best-selling English writer Elinor Glyn called a “sultry glamour,” suggesting “a new kind of woman altogether—daring, provocative, sensuous.”35 Glyn and Marion believed her adult image explained why she became the first star to parade her motherhood, bringing babies “into vogue.”36 Swanson “didn't just represent glamour” she “invented it,” recalled Colleen Moore, poised to become the definitive flapper of the 1920s. In the process, Swanson created what the journalist Adela Rogers St. Johns called “the all-time prototype image of A Movie Star.”37

  FIGURE 17. “Not entirely occidental” glamour queen Gloria Swanson on the cover of the Spanish fan magazine El Universal. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  In establishing glamour as essential to the prototype of the postwar movie star, Swanson deployed a quality that historian Peter Bailey calls “a distinctively modern visual property.” Glamour helped to account for how consumer capitalism disseminated and normalized new gender norms regarding sexuality. Glamorous strategies marketed a “middle ground of sexuality,” in Bailey's words. As an “open yet licit” form of eroticism, glamour was “deployed but contained, carefully channeled rather than fully discharged.”38 The approach helped to explain why images of female bodies proliferated so rapidly in the period, becoming an acceptable if contested feature of modern public life. Swanson's star image displayed another important aspect of glamour: its promise that women's sexuality might act as a natural, positive part of her personality. Synonymous with neither beauty nor sex, glamour's provenance lay in poetry, in an allure fashioned from mystery, magic, and contrivance that might transform bearer and beholder alike.39 Never considered a great beauty in her day, Swanson's famed “ability to wear clothes” indicated glamour's creation through the expert manipulation of externals that changed an ordinary-looking woman into a magnetic force. To this façade, Swanson added a manner characterized as “gracious though cool,” “indifferent to the critical glances of women, the flattering attention of men.”40 Distance—in Swanson's case, both the objective absence created by her mechanically reproduced image and the subjective remove fashioned by her aloof persona—was central to the exercise of glamour. Swanson's sexuality did not render her a victim, forced to submit to another's desire. Distance allowed Swanson to enhance the promise of erotic possibility while simultaneously controlling and elevating her status, as not so much an erotic object as a glamorous subject who bestowed value on her beholder. “You walked the entire length of that long room. Looking straight ahead of you, you never once turned to look back or to retrace your steps,” a fan who worked briefly with Swanson during the 1910s remembered, suggesting the impression the star's self-confidence left many years later. The poem another fan wrote to her suggests the hope this image gave, “You brought the screen much more than glamour, you brought the dreams a woman dreams! When I read about you / There were holes in my / Stockings / I tried to embroider / And a narrow, gold ring was in hock / But I forgot about it / When I spent my last fifty five cents / Before pay day / To see you on the screen!”41

  In the early twentieth century, women pioneered industries built on glamour, including cosmetics, fashion, interior design, and early Hollywood. Stereotypes that designated, and often trivialized, the expertise and interests associated with these businesses as feminine facilitated women's professional roles within them even as they restricted their chances in so-called masculine ones elsewhere. A valuable commodity in consumer culture, glamour sold many of the “expressive goods” that fueled the dramatic expansion of the nation's economy between 1900 and 1930.42 The amount spent on movies, records, clothes, cosmetics, and home decor accounted for the largest increase in spending: 800 percent in the decade between 1914 and 1924. Such goods shared a connection to considerations of what designer Elsie deWolfe called questions of “aesthetic tastes.”43 A former stage actress turned America’s first celebrity interior designer, deWolfe’s smash-hit book, The House in Good Taste (1915), inspired women to trade the somber clutter of Victorian homes for a “modern house” filled with sunshine and chintz. More important, deWolfe taught women the importance of making their environments reflect the individual “personality of the mistress.” Aesthetic or expressive goods mobilized in pursuit of glamour promised to confirm a certain idea of the purchaser to herself: this was a woman capable of creative expression, who valued her fantasies and desires. The women who deployed glamour used it to pursue more financially rewarding, exciting jobs, as well as more independent, free-spirited lives. “While men still shaped the world, it was the women who shaped the style in which we live,” deWolfe asserted, suggesting how the glamorous strategies associated with consumer capitalism reflected the possibilities and limitations of the day.44

