Rassegna stampa di Gloria Swanson

When Joseph P. Kennedy bought his son Jack a private plane for presidential campaigning, he rationalized the expense with a memory of having once “risked a million dollars . . . on an adventure much less worthwhile.” Three decades before President Kennedy became his principal production, the ill-fated “Queen Kelly” and its silent star, Gloria Swanson, had marked the culmination and comeuppance of Joe Kennedy’s half-dozen years in Hollywood. “Joseph P. Kennedy Presents,” Cari Beauchamp’s smart if bean-counting new book, suggests that nothing in Kennedy’s long career of banking, stock manipulation and New Dealing prepared him for presidential politics the way his time in the picture business did.
Even as a bumptious Boston arriviste — “America’s youngest bank president,” who avoided the draft in World War I by running a shipyard for the government — Kennedy had felt an itch to get in on the money being made by all the new Jewish moguls (he called them “pants pressers”) out in California. In 1919, he formed a production company to move the blackface song-and-dance man Fred Stone from vaudeville into the movies. Kennedy then spent several years running companies that distributed films produced by others until, in 1926, he became “the first outsider to simply purchase a studio outright.” Will Hays, the industry czar, welcomed Kennedy’s acquisition of FBO and the arrival of a new, “exceedingly American” presence in Hollywood.

FBO churned out horse operas and family fare, but Kennedy still managed to bring a bit of Harvard to Hollywood, and vice versa: in 1927, he organized a series of lectures by film-industry leaders, starting with himself, at the university’s business school. The attendant publicity, as Kennedy wanted, was mostly personal. Other studio bosses might fly beneath the radar, but Kennedy continually puffed and polished his own story, cultivating and bullying profile writers until their philandering subject looked like a family man and all the ink in his books ran a deeper shade of black.
For a while Kennedy acquired studios about as often as he fathered children. He took over Pathé not from any passion for its newsreels or its star director — he quickly reined in Cecil B. De Mille’s spending — but to gain access to the theaters of the Keith-Albee-Orpheum Corporation, with which Pathé had become allied. Kennedy thus entered vaudeville in order to finish it off, seizing its Main Street palaces and wiring them for talkies as fast as he could. His cruel treatment of the notoriously cruel impresario Edward Albee (“Didn’t you know, Ed? You’re washed up, you’re through”) helped extend his conquests to the point where the columnist Louella Parsons declared Kennedy “the Napoleon of the movies.” Within days of adding First National to his empire, he fired more than a score of executives and producers. When he turned his green eyeshades toward the actors, Loretta Young got to stay; Mary Astor did not.
Wherever he operated, Kennedy delegated authority to a posse of loyalists he’d met long ago back East. (Chief among them was Edward Moore, for whom Kennedy’s one surviving son is named.) The boss favored coded cables and the telephone, over which business could be conducted more quickly — and less bindingly — than it might on paper. The victims of Kennedy’s many betrayals included Fred Thomson, the handsome, straight-arrow cowboy star married to the screenwriter Frances Marion, the subject of Beauchamp’s previous book. After putting him on a rapacious “personal contract,” Kennedy dropped Thomson in favor of Tom Mix, and when Thomson died at 38, in December 1928, Kennedy contrived to make money off his life insurance.
