Picture-Play Magazine (Mar-Jul 1929)

Photo by Press Pictures Though a grandmother three times, Elinor Glyn has scarcely a line in her face and possesses youthful vitality to a startling degree. TN an exotic nest, on the rooftop of a Los Angeles I hotel, dwells one of the most-talked-of and the leastunderstood women in the movies — Elinor Glyn. I went for a prearranged interview with this muchdiscussed Englishwoman, expecting a totally different personality from the one I found. I neither went to scoff nor did I return to pray. But the elevator that The interviewer went to see Elinor Glyn wearily that she had drunk pre-Prohibition champagne, aration, and describes one of the most surprising with the By Ma^me shot me up to Madame Glyn's Chinese apartment, wearily willing to be thrilled, brought me down again feeling as though I had drunk some pre-Prohibition champagne. To say that Elinor Glyn sparkles but poorly expresses her scintillating personality. As an individual she is as unique as she is stimulating. "Just because I do not think and feel like every one else," she told me, "I am considered a poseuse, arrogant, uppish, frightfully egotistical." I found her anything but! Instead of the overdressed, overpainted woman with green eyes and flaming-red hair pictured by Glyn biographers, I saw an English aristocrat, appropriately turned out in every detail, living in a world of beauty far above the average ken. She had just returned from an early-morning shopping tour, and was wearing a one-piece frock of rose and gray silk, gray-kid pumps with French heels, plain, tailored hat of soft-gray felt, pulled at the fashionable low angle on her head — so low I could not tell whether her hair was bobbed. Enough hair showed, however, to see that it was the natural red that generally goes with freckles, the which dot Madame Glyn's milkwhite skin. With a figure that could make her fortune if she hadn't a brain in her head, Elinor Glyn, a grandmother three times, has exuberant vitality and youth that are nothing short of remarkable. There is scarcely a line in her face, the features of which are cut like a cameo. In her gray-green eyes, described by one of her vivisectors as "the shade of evaporating marsh water suddenly exposed to the sun," lies the wisdom of the ages. "How on earth have you kept so young?" was one of the first questions she astonished out of me. I had heard that Madame Glyn was an occult, not always on this sphere. Was this her secret? "By vibrating to all the beauty and color around me. Look!" she commanded, sweeping her hands over the dining room where, partaking hastily of a breakfast, lunch of fruit, she had received me. I had been looking at a jewel of a Chinese room set in platinum — a jewel that glowed with all the colors of a rainbow softly veiled in mist. Every semblance of a hotel room had been wiped out. Even the doors had lost their identity in a glaze of mauve, decorated in gold dragons. The side walls were dull silver. In their panels were vivid Chinese paintings, representing the celestial goddess of wisdom, happiness, and love. Intermingled with the black-lacquered furniture were orange, scarlet, and mauve cabinets and serving tables. There was also an especially fine bedragoned screen. The windows had their ledges painted periwinkle blue. They were hung with magenta silk, bordered with blue and mauve. "Every color has a meaning for me," said the woman who had created this setting, as she went about the room caressing various objects, declaring they meant more to her than the heirlooms in her London and Paris homes,