ROOTED

 

CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG : AMERICA'S FIRST FIRST LADY OF THE SCREEN BY GRETA DE GROAT - STANFORD UNIVERSITY

My research suggested that Greta De Groat was a primary modern researcher and writer about Clara Kimball Young. I found her page on a Stanford University website. I'll focus on the chapter called Enter Louis Selznick:

STANFORD : DE GROAT : CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG

Excerpt: Louis Selznick, an ambitious producer with an ultimately fatal habit of antagonizing powerful business rivals, saw a potential goldmine in Young. He signed her 1914 and immediately starred her as Lola, a woman who is transformed from a respectable young woman into a vamp who heartlessly destroys men after her dead body is resurrected without a soul. This was another hit which cemented Clara Kimball Young's position as a top star and James Young as a sought-after director. She was now one of the chief attractions of World Film Corporation, for which Selznick had become the vice president.

Meanwhile, Selznick and Young's personal lives were becoming intertwined. Mabel Normand later recalled James Young on the set in 1915, head in hands, saying "where I made my mistake was in ever inviting that fellow to the house." Selznick's wife had to endure the humiliation of escorting Clara to public events to squelch rumors, which apparently fooled no one. James Young ceased directing her films after The Heart of Blue Ridge (1915), and in 1916 sued Selznick for alienation of affection. Clara counter sued charging cruelty, and Selznick replied that the marriage was already in trouble before his appearance. James Young finally obtained a final decree on April 8, 1919, on grounds of desertion.

Excerpt: In February 1916, Selznick was ousted from World, but he had a surprise up his sleeve. As it happened, Clara Kimball Young was under contract, not to World, but personally to Selznick. His rivals had rid themselves not only of Selznick, but also of their most popular star. Within months World was reissuing most of her films.

Selznick lost no time in forming the Clara Kimball Young Film Corporation, with himself as president, and formed Selznick Productions to distribute her films and those of some other independent producers.

C 2026

Note that De Groat lists a good number of references and is open to new information about Clara. I checked Google Books for mentions of Clara and her name brings up mentions in movie business and fan type publications. 

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CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG : SHE KEPT A DIARY FOR SEVERAL MONTHS IN THE YEAR 1921

Wow! There's a web site called DIARY FILE... And it's dedicated to preserving though digitalization, historical diaries and letters. 

Excerpt: At the time of the diary, she was thirty years old and actively shooting several films per year.  

DIARY FILE : CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG

Excerpt (Quoting from the diary itself, thus this was written by Clara herself.) about loosing weight.

With jockeys, show girls and movie stars, and light weight boxers, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness becomes a mere question of yielding to Shylock his pound of flesh. They are habitual defendants in the Court of Public Favor, charged with the heinous offense of overweight and, if judged guilty, they must pay the forfeit in flesh or retire from the limelight. No Party arises to plead on their behalf. “The Law allows it, and the court awards it.”

Read on!  In these excerpts Clara mentions filming with Harry Garson who she's involved with and who is directing her in a movie, as well as a good party at the Ambassador Hotel.

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CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG IN THE MOVIE "KEPT HUSBANDS"

I was thrilled to find the full silent film entitled Kept Husbands which Clara Kimball Young starred in, which was posted by a YouTube station called The Film Detective. It's a story about the rich and the poor, and in the end the woman who started out poor returns to her steelworker husband.

 

Why is it that "Kept" is a term used about mistresses, women who are supported by men they are not married to, while "Kept" is not used for a wife who is entirely dependent on her husband for financial support?  A stay-at-home wife and mother - a 'homemaker' - a woman who is entirely dependent on her husband, is honored. It's tradition. It's conservative.  And today, it's rare to be either!

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MORE

 

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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GATHERED

 

CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG : PROLIFIC ACTRESS - SECOND TO FOUND HER OWN "NAMESAKE" MOVIE PRODUCTION COMPANY : MISTRESS OF LEWIS J. SELZNICK

 

Clara Kimball Young as painted by Rolf Armstrong.

Cover of May1920 Photoplay Magazine. Also appeared in Motion Picture news same month.

CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG

Clarisa Kimball

Edith Matilda Clara Kimball

1890 - 1960

Axel Madsens book about Gloria Swanson and Joseph P. Kennedy lead me to Clara Kimball Young, who I'd never heard of before. Though I found some information about her in his book, for this month's reportage about this famous Hollywood Silent Screen Era actress, I had to do further research.

Clara Kimball Young began her stage acting career as a three-year-old child who toured with her parents who were also actors and grew up on the road. Clara Kimball came by her name Clara Kimball Young name through a first marriage, in 1910, when she was about 20, to James Young, an actor who'd appeared on Broadway and director who is said to have launched her career. They were both signed by one of those upstart movie making companies, The Vitagraph Company of America, in 1912. So maybe it was that company that launched both of their careers. She appeared in more than 150 films, beginning in 1909,  mostly in the silent film era, before her screen retirement in 1943. She was at the peak of her fame from 1915-1917 according to polls that were taken in those years.