Kennedy’s successes could be big and even visionary: he knew early on that sound pictures would transform the industry and that its scattered studios would have to undergo, in Beauchamp’s words, “Darwinian consolidations.” But his retreat from the business occurred as fast as his entry. Before the ’20s ended, Kennedy was outmaneuvered by David Sarnoff, with whose RCA he had merged FBO in order to create RKO. He also lost control of First National to Warner Brothers. Soon he was selling off everything — for millions, to be sure — except for Pathé, and left himself to concentrate on the only Hollywood obsession he’d ever had besides the grosses: Gloria Swanson.
In 1927, once they were brought together by the independent producer Robert Kane, Kennedy began to ease as well as exploit the actress’s financial problems. Swanson had just finished making “Sadie Thompson” and was heavily obligated to the I.R.S., United Artists and her own flotilla of fluffers. Kennedy got everyone paid, took control of the star’s purse strings and then pounced on her in a Palm Beach hotel room while Eddie Moore took her husband, a French marquis, deep-sea fishing.
According to Beauchamp, Swanson “genuinely liked” Kennedy, but found the security he provided more refreshing than the sex. Over the next few years she sent Christmas gifts to the Kennedy children, made a visit to Hyannis Port and spent time in London and Paris with both Joe and Rose Kennedy as well as her own husband — whose affair with Constance Bennett troubled Swanson much more than Joe and Gloria bothered Rose. Kennedy’s wife waited things out, just as she and the children had always waited out Joe’s long Hollywood absences from the family homes in Massachusetts and New York.
What kept Kennedy and Swanson together was “Queen Kelly,” a celluloid calamity resulting from the only time he “went ‘creative.’ ” Kennedy had always approached the film business with what he called “the viewpoint of a banker,” but when it came to “Queen Kelly” he was a cinéaste smitten with a star. The earliest version of the plot, suggested by the director Erich von Stroheim, involved — in Beauchamp’s heroic attempt at summary — a Catholic maiden whose “chance meeting with the prince of a European kingdom leads to a fire at her convent and then a night at the castle where the lovers are discovered by the queen, who whips Kelly and orders the prince arrested. Kelly attempts suicide before returning to the convent, where she learns she has inherited her aunt’s brothel in Africa.” The production’s delays, overruns and contemplated mixture of silence and sound were so messy as to make the plot seem Aristotelian. Kennedy eventually broke down in front of Swanson, stunned to hear himself saying, “I’ve never had a failure in my life.” Stroheim was replaced; the production was shelved, revived, and then at last abandoned. Kennedy sold Pathé and left Hollywood in April 1930.
“Joseph P. Kennedy Presents” is well sourced, often to a level of detail about stock swaps and share prices that suggests an M.B.A. case book; Kennedy’s sex-laced financial dealings with Swanson get timelined with an urgency and precision that may seem more suited to a study of the Cuban missile crisis. Beauchamp’s protagonist seems, finally, a hollow figure, the man who “shifted the gears of an entire industry” toward the short-term financial thinking “taken for granted in today’s multinational corporate Hollywood.” His real achievement in the film business was a quick “tenfold” increase in personal wealth. That was something, but not, Kennedy seemed to understand, all that much. If he wanted to keep crowing like Pathé’s trademark rooster, he knew that he should start concentrating on his own brood back East.
Joseph P. Kennedy Presents. His Hollywood Years
By Cari Beauchamp
Illustrated. 506 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35
Da The New York Times, 1 Febbraio 2009

