These days, Gloria Swanson is most famous for her star turn in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard, where she played Norma Desmond, a delusional, champagne-swilling movie star whose best days have long since passed. In real life, Swanson had a less famous but far more enduring role — as a health food advocate. Although she had a taste for decadence and drama, Swanson was an early proponent of the macrobiotic diet, and gave up drinking and smoking along with meat and refined sugar. Local historian Hadley Meares has the details on Swanson's dietary decisions.
KCRW: Tell us a bit about Gloria Swanson's background. Who was she? Where did she come from? How did she break into Hollywood?
Hadley Meares: Gloria Swanson was truly the biggest movie star of the 1920s. She was born in Chicago in 1899. She was an only child. She was an Army brat, so she really wasn't from anywhere. The family moved from base to base. She was very precocious and very sophisticated from a very early age. She talked about how she didn't really have any interest in other children. She was interested in herself and growing up and living a glamorous life.
She gets her wish really early because when she's only 15, she is discovered while visiting Chicago's Essanay Studios with an aunt. Soon, she is in the studio system playing these 30-year-old society women in quickie talkies, even though she's only 15. She moves up the ranks really fast. She was very confident, very dynamic and she had this feeling that she was meant to be a star and meant to be a public figure.
Prior to Sunset Boulevard, what were her most famous movie roles? Were they mostly silent?
Yes, she was primarily a silent star. She became a huge movie star in these drawing room comedies that were directed by the legendary Cecil B. DeMille. They had names like Male and Female. They were these comedies of the sexes, where she played really glamorous, liberated women who were always wearing beautiful jewels and furs. Then, she turned in the late 1920s, to more serious fare. She started producing so she was in movies like Sadie Thompson and The Trespasser, these movies that had a little bit more weight to them. By the 1930s, the movies kind of lost interest in her and she lost interest in the movies.
United Artists stars and partners gather in 1931. Left to right: Al Jolson, Mary Pickford, Ronald Colman, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Joseph Schenck, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Goldwyn, and Eddie Cantor. Photo via the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection
Give us a physical description of her. How tall was she? What did she look like?
She was a fascinating-looking person, which is, I think, one of the reasons she became such a big silent star. She was really tiny. She was around 4'11" or five feet tall, and she only weighed 95 pounds. If you've ever seen photos or if you've ever seen Sunset Boulevard, she had these huge eyes and these big teeth. Her mother used to dress her in these elaborate outfits when she was little to try and take away attention from these big teeth that became her trademark. She had a large head that made it perfect for photographing. She was very distinctive-looking and very unique and beautiful, in her own way. Nobody else looked like Gloria Swanson. She had a face.
She had a messy, long-term affair with Joseph Kennedy, which soured her relationship with both Hollywood and men, in general. Was this around the time she became interested in health food?
It was around the same time, it was the mid to late 1920s. In her autobiography, Swanson talks about how her friend Rudolph Valentino's tragic death at such a young age started making her think about doctors and how people were treated by the medical establishment because she felt that the doctors had killed him.
When she was making the movie Sadie Thompson, she was feeling really stressed and had all these terrible stomach problems. So she goes to Dr. Henry Bieler, who was out of Pasadena. He says to her, "What did you have to eat last night that your stomach's hurting?" She gave him a list of all these decadent foods that she'd eaten and the champagne she had drunk. He said to her, "I want you to mentally picture putting all this food in a pail, then tell me what animal, including a pig, would eat it." The thought of that terrified her. So he gave her a list of healthy foods to start eating. From that day, her life was transformed and she became a self-described health food nut.
Located at 904 N. Crescent Drive in Beverly Hills, this mansion once belonged to actress Gloria Swanson. Circa 1937. Photo via the Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection
What was her version of health food? What were some of the foods she relied on?
She loved lentils and brown rice. She was a big proponent of organic vegetables. Very early on, she was into raw food. She claimed if she did anything with her vegetables, it was only to steam them. She steamed her oatmeal, so it wouldn't lose its nutrients. She only drank spring water from France. If she had to have sugar, she generally made it by boiling organic raisins. So she was really into what we would think of now as a very clean diet.
How common or uncommon was that type of diet in her era?
This was very uncommon. She was lampooned and mocked as a freak for decades. She was very self-deprecating about it. She would call her health food obsession one of her soapboxes. She was uncommon for the time but in Los Angeles, there were many early health food adapters, a lot of whom were women. There was a woman called Vera Richter, who was a raw food expert. She opened a bunch of raw food cafeterias in Los Angeles in the teens and '20s. There was the famous swimmer Annette Kellerman, who was also a huge health food proponent. She opened a health food store in Long Beach. So there were a lot of people, primarily women in Los Angeles, who were beating the drum about healthy living.
Gloria Swanson (second from left) chats with Betty Jones, Mrs. Galen R. Goodson and Mrs. Thomas W. Simmons (left to right) at a tea party she hosted on December 7, 1936. Photo via the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection
Her haranguing people about their diet actually led to her sixth and happiest marriage. How did that come about?
I love this story. She met the writer William Dufty, who had done a lot of different writing although he's primarily known for being the ghost writer of Billie Holiday's Lady Sings the Blues. She met him in 1965 at a dinner, and he was very overweight at the time. She saw him pouring tons of sugar into his coffee. In Gloria's way, she bluntly told him that he was killing himself by eating the way he did and consuming all of this horrible white sugar. Dufty really took this to heart.
A few months later, he reappears in her life and she invites him over. All of a sudden, she says, here is this trim, good-looking young man where before had been this very unhealthy, bloated, unhappy man. Dufty said to her, "You really changed my life. You saved my life." They ended up talking all night, and it was love from there. They were very happily married for many years until her death,
Later, in 1975, he ended up writing a bestseller, Sugar Blues, which talked about refined sugar as a drug.
That's right. He dedicated it to Gloria Swanson for basically saving his life. She went on the road with him, tirelessly promoting it, going up on what she called one of her mini soapboxes to plead with the public to stop eating processed foods and so much sugar.
A quartet of screen stars discuss old times while shooting Sunset Boulevard on May 11, 1949. Left to right: Buster Keaton, Gloria Swanson, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H.B. Warner. Photo via the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection
Gloria Swanson sits on a lounge chair beside a swimming pool on July 24, 1970. Photo via the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection
Gloria Swanson celebrates her 80th birthday, greeting her friend, Adela Rogers St. Johns, at a meeting of Roundtable West on April 15, 1979. Photo via the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection
Swanson applies lipstick while producer-director Milton Bren looks on. Photo via the Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library Collection