  Swanson’s rise displayed how glamour offered some women the means to escape the restrictions they faced in a society in which men’s dominance was still pervasive. Swanson recalled how “the world of 1916,” the year she left her hometown of Chicago for Los Angeles, was not just “a man’s world” but also a “business run entirely by men.” After signing on as a featured player with Mack Sennett, the king of slapstick comedy, she quickly feared “succeeding too well.” According to Swanson, an actress at Sennett’s Keystone studio could do little but play a “dumb little cutie serving as a foil to the broadest slapstick comedians in the world,” by “having her skirts lifted and dodging flying bricks.”45 So Swanson quit Keystone, shortly after quitting her first, miserable marriage in 1917. Sad and unemployed, she later claimed that she put “every cent” in her purse and set off for “the new Los Angeles department stores” where she purchased a “bottle-green suit with a squirrel collar” and a “perfect fit.” The suit seemed in a minute to wipe out the last six months of my life.” Indeed, she credited the bottle-green suit with another magical act: landing her a part in the society melodrama You Can’t Believe Everything (1917), which garnered the actress her first featured piece in Photoplay, “Gloria Glorified.”46 “Swanson graduated from light comedy to drama,” the article proclaimed, displaying her accurate evaluation of how dramas offered women more stature than comedies. It is impossible to know whether Swanson’s tale is apocryphal, but certainly any good actress knew the difference the right cost
ume could make. And taking refuge in a department store, a place designed a century earlier as a paradise for women, became a standard practice in Swanson’s films for escaping frustrations associated with living in a “man’s world.”

  FIGURE 18. “An Actress . . . what Everywoman would like to be.” Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  The personal power of a glamorous woman that Swanson encountered early in her career suggested how such an image promised fans that a woman made of equal parts style and authority could master any situation. Shortly after the release of You Can’t Believe Everything, Swanson met Clara Kimball Young, one of the first actresses to create her own production company. Young’s authority over every detail of her life amazed Swanson. “In what other business,” she wondered, “could this delightful elegant creature be completely independent,” not just “turning out her own pictures” but “dealing with men as her equals, being able to use her brains as well as her beauty, having total say as to what stories she played in, who designed her clothes, and who her director and leading man would be.”47 Ultimately, glamour required a quality that fan culture repeatedly emphasized that the real Swanson possessed in spades: courage.48 Swanson’s whole career began with “a dare” that “aroused her fighting blood,” an article explained to fans; “I wanted to see if it was possible . . . if these others had something I didn’t have.” “She has Courage,” the writer Elinor Glyn declared; “she knows no fear! Imagine what it meant to go down in that den among the lions,” Glyn continued, alluding to Swanson’s performance in Male and Female (1919). The film featured her character’s transformation after a shipwreck from an English lady to a scantily clad, Artemis-like huntress who, quite literally, lies down with the lions, proving her the naturally superior woman among the castaways. Swanson also demonstrated courage by advertising her controversial positions on hot topics of the day. “I not only believe in divorce. I sometimes think I don’t believe in marriage at all,” she announced in Motion Picture.49 Swanson’s star persona emphasized that a glamorous woman needed the confidence to turn heads and a willingness to put up a fight. As one critic put it, “Gloria bobs and rouges and lingeries [sic], yet always defeats the villain’s ends—even if he supplied her with the rouge and the lingerie.”50 Such qualities explained why “An Actress,” could claim, “Woman folk like this actress and say so emphatically. She is what Everywoman would like to be when she abandons herself to moments of wild and secret thought.”

  II

  Jesse Lasky also wooed a cadre of famous writers, including the English author Elinor Glyn, to add new glamour to Paramount after the war.51 In bringing Glyn over in 1920 to script and supervise Swanson’s first starring vehicle, The Great Moment (1920), Lasky admitted that Glyn’s appeal partially derived from the fifty-six-year-old writer’s expertise with publicity. According to Lasky, Glyn was already “as adept as Salvador Dali at drawing attention to herself” when she arrived. By comparing Glyn to the great Spanish painter of the surrealist avant-garde, Lasky referred to her skill at drawing upon the engrained cultural superiority of Europeans in the American mind to justify her creation of unconventional romances. More than any other individual in early Hollywood, Glyn taught industry insiders and fans how the romantic ethic of artists demanded, and excused, their franker explorations of sexual desire.52 The discussions she initiated about “love” (read: sex) and marriage in celebrity culture also offered a means for the industry’s female personalities to express their desire for relationships that satisfied them erotically and supported them professionally. In the process, early Hollywood’s fan culture described and discussed many of the practices and ideals later associated with companionate marriage and sexual liberalism. Critics charged that the promotion of new sexual norms and marital bonds by glamorous women were “nastifying [sic]” sex and encouraging women to follow their passions wherever they might lead.53 In this way, early Hollywood sparked much of the heat that fueled the twentieth century’s revolution in sexual behavior and attitudes.

