WHEN Garbo's contract came to an end with the completion of her last picture, “As You Desire Me,” and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer pulled down the blue and yellow flag that for over five years–to the envy of all Hollywood–fluttered from their highest turret, Garbo fans the world over eagerly waited to hear her next move.
     The film colony expected her to shake the Hollywood dust from her brogues as soon as the “last shot” had been taken. As spring melted into summer the Swedish star was glimpsed here and there about town giving rise to all sorts of fantastic stories.
     One had it that Garbo was already on the high seas while her double, appearing occasionally along the boulevard, fooled the public. Another rumor persisted that Garbo had given up her home and was hiding somewhere along the coast: Few gave any credence to the story that the tall, straight-haired blonde garbed in brown  masculine corduroy trousers and blouse, seen occasionally on the boulevard, was Garbo.
     The fact of the matter is that it was Garbo and that she had not left town nor given up her home.
     Garbo did originally intend to leave Hollywood early in June–at the completion of her picture–and had booked passage on the “Gripsholm,” her favorite boat, through G. Eckdahl & Son, steamship agents in Los Angeles. These reservations were cancelled when it was found that Garbo's business affairs could not be settled by that time. When the press all over the world precipitated a spectacular controversy on Garbo's plans, Garbo–clever show woman and business head that she is–became more mysterious than ever.

HER usual routine of spending a great deal of time with her two friends, Mercedes d'Acosta, a scenario writer who was at that time busy on the script “Rasputin” which was being prepared for Ethel, Lionel and John Barrymore, and Mrs. Berthold Viertel, wife of the German motion picture director who came to Hollywood under contract to Fox, was clothed in secrecy.
     Miss d'Acosta lived in the plain two-story green frame house that squatted comfortably behind a trim hedge about a city block up the country road from Garbo's–a place that Garbo herself found for her friend.
     Mrs. Viertel dwelt with her husband and three children in Santa Monica, a good Garbo walk away from the Swedish star.
     But Garbo, that past mistress in mystery, knew how to keep the public guessing.
     No longer were she and her friend Mercedes seen hiking over country roads. The canvas-inclosed tennis court inside of the high iron gates that guarded her grounds was silent. No. longer did her limousine glide m and out of the driveway. Reporters and cameramen haunting her gates got no glimpse of Garbo.
     Garbo's colored chauffeur went around wailing that his mistress had left town and that he was looking for a new job. The gardener who worked for ZaSu Pitts next door vowed that the Swedish star had moved away.
     But Garbo's household, secure from intrusion behind a closely woven high wire fence screened with thick shrubs, was going about its daily routine as usual. Garbo was simply out-Garboing herself.

FOR instance, she was so cautious that instead of traveling in a rare, unexpected early morning rain that drenched Hollywood a short time before she left, Garbo wouldn't risk walking even that short distance between Miss d'Acosta's house and her own.
     Around eight o'clock of that particular morning, a fresh young blonde of some eighteen summers was seen to skip, out the front door of Mercedes' house and into the garage, out of which she drove a small closed car into the circular driveway, stopping directly opposite the front entrance. When she jumped out to go inside she left the motor running and the car door open.
     It was all of fifteen minutes before the blonde reappeared with Garbo–blue trousered legs showing beneath a tightly buttoned brown trench coat and blue beret tilted jauntily over straight blonde hair–following close behind. Both girls hurried into the car, which glided swiftly down the road turning through the wide-swung gates at Garbo's place.
     When the car stopped at the side of the house the Swedish star jumped out and hurriedly disappeared through her front door. The young girl turned and drove back to the green frame house a block up the road.
     And when Garbo visited her friends, the Viertels, she went under cover of darkness. With her estate bordering on two roads (Rockingham Drive at the front and Beverly Boulevard on the rear) the star was able to slip out unobserved.
     If Garbo hadn't signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or with some other studio why was she staying in Hollywood? For the simple reason that she, like many of her predecessors, was arguing over a contract.

