Gloria and Joe: The Star-Crossed Love Affair of Gloria Swanson and Joe Kennedy

By Axel Madsen

The ultimate Hollywood story revealed: the sizzling relationship between Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of America’s most influential political family, and Gloria Swanson, one of the most prominent silent film stars of her day. Gloria and Joe were in love with each other and with the movies, especially Queen Kelly, which completed the real-life ménage à trois. Starring along with the star of the screen and the Boston Brahman in this exposé are Erich von Stroheim, Kennedy’s wife Rose, Swanson’s husband, and a cast of colorful hangers-on. Madsen recreates their love, scandal, and world, which in its extravagance and intrigue has never been surpassed.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 17, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504008556

Book preview

Part One

Chapter 1

The Savoy Plaza

Lady, lady, should you meet

One whose ways are all discreet,

One who murmurs that his wife

Is the lodestar of his life,

One who keeps assuring you

That he never was untrue,

Never loved another one.

Lady, lady, better run.

—DOROTHY PARKER

He was surprised at how tiny she was; she thought he didn’t look like a banker. She was amused by his Boston accent; he was shocked when she told him her five-year-old adopted son hadn’t been christened. She surprised him by ordering steamed string beans, braised celery, and zucchini; he ordered shrimp cocktail to start with, and told her he had three boys and four girls.

Gloria Swanson was staying at the elegant new Savoy Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue across from Central Park South. She was in New York this last week of November 1927 to show United Artists sales and distribution chiefs her daring screen adaptation of Somerset Maugham’s famous short story that ran on Broadway for eighteen sold-out months as Rain. She was convinced—and a sneak preview in California had confirmed her most optimistic expectations—that in this picture, starring Lionel Barrymore and herself, she had a hit. She was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, and lawsuits for the nonpayment of bills were piling up, but on the way into the Renaissance Room with her manila envelope under one arm, she had told the maître d’ to put the check on her bill. If the gentleman asked for it, the headwaiter should say the lunch was compliments of the management.

Joseph P. Kennedy mentioned a few familiar names. He had looked forward to meeting her. They mentioned the unusually mild weather, the fact that this was the only day they were both free, small worlds. They both knew First National Pictures’ Bob Kane, of course. At her time at Paramount, Robert Kane, Sidney Kent, and Sam Katz were known as the front office KKKs.

The maître d’ helped them get rid of the oversized menus. She was returning to Hollywood Saturday, she said.

People at nearby tables couldn’t take their eyes off her, he noticed. She lit up the room. At twenty-eight, she was the embodiment of the vivacious, secure, and intriguing woman. Her screen image of the new, sophisticated 1920s female, combined with her ambitious, aggressive, managerial nature, had made her the top box-office magnet. Thousands struggled for a glimpse of her at premieres; fans deluged her with 10,000 letters a week. Her flamboyant fashions and innovative hairstyles, even her chin mole, were copied by millions of women. Diminutive (she stood all of 5’ 1"), she was every inch and every moment the star. Over the long-distance telephone, Kane had asked him if he were free for lunch Thursday. She was looking for financing for her next film, and possibly for a tie-over loan.

She guessed her luncheon partner to be in his late thirties. He was broad-shouldered and athletic in his three-piece pinstripes. His freckled face and toothy smile were still boyish, and the horn-rimmed glasses gave him something of Harold Lloyd’s quizzical innocence. If she was on her guard, it was because the name Joseph P. Kennedy had figured among the industry chiefs who had condemned her for filming the Somerset Maugham story. On the phone, Kane had confirmed that Joe Kennedy was a distributor, but also that he was a banker and a consultant to several Wall Street investment houses just starting to get into motion pictures. Maybe he was ready to give Bank of America a little competition. Since you’re going to New York, I’ll give him a call. Bob Kane had also told her to relax. Everyone producing pictures was in debt. The money always came in eventually.

My wife and children were impressed when I told them who I was having lunch with, he said, smiling. He looked across at the face that conformed to no known specifications of beauty but photographed successfully from any angle—the chiseled chin, dished nose, and curious almond-shaped eyes (blue as splinters of heaven, a fan magazine effused) that somehow blended into a bizarre loveliness. She had an elfin quality and a vivid, lively magnetism that was so arresting that nobody had much to say in her presence. Her daughter’s name was also Gloria, he noted. What was her little boy’s name?

