All Things Beautiful

Even in the midst of the clamorous, ridiculous, so often tedious parade that is Facebook, sometimes something stops you in your tracks. This went past a few days ago, and I've just spent a considerable amount of time tracking it down so that, in case you missed it, you too can spend a little time in a glamor-induced trance.

Of Couture and Corn

The holiday weekend rolls on, with yesterday's highlight an outing to the Museum of Fine Arts, ostensibly to see their current exhibition of Goyas.  I found an unexpected treat, however, that very nearly outshone even the master's portrait of the Duchess of Alba (not, of course, the recently deceased edition thereof - she was old, but not that old...).

Gloria in Excelsis

Tiny Gloria Swanson and her great big Christmas tree...

First, Last, and Always a Star

There's nothing like a ten-hour flight to plow through a good book, and that's exactly what I did yesterday, flying back from Vienna.

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...

Birthday Boy: The Greatest Showman on Earth

Today's birthday boy, who turns a youthful 131 today, is not in fact the glistening creature seen above; no, he is instead the director who gave birth to this and countless other memorable images and who, thanks in no small part to a movie in which he appeared but did not direct, is best remembered as "Mr. DeMille (I'm Ready for My Close Up)."

Cecil B. DeMille's legacy in pop culture is a funny thing, reliant on his own late-in-life self-promoted image (all jodhpurs, monocle, and riding crop) and his last few pictures, which were bloated, pompous things in comparison to many that preceded them over his long career.  Those who only know DeMille from his second go at The Ten Commandments would be amazed at the slick, cosmopolitan melos that first made Gloria Swanson a top star, with racy titles like Why Change Your Wife? and (the picture from which this still is taken) Male and Female, as they would be even by his earlier epic pictures like King of Kings or the first Ten Commandments, which managed to combine solemnity and salaciousness in a very audience-pleasing sort of way. 

When it comes to Male and Female, there's no question - even in that Ziegfeldian headgear - on which side of that equation the gentleman pictured, leading man Thomas Meighan, stands, is there? 

This high-toned lubriciousness was the kind of thing in which earlier DeMille excelled - giving moviegoers a touch of inspiration (from the Bible, often, or, as here a hit play by J.M. Barrie, of Peter Pan fame) accompanied by a hefty dose of sex and other thrills - Mr. Meighan, above, or Miss Swanson menaced by a lion in Male and Female; Claudette Colbert, in her alas too-brief exotic phase, eponymously as Cleopatra or as Poppaea in Sign of the Cross; a decadent Dirigible Ball in Madam Satan.  By the time you get to Chuck Heston parting the Red Sea or the odd spectacle of the, shall we say, disparate acting styles of Betty Hutton and Jimmy Stewart crossing paths in The Greatest Show on Earth,  that earlier DeMille seems very far away indeed.

Personally, I think it's no accident that the end of his more interesting phase coincides with his experience directing my least favorite of all the Hollywood ladies, Miss Loretta Young.  Perhaps once he survived her Berengaria of Navarre in The Crusades, to which role her blonde-banged wig brings more verve than the lady herself, he'd had enough, and decided it was easier to direct pyramids and herds of circus elephants than actors.  You can hardly blame him.

Calling Gloria

Miss Swanson is having a moment. If I had those furs, I don't think I'd ever do anything else. I especially love how they appear to be stippled with castoff rough drafts of her eyebrows...

Alternate Reality

Hmmm. Had this film been a success, Gloria might have been the second Mrs. Joseph Kennedy, there never would have been a Sunset Boulevard (or, for that matter, a Killer Bees), and the kids would have been so busy helping Rose nurse her grudge that none of them would have had time for politics, any of them - and Teddy would never have been born at all.

The March of Time

The passing years are a challenge for even the greatest stars. One moment you're Queen of the Lot, at the top of your game, and the next you've started that long, slow slide that takes you through memoirs, TV movies, and appearances at increasingly obscure film festivals to oblivion.

It can start without warning. For example, I believe that Dame Elizabeth, whatever else happened thereafter, experienced the Movie Star equivalent of Jumping the Shark the moment she donned that headdress.

For many, the next step is an ill-advised return to the stage, all too often playing against type. Is there anything in the world less hard-boiled than Claudette Colbert, drooping cig or no?