ON good authority I have it that Garbo first was approached with a contract guaranteeing fifteen thousand dollars per week with a schedule calling for several pictures to be made during the year.
     Well aware of her high box- office value and knowing full well that too large a yearly output of pictures whether good or bad cheapen a star, Garbo, it is said, asked that she be limited to but two pictures during the year and that she receive three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for each of them. A total yearly salary of seven hundred thousand dollars.
     It was then that the conferences between Garbo and Metro started that kept her tarrying here. Metro, it seems, wanted Garbo, but they didn't like her terms and Garbo wanted to remain with Metro, provided they could agree.
     I was told that Metro agreed to the two a year picture schedule but named three hundred and twelve thousand dollars per picture as the limit; a salary of six hundred thousand odd a year.
     Her first picture will be a story based on the life of the Swedish Queen Christina. The original is by Garbo's friend, Mrs. Berthold Viertel and Margaret Levino. It's a tale of love overcoming duty.

SO Garbo, like Kipling's cat, continues to walk by herself doing pretty much as she pleases, while the applause of her admiring fans gathers volume.     
     Hollywood does not know what to think of Garbo. This strange foreigner who refuses to become a part of the town that has made her independently wealthy and world famous. This girl of humble birth who so royally breaks all of Hollywood's commandments as she serenely marches on to greater heights. Hollywood admits that she has them all licked.
     All of the world, including Hollywood, looks upon Garbo as a mysterious, strange woman sprung from some unknown land. Assuredly she is strange and certainly she does stand apart from the rest of the world in refusing to allow sudden great wealth and worldwide fame to change her humble habits and simple manner of living.
     But in her own home and among her own friends Garbo is no more mysterious or strange than you or I.
     Through her natural shyness and dislike of crowds she unwittingly hit upon an idea of seclusion which has given her more freedom ever accorded any other celebrity and at the same time showered her with the greatest worldwide publicity ever tendered a person in the public eye. Her dislike of meeting the public has developed into a legend that has made it possible for her to turn her back on the world individually and collectively and make them like it. She has withdrawn from the public gaze so thoroughly that any least trivial bit of information about her, such as what she eats for breakfast or how often she shampoos her hair is considered news.     
     Many persons swim in the nude in the privacy of their own pool, but the fact that Garbo often takes her plunge in the altogether is worthy of big headline material.
     Probably every Garboian in the country will rush to the library to get de Maupassant's, Tolstoy's and Oscar Wilde's writing when they hear that they happen to be the Swedish star's favorite books. And no doubt there will be a revived interest in German and Swedish history when it is learned that Garbo has a collection of these book; which she reads over and over.

AND most of the readers of MODERN SCREEN will smile when they read Garbo's opinion of Hollywood that she was continually expressing to her housekeepers during the months they managed her home.
     “Hollywood!” she would wail. “It is nothing but a lot of painted cracker boxes hanging to sun-baked hills. It is the most tiresome place in the world. If I could only get away from it!”
     And there are many world celebrities who would love to take Garbo's stand of independence in denying interviews and refusing to put themselves on parade at premieres, restaurants and banquets, if they thought they would survive.     
     Garbo continually has to be on her guard or she will be tricked into getting herself into a spot that may upset the tradition she has built about herself.
     When Dietrich first arrived here. Garbo had a natural curiosity to see if there was any truth to the report that there was a striking resemblance between the German star and herself.     
     “When Garbo was invited to attend a private showing of Dietrich's first Hollywood-made picture at Paramount one evening, she was wild to go,” smiled her friend Wilhelm Sorensen. “It wasn't until I made it plain to her that such a visit would probably be turned into a tremendous publicity stunt that she gave up the idea.     
     “And one day she received word that her admirers in Sweden had planned a great treat for her. Her fans it seemed had clubbed together and raised money to cover a long distance telephone call between Hollywood and Stockholm so that Greta could sit in her California home and talk to her mother as she sat in far away Sweden. Of course it was understood that details of this arrangement would be published.     
     “Garbo replied that when she wanted to talk to her mother she could pay for her own telephone call and then she could be certain that the world would not be listening in on the conversation.”

