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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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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