EMMA MARGUERITE "PEGGY" UPTON BECAME PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE THROUGH MARRIAGES : MICKEY NEILAN WENT FROM PEGGY TO GLORIA

In this passage, the way movie stars, directors, producers, and financiers intertwined in Golden Era Hollywood reminds me that it was once a very small town.

Excerpt page 79  Mickey Neilan swept her (Gloria Swanson) off her feet that summer with his madcap, brilliant, vivacious insouciance and his claim that there were only some 290 days before he was free to marry her. "After Herbert, how could I not love him?" she would ask. "After one afternoon with him, how could I not forget Craney Gartz and every other handsome man who had ever tempted me?  As Mickey waltz me into my first real love affair, it never occurred to me to utter a syllable of protest."

While waiting for his divorce to become final, Mickey lived like a young lord at the Los Angeles Athletic Club next to Charlie Chaplin, who was trying to escape the sensational charges surrounding his divorce from the teenage Mildred Harris.  Mickey's romance with Gloria was particularly torrid and came after his affair with Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl who distracted him so much from his long and confused  Strangers Banquet that the  cast and crew had to wait two weeks after the starting date before Neilan showed up. The term "gold digger' had been coined in honor of Peggy around 1920.  Born Margaret Upton in Virginia, the bid blonde had arrived in Chicago in 1914, changed her name to Hopkins, and landed her first millionaire husband, Stanley Joyce.  Divorced with a million-dollar settlement, she had, in quick succession, netted four more millionaire husbands. Dressed in stylish mourning outfits, because Henri Letellier, a famous Parisian publisher and man-about-town, had just taken his life on her account, she had cruised into Hollywood with a three-million-dollar bankroll, bent on a movie career.  After Mickey's infatuation with her had cooled, he had introduced her to Chaplin, who used the story of her relationship with Letellier as a basis for A Woman of Paris.

Notes: Herbert Somborn was Gloria Swanson's second husband.  She had an affair with Mickey but decided on marriage to Henri de la Falaise, during which she had her relationship with Joseph P. Kennedy.

A Woman of Paris was Chaplin's movie that came out in 1923

Margaret Upton is an Americanization of her name given a birth : Emma Marguerite Upton

The Author was incorrect that Peggy changed her name to Peggy Hopkins. The name was a result of her second marriage.

in 1910 she married Everett Allen Archibald Jr., a millionaire. But she was only fifteen years old and so the marriage was annulled. (What kind of parents did she have?)

In 1913 she married Sherburne Philbrick Hopkins, a lawyer from a prominent and rich family. She left him to pursue acting and with his approval that she marry James Stanley Joyce.

in 1920, she married James Stanley Joyce.  She married two days after ending her marriage with Hopkins. This was her most famous marriage because of the story that she refused to come to him on their wedding night unless he wrote her a check for half a million dollars first.

During this era in Hollywood, in which Pat Powers, an associate of Joseph P. Kennedy, attempted to move Peggy into an acting career, she then married in 1924 to Count Gosta Gustave Morner, who she said was her first true love. They divorced in 1926.

Peggy had two more husbands in her life, years later. This information was culled from Wikipedia.  I note that her reputation as a "Gold Digger" came because of her many marriages to rich men, but also because she attracted other men who wanted to marry her, but I wonder if it was only that she was beautiful and charming. What about men who go after a woman knowing they may not succeed with her?

Missy.

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PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : THE ORCHID LADY OF STAGE AND SCREEN

 

In the Roaring Twenties Peggy Hopkins Joyce was called

 "The Orchid" or "The Orchid Lady of Stage and Screen: 

Orchids were (and often are) exotic and, when rare, expensive,

 and require special care, 

just as she did.

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : SPENDTHRIFTY GOLD DIGGER : THE GOLD DIGGER AS A COMIC FIGURE : HUNGER MAKES YOU THINK

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE 

 SPENDTHRIFTY GOLD DIGGER

First posted on April 5th 2010

Born Emma Marguerite Upton

1893 – 1957

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE was the most publicized Mistress-Courtesan of the 1920's and 1930's. She was introduced to Florenz Ziegfeld, who owned the famous showgirl venue New Amsterdam Theatre, by a dressmaker to fashionable ladies, Madame Frances, and her career began. She was a heartbreaker and international celebrity, perhaps the first famous to be famous woman of the 20th century. She was known for her spendthrifty ways as well as a steamy sex life. Was Peggy ruthless and sociopathic? Or did she simply decide at a young age that she would do well, beyond her childhood as the daughter of a Norfolk barber?

She had three multimillionaire husbands. And a great number of generous patrons. She came to own one of the largest blue diamonds known to the world in her time.

