Gloria Swanson and Her Circle in the Twenties was originally published in the July 1950 issue of Vogue.
They all glowed with a violent glamour in the nineteen twenties.
Dark glasses were for eye treatments, not for disguise.
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Only Lillian Gish was shy.
It was fun for the stars and more fun for the public.
Miss Pickford had the assistance of Douglas Fairbanks; alone Miss Swanson battled for her dollars.
She persuaded Wall Street bankers to finance her unit.
Everyone and everything influenced her.
She listened and she wept.
She hired and fired and shot situations that were never used, ordered sets and countermanded them.
The present excitement over Sunset Boulevardis another cliff hanger in the perils of Gloria.
She appears on television shows, looking miraculously young in soft black dresses and shadowy hats.
She is back in the business again.
(InSunset Boulevard, he still wears the puttees.)
In those days at least he publicly announced that he believed himself divinely inspired.
Thousands of extras had been transported to the desert, all were ready in their Israelite robes.
But the day was dark.
Facing a loss of time and money, a less inspired assistant director dismissed the extras.
As they turned away, DeMille suddenly ordered them to remain.
He grouped the horde, stationed assistants on the rim, placed Moses in position.
The man who invented the close-up was David Wark Griffith.
His grey eyes picked up details like a vacuum cleaner.
Beneath a large grey hat, his hair, long and thin, spiked gently over his collar.
His clothes were as unlike those of other Hollywood men as his direction was unlike that of other directors.
He was an original.
There followed fame and a heavy undergrowth of eccentricities keeping pace with his development of new techniques.
To point a scene, he introduced close-ups.
He brought in cut-backs and later fade-outs.
The left one hooked on the right, which was lifted vertically as though he were a candlestick bearer.
His voice was deep and slow with the resonance of a nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor.
All was deliberate, as though he were watching himself in a slow-motion film.
He never willingly wrote finis to a movie.
There was always time for one more close-up.
(He always cried at the sight of his own success.)
Those tears were the overflow of a man terribly enjoying himself.
When the exhibitors first knew him they knew him as shrewd, but with a vein of sentiment.
Within a few years that vein was publicly varicose.
Beneath a creamy top, and a soft slow voice, lay rock which nothing shifted.
Before the others were out of the nickelodeons, he had stretched out for big productions.
When others economized, he paid out, commercially courageous.
At executive meetings, he sat, a sad-eyed icicle, in the midst of arguments.
Afterwards he would propose one of his bargain-sharp decisions.
It floated in, a gumshoe notion.
He amalgamated, he congealed and he was called “Anaconda Adolph.”
Behind them both stood their mother.
Mrs. Talmadge had a sense of fundamentals as sharp as a bread knife.
What could be fairer than that?"
And her girls knew.
There was no bunk about them.
Disconcertingly witty and hard-boiled, the Talmadges were impossible to impress.
Partners with Miss Swanson in United Artists at one time were the great Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
To preserve that glitter Fairbanks worked.
Miss Pickford did nothing.
She stood for sanity.
Hers was a snicker of sense in the midst of treble hysteria.
Actually he was pretty coony.
He loved to play dead because he made such a smart ghost.
At Pickfair, high on a Hollywood hill, they received the world.
Everyone came to see them.
And after dinner they showed, as Hollywood still shows, a movie for entertainment.
We didn’t need dialogue.
There just aren’t any faces like that anymore.