Joseph, after my late father. Both Gloria and I have called him Brother for so long the poor boy thinks it’s his real name.

He told her his eldest son was named Joseph, too, after him. He couldn’t help noticing how the rest of the luncheon guests watched them—watched her—and pretended not to hear what they were saying.

She handed him the contents of her folder and thought he looked relieved to have something to study. At Bob Kane’s suggestion, she explained, she had had her accountant prepare a memorandum outlining proposals by United Artists and Bank of America for financing Rockabye, her next film. She would be grateful if he would tell her which offer seemed the better, and if he had an alternative proposal of his own.

Behind the movie star’s dark, husky voice, determined chin, and regal sparkle, he guessed at a chaotic existence, days tied up in knots with her press agent, script manager, production chief, wardrobe designer, secretaries, maids, and bill collectors. Even though she was going to release Rain under the title Sadie Thompson, she was playing with dynamite. The Maugham story about a puritanical South Seas missionary who tries to reform a prostitute only to fall prey to her spunky charms was the property every studio had itched to do and every actress with a brain and a figure had dreamed of doing. The two-year-old decency code, however, automatically banned story material that ridiculed the clergy, and it warned producers to be extra careful when depicting women selling their virtue.

He asked about the people running her company, about her accountant.

Irving Wakoff, she said.

He didn’t know the accountant to the stars. Scanning the papers, he said nobody in Hollywood knew how to draw up a balance sheet that answered bankers’ questions. Certainly nobody knew how to depreciate, to amortize, to capitalize—the very things that in any other business spelled the difference between success and failure.

He didn’t tell her Kane had suggested that he look into her affairs with the view of perhaps taking over Gloria Swanson Productions, that she was now prepared to place herself in proper hands and star in pictures instead of trying to be a businesswoman. When he asked about her overseas grosses, she grimaced.

Gloria had her own office in Paris because Paramount distributed her films there, and she didn’t trust their figures or their advertising. If Henri, her husband, was in France right now, it was to try and make sure The Love of Sunya got booked into the right cinemas. Here, the press had called it a fragile little fantasy of sweetness. Joseph Schenck, the head of United Artists, had said it wasn’t exactly dynamite, and Wakoff felt that only foreign revenues could make it break even. The notices were much better in Europe.

The Love of Sunya had inaugurated the Roxy eight months earlier. The biggest night in movie history, the newspapers had called the premiere. U.S. senators and generals; the governor of New Jersey; Mayor Jimmy Walker; the czar of the Motion Picture Producers association, Will Hays; Irving Berlin; the Shuberts; the Harold Lloyds; Schenck and his wife, Norma Talmadge; Adolph Ochs; and Mrs. Otto Kahn attended. The crowd almost broke down the doors when Charlie Chaplin tried to sneak in unnoticed. The 100-piece Roxy Symphony preceded the forty-member Roxy Ballet on the stage. Filmed greetings from President Calvin Coolidge, Mayor Walker, and the eighty-year-old Thomas Alva Edison appeared on the giant screen with printed titles before spotlights picked her out in the audience, wearing a scintillating black evening gown, her hair lacquered down flat against her head the way she wore it in several sequences in the film.

Funny, he said, I used your picture to illustrate the fact that movies are like green salads, they wilt fast. To inaugurate the Roxy, he explained, her picture might have rented for $50,000 for a ten-day engagement. Nine months later it would rent for $7.50 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Where had he used Sunya to show the perishable nature of motion pictures? It was just three days after the Roxy premiere, while speaking at his alma mater, Harvard.

When he said Hah-vad, she tried to remember whom he reminded her of. She asked where he had learned about the picture business, and he said, At Harvard. I’m just applying the principles I learned there to the movie industry because I’m convinced most people in pictures don’t know how to do that.

To show she knew a few things about figures, she said that, if you believed the newspapers, the only people making any money in movies were the stars; the moguls were all working for nothing. The way she understood the arithmetic, eighty percent of the box office went to exhibitors and distributors, to say nothing of their friends, the butcher, the baker, and half the world, who walked in for free. But how could she as a producer stop that? Why, not even Mary Pickford’s mother can be in twenty thousand theaters every night to count the house.

Does she do that? he asked, incredulous.

That’s what they say, but you couldn’t prove it by me because she never took me along.

He burst into peals of laughter and whacked his thighs. People at nearby tables shifted in their seats, but he couldn’t stop laughing. As she would write more than fifty years later, he was enjoying himself so unabashedly, so unaffectedly, that I started laughing too.