  Glyn learned to use the glamour of continental artistry as a shield for sex-talk after the publication of her sixth novel, Three Weeks (1907). She later held “the limitations and deprivations of my married life” accountable for her turn to writing the kind of passionately erotic melodramas that Hollywood’s female fans later devoured. A notable, red-haired beauty, necessity drove Glyn into a misalliance with a country gentleman at twenty-seven. The older, good-humored husband preferred drink, hunting, and the company of other men; the romantic younger wife liked art, conversation, fashionable city life, and travel along the British Empire’s edges. Although the marriage and her fashion flair provided Glyn the social entrée she sought, “her romantic temperament craved for a lover.”54 The lifelong diarist turned to her pen when bankruptcy threatened the spendthrift couple and their two daughters. Published when Glyn was forty-two, Three Weeks was a departure from her previous novels of manners. The book expressed what the author called her “fierce rebellion” inside, as “the syren [sic]” within vented “itself in the passionate writings. . . . My imagination was roused not by possession and its joys, but by a longing for them.” The book told the tale of an older woman’s creation of the perfect male lover. The heroine, an “intensely soignée” and unhappily married Slavic noblewoman called only “Lady,” plays Pygmalion to “a great, big, beautiful baby,” an aristocratic English youth named Paul.55 With only a three-week vacation to create her ideal lover, Lady gives Paul a crash course in the senses, teaching him to reject his “English conventionalities” and learn how to love. “Love is tangible—it means to be close—close—to be clasped—to be touching—to be One!” Properly performed, love requires full commitment to a partner’s delight and fantastic attention to details like tiger-skin rugs for lounging, and elicits a woman’s complete surrender. After much teaching of technique, Lady orchestrates “their wedding night” in a setting “fit for the Favorite in a harem.” “By foolish laws we are sinning,” she reminds her besotted lover afterward, “and you would be more nobly employed yawning with some bony English miss for your wife—and I by the side of a mad drunken husband.” Rejecting the custom that “a moral woman” must remain “the faithful beast of burden to one man,” Lady proposes another code instead: “to live a life with one’s own love.”56

  FIGURE 19. Elinor Glyn with protégé Gloria Swanson, in a Tokyo fan magazine. Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

  Although Glyn called herself “the first writer to dare openly to glorify the joys of earthy love,” she was actually one of the first female writers to suggest that men had much to learn from women about satisfying sex. The idea struck a nerve and the book became an international, scandalous hit that stalled the self-described “social pioneer’s” climb in England. The stance of both the author and her heroine violated a century of Anglo-American conventions about sexuality that taught “the girl repression, the boy expression.” “These lessons,” in the words of a well-known Victorian doctor, were learned “not simply by word and book, but . . . graven into their very being by all the traditions, prejudices, and customs of society.”57 Most of the press pilloried Glyn, blaming her (presumed) female readers for the “Scarlet-crested Elinor Glyn wave” of writers who imitated her success. This “Fleshy School of Fiction” was “naturalizing” continental attitudes toward sexuality, British critics charged.58 By preferring the “garbage spread out in the sun by imitators of the erotic, absinthe-drenched, nerve-racked decadents who swarm about Paris cafes,” “readers—chiefly women—who make the fortune of English fiction” endangered “the splendidly wise and tender-hearted tradition of Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray.” “Why is it that when women writers of the modern school deal with passion, they succeed only in ‘nastifying it?’ ” wondered an American literary critic who considered Glyn the most shocking example of the trend. Scandalized by women’s interest in this openly sexual material, critics protested that she cynically “gl
amoured over” women’s base desires with the “holiness of love.”59

  But Glyn’s status as a best-selling author offered a new means to advance, as she seized the “role of ‘Elinor Glyn the famous authoress’ ” and “pioneer in the cause of feminine emancipation” who sought “to free the souls and bodies of women from the heavy age-old trammels of custom and convention.”60 Thus Glyn perfected the part of a glamorous, cosmopolitan authoress who aimed to teach women how to recognize, and enjoy, sensuality. The approach allowed Glyn to hone the strategies that would sell early Hollywood’s more erotically daring melodramas and stars after the war.61 After Three Week’s publication, Glyn quickly learned that more than love was necessary to justify women’s interest in “love.” On the Atlantic crossing, headed for her first publicity tour in the United States, an American “dollar princess” schooled the writer about the image that would best impress her compatriots.62 The reporters who met Glyn when she disembarked in New York encountered “Madame Glyn”—the “title” she insisted on for the rest of her career. Dressed much like her protagonist in Three Weeks, she appeared as part exotic, purple-gowned seductress, part aristocrat of devastating refinement who claimed the status of a continental artist. This performance mediated the reception of her unconventional views and likely increased her sales. “Her main complaint about America is that life here lacks the color and tone that effloresces in ‘Three Weeks,’ ” explained one journalist, agreeing that American life was “emotionally drab and lacking in the esthetic values that are the gift of the continental temperament.”63