What Becomes...

For no particular reason except that it's a lovely thing, Miss Swanson in Blackglama.  The artists who worked on this campaign were both extraordinarily sensitive to the personalities of their remarkable sitters - initially, at least, legends indeed - and as heavy-handed with the retouching as anyone this side of MGM at its most shameless.

The genius of the Blackglama ads (as demonstrated in this gallery, which does the brand the disservice of including the more recent, distinctly less legendary, sitters) is that they simultaneously play on the image of each sitter (Swanson with her carnation, Ann Miller dancing, Hellman and her cigarette) and universalize them - not just by draping them in mink, but by reducing their faces to their most essential elements.  It's a different kind of retouching than was usually seen until then (the first ads ran in 1968), which frequently relied on soft-focus and a glow so intense the sitter could seem to be lit from within (the kinds of stills beloved of fallen stars now appearing in your local dinner theatre's production of I Do! I Do! or Forty Carats).  Instead, these smoothed-out faces are masklike, in a way that emphasizes why each legend matters.

Swanson looks softer and more reflective than was her wont.  Famously un-nostalgic, she survived the ultimate anti-nostalgia trip that was Sunset Boulevard by refusing to be trapped by Norma Desmond, even if she never did find another role as challenging. To look at an assortment of Swanson images over the decades is to be astonished at the strength and variety of her expressions.  In this picture, though, she ponders; it is uncharacteristic, yet arresting.  She may just be thinking about her lunch, or what she'll do that evening, or the oddness of wearing a fur coat and black leather gloves in what may well have been August, but she seems lost in a revery - as well she deserved to be - of her own fabulosity.  Perhaps that's what becomes a legend most...