«Uno dei miei cinque mariti, non ricordo quale - affermò una volta Gloria Swanson - ha detto che io sono una specie di camaleonte, senza una mia propria personalità, ma abile ad impadronirmi di quella dei personaggi che ho interpretato al cinema». Un'affermazione in un certo modo anche autolesiva, ma non del tutto lontana dal vero, perché Gloria Swanson, la cui carriera cinematografica è stata una delle più preminenti di Hollywood, è stata davvero capace, con i suoi occhi sinuosamente sensuali e una forza di volontà ferrea, di interpretare i ruoli più disparati e sempre con una perfetta aderenza al personaggio.
Aveva cominciato un po' come tutte, dapprima comparsa, poi qualche particina ed infine il nome nei titoli di testa. La compagnia nella quale aveva esordito era la Essanay, quindi brevi comiche, alcune in coppia con Wallace Beery, il quale, travestito da donna, interpretava il personaggio di «Sweedie», una svedese un po' tonta alla prese con l’«american way of life». Con Beery ci fu un matrimonio durato un mese. Intanto, passata da Sennett, Gloria trovò un altro partner in Bobby Harron, un attor comico di bassa statura, dal volto tondo e gioviale: insieme apparvero in una ventina di domestic comedies, in due bobine.

La Swanson lasciò Sennett quando si rese conto che questi voleva farne una seconda Mabel Normand e se ne andò alla Triangle dove interpretò una decina di indistinti domestic dramas: però erano lungometraggi, e tutti da protagonista.
Sulla sua elegante e fascinosa personcina - Gloria era alta appena un metro e mezzo, pesava sui quarantacinque chili, una vera e propria Venere tascabile - si posarono gli occhi di Cecil B. DeMille, che le propose di lavorare con lui alla Paramount. Conscia che la sua posizione divistica avrebbe potuto avere uno slancio verso l'alto, Gloria si lasciò dirigere mansueta come un agnellino, reprimendo il suo carattere che non era certo dei più condiscendenti. Nei film girati con DeMille, Don't Change Your Husband (1919), For Better For Worse (1919), Male and Female (1919), Why Change Your Wife.? (1920), Something to Think About (1920), The Affairs of Anatole (1921), Gloria impersonò personaggi positivi: fu sempre la moglie, mai l'altra e pur costretta a fare l'angelo del focolare che alla fine riconquista il marito farfallone, non si presentava mai senza indossare abiti firmati, pellicce costosissime, gioielli di Cartier.
Questi film, ancora oggi godibilissimi per la spiritosa maniera in cui sono raccontati e la sempreverde interpretazione della Swanson e - non dimentichiamoli - dei suoi partners e dei caratteristi, suggerirono anche a tante spettatrici nuove idee sui cappellini, sui negligées, sulle pettinature, sull'arredamento.
Altri registi che seppero valorizzare il talento di Gloria come attrice brillante e anche autoironica furono Sam Wood (Under the Lash, 1921; Beyond the Rock, 1922, in coppia con Rodolfo Valentino; Her Gilded Cage, 1922; The Impossible Mrs. Bellew, 1922; Bluebeard's Eight wife, 1923) e Allan Dwan (Zaza, 1923; A Society Scandal, 1924; Manhandled, 1924; Stage Struck, 1925; The Coast of Folly, 1925). In questi film la Swanson rimane fondamentalmente fedele al personaggio suggeritole da DeMille, con l'aggiunta di una più vasta gamma di espressioni e di toni che vanno dalla commedia al domestic drama, fino alla ricostruzione storica un po' fasulla della vicenda di Madame Sans Gêne (1925), fatta però su misura per lei e girata in Francia da Léonce Perret.
Divenuta produttrice in proprio con l'apporto economico di Joseph P. Kennedy (padre del futuro presidente), al quale Gloria era legata anche sentimentalmente, dopo The Loves of Sunya (1927), non molto diverso dai precedenti, Gloria volle portare sullo schermo la novella di Somerset Maugham, Rain. Nel complesso personaggio di Sadie Thompson, come il film (1928) si intitolò, Gloria dette un'interpretazione così caratteristica che ottenne una nomìnation al primo Oscar della storia (vinto poi da Janet Gaynor).
Dopo, venne Queen Kelly (1928), diretto da Erich von Stroheim. Mai portato a termine per i dissidi tra attrice e regista e per l'avvento del sonoro (il film era ancora muto), una versione montata dalla Swanson e sconfessata da Stroheim circola ancora nei cineclub.
Con il parlato, l’allure che aveva sempre circondato i film della Swanson venne a rarefarsi. Dopo l'insuccesso di tre o quattro film sonori, Gloria decise di intraprendere nuove attività: moda, cosmetica, dietetica, dimostrandosi abile promotrice di confezioni di abbigliamento, prodotti di bellezza e di sana alimentazione. Nel 1950, Billy Wilder la volle interprete di uno dei più amari film sul divismo, Sunset Boulevard, la crudele biografia - quasi autobiografia - di un'attrice famosa ed ora irrimediabilmente finita. Le mise accanto Stroheim, nella parte di un ex-celebrato regista, ora ridotto al rango di chauffeur e un bonario eppure cinico Cecil B. DeMille, che lei crede la voglia protagonista del film della sua rentrée, mentre il regista l'ha interpellata solo perché vuole in prestito l'automobile d'epoca da leiconservata come una reliquia del passato.
Inutile dire che Sunset Boulevard fu il canto del cigno di Gloria, un canto melodioso e struggente, che consegnò questa irrequieta diva - la cui vita privata e matrimoniale meriterebbe un testo a parte - non più alle copertine o agli articoli dei «fan-magazines» ma ai testi di storia del cinema.

Da Le dive del silenzio, Le Mani, Genova, 2001.