What a Widow!; a romantic comedy, based on the talking motion picture [etc.]

New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Very Good+ in Good dj. (c.1930). First Edition. Hardcover. [book is just lightly shelfworn, vintage bookseller's label (The Three Schuster Stores, Book Department) on front pastedown; the jacket has a number of crudely-applied old/yellowed internal tape repairs (mostly fixing several tears on the spine, but also with a long strip (applied both internally and externally) along the front flapfold; most of the front panel illustration, fortunately, is unblemished]. (4 B&W film stills) The true first edition of this title, a novelization of "an original screen story written by Josephine Lovett," and starring Gloria Swanson -- then just on the cusp of a career eclipse from which she would emerge, spectacularly, twenty years later in SUNSET BLVD. The title page makes sure to inform us that the movie was a "United Artists Pictures, which Joseph P. Kennedy Presents" -- Kennedy, of course, having been engaged for the previous couple of years in an affair with La Swanson. By all accounts, their romantic relationship had ended by this time, but they were still involved as business partners in her production company, Gloria Productions, which she had formed with Kennedy a few years earlier. This film, directed by Allan Dwan, was its final production, and would probably have been classified by Norma Desmond as one of the "pictures [that] got small." (Fun fact: among the supporting players in this film was a "William Holden" -- but not THE William Holden who co-starred with her in SUNSET BLVD.) .