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The Most Beautiful Man in the World

University of Nebraska Press

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ISBN: 0-8032-2969-0

Chapter One

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

When seventy-seven-year-old Paul Swan wrote to his longtime friend
American poet and journalist Jeanne Robert Foster on 28 November
1960, it was to ask her help with an autobiography that he considered
his magnum opus: "Well, my book should be cut down and
just the events used which contribute to the revelation of the person
I am-which clarify the strangeness ... of my personality-the soul
that looks for beauty in all people and things." Regardless of the
judgment of others, Swan never faltered in ranking his work among
the best of its kind, and he rarely felt that he was paid enough for it. In
fact, the reaction of critics to his art was so favorable that Swan might
be forgiven some hubris, but at this stage in his career his best work
seemed behind him. Foster read the book but declined. Ultimately it
would not be Swan's autobiography but a 1965 experimental film by
pop artist Andy Warhol entitled, simply, Paul Swan that would give
Swan, once hailed as "the most beautiful man in the world," a place in
American cultural history.

"I am themost famous unknown person in New York," Swan says in
the opening of Paul Swan. It is true that he was largely forgotten by the
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1960s. Even his beloved Carnegie Hall pushed him aside in 1961, along
with a number of other artists, when rents were raised substantially.
In desperation, Swan found new digs at the Van Dyke Studios on 939
Eighth Avenue at Fifty-sixth Street in Manhattan.

Once Swan had been known as "America's leading exponent of classic
dancing." In the second decade of the twentieth century, while acting
in silent films for Post Films, Five Star Featurettes, and the Pluragraph
Company, he also dazzled audiences at Arthur Hammerstein's famous
Victoria Theater in New York with performances of The Sphinx and
Faun Dance. He soon became so well known that audiences readily
understood Adele Astaire when she chided her brother, Fred, in one of
their song-and-dance routines, "Don't think you look like Paul Swan!"
His dance performances won acclaim from Hollywood to Athens, and
audiences marveled at his beauty.

As noted as Swan was for his dance, it was not his earliest artistic
talent. His first published artwork appeared on the cover of Putnam's
Magazine in December 1908. In 1909 he was chosen by Russian actress
Alla Nazimova to paint five portraits of her in her various Ibsen costumes.
By 1923, when he appeared in Cecil B. DeMille's original Ten
Commandments, he was executing commissioned portraits and sculptures
of some of the world's best-known figures, including actor John
Barrymore and Sir Eldon Gorst, the governor of Egypt. He was hailed
as one of America's leading painters, and on 21 March 1929 the Chicago
Evening American called him "a modern Leonardo da Vinci." From
New York to London, from Buenos Aires to Paris, reviewers praised
his art. His portraits and photos of him dancing appeared in magazines
such as Vogue, Literary Digest, New York World, Spur, Fashion Digest,
and Esquire. In 1930 the New York Times gave equal space to Swan
and French dignitary Prince Joachim Napolèon Murat in a headline
announcing their arrival in France (SB).

Swan was one of a very few ever to achieve international celebrity
during his life for such a combination of talents. Robert Forrest Wilson
wrote in Paris on Parade (1925): "He follows most of the seven arts and
does more in any one than most in their individual specialists. He
sculptures symbolic portrait heads, and paints decorative murals for
the wealthy of New York, writes verse and gives classic dancing concerts
in Athens and elsewhere in Europe" (224).

But Swan eventually became a caricature of his former self. When
he returned to New York in 1939 after living a decade in Paris, he found
a city much different from the one he had left in 1930. He was fifty-six
years old, and his dance was in a natural state of decline. Unlike
Japan's multitalented bisexual writer Yukio Mishima, a fellow devotee
to the Greek ideal of beauty who thought his artistic life was over at
forty-five (and so ended it), Swan could only remember the time he
had been called the most beautiful man in the world. Most of us have
some avoidance techniques to deny what we see in the mirror. Swan
seemed intent on obliterating this evidence. He applied shoeblack to
graying hair and improved his photographs with a black pen in order
to nip his waist or lift his sagging chin.

Painting portraits still brought him commissions and exhibitions;
his skills had not diminished appreciably in this area. But he continued
to hold weekly dance performances into his eighties, public displays
in which he unknowingly parodied his past grace. He became a character,
one that New Yorkers tend to collect as evidence of the strange
and complex nature of their city. Perhaps if he had retired sooner his
reputation as a dancer would have been better preserved. But he chose
instead to continue to dance until his daughters, Paula and Flora,
finally moved him into a Bedford Hills nursing home in 1971, where
he died in February 1972, at the age of eighty-eight.

