The Most Beautiful Man in the World: Paul Swan, from Wilde to Warhol
by Janis and Richard Londraville
University of Nebraska Press
278 pages, $29.95
PAUL SWAN, the oldest of ten children, was born in 1883 in rural Illinois. His life was one of legend, but he did not attain lasting star status in the pantheon of gay arts. In the early years of the 20th century, Swan—who had to run away from home in order to receive a high school education—was as famous a dancer as Fred Astaire. When he danced at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, a highly regarded vaudeville house in Times Square in 1914, the marquee billed him as “The Most Beautiful Man in the World, a Reincarnated Greek God.” But Swan, a fan of John Singer Sargent, also became famous for his portrait paintings. His full-length depiction of the great actress Alla Nazimova (who told him he was “a Dorian Gray before he knew sin”) established his career as a portrait painter in 1910. For the most part self-taught in all his endeavors, he also sculpted, published poetry and plays, toured the world lecturing on art, acted in a few silent films and on stage, and constantly socialized in search of wealthy patrons.
Swan’s life was the quintessentially American success story. Desperate “to be educated and cultured,” as he wrote in his unpublished memoir, he started putting on plays in the corncrib at the family farm in Nebraska with Harriet, the one sibling who enjoyed his company, and arrived at international, albeit transient, fame as a young man. In 1965 he starred in Andy Warhol’s Camp, a “dimly lit and grainy portrayal” in which Swan performed a dance he had choreographed 25 years before. In the intervening years Swan pursued his various artistic careers and received reviews ranging from mixed to effusive. Janis and Richard Londraville had access to all of Swan’s unpublished works and letters, thanks to the generosity of some of his family members, and their book contains exquisite reproductions of some of Swan’s artwork, as well as one early photo of Swan looking much like an American version of 1920’s movie heartthrob Rudolph Valentino. (Much of Swan’s work is in the collection of the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.) While this is an enjoyable book, the authors are somewhat too prone to negative psychologizing. Swan’s mother was unbearable, a religious fanatic, but her many failings are mentioned repeatedly. Swan comes across as an outrageously narcissistic egotist, entranced with his own looks, tending to mooch off friends and relatives, skipping out on rent and hotel bills, and seeming to exhibit a willful disregard for money. Even though he was extravagantly generous with money that he didn’t have, his motives were often honorable, such as fundraising for women’s suffrage and for humanitarian causes during World Wars I and II. Swan died in 1972, soon after having been placed in a nursing home. He had been living in squalid circumstances in his Manhattan studio, but up until nearly the end, he continuously advertised in The Village Voice, looking for audiences to attend his dance productions, which he performed in full costume and stage makeup.
Early in his career Swan married Helen Gavit, who was eight years his senior. An artist’s daughter for whom the artistic life held great appeal, she had been in a Boston marriage with Allie Harding prior to their meeting. Gavit is said to have stated that “I married the only man I could endure.” After their two daughters were born, Swan placed at least an ocean between himself and his family, visiting occasionally. In later years, he was so concerned with aging that he sometimes shaved decades off his real age, making it seem that his adult children were still little girls. Swan had affairs with women and men during his early life and denied his homosexuality. Apparently, though, he was exclusively gay during his later years, and the authors are quite straightforward when discussing Swan’s sexual orientation as well as his difficulties in being openly gay. They do gloss over some episodes about which one would like to know more, such as his penchant for shopping while dressed in drag with his landlady’s daughter—this in early 20th-century Lincoln, Nebraska.
