Four decades after ghostwriting Gloria Swanson’s autobiography, Wayne Lawson sets the record straight about who did what to whom.
Dufty and Swanson soon became a couple. In 1975 he publishedabout the deleterious effect of sugar on America’s health, and Swanson went on the book tour with him. They married the following year, when he was 60.
One week later I started editing. The schedule before us was daunting. Degas had promised Epstein the full manuscript in a year. Six months had been spent on these first 100 pages, which I cut considerably. We figured we would need to produce a chapter a week for the next six months.the chapters he started bringing me were arrived at, Degas said Swanson was not getting along with Dufty, so they stayed at opposite ends of the apartment.
Just consider: In the movie Norma is revising the screenplay with which she hopes to recapture her stardom with the aid of Joe Gillis , a handsome young man who is completely at her disposal because he is broke. With each passing day, she falls more deeply in love with Joe, until she cannot bear to have him out of her sight. And though Joe yields to her advances out of gratitude and necessity, deep down he yearns for the day when he can return to the world of his contemporaries.
“He said he didn’t want a word changed,” Degas said. “He wanted it to go straight to Jason Epstein. What shall I do?”Degas later reported Epstein’s reaction. “He asked if it was some kind of joke.”and very soon Dufty was out of the picture.1925; in Telluride, 1974; staring down a sculpted self-portrait, 1978.
In our subsequent talks, however, the thrill he conveyed that afternoon, after having had sex with the greatest star of them all, could suddenly cool. Within a week or so he began to complain that he had lit a fire he could not put out. She had become rapacious, he said. Whenever they were in a room alone together, she would start grabbing for his fly. He said it was mortifying.On May 1,
I poured a scotch for myself and some crème de menthe for her. As we settled back with our drinks, she said, “Thank you. Now it’s all up to the critics.” That day I also met an unobtrusive man named Raymond Daum, who was the archivist of Swanson’s papers.The New York Times Book Review, He remained with her, however, and the tabloids treated them as a devoted couple. I remember one gossip column carried a picture of them out together, along with questions as to whether this man half Swanson’s age was destined to be husband number seven. On the surface it certainly seemed that, once Dufty was out of the star’s life, she blossomed.
Once the text of Swanson’s book was finished, in 1980, Swanson, Degas, and I agreed that it needed a foreword, because readers and critics would certainly question whether Swanson, at 80, had written a dense text of 500 pages by herself. I helped Swanson come up with the following paragraph, in which her order of importance is only too evident.
When Dufty’s marriage to Swanson ended, he moved to Michigan to care for his ailing mother. There he met Dennis Fairchild, an astrologist, who became his lover. They remained together until Dufty’s death, in 2002, at the age of 86. It is clear from Shearer’s book that Dufty instilled in Fairchild and a couple of friends his wishful version of how he exited Swanson’s life and the role he played in producing her memoirs.
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