Perhaps we will never know exactly how it began or when, but Clara became involved with Lewis Selznick in business and personally. Film making and distribution early on emerged from a number of upstart companies that competed, but also sometimes bought each other out or made deals. A company called the World Film Corporation was established in 1914 by Selznick and a partner. World Film Corporation distributed independently produced films (the term independently fits the efforts of so many of those upstarts) and had offices in New York City. It became the company that distributed the movies that starred Clara Kimball Young. 

Today she is honored as a pioneering woman in Hollywood not only because she acted in so many mostly silent films and was considered to be the most popular actress of 1914 but because she was the second woman to found her own namesake production company, second only to Mary Pickford. (Pickford, with a group of others who called themselves United Artists.) Her company, the Clara Kimball Film Corporation, was established in 1916, at that peak in her fame. Selznick partnered with her on that project.

Lewis J. Selznick is one of the early shakers-and-movers of the early years of Hollywood, one of several men of Jewish eastern-European heritage who came to America seeking a new way of life and a fortune. Born in 1870 of Russian-Jewish heritage, he was about twenty years older than Clara. At the age of 26, he had married Florence Sachs, with whom he had four children. (One of them, David, followed his father into the movie business and is renown in his own right.) Initially settling in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area, he owned jewelry stores. He retained them when he got involved in the movie business, and apparently he gifted Clara with jewelry quite a bit. For when it was over between them, when she was 'ruined' by him, it was said that she was reduced to selling her jewelry.

Something to be careful with, I think, is the way a woman's will to independence or to have a business in which she can earn more money, might be attributed to a man or men in her life.  In those times this was, unfortunately, often enough true. I feel sure that there were some people who thought she was daring for even considering having her own Production Company.

Apparently, while married to James Young, she was already involved with Lewis Selznick, for a passage from Madsen's book, which I'll soon post, is that she fell in love with a co-star, Harry Garson, and out of jealousy Selznick revenged. (But the book doesn't say that she married Garson! - Which she did in 1920.) Garson was an actor but also a film producer and director. The implication is that she ended her marriage with first husband James Young to be with Garson, and therefore, that she saw no point in continuing with Selznick, if ever there had been a chance he would leave his wife and their family to marry her. 

Another take on this, and perhaps her personal life was this complicated, is that her relationship with Selznick was considered to be volatile and the cause of her first divorce, as, according to the Turner Classic Movies Fan site dedicated to her, "She became involved in a much publicized affair with Selznick, culminating in a 1916 divorce suit accusing her of alienation of affection. James Young finally obtained a final decree on April 8, 1919 on grounds of desertion." (But she marred Garson and stayed married to him until 1927.)

Clara's third marriage in 1928 was to Dr. Arthur Fauman. They stayed married until his death in 1937. Widowed at 57 years old, Clara didn't remarry again. She had never had any children.

Or did she?

I tried to track this down as to where the information came from, but a Rudolph Valentino fan site called Mad About the Boy on Facebook references an authorized biography. It was written by Joan Wester Anderson and was titled Forever Young: The Life, Loves, and Enduring Faith of a Hollywood Legend and was published in 1999 or 2000. Because Valentino and Clara Kimball Young starred together in a film, there's some interest in her on that fan site. According to that post on the Valentino fan site, to quote:

"During her active career, she was not known to have any children. However, in a 1999 authorized biography, it was confirmed that Young gave birth to a biological daughter, Judith "Judy" Young, on November 6, 1935. The child's father was reportedly actor Clark Gable, with whom Young had a brief affair."

(So she had a child she kept secret though married to Dr. Arthur Fauman?)

"To preserve her public image, Young temporarily placed the baby in an orphanage shortly after birth and initially claimed she had adopted her. Judith later took the last name Lewis after Young married Tom Lewis." 

Tom Lewis?  Did this person mean Lewis Selznick? As Clara did not marry a Tom Lewis...

I tracked the book down and it turned out this was misinformation.  Anderson wrote the book about another actress, Loretta Young!

All right!

Let's look into Clara Kimball Young, who was once one of the most popular actresses of the Hollywood Silent Film era and does have a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame!

Missy

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FLORENZ ZIEGFELD HELPED LAUNCH MANY WOMEN'S CAREERS

 

The film came out in 1936 and featured a large and well loved cast of 

characters, in particular the leading men William Powell, Luise Rainer, and actress Myrna Loy.

It suggested the life of Florenz Ziegfeld, 

as a man who womanized, made a fortune but lost it, 

and who helped launch many a showgirl's career.

Ziegfeld girls often went on to pursue modeling, acting, 

and marrying or mistressing rich men.

Several of them have been featured here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO.

