PART ONE

On November 5, 1980, I attended a book party at the home of S.I. Newhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Random House, the publisher of Swanson on Swanson, the book being celebrated that day, had been purchased earlier in the year by Advance Publications, the giant media company owned by Newhouse and his brother, Donald. I don’t think I knew a single one of the large group of invited guests.

The book was the autobiography of Gloria Swanson, who, back in the silent-screen days, had been one of the highest-paid and most popular actors in Hollywood, Cecil B. DeMille’s biggest star. She was now 81 but looked 60. Not quite five feet tall, consummately stylish, she held court in the art-filled rooms that evening as the fancy crowd swarmed to congratulate her.

For an hour or so, I hugged a wall and nursed a drink, feeling quite out of place. Then I saw Swanson making her way over to me. “Only you and I know who wrote this book,” she said. “Thank you.”

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That was four decades ago, and only now do I feel comfortable telling the story surrounding it. Actually, it took four people to write the book: Swanson, her sixth husband, her lover, and me. When Swanson spoke to me that day, she couldn’t have imagined that the story was far from over, or that it would be distorted almost beyond recognition in the course of time.

IT HAD BEGUN for me the previous year, 1979. According to the diary I kept then, on July 19 I had a call from Brian Degas, a friend I had not seen in almost 20 years. Smart, likable, and very handsome, he had arrived in New York from Argentina in 1956. We had two mutual friends, both former Princeton classmates of mine: Chiz Schultz, a producer at CBS, where Degas worked, and Art McCormack, an account executive at McCann (then called McCann Erickson), with whom Degas shared an apartment for several years.

I had left New York the year before Degas arrived to get an MFA at the writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa. After that I spent a year in Paris on a French Government Scholarship and a semester at the Princeton Graduate School. In 1959 I gave up on academia and returned to New York, where I spent most of the next decade working on two encyclopedias published by Grolier. Degas was a regular part of my circle of friends.

In 1963 he moved to England, where he became a writer and producer on a number of TV series, including The Saint, which starred Roger Moore. He also collaborated with the Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis on several films, including the provocative sci-fi feature Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda. Degas became best known as the creator of Colditz, the award-winning series about the German castle where POWs were incarcerated during World War II. It ran from 1972 to 1974. In 1968 he married the BBC radio announcer Maggie Clews, and they had two sons.

Over the years Degas and I lost touch. When I got the unexpected call from him in 1979, I was a freelance editor. Knowing what I did of Degas’s success in England, I was shocked when he informed me that he was working with Swanson on her memoirs. They hoped shortly to turn in the first 100 pages to Random House, and he asked if I would read them and give my opinion. I said I’d be happy to.

I HAPPENED TO BE a big fan of Swanson’s. In September 1950, on my first trip to New York, I went to Radio City Music Hall, and the film on the enormous screen was Sunset Boulevard, her great comeback picture. It knocked me out.

When I was a student in Paris in 1958 and 1959, one of my French friends gave me a whole new insight into Swanson. Guy Jacquet was an actor in Jean-Louis Barrault’s repertory company, and one of its productions that season was Madame Sans-Gêne, the vintage comedy by Victorien Sardou and Émile Moreau about a plainspoken laundress who rises in the court of Napoleon. Madeleine Renaud, Barrault’s wife, was playing the title role. Jacquet said Swanson had starred in a silent-film version in the 1920s.

Swanson was on his mind because Erich von Stroheim, the Austrian actor-director who had played the role of Max, Norma Desmond’s butler and former husband in Sunset Boulevard, had just released a small part of a sprawling, unfinished film he directed in 1928 called The Swamp, which starred Swanson. The released portion was called Queen Kelly, and Jacquet raved about Swanson’s performance. “You have to see it. She plays a 16-year-old convent girl, and she was 30!” he said. I dutifully went to see the film and realized that Jacquet had not exaggerated. Swanson was incandescent.

Now, 20 years later, I could hardly believe that a friend of mine actually knew the extraordinary creature.

ON AUGUST 23, Degas phoned to say he would bring me the finished pages in 10 days. In the meantime, he said, he wanted to explain the project to me, so the next day I went to the apartment he was renting on the Upper East Side.

During the past year, he had coproduced Chapter 17, by the English playwright Simon Gray. After it flopped, he went to Hollywood to raise financing for a big-budget motion picture. His bad luck continued there. The backers suddenly pulled out.

