" Sunset Boulevard "
 
It's a name that resonates throughout
the world as a symbol of
"Hollywood"
 
But also when we think of "Hollywood"
many other images come to mind!
 

Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, and Mae West
were fabulous women!
 
" Way ahead of their time!"
remarked Bette Midler.
 
"Those three women lead the way in the 20's for
Davis, Crawford, and Hepburn
in the following decades."

"Hollywood historians give the later three actresses credit for being
the 'strong women' types along with Barbara Stanwyck.  But
they got it from Swanson and Garbo.  People easily forget
'silent film' in considering film history." recalled Bette.
 
 
Of these talented individuals, I personally found
"Gloria Swanson"
exceptionally fascinating!

Star status was a position she understood completely:
" I have decided that when I am a star,
I will be every inch and every moment a star!"
 

 

Even from the beginning, there was
something special about
" Gloria May Josephine Swanson "
 
" I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents.  They may spend
a whole lifetime trying to figure out the reasons for their choice,
but nothing in any human story is accidental. "
 
" This time, for instance, I obviously wanted a long, exciting life.
Millions of boys and girls made love in the summer of 1898, but
I waited for the right moment between a young man named
Joe Swanson and his wife, Adelaide, before I willed my way from
infinity, to the second floor of 341 Grace Street in Chicago.
I decided to be a girl. "
" I was born on March 27, 1899, under the sign of Aries.  My maternal grandmother,
who was in attendance, leaned down to my pale, exhausted mother and said,
"She's beautiful."  Then she turned to the doctor, and lowering her voice so that
her daughter wouldn't hear, asked, "But aren't her ears awfully large?" "


 

The birth of a child is always a blessing!
 
" I gave birth to an Angel, "
exclaimed Bette.
 
Sophie Frederica Alohilani
von Haselberg
November 14, 1986

 

 

"The size of my ears, which had alarmed my grandmother Bertha Lew, the
day I was born, continued to worry my mother in the years to come.
My big blue eyes were one thing;  my big ears were something else.  So
for years, while all the other girls my age were wearing teeny tiny hair
ribbons, my mother made giant silk bows and poufs for me to hide my ears."

Between the ages of five and eight.

 

 
Gloria's career from the beginning has been a unique one.
She was first exposed to film, as an "extra" on a visit to
Essanay Studios, in New York City, at the age of
seventeen, and over the next few years had a number
of small parts.  Then she weathered eight so-so pictures
at Triangle Studios, before being discovered by
Cecil B. De Mille.  Who transformed her from a pretty
and spirited young actress, into a poised, well-groomed,
glamorous Star!

 
There is no doubt that the films she made for DeMille,
set the pace for the 1920's.  Glamour and seduction went
hand in hand with inevitable retribution, but not before
the audience had received a heady vision of Swanson's
sexual exhibitionism.
"Make it sleeveless, backless, skirtless ~
in short, go to the limit."
DeMille, with Swanson as his model, was more responsible
than anyone for making Hollywood films the vehicle for
exaggerated 'haute couture,' for extravagant grooming and
hair-styling, and for luxurious interior decoration.  Gloria's
elegant body was seen swathed in the most extraordinary
garbs, which flowed down into trains around her feet, or
she appeared in stages of undress calculated to excite
her more sex-starved audiences.
By 1923, she had become so astronomically popular, only just behind
Mary Pickford, that she was able to dictate her own terms to
Paramount when they wanted to renew her contract.
She shrewdly varied her roles as much
as possible without loosing her identity,
making a trip to France for the lead
in "Madame Sans Gene" in 1924.
She brought back not only a smash
hit film, but her new husband,
Henri de la Falaise, a French marquis.

