The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol [Hardcover]

Janis Londraville (Author), Richard Londraville (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2006

When Andy Warhol cast Paul Swan (1883–1972) in three films in the mid-1960s, he knew that the octogenarian had once been internationally hailed as “the most beautiful man in the world” and as “Nijinsky’s successor.” Arthur Hammerstein had advertised Swan as “a reincarnated Greek God,” and George and Ira Gershwin had celebrated his beauty in their musical Funny Face.

What Warhol didn’t know was that Swan had also been called “America’s Leonardo,” portrait artist of the famous and the infamous, including writer Willa Cather, aviator Charles Lindbergh, British Prime Minister James Ramsay MacDonald, and dictator Benito Mussolini. This book is the first to tell Swan’s story, from his days as a world-famous dancer and artist, through his film career—which ran from silent pictures, including De Mille’s Ten Commandments (1923), to Warhol’s Camp, Paul Swan, and Paul Swan I-IV (1965)—to his portrait painting late in life when Nelson Rockefeller’s children, Malachy McCourt, and Pope Paul VI were among his subjects.

With unprecedented access to Swan’s scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and an unpublished memoir that tells the story of a bisexual man trying to build a public life in perilous times, Janis and Richard Londraville reconstruct the intriguing life of this uniquely interesting figure, whose story, although widely glossed in the press, was until now never fully known.

(20060926)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1965, Andy Warhol made a film in which the 82-year-old dancer and gay camp idol Paul Swan, once called "The Most Beautiful Man in the World," is shown trying to recreate one of his youthful performances, unintentionally making a mockery of his past grace. The authors (Dear Yeats, Dear Pound, Dear Ford) of this insightful and compassionate biography take account of this and other pathetic aspects of Swan's old age, but for the most part they emphasize the positive side of his life. Raised on a Midwestern farm in a family dominated by a rigidly Methodist mother, Swan left home at 15, adopted a bohemian life style based on Oscar Wilde's dictum of art for art's sake, and became a successful portrait painter and sculptor as well as an actor, a poet and a leading exponent of classical dance. Bisexual, married and the father of two children, he was the quintessential eccentric, especially in his later years when he wore quantities of makeup, bathed in olive oil and stuffed his pants with socks to make himself appear better endowed. The Londravilles don't focus on these oddities. Their book succeeds because they concentrate on Swan's considerable artistic achievements, especially his accomplished portraits. (Mar.)
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From Booklist

Beauty and fame are fleeting and seem all the more so when possessed by one person as they were by poet, artist, and dancer Paul Swan. Quite forgotten today, Swan had an instinct for the right place and time to display his talents: on the vaudeville circuit in the teens, twenties, and thirties, in the Warhol crowd in the sixties. (Warhol filmed the elderly Swan creakily performing his campy, dancelike imitations of Greek heroes.) That instinct helped him to escape his dreary, rural Nebraska childhood home, a place deeply unpropitious to an artistic child with homosexual feelings; to make opportunities of what others found dead ends; and to propel himself from Chicago to New York and beyond, sometimes as a model, sometimes as an artist, always as a talented, resourceful American bohemian, wearing many hats to pay the rent while always returning to his easel. If Swan never painted a recognized masterpiece or choreographed a dance to equal those of Jerome Robbins or George Balanchine, the Londravilles' highly readable biography argues that, however minor, Swan matters. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; 1 edition (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803229690
• ISBN-13: 978-0803229693
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #686,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most interesting Biography I have read, September 15, 2006

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ABIGFAN - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol (Hardcover)

If this were fiction, it would almost be unbelievable. As a biography, it's simply fascinating to read what he did, who he knew, and how he survived during that time in history. An excellent exploration of art, sexuality, personality. You will burn through it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Poem for Trapped Things, November 11, 2006

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Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol (Hardcover)

I have a feeling this book will continue to draw acclaim as the months and years go by, for it must be the standard biography for some time to come. Drawing on a wealth of material from the artist's family, Janis Londraville and Richard Londraville have managed to animate a long forgotten story, and it has made me completely interested in Paul Swan's works in all their guises. It's hard to imagine today the ease with which Paul Swan seems to have said to himself, "Well, painting is only making me this famous, I think I'll add another string to my bow and become an interpretative dancer"? How often does that happen, and how often does any arrist excel in both wildly competitive fields?

Janis Londraville and Richard Londraville hint that Swan's good looks helped him along here and there. With so many photos of him spread throughout the book, a concordance of beauty begins to take shape in the reader's mind. Is he the "most beautiful man in the world" as his press agents claimed? It's a type of good looks you don't see very much today, or if you do, you see them in leading men who are just average looking--say, the Bill Pullman look. (Take a gander at the book jacket photo.) But Swan knew how to work his look, and he studied the Egyptian arts of presentation, so that his dances resembled early versions of Madonna's "Vogue" movements, with hand manipulations framing the face, the body, the long legs and the cinched in waist. He could have been a contender in the movies, but alas, he let the camera come close a little too late (he was already 40 when he played a herald in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (first version) by Cecil B. DeMille. In fact his age was always getting in his way, like a clumsy, ardent teenage boy stumbling over his erection. In old age he was still performing his "Grecian" and "classic" dances in which, apparently, he would dance off his seven veils and at the end reveal the original naked body Isadora Duncan had fondled way back in the day. In his prime, when he went to Greece, Greek newspapers claimed that their statuary had come to life and was walking in American clothes! "See him and then see our marbles! Is he not the Hermes of Praxiteles come to life again? Or is he Antinous?"

He was sort of a dramatic Paul Lynde sort of queen except without a sense of humor, and not much of a dad to his two long suffering daughters. The authors luckily had his unpublished memoirs to draw on, and they are adept in art criticism to a scary extent, coming close to persuading me that Paul Swan's painting is necessary, like Thomas Hart Benton or Jackson Pollock. At any rate he is an American Rousseau, for good or bad, and I would love a companion volume with full color plates of all his surviving work, And what a shame that the authors worked hard interviewing nearly every available witness who knew the old man, and in a touching vignette they report that one, the actress Lisan Kaye, who posed as the Empress Theodora in 1944 for Swan, can't remember him at all, trapped as she is in her Alzheimer's disease. Something very Swanlike about that inability.

Do the authors cheat in subtitling their book "from Wilde to Warhol," considering that Swan actually never did meet Oscar Wilde? Yes, a little, I think, but it suits the carnival barker aspect of their subject, for whom no publicity was bad publicity.

5.0 out of 5 stars Fleeing Nebraska to "live". . ., March 19, 2011

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QueenofCheap Books "QueenofCheap Books" (Red Cloud, NE United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol (Hardcover)

I loved this book! So many Nebraskans have had to leave this culture to excel artistically. What a shame. ( I think they'e still leaving.) This story, with its compelling hero, would make a great movie. If only one could find the most beautiful man in the world to play the part.