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : THE GOLD DIGGER AS A COMIC FIGURE

First posted April 6 2010

Excerpt Page 84 :

"Though the gold digger is a comic, not a tragic figure, she is not totally uncomplicated. While men adored these creatures, they were also made slightly uneasy by them. It was appealing to have a glamorous plaything whose favors could be bought for no more than the price of a fashionable apartment, a generous allowance, and a regular supply of steak dinners and expensive jewelry. But in making such a hard-nosed exchange, these women exhibited not only a deep cynicism but also a degree of power, which is one reason men felt a certain anxiety in their presence. Men were also made uncomfortable by females who so flagrantly flouted the social rules designed to keep people in their places. Unlike the courtesans of Europe, who occupied an established an respected niche, the American gold digger was a renegade; there was nothing subtle, or admirable, about her methods - or her goals."

 

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE : HUNGER MAKES YOU THINK

First posted April 9 2010

Excerpt Page 43: 

In her memoirs Peggy described her transition from society wife to Broadway showgirl as the ultimate Cinderella story... As she told it, she left home in March on 1915 with a single suitcase full of clothes and headed by train to New York, where she ensconced herself in the Hopkins family suite in the St Regis Hotel off Fifth Avenue... Wearing torn stockings, her last pair of fresh underwear, and a plaid suit that badly needed cleaning, she headed south towards Times Square pondering the ways of the world.

"Hunger certainly makes you think about things," she wrote. "When I was a kid I used to think that it was Love that was the most important thing in Life, then after that experience in Denver I thought it was money, but now I know it is food." - Peggy Hopkins Joyce

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MISTRESSES DISCOVERED IN THE GLORIA SWANSON STORY : PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE and CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG

As you know, MISTRESS MANIFESTO depends most often on books - biographies and memoirs especially - that have been published in the past and which I've selected and read cover to cover.  Once in a while I read a book about one of the women I plan to elect to the Mistress of the Month pantheon, and I find that another Mistress or two has been mentioned.

That's been the case reading 'Gloria and Joe' by Axel Madsen, which was my primary source for posts last month about Gloria Swanson.

Golden Era Hollywood - Silent Films - Talkies -  The development of technologies, the movie-makers - producers - directors - studio heads -  Madsen's book tells a lot.  To my surprise a woman I wrote about in April of 2010, Peggy Hopkin's Joyce, called a 'Gold Digger' and who ended up one of the world's largest diamonds, is mention. Another woman mentioned is the actress Clara Kimball Young, who, shame on me, I never had heard of before. These two women who were in Hollywood and hoping to become movie stars in the same era as Gloria Swanson.

Now, if you've been reading MISTRESS MANIFESTO, you know that the Classic Mistress is a woman who was (or maybe is) entirely "Kept" by a man who she isn't married to. Kept as if being financially provided for, often for her entire life, sometimes though he is married to one - or several women - over time.

Gloria Swanson was a talented and determined woman whose personal life suffered because of her fame and wealth and perhaps her own unconventional values. However, I think that if she had come of age in the 1960's she would have had affairs but not married the men she did when it was believed with good reason that a celebrity could have their fans turn against them if they went against the morals of the day. Having a series of lovers and not marrying them is rarely such a scandal now. 

But what about Peggy Hopkins Joyce? Clara Kimball Young? Let's find out what author Axel Madsen wrote about them in his book Gloria and Joe. I'll add-to with research and reportage as we go along.

Missy

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GLORIA SWANSON SAID "IF YOU'RE 40 YEARS OLD AND YOU'VE NEVER HAD A FAILURE ...

You've been deprived!

Gloria Swanson by A. L. Whitey Schafer

August's Posts Will Begin Tomorrow!

 MISSY ASKS YOU!

Are you a person who learns from your failures?

 

GLORIA SWANSON : A WOMAN OF SCIENCE and INVENTION

ANOTHER SIDE OF GLORIA SWANSON : While researching around Gloria and Joe, I found that the Library of Congress Blog included Gloria in it's WOMEN OF INVENTION website!

Excerpt: When the legendary screen diva Gloria Swanson died in 1983, she was 82 years old. Yet, for all the things she did–the multitude of lifetimes she seemed to live–it does not seem possible that one person was able to fit all of it in just eight quick decades. Consider what Gloria Swanson (whose legendary film “Sunset Boulevard,” from 1950, was among the very first films added to the Library’s National Film Registry) was: an actress, film producer, fashion designer (and fashion icon), acclaimed visual artist, best-selling author, newspaper columnist, businesswoman, health advocate, radio host, and television pioneer. And, even then, she still found the time to raise three children and marry (and usually divorce) six husbands!

Additionally, one aspect of her life for which Swanson should also be remembered is as an inventor, patent holder, patent facilitator/executive and humanitarian. It’s a quartet of labels that all arrived, more or less, together.