When he grew businesslike again, he told her that since she knew Sidney Kent she should ask him for some old Paramount distribution figures for Europe. With those one could work out projected overseas grosses for Sunya and Sadie Thompson. Upcoming play dates should be counted as income, as accounts receivable. Otherwise your balance sheet for this entire year will be just an inventory of cost—all red ink.

He said all the right things convincingly, she thought.

As the waiters cleared the plates, she observed him with more interest than she usually accorded businessmen. Behind the bespectacled glance, receding blond hairline, Boston accent, and sonorous laughter, she divined shrewdness, imagination, and an electric and vital temperament. He was fun and spoke with enormous facility. Suddenly she knew who it was he reminded her of. It was Craney Gartz, her millionaire suitor ten years ago. Her success as a funny, impossible girl in crazy clothes in Cecil B. De Mille’s Park Avenue idylls had made her realize that Craney’s money, good looks, and teasing, patrician snobbery were not enough. Craney kissed wonderfully, but she had never allowed him to take her to bed. Like her luncheon guest, Craney knew how to talk passionately, how to be inspired by ideals.

A waiter brought him his pie, ice cream, and coffee. He had heard about the duplicity she and Raoul Walsh, her director, had used to get the Somerset Maugham screen version started, how they had changed the Reverend Davidson into a Mr. Davidson. Since they couldn’t use the title of the forbidden play, Walsh opened the picture with a torrential downpour designed to jog people’s memory of the stage play that Jeanne Eagles had made memorable on Broadway and Tallulah Bankhead had tried to repeat in London only to be vetoed by Maugham in favor of Olga Lindo. He also knew production money had dried up for her after Will Hays and the Motion Picture Producers had put pressure on United Artists and Joe Schenck. With Kent, Katz, and twelve other studio chiefs and distribution heads, he himself had signed a telegram to Schenck condemning the making of Rain under any subterfuge title. Bob Kane had told him that, in order to finish the picture, Gloria Swanson was selling property in New York and California.

Stirring his coffee, he leaned forward and, with a twinkle in his eye, asked how she had managed to get Will Hays to give her the go-ahead in the first place.

For a second she resented the question. She was still smarting from the battle. Then she thought he was paying her the compliment of dealing with her as an equal, producer to producer. I just invited him to lunch and asked him, she said.

She realized her mistake the moment he burst into laughter. There was something in his mirth that implied she had used her feminine wiles on Hays when in fact she had outsmarted Hollywood’s director of morals and the rest of them.

Taking out a cigarette, she said in measured tones, I think I told all you gentlemen as much when I replied to your telegram to Joe Schenck in June. I know you got your copy, Mr. Kennedy, because your secretary or assistant replied.

He reddened.

Fumbling for a match, he said he had understood the issue of defying the decency code to be a mere formality. Rain ridiculed a clergyman, therefore no one was supposed to adapt it for the screen. A number of other signers had done me a favor. I felt I owed them one in return.

A waiter smartly lit her cigarette. When she asked what favor they had done, he told her that, to assist in the industry’s rehabilitation, he had persuaded Harvard to sponsor a series of speeches by a dozen top film people last March. Marcus Loew, Adolph Zukor, Jesse Lasky, Harry Warner, Will Hays, William Fox, and a half dozen others had lectured on the film business.

Adolph Zukor at Harvard, she said. That’s an image to conjure with.

They both smiled.

In any case, she was proud of Sadie Thompson, she said. Barrymore was marvelous as the sanctimonious, lustful hypocrite. And so was Raoul, both directing and playing the marine sergeant with whom she runs off in the end.

She couldn’t resist telling him that Raoul and she had had a hard time identifying the name Joseph P. Kennedy among the Zukors, Loews, Foxes, and Laskys on the collective telegram. What had he produced?

His answer was mildly defensive. "My most successful picture was The Gorilla Hunt."

Never heard of it.

I walked out of it myself, and I can’t for the life of me understand why it made money, but it did.

Had she heard of cowboy pictures starring Fred Thomson? Big-city audiences generally had no idea who was Fred Thomson and his spirited gray stallion, Silver King, but in theaters outside large cities their pictures had the widest distribution. Fred Thomson was married to Frances Marion, the writer.

Frances is a friend of mine, a woman with a talent for picking people.

