Gloria Swanson as faded screen star Norma Desmond, with Erich von Stroheim and William Holden in 1950's Sunset Blvd. Photo / Getty Images
Today’s Hollywood thinks it can stave off ageing. Norma Desmond shows us why that’s madness, in close-up.
It was January 1950, and a new motion picture had just finished its first preview screening for a select Hollywood audience. The movie wouldn’t open to the public until August 10, but 300 of the industry’s most important studio executives, producers, directors and stars were crowded into the theatre. The movie was called Sunset Blvd., and the word was that it was nitroglycerin.
As the end credits came up over the final image of silent film has-been Norma Desmond advancing on the camera, her fingers curled in a demented come-hither dance for the audience, the assembled glitterati staggered out, astonished at what they’d seen: a Hollywood movie that pulled back the tinseled illusion of their company town, revealing the decay. Many of the guests clustered around the movie’s star, Gloria Swanson, a legend of silent cinema making an unparalleled comeback. Actor Barbara Stanwyck got down and literally kissed the hem of Swanson’s gown, a wonderful we’re-not-worthy moment that briefly reinstated the old order.
Over in a corner, however, MGM head Louis B. Mayer – arguably the most powerful man in town – fumed to a group of yes-men, fulminating about “that lowdown scum Wilder”. According to Sam Staggs’s 2002 book, Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard, Mayer spied the director of Sunset Blvd., the Austrian-born Billy Wilder, crossing the lobby and stalked over, red in the face, screaming, “You befouled your own nest! You should be kicked out of the country, tarred and feathered …”
Wilder’s response has been variously reported as “Go f--- yourself” and “Go s--- in your hat,” but Mayer’s rage is understandable. The man helped create the system that Sunset Blvd. exposed as a sham – a star system in which human beings were tweaked and polished and remade until they were gods of the screen.
But the thing about gods is that they never age. Film is eternal; a movie is always experienced in the present tense. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman are still on that tarmac at the end of Casablanca, and they always will be. The sin of Sunset Blvd. – and for the Mayers of Hollywood, the unspeakable heresy – is that it was the first movie to admit that stars get old.
Well, of course they do. Everyone knows that now. There are second acts and third acts and sometimes even fourth acts in popular culture, as actors and other celebrities reinvent themselves into fresh personas and new mediums, ageing with grace or plastic surgery. In 1950, though, this was shocking news, and it’s worth asking why.
The answer turns out to be disarmingly simple: there were movie stars of an earlier generation, but an industrial revolution had banished them from sight. The coming of talking pictures in the late 1920s was a comet that killed off dozens of dinosaurs, internationally known and adored performers whose value was suddenly nil. A handful survived – Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, a newly minted ingenue named Joan Crawford. Most vanished into ostentatious mansions or dwindling roles; some threw in the towel and walked away; some took their own lives. The point is that no one ever saw them age, and so the town’s secret, the big lie, was safe.
By the late 1940s, though, there were rumblings. The new stars of the talkies – Bette Davis and Mae West and James Cagney and Katharine Hepburn, actors who sounded like no one but themselves – were edging into their 40s. The men were allowed to get older, with Bogart proving that some actors are best left to age like firewood or Scotch. The women saw nullification on the horizon. The 1950s would be an era when a youthful new star like Audrey Hepburn would be paired with old goats like Bogart (30 years Hepburn’s senior) in Sabrina and Gary Cooper (28 years) in Love in the Afternoon. (The only two stars to get away with co-starring with Hepburn were Fred Astaire, who was never old or young but always just Fred Astaire, and Cary Grant, whose elegant aplomb was timeless.)
1950 also saw Davis star in All About Eve as a kind of Hail Mary career pass, playing a Broadway legend fretting whether fame had a built-in shelf date. But Sunset Blvd. was something else entirely to the actors of Hollywood: proof that a star could come back from the dark side of the moon – the silent era! – to be relevant again. No wonder Stanwyck knelt before Swanson that night: she saw an almost certain career obsolescence disappear (and went on to act in movies and TV until she was in her late 70s).