 Read all about it!

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS BLOG : GLORIA SWANSON WOMAN OF INVENTION 

MISTRESS GLORIA SWANSON & WIFE ROSE KENNEDY : A LOVE TRIANGLE

 Joe Kennedy told his wife that Gloria Swanson  was his most important business partner.

Excerpt page 212 : ... The two women in his life played along.  Echoing Joe's exact sentiments, Gloria told Rose she was grafted she had her husband to giver her the right business advice because her affairs were a mess.  Gloria would always wonder what exactly Rose knew, and she always watched for a remark, a glance, a gesture, that would tell her whether Rose was a saint, a fool, or a better actress than she.  There were moments she knew she was being tolerated, for Joe's sake, and moments when Rose must have been aware of the fatuously surprised face Gloria showed.

Rose willed herself to believe that her husband told her.  She, they, had nothing in common with Gloria, no convictions, no sanctity. The mere fact of lying - if that was what Joe was doing - showed he respected that sanctity, the family they had created together, even if he had deserted their marriage bed. So to Rose, Gloria was a talented star, incipiently crucified by her own good looks, terribly lonely behind the put-on self-deprecation and blasé indifference to her own fame. Gloria was a woman married to an affable but untalented man and therefore desperately in need of Joe's solicitude and financial acumen.

Joe Kennedy promised Gloria that she would never have to be alone with his wife, Rose. He had Gloria come out to the family compound in Hyannisport. But the day came when Gloria was tricked into being taken to talk to the Cardinal O'Connell of Boston. She bluffed that she had only a business association with Joe. He knew better. He told her that Joe was in trouble. His Catholicism was being challenged by having the affair with her. She was offended. She thought the Cardinal should be talking to Joe. But the message was clear. She was being told to quit the affair with Joe, to leave him be. It's possible that Rose's father was the person who had contacted the Archdiocese of Boston. The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper reported that the former Boston mayor (Rose's father) had ordered Joe Kennedy to get out of Hollywood.

When Joe dumped Gloria, he simply left Hollywood without making plans to see her.  Some years went by and, perhaps both had become philosophical, because the author reports of a friendly-enough phone call and favor.

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GLORIA SWANSON : SINKING MONEY AND TIME INTO THE MOVIE 'QUEEN KELLY' WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Excerpt page 201 :  Gloria and Joe were having dinner on Rodeo Drive when Joe handed her a leather--bound copy of Stroheim's massive script and told her Robert Sherwood had finally read it and pronounced it the best film story ever written...  (Queen Kelly's script was originally entitled The Swamp.)  

Excerpt page 14 :  By starting their ambitious film project as a silent (film) four months after the release of the all-talking Lights of New York, producers Swanson and Kennedy and director Stroheim were extraordinarily careless, suicidal, or both.

The movie was worked on in 1928-1929 - the years in which the stock market fell and the Great Depression took hold. At the time technology for recording wasn't terrific and frustrated the actors and directors who had to carefully move on set to be near hidden microphones.  Sound engineers were trained by the telephone companies and if an actor turned his head away from the microphone they'd have to yell cut and start over. Some actors waited to see how it would all work out. Some actors lost their careers when the public heard what they sounded like. In some cases sound was added to silent film. All all-talkie was a film in which the entire film from start to finish had sound - the actors voices - background.

Excerpt page 205 : ... (A front page story read..) "Miss Swanson will appear in a few talking sequences and it marks the first time for her voice to be heard by the general public. She had never made any personal appearances tours nor has she ever spoken over the radio.: A Variety item a week later announced that Ben Glazer, the overseer with Le Baron of the Stroheim project, was working on the screen treatment of FBO's first talkie, a film scheduled to go into production in ten days.  Persistent rumors that Stroheim and Swanson did not see eye to eye on Queen Kelly were only laid to rest on November 5 when Motion Picture news reported that the film "went into actual production Thursday morning on location at the old Lasky ranch."

Another possible issue that might have delayed the making of Queen Kelly was that Joe Kennedy said that more than anything he wanted the two of them to have a child. Kennedy already had many children with his wife, Rose. Gloria said there was no way she would be willing to do that.  Yet, it is possible that she did become pregnant and had an abortion.

Excerpt: Queen Kelly, in the scheme of things, was an anachronism, a Gloria Productions film for United Artists, shooting on RKO stages because of its star's personal relationship with the ancien regime... and with each passing week, wearing out its welcome

In the end, Stroheim went way over budget and the money lost was significant. Queen Kelly was released as a silent film by United Artist in 1931. According to Wikipedia, it was released as a part-talkie in European and South American markets because of a contract she had with Stroheim and that version had a different ending - a different director and cinematographer - a year or so later.