He called for the bill. The maître d’ told him the lunch was on the house.

When he glanced over her accountant’s memo one more time and, without making an offer of his own, advised her to accept Joe Schenck’s proposal, she realized the luncheon had been a waste of time. His handshake, when they said good-bye in the lobby, was firm; she was sure she wouldn’t see him again.

It was turning colder after a record warm autumnal spell (the Weather Bureau thermometer atop the Whitehall Building had touched seventy degrees the previous afternoon, a new high for a November 23). De Mille’s King of Kings was playing at the Gaiety; John Gilbert and Greta Garbo were opening in Love, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, at the Embassy; Michael Curtiz’s Good Time Charley was at the Roxy; Aileen Pringle and Barrymore were featured in Body and Soul at the Loew’s Lexington; and at the Warner on Broadway and Fifty-second Street, The Jazz Singer was entering its second month (See and Hear Al Jolson on the Vitaphone, cried the newspaper ads).

Joe Kennedy rushed back to his office at the 1560 Broadway building. These days he spent most of his time at the West Coast studio of Film Booking Office Inc., but like any self-respecting movie company FBO maintained its corporate headquarters in New York. It was less than two years ago that he had strolled into FBO to take charge. If Gloria Swanson wanted to know who he was, it was all in the September issue of Photoplay. A feature article described how he had been in his new office all of half an hour when he had sent for one of his vice presidents. The man appeared, expecting to discuss weighty matters of policy. Kennedy was studiously examining his desk, going through the drawers with systematic efficiency. Then he looked up with an air of great profundity. ‘What this corporation needs first and most of all, is a nice box of Havana cigars for the president’s office.’ After that they proceeded to business. The most influential film journal for the general audience told how just fifteen months after engineering the takeover of FBO, Kennedy had become known as someone who was bringing substance to a picture business that was supposed to work in mysterious ways and be controlled by some deep combination of luck, magic, and genius.

Since he and his group of Boston backers had bought control of FBO, he had not only turned the small, debt-ridden company around, he had also acquired an increasingly ambitious view of motion pictures.

Walking into his office, Kennedy told his secretary to get Sidney Kent in Los Angeles. Kent was Paramount’s sales genius and one of the executives Kennedy had persuaded to speak at Harvard. A cool, practical, eternally disapproving watchdog against dangerous expenditures, he was the kind of manager that Joe Kennedy believed every movie company should have. Kent was an elegant easterner like himself, less than happy in California. Their conversation was to the point. Joe had just met Gloria Swanson and wondered if Sid would do him the favor of getting together some figures on her European grosses.

No problem. Kent could have a set of figures by tomorrow. Joe explained that he needed the figures to see if Swanson’s future overseas revenues could collateralize a production loan. Sid became personal. He and his wife were in the process of getting a divorce. His lawyer had asked for a postponement, but Milton Cohen, his wife’s attorney, was being difficult. Cohen was also Gloria Swanson’s lawyer. Did Kennedy think he could ask Gloria to give her lawyer a call?

Swanson didn’t go out that afternoon. Telling the hotel operator not to disturb her, she spent the next three hours with UA’s heads of sales and distribution. She suggested they screen the picture for the big theater owners while she was in New York and could answer questions.

Gloria had become one of the united artists a year ago. Fifty-three feature films had convinced her that studios inevitably became factories of mediocrity and that, however much she was idolized and envied, the public was tiring of the repetitious society pictures she was doing. When Paramount offered her $10,000 a week plus half the profits of any film she appeared in, she began to seek out more substantive roles in independent productions.* She had bought into United Artists Corporation and become an equal owner with D. W. Griffith, Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford and her husband Douglas Fairbanks, and—UA’s real power now—Joseph M. Schenck. Of all the women in the movies, only Pickford and Swanson had their own production units. Mary had the assistance of Doug, the most business-minded and astute of the four founding partners. Swanson’s French marquis had a reputation for a reckless taste in spats, but no talent for standing up to Schenck in loan and contract negotiations. She had had to learn fast.

To get the sales and distribution chiefs excited about Sadie Thompson, she showed them the cards from the San Bernardino sneak preview. Most were positive to raving. Splendid, don’t cut a scene, said one. Miss Swanson wonderful. Super picture, commented another. Others read, First picture I ever saw where Gloria didn’t wear a million dollars’ worth of clothes. Wonderful. Way ahead of the play at the Biltmore. The negatives ran from the ambiguous, A slam on the Christian nation to Acting was wonderful but as a church member think religion should be left out of pictures and Disgusting. The point was that not one was indifferent. Before they broke up the meeting, she agreed to a series of publicity interviews.

