Elinor Glyn - References in Popular Culture

References in Popular Culture

• A scene in Glyn's most sensational work, Three Weeks, inspired the doggerel:

Would you like to sin

With Elinor Glyn

On a tiger skin?

Or would you prefer

To err with her

On some other fur?

• Glyn also makes an appearance in a 1927 Lorenz Hart song, "My Heart Stood Still" from One Dam Thing After Another:

I read my Plato

Love, I thought a sin

But since your kiss

I'm reading missus Glyn!

• She makes cameo appearances as herself in the 1927 film "It" and in the 1928 film Show People.

• She occasionally cites herself in the third person in her own books, as in Man and Maid (1922) when she has a character refer to "that It" as something "Elinor Glyn writes of in her books."

• In Evelyn Waugh's 1952 novel Men at Arms (the first of the Sword of Honour trilogy), a (RAF) Air Marshal recites the poem upon spotting a polar-bear rug by the fire in a London club, of which he has just wangled membership (p. 125). To this, another member responds 'Who the hell is Elinor Glyn?'. The Air Marshal replies 'Oh, just a name, you know, put in to make it rhyme.' This was both a snub to the Air Marshal, and a literary snubbing of Glyn by Waugh.

• In Dorothy L. Sayers' Unnatural Death (1927), a woman is described:

‘Never had he met a woman in whom 'the great It', eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.'

• Among the funniest of S. J. Perelman's writings is his series of pieces Cloudland Revisited in which as a middle-aged man, he re-reads and describes the risqué novels that had thrilled him as a youth. Tuberoses and Tigers deals with Glyn's Three Weeks. Perelman described it as 'servant-girl literature' and called Glyn's style 'marshmallow'. Perelman also mentions a film version of the book made by Samuel Goldwyn in 1924, in which Aileen Pringle starred. Perelman recalled Goldwyn's 'seductive' image of Pringle 'lolling on a tiger skin...'

• In the 1962 film version of Meredith Willson's musical The Music Man, Marian Paroo, the librarian, asks the prudish Mrs. Shinn, the mayor's wife, if she would not rather have her daughter reading the classic Persian poetry of Omar Khayyam than Elinor Glyn, to which Mrs. Shinn replies, "What Elinor Glyn reads is her mother's problem!"

• In Upstairs, Downstairs, after Elizabeth Bellamy's disastrous marriage she meets a new lover, the social-climber Julius Karekin. After a passionate night, he sleeps while she reads part of Chapter XI of Three Weeks aloud.

• In the 2001 movie The Cat's Meow, Elinor Glyn, played by Joanna Lumley, is one of the guests aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht on the fateful weekend Thomas Ince died. Lumley, as Glyn, provides voice-over narration at the beginning and the end of the film.

• In his autobiography Mark Twain describes the time he met Glyn, when they had a wide-ranging and frank discussion of "nature's laws" and other matters not to be repeated.

• In the 1923 film The Ten Commandments, one title card says "Nobody believes in these Commandment things nowadays - and I think Elinor Glyn's a lot more interesting."