 
Upon returning to America, a brass band met her
at the station and she drove in an open car with the
Marquis and Louella Parsons, who had hurried to
met them at the depot.  From station to station the
streets were lined and Gloria stood in the tonneau
throwing kisses on her subjects.  The Marquis
modestly kept his hat on, and his head lowered.
When Gloria entered Grauman's Million Dollar
Theatre that night for "Madame Sans Genes' "
Los Angeles premiere, the audience rose and sang,
"Home Sweet Home."  She was wearing a cloth-of-silver
gown and her diamonds, and had tears in her eyes.  As
the band continued to play, the audience wouldn't
stop cheering and yelling, until the lights dimmed and
the picture came on.
" A few minutes later the head usher came down the aisle and knelt at my feet,
telling me that the police couldn't handle the crowd anymore out front.  They were
bringing a car around to the alley and wanted us to leave immediately through the
orchestra pit and backstage.  So Henri and Mother and I sneaked out in the
darkness to the alley, where the car was waiting, and
the police escorted us on our slow drive home.
It was our first quiet moment in days, the first time I could really think.
Mother finally said, "Glory, you're so quiet.  This should be the happiest
night of your life." 
"My mother and I could look out the same window
without ever seeing the same thing."
I shook my head.  "No, Mother," I said, "it's the saddest.
I'm just twenty-six.  Where do I go from here?"
" I was thinking that every victory is also a defeat.
Nobody gets anything for nothing. "
As you will see later, she paid a price to be there that night.

When she became a major star, in the 1920's, she bought the King
Gillette mansion and furnished it as a showplace.  "The Second
woman in Hollywood to make a million, and the first to spend it,"
they said of her.  The twenty-two room, Italian mansion stood
on Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Drive, a short distance
from the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Shown here in 1928, Gloria is surrounded by acacias and palm
trees, in the garden of her Beverly Hills home.

If there is one star, of today, that seems to exhibit the style
and sophistication, once belonging to Gloria Swanson,
it would be "Demi Moore."
 
With a nod to the classics, Demi covered her crushed velvet dress with a
black wool crepe'.  Crimson lips, ringlets, and a jeweled
headband accent her gorgeous face!
 

 

Whenever anything was written about Gloria, one topic always seemed
to come up!  She was extremely concerned about the food we were
eating, and the quality of the water we drank.
For some reason, her concern was always "misunderstood."
" . . . I began having terrible stomach pains.  I tried to ignore
them, but they didn't go away.  They increased.  I was absolutely
certain I had ulcers, and the more I worried, the worse the pain
got.  Henri and Lois Wilson begged me to see a doctor, but the
only one I trusted was in Paris, and knowing me, all of our
friends were reluctant to suggest one.  I was frantic, however, and
in serious pain.  In no way could I start filming in that condition.
Finally I called Jane Grey, a friend who worked for
'Good Housekeeping' magazine, and she recommended a doctor
in Pasadena, who had been treating her mother.  In fact, she swore
by him.  The doctor's name was Henry G. Bieler, and his office was
so tiny and unassuming that I checked the address again before I
went in.  There was no receptionist and no nurse, just a simple
room with a couple of chairs in it and a sign on the wall that said:

" NO SMOKING!"

Oh, no, I thought; had I driven all the way to Pasadena to get a sermon on the
evils of smoking?  What nonsense.  I had been smoking since I was fifteen.
The only time I ever quit was when I was pregnant.
Dr. Bieler was a little man, not much bigger than me.  He looked more like a
bookkeeper than a physician:  no white coat, no stethoscope, no smell of medicine
or disinfectant about him.  I repeated what I had told him on the phone, that I feared
I had ulcers and that Miss Grey had recommended him to me.  He seemed not to
pay much attention to what I said.  He just kept staring at me.  Then he sat
down at his desk and motioned for me to sit down opposite him.
At last he spoke:  "Take off your earrings, please."
As I started to reach for my ears, I thought, 'This is ridiculous, and paused.  I even
considered leaving by the door I had just entered.  He gave me an instant look,
however, so I took off my earrings and put them in my purse.  Still he just kept looking
at me.  Then he reached into a desk drawer, and pulling out a long yellow pad and
pencil, asked,
"What did you have to eat last night?"
I was still dubious ~ very ~ about the earrings business, but at least his second
remark related to my stomach, where the pain was, so I hastened to be cooperative.
"Oh!" I said.  "A shrimp cocktail."
"You didn't have any of those little things before you went to the table?"
"Oh yes, hors d'oeuvres.  Well, let's see, I had some toasted almond, several green
olives wrapped in bacon, and a deviled egg."
He was writing everything down.  When he got to the deviled eggs, he motioned
for me to stop until he could catch up.  Half amused, I looked at the pad as he wrote.
"Deviled egg" wasn't two words.  It was a list of all the ingredients:  egg, mayonnaise,
mustard, paprika, Worcestershire sauce, chives.
"And a bit of pate' and a cheese puff," I said, in a deliberately speeded up tone in
order to convey to him that I was a busy woman and in no mood for games.
With no change of pace on his part, he added those things to the list.
"Did you drink?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.  "Dubonnet.  A sip."
"All right," he said, "now, back to the table.  What kind of sauce did you
have on the shrimp cocktail?"
You have to guess, I wanted to say, but I controlled myself and said, "Something red."
He stopped and considered for a minute and then added many items to the list.  His
inquisition continued, course by course, through the whole meal I had eaten the
night before with Henri and friends:  soup, fish, chicken, the various accompanying
wines, the jelly with the bird, the sauce and the stuffing with the fish,
the peas, the fresh asparagus.
"Hollandaise sauce?" he interjected and I nodded, and he recorded it.  "How about
dessert?" he asked, when we came to the end of the meal.
 