Degas said he turned to friends in Los Angeles for help, and the actor Claire Trevor had an idea. Her husband, Milton Bren, had directed Swanson in 3 for Bedroom C, the picture she made after Sunset Boulevard. Swanson was an amateur sculptor, and Trevor suggested Degas contact her and propose mounting an exhibition of her work.

Once he met Swanson, Degas said, he had little trouble persuading her to show her sculptures in a London gallery. He even got her to make several new pieces. It all went off perfectly.

“What next?” Swanson asked him.

“How about writing your memoirs?”

“No,” she said. “Bill and I tried it once, and it didn’t work.” Bill was William Dufty, her sixth and current husband.

Degas said he told her, “That’s because you didn’t go at it right. Your life should read like a novel. If I worked on it with you, I know it would be a big success.”

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He said she told him to go ahead and see if he could get a publisher interested. Degas confessed to me that he hadn’t had a clue where to start, so he checked out stars’ biographies in a couple of big bookstores in New York to see which publishers to even approach. Then, without consulting anyone or looking for an agent, he personally pitched the idea to Jason Epstein, the top editor at Random House. To his amazement, he said, Epstein offered $450,000 (some $1.8 million today), to be paid in three installments—upon the signing of a contract, upon delivery of the manuscript, and upon the star’s completion of a book tour.

Degas said he now sat with Swanson for hours every day, squeezing every juicy detail out of her about her triumphant years in Hollywood, her six marriages, and her long string of love affairs. Dufty was writing the text.

“The book could be just the beginning,” Degas said. It could be turned into a one-woman stage show for Swanson, for instance. Just her affair with Joseph Kennedy, who took over her business in 1927 and almost ruined her, was ripe material for a play or movie. He reminded me of how big Swanson had been, how at her peak she had only one female rival: Mary Pickford. Her salary from Paramount in 1925 was $7,000 a week, or $98,000 in 2022 dollars. Before Sunset Boulevard she had made more than 40 feature films, with costars ranging from Rudolph Valentino to Laurence Olivier. “So who knows,” he said, “what this book might lead to?”

ON SEPTEMBER 18, Degas brought me the first 100 pages. “Be very honest,” he said.

I was. I called him the next day and said, “I don’t think you should show this to Random House. It reads like an old lady’s book: I feel sure that unborn babies pick their parents? Come on, Brian. Everyone thinks of her as Norma Desmond.”

“Are you willing to tell Gloria that?”

Two days later I was in Degas’s apartment again, face-to -face with the great star. “Brian says you have ideas for improving the book,” she said. “What are they?”

I said first of all I thought it was a mistake to start with her birth. She probably had the greatest comeback story in movie history. I suggested, therefore, beginning the book with Sunset Boulevard and telling her life as a flashback.

“I don’t know why,” she said, adding, “I hope you don’t think I’m anything like that awful woman I played in the film.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I just assumed Sunset Boulevard was the high point of your career.”

“It was certainly not the high point!” she exclaimed. “The high point was the year I made Madame Sans-Gêne in Paris. I was the first Hollywood actress to produce and star in a picture in Europe, and I married a titled Frenchman. When the picture was finished, in 1925, Paramount gave Henri and me a private railroad car all across America, and the day we arrived in Los Angeles, every important person in the industry was on the platform to meet us.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s where I’d start the book.”

Several days later Degas called to say Swanson accepted my idea, and they wanted me to edit the book.

“What about Jason Epstein?” I asked. “What about William Dufty?”

“Bill will write the first draft of what Gloria and I give him,” he said. “We’ll give Jason Epstein your edit.”

DEGAS NEXT ARRANGED for me to meet Dufty. A journalist by training, in 1965 Dufty had sat next to Swanson at a medical conference. Swanson, a longtime natural-health advocate, was appalled to see the heavyset guy beside her dumping more and more sugar into his coffee. She told him he was killing himself.

Over the next year, Dufty translated You Are All Sanpaku, the Japanese book that popularized macrobiotics, and sent a copy to Swanson, who invited him to her apartment. The man she greeted at the door had lost 80 pounds, and he told her she was responsible for the change.

He was nearly 17 years younger than she, separated from his wife, with whom he had a 20-year-old son. Before You Are All Sanpaku, he had ghostwritten Lady Sings the Blues, the memoir of Billie Holiday, who was a friend of his wife’s.

As Swanson put her life on pages, she started to inhale the old glory days, when headlines referred to her by her first name only and the world was at her feet.

Dufty and Swanson soon became a couple. In 1975 he published Sugar Blues, about 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.

