![]() On August 23, Degas phoned to say he would bring me the finished pages in 10 days. Now, 20 years later, I could hardly believe that a friend of mine actually knew the extraordinary creature. I dutifully went to see the film and realized that Jacquet had not exaggerated. She plays a 16-year-old convent girl, and she was 30!” he said. The released portion was called Queen Kelly, and Jacquet raved about Swanson’s performance. 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. Degas was a regular part of my circle of friends. 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. After that I spent a year in Paris on a French Government Scholarship and a semester at the Princeton Graduate School. ![]() I had left New York the year before Degas arrived to get an MFA at the writers’ workshop at the University of Iowa. 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. Smart, likable, and very handsome, he had arrived in New York from Argentina in 1956. 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. It had begun for me the previous year, 1979. 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. ![]() Actually, it took four people to write the book: Swanson, her sixth husband, her lover, and me. That was four decades ago, and only now do I feel comfortable telling the story surrounding it.
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