Understanding Sunset Boulevard
POV: You’re like…really old.
A woman stands atop the staircase, poised and ready. Claw-like fingers brush up against silk, clinging to spotted skin with sweat and spots. A single, over-bright eye shines out past false lashes. Time seems to stop as a voice thickened by time lets out just one line to send chills up the audience’s spine. “All right, Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.”.
This line, iconic in its horrific delusion, is the culmination of an entire film’s worth of careful build up to one central theme: stardom is insanity. Beneath the torrid love triangle and the nostalgic throwbacks to a bygone era of Hollywood, this is the core of ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950). Norma Desmond, in all her glamorous finery, is the monster.
Desmond may be as fictional an actress as Lydia Tár is a composer, but both reflect real people. The era in which silent cinema reigned ended with extreme quickness, and in its wake was a bevy of actors who simply couldn’t cut it. The biggest names in the world didn’t so much fade – they were rubbed out completely. Many suffered the humiliation of talking to an audience who found them suddenly lacking. By 1933, the stars of the 1920s were (almost) all washed up.
Which is insanity, considering the very real star power we are talking about. Sound wiped out half an industry. Unless you were fairly new and lucky enough to have a voice that audiences could connect with, like Greta Garbo or John Barrymore, you were toast. At best, these actors lingered for a few films, and were meagrely rewarded for it.
I mean, look at Mary Pickford.
The name Pickford means very little to the majority of the moviegoing population. She’s a relic of a relic, somebody your grandmother forgot about in the 1960s. But this was the Queen of Hollywood in her day. Part of the ultimate power couple through her second marriage to Douglas Fairbanks. Somebody who commanded respect, admiration, and deference. The second woman ever to win an Oscar for Best Actress, and likely only missing that first every award because there was nothing to award the year previous. Pickford’s Academy Award in 1929 was a film in which she was, in effect, playing against type.
If anything stands out to you by the name, it’s likely the image of a grown woman playing a child or teenager. With her (greyed out) golden curls and cheeky smile, she has spent almost two decades alternating between girlish whimsy and womanly stoicism. She was “the little girl with the curls” from her first appearances through the early 1910s, until a whirlwind of attention in 1913 transformed her from the plain Gladys Marie Smith to Mary Pickford, the first Movie Star. Capitalised for effect.
So huge was her fame that, in 1918, that Paramount Pictures’ head honcho Adolph Zukor offered her $250,000 (the equivalent of roughly $5 million today) to retire rather than leave for a competitor. She instead worked moved to First National Pictures, the same studio that worked with Charlie Chaplin. This later became part of Warner Bros., but for a short while, it was the cream of the crop. Partially because it held the trump cards of Pickford and Chaplin.
I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of her career in detail, but I just wanted to emphasise just how undeniably important this woman was. She sat somewhere between Julia Roberts and God in terms of how big she was at her peak. 1917 saw her star in six box office hits. Literally one every two months. Which is why the five, measly sound films she made 1929 to 1933, one of which was never realised, stands in such contrast.
None of them are very good, and Pickford isn’t particularly brilliant in them. Oh – she’s fine enough. There’s nothing embarrassing in these films except the reception. Whatever hold she had on the public died when she opened her mouth.
It was a sputter of a finale.
Pickford remained a staple of Hollywood through the rest of her days, but as a producer and member of the elites. Her star marriage collapsed in a sea of infidelity and separation, and she remarried a former co-star and adopted some children to dislike. Living in the famous Pickfair, she was to remain a legend in her lifetime. Stabs were made at a comeback, but never followed through. The actress had fundamentally lost the day sound came to pictures, and she wasn’t the only one.
"Get away, dears. I don't need you anymore and you don't need me."
If there is a story that feels analogous to Norma Desmond, it’s her namesake, Norma Talmadge. Or at least, her and her family. One of the three sisters to become actresses and stars in the 1910s to escape poverty, Norma, Natalie and Constance feel like the ultimate story in post-silent fame. Only she seemed invested enough to continue after the switch to sound, and only for a few years. Much like Pickford, she simply had no choice but to give it up to save her dignity.
While Natalie gave up film much earlier than her sisters, instead becoming involved with and then separating from Buster Keaton, Norma and Constance were two of the biggest stars of comedy and drama throughout the 1920s. Norma Talmadge was the serious actress, the clawing and cloying woman of the screen. You can see many of her jerky and often painful mannerisms in Gloria Swanson’s performance in ‘Sunset Boulevard’.
That may sound like a criticism, and in sound, it definitely is. Both sisters, and to a lesser extent Natalie, were naturals for a certain kind of theatrical movement on screen. Naturalism was never in vogue while they were training, and Norma in particular knew how to work within these stylistic boundaries.
As a result, the films were immensely popular. She was amongst the bevvy of stars that made up First National Pictures. Her fans adored her and she was amongst those who first stamped a hand into wet concrete in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. But notoriety and fame truly did not translate to success in the talkies.
"Quit pressing your luck, baby. The critics can't knock those trust funds Mama set up for us.” – Constance to Norma Talmadge
Talmadge’s two sound productions were mostly disasters. In her mid-30s, she had already reached a precarious time for the female star, and while her voice was fine, her mannerisms had lost their charm. The only highpoint in her first sound production, ‘New York Nights’ (1929), is a short song by the piano, in which she seemed to transform into a woman with warmth and charm. No such high points exist in her final picture, ‘Do Barry, Woman of Passion’ (1930).