Our meeting at Degas’s was very short. Dufty made no effort to be cordial. He said he was writing a new opening for the book, not acknowledging that I had suggested it. He said that he would finish it in a week or so.

I never saw him again.

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DEGAS BROUGHT ME the new opening chapter on October 19. It was a remarkable improvement, with Swanson not only reliving her marriage to Henri, Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudraye, and her triumphant return with him to America, but also disclosing the abortion she underwent in Paris in order to avoid scandal and save her career. The chapter opened with an item about the wedding by a reporter named Basil Woon, and that gave it a genuine flavor.

It also gave me an idea: start chapters with epigraphs. I called Michael Lutin, an astrologer friend, said I was editing Gloria Swanson’s autobiography, and asked if he could give me a quote for an Aries born March 27, 1899, to open Chapter 6.

He came up with a passage from his book Saturn Signs, ending with: “The world’s big, and you will see it all. You’re an arrow as it travels between the bow and the target.”

I passed this on to Degas, who reported that Swanson was thrilled with it. I said in that case we would need lots of high-powered quotes for epigraphs from important people in Swanson’s life, starting with Cecil B. DeMille. Degas said that would be easy; Swanson was a pack rat. She had saved every article, interview, clipping, program, invitation, and letter, enough to fill hundreds of boxes, which she kept in storage.

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.

IN EXPLAINING HOW 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. Degas worked with Swanson at her end, getting her to tell everything she could remember, prompted by the material in her boxes of files. Together they shaped her recollections as dramatically as they could, and Degas gave the resulting narrative to Dufty, who composed a rough typed draft. I didn’t question Degas about this strange-sounding arrangement, but I felt that he was not giving me the whole picture.

I usually did a heavy edit of Dufty’s work—frequently rewriting whole pages—and copied my edit out in longhand on legal pad pages. A typist made a clean copy, and Degas delivered it to Random House.

Each week Degas brought me the next chapter, and I read my edit of the last one aloud to him. Occasionally he would interrupt me, saying, “That’s a word Gloria would never use,” and together we would modify the language.

Late one afternoon when I was writing the final pages, Degas phoned. “Something amazing just happened, and I have to share it with you. I just fucked Gloria!”

The longer this procedure went on, the more obvious it became to me that I was Swanson’s ghostwriter more than Dufty was. For instance, I proposed that we end the first half of the book where it started and repeat the flashback pattern, starting with Sunset Boulevard for the second half. In spite of reservations Swanson had about Sunset Boulevard, Degas convinced her I was right.

Swanson had routinely complained to interviewers over the years that, after the success of Sunset Boulevard, producers kept trying to typecast her as Norma Desmond.

From little hints Degas dropped, however, I began to sense more and more strongly that the doppelgänger in the film was taking over. As Swanson put her life on pages, she started to inhale the old glory days, when headlines referred to her by her first name only and the world was at her feet. At the same time, in her Fifth Avenue apartment she was actually replicating Norma Desmond’s situation in Sunset Boulevard.

Just consider: In the movie Norma is revising the screenplay with which she hopes to recapture her stardom with the aid of Joe Gillis (read: Degas), a handsome young man who is completely at her disposal because he is broke. (In the original script, it was Norma’s memoirs they were working on!) 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.

On the premises, all the while, working as Norma’s butler, doing his part to keep her legend alive, is Max, the discarded, degraded husband: Dufty.

AT THE END of five months, Degas told me Swanson was going to a spa in California for two reasons: She needed a rest, and she wanted to get away from Dufty. As he delivered the news, I got a distinct sense of relief in his voice. During Swanson’s absence, he would be free to be himself.

Shortly after she left, however, things took a strange turn. Degas told me Dufty had come on to him. When he went to pick up the latest pages, he said, Dufty had met him at the door in an open robe with an exposed semi-erection. Degas said he had pretended to ignore the creepy overture.

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A week or two later, things got even weirder. As usual, Degas brought me a new chapter, but he said Dufty had told him he did not want me to touch this one. It was a lengthy diatribe about Joseph Kennedy. In addition to being a crook in business, Dufty said, Kennedy was a thorough degenerate who led a dissolute life.

“He said he didn’t want a word changed,” Degas said. “He wanted it to go straight to Jason Epstein. What shall I do?”

“Give it to Epstein,” I said.

Degas later reported Epstein’s reaction. “He asked if it was some kind of joke.”

