Earlier this year, film historian and autthor Steven Michael Shearer released his latest book about another classic Hollywood star. After titles on Patricia Neal and Hedy Lamarr, he released Gloria Swanson: Hollywood’s First Glamour Queen this past January. The coffee table book is almost 500 pages with more than 400 photos inside.
The author is also touring in support of the book at Pride events through December. Shearer will appear during Pride Month at Barnes & Noble Dallas (Lincoln Park) on Saturday, June 7, from 3-5 p.m.
About the book:
Gloria Swanson is most remembered today for her role as “Norma Desmond” in Billy Wilder’s noir sound classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), but Swanson during her heyday was heralded as filmdom’s leading fashion queen, as proclaimed by director Cecil B. DeMille in such silent motion pictures as Male and Female (1919), Why Change Your Husband (1921), and The Affairs of Anatol (1922). Throughout that decade and well into the 1930s, Swanson set fashion standards on and off the screen in creations designed by such illustrious couturieres as Mitchell Leisen, Paul Iribe, Norman Norell, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ree, Capt. Edward H. Molyneux, Coco Chanel, Rene Hubert, and later Edith Head. In the 1950s, she designed and managed her own line of ready to wear fashion patterns called Forever Young for women of a discernible age.
Gloria Swanson: Hollywood’s First Glamour Queen is a photographic tribute to the Hollywood legend and to the woman. Focusing on style and fashion, the book contains personal and professional photographs, many never before published, and running biographical commentary by Shearer, who also wrote what is considered the definitive book of the actor, Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star.