Ghostwriting Gloria Swanson: The Strange, Sexually Charged Genesis of a Legendary Autobiography

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.