I have no idea what happened to those pages. No part of them got into Swanson on Swanson, and very soon Dufty was out of the picture.

WHEN SWANSON CAME back from the spa, she stayed at first in a hotel on the East Side. Degas said she would not move back into the apartment until every trace of Dufty was gone, and she insisted on having the place fumigated and the locks changed.

The book still needed a conclusion, in the form of another flashback, starting with Swanson’s being honored by the United Nations for a postage stamp she designed to commemorate the United Nations Decade for Women, followed by a résumé of her varied activities between Sunset Boulevard and the writing of the memoirs. In those 30 years she had, among other things, made three unsuccessful feature pictures and a TV movie; acquired a whole new audience through her frequent guest appearances on television—everything from Dr. Kildare to The Carol Burnett Show; starred in three Broadway plays; and held contracts with Neiman-Marcus and a clothing line called Forever Young to design and promote women’s fashions. She and Degas pulled the necessary material from the files, and I wrote the text.

Ironically, that final block of time covered her marriage to Dufty and her association with Degas, but Swanson did not mention anything about getting rid of Dufty or falling in love with Degas.

LATE ONE AFTERNOON when I was writing the final pages, Degas phoned. “Something amazing just happened, and I have to share it with you. I just fucked Gloria!” He said it hadn’t been easy: “I’m hung like a bull.” But he said it was thrilling: “You know how critics always talked about her eyes in her big love scenes? How sexy they were—liquid, luminous? Well, they were just like that today!”

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.

But he ran hot and cold—impressed and amused by Swanson one day and annoyed by her the next.

ON MAY 1, I completed the text. Degas said he doubted if Swanson would read the whole thing. She not only read it but also attached hundreds of query notes with straight pins to the typed pages. She and I spent the whole first week of June in her apartment, incorporating her changes, as well as those requested by Epstein.

“Who said my father said that?” she snapped over one note.

“That’s what they gave me,” I said. “But he’s your father, and it’s your book. What would he have said?”

“Well,” she said, and her voice suddenly softened, “he would have said something like…”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s change it.”

We spent hours rewriting a passage about her famous scene with a live lion in Male and Female, and about how meticulously DeMille had directed every second of it back in 1919.

Degas occasionally came in while we were working, and it was obvious that she was totally infatuated.

The day we finished, Swanson invited me to stay for dinner. She prepared salmon and corn on the cob, and the two of us sat in a small booth in her kitchen. “There’s no mercury in that fish,” she declared proudly.

Later, she offered dessert, but I said I’d rather have a drink. “I’ll have one too, to celebrate,” she said. “Fix me a little glass of that green stuff.”

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.”

I remember two things I asked her that evening and her arch replies. Was she friendly with Greta Garbo, who lived blocks away in New York? “I don’t really know her,” she said. “I understand she just likes young girls.” How about Buster Keaton (a particular favorite of mine); what was he like in real life in his prime? “We never socialized with him,” she said, adding, “Chaplin was my clown.”

Within days Degas wrote me a check for my work, doubling the amount we had initially agreed on, and I don’t believe I saw Swanson again until November, when the book was published.

SHORTLY AFTER THE party at S.I. Newhouse’s house, I went to Swanson’s apartment, and she signed a dozen copies for my relatives and friends. I’m looking at one of those copies now, inscribed to my sister: “To Beverly Lawson, You have such a wonderful brother. I’m jealous.”

I think that’s the day I met Swanson’s older daughter, also named Gloria, from her second marriage, to Herbert Somborn. I never met Michelle, her daughter by her fourth husband, Michael Farmer. Joseph, Swanson’s adopted son, had died in 1975.

That day I also met an unobtrusive man named Raymond Daum, who was the archivist of Swanson’s papers.

THE BOOK WAS a commercial success, due in part to Janet Maslin’s review in The New York Times Book Review, which began “Movie stars’ memoirs don’t get any better than ‘Swanson on Swanson.’” Maslin continued, “[B]ut it isn’t her story that makes her book so sparkling. It’s the way the story is told.”

Swanson and Degas went on an extensive book tour in December. In interviews she referred to him as her business partner (they had formed a company called Gloria’s Way), but she also said he was the man who had changed her life. He playfully called her Madame. The book eventually sold almost 150,000 copies in hardcover and 300,000 in paperback, not counting a number of foreign translations.