By the time he met Warhol in 1964, Swan was no longer the young
headliner whom Arthur Hammerstein had called "a re-incarnated
Greek god." Warhol then worked out of an old firehouse at East
Eighty-seventh Street, a short walk from the first studio Swan had
taken in New York City, on East Eighty-sixth Street, fifty years earlier.
He met Warhol and his assistant, an aspiring poet named Gerard
Malanga, during the filming of Gregory Markopoulos's The Illiac
Passion, which Markopoulos based on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound.
Swan played the role of Zeus, Warhol played Poseidon, and Malanga
played Ganymede. "Illiac," although unmistakably anatomic (spelling
aside) and, in this context, unmistakably gay, refers us also to Homer's
poem and thus creates a circle of Greek references. Scenes in this innovative
and disturbing film employ the same kind of paralysis Beckett
had used on his stage: "The imagery in The Illiac Passion is striking in its
hypnotic repetitions, particularly in a sequence where a man repeatedly
attempts to walk, but finds himself unable to move, perhaps trapped
in the director's powerful mise-en-scene.... [Markopoulos] reads from
Thoreau's translation of Prometheus Bound but 'edits' the words just as
he does the images, repeating phrases as if they were chants, with the
repetitions alternating with silences" (Morris 2).

Markopoulos was gay and wanted "to make homosexuality a beauty
in life." "The average man is destroying beauty," he once said. "The
average man no longer looks into another man's eyes. Everyone is
afraid." Swan had lived his life stubbornly, if not bravely, looking into
people's eyes even in periods of self-doubt. He never wavered in his
attempts to create and promote his vision of beauty. Whatever other
aesthetic motives he may have had, the director admired the dancer
and rewarded him with a role in his film.

At least in part because of Warhol's interest in Swan's "unswerving
dedication to his increasingly anachronistic art form," the filmmaker
decided to load his Auricon sound-sync camera and shoot the film
Paul Swan (Angell, "Paul Swan" 23). Paul Morrissey, director of photography,
said the movie was "a record of a kind of performing art of
the early years of the century, but more fascinating being performed
in the middle sixties long after it had gone out of fashion" (Morrissey).
While Warhol was surgically deconstructing artistic tradition, forcing
his audience to look with new eyes, Swan was hanging on blindly to the
Greek ideal he had embraced as a young man, dancing for dwindling
audiences who, in the 1960s, began to consist primarily of young gay
men and old women with fidgety grandchildren in tow.

Warhol often focused on "reinterpreting the worth of cultural waste
products" (Koestenbaum 28), whether they were soup cans or elderly
artists. For those who know the story of Swan's magnificent early career,
Paul Swan at first seems a dreary film that draws attention to the star's
age. Swan has difficulty bending, kneeling, and swinging the same
sword he had once wielded in To Heroes Slain-a dance he created half
a century earlier as a tribute to soldiers killed at Flanders. It is painful
to watch Swan attempt quick costume changes as Warhol's unrelenting
camera lens moves just enough to observe the ordeal.

Swan's early reputation as "Greek god reincarnated," "Hermes of
Praxiteles," and "Adonis" was a history long buried beneath the cultural
waste Warhol wanted to excavate. This dimly lit and grainy portrayal
of an eighty-two-year-old man trying to dance reminded Morrissey "of
the Candid Camera tv-show in which people didn't know they were
being filmed. This is the only instance ... in any of the experiments
when someone didn't know they were being filmed."

Swan did, however, know that filming continued, and he was frustrated.
He complains during one difficult costume change, "Oh dear,
God damn. I can't do it this way. It takes too long." Then he remarks
to someone as he dons his headdress, "I look like you." Still frustrated
at trying to pull on the costume, he groans, "It takes too long. It spoils
it. I can't do it." He quickly reassures himself: "I suppose you can cut
all that out, can't you?"

Morrissey believed that Paul Swan was "one of the very few times
when the concept [of keeping the camera running and not editing the
film later] was effective.... What makes this film so interesting is its
combination of extreme theatrical artifice (the Paul Swan recital) and
the total lack of any artifice in the intervals of the costume changes."

Swan believed-even when his skills were deteriorating-that he
had something to offer those who watched him. In spite of such confidence,
and even after a lifetime of performances, he still dealt with
chronic stage fright. Warhol wanted to observe and record Swan as
the old man confronted his demons. He may also have been attracted
to Swan as a film project because of his own interest in dance. After
Warhol began living in New York City in the 1950s, he associated with
a number of dancers who inspired him in a variety of ways. Freddy
Herko, for instance, appeared in some of Warhol's early films, but he
danced himself into oblivion when, after putting Mozart's Coronation
Mass on the hi-fi, he leaped out of a window and killed himself
(Koestenbaum 24). The death must have been upsetting, even though
Warhol reportedly told friends that he wished he could have filmed it.
Warhol's interest in Swan-a decrepit dancer whose performance could
only remind him of the body's inevitable ruin-seems to make more
sense when one considers Warhol's preoccupation with last things.