At five o’clock an apologetic hotel operator called her suite. A Mr. Kennedy had been phoning for two hours and was now downstairs asking to see Miss Swanson. Bemused, she told the desk to send him up.

When she opened the door, Joe apologized for disturbing her and came straight to the point. He had called Kent about the European grosses of her films. He will give us everything we need. He’ll be calling back tomorrow.

Before she could say, Who’s us? he said there was something she could do for Sidney in return. He explained the situation: The Kents were getting a divorce, and Mrs. Kent’s lawyer, Milton Cohen, was being stubborn about a postponement. Would she call Cohen and ask him to reconsider?

She felt a little guilty about the way she had deflated his producer’s ego at the end of their lunch. All right, she would call Milton and tell him Sidney was helping her out.

Could you phone him now? he asked. I’d like to have an answer when Sid calls me in the morning.

She hated to be pushed, but as she would remember, his urging had an almost playful tone to it, as if he were sharing the fact that it was fun to get things done quickly and efficiently. Chance would have it that Milton was in his office. When she got him on the line, she told him she hated to ask favors, but here she was asking for one anyway.

Hearing her out, Milton agreed to give Sid Kent’s lawyer a postponement. Mr. Kennedy had been standing beside me during the call, she would write in her memoirs. When I told him Milton would do what I had asked, he smiled as if I had passed a special test of his devising. He called me a good scout and said he wouldn’t forget it.

He also said he had found out from the hotel manager that it was Gloria who paid for the luncheon. So now it was his turn. Would she have dinner with him? He had a proposition to discuss with her.

She had an engagement with her old friend Le Roy Pierpont Ward, but had a hunch the dinner with Kennedy might be important. So she phoned Sport, as everybody called the unofficial master of the most fashionable Manhattan set, and changed their dinner date.

Then she accepted Kennedy’s invitation. He would call for her at 6:30. It was a bit early, but he wanted to take her to a special place on Long Island.

*All figures in this book are given in vintage dollars. To get a sense of Hollywood’s Fabulous Twenties, the reader should multiply all figures by approximately 5.5. Thus, $10,000 a week in 1927 is the equivalent of $55,000 in 1988. It should also be kept in mind that federal and state taxes on high incomes averaged a mere three percent in 1928. (Source: Wharton Econometrics Associates)

Chapter 2

Gloria

When Adelaide Svensson and her daughter reached Los Angeles in the spring of 1915, sixteen-year-old Gloria was a veteran movie actress. Yet Mrs. Svensson and the flat-chested Gloria, with her bad posture, Illinois twang, and gamine toughness, were no onrushing stage mother and daughter team getting off the train at Union Station. Los Angeles was a mere stopover—at least that was how Gloria understood it—on their way to the Philippines to join Gloria’s army father at his new post.

Along with her sister Clara, Adelaide—Addie to everybody—had recently inherited a modest sum from her miserly Polish-born father, known to Gloria as Grandpa Klanowski, and was in no hurry to get to San Francisco, the embarkation point for military dependents sailing for Manila. Mother rented an apartment in a two-story house on Cahuenga Boulevard, a tree-lined street running north from Beverly Boulevard through the heart of Hollywood. Gloria’s personal world fell apart the day she asked when they’d be moving on. They might not go to Manila, Addie said. The explanation that followed was that Mother was separating from a hopeless alcoholic, a man whose problem was he couldn’t face problems. The money from Grandpa gave her breathing space, allowed her to think things over away from Grandma Bertha and Daddy’s relatives. If, after all, she decided that no other life was possible, they might still go. In his letters, Daddy begged her to give him another chance.

Through her mother’s story, Gloria recognized instances of her childhood, her father’s drinking, hearing them argue. She didn’t know he gambled, that he had run up debts. She vaguely understood what her mother meant when she said she and Daddy had not been close for the past five years, that this last year’s living apart had given Mother the idea of a permanent separation.

When Addie finished, Gloria was too shocked to cry. Don’t you really love him? she asked.

Not just now, Mother answered, and I haven’t for some time.

Then and there Gloria realized she hardly knew her father, that by upbringing she was more her mother’s child than his. But still, she loved her absent father. She would never abandon him.

