After nearly two decades away from the silver screen, Gloria Swanson agreed to play a Hollywood legend who boards a fateful flight in the hit film Airport 1975. For the role, which would be her last, the diva insisted on writing her own dialogue. “I was holding out for a picture I could take my grandchildren to see, something exciting and contemporary, without senseless violence,” she said.
Gloria prized her grandchildren almost as much as her life as Hollywood’s most dazzling diva. “She was very ambitious and very certain of herself,” says Stephen Michael Shearer, author of Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star. “She commanded a room when she entered it, even at 4-foot-11-inches tall.”
An only child born into a family of modest means, Gloria’s parents fueled her confidence with an assertion she could do anything she set her mind to. A crush on a movie star inspired teenage Gloria to talk her way onto her first film set.
By the dawn of the 1920s, Gloria was among Hollywood’s biggest silent-movie stars. “[Director] Cecil B. DeMille discovered her. He dressed her up, and he educated her,” says Shearer, who adds that despite her petite stature, Gloria wore silk brocade, feathers, furs and Art Deco jewelry with flair. “She was hungry to better herself and became Hollywood’s first glamour queen. She also developed into a fine actress.”
From 1918 to 1929, Gloria earned $8 million but spent money lavishly, not only on clothes and jewels, but also on creating her own production company — which nearly bankrupted her. “She had an extremely romantic notion about life,” explains Shearer. When her film career went into decline in the 1930s, she moved to New York, where she appeared in theater and took up painting, sculpting and activism.
Aware of the plight of many Jewish scientists in Europe during the rise of fascism, Gloria created Multiprises, a patent licensing company, and spent her own money helping at-risk scientists move to America. “To her credit, she actually saved the lives of some of these scientists,” says Shearer.
Sunset Boulevard
It’s rumored that Greta Garbo declined the role of Norma Desmond in 1950’s Sunset Boulevard, leaving the door open for Gloria to stage a comeback and win her third Academy Award nomination. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done it,” she complained when a new generation confused her in real life with delusional Norma. “She didn’t live in the past,” says Shearer. “Yet she never could understand why a woman of 50 years or more wasn’t given romantic leads.” Still, her role in Sunset Boulevard would be her greatest and stand the test of time.
Like so many ambitious people, Gloria had a difficult personal life. She was divorced five times before marrying William Duffy, a writer and activist 15 years her junior, in 1976. And although her relationships with her children were distant, she made an effort to become a part of the lives of her seven grandchildren — whose existence she called a blessing in Airport 1975. “She loved her grandchildren,” says Shearer. “There’s not one grandchild that didn’t say anything but good things about Gloria.”