I was therefore surprised, when Degas and I got together for drinks later, to see how his attitude toward Swanson had darkened. He said she had been incredibly difficult on the tour. He described one formal dinner where she complained about even the slightest things, insisted that they get up and leave in the middle of the meal, and finally worked herself into such a state that she was on the verge of fainting. He had to carry her up a flight of stairs in the hotel. “Halfway up,” he said, “she pissed all over me. It was disgusting.”

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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. She looked ecstatically joyous, for instance, in a Richard Avedon photograph in Vogue, and she posed majestically in sable for Blackglama’s “What Becomes a Legend Most?” campaign.

She and Degas were now traveling in a realm so removed from mine that I had almost no contact with him after we finished Swanson on Swanson, and none with her. I heard from one of our mutual friends that Degas had invested their money from the autobiography unwisely and lost much of it, and that they had parted on bad terms.

PART TWO

ON APRIL 4, 1983, I was stunned to hear that Swanson had died of a heart attack. I was then an editor at Vanity Fair, which had been launched by Advance Publications the previous month, and I soon heard from Raymond Daum. When Swanson sold her papers to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1982, she arranged for Daum to continue as the archivist there. He would remain in that position until 1991, and he quickly took it upon himself to tell the end of Swanson’s life as he saw it to anyone who would listen.

In our intermittent calls over the years, Daum’s major aim was to depict Degas as a ruthless grifter who cunningly manipulated Swanson for her money. Daum always managed to sound more like a jealous rival, however, than a conscientious employee, and the Degas he described was nothing like the Degas I knew.

Annette Tapert, who interviewed Daum for the Swanson chapter in her 1998 book, The Power of Glamour: The Women Who Defined the Magic of Stardom, quotes him at length.

[Swanson] fell for Degas hook, line, and sinker. She was like a little girl. She would sit on his lap and cuddle and coo and say to me, “Look at that boy, he could play a leading man!” The whole situation was like a parallel to Norma Desmond, except in this case Degas made the schemer Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard look like an angel.

Tapert continues: “Daum discovered that Degas was bilking Swanson out of almost all of the modest fortune she had left and had stolen valuable personal mementos and relevant documents to her career. But Swanson refused to believe Daum or her family when they came to New York to deal with the problem.”

Tapert concludes: “The bubble burst when two producers who’d been negotiating with Degas for Swanson to star in a Broadway show taped their conversations with him in which he spoke disparagingly of her. According to Daum, Tapert writes, “When they played the tapes for Gloria, she finally realized she’d been betrayed. Devastated, she wept to Daum, ‘You warned me. All along I was a fool.’ ”

Playing those tapes for Swanson was bound to have predictable and irreversible results. It banished Degas, for sure, but it can only have left Swanson lonely, bitter, and heartsick for the rest of her life. Her daughters barred Degas from seeing her.

THE STORY DOESN’T end there. In 2013, 30 years after Swanson died, two new biographies appeared (the first, incidentally, since Swanson on Swanson). I was stunned to realize that they both reflected a seismic shift of emphasis concerning the contributions Degas, Dufty, and I made to Swanson’s autobiography.

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.

As for the manuscript itself, I have relied on the help of three people: Brian Degas, who conceived of the dramatic structure of the book, helping me see things I was not willing to see, and was the lifeblood through all the stages of getting it published in its present form; Wayne Lawson, who took all the drafts and corrections and revisions and helped me weld them into the final version; and my husband, William Dufty, who tirelessly helped me research all the early material.

When Swanson got back from the spa, she must have been aware of Dufty’s behavior in her absence, from his Kennedy chapter to his flirtation with Degas. She therefore ordered him out and moved Degas in. And that began the brief part of her story—her last two years—that Daum proceeded to co-opt. He soon turned Swanson’s savior into her destroyer.

Daum died in 2003, but he is quoted extensively in one of the 2013 biographies, Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star, by Stephen Michael Shearer. The author also seems on his own to take every opportunity to pillory Degas, as these examples demonstrate (the italics are mine):

Degas’s biggest draw for Gloria, indeed possibly with all his conquests, was his fading good looks, his accent, and his abundant charm…. Degas, described as a darling or a demon, depending on whom one talked to, was quite able to romantically fulfill the needs of older women, said one of his former friends.

If Shearer sets out to vilify Degas, it is probably because he has a self-appointed hero to replace him: William Dufty.

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.

According to Dufty’s later partner, Dennis Fairchild, Bill ‘went to Spain for two weeks, and then when he came back agreed to do the book as a wedding present to her.… [H]e wrote her book in twelve weeks.’