Gloria was the only child of Joseph Svensson and Adelaide Klanowski. Her father was one of thirteen children of second-generation Swedish emigrants. Jons and Johanna Svensson had taken their brood to Lutheran church every Sunday and allowed no drinking or card playing in their house. People later said this was why several of their sons turned out to be heavy drinkers and gamblers. Joseph’s elder brother Charles was an adventurer. He was prospecting for gold in the Canadian Northwest Territories in 1899 and later told everyone how one night he had seen a strange light and dreamed his brother Joe had a baby girl.

Gloria was born March 28, 1899 on the second floor of 341 Grace Street in Chicago. Since it was Holy Week, Joe decided to call the girl Glory. She was christened Gloria May Josephine Svensson—May for her maternal great-grandmother and one of Joe’s sisters; Josephine for her father. On her mother’s side they spoke German and, besides Grandpa Klanowski, were mostly Alsatians. Gloria would remember her great-grandfather telling her he had been chef at the royal household in Baden-Baden before emigrating to the States in 1852. He loved to talk about the great Chicago fire in 1871. Their house on La Salle Street had burned to the ground. They had saved their children and the clothes on their backs, nothing else.

Grandpa Klanowski was a man of property who lived near Lincoln Park, but he was such a miser that Grandma Bertha divorced him and remarried, giving Gloria a second maternal grandfather, Grandpa Lew. The divorce turned Grandpa Klanowski into such a hater of women that he hired a man to cook and clean for him. Gloria believed he worried about his skinflint reputation because he once started to give her a dime and then, after studying the expression on her face, upped it to a quarter.

An only child, Gloria grew up close to her parents. In her autobiography she would note that in her nightly prayers there were only the three of them. I used to kneel and say my prayers out loud. They were the same every night. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. God bless Daddy and God bless Mommy and make me a good girl.’ After I climbed into bed, I always added a silent prayer that God would somehow find a way for me to get out of going to school without being sick.

She would remember a grade school teacher telling her mother that she didn’t pay attention, that instead of copying out arithmetic problems she drew pictures, to which Mrs. Svensson responded that her daughter was obviously artistic. Next thing Gloria knew she was enrolled in the children’s drawing class at the Art Institute.

Joe worked in the Chicago office of a congressman. His parents had little regard for politicians and joked that Joe’s job could only prepare him to become a lawyer or a crook. They didn’t think of government service. Joe anglicized his surname, and when Gloria was eight, the War Department in Washington notified him that it was putting him in charge of transportation for the United States Army, either in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, or Panama, where American ingenuity was building the canal. Gloria thought her prayers for no more school had been answered.

Instead of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, or Panama, Joe Swanson went first to Florida. Mother and daughter followed. The train trip took three days and two nights, and the further south they got, the hotter it got. They opened the windows only to have soot from the locomotive blacken them. By the time they reached Tampa, Gloria’s hair was, for the first time in her life, truly dirty. But she wasn’t in school.

The house they lived in at the Key West Army Base was in front of the dock where the army kept a launch and several dinghies. The house stood on pillars, to protect it from flooding during the hurricane season, and had a veranda with a beautiful view in every direction. Joe Swanson took his daughter grunt fishing and taught her to tell time by the different bugle calls. Even school wasn’t so bad. With four or five other army brats, Gloria was driven to a private school in a buckboard by a soldier. On warm days the teacher took the class outside to sit under the palm trees.

Singing in Sunday school led to Gloria’s first contact with show-business people. Venice Hayes, a New York actress spending the winter in Key West with her tubercular father, said Gloria had a pretty voice and was astonished to hear the pretty eight-year-old had never taken singing lessons. The Swansons were invited to meet Frank Hayes, who was also in the theater. Mother told Gloria that tuberculosis was not contagious if windows were kept open and one didn’t get too close to the TB sufferer, but Gloria thought the elegant and terribly thin Hayes smelled funny. With the local people, he was helping put together a show in which Venice would play the leading lady. After hearing Gloria sing, Hayes asked her mother if the girl could be part of the soiree.

Mother coached Gloria to sing As the World Rolls On, made her a new dress, and on the night of the show was backstage, while Daddy and people from the base were in the audience. Gloria, who had never heard grown-ups talk openly and rapturously of love, was so enthralled by Venice playing her love duet she didn’t realize the actor in the scene had forgotten his lines. Suddenly, Hayes was next to her, shoving her onstage, and whispering, Sing your song, Glory, now!

