The Power of Glamour: The Women Who Defined the Magic of Stardom

From Annette Tapert, the coauthor of the popular The Power of Style, comes a book that is just as beautiful and entertaining but that redefines an attribute even more intangible. In word and image, it evokes a unique Hollywood era and eleven of its goddesses who lived, and left as their legacy, the Power of Glamour.

When the Glamour Era met the Golden Age of cinema, it cast a spell on a public beaten by the Depression and the threat of war. But the key ingredient in 1930s glamour was personality. Annette Tapert's movie-queen profiles, rich with fresh insights, reach beyond the star-making machinery, fan magazines, fashions, and cosmetics to the essence of each women: the carefully molded image of Gloria Swanson, who started it all . . . Marlene Dietrich's siren persona on and off screen . . . the "reverse glamour" of Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. Their power--and that of Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, and the long-neglected Kay Francis, Dolores Del Rio, and Constance Bennett--lay in using style, wit, and guile to outsmart the studio system and enchant the world. In these pages we see how, veiled in intrigue and mystery, they brought glamour very close to its original meaning: witchcraft.