Greta Garbo I.
Decoding Greta Garbo is a little like unravelling the fall of the Roman Empire, where, sifting through the tumultuous undulations of a millennium, one is left no longer wondering how Rome fell but how it lasted so long. In the case of the enigmatic Garbo, how did the world’s most famous actress become its most notorious recluse? Once described as “a deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo,” the question is not why she quit the business but how she allowed herself to become an actress in the first place.
“Some quirk of Nature and Art created a face, a personality, and an erotic presence unprecedented in history,” concluded biographer Barry Paris in the 1995 tome, Garbo.
Seven decades earlier, though, when the shy Swedish actress arrived in Los Angeles with the director Mauritz Stiller, the movie tribe found her generally unremarkable. One even jibed that bringing Garbo to Hollywood was “like bringing a sandwich to a banquet.” But having seen her only Swedish feature film The Saga of Gösta Berling, Louis B. Mayer was impressed.
Films being silent, that she could not speak English was irrelevant. Her face was perfectly symmetrical and once in front of the camera, the young unknown could convey a gamut of emotion in the flicker of an eye. One year, diet and trip to the dentist later and Greta Garbo was on her way to becoming one of the greatest film stars of all time, redefining her craft with an ethereal screen presence that touched the erotic depths of men and women alike.
There was just one problem. She hated the limelight. The first Hollywood star to go for full privacy, Garbo shunned reporters, refused to attend premieres and, ultimately, banned all visitors from the set. Unfortunately, this did nothing but fuel the public’s obsession. By the time Grand Hotel came around—the 1932 film in which she uttered “I want to be alone”—her magnificent contralto voice was already heavy with weariness beyond her twenty-six years.
A decade later, when she abandoned Hollywood at the height of her fame and beauty and took herself off into self-imposed exile in New York, she attained an immortality in life the likes of which Dean and Monroe had to die young to achieve. However, to the few who knew Garbo well, the shift from screen goddess to recluse must have seemed a long time coming.
Her actual words in real life were a little different. It was 1938 and she was a few idyllic days into a month-long stay on the Amalfi Coast with the composer, Leopold Stokowski. The press discovered the pair’s whereabouts and encamped outside the villa for two weeks, wanting to know if the ‘bachelor’ Garbo was romantically involved with the composer and finally tying the knot. Seeing her distraught, Stokowski suggested she give a quick interview to disperse the hoards.
“Well, what do you want?” She told them she had no intention of marrying and to the surprise of all, continued with uncharacteristic candour in what was to be one of only 12 documented Garbo interviews.
“I haven’t many friends,” she said. “I haven’t seen much of the world, either. My friend, Mr. Stokowski, who has been very much to me, offered to take me around to see some beautiful things. I optimistically accepted. I was naïve enough to think I could travel without being discovered and without being hunted. Why can’t we avoid being followed and examined? It is cruel to bother people who want to be left in peace. This kills beauty for me. I live in a corner. I am typically alone, but there are so many beautiful things in the world that I would like to see before they are destroyed… I wish I could be otherwise but I cannot. I ONLY WANT TO BE LEFT ALONE.”
It was not her films, only subsequently discovered, but this idea of aloneness that first drew me to her story in my late twenties. A friend had given me the Sotheby’s catalogue, The Greta Garbo Collection, with the contents of her New York apartment that went under the hammer in 1990, the year the actress died at age 84. Interspersed between Renoirs, Jawlenskys, bibelots, and fine Régence and Louis Quinze furniture was a series of tightly cropped vignettes of a terracotta and rose-hued interior, as well as iconic black and white photographs of Garbo herself.
The collection was far from groundbreaking, although her passion for German Expressionism was interesting for the time. There was even something bourgeois about the interior, as if a working-class Swedish girl had made a lot of money quickly, rubbed shoulders with a Rothschild or two and then decorated her first home—essentially what happened. In either case it made for hypnotic page gazing. Garbo’s eccentric withdrawal from her craft had become as enmeshed in her legend as the craft itself and the Sotheby’s catalogue, like looking through a keyhole, seemed to reveal a sliver of her soul.
In the four decades she inhabited this seven-room world overlooking the East River, few people were granted entry and of those who were, even fewer made it past the small entrance vestibule. But as the catalogue revealed, a group of little pictures in the drawing room, mainly of roses, was concealed behind the folds of a Fortuny curtain. Two-time fiancé Cecil Beaton was not exaggerating when he said that Garbo was so private she’d make a secret out of what she’d had for breakfast. Even within the safety of her inner sanctum, she did exactly that with this little garden of pictures.
“Ava Gardner was sure she was in for the Guest from Hell, but Garbo soon materialised—topless—by the pool, all smiles. ‘She changed into a dress after that, accepted our offer of vodka, and began a memorable weekend of drinking, eating, laughing and more eating,’ wrote Gardner, who privately told a friend, ‘She ate a whole fucking chicken!'”
Clare Booth Luce, who wrote the 1936 play The Women, described Garbo as a “a deer in the body of a woman, living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo.” Director and producer Hal Roach characterised her more simply, as “a very quiet girl, who happened to photograph terrifically.”