Did Warhol also see himself in Paul Swan? Was he intrigued (or
reassured) by Swan's stubborn decline? By the 1950s, Swan's use of
theatrical makeup had increased dramatically. He began stuffing his
pants with socks to make himself look more endowed; his mascara
sometimes looked more like black globs than eyelashes-the result of
his increasingly poor vision and palsy in one eyelid.

In the same decade, Warhol began wearing hairpieces, although he
was only in his twenties. He wore pinhole cardboard glasses to try
to strengthen weak eyes; he had his nose sanded (Koestenbaum 34).
By 1963 he had begun wearing the now famous silver wig. Did his
own uncertain health have something to do with his interest in Swan's
determined denial of physical decline?

Wayne Koestenbaum offers another reason. Warhol considered subjects
in order "to solve one conundrum: what does it mean to exist in a
body, next to another person, who also exists in a body?" (Koestenbaum
11). In Paul Swan, which Koestenbaum calls "more Gloria Swanson
than Rudolf Nureyev" (Koestenbaum 24)-remember that the dancer
was geriatric at the time-Swan was the only body, the solo performer.
The body he was existing in was the distorted image of who he had
been, "the most beautiful man in the world."

There are, then, two characters in Paul Swan: Paul Swan the old man
and the memory of Paul Swan as Adonis. Swan unknowingly creates
the tension in the film as these two characters battle with every lunge,
every arm extension, each costume change. Just as we are often shocked
by a snapshot of ourselves revealing flaws we ordinarily decide not to
see, Swan's dance is a ghostly echo of the grace and beauty that once
was. What at first appears as "more Gloria Swanson than Rudolph
Nureyev," a spectacle for us to deride or pity, becomes a study in the
capacity of the human to ignore the burdens of time. As W. B. Yeats
says in "Sailing to Byzantium,"

An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing
And louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

Swan never ceased his song, no matter how his voice cracked.

The comparison to Swanson is apt, for certainly it is not the young
Gloria that Koestenbaum is referencing but rather the caricature of
Norma Desmond that she created in Sunset Boulevard. Just as the
young Gloria appears in our mind's eye when we watch that film,
so does Swan's youth and skill filter through the old man's creaky
performance. Warhol's unblinking camera pushes our collective noses
into the ultimate end of life and art.

Further, Swanson's choice to become a caricature is clearly an artistic
decision, and its execution is shared by actor, director, and writer. In
Swan's case, he is more found object for Warhol, and the art that
results is more precisely Warhol's alone. This intense focus removes
any consideration of Swan's performance as performance and allows
us to concentrate on exactly why Warhol has chosen to make this film.

The camera's focal distance varies occasionally during the film, but
it returns again and again to a close-up of the face of Paul Swan, the
aged Adonis. Sometimes the camera searches as it zooms, finding only
part of Swan's face or briefly chopping off his head. When it ultimately
locates its subject, Swan's deterioration is exposed. Paul Swan disturbs
us. Let the movie end, and let the poor old man off the hook. But
Warhol won't do that: "The more you look at the exact same thing,"
he said, "the better and emptier you feel." After sixty-six minutes, no
illusions are left.

Warhol wanted to disturb us. "Time has the power to move and the
power to stand still; time's ambidextrousness thrills and kills," and so
Swan's difficulty on stage is one way that "Andy pumps full-strength
his experience of time as traumatic" into his film (Koestenbaum 70).
He wanted to put Swan in a situation, turn the camera on, and see
what happened. Swan finishes his performance, but the camera is still
running. When he pokes his head out onstage, someone yells at him,
"Come out and make a speech. The film is almost over." Swan questions
the direction, asking if he should recite some of his poetry. The person
yells again, "I just want you to make a speech, like at the end of a
performance." And so Swan recites poetry until, in medias res, the
film ends.

Callie Angell, adjunct curator of the Warhol Film Project at the
Whitney Museum of American Art, writes that the "fluidity of Warhol's
filmmaking practice, which was often serial in nature and structured
around the full-length reel as the basic unit of production, has in some
cases made it impossible to categorize Warhol's films in the standard
filmographic terms, or evaluate them as unique art objects" ("Andy
Warhol" 123). She continues: "Traditional archival methodologies became
inadequate in the face of Warhol's idiosyncratic film practice.
For example, the standard filmographic catalogue, which lists finished
films in the year in which they were released, seriously misrepresents the
actual nature of Warhol's modular and extremely flexible film production,
in which individual reels often accumulated their own histories as
he used and reused them under different titles and in different formats"
(140).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Most Beautiful Man in the World
by Janis Londraville Richard Londraville
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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