Is Garbo Going Home?

The Greatest Greta's Contract Expires Next
April. She Hasn't Re-signed. Will the Viking
Venus Retire at the Top?

NEXT April, Greta Garbo's $7,500-a-week contract with M-G-M comes to an end.
     And with its ending, there is every indication that Garbo means at once to pack up her comparatively few little belongings, draw her fat fortune in cash and bonds from the banks and safe-deposit vaults, buy a one-way ticket to Sweden on some little old freighter, and make good once and for all in a big way on that oft-quoted famous line of hers:
     “Ay t'ank ay go home.”
     One before, you remember, when Stiller died–Stiller the great director who discovered Garbo and who many believe was the love of her life–Garbo went home. At that tine nobody was sure whether or not she would return. I know positively that the Metro officials were worried about it. But that was in the days when the Gilbert romance was still going strong. Maybe that brought Garbo back. Maybe not. Come back she did, silent as ever. She telephoned Jack from New York the day she arrived. She never told anyone what she did on that trip or just why she took it. She held her counsel.

THEN last summer there were the rumors–absurd, unsubstantiated rumors–that Garbo was going abroad to play with Max Reinhardt's Theatre Group. Naturally nothing came of that.
     But this time there are excellent reasons for believing the greatest personality movies have ever known intends to desert them. There are lots of signs that prove that Garbo is pretty bored with her career and that she has the wisdom not one in a million possesses of quitting while she is at the top.
     When she's gone, it is highly probable that never again will she set foot in Hollywood–the Hollywood she detests with a thoroughness that is general knowledge there; the Hollywood that never once in the five years she's been there gave her one thing she wanted–except money.
     Money it has given her plenty. When she gets back to Sweden she will be a millionaires. She can bring true the dream of which she makes no secret–to buy a little island of her own, to build thereon the ultra-private castle she yearns for, and to live the rest of her life like a queen, not ever having to do one single thing she doesn't want to, nor having to see or be seen by anyone she doesn't want to. To Greta Garbo, that will be heaven come to earth.
     That Garbo fully intends to do this–shake Hollywood's dust forever from her feet and spend from then on doing only what she wants to–is no idle prophecy. Here are the factors on which it is based:

IN the first place, there is no secret about Garbo's dislike for Hollywood. That dislike, of course, would be the fundamental motivation for her good-bye.
     More than one, the Norins–Gustaf and Sigrid, the Swedish couple who, reduced in circumstances, worked in Garbo's home–have heard her say, in the years she's been in Hollywood, that she “can hardly wait to get out of Hollywood.”

     More than once, at those little intimate dinners where Garbo's very few close friends gathered–Wilhelm Sorensen, Jacques Feyder, a few others–the talk turned to that hoped-for future “sometime” when they'd all be together again in Europe, away from “this damn Hollywood.”
     Garbo never found happiness in Hollywood. It is not necessary here, to elaborate much on that topic–thousands of words have been written about it; it's public knowledge. Everything that is Hollywood is the very antithesis of what Garbo wants–its blatant publicity and exhibitionism; its manners; its amusements; its very climate. Garbo loathes all these with a hatred that is only held in check by patience–waiting for the day when she can leave.

SIGNIFICANT, too, is this–that at present, two of the very closest friends with whom she has discussed plans to quit Hollywood for Europe together are already abroad. Jacques Feyder and his wife are in Paris; it is likely they will remain. Mrs. Conrad Viertel is preparing to leave for Russia, northern Europe, on an indefinitely long trip. What more likely than that next Spring may see the group reunited in Stockholm, say, or Berlin?
     There is no financial reason why Garbo sould not turn her back on Hollywood. She has seen to that.
     In the five years she has worked in pictures in Hollywood, she has been paid a salary of well over a million dollars! At present, she is getting more than a thousand dollars a day.
     Of that more-than-a-million, Garbo, has spend a minimum. She goes out little; her wardrobe of evening things is less expensive than many an extra girl's.
     She still has the same car she bought when she first came to Hollywood–a five-year-old Lincoln.
     She does not own her house. She does not even lease one. She pays rent, month-to-month! If she had bought a house, there would be that burden to worry about when she decides to leave; instead, she does not own a single piece of real estate to hamper her free flight from Hollywood the moment she's ready to go. She pays $600 a month rent to a man named Donald Armstrong, and when her original year's lease expired last year, she refused his suggestion that she sign up for another year. If she had, the lease would have extended beyond next April–and that's the month her contract with M-G-M ends.
     It is safe to say that outside of the income taxes she has been forced to pay, Garbo has put away more than 80 percent of her earnings. In her five years in America, she has had to give Uncle Sam approximately a quarter million dollars in income taxes. Yet that still leaves more than three-quarters of a million saved. Is she saving her hundreds of thousands, then, to build a pretty monument for herself when she is dead, do you think?
     Or don't you think, rather, that she has been saving it so that, come next April, she can go to Sweden, where she can make come true the wish that's revealed so expertly by Rilla Page Palmborg, who of all writers in Hollywood perhaps knows Garbo best? In her revelatory volume, “The Private Life of Greta Garbo,” Rilla Palborg writes:
     “… Garbo tells her friends that when her contract is terminated, she will sign no other. … She is tired of making pictures she does not want to do. She … has all the fame and glory she wants. …
     “An hour's ride out of Stockholm, where an arm of the ocean cuts, into the mainland, is a summer resort known as Marlen. Tiny islands dot the surface of this blue water. It is on one of these wooded islands that Garbo wants to build her home. … There will be bathing, with a private beach. There will be an swift motor boat to carry her to and from the mainland.
     “In Stockholm, she will have an apartment always ready and waiting for her when she wants a bit of gay life of the city. No doubt, Garbo will spend part of her time in Berlin. …”
     M-G-M will probably be at Garbo with new contracts, importuning her to sign. Probably they will offer her more money. Garbo, if she runs true to form, will listen to them an say nothing–and sign nothing.
     One day in April, her contract ends.
     Perhaps, a few days later, a Swedish freighter will lie at a pier in Los Angeles' harbor. It wouldn't surprise those who know Greta if, a few hours before the ship sailed, a mannish-coated woman with a suitcase or a handbag should walk unobtrusively up the ship's gangplank to a cabin reserved in advance.

from:  MovieMirror     Dezember 1931
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