"I have an English cook," I said,
"and she made a trifle."
"I see," he said and wrote down all the
ingredients:  eggs, flour, raspberry jam, sherry,
whipped cream, slivered almonds, and
maraschino cherries.
"Coffee?"
"No."
"Nothing to drink after dinner?"
 
"Yes, champagne," I said, "one glass.  And several cigarettes," I added, assuming that
that was what he had probably been trying to get out of me all along.  It didn't
seem to interest him.  By now he had covered three sheets of foolscap, and
he was scanning them like an accountant.
"I'll tell you what I want you to do," he said.  "Close your eyes while I read off each
item I've recorded here on your chart.  I want you to imagine a plate, empty at first,
and then as I call out these ingredients, I want you to visualize them piling up
on that plate.  Or better still, imagine spooning them into a garbage pail."
He read the whole list slowly to me; waves of nausea built up inside of me,
so that I thought I was going to throw up.  When he finished he asked
me calmly and matter-of-factly,
"Tell me, what animal, including a pig, would eat that combination of things in less than two hours?"
I was dumb struck.  No one had ever spoken to me like that before.  He smiled
quizzically at me for a full beat before he drove the nail home.
"Why do you treat your stomach like a garbage pail?"
We then exchanged a smile of complete trust.  I knew this was the doctor
for me and he knew I was salvageable.
In medical school he had been ill himself, he told me, of asthma and kidney
problems.  His professors recommended all the conventional treatments, but he
got steadily worse.  At last he came across an out-of-print book on fasting.
Having tried everything else without success, he felt he had nothing to lose,
except the useless weight.  As he grew noticeably thinner, his friends and professors
expressed concern.  They told him he was killing himself.  But he didn't feel awful,
and once he had lost sixty pounds, he also lost his asthma and his kidney problems.
Then he began to read some of the books on natural medicine written by traditional
American doctors who had practiced and studied in this country early in the century,
before doctors began to prescribe only the standard drugs and medicines produced
by the huge international pharmaceutical cartels.  At that point, he became a
maverick and reverted to the good sense of a healthier age.
His words made perfect sense to me.  In fact, I felt better just listening to him.  At
the end of an hour and a half he told me I could put my earrings back on.  Then
he prescribed a series of enemas and a modified fast of vegetable broth made of
zucchini, celery, and string beans, and told me come back in a week.
"May I ask why you had me take off my earrings?" I questioned him, before I left.
"Of course," he said.  "I wanted to see your lobes.  Long lobes indicate
healthy adrenals, and you certainly have them."
I had a few rough days as my body gradually eliminated
the poisons built up in it, and Henri protested loudly
that surely I was making myself ill, not well, but by the
time I went back to Dr. Bieler I felt like a different woman.
And by the time we went into the studio to start shooting
"Sadie" ~ my skin was glowing, my eyes were clear and
sparkling, and my nerves were calm.  Dr. Bieler was a great
doctor because he was a great teacher.
He taught me simple things, such as:

There are not thousands of physical disorders, only one ~ toxemia.