AND the Swedish star hangs on to little souvenirs that remind her of happy times, just like you and I. According to her housekeepers, tucked in among her favorite books were a collection of menus that she had taken from the “Gripsholm,” on which she crossed to Sweden when she made her first visit back there after she became famous.     
     And below this shelf of books, on her writing desk stood a little brown and white cloth dog with a ribbon around it's neck bearing the name of the boat.     
     And Garbo has a hobby of collecting men's handkerchiefs. Among her own kerchiefs, which are large silk squares initialed G. G., are several big linen ones embroidered with C. B. which Garbo told her housekeeper stood for the director, Clarence Brown. There were several marked with a plain S that once belonged to her old friend Mauritz Stiller and others marked F standing for the French director, Jacques Feyder.     
     Most intriguing of all her keepsakes was the plain gold wedding ring that the housekeeper found tucked away in the corner of the drawer in the little table at the head of Garbo' bed when she. was putting clean paper in it one day.     
     A wedding ring hidden in Garbo's bedroom. What did it mean? Did she keep it near her bedside to take out in the still of the night and bring back cherished memories? Or was it only a “prop” wedding ring that she had sometime worn in a picture?

IN this same bedroom Garbo kept a big, rough, wooden box in plain sight shoved under a dressing, table. “It arrived soon after Christmas,” said the housekeeper, “filled with an assortment of canned anchovies, sardines, caviar and liver paste.     
     “Miss Garbo had the cover ripped off and the box left in her bedroom. She must have gotten up in the night and lunched on the canned delicacies as we often found empty tin boxes in her bedroom in the morning. Other times we found them in the kitchen sink.”     
     It seemed that Garbo never has learned to like American food. One of her favorite nearby excursions was to lunch on shipboard when certain Swedish and German boats docked in the Los Angeles harbor:
     And just like you and I Garbo has her strange little habits of saving and little idiosyncrasies.     
     For instance she has a mania for watching a burning fire-place. No matter how hot the day, according to her housekeeper, whenever Garbo went into the living room she lighted the wide fireplace which she had ordered to be kept laid with logs. If friends were with her they invariably suggested that they go out in the garden. But as soon as Garbo came back in the room she would light the fireplace again. “Sometimes,” said the housekeepers, “that fireplace was swept and laid six times a day.”     
     And they were always picking up the little piles of torn foreign fan mail that Garbo left all over the place. “We could follow her trail by these heaps of paper,” they laughed. “We would find them in the garden, on her bed, on the floor in her bedroom, on the floor in her automobile, in front of the fireplace in the living room, everywhere.
     “This trail was a great help to us when we were searching for her colored glasses, which she was continually losing all over the place.     
     “And as she seldom carried a purse when she went out she was forever losing the money that she clutched in her hand or in her little black coin pocket book.”     
     And for no reason at all, according to these housekeepers Garbo insisted on saving all of her empty bottles.

SHE kept them stored in one of her Wardrobe trunks upstairs. In another of her trunks were dozens of high heeled slippers in all kinds of material and every shade imaginable. Dainty shoes she had worn in pictures that did not feel as comfortable or go as well with her plain clothes as the flat heeled men's shoes she wore.

DON'T think that Garbo didn't have her romances, too, although she was clever enough to keep them well hidden from Hollywood,” they smiled. “We never will forget the nights when a certain foreign director, who called often, forgot to turn out the lights of his automobile in his haste to , get in to see his friend and left them streaming up the driveway across our windows keeping us awake most of the night.”

from:  Modern Screen     November 1932
© Copyright by  Modern Screen