She was born Greta Gustafson in working-class Södermalm, Stockholm, in 1905. A summary of her childhood years later spoke to the way she navigated life: “I was born. I had a mother and a father. I lived in a house. I went to school. What does it matter?” As abrupt as her assessment may have been, her heritage—the depression of dark and endless winters and, paradoxically, the simple and kindred spirit of Swedish society—bore greatly on her character and how out of place she would feel during her 17 years in Hollywood. “To know Greta, one most know the North,” wrote friend and erstwhile lover, Mercedes de Acosta. “She may live the rest of her life in a southern climate, but she will always be Nordic, with all its sober and introvert characteristics. To know her one must know—really know—wind, rain and dark brooding skies.”
Stiller, who quickly became a father figure while directing the young actress in The Saga of Gösta Berling, her own father having died when she was 14, crafted the star-to-be from the shy Greta Gustafson. When Mayer saw the film, he knew he’d found a new sexual symbol in the young Swedish actress—the ultimate vamp—and struck a deal with the director to take the two as a package. It’s unclear if he ever intended to use Stiller, as Hollywood liked to poach European directors as a way of eliminating competition on the other side of the pond.
They arrived in New York on July 6, 1925 but by the end of 1927, ill and depressed and having never completed a film for MGM, the once powerful Stiller had returned to Stockholm in defeat where he would die the following year. Alva Gustafson, Garbo’s older sister had also succumbed to tuberculosis in 1925 and in many ways, the actress never recovered from the combined loss.
Hollywood was more generous with the actress than it had been with the director and by the time she wrapped up her third picture with MGM—1927’s Flesh and the Devil alongside heartthrob John Gilbert—she was already a star. Plot didn’t matter so much with Garbo—a good thing as the overwhelming majority of her films were average at best. But in an Eleonora-Duse-like triumph of ability over ordinary material, her consistently sublime performance lifted even the most banal of her pictures out of the mire of Hollywood schmaltz.
Her eyes conveyed deep feeling and in silent films, she required less intertitles to transmit emotion than any other performer. “With Garbo,” wrote film historian David Robinson, “you were aware less of an actress than of a soul exposed to mankind.”
Hollywood was rife with sexier forms at the time but the erotic appeal of the young and now lithe Swede was profound. English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan summarised her allure: “What when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.” She was a new breed of screen female just as Mayer had predicted: the seducer, with leading men such as Gilbert in the role of the seduced. (The two were also a couple off-screen, Gilbert proposing to Garbo, unsuccessfully, on more than one occasion.)
It was all acting though. While she was technically bisexual—and predominantly lesbian at heart—the more she became a sex symbol the less she understood or was able to deal with it, becoming increasingly asexual over time. Often tired, the last thing she felt was seductiveness as she struggled with exhausting MGM schedules of three to four pictures every year. “The metabolism that photographed as listless sensuality was really closer to fatigue,” wrote her biographer, Barry Paris. “What looked like a migraine on Joan Crawford was, on Garbo, an intense form of sexual yearning.”
The advent of sound pictures—the ‘talkies’—in the late 1920’s was the movie industry’s most Darwinian of chapters and Garbo was one of the few screen artists to transition successfully from silent films to sound. She was in no rush though; most stars had done so at their peril, Gilbert, eventually being one of the more high profile failures.
It was all the talk at the Santa Monica home of Salka Viertel, which for emigres was the most famous address in LA. Overflowing with artistic refugees, Hollywood was fast becoming the new Weimar Republic as throughout the 1930’s “the most suicidal bloodletting of a civilisation,” took place, according to Austrian director Gottfried Reinhardt, “since Spain’s expulsion of the Jews and Moors in 1492.”
Hundreds of artistic collaborations were hatched in Salka’s salon. “I walked in the back one day and there was a guy with short hair cooking at the stove,” recalled writer Robert Parish. “In the living room, Arthur Rubinstein was tinkling on the piano, Greta Garbo was lying on the sofa and Christopher Isherwood was lounging in a chair. ‘Who’s the guy cooking in the kitchen,’ I asked to no one in particular. ‘Bertolt Brecht,’ came the reply.” For Garbo, it was not only a safe and familiar environment, culturally removed from the brashness of America, her friendship with the hearty Salka was the truest and most enduring of her life.
The hesitant Swede took the plunge into sound and received Academy Award nominations for best actress for her first two talking roles, Anna Christie and Romance (1930). Garbo the star was reborn as Garbo the icon. A new word—‘Garbonomics’—was coined for for all the money she was making, while Cole Porter wrote her into the song: “You’re the top! You’re the National Gallery. You’re the top! You’re Garbo’s salary…” She earned $1.3 million in her first seven years in Hollywood, a huge amount in Depression-era purchasing power, and by 1935 had made in excess of $35 million for MGM. Films across the beginning of the decade such as Mata Hari (1931), Grand Hotel and Queen Christina (1933) brought in small fortunes.