We poison ourselves and one another.  Pain is a divine signal from heaven, nature,
Mrs. God, Mother Nature, whatever it is, telling us to mend our ways, to stop
poisoning ourselves, to clean ourselves out.  It we eat simple, natural food in
modest amounts, our wonderful bodies will heal themselves naturally.  Each of
us is personally responsible for his own health.  He said he wouldn't allow his
patients to take any medicine or drugs, not so much as an aspirin.  To take
painkillers and treat symptoms, he said, is as insane as turning off an alarm
while the fire rages on unchecked.
For years, people I didn't know considered me an obsessive crank about food
and diet.  I didn't care.  I still don't, and the longer I live, the more people join
me in the certainty that your body is the direct result of what you eat as well as
what you don't eat.  I know my body.  I like it and I trust it.  I don't stuff it full
of bad food, and I don't let surgeons start cutting into it the minute I have a
pain somewhere, because pain, as Hal Bieler told me 1927, is a divine signal, telling
you to take care of yourself with proper diet, not necessarily telling you or a doctor
who hardly knows you that some part of you has to be cut or numbed with drugs.
Health is just everyday sensible care of your body.

"Thank you" for allowing me to relate Gloria's story.  Because I feel to a
large degree, she has been completely misunderstood, as to why she decided
to follow a healthier lifestyle.

Here's one more item, which will surprise you!

"I became a fanatic about healthy food in 1944, when it became common practice
in the United States to spray crops with insecticides, and as soon as I learned in
1951 that one U.S. Congressman, Representative James J. Delaney, was devoting
himself to having laws passed to stop the food we eat from being sprayed and manured
with harmful chemicals, I threw myself into supporting him in every way I could.
In 1952, I was the guest speaker at the Congressional Wives Club in Washington, on
a day when Bess Truman was the guest of honor, and instead of telling the six or seven
hundred women at the luncheon "all about Hollywood," as I'm sure they expected me
to do, I made them listen to a hundred horrifying facts about female hormones being
injected into chickens, and the poisoned condition of crops and soil all over our
country, and I begged them to go right home and force their husbands, by whatever
means they could bring to bear, to vote for the Delaney Amendment."

I found that interesting, considering that over the past few years, we have
seen quite a few well known celebrities testifying on Capitol Hill,
on behalf of various causes.
 

For more recent film-goers, Gloria's return to the screen in
"Sunset Boulevard"
will always remain a defining moment
in cinematic history!

"All those wonderful people out there in the dark."
 
Released in 1950, the picture starred
"William Holden, Gloria Swanson,
Nancy Olson, and Erich von Stroheim."

The story is so well know, that a
description is not necessary!
Gloria always denied that Norma Desmond, the
faded silent star, who lived in the past and became
demented by Hollywood's neglect, had anything
to do with her own inner process.  But honestly,
how could she not help but identify to
some degree with the character?
Gloria, too, had known great stardom and great
failure.  She had experienced deep disappointments
and neglect for many years, just like Norma, who
also considered herself 'every inch the star.'
They shared so many similarities, that it was
only fitting that Gloria received the honor of
playing this part.
For it she got her third Academy Award
nomination, but unfortunately, Judy Holliday
won for "Born Yesterday."

 
"We didn't need dialogue then.
We had faces!"
 
"I am big!  It's the pictures
that got small!"

"I'm ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille."

The expected offers after "Sunset Boulevard" failed to come in,
and Paramount seemed little interested in her subsequent fortunes.
She was offered a test for "Darling, how could you,"
but proudly refused to test.
 
If they don't know what I can do by now,
why bother!" she exclaimed.
 
In the early seventies I starred in a full length
horror film, called "Killer Bees," made especially
for television.  Although I read the script with
trepidation, I ended up thinking it was
terrific and said, "yes."
 
I played a German woman, the mother of Craig
Stevens.  We shot the film in Hollywood and on
location in the beautiful Napa Valley, above
San Francisco.  We saved the scenes with the
bees for last.  The picture turned out to be a
classic in the genre, I think, and it is rerun
frequently in America and abroad.

 

People always ask me, "Weren't you terrified to
do those scenes with the bees?"  I always want to
say, "Not as terrified as I was to have the lion put
his paw on my back in 1919, for "Male and Female."  But instead, I explain that I was really worried only about my ears, so I put cotton in
them.  Anyway, the bees were sluggish at the
start, when they put them all over me, and only
came alive as the lights warmed them up.
Furthermore, we were told that they had all
their stingers removed, but that is the kind of
information that's always hard to believe.

With Dolores Del Rio, a very rare 1970's shot.

~ Those eyes!  That incredible face! ~
~ She was Gorgeous! ~
And she kept getting better!
 
If in her old age, she jumped off the deep
end proselytizing about "the poisons in
out food that are killing us," she managed
to remain a beloved if not, eccentric
public figure.