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VIVACIOUS

 

PLANNED DOWN TIME NOTICE : MISTRESS MANIFESTO WILL BE "DOWN" AT SOME POINT IN THE NEAR FUTURE

To my regular readers!

After blogging for so many years, it's time to move MISTRESS MANIFESTO to a new theme and format. Although this, and some other adjustments, may happen quickly and easily, a day or so perhaps, I want you to know that I'm preparing for glitches or more time consuming actions. I will be trying to do technology updates bit by bit at first without disappearing from the Internet, but it's likely my tech will have more recommendations....

Missy

GLORIA SWANSON and JOE KENNEDY : THE WAY THEY WERE

 He was married with many children, she was married with two.

Excerpt page 194 : Gloria was very much one of Hollywood's own, and honored player of the movie colony's most popular pastime, a party-giving and party-goi9ng, but Joe was not.  His Catholicism and Boston sense of propriety prevented him from a too ostentatious display of his double existence  Though many in Hollywood would later make the comparison, Gloria and Joe were no Marion Davies - William Randolph Hearst twosome who flaunted their liaison.

For one thing, Gloria and Joe were both married with children. She was no starlet looking for  a sugar daddy; he, no elderly tycoon hopelessly in love with a chorus girl. She saw in him someone who was plainly going far, and she fell in love with his business savvy and can-do openness. He was the one man in her life she trusted when it came to money. To him, she was one of the most desirable women, one of the symbols he had grappled with all the way up from East Boston  He fell in love with a woman who was everything Rose was not.  Gloria was, first of all, fame --- a woman whose public personality spoke to people of golden youth and glitter.  To discover that she was also a creature of shadows was part of his lover's ecstasy. She was a woman of her own means, self-confident and elusive, possessed of a dignity that was both paralyzing and magnificent. In their intimacy, she was almost tomboyish --- terse and disarming.  Fun, too.

Excerpt pages 194-195 :

Smitten with her from the first meeting at the Savoy Plaza (Palm Beach - Florida) two months earlier --- with the idea of her as well as the fact --- he was not only giving her advice but smothering her with attention.  He loved uncovering the Gloria Swanson millions would never know --- the quiet, slightly weary person with soft hair and a dark, husky voice so different from the screen image, the woman who boasted that she'd never been kept.  None of her homes, he happily discovered, was a place into which friends casually dripped.....

They made love at his place. Here, he was in control of comings and goings of staff and underlings. On Crescent Drive (Beverly Hills), her waking hours were a series of disturbances by butler and maids, secretaries and assistants, and her moods ran in channels dammed up by her staff.  On Rodeo Drive (Beverly Hills - his place) order flowed effortless from the master.

Excerpt page 209 :

...When he had a moment alone with Gloria, he called her the most desirable woman, held her gaze with his electric blue stare, and said he couldn't wait to take her out that evening. She told him they had to be reasonable; they couldn't be seen together.  "We're business associates," he grinned.

"Business is done in the daytime if both associates are married," she said.

If you want to know the slightly more scintillating details - not pornographic but - certainly get yourself a copy of this book.|

In this passage, we note that Gloria Swanson had never been kept and was proud of that, as a woman who had earned her own for years. All Mistresses are not Kept, and all adulterers are not Mistresses, and so here we go again trying to define Mistress. It is the nature of the relationship that defines it, I believe, but in popular thought it's all about money and sex, as if love doesn't count.

Gloria Swanson's husband Henri moved into an affair with actress Constance Bennet.

Missy

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GLORIA SWANSON AND THE "BANKER" JOE KENNEDY : HE DID HIS RESEARCH AND WAS INTENT ON SEDUCING HER ... SHE LET HIM ...

Not only because he desired Gloria Swanson as a woman, but because he wanted this actress, perhaps the most famous and successful in the silent film era, to work for his studio and make money together.

Joseph P. Kennedy was the youngest bank president in the United States in 1914 when he was only twenty-five years old.  He had graduated from Harvard and was vividly aware of the discrimination against Catholics and the Irish. He went on to make a fortune in the stock market, and in real estate, and he wanted to add a Hollywood studio and movie making to his wealth portfolio. Though he had many a success in business, reading Axel Madsen's account, I couldn't help but think that he was overly confident that he could also succeed in Hollywood. He went after Gloria Swanson in a manner that would suggest that he had done some research and knew that she was in debt because of her own efforts to produce her own movies.

It's easy to vilify Kennedy but it would also seem that Gloria Swanson didn't resist his seduction.

