‘Gloria Swanson: Hollywood’s First Glamour Queen’
By Stephen Michael Shearer
Lyons Press, 476 Pages

This sumptuous illustrated biography, weighing in at more than four pounds, begins: “Gloria Swanson was a great motion picture star. Her pictures for Paramount in the 1920s made millions, and her public and social life reflected all the glamour and mystique that so mesmerized and fascinated the average American moviegoer.”

What is sometimes misunderstood is that at the start of the motion picture industry — at least insofar as Gloria Swanson was concerned — she set the standard: “I have decided that when I become a star, I will be every inch and every moment a star. Everybody from the studio gateman to the highest executive will know it.” That is an exhausting ambition, and yet Swanson never swerved from the demands of stardom. 

Swanson was not exaggerating — at least not by much — when she insisted that the star, not the studio, was supreme, though those highest executives often thought otherwise: that they were in charge. Yet as Hollywood columnist Sidney Skolsky liked to say: “Nobody knew more about a Marilyn Monroe movie than Marilyn Monroe.”

When Swanson made that latter-day appearance as the has-been movie star in “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and declared, “It’s the pictures that got small,” her character, Norma Desmond, was not merely glamorously self-absorbed, she was recognizing that without her a certain grandeur had faded from the motion picture screen.

That Swanson could not sustain the glamour of her stardom in the talkies is perhaps a tribute to the way she looked, in that no number of spoken, audible words could enhance it. To be silent was to be complete, allowing audiences to voice her. Some beautiful stars, like the Hungarian Vilma Banky, quit their careers at the beginning of the sound era — in her case not only because of a thick accent but because she realized that in the new dispensation she could not compete with her own, perfected image of the silents.

If Swanson was not able to triumph in the talkies, she did not exactly fade from view. She made good on her vow to be at all times a star, which meant after more than a decade of costume dramas, social comedies, and appearances in seemingly every kind of domestic and exotic location she had to choreograph her off-screen appearances, as in a delightful photograph of her applying makeup to Babe Ruth as tennis champion Bill Tilden looks on, in admiration of her creation.

Not that Swanson’s emergence in the talkies was a complete bust. She began well in “The Trespasser” (1929): “The best talker seen yet,” a Variety reviewer averred. Yet in subsequent reviews, it seemed that critics just wanted to discuss her splendid clothes while complaining of the poor sound quality of her early talkies. 

Mr. Shearer sums up Swanson’s problem by quoting a film historian, James Robert Parish: “the legendary screen goddess” became “Gloria the human actress.” Titles of her talkies include “Indiscreet” and “Tonight or Never” — jolly and forgettable. She tried Broadway and she tried television, with no significant impact.

“Sunset Boulevard” (1950) did not so much celebrate Swanson as confirm her status as relic, with lines such as, “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” What is striking about her  photographs is just that quality of making a face, striking a pose, that relies on stillness and silence.

Mr. Shearer’s narrative is well paced. He has a knack for picking just the right quotation from Swanson and those commenting on her. Because there are so many illustrations — film stills, celebrity shots, snaps of Swanson at home, with her many husbands, her daughter — the interest in Swanson never fades. Like the stardom she never abandoned, she looks pleased with herself, though not, paradoxically, in a selfish way. She seems to be having a lot of fun in guest appearances, vamping her way through “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and playing Charlie Chaplin on “The Carol Burnett Show.”

By the end of the book, Mr. Shearer has prepared us for the only way such a book could end: with the tribute of Max von Mayerling (Erich von Stroheim) in “Sunset Boulevard”: “Madame was the greatest star of all.”

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress,”  “Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag,” and “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”