Unlike Bette Davis and Joan Crawford who had to resort to horror flicks to keep food on the table in later life—in Davis’s case, into her eighties—Garbo’s own salary was so large and well invested that by the time she left the business, she was seriously wealthy and all the more able to abandon her career. Over the years, in a bizarre combination of luck and the weapon of her own indifference (Garbo was ever disillusioned and willing to walk away from Hollywood), she was able to negotiate a series of lucrative contracts with MGM. Rare was the person to successfully challenge Louis B. Mayer but in 1926 all Garbo had to say was “I tank I go now,” in that deep Euro accent for another zero to be added to her weekly wages—just one in a series of victories over the behemoth studio.
Socially, in Hollywood, she was equally nonchalant. If invited to come to dinner the following Wednesday her usual response was: “How do I know if I’ll be hungry on Wednesday?”
Queen Christina was her finest role to date and ushered in a chapter of higher calibre films because of one such negotiation. With her contract set to expire in June 1932, Garbo prepared to leave on an indefinite sabbatical to Sweden—and without a contract, MGM knew she would not return. The actress, on the other hand, was terrified the studio would release details of her life to the press, a tactic they often employed to sabotage the careers of defecting artists.
She remained in Sweden for eight months but what nobody knew is that on the eve of her departure from California, she had signed a top-secret deal unprecedented in Hollywood history. She was to be paid a quarter of a million dollars per picture in a two-picture deal—a colossal figure for the height of the Great Depression. The studio knew, though, it was not money alone that would keep her, so they created a separate production company set up within MGM for Garbo’s own exclusive use. She was given control of filming schedules (no more four pictures a year), director and co-star approval, and, most importantly, she had a say in script selection and could finally do pictures she liked.
Queen Christina was the first to be truly worthy of her talent. It was also a role close to Garbo’s heart. Set in 17th-century Sweden, the eccentric, cross-dressing Christina (Garbo always wore trousers and flat shoes) is about to abdicate (as Garbo did when she left Hollywood) and proclaims that she is not keen on applause (Garbo wanted people to like her work but only if they did so quietly). “I know that the part I have played cannot be governed by ordinary stage rules… Others know nothing of my motives and little or nothing of my character and way of life, for I let no one look inside me.” If she’d ever penned an autobiography, this could have been the opening line.
“Must I smile for the masses,” was another pearler, and when a courtier tells her that she couldn’t allow herself to die an old maid, the queen replies: “I have no intention to, Chancellor. I shall die a bachelor.” Throughout her life, Garbo loved to refer to herself in sexually ambiguous terms, for example: “I’ve smoked since I was a small boy.” She may not have realised at the time but medical experts today believe the real Queen Cristina was most likely a hermaphrodite.
Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936) and Ninotchka (1939) were three of her notable films later that decade—Ninotchka in particular as it was her first comedy and many were dubious as to whether or not the serious Swede could pull it off. She was so dryly brilliant and received her fourth Oscar nomination for her title role as a Soviet commissar in Paris—her third had been for Camille—but she lost to Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With The Wind. She would receive an honorary Oscar in 1955 and in typical form did not attend the ceremony.
Reports of Garbo’s lesbianism were mainly circumstantial, Mercedes de Acosta being the most notable exception. Either her Sapphic rendezvous were few, or a tight-knit lesbian mafia in Los Angeles was very good at keeping Garbo’s secret. What does seem apparent is that the majority of her significant attachments were with women and following that, gay men, such as her 40-year friendship with the nutritionist, Gayelord Hauser and her on-again-off-again relationship with the aforementioned Beaton. As the 1930’s rolled by, Garbo’s conflicted sexuality was probably the thing she most wanted to conceal—and the non-stop probing into her love life that came with living in Hollywood was a key factor in both her public and private withdrawal.
Then in December 1941 came the infamous Two-Faced Woman. That it was released just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbour was not the only reason the film flopped: Two-Faced Woman was a disaster on every front. Moral watchdogs from both church and state objected to the storyline, in which a ski instructress (Garbo) impersonates her twin sister to seduce and win back her philandering husband. Much like botched surgery, the film was cut and edited until it made no sense.
Garbo’s hair was also cut short and looked terrible. Couturier Adrian, who designed both the iconic high-necked evening gowns and boyish casual attire the actress wore in 17 of her 24 Hollywood films—making Garbo one of the great fashion icons of the 1930’s—foresaw such catastrophe that he resigned from MGM over the lowbrow “modern American” makeover the sophisticated actress was to be given. And director George Cukor did such an appalling job—the film should have been canned—that he later acknowledged his hand in the killing of the career of the great Garbo. Time nailed the extent of the disaster, reporting that watching the film was “like seeing Sarah Bernhardt swatted with a bladder.”
To be continued…
Stay tuned for more on the film that killed the career of the world’s greatest actress, her life post Hollywood, the legendary walks around Manhattan and the effect she had on Jackson Pollock, John Lennon and Andy Warhol in Greta Garbo Part Two—coming soon.
From a story originally published in Reflektor Magazine.