Do You Remember: Gloria Swanson’s Sugar Coffin (Courtesy of Kenneth Anger)

Oh hell yeah, it’s time for some old-school celebrity gossip this week!

She was the queen of silent cinema who made the ultimate comeback in one of Hollywood’s most damning self-portraits. He was a former child actor turned radical queer filmmaker who gained notoriety for his slanderous tales of Golden Age excess. Putting Gloria Swanson and Kenneth Anger in the same room together feels like something dreamed up by John Waters. Their feud was brief but oh so delicious.

In the 1950s, Kenneth Anger needed money. He was an underground sensation thanks to his short films like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome and Fireworks, which pushed the boundaries of surrealism and queer representation on film. But it wasn't paying the bills. While living in Paris, he teamed up with film critic Elliott Stein for a book about classic celebrity gossip, much of which he had heard from his beloved grandmother when he was a child. The book, Hollywood Babylon, was a legendary scandal.

First published in France in 1959, it was banned shortly after it was first published in the U.S. in 1965, and it wouldn’t be released officially until the mid-70s. It was juicy, gaudy, and mostly fake. Anger's claims were almost immediately challenged by many in the know. He claimed that Lupe Vélez was found with her head in a toilet after she died by suicide via an overdose of sleeping pills. The assertion that Clara Bow had sex with the entire USC football team, including a young John Wayne, was debunked endlessly for decades, including by Bow's sons. A lot of his stories were just kind of mean and sexist, a matter not helped by accompanying photos of crime scenes and dead bodies, like those of Carole Landis and Elizabeth Short.

I have, of course, read Hollywood Babylon. I think it’s a crucial text for gossip studies, even of it is largely nonsense. So much of it feels true in spirit, which might be why Anger continued to have so many acolytes well into his 90s. It captured the plausible fantasy of Hollywood as a cesspit of moral degradation that you’ve always not so secretly hoped it to be. But as a piece of gossip, it’s best understood as both a product of its time and as the sniggering cocktail hour chat of an industry outsider who always viewed the mainstream entertainment industry with an intense side-eye. As he was quoted as saying in the unauthorised biography of his life, "If you are a member of the media, you belong to the public. You've made that Faustian bargain with your public. Take me – all of me – I'm yours."

In Hollywood Babylon, Anger writes that Gloria Swanson described Lana Turner as “not even an actress… she is only a trollop.” Anger was apparently unaware that this quote actually originated in a column by Walter Winchell, which Swanson had retracted. When Swanson found out about the quote, she called in her lawyers and filed a libel suit in 1977.

(Image via Giphy.)

By the late ‘70s, Swanson had settled into her status as a retired grand dame of Hollywood who lived fabulously. Sunset Boulevard had revived interest in her, but she didn’t leap to return to the film industry afterward. She only made a couple of films following her magnum opus, then did a few TV and theatre pieces before returning to her world of glamour and money. She was basically the anti-Norma Desmond and she was proud of that. Swanson was also a health nut who was ahead of her time in advocating for things like a macrobiotic diet and opposing the use of insecticides.

In 1976, she married William Duffy, a writer who became her sixth husband and stayed with her until her death. In 1975, he had written Sugar Blues, a health book that delved into the history of the legal white stuff and the many maladies its consumption can lead to. Duffy compared sugar to heroin, writing that both were "nothing but a chemical" that was refined into something else. A lot of Duffy's claims were pure scaremongering, such as implying that eating sugar was a contributor to mental illnesses, cancer, and the bubonic plague. It's a book with a, shall we say, limited understanding of science. But it was also very popular and widely read. Even John Lennon was a fan.

Swanson’s health philosophies fit right in with that of Sugar Blues. Together, the pair travelled the country speaking about the importance of good nutrition. Swanson was certainly a great ad for it. She was still gorgeous and nimble in her 70s. In a 1975 piece for The Palm Beach Report, Swanson is quoted as saying, "My concern for good health has been a life belt for me. I feel a debt to the public and will spend my life trying to help them." Said help involved claiming, "No one can have skin like a baby's bottom if they're going to stuff that hole in their face with chocolate and banana splits." Harsh.

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Anger was annoyed with the lawsuit. It had been 17 years since he’d written the book and he’d only done it for the money. Plus, Swanson was one of dozens of stars he’d sh*t-talked. As wrote for The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, "Swanson’s claim failed to meet the court’s standards for libel, and the court found in favor of Anger and the defendants. Hollywood Babylon was not libelous “on its face” or defamatory “per se,” as the innuendo surrounding the passages could not be used to enlarge the allegedly libelous statements. In other words, the innuendo wasn’t strong enough to render Anger’s statements libelous."

But before this verdict was reached, Anger decided to get super petty. He started barraging Swanson with "hate art" that included voodoo dolls, magical incantations, photos of Swanson pierced with pins, and a large plastic bag containing lightbulbs. Anger signed the majority of the works with “Uncle Sugar” or “Uncle C12H22O11.” The weirdest hate mail was a mini green wooden coffin filled with sugar. Painted on the lid was "Hic Jacet Gloria Swanson."

(Image via the Harry Ransom Centre.)

In 1982, a year before her death, Swanson sold her archives of over 600 boxes to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Contained within was the coffin. It's unknown why she kept it. Perhaps she appreciated a good joke or wanted to stare down the sugar like a macrobiotic goddess. For the Ransom Center, preserving and archiving a coffin full of sugar was a challenge. When they decided to move the powder into plastic bags, they made a discovery. Underneath the sugar was a piece of newsprint with the Hebrew word for "shalom" written on it. No one at the Ransom Center had seen this before, and it's unknown if Swanson ever discovered it herself.

(Image via the Harry Ransom Centre.)

This is such classic petty gossip that I’m almost sad we don’t get stuff like this nowadays. Instagram shade just isn’t this creative. It also opens up SO many questions. Did Anger make the coffin himself? How did he get the idea for this? What did he intend with the hidden Shalom? Was that is version of a “bless your heart” read? Did he make any other coffins for his many enemies and what did he put in those?

Let’s get back to some classic craft-related bullying. Someone send Gwyneth a candle that smells like Winona Ryder or something!