Circa 1928  Joseph P. Kennedy invited Gloria Swanson and her husband Henri de la Falaise to come to Palm Beach, Florida, where he'd bought a house for his family. He was welcoming and so was Palm Beach society. Calling cards, invitations, parties in her honor, teas, receptions, and business meetings too. He was very proud of knowing her.  He also endeavored to get Henri out of the way. 

 

Excerpt pages 174-175: 

In retrospect, Gloria would remember the tact with which Joe made the offer that could make her husband distinct his own man and, if Henri was clever, rich as well. In her autobiography, her smile o gratitude to Joe when the two men came to a quick verbal agreement immediately precedes her account of how the next day she and Joe tumbled into bed. Her indebtedness to Joe no doubt softened, in her own eyes, the adultery that, since the kiss on the train, she knew was inevitable. In a reversal of the story of the biblical David, who sent Uriah into the most dangerous part of the battle so he could possess Bathsheba, Joe was ready to heap gold on the man he wanted to cuckhold.

Kennedy biographers would wax saucily on how Joe eliminated, with some permanence, the coveted movie queen's husband, but neither Gloria nor the Kennedy memorialists could explain how Joe was able to offer Henri a Pathe directorship in January when he didn't become a Pathe advisor until February. Gloria was, of course, writing for posterity, and by having Joe's generosity and Henri's opportunism preceded her surrender, she softened her image...

Henri would leave no memoirs of his own, and we can only speculate on whether it all passed over his head or whether he knew he was defeated and went for the proffered brass ring. ... he might have been the first to sense he was on a sinking ship and that his wife's impending adultery set him free, morally, to concentrate on enriching himself.

Joe's infatuation was hard to ignore. Others saw how he was dazzled and drawn by Gloria's presence, how his own success - Palm Beach, Gloria, the lot - all made him live beyond the rules, how she exerted an attraction that went beyond physical beauty.

Excerpt page 193 : ... (Circa 1928) ... (Joseph P. Kennedy) took over Gloria's life.  He arranged everything, including Henri's departures. The lovers had two distinct lives: one with each other when Henri was in France, another when the marquis was in town. Joe arranged his own existence so as to be in Hollywood when Henri was not and in the east when Gloria's husband was home.

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BASKETFUL

 

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY - THE PATRIARCH : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

 JOSEPH P. KENNEDY - THE PATRIARCH : 

The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw. 

MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

first posted February 26, 2018

This is a fine work, well researched with permission of the Kennedy Family who allowed sealed documents at the Kennedy Library to be open to the author, and can be read just for the historical content.  Joseph. P. Kennedy was the self made man who fathered U.S. President John F. Kennedy and left his many children millions.  We Americans seem to know a lot about them, and this vast family still has some illustrious members. Of surprise to me (and I've read so many books about the Kennedys and Jackie and Marilyn) is that Joseph P. Kennedy had quite the relationship with Franklin Roosevelt before and after he became President of the United States and was no stranger to visits to the White House, but also that he socialized with William Randolph Hearst and his Mistress Marion Davies.  Author David Nasaw's focus is entirely on Joseph P. Kennedy so the relationships of all other's named, including his wife Rose, are not detailed, and if you've read a lot of books or seem a lot of films around the Kennedy's much of the information you read here may seem repetitive.  However, I'm reviewing this book for MISTRESS MANIFESTO because of the many characters in it that you have read about here (and can easily summon up using the Google Search feature embedded in the side bar to bring up past posts about!)

These include: 

Joseph P. Kennedy's Mistress Gloria Swanson

William Randolph Hearst and his Mistress Marion Davies

Missy Lehand, said to be the in-Whitehouse Mistress of President Franklin Roosevelt,

Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, daughter of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy.

Clare Boothe Luce (Who I owe a month to.)

And of course Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, who I think would have made a better Mistress than a Wife.

I came away with an understanding that Joseph, though frequently not home due to business, and the fact that he and Rose seemingly lived separate lives though united by their children. wrote loving letters to his children and had not abandoned his fatherhood.

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Here's where you can find posts in my archive:

November 2019

MARGUERITE "MISSY" LEHAND :OFFICE WIFE AND WARM SPRINGS MISTRESS OF FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

July 2013
MARION "ROSEBUD" DAVIES : MISTRESS OF NEWSPAPER MAN AND HEARST CASTLE BUILDER  WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

March

KATHLEEN “KICK” KENNEDY ; Sister of J.F.K., Widow of Billy Hartington, Mistress of Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam When They Died in A Plane Crash

GLORA SWANSON IN JAZZ AGE PARIS : YOUNG and RICH - READY TO REMARRY - PREGNANCY and THE NIGHTMARE ABORTION

Gloria Swanson in Jazz Age Paris : She wrapped a movie called Madame Sans Gene, which was being touted as another success and galas for the opening were being planned in New York City. Starting in January 1925 she would be making $7,000 a week. She had met the man who would become her next husband, French nobleman Henry de La Falaise, reputed to be a millionaire himself. He wasn't close. Her net worth was higher. He was alarmed by her spending; A costume party in which guests danced to three bands, for instance, or that she had bought gifts for every member of the cast and crew of the film. She was mixing with the most famous and successful creative people in Paris.

