CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG : REDUCED TO SELLING HER JEWELRY : LEWIS SZELNICK WASN'T HAPPY WHEN FELL FOR HARRY GARSON and MARRIED HIM

Excerpt from the book : In this book author Axel Madsen writes that actress Gloria Swanson, married to Herbert Somborn of Equity Pictures, and actor Rudolph Valentino were friends. Two years earlier, in 1919, he had made the movie Eyes of Youth with Clara Kimball Young.  

Here's a clip from the movie from a YouTube poster Imperio Retro  

Excerpt page 83: Getting to know Valentino was a pleasure for Gloria.  He too, was caught in a miserable marriage. His wife was the dancer Jean Acker. He was an excellent horseman, and on Sunday mornings he and Gloria rode together in the Hollywood Hills. .... They talked about Eyes of Youth, the picture he had made with Clara Kimball Young two years earlier. Rudy felt sorry for Clara. She had been Lewis Selznick's mistress for years.  The reason Selznick had pulled the financial rug from under Equity Pictures * was that Clara had fallen in love with Harry Garson.  It was Garson who had persuaded Clara to produce her own picture. Now she was reduced to selling her jewelry. The Studios wouldn't touch her.

Missy here : It may've been that the increasingly powerful Selznick decided that Clara would "never work in this town again." However, I think we need to look at the changes in the movie making business that effected everyone, from various business deals that eventually lead to larger, more powerful studios that put actors on contract, the Great Depression, and the technology that ended the silent film era in which Clara Kimball Young had found her fame and rapidly moved to movies with sound.

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CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG TALKED MOVIE BUSINESS - IMPRESSED AND INSPIRED GLORIA SWANSON : THEY BOTH ESTABLISHED THEIR OWN MOVIE PRODUCTION COMPANIES

We continue with the entwinned story of Gloria Swanson and Clara Kimball Young.

Excerpt page 70 : (Gloria Swanson had begun her relationship with the man who became her second husband Herbert Somborn and they went out to dinner with Clara Kimball Young.)

Their first dinner with Clara Kimball Young had been an eye-opener for Gloria.  Not only was their hostess a gracious, amusing woman, and her candle-lit dinner for four exquisite; she, Herbert and Harry Garson, the general manager of Equity Pictures (the distribution company for Clara's movies), talked about movies on a level Gloria had never heard before. Clara's story paralleled Gloria's insofar as marriage was concerned. James Young and Clara Kimball, soon to be his bride, had come from a Salt Lake City stock company to appear in Vitagraph pictures, and before long both were making $1000 a week. As with Gloria and Wally (The actor Wallace Beery) problems had started when Young's ascent didn't match his wife's'.  Clara's breakthrough picture had been My Official Wife in 1914, in which Leon Trotsky had been an extra  Success had brought her other offers from Vitagraph's rivals, and she had accepted a contract from World Films, managed by the ambitious Lewis Selznick, who had made her a star in Trilby, Camille, and The Common Law (three movies), sophisticated pictures dealing with feminine martyrdom.  Her women admirers were legion, and here she was talking distribution deals, stock issues, mortgages, and billboards because movies could show cars, clothes, curling irons, whatever, the hostess turned toward Gloria and said, "He's absolutely right,  Don't you think so, Miss Swanson?"

Gloria Swanson went on to marry Herbert Somborn and have a daughter with him, but the marriage ended badly. She'd decided for Somborn and gave up Marshall "Mickey" Neilan. Mickey had directed Clara Kimball Young for a Harry Garson tear jerker. (Clara married Garson eventually.)

Excerpt page 73 :

For Gloria, the (her) marriage became a cram course in economics and contract law... Persistent long-distance phone calls during the Alexandra suite honeymoon had forced Herbert to admit he was, momentarily, in some difficulty. For different reasons, Selznick and Powers had turned against Equity pictures. Selznick, who was worth sixty million dollars, lived in a seventeen-room Park Avenue apartment, and made fifty films a years, was in a new scrap with his rivals. To make sure they rented all their movies, regardless of quality, film companies resorted to 'block booking." In order to get pictures with big box-office stars, theater owners had to accept a block of less profitable moves. New, Selznick was breaking away from the practice and offering the new Clara Kimball Young features separately at considerably higher rentals. They made everybody else less saleable suffer, and Selznick's relations with his rivals were at a low point. Exhibitors didn't want to be caught in any high-power crossfire and simply refused to book Eyes of Youth.

*** Because Gloria saw how Clara had been treated after breaking from the then-existing Studio System she was a bit afraid to found her own company.

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Research includes using Google, AI, Wikis, YouTube, etc.

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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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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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.