Nonsense. In the first 26 weeks of the allotted contract time, Swanson and Degas and Dufty together produced only 100 pages.

Another key Shearer source is Dirk Benedict, an actor who played opposite Swanson in the Broadway play Butterflies Are Free:

For years Gloria had nagged Dufty, “Bill, you must write my book.” According to Dirk Benedict, he warned Gloria, “You can either have the marriage or the book,” telling me he always had to drag the stories out of her and she didn’t want to tell the truth. Bill eventually buckled, however, and throughout the year worked on Gloria’s memoirs.

Hardly. Degas, not Dufty, sat with Swanson and got her to tell in detail for the first time the stories that make her book so rich.

The source of the following passage is Timothy Rooks, a friend of Dufty’s:

In early May 1980 Gloria secretly went to the publisher and added a codicil to the book contract, insisting now that one-third of the proceeds from the sales of the book be handed over to Degas…. When Dufty found out, he ended their marriage. A man of his word, he completed the writing of her story, then walked out of the apartment and the marriage in June.

Hold it. Dufty did not walk out of the marriage with great dignity. Swanson drove him out. And he did not complete the book. I did, with Swanson and Degas.

As the executive literary editor of Vanity Fair, I received a galley of Shearer’s book for review consideration. I phoned the editor and expressed my concern about all the inaccuracies, particularly those involving me. As a result, my role in producing Swanson on Swanson was amended to read: “Dufty would write a chapter a week, and Lawson would edit the work, sometimes rewriting whole chapters himself.” Who’s missing from that account? Brian Degas.

Gloria Swanson: Ready for Her Close-Up, the other biography published in 2013, is by Tricia Welsch, a faculty member at Bowdoin College. In her acknowledgments she says of Swanson on Swanson, “for my money the best Hollywood memoir ever written,” and she cites the book some 230 times.

I am not mentioned, however, and Degas is relegated to four demeaning pages, based mainly on an article by Molly Haskell, published in Vogue in 1980.

About the authorship of Swanson on Swanson, Welsch writes as if Dufty was the only person of use to Swanson: “Dufty was an experienced ghostwriter, and his organizational help was invaluable, but Swanson on Swanson was written in the actress’s own voice, as the archive holdings make clear.”

She says of Degas, “Brian Degas took quite a lot of credit for himself, shouldering aside Bill Dufty.” Her last word on Degas comes directly from the long-deceased Daum, filtered through Swanson’s younger daughter: “Worried that her infatuation with the younger man would harm Gloria, her friend and archivist Raymond Daum warned Michelle that Degas (whom he called ‘that monster’) was manipulating her mother…. Daum claimed that Degas ‘capered around the apartment when Gloria was ill, excited by the prospect of the money he could make from her death.’ ”

The cumulative picture of Degas drawn by all the writers mentioned is poisonous, though none of them, to my knowledge, ever spoke to him. I asked Tapert, who is a friend, if Degas had ever threatened to sue, and she said no.

So let me play the devil’s advocate, because I was there. First of all, without Brian Degas, there would be no Swanson on Swanson. Degas may have been down on his luck when he approached Swanson, but she was undoubtedly flattered to be approached—at 79, after five failed marriages and a sixth in trouble—by a captivating 44-year-old producer. In short order, Degas did marvelous things for her: the London gallery show and a best-selling autobiography. Most importantly, he made love to her and made her feel young again. He did for her what only director Billy Wilder had been able to do before him, with Sunset Boulevard. He gave her back her stardom.

He also got a nice sum of money for Dufty, for a book I am confident Dufty was incapable of writing on his own.

He gave me the chance of a lifetime, which became the basis for a long career in publishing.

In August 2018, I called Degas to say I was thinking of writing this article. We had had no direct communication in decades. I knew he was in England, partnered for the last 30 years with a woman he had referred to in one interview as “the captain who runs the ship.” He had been writing and producing episodes for two TV series, Virtual Murder and Specials.

We talked for nearly an hour before I gingerly inquired about his separation from Swanson. Was it difficult?

“It was,” he said. “You know, she got very angry when I told her I wanted to go back to England.”

He stopped, and I could tell that that was all he intended to say, with no mention of Daum, or Dufty, or the new biographies. He was emphatically bringing the curtain down on one brief period of his life, with no desire to go over any of it again, ever.

Degas died on April 3, 2020. He was 84. To do him justice, if nothing else, I resolved to tell the whole story, starting with Swanson’s saying to me, “Only you and I know who wrote this book.”

Well, reader, now you know.