Walking into the limelight, Gloria looked back toward the wings to make sure there wasn’t some mistake, but both Hayes and Mother nodded vigorously. Gloria stood center stage waiting for the note from the piano. None came. Finally, she just sang As the World Rolls On a capella. Everyone clapped. She ran offstage. Mother hugged her, Hayes beamed. Gloria couldn’t understand why. She had had no piano accompaniment, and during the entire second chorus all she had been able to think of was that she needed to go to the bathroom. She decided her future was in drawing.

Her next stage performance came four years later in San Juan’s old opera house. The Swansons transferred to Puerto Rico when Gloria was eleven. Together with Colonel Howes, his wife, and their two children, Bobby and Harriet, the Swansons and five other army families lived in San Juan’s Artillery Park. The island had been under American control for only twelve years, and Gloria realized she and the other army families were different—privileged. She loved the feeling. She also loved the smells and sounds of the Caribbean city: the smell of tamarinds, mangoes, and papayas in the open market, the odor of kerosene on the tile floor to repel insects, the music of church bells, street carnivals, and guitars. She was soon playing with a major’s son one year younger than herself. They learned to ride together. The boy loved the beach, but she was afraid of water and refused to learn to swim and dive.

Harriet Howes had Gloria persuade her mother to let her change schools so she could be part of The American Girl, a musical show set in a girls’ school. They rehearsed for weeks. Harriet played the principal because she was the tallest; Gloria played a willful girl who left school and had to be tricked by her friends to go back. Colonel Hayes commandeered the beautiful old rococo opera house in San Juan for the two performances of The American Girl. On opening night Gloria found a gold star on her mirror and her name painted under it—in her father’s handwriting. She would not record any audience reaction to her performance but remembered telling herself she would be an opera singer.

She learned some of the facts of life at the stable when she and her girlfriend found a newborn colt in a stall and Gloria’s best friend told her it was naturally beige because its father was the beige stallion. Its father? Horses don’t get married, Gloria objected.

Glory, you know what I mean, came the answer.

She didn’t really, but by questioning other girls she came to a proximate understanding of what she sensed was an acutely uncomfortable subject for most people.

Addie loved to make dresses for her daughter, and Gloria loved to show off the clothes her mother made. In June 1914 Joe Swanson was temporarily based on Governors Island, the two-square-mile dot in New York harbor, and his wife and daughter went to Chicago for the summer, arranging to stay with Grandma Bertha.

Mother was finishing a dress patterned on one in the wardrobe of the famed dancer-actress Irene Castle when Aunt Inga, Gloria’s uncle’s sister-in-law, came for a visit. Aunt Inga knew all kinds of interesting people. A trained nurse working for wealthy Lake Shore families, she was the only woman Gloria knew who smoked. To entertain the fifteen-year-old Gloria, she offered to take her to a place on Argyle Street on the North Side where they made motion pictures.

In Puerto Rico, Mother and Gloria had seen moving pictures in a hot little movie house. They had watched people move around on a sheet, waving their arms and making faces. After ten minutes it was all over, and Addie had decided she’d never spend another nickel to see that again. Aunt Inga asked if they had seen Quo Vadis. What’s that? Addie asked, her mouth full of pins. Inga explained that it was an Italian epic that was being shown at the opera house. It cost a dollar to get in, but a live symphony orchestra played all through the picture, which ran for nearly an hour and a half. And on the screen you saw chariot races, slave galleys, and an arena full of lions. Inga wanted to see the movie, but she didn’t want to go alone. Which was why she was ready to take a Mr. Spoor up on his invitation to see his motion picture factory on Argyle Street. Maybe the Americans were doing things as exciting as the Italians.

George K. Spoor was the Ess to F. M. (Broncho Billy) Anderson’s ay, in Essanay, a company that made pictures both in Chicago and in Niles Canyon near San Francisco. Anderson made the Broncho Billy movies out in California, while on Argyle Street, Spoor was in charge of two-reel comedies and dramatic pictures. The company’s big star was Francis X. Bushman. The studio also employed a trio of famous stage actresses: Beverly Bayne, Ruth Stonehouse, and Gerda Holmes.

Gloria convinced her mother to let her wear her new Irene Castle dress for the visit to Essanay. Spoor was out of town, but his brother came out to meet Aunt Inga and Gloria, and quickly found a nice young man to take them around.

