Picture Play Magazine (Sep 1925 - Feb 1926)

The New Gloria — Will She Continue to Conquer? 69 a greater naturalness than I have ever felt before. "It was between two and three years ago that we used to talk, wasn't it?" She mentioned incidents of former meetings which showed a most retentive memory for casual occurrences, surprising when you think of all the people she has met in these crowded recent years. "I can see how you got that impression of me. The Gloria I had always wanted to be was restrained by a wrong perspective on things. "I was miserably unhappy, so I bluffed. If I seemed aloof, it was because I was afraid of every word. Things I said were twisted. I was misquoted. Even chance comments to acquaintances were changed as they were relayed from tongue to tongue. I decided that the best attitude was one of courtesy but not of intimacy. I was cordial — but careful. "I never had been buoyantly, gorgeously happy, as so many young girls are. Success, the thing that I had thought I wanted, brought with it new problems and hurts. My childhood — you know about that, at the army posts. Happy, most of it, but not a normal childhood of living in a regular neighborhood and going to a regular school and having a regular bunch to play with. Sometimes there were other youngsters, and we would have our regiment and drills, and imitate our soldier-fathers. But at some of the posts there were no other children, and I was often alone. "That childhood gave me certain qualities of character that have been of much value — independence, quickness of thought, decisiveness of judgment, action that seems best regardless of consequences — the spirit that the army teaches. But it robbed me of a lot of sweet sentimentality that girl-children need. What we call hokum, in pictures, and yet you see it in every ordinary home where the children are reared in a more 'regular' life. "I came into pictures, an awkward, untrained girl, determined to succeed but more than a little bewildered by the strangeness of it all." Gloria seemed anxious to trace for me the influences which eventually brought into form the Swanson personality that for several years alone held her public, and to analyze what effect each stage of her progress had upon her development. We talked for two hours, of her first years in pictures, and she said far too much to be condensed in one article, so I shall merely summarize her reflections. "Gradually, I studied and learned and was helped by Mr. De Mille and others, for whom I shall always feel the greatest gratitude. Then came my first marriage, which ended unhappily. And the second which, breaking up just as my success was beginning to pall a little, left me embittered. "I decided that for strong individualities the usual sentimental theories were unnecessary and incompatible. I did not need marriage, home, the things other women cling to and hide behind. I would be independent, bluff it. I thought that I was not the domestic type. I encountered a good deal of unjust criticism, some of which was motivated by that peculiar resentment Photo by Eugene R. Richee which so many feel toward a personality in the spotlight. I wasn't a girl to be loved ; I was a curiosity, to be looked over, admired or made fun of. I don't think many of my very best fans, even, thought of me then in a deeply personal sense, or if that feeling was dormant in them, as it must have been because it was expressed so beautifully during my illness, at that time they must have been unaware of it. "I had almost unbearable hurts. When my father died, his body was sent to me at Chicago for a military burial. We had been pals, my father and I ; in my childhood he had tried to make a good little soldier of me. He taught me to hold myself straight, to think and act like a man. "You may think that the cold Gloria Swanson of those days couldn't love anything or anybody but her precious career, but I tell you her heart was heavy when the one dearest to it was put into that grave. And they followed me about, newspaper photographers and the public, asking me to pose for snapshots in mourning. Even my grief" — her fists doubled and struck the table with emphasis — "was something to be exploited for a curious appraisal. "In New York, I worked hard, and got myself out of the clothes-horse rut. 'The Humming Bird' is dear to me, in memory, because it was the picture that I call my salvation. It started my career off on a new slant, and they began to say that I might develop into an Continued on page 92