THIS is a story about Greta Garbo.
The woman who wants walks alone. The mysterious hermit who never enters into the life of Hollywood. The girl who is known to no one and whom millions desire to know.
It is a revelation of the real Garbo which she herself would never make, a searchlight turned upon her soul.
When you have read it perhaps you will understand as I did, a side of Garbo's character which has not before been revealed. For it isn't a cold heart which is hidden behind her strange silences and iron reserve, but something very different. It begins with a boy born and raised in the mountains of the South.
Until he was nineteen this hill-billy had never seen a motion picture. His world had been bound by the fills of Kentucky, inhabited only by the mountaineers, who are a people unto themselves. Stern, silent, illiterate people, inured to poverty and loneliness.
Then through the medium of the screen the world unfolded before him–the far places of the earth and sea–the glories of ancient times–the beauty and drama of life itself.
Motion pictured created for him a new universe, fresh from the hands of the gods, new, amazing, wonderful. He loved them and sought them whenever he might.
One day, in a newspaper some traveller had cast by the wayside, he saw an advertisement. A firm in Chicago was looking for actors to play before the camera and they mentioned the enormous salaries paid to stars, told in glowing terms of the unknowns who had arisen to great heights.
So Gavin Gordon left the mountains of the South and went to Chicago, wearing his boots, carrying his carpet bag, silent before the many strange things that he saw. With his slouch hat in his hand, he stood before the desk of the man who had written the advertisement and in the deep, pleasant drawl of his people, he said, “Air you the man that wrote in the paper fer movie actors? I aim to be one naow and I guess I don't mind startin' any minit. How much did you say a man gits for thet?”
But it turned out that they didn't want to pay anybody. They wanted to be paid for training aspirants in the art of motion-picture acting. Gavin Gordon listened in stern silence, fingered the nine dollars in his pocked and walked out without another word. That afternoon he got a job in the stockyards–for he has hard and strong from working among the timbers. But his purpose was not altered. Others had become part of that glamorous life, others acted in motion pictures. Some day he would do it, too.
SILENTLY, persistently, he pursued his goal. New York, he discovered, was the nearest place to go, the nearest place where pictures were made. So, when he had saved enough money, he went to New York.
And there he had his first bit of luck. An agency to which he applied listened to his deep drawl and told him they could get him a small part on the stage because of it. He took it.
But he didn't stay in New York very long. For one afternoon, in a great theatre on Broadway, he looked upon the silver sheet and saw a woman.
Women had never meant anything in his life. He knew nothing about women. He had been too busy. The loneliness of the big cities had been harder to bear than the loneliness of the fills, but the only girls he admired, those who drove along Michigan Boulevard and Fifth Avenue, were beyond his reach. They alone approximated the vision he had seen on the screen.
This woman was perfect. All other women became nothing. Here, though he did not so phrase it to himself, was the Helen of Troy who comes once to every man–the acme of feminine loveliness.
Her name was Greta Garbo. |
GAVIN GORDON went to Hollywood, because he found out that Garbo lived and made pictures in that distant land of which he had heard so much.
The tall, tanned, handsome young man who got off the Santa Fe trains in Los Angeles was very different from the boy who had made his way along the crowded streets of Chicago that first day. He had discarded boots, slouch hat. Already he had begun to assume some of the ways and habits of his idols of the screen. Quick to learn, terribly observant, he had copied as far as he was able. The vivid charm of John Gilbert, the nonchalance of Menjou, the manliness of Dick Barthelmess had appealed to him most. All these he had watched–and for three years continued to watch–and had taken from them such things as he felt he could use.
This newcomer had for his weapons in his attack upon the closed corporation of Hollywood a delightful voice, a certain shy reserve, and a lean face full of character.
But Hollywood would have none of him. For two years he went from disappointment to disappointment, trod the well-worn path from studio to studio, which has often enough been watered with tears.
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Gavin Gordon shed no tears, knew no despair. His real sorrow was that he never saw Greta Garbo. Soon he discovered among the others he met that the great actress of the screen was difficult to know, even for the elect. She moved in mysterious ways, lonely ways, and there were hundreds of people right in her own studio who had never spoken a word to her. Even the girl who did stand-ins for her–to take the burden of standing for lights and camera angles from her shoulders–had never met her. No one, not even the studio officials, knew where she lived.
He had to content himself with going every night to see any picture of her that was running, sitting for hours wrapt in wonder at her art and her beauty. This woman of the silversheet filled his thoughts and his dreams.
If he could only get a chance. The friends he had made marveled at the steadiness of his ambition, the silent, smiling determination of this tall young man from the South. Knowing Hollywood, they wondered if he would be added to the thousands who have tried and failed and been heartbroken.
He might have been but for a chance, a coincidence such as fiction editors deplore on the ground that things like that don't happen in real life.
IN the dark projection room of one of the biggest studios, a group of worried people sat watching the screen. A producer, a director, a writer and a famous star.
They were looking at screen tests, sent to them from all the studios in Hollywood, searching for a young actor who could play a certain part. All the well-known leading men had been discussed and found wanting. All the newcomers being hailed had been considered. Stage actors had been eliminated one by one. Agencies had sent candidates without number.
No one seemed to be just what they wanted and the situation was desperate. So they sat running test after test, hoping somewhere among the unknown legions to make a lucky find.
