Gloria Swanson Quotes

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 Cecil B. DeMille’s 1920 film Why Change Your Wife?, the usually glamorous Gloria Swanson played a wife who wore glasses, listened to classical music, and read such books as How to Improve Your Mind. It was obvious to the audience why her husband left her for a perfumed, short-skirted man chaser. But a happy ending was achieved when Swanson’s character ordered some sleeveless, backless dresses and devoted herself to improving her dance steps instead of her mind.

My mother and I could always look out the same window without ever seeing the same thing.

One of the very hot topics between Jimmy and Sam Giancana was Senator John F. Kennedy’s upcoming campaign for president. This was very controversial between them. Giancana had been promised by Kennedy’s old man that he could control Bobby and nobody had to worry about Bobby if Jack got in. The Kennedy old man had made his money alongside the Italians as a bootlegger during Prohibition. He brought in whiskey through Canada and distributed it to the Italians. The old man kept his contacts with the Italians over the years as he branched out into more legitimate things, like financing movie stars like Gloria Swanson who he was having affairs with. Sam Giancana was going to help John F. Kennedy against Nixon and so were Giancana’s buddy Frank Sinatra and practically all of Hollywood.

I could visualize them then, the men who had decided sometime in the distant past what the purpose of human life on earth really was and had set up dormitories and Population Control and the Rules of Privacy and the dozens of inflexible, solipsistic Edicts and Mistakes and Rules that the rest of mankind would live by until we all died out and left the world to the dogs and cats and birds. They would have thought of themselves as grave, serious, concerned men—the words “caring” and “compassionate” would have been frequently on their lips. They would have looked like William Boyd or Richard Dix, with white hair at the temples and rolled-up sleeves and, possibly, pipes in their mouths, sending memos to one another across paper-and-book-piled desks, planning the perfect world for Homo sapiens, a world from which poverty, disease, dissension, neurosis, and pain would be absent, a world as far from the world of the films of D. W. Griffith and Buster Keaton and Gloria Swanson—the world of melodrama and passions and risks and excitement—as all their powers of technology and “compassion” could devise.

In the early seventies I starred in a full-length horror film called 'Killer Bees,' made specifically for television, and 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, as Mr. DeMille had saved the lion for last in 'Male and Female.' 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 a lion put his paw on my back in 1919, but instead I explain that I was really worried only about my ears, so I put cotton in them, and that 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 it is always hard to believe.

I’ve given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can’t divorce a book. —Gloria Swanson

Spending time around her house, I came across a cache of 16mm movies in her basement. It turned out that Barbara [Stanwyck] had a lot of her own movies, and I convinced her to spend some time watching them with me. I ran the projector. She had prints of Union Pacific, Ball of Fire, and Baby Face, among others. She didn't particularly like watching them, but she did enjoy reminiscing about their production: how she got the part, what the location was like, that sort of thing. She liked people with humor and always spoke highly of Gary Cooper, Joel McCrea, and Frank Capra. Oddly enough, she wasn't crazy about Preston Sturges; she seemed to feel that he expended all his charm and humor for his movies and that there wasn't anything left for his actors. In broad outline, all this sounds a little bit like the scene in Sunset Boulevard where Gloria Swanson sits with William Holden and watches a scene from Queen Kelly, rhapsodizing about her own face. But Barbara couldn't have cared less about how she looked; as I watched her films with her, it was clear that, for her, the movies were a job she loved, as well as a social occasion for a woman who was otherwise something of a loner.