Natalie and Constance Talmadge had never bothered to appear in a sound production.
The end result was three very rich women who had been, at one time, very poor. Norma post-retirement has been described as restless, but the truth was, these were women of leisure. They stood as testaments to the Hollywood version of the American Dream.
Nobody has ever been more famous than Clara Bow.
I mean that as sincerely as possible. In January of 1929, as the silent film era and her fame were both peaking and collapsing, a 24-year-old Clara Bow was inarguably the most famous young woman in the world. Described upon her arrival to Hollywood, following a photo contest, as “a genuine spark of divine fire”, she was a phenomenon.
In many ways, the life of Bow is not that which Desmond is meant to represent. She came too late, was too young when Hollywood switched to sound, had too much potential to continue. A fundamental part of Norma Desmond is her refusal to accept she was done when talkies hit, but Bow, like the Talmadge sisters, chose to leave. Fame chewed her up and spat her out.
“I have known hunger, believe me.”
Watching a Clara Bow picture outside of the context of her fame is an exhausting experience because most are terrible. Unlike Norma Talmadge, she isn’t particularly dated in her performance style. There are no claws and careening necks to parse through. In fact, Bow could easily be understood as one of the most natural talents of the later silent era. She had the ability to perform her scenes in a way that read as entirely human, which was fast overtaking the more affected movements of early cinema. But with so much money guaranteed, studios put little effort into her career.
It's strange, in retrospect, how disconnected that sounds. You have an actress with talent and the audience to back it up, and yet the studio just didn’t put the money in. But there was no need, and no desire. She didn’t quite look like the star they wanted, her manners weren’t particularly refined, and again, her films’ success was essentially assured.
“[when] Bow was at her height in pictures we could make a story with her in it and gross a million and a half, where another actress would gross half a million in the same picture and with the same cast.” – David O’ Selznick, film producer
Often ascribed as another of sound’s victims, she essentially wasn’t. Success followed Bow around like a bad stench, and her departure from Paramount Pictures almost destroyed the company. No, it was poor mental health that killed Bows career.
If there is anything of Clara Bow that feels like it may have inspired ‘Sunset Boulevard’, it’s her post-film life. After the film ‘Hoop-la’ (1933), Bow retired and had two children with her actor husband, opened The ‘It’ Café, named for her most notorious role, and once that shut down in 1943, she was rarely heard from.
She struggled with mental health issues, and like all women mentioned on this list, was considered at some point for the role of Desmond.
So, who was Norma Desmond?
There’s so many more women who clearly inspired the type that ‘Sunset Boulevard’ represented, shown by the fact that almost every actress before Gloria Swanson was massively insulted. Norma Shearer, Valeska Suratt, Greta Garbo; there were plenty of silent era stars who’s reclusiveness made them both ideal casting and impossible choices. When Mae West was asked, an actress who never acted on screen during the silent era, she was insulted at the suggestion she play a has-been.
Former stars like Pola Negri were asked, they declined on the strength of the script (and in Negri’s case, her accent was considered too thick anyway). Many felt it was too cruel for its own good. Mae Murray, another actress who was both considered for the role and likely an inspiration for it, was offended at the final product, likely due to its similarities to her own mental health issues.
Marian Davies likely explained the general reaction best when she said, “None of us floozies was that zonked (crazy).”
But ultimately, the only Norma Desmond to every exist on screen is and always will be Gloria Swanson. Convinced to do a screen test for the director Billy Wilder by her friend and director George Cukor, she managed to step into the role that defined her career. Swanson was one of the women who had failed to find success post-sound, with the added scandal of her Kennedy lover sending her an invoice for her career thrown into the mix. But nothing can overshadow her performance in the film.
“If they want you to do ten screen tests, do ten screen tests. If you don’t, I will personally shoot you.” – George Cukor
When Swanson is on screen, you feel exactly why Desmond is so beloved and so rotten. The wealth and power of the silent era, the glamor and decay. She’s a fragmented reflection of every woman left behind in 1929, including herself. But there’s more than just history behind her eyes. The passion, lust, and narcissism that is the character’s foundation lights her up and engulfs every scene.
But she is still also history.
Her playfulness is Mabel Normand. Her seduction is Pola Negri. Her swishing and swanning are Norma Talmadge. Norma Desmond is the type of woman who can and will do a perfect Charlie Chaplin impression to impress you. She’s flirty and girlish in a way that only reads false because you saw her be haughty earlier.
Because there is no real Norma Desmond. She’s a shadow of the industry.
Like so many women in this age of Hollywood, she’s a performance. Her story, her presence, her career, they’re barely more fictional than the women she represented. Stars like Mary Pickford and Clara Bow saw their lived rewritten plenty of times over for fan amusement. How different is it to obscure poverty, than it is to write it whole cloth? And sometimes they even did that!
To understand ‘Sunset Boulevard’ is to understand that it was insulting to these women partially because it was honest. Pickford was a recluse in Pickfair. Bow and Murray were really suffering from mental illness. All of them were old, all of them were former stars, and all had been effected by the arrival of sound. Some were hit harder than others, but the truth hurts. But the film was right about plenty else.
For one, they really did have faces
Select bibliography
Silent Stars by Jeanine Basinger
The Star Machine by Jeanine Basinger
Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder, with an introduction by Jeffrey Meyers
Behind The Scenes of “Sunset Boulevard!”
Sunset Boulevard: what Billy Wilder's satire really tells us about Hollywood