Suddenly there appeared before them on the screen a tall, well set up young man, with a stern face marked by self-discipline and reserve, and through the sound tract came a slow, deep voice, with the softness of the South held in check by a delicate precision of enunciation.
The little group sat up, when as quickly as it had come on the picture faded, the lights went up.
“I'm sorry,” said the operator's voice from above them, “that's not for you. It got here by mistake. That's for Mr. Vidor. I'll be ready in a minute.”
“You run that test,” said the producer.
“Okey,” said the operator. They ran it four times
“Well?” said the producer.
“That's it,” said the director and the star in chorus.
TWO hours later a publicity man in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer office called a Santa Monica number and asked for a name written on a memorandum before him.
“Mr. Gordon?”
“This is Mr. Gordon.”
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“We wondered if you could come in some time tomorrow and have some portraits taken. This is the publicity department at M-G-M. We'll need new photographs to go with the announcement.”
“What announcement?” said Gavin Gordon.
“Why, that you're to play the leading role with Garbo in ‘Romance'.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. Then a voice said, “My God!” and meant it.
It isn't often that it comes to a human being to have his every wish gratified. Had Gavin Gordon been given a magic lamp and one wish to be fulfilled, he would have chosen to play Tom, the young minister opposite Garbo, rather than to be President or owner of a million dollars.
When he first met her for talks concerning the story, he found her to be even more marvelous than he could have imagined.
“She was so gracious,” he told me, “so beautiful, but so kind. I had heard how aloof she was. But even that first day she put me at my ease, made me feel confidence that I could do the part the way she wanted it done. She was queenly, yes. But with the queenliness of every great artist. Far above other women, but with the greatest sweetness of manner and the most natural way of talking to you.”
THE starting date of the picture arrived. Gavin Gordon hadn't slept all night and when he got into his little roadster he was in a delirium of happiness. As he drove along Washington Boulevard, keyed to the highest pitch, ready for the great day of his life, another car turned out of a side street and crashed into him.
He was thrown out onto the pavement and struck on his left shoulder.
When he couldn't sit up, he found that the pain was excruciating. His arm hung at his side helpless. Red hot daggers plunged through him. But he thought of only one thing. “I won't be able to play the part. If they know I'm hurt they'll never let me start.”
The mountaineer blood told. Gavin Gordon got to his feet, set his jaw stubbornly, and drove to the studio.
With infinite pains he put on a makeup. The sweat pouring down his face, he got into his costume. Holding himself rigid, he went out on the set. For a solid hour he worked, upheld by his nearness to his idol, by his iron determination to say nothing to anyone lest the part be taken from him.
At the end of that hour he fainted in Garbo's arms.
That time when he came to, he was in a hospital. He had a fractured collar bone, a dislocated shoulder and a mass of torn ligaments. But he tried to get up. He tried so hard that the nurses called frantically for the doctor.
“I won't stay here,” the boy shouted. “I'm all right. I'm not really hurt. I can stand in, let me go back.”
He struggled so, weak and half sick with pain and the worse torture of his fears, that he tore loose the dressings and rebroke the bone that had been set.
Suddenly he heard a deep, sweet voice saying, “Please do not do that. You are hurt, Mr. Gordon. We are so sorry. But if you will be good and take care of yourself, we will wait in the picture for you. I, Garbo, promise you that.”
Looking up, he saw Garbo, wrapped in a tweed coat, smiling down at him.
Speech deserted him. He was nearer to tears that he had ever been since he was a kid. He lay back quietly and from then on he was a model patient. When discouragement or fear came upon him, when he thought of how the hand of destiny had struck him at the one moment that might spell disaster, he looked across at a big basket of roses that stood beside his bed. They had come with only a card, but on the card was the magic word, “Garbo.”
What he did not know until later was that at the studio Garbo was fighting in her own peculiar way to keep the promise she had made him.
It may be that Garbo had heard all the things he said that say in his delirium, may have looked into the boy's heart and been a little glad to be the ideal of such a man. No one will ever know that. But surely admiration of his courage and sympathy for his ambition–things she can always understand–had entered her mind. She saw at once what this chance meant to him, what a long struggle lay behind it.
IT had been a long time since Garbo had to threaten “I go home now.” Her enormous popularity, the broken box-office records standing against her name, had made it easy for her to have things the way she wanted them. What Garbo wants, she gets.
Whether or not she had to threaten, she wanted Gavin Gordon given his chance, she wanted him to continue in her picture. She said so when they suggested that they could not delay work, that they must get another leading man at once.
“Gavin Gordon plays that part,” said Garbo.
Having settled that, she did the fair thing to the company. With the director she mapped out all the scenes in the picture in which he did not appear–the scenes she had alone, or with Lewis Stone, who plays the other man. At no small inconvenience to herself, she shot any part of the picture that the director thought best. When Gavin Gordon was able to be up, they did the scenes in which he plays an old man, where he could bend over and ease his hurt.
“And she helped me through those scenes so wonderfully,” he said. “She didn't think of herself and how it would be for her. She was so kindly, she always made it possible for me to do each scene. I have only seen her that one time outside the studio. But I know that Greta Garbo is a great woman, and the kindest woman in the world.”
Maybe he is right.
from: The New Movie Magazine No. 01 1930
© Copyright by The New Movie Magazine
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