The stars are ageless. So says Norma Desmond, the forgotten silent-movie queen at the center of “Sunset Boulevard.” Desmond is written as an inconceivably ancient fifty—the age of Gloria Swanson, the actress who played her. Swanson died in the early eighties, shortly after her co-star, William Holden. Nancy Livingston, then an ingenue named Nancy Olson, who portrayed a novice screenwriter and Holden’s love interest, is the last surviving member of the cast.
Livingston is ninety-four, and lives just north of Sunset, in a one-story L-shaped house graciously appointed with animal-print velvet, much like the interior of Norma Desmond’s Isotta Fraschini. She has coiffed medium-blond hair, high Scandinavian cheekbones, and a trim figure. “I’m the same weight I was in college, that’s not an issue,” she remarked breezily on a recent afternoon. In October, “A Front Row Seat,” a memoir about her life in and around show business, will be released. “I have to stay well through the end of the publishing of the book,” she said. “And then will you just please leave me alone and let me be, so I don’t have to look wonderful every day.”
When she was cast in “Sunset,” Livingston was a junior at U.C.L.A., signed to a seven-picture contract at Paramount. College nickname: Wholesome Olson. The lot was full of starlets, but Billy Wilder, the film’s director and co-writer, homed in on her. “He’d say, ‘Are you going to the commissary? I’ll walk with you,’” she recalled. “He would ask me questions: ‘What was it like growing up in Wisconsin? What is U.C.L.A. like?’ It was clear to me years later that he had the character, the aspiring young writer, in mind. He did not want a starlet with barely a high-school education.” Edith Head designed the costumes, but Wilder asked Livingston to wear her own clothing. “By the way, I did not have a great wardrobe,” she said. “I didn’t know where to shop. I was from Milwaukee!” When Howard Hughes pursued her briefly, her strategy was to bore him into retreat with stories of her Midwestern childhood.
Not long before the movie came out, in 1950, Livingston met and married her first husband, the librettist Alan Jay Lerner. “I was his third wife. He was ultimately married eight times,” she said. “He was writing ‘An American in Paris’ when I met him. Then he wrote ‘Paint Your Wagon.’ Then he wrote ‘My Fair Lady,’ which he dedicated to me. Then he wrote ‘Gigi.’ And he was reading ‘The Once and Future King,’ about King Arthur, and thinking about ‘Camelot,’ when we were divorced.”
Next, she married Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol Records, who earlier in his career had written “Bozo the Clown,” made a soloist of Nat King Cole, and created “Bonanza,” which ran for fourteen seasons. As president of Capitol, she writes in the book, he helped design the company’s iconic record-stack headquarters; it was his idea that the aircraft-warning light on the top of the building blink out “H-o-l-l-y-w-o-o-d,” in Morse code. He signed the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Band.
In 1965, Livingston hosted a party for the Beatles at the house above Sunset and invited all the most interesting people in Hollywood: Rock Hudson, Hayley Mills, Natalie Wood. Tony Bennett was at the piano, singing the American songbook. McCartney charmed; Lennon didn’t try. “John was so difficult,” Livingston said. He was standing alone by the pool when she approached to offer him a drink. “Leave me alone,” he said. Distressed, Livingston asked Gene Kelly to intercede. “He did, and the two of them hit it off, and then John was the last to leave.”
She went on, “What was it like being married to two Alans?” Livingston wondered aloud. “First of all, I never made a mistake—‘Alan, darling.’ And my monogram has been the same since I was twenty-one. On my jewelry, my linens, my luggage, my silver, it is NOL.” According to Livingston, in 2009, when her husband was dying, he said, “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry you’re never going to be able to marry again. There are only so many Alan L’s in the world.”
Not long after “Sunset Boulevard,” Livingston, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance, decided to quit acting. Too narrow a life, she said, too much waiting around. Or maybe it was that the dark moral of the movie struck her, even from that side of the actuarial looking glass.
“Gloria Swanson was the one person on that set who understood what a great film this was, because she understood the truth of it,” Livingston said. “She was beautiful, but she was over the hill for them.” Not everyone wanted the truth. Wilder screened the movie for Louis B. Mayer, the producer who co-founded M-G-M. Livingston said, “When it was finished, Billy was walking up the aisle and Louis B. Mayer says, ‘How could you do this to us?’ And Billy said, ‘Go f*ck yourself. ’”♦
