She was an army brat, born in Chicago, but spent most of her life in Puerto Rico and the Florida Keys. (Note: Not the official name of the center, but when an archive has Scarlett O’Hara’s dresses, that’s what you’re wont to call it.) All your notes, telegraphs, thank you cards, scripts, and contracts become the “Gloria Swanson Collection,” housed, conveniently for me during my Ph.D., at the Harry Ransom Center for Awesome Older Stuff. When Gloria Swanson passes away, as she did in 1983 at the age of 84, then they go to an archive. When grandmothers pass away, the stuff goes to Goodwill or an estate sale or your basement. I also know a ton about her because she, like so many of our grandmothers, was a notorious packrat. She designed a dress line for middle-aged ladies in the 1950s using “glamour sizes” (read: size 12 and up) and made millions. She bought and sold patents, ran her own household, and supported various husbands.
Swanson become synonymous with Norma Desmond, her character in that film, but she was much, much more - one of the first women to start her own production company, the first star to publicly become a “mother” in Hollywood, and a serious pioneer of the organic food movement. Which is part of the reason she’s so unfathomably good in Sunset Boulevard, but we’ll get there soon enough.
And when Hollywood began to change the way it made and distributed films in the late ’20s, she was one of dozens destined to remain a relic of an earlier time. She was of a different set of stars - a different breed than Garbo, Dietrich, and other classic idols - that truly lived like demi-gods.
Swanson wasn’t evil, and she probably wasn’t even a bitch, but she just knew how to run that game. And for a period in the 1920s, she was the biggest star in the world.
She was 4’11,” wore a 2 ½ in shoes, and had a waist approximately the size of my neck. She wasn’t “just like us.” She didn’t take out the garbage or “wear cotton” or go to the bathroom. Gloria Swanson wasn’t here to make friends.