The grand irony, of course, is that while Sunset Blvd. was feted in the movie industry as a triumph for Swanson, the message to audiences and the future was the opposite: that movie stars continue on even after we’re done with them, turning in on themselves to gnaw on the adoration they once received from the world. That applause gone silent leads to insanity, scandal, monkey funerals and dead screenwriters in the swimming pool. (Among other things, Sunset Blvd. was arguably the first movie to be narrated by a corpse, Norma’s kept man, Joe Gillis, played by William Holden.)
Look no further than last year’s horror hit The Substance, with Demi Moore playing a modern Norma, for confirmation of this story line’s tenacity. Even without Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1993 Broadway musical adaptation (whose Tony Award-winning 2024 revival just closed), Sunset Blvd. lives on for audiences that have never seen the movie but can quote “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille” with the proper delusional fervour.
Interestingly, Wilder and co-writer Charles Brackett initially wrote the script as a comedy rather than a horror show and thought about approaching West for the lead. But West was unthinkable as a silent star – you had to hear that do-me-big-boy drawl for her persona to work. They tried offering it to the unofficially retired Garbo – no sale. Most deliciously, there are stories of Wilder pitching the plot to Mary Pickford, not only the biggest star of the silent era but the first megastar ever. Realising that the role of Joe Gillis was positioned as equally important, Pickford insisted on being the clear main character. Sensing that he was closer to Norma Desmond than he wanted to be, Wilder diplomatically cut the meeting short.
Swanson had been almost as big as Pickford in the silent era, a melodramatic fashion plate whose life offscreen was as glamorous as the romantic fantasies she made with director Cecil B. DeMille at Paramount. (She had three marriages by 1931, including one to a French count.) But by 1949, when Wilder approached her to play Norma, Swanson was earning US$350 a week as a television talk show host in New York. She promptly divorced her fifth husband and got on the first train west, and she hadn’t even read the script.
Give her credit, though. When she did read the script and realised this sordid tale of a forgotten silent-film star was a brilliantly cruel parody of her own career and most of her peers’, she recognised it as both true and a hell of a part.
Swanson looked much younger than her 52 years and bristled at the idea of making a screen test (for Paramount, the studio she had helped build). But she got the irony of the thing, and the horror, and the many levels of its daring. Inside Norma’s Hollywood haunted house is a brutal concordance of Wilder fiction with wilder reality. Norma’s butler, Max – her former husband and director – is played by the director Erich von Stroheim, and the film they screen one night is Queen Kelly, a notorious, unfinished 1928 fiasco that von Stroheim made with Swanson. Using the film was von Stroheim’s idea; he got the joke, too, and all too well.
So did the “waxworks” Wilder hired to play Norma’s bridge group: Anna Q. Nilsson and H.B. Warner, both major draws during the silent era, and Buster Keaton, at that point an alcoholic wreck several years away from rediscovery. Swanson designed a hat for Norma’s meeting with DeMille (playing himself) that consciously echoed one she had worn in 1919’s Male and Female, directed by DeMille. The actress later described Sunset Blvd. as “a modern extension of Pirandello, or some sort of living exercise in science fiction”.
In the end, though, the triumph was short-lived. Swanson got work but not enough to sustain a second film career, and she realised too late that the role had eclipsed the actor in the public’s eyes. Nominated for a 1951 best actress Oscar, she lost to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, and as the reporters clustered around her afterward, “it slowly dawned on me that they were unconsciously asking for a bigger-than-life scene, or, better still, a mad scene. More accurately, they were trying to flush out Norma Desmond.”
The quote is from her 1981 memoir, Swanson on Swanson, which remains a great read for its clarity, honesty and colossal star vanity. No matter how much she played the diva, Swanson understood the game and her part in it. “I may not have got an Academy Award,” she writes, “but I had somehow convinced the world once again of that corniest of all theatrical clichés – that on very rare artistic occasions the actor actually becomes the part. Barrymore is Hamlet. Garbo is Camille. Swanson is Norma Desmond.”
And so, for most people, she remains. Norma was Swanson’s last major role, the one that embodied all those aspects of celebrity the culture avoids until it’s time to feed on the bones. Sunset Blvd. is about the quiet after the acclaim and the madness that can accompany it. It’s about the absolute egotism necessary to sustain stardom. Most subversive of all – and here, I think, is the source of Louis B. Mayer’s rage – is the idea that famous people need us more than we need them.
The moral of Sunset Blvd. is that fame is a drug, but it’s the withdrawal that kills.