Excerpt page 109: News of Gloria Swanson's sumptuous wrap party reached American gossip columns, together with rumors that the screen idol had gone totally French - indeed, that as soon as her divorce became final in January, she would marry a French Millionaire and quit the movies. ...... She discovered she was pregnant.

Gloria  had signed the morals clause in her contract. Her divorce from Herbert Somborn was not final and she dreaded being known to have had an affair by giving birth "very prematurely." She couldn't marry Henri de La Falaise asap and become a bigamist. She decided having an abortion was the only thing she could do. And she decided to do so without telling him.  It would not be her first abortion. For she had been aborted during her first marriage to Wallace Beery. She called a journalist, the only person she thought she could trust to explain her dilemma and find a doctor for her.

Excerpt page 109 : ... When she said she saw no other solution but an abortion, he agreed. "You and Henri are both young," he said. "You have all the time in the world to have another child." The words stung. When she was seventeen a nurse had told her the same thing. She had judged Wallace Beery harshly then, had never really forgiven him, and now she was ready to do the same thing.

Andre (Davin) arranged the abortion while Henri arranged a civil wedding.  As it turned out, she was given permission to legally marry Henry earlier than she had thought and as it turned out the abortion had been arranged for the day after she had the permission to marry!

She married Henry and then Andre went with her to the abortion doctor. She was given ether (put her under before the surgery) and afterwards she was "surprised she could walk." She went back to their hotel suite at the Plaza Athenee and went to bed, awakening with a serious fever. 

Except page 110: By nightfall she was drenched in fever. Henri called a doctor, who had her hospitalized. Each time she woke up. Henri was there. She told him the truth; he told her she had tetanus. He didn't say that such infections were often fatal and characterized by violent spasms and rigidity of many or all the voluntary muscles. Nurses tried to make her stand up; her feet folded under her. Finally, she had her first meal sitting in a wheelchair. Everybody applauded when she began moving her toes.

Of course, the truth of her illness was kept a secret. 

Excerpt page 111: The return to America was a triumph. Gloria's marriage to a nobleman and her long battle with death had provided Famous Players-Lasky/Paramount with millions of dollars' worth of free publicity, and Zukor and Lasky pulled out all the stops. Adoring crowds nearly smothered the far from recovered movie star, but it was out of the question for Gloria to lay low.

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JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS by CARI BEAUCHAMP ! MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

JOSEPH P. KENNEDY PRESENTS by CARI BEAUCHAMP ! 

MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

First posted May 14, 2009

Long wait for this new book from the public library but worth it! Joe Kennedy made a fortune in the movies about the time (1920's - early 1930's) that talkies and sound film came into being, leaving most silent stars in the dust! Read all about his outside of marriage relationship with actress Gloria Swanson... (Did his bail out of her misfortunes end in a rip off and personal betrayal?)

pages 276-277

...Rose (Kennedy - Joe's wife, mother of eventual President John F. Kennedy) never publicly wavered from her deep-seated belief that Joe's relationship with Gloria was purely professional... (Goodwin) was incredulous about Rose's "strange attitude" and concluded that "it is impossible to believe that Rose did not know," yet she had "willed" that knowledge out of her consciousness. it was "better perhaps to follow the pattern set by her mother long ago: to suffer in silence rather than take the enormous risk of shattering the entire family and bringing public disgrace upon herself and her husband."....

... Gloria too was shocked at Rose's failure to see anything untoward in her relationship with Joe. "If she suspected me of having relations not quite proper with her husband, or resented me for it, she never once gave any indication of it." Was Rose "a fool, I asked myself as I listened with disbelief, or a saint? Or just a better actress than I was..."

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GLORIA SWANSON AT THE HEIGHT OF HER CAREER : SHE FELT BLACKMAILED INTO AN EXPENSIVE DIVORCE BY HER HUSBAND AND THE HAYS OFFICE

Excerpt page 5 : In 1924, Hollywood movies were made on sets built on stages and back lots. Newfangled rear projection and process-screen photography even enabled characters to sit or stand in front of a screen and appear to be anywhere in the world.  To go overseas to make a picture was unheard of. ...

With the possible exception of Mary Pickford, who never managed the transition from  the girlish image that had made her "America's Sweetheart" to full screen womanhood, Gloria Swanson was the most popular  female celebrity in the movie-crazed mid 1920's. When, in September 1924, she sailed to Europe to make Madame Sans Gene, she was twenty-five, had starred in thirty movies - six in a row with *De Mille - and her leading men had included the great heartthrobs from Wallace Reid to Rudolph Valentino.