 


She certainly never fit anyone's standard
of beauty.  Surprisingly small at slightly
under five feet tall, she was a fashion
plate for over 60 years, and it seemed
that she would go on forever.

Greta Garbo once asked, "Gloria, how you wear me out.
Where do you get all this energy?"
Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to
abide by the simplest of such injunctions.  In 1919, for example, I promised my father
I would never fly in an airplane again.  Although I waited until Daddy died to go back
on my word, I have flown hundreds of thousands of miles since then, in propeller
planes, in giant jets, and in one of the early successful helicopters, over Niagara Falls,
when I felt like a hummingbird.  As a guest of the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, I was even invited, by Wernher von Braun himself, to sit in one
of the first space capsules, before astronauts even flew in it.
In 1921, after two unsuccessful marriages, I told myself and
millions of fans that I would never marry again.  I have had four
more husbands since then.  In 1925, I said I would complete my
contract at Paramount and never make another picture, and
in 1951, after a successful comeback that threatened me with
typecasting for the rest of my life, I vowed I would never play
another aging movie queen.  As recently as 1974, I made a
feature picture in Hollywood and played in it an aging
movie queen ~ myself, Gloria Swanson.

So it's no use saying never.
Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of
rich possibilities to have restrictions placed on it.
 
Gloria Swanson, at eighty-one, in full possession
of all her many strengths, and now the sole
survivor of a lifetime filled with such adventures
that no novelist could begin to imagine, tells
her own story ~ in her own words!
And leaves nothing out!
"These are the memoirs of a great survivor, a great actress, and
a beautiful woman ~ the Hollywood story for all time!"
Previously, she had vowed that it would never happen,
but through the years so much distortion had been
published about her, that she wanted to set the record straight, even if at times her own account didn't flatter
her image.  "I'd rather have the truth in print, even if it's painful and abrasive," she told an interviewer in 1980,
"than lies and fantasies and suppositions."

"Sparkling . . . Movie Stars' memoirs don't get any better
than this," wrote Janet Maslin, of the New York Times.  And
John Barkham has this to say:  " 'Swanson on Swanson' is the
most revealing book ever written by an authentic movie queen."

In 1980 and 1981, Gloria did a cross-country promotional
tour for "Swanson on Swanson" that would have severely taxed the energies of someone a third of her age.

 
If you ever get the chance to read her book, it's absolutely fascinating!
One of the most touching stories within, occurs on the last two pages, where
Gloria is going over her checklist, of the things she wanted to talk about.  In drawing
the book to a close, she returns to the moment in her life, when she felt the happiest ~
but yet, the greatest despair ~ when she would never be able to view her life the same
way, ever again.  She begins by talking about her recent marriage to Henri, her
successful film career, and unfortunately, the baby she decided to not have.
 
In 1925, the Hays Office with its rigid censorship ruled Hollywood with an iron
fist.  If she had Henri's baby, her career would be finished.  The industry and the
public would both reject her, viewing her a morally unsound individual, unfit to
represent them.  So she underwent an abortion of his baby to save her career,
and almost died from the secret operation.
 
"If the operation had gone as smoothly as I was assured it would, I would have
continued my life as usual later that same day and gone on living normally for years
to come, with twinges of guilt, of course, but probably never with any full realization
of my proper feelings about what I had done.  However, the doctor bungled the
simple operation, and the next day I was unconscious with fever.  Then for weeks
I lay between life and death in a Paris hospital, having nightmares about the
child I had killed, wishing I were dead myself."
 
With those words in mind, here's her final
thoughts from the book:

With my children, Joseph,
Michelle, and Gloria
in Beverly Hills, 1934.
"I am blessed at eighty-one with two daughters,
six grandchildren, and two great-grand children.
They are the joys of my life.  In 1975, my son, Joseph,
died, much too soon, much too young.  In 1979, one of
my four granddaughters died, much, much too soon,
much, much too young.  They have been my
greatest sorrows.
"Life and Death."
They are somehow and beautifully mixed,
but I don't know how.
I have only had intimations."

 

In 1966, my dear, sweet mother died.  She was
her own woman, had married three times, had one
child, me, and had fulfilled herself.  Every week
on Sunday, I had called her when we lived apart,
and every year on my birthday I sent her flowers.
I nursed her for the last two weeks of her life as
if she were my baby.  Finally, as she lay in a
hospital bed in California, dying of a stroke from
a transfusion I hadn't wanted her to have, I kept
whispering in her ear, "Let go, my little mother,
let go."  It was as simple as that.  The moment
was there.  I knew it.  So I'm sure, did she.

