Swanson Song

GLORIA SWANSON's best-selling autobiography was the product of a literary quadrangle with all the emotional complexity and sexual tension of her immortal comeback vehicle, Sunset Boulevard. Breaking his silence four decades after helping ghostwrite Swanson on Swanson, WAYNE LAWSON sets the record straight about its fraught genesis and the smear campaign that followed

- WAYNE LAWSON

PART ONE

On November 5, 1980, I attended a book party at the home of S.I. Newhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Random House, the publisher of Swanson on Swanson, the book being celebrated that day, had been purchased earlier in the year by Advance Publications, the giant media company owned by Newhouse and his brother, Donald. I don’t think I knew a single one of the large group of invited guests.

The book was the autobiography of Gloria Swanson, who, back in the silent-screen days, had been one of the highest-paid and most popular actors in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille’s biggest star. She was now 81 but looked 60. Not quite five feet tall, consummately stylish, she held court in the art-filled rooms that evening as the fancy crowd swarmed to congratulate her.

For an hour or so, I hugged a wall and nursed a drink, feeling quite out of place. Then I saw Swanson making her way over to me. “Only you and I know who wrote this book,” she said. “Thank you.”

That was four decades ago, and only now do I feel comfortable telling the story surrounding it. Actually, it took four people to write the book: Swanson, her sixth husband, her lover, and me. When Swanson spoke to me that day, she couldn’t have imagined that the story was far from over, or that it would be distorted almost beyond recognition in the course of time.