When Gloria Swanson wanted out of her marriage with Herbert Somborn, he and his attorney threatened her for $150,000: According to author Axel Madsen, De Mille was panicking too.  The Hays Office, as it was called, had instituted morality clauses in movie star's contracts with their studios, and a nasty divorce with rumors flying about her infidelity could end her career.  As a result, De Mille called a meeting and insisted that the divorce would have to be settled secretly as, though she could have charged her husband with desertion a year earlier, now her circumstances could threaten the entire industry! (pages 86-87)

Excerpt Page 87:  When the divorce papers were presented to her, she was tempted to sign it all without seeing her own humiliation spelled out in black and white.  She steeled herself, however, and began to read. Paramount was indeed picking provisions that awarded Herbert $70,000 because he ha "assisted in procuring" her much-improved contract. He was paid $35,000 in cash and another $35,000 in installments, deducted from her salary at the rate of $500 a week. There was more. To keep her job, she had to sign a morals clause waiver. Should she in the future "be charged with adulterous conduct or immoral relations with men other than her husband, and such charges or any of them were published in the public press," her contract would be null and void.  Angry and embarrassed, she signed and went back to work.

During her marriage to Somborn, from 1919-to 1922, Gloria gave birth to a daughter and adopted a son. She remarried to French nobleman Henry de La Falaise in 1925. She had her relationship with Joseph P. Kennedy during that marriage. She and Henry divorced in 1931.

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* Demille : Cecil B. DeMille - a movie producer and actor
** Herbert K. Somborn (m. 1919; div. 1922): President of Equity Pictures Corporation.

GLORIA SWANSON IN THE 1923 SILENT FILM "ZAZA"

Gloria Swanson was one of those few actors who was able to go from the acting - later considered exaggerated expressions to convey the emotions and story - necessary in silent films to the talkies, both speaking and singing as well as acting more naturally. Her career was roaring in the 1920's, the era of the flapper, and the New Woman. She married six times and had three children as well as being engaged in political and humanitarian causes in which she used her fame.

From 1914 to 1974 she appeared in films and on some television programs.

IMDb GLORIA SWANSON's FILM CAREER A long list.  Click here!

Gloria Swanson was the top movie actress in the United States for many years, unless you considered Mary Pickford. Pickford was not successful past the silent film era.

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GLORIA SWANSON and HER RED CARNATIONS

Gloria Swanson was known to carry a red carnation when she was out in public or appeared on a television talk show, so that flower became an associated icon. She would give them as little gifts. In 1981 during an interview with Barbara Walters, she said she had first started doing so in order to have something to do with her hands instead of smoking a cigarette. She exercised, limited her diet to health foods, and credited taking care of her health for maintaining her beauty without cosmetic surgeries or procedures.

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GLORIA SWANSON - THE PATRIOT and HUMANITARIAN

In the late 1930's and early 1940's, the World War II era, Gloria Swanson put at least $25,000 into establishing a company called "Multiprises," with the mission to help Jewish and anti-Nazi scientists and inventors to escape from Europe and set up in the United States. They were working to develop new technologies that would be useful to the United States military.

The actress would be considered a conservative today. She was a Republican who supported the presidential campaigns and of Wendell Willkie (1940, 1944), Thomas E. Dewey, and Barry Goldwater (1964). In 1964, she also spoke at a "Project Prayer" rally in Los Angeles, advocating for school prayer in public schools. In 1980 she activated for the Reagan-Bush presidential election. I speculate her attraction to the Republican party - as it was in those days - was because she was a self made business woman.

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This post is the result of Internet research. 

THE DYNAMIC SCREEN STAR GLORIA SWANSON : HER TWO - THREE YEARS WITH JOSEPH P. KENNEDY MAY HAVE RUINED HER CAREER BUT IN LIFE SHE PERSEVERED

GLORIA MAE JOSEPHINE SWANSON

1899 - 1983

Back in 2009 when I began this blog, the very first posts I made here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO included Gloria Swanson, a silent screen star who made it to the talkies, was married repeatedly, and might be most known today for the 1950 film "Sunset Boulevard" in which she portrayed an actress clinging to a famous past long gone. An unconventional woman for her times, the petite and classically beautiful Swanson was a talented actor who earned fabulous sums of money but lost control of her finances when producing her own movies. In 1927, Joseph P. Kennedy, the future father of President John F. Kennedy, and by then a successful banker and broker in his late 30's, married with children, came into her life. She was married too, to her third husband.