When it came to actresses, it was Mary Pickford who established United Artists, along with others. Clara Kimball Young was the next, and by 1916 many actresses had the same idea. They wanted more control over their careers, to expand, and to prosper.

PAT POWERS ATTEMPTED TO LAUNCH PROTOGEE PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE'S MOVIE CAREER

Excerpt page 131:  Joe (Joseph P. Kennedy) could not have picked a better time to make his debut as a movie mogul. The years 1926-1927 were one of the most prosperous periods in Hollywood history; almost every one of the 740 films made each year was a box-office success.  Movie-going had become a worldwide obsession. There were over 50,000 movie theaters around the world, more than a third of them in the United States and Canada.  Annual receipts in North America alone came to more than $120 million.

With Pat Powers, Joe plotted to fold the ailing Producers Distribution Corporation into Associated Exhibitors with the view of merging the fused entity with FBO to make an even bigger company. Joe was on the financial periphery of Pat's efforts to launch Peggy Hopkins Joyce, riding high on the success of his uninhibited and lavishly rich version of The Merry Widow, Erich Von Stroheim declined to take part in furthering of Peggy's screen career. Instead Micky Neilen (who Gloria Swanson had given up on in order to marry Henri de la Falaise) undertook the mission. The result was The Skyrocket, a thinly disguised retelling of Neilan's torrid affair with Gloria Swanson.

Excerpt page 164:  Soon after The Merry Widow was finished, Stroheim agreed to have lunch at the Ambassador with Pat Powers and the canny Irishman's new protégée, Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Powers wanted to launch the former Ziegfeld beauty as a film star. Stoheim, however, was still smarting from his experience with Mae Murray and was in no mood to start another ex- Broadway hoofer;s screen career.  Instead he hypnotized Powers with a project of his own, a double feature to be called The Wedding March and The Honeymoon that he would write, direct, and star in himself, and that would make tons of money for whoever financed it.  As he explained to Pat and Peggy, the appeal of his project was that it could be shown in two parts, tobe screened with an hour's intermission...

Missy here : As was and is often the case, a woman's career depends on being the protégée of a man, some patronage, and if he fails, so does she.

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THE SKYROCKET : PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE IN 1926

This was Peggy Hopkins Joyce's first full length movie, as she had done "shorts" before

 and it was intended to launch her movie star career 

and allow her to be know for an accomplishment

 other than meeting, marrying, and divorcing rich men...

It's a rags to riches to rags again story.

According to author Axel Madsen, on page 131-132 of his book, Mickey Neilan had bought the Edendale studio from a bankrupt Harry Garson and Clara Kimball Young for $300,000, 

refurbished it, and with financing from Pat Powers made a movie about Hollywood, called The Skyrocket. The film was "a thinly disguised retelling of Neilan's torrid affair with Gloria Swanson!

PEGGY HOPKINS JOYCE & CLARA KIMBALL YOUNG : ZIEGFELD FOLLIES SHOWGIRLS WENT INTO ACTING

In this passage from the book by Axel Madsen, a man named Pat Powers, nineteen years older than Joseph P. Kennedy,  who'd started out as a policeman, had become a businessman and had gotten involved in the nickelodeon business, in particular the Edison-Biograph company.  At the time a number of small companies were at war with each other to dominate the movie making business and the movie theater business. 

Excerpt page 99 :  Powers was a loner. He sold out to (Carl) Laemmle and for the next decade was in and out of film investments with a variety of partners. Known as a "bonus shark," he loaned production money at steep interest rates or became a participant in the profits. One partner was Lewis Selznick, the former jewelry dealer from Kiev who had persuaded his sons they were heirs to a kingdom, but who had lately lost his fortune. When he hadn't been able to pay a debt of a mere $3000, Selznick's enemies had forced him into bankruptcy. His sons, Myron and David, vowed vengeance.

Clara Kimball Young adored Powers and believed him to be the most wonderful, clever man in the world. He had lost money, however, by becoming a major stockholder in Equity Pictures. A year later he had invested $120,000 in one movie --- The Miracle Man with Lon Chaney --- and made three million dollars.

Now in his mid-fifties, Pat had become infatuated with the icy blond charms of Peggy Hopkins Joyce. She had distracted Mickey Neilan (who Gloria Swanson had once had a between-marriages affair with) and told (Charlie) Chaplin of her gold-digging days while skinny dipping with him on Catalina. Peggy had added MGM's frail wunderkind, Irving Thalberg, to her list of conquests, wanted Erich von Stroheim to write and direct a film starring his Peggy. Pat was courting the stormy, individualistic Stroheim because in The Merry Widow, MGM's current hit, the director had managed the feat of turning Mae Murray, another ex-Follies hoofer, into a star

Reflating the careers of former chorus girls was not among Joe Kennedy's ambitions in 1924....

Lewis Szelnick's mistress was Clara Kimball Young.

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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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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 

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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