Suddenly, you find yourself wearing unfortunate jewelry and biting nervously at the centerpiece...

Some few, in the end, achieve a rare grace; Miss Lillian, luckier than most, seems never to have made a wrong step (except perhaps that hat) during the last three decades of her long, long life, holding her own even against Miss Davis and coming out smiling.

But most are not so lucky, as evidenced by frail, sad Lucy, apparently attempting a slo-mo slap at the hapless (and for the moment, unsuspecting) Dorothy Lamour impersonator to her left.

Beyond that, draw the veil; you don't want to venture into the final stages, the time of This 'n' That, the Motion Picture Country Home ("Irving! Where is Irving? We'll be late for my premiere!"), and moments like the ghost of Mary Pickford appearing live, more or less, from Pickfair on the 1976 Oscars.

It's no surprise that Ruth Elizabeth said it best: old age is no place for sissies. Ironic, though - given that it's mostly sissies that are paying attention...

Gloria, Janis, and Dick

The bad girl of 1968 meets the bad girl of 1918. The latter outlived the former by a dozen years, which ought to tell you something. Gloria's seventy-odd here, and I'm deeply jealous of her shoulders. Janis appears vaguely to know where she is, but not much more. Dick is in plaid, which may not be a good idea.

This was the kind of thing that we once got to see on television all the time. Now people shout at each about their octuplets and their investments and, for all I know, their octuplets' investments.

Costume Party Confidential

Whoops - add Constance Bennett to the list of theme party spoilsports! Connie, darling, an ermine shrug - despite the possible effect of making you look snow-capped - is not Tyrolean!

Marion, as hostess, looks like she's getting ready to cut a bitch. Egged on - as always - by that troublemaker Gloria.

Good times.

Beauty Celestial...

...The best, you'll agree...


In 1960, photographer Eliot Elisofon joined forces with Gloria Swanson to capture the final moments of Manhattan's fabled Roxy Theatre - home in 1927 to one of Swanson's last silent epics, The Love of Sunya.

The first image became famous from the moment it first appeared in Life. A decade later, memories of it spurred Stephen Sondheim and the other creators of Follies in finding just the tone for what they decided had to be a story of "rubble in the daylight."

What I didn't know was that there are others in the series.

This one, I think, in stark black and white, is almost more powerful than the more famous color shots. Swanson's defiant, fierce pose bridges the gap between ecstasy and despair, a power given only to the greatest and most evocative of stars.

Standing there, unbowed and utterly unaware of the devastation around her, she is superb, immortal, the very last of Those Beautiful Girls to leave as the curtain comes down, finally and forever...

Image du Jour: Calling Gloria

Swanson by Bachrach. Just because.

Birthday Boy: Somebody's Perfect

102 years ago today in a little town in Austria-Hungary, Mrs. Eugenia Wilder, née Dittler, had a baby boy. She must have been a remarkable woman, for her little Billie grew up to be Billy Wilder.


Looking through his owlish round spectacles, observing Mama Eugenia, what did he pick up that allowed him to create a gallery of some of the screen's greatest - and most diverse - women?

Is there part of Eugenia in Nina Yakushova Ivanoff, whom a combination of Paris and Melvyn Douglas transform into Ninotchka?



Somewhat more disconcertingly, is there anything of her in the predatory Phyllis Dietrichson, queen of the blank face and the world's only ominous bangs?

Perhaps that's the part that let him bring to life so entirely the vast and tragic mess that is Norma Desmond:

(I think Boulevard Crepuscule is if
anything a better title, don't you?)

I would like to think she's there in Ariane Chavasse, Hepburn's most sophisticated gamine in Love in the Afternoon (and if the December in any May-December is Gary Cooper, who's to say it nay?):

But, to my mind, the proof that Eugenia did good by her little boy is that he grew up to be able to imagine two such creatures, equally improbable, as Sugar Kane Kowalczyk and the man who transforms himself so happily into the fetching bass player Daphne:

He did well by his leading ladies, that's for sure: two of Stanwyck's defining roles (Double Indemnity and Ball of Fire), two of Monroe's (Some Like it Hot and The Seven Year Itch), two of Audrey Hepburn's (Love in the Afternoon and Sabrina) making Garbo laugh and Swanson immortal - not bad for a boy from Sucha Beskidzka.

I do think some of it had to be Eugenia.