Gloria Swanson is most remembered today for her role as "Norma Desmond" in Billy Wilder's noir sound classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), but Swanson during her heyday was heralded as filmdom's leading fashion queen, as proclaimed by director Cecil B. DeMille in such silent motion pictures as Male and Female (1919), Why Change Your Husband (1921), and The Affairs of Anatol (1922). Throughout that decade and well into the 1930s Swanson set fashion standards on and off the screen in creations designed by such illustrious couturieres as Mitchell Leisen, Paul Iribe, Norman Norell, Sonia Delaunay, Max Ree, Capt. Edward H. Molyneux, Coco Chanel, Rene Hubert, and later Edith Head. In the 1950s she designed and managed her own line of ready to wear fashion patterns called Forever Young for women of a discernable age. Gloria Swanson: Hollywood's First Glamour Queen is a photographic tribute to this extraordinary woman. Focusing on sense of style and fashion, the book contains hundreds of personal and professional photographs, many never-before-published, and running biographical commentary by biographer Stephen Michael Shearer, author of the definitive book of the star, Gloria Swanson: The Ultimate Star (St. Martin's Press-Macmillan).

Hedy Lamarr's exotic beauty was heralded across Europe in the early 1930s. Yet she became infamous for her nude scenes in the scandalous movie "Ecstasy." Trapped in a marriage to one of Austria's munitions barons, a friend of Mussolini's who hid his Jewish heritage to become an "honorary Aryan" at the onset of World War II, Lamarr fled Europe for Hollywood, where she was transformed into one of film's most glamorous celebrities, appearing opposite such actors as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and James Stewart. As her career faded, she went from one husband to the next, her personal troubles and legal woes casting a shadow over her phenomenal intelligence and former image.

Stephen Michael Shearer separates the truth from the rumors regarding the life of Hedy Lamarr, and highlights her astonishing role as inventor of a technology that has become an essential part of everything from military weaponry to today's cell phones.