 
There have to be patterns and reasons, but we can never
seem to figure them out logically or completely.  If we
wait and search, however, we stumble from time to
time onto partial answers.  For example, the greatest
regret of my life has always been that I didn't have
my baby, Henri's child, in 1925.
 
  Nothing in the whole world is worth a baby, I realized as
soon as it was too late, and I never stopped blaming myself.

 

Then in 1979, Bill and I traveled to Japan, and at a Buddhist
temple at a place called Kyo San, or Honorable Mountain,
our guide and a Buddhist monk led us up through the most
timeless, peaceful landscape I have ever seen, asleep or awake;
a mountain forest of giant cedars, with a network of pathways
lacing the area, and ancient graves everywhere.  At one point,
I noticed a tiny figure near the massive roots of one of the
cedars.  Then another.  Then I realized that there were
hundreds.  With little cloth bibs around them.

" What are these? " I asked.
" Babies," the guide said.  He crouched down for a closer look at one stone.
" Fifteen hundred twenty-five.  This baby's life was ended before he was born."
Then he and the monk must have seen how deeply moved I was, for they showed
me how to pay respect in that place.  They gave me a dipper of water and indicated that
I should pour it over the tiny stone figure.  Then I burned the incense the monk
gave me, and left some grains of rice.
As we stood up, I was crying fresh tears out of a guilt I had carried for fifty-four years.
The guide and the monk exchanged some words, and then the guide said to me,
"We all choose our parents.  We choose everything.  No blame."
I believed him.  The message came to me too directly
for me to disbelieve it.  I believe it to this day.  And
since that day on the Honorable Mountain, I look at
my children and their children, and their children
with respect and awe as well as love.
Things are not clear yet, not by a long shot, but they
are getting clearer than they were that day in the
summer of 1898 when I picked Joseph Swanson
and his wife, Adelaide, to be my parents.

Shortly before her death, Gloria said,
"I don't even want a tombstone ~ people will
remember me in their hearts or not at all."

To the end, this ~ 'Lover of Life' ~ lived that "life" to the hilt.
But time was running out, as it must for all mortals.  Gloria began to grow
unaccountably fatigued.  And then, around the time of her eighty-fourth birthday,
came a heart attack.  At Doctors Hospital - Cornell Medical Center, her celebrated
life force seemed at first to rally, and then at 4:45 a.m. on Monday, April 4th, 1983,
she passed away in her sleep.
The large headlines announcing her exit from this life would have pleased her.
"The New York Times" honored her on April 6th, with a special editorial entitled:
"THE GREATEST STAR OF THEM ALL."

"Gloria Swanson, who died this week at the age of 84, was young when the movies
were young, and has to be mentioned in the same breath with Douglas Fairbanks,
Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino.  Unlike her peers, however,
she eclipsed the successes of her youth with one remarkable performance in
middle age.  It's impossible to imagine any other actress playing the deluded
Norma Desmond and uttering that memorable last line,
"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille."

" The Scene was Unreal "
 
Hordes of curiosity-seekers were trying to squeeze into the gowns,
sizes four and six; others were manhandling egret feathers and Lalique
perfume bottles.  The glory that was Gloria Swanson was up for grabs, and
when the auction ended, the tattered gold-thread Salome scarf from the finale
of "Sunset Boulevard" had brought $8,000.  But this was not the end of the
indomitable star who died in the spring of 1983.
The real Swanson treasures are stored away at the University of Texas, not to
be opened until the year 2000, presumably in deference to the family of
Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., who might be embarrassed by the love letters
he wrote to Gloria when she was his mistress.  "I don't want to cause
any embarrassment to anybody.  But I feel that the letters should be
kept because they show a different side of a man who was an
important figure in American history."
But aside from the personal notoriety, there is no question, hers was
one of the important careers in film history.  Her performances,
too little seen today, defy age, just as she did!
Gloria was Magnificent!

Be sure to tune in at a later date, when I'll be presenting
the stunning theatrical tribute to
"Sunset Boulevard."

"Gloria would have been thrilled,"
remarked Bette Midler.

 

 
 
 
 
 
 

 

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