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...boiled American come from? What will they do after the final fade-out? And what of Laura Hunt and Waldo Lydecker (Gene Tierney and Clifton Webb in Laura), Guy Haines and Bruno Anthony (Farley Granger and Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train) and Norma Desmond and Joe Gillis (Gloria Swanson and William Holden in Sunset Boulevard...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Flick Lit Suspects | 6/3/1985 | See Source »

...amount of wishing could prevent her from becoming the most publicized child of the '30s. Appalled by whispers of Gloria Sr.'s loose life of pornographic orgies and sapphic lovers, Little Gloria's paternal aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, sued for custody of the child in 1934 and won. In the best account of this celebrated trial, Little Gloria, Happy at Last (1980), Journalist Barbara Goldsmith argued that a greater anguish lay below the ten-year-old's fear of being torn from her home in some Solomonic decision. "I was afraid she would take me away," Gloria had testified...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Society's Child Once Upon a Time | 5/6/1985 | See Source »

...this specific dread is unacknowledged by the autobiographer, it seems to be the subtext of the hearing and all that follows: "I had been led on into a strange country, a country that knew no boundaries and was called Pain." Terrified of strangers, besieged by reporters, taunted in schools, Gloria blinks through a chaos of flashbulbs and interrogations; in a nation wasted by the Depression, she becomes America's real-life Little Orphan Annie...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Society's Child Once Upon a Time | 5/6/1985 | See Source »

...this stuttering, bewildered figure who complies with any request: "That's better that's better, Little Gloria--only smile, please, smile smile smile smile!" Later she becomes pathetically grateful for romantic attention. Some adolescent scenes might have been snipped from a Philip Barry comedy: when 16-year-old Gloria develops a crush on a neighbor, an aunt informs her, "You can't marry him--because if you did, why--well--your name would be--Smith--wouldn't it? You'd be--MRS. SMITH!" The sobbing girl is consoled by her grandmother: "Maybe he could call himself Smythe--wouldn't that...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Society's Child Once Upon a Time | 5/6/1985 | See Source »

...more often, the author evinces a tragic yearning for days that never were. Her obviously neglectful and self-indulgent mother is made into an art nouveau madonna, complete with aura: "I would drift into . . . the sunlight yellow that surrounded her." Reality is hard to hold; at 17, Gloria finds herself staring hard at visitors, "because if I didn't keep my eyes on them they might all disappear in a puff of the . . . cigarette." She imagines a sofa as "a nest on the topmost branch of a tree where I'm safe and nothing can harm...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Books: Society's Child Once Upon a Time | 5/6/1985 | See Source »

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