Some would say he targeted her.  But, my dear readers, after reading this book I've decided to take the perhaps unpopular stance that Kennedy's confidence, built through other business and investment successes - as a Harvard educated banker who was quite savvy with money and investing in other areas, including the stock market - might have given him the idea that he could succeed in the movies too. But he was in over his head, in business and in love -  and so was Gloria when it came to the business side. There was a lot of ruthless competition and the Stock Market Crash of 1929 that plunged the country into the Great Depression, though Kennedy personally wasn't plunged, is something to consider too.

The silent film era was almost over and Swanson was one of the actresses who moved into the talkies with some success. But perhaps, though Swanson was at the top, earning record-breaking sums for her acting, she wouldn't have sustained her career anyway, for she was getting older.  Acting for women, like modeling, tends to span years, not decades, to this day. Swanson wanted to produce her own movies. Kennedy wanted to expand his financial empire by investing in the movie business, by owning his own production company, and making movies with a star that would attract the audiences. So, he was quite possibly learning as he went himself and the day came when he knew it was all too much for him and he got out. However, the overall opinion circa 2026 is that the man was ruthless and heartless, allowed her to sink her fortune into a movie that didn't go so well, and then left her in a lurch and broke. 

That's why the book "Gloria and Joe" by Axel Madsen jumped off the library shelf; and my quick review of it at this moment is that it goes into detail about both Gloria and Joe's career success and financial dealings before they met, while I will focus on what happened when they did. Though Gloria Swanson was at the top when they met in November of 1927, she had been taken advantage of by men before, in various ways. Joe Kennedy had done his business research, had interesting questions that proved he'd done his 'due diligence", but also manipulated her to agree to let him get her out of debt and into his bed.

Gloria Swanson was married several times, the first time at age seventeen to Hollywood star Wallace Beery, who was thirty. According to Gloria, he raped her on their wedding night and he was very abusive. She had an abortion he tricked her into during that brief marriage and wanted out quickly. They were married in 1916 and divorced in 1918; she had to wait a year before the divorce could be granted at that time.

Her second husband was Herbert K. Somborn, a movie business executive who was the president of Equity Pictures Corporation at the time. According to author Madsen, he hid his financial problems from Gloria until they were married and unfairly threatened to ruin her by lying that she'd had a long list of men - adulterous affairs, in order to get money from her, when she wanted out. They were married in 1919 and divorced in 1922-23.  Movie moguls at the time were involved in getting Somborn a settlement that would preserve her reputation and thus her career, though there were some shenanigans going on there too. Gloria felt this husband was blackmailing her. A morality cause was added to her studio contract. Herbert was the father of her daughter, Gloria Swanson Somborn, who was born in October of 1920 and called Sister. It was a difficult birth and so Gloria also adopted a son from an orphanage, Joseph, called Brother. Somborn used the money he got in his divorce settlement from Gloria to invest in the restaurant business, the popular Brown Derby. Of interest to me, though perhaps it is just a coincidence, Gloria named the son, said to be of Irish heritage, Joseph Patrick Swanson...

Her third husband was Henri de la Falaise, a French aristocrat with a noble heritage who also benefited by his marriage to Gloria. She met him in Jazz age Paris, and he followed her to Hollywood where he was offered the opportunity to become a movie director. It Joseph P. Kennedy who offered him that opportunity and Henri had to go back to France to take the job; this was likely Kennedy's manipulation to get him out of the way. Some of her friends thought Henri was a gigolo, but he was one who could hold his own in conversations and an intellectual who seemed to have loved Gloria, if his heartfelt, sad goodbye is to be believed. They were married in 1925 and divorced in 1931, this being Gloria Swanson's longest marriage.

Her fourth husband was Michael Farmer, a rich sportsman, who she married in 1931 and divorced in 1934. During this marriage Gloria gave birth to Michelle Bridget Farmer in 1932.

Her fifth husband was William Davey, an investment banker, who she married in 1945 and divorced in 1946.

Her sixth husband was William Dufty, a  successful ghost writer and anti-sugar activist, who she married in 1976 and stayed married to until her death in 1983. They shared a macrobiotic lifestyle. Gloria believed healthy food was the key to, not only health, but also her enduring good looks. She was considered to be a "fitness pioneer."

Now dear readers, I want to let you know that while reading this book, I learned a little bit about a mistress I had never heard of and a little bit more about one I elected Mistress of the Month years ago. So stick with me, because next month I'm going to include them in this narrative!

Missy

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For this month's posts, Axel Madson's book is the primary reference.  Having once read Swanson's memoir and at least two books about Joseph P. Kennedy, I also did some Internet research.

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January 2016

CLARA BOW

Actress, First "IT Girl" and Roaring Twenties Mistress of Old Hollywood Film Producer B.P. Schulberg