The guide took them to a cavernous cement basement room, where a man with a pistol in his belt and a whistle around his neck sat on an upturned barrel and yelled, Kick him! Fall on his face! to a dozen young men and women piled up in a screaming heap. Occasionally, the visitors could distinguish faces, but most of the time all they saw was arms and legs. Some of the feet had roller skates on them. The man on the barrel shouted, Funny. Good! Now do it again.

Everybody got off a great big woman in a maid’s uniform lying on the floor. The guide explained to Inga and Gloria that the man on the barrel was E. Mason (Lightning) Hopper, the director. The fat woman turned out to be Wallace Beery in drag. In Yankee Consul on Broadway, the tall, good-looking, thirty-year-old Beery had been the understudy for Raymond Hitchcock and was an immediate sensation when he went on for Hitchcock one night. At Essanay he played Sweedie, the dumb Swedish immigrant maid, in the slapstick two-reelers that were making a fortune for the company. Inga and Gloria noticed the camera and the quiet little man fussing over it.

When everybody was ready, the little man started grinding the camera, Hopper started screaming, and the roller skaters fell in a pile on Beery, kicking him and trying to sit on his face. They had to do it one more time because somebody knocked Beery’s wig off.

Inga and Gloria didn’t get to meet Francis X. Bushman, but the guide took them upstairs to watch the shooting of a wedding scene for another picture. Here, things were a little more sedate, and the guide told them Gerda Holmes played the bride and Richard Travers the groom. Inga knew who Gerda Holmes was. While they watched, a man walked over and introduced himself as Mr. Babile, the Essanay casting director. He wondered if he could have Gloria’s address and phone number. She looked at her aunt, who said, Go ahead. Babile explained that directors were looking for interesting new types all the time. Gloria was sure the reason for Babile’s interest was the Irene Castle dress.

Babile called the next morning and asked Gloria to come in at 1 P.M. and be in a picture. She told him she had to ask permission. When Mother said she didn’t see anything wrong with it as long as Mr. Spoor was a friend of Aunt Inga’s and Gloria was on vacation, Gloria went back to the phone and said yes. Babile told her to wear the same dress as the day before. She knew it.

When she got to the studio, she was taken upstairs, where twenty people were being coached for a continuation of the wedding scene she had watched the day before. Gerda Holmes was expected at any moment. Richard Travers was already there. When the director saw Gloria, he asked his assistant to get her a bouquet of flowers. Holmes arrived, they rehearsed the scene. The director hollered, Let’s go. Gloria came forward with the flowers; Holmes gave her a big smile when she took them from her and then smiled at Travers. The director said, That’s it for this one, and stagehands started taking down the scenery.

An assistant told Gloria and several others to stop by the office on their way out. Each was given a pay envelope. When Gloria opened hers she found an absolute fortune: $3.25. For one hour of doing nothing! No wonder boys and girls were willing to fall in a heap on roller skates. When she got home, she called Aunt Inga and made a date to go shopping at Marshall Field’s the next day.

Gloria was called back in her Irene Castle outfit for a scene outside a church. A few days later she went to New York to see her father and a girl she had first met in Key West, and was happy to leave the pictures behind. She was going to be an opera singer after all.

Less than a week into her New York vacation, Mother forwarded a typewritten letter from Essanay, offering Gloria a position as a guaranteed stock player at $13.25 a week for a four-day week or $20 if she worked six days a week. With her own money, Gloria could take classes at the Art Institute and singing lessons with a good teacher. It also meant she wouldn’t have to go to school. Her mother had read the offer and hadn’t torn it up. That had to mean Mother didn’t think it was out of the question.

When Daddy came to dinner at the girlfriend’s Staten Island mansion, the parents talked only about the war that had broken out in Europe. America was not involved, but Daddy said all army bases were on permanent alert. He didn’t expect to be stationed on Governors Island much longer. There were rumors that his next assignment would be Manila. He seemed a little sad when he took her to Grand Central Station for her return to Chicago. Maybe it was the war, she thought, or just saying good-bye.

Because of the war and the uncertainty of their future, Mother told Gloria she could quit school and work in pictures as long as they stayed in Chicago.

Gloria reported to work at Essanay and was assigned a little cubicle of a dressing room with a girl named Virginia Bowker. The next day they were told to report to