But no matter what the book showed of Mrs. Talmadge’s maternal ebullience, she really knew exactly how good they were and how bad. And her girls knew. There was no bunk about them. Disconcertingly witty and hard-boiled, the Talmadges were impossible to impress. Around them shimmered noise and laughter and the sound of the phonograph, and in the centre moved Constance, who always acted as though she had swallowed an arc light for breakfast.
Partners with Miss Swanson in United Artists at one time were the great Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. By 1927 they both wore halos, cut for them by a devoted public, halos a trifle binding, a fraction cocked, which Douglas Fairbanks industriously kept shining. To preserve that glitter Fairbanks worked. Miss Pickford did nothing. She stood for sanity. Hers was a snicker of sense in the midst of treble hysteria. In a business where everyone, including her own husband, collected eccentricities, she remained simple, a trifle dowdy, old-fashioned, her skirts too long, her hair piled in those golden, unconvincing curls so admired in 1915 when Biograph’s Little Mary was growing into “America’s Sweetheart.”
Extremely shrewd in business, Mary Pickford aided Fairbanks in the publicly encouraged fallacy that he had no head for business. Actually he was pretty coony. At directors’ meetings of his various interests, he would sit apparently a blank at the table and then, the words straining in a submerging flow of synonyms and explanatory phrases, he would offer an acute suggestion. He loved to play dead because he made such a smart ghost.
At Pickfair, high on a Hollywood hill, they received the world. Everyone came to see them. And after dinner they showed, as Hollywood still shows, a movie for entertainment. Slumped in a deep chair, Fairbanks, the king at ease, home from the studio, and Mary, the grave queen, home from a cornerstone laying, would slip back their halos and chew peanut brittle.
That was in the silent movie period so beloved of the ageing handsome character, Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, whose definitive comment after watching an old film was: “Still wonderful, isn’t it? And no dialogue. We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces. There just aren’t any faces like that anymore. Maybe one—Garbo.” It is through Norma that Gloria Swanson, who began in the movies as an extra in 1913, is a star again in 1950, playing with the exaggeration, the intensity and some of the extraordinary technique invented by those pioneer directors, D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille.