Posted By BillHeise on February 27, 2010

I watched Sunset Boulevard yesterday with Gloria Swanson in the role of Norma Desmond. She’s as creepy as it gets in Hollywood, and never more so than when her imaginative mind has taken full control of her reason in the final moments of the film when she addresses “those wonderful people out there in the dark.” Then she tells Mr. DeMille that she’s ready for her closeup and the lines of her face disappear into a clouded and indistinct figure, just as she has lost the ability to distinguish what is real from what is the product of her imagination:

I love her, but I didn’t know much about her.I looked her up on Wikipedia and found out that she was a silent film star who couldn’t make the transition into “talkies.” So she went back east and worked in local theater.

But in her day, she was  one of the Hollywood pioneers of the the glamor queen look. This blog describes her as the first “clothes-horse” in Hollywood:

audiences flocked to her films to view her wardrobe as much as her performance. Her fashion ensembles, hair styles, and jewels were legendary (her annual budget for jewels was reported to be $500,000).

By 1924, Gloria Swanson was a leading screen actress. On screen, Swanson cultivated the image of an exotic, mysterious, and, at times, slightly dangerous, woman. Off-screen she was stunningly frank, outrageous, and a shrewd business women. In all her worlds, Swanson was the embodiment of the modern, liberated woman.

I love this picture of her, taken by Edward Steichen, the chief photographer for Condé Nast’s flagship magazines, Vogue and Vanity Fair.

And here are three more photographs of her:

Here she is in her (I am not making this up) “monkey fur cape.”

Here, she loses her clothes and dons the twenties version of Princess Leia’s Metal Bikini:

Here she is showing the free spirit of a woman who had gained the reputation as a “stunningly frank, outrageous” woman.

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