FIRST OF THREE PARTS

The
Great Garbo

IN HER GLORY SHE REIGNED SUPREME
AS A BEAUTY, AN ACTRESS, A LEGEND

by JOHN BAINBRIDGE

Two years ago some old Garbo films sent John Bainbridge on a search that ultimately took him to Hollywood, Stockholm, Paris and London, into scores of homes and through all the literature on Garbo in several languages. Now LIFE presents the first of three instalments from the only complete biography of the woman Bainbridge has called “one of the great ornaments and excitements of her age.” Doubleday will publish the book Garbo on March 24 ($4.00).

OCCASIONALLY in recent years the corridors of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City have been fleetingly graced by a pale, handsome woman wearing dark, nondescript clothes, a floppy, face-concealing hat and low-heeled shoes. She usually goes straight to the museum's large and famous film library. There, with a museum official whom she knows well, Greta Garbo sits down to watch one of the 24 movies which, during the 16 years of her stardom, brought her fame and adulation of a sort the world had never before granted to any living person and may never grant again.
     As she watches her celluloid image, Garbo reveals the enigmatic qualities that have continued to. intrigue the world as much as ever during the 13 years since the release of her last movie. To its creator, the character of Greta Garbo the actress is an image that exists only on the screen. In that form she regards herself with the interest and affection she might have for a rather good friend. While the film unreels, she gradually sheds the taut reserve with which she entered the projection room. To her companion she comments on her actions on the screen, always referring to herself in the third person. “Watch her now,” she may remark. “She's going to ask for money. Oh my, look at the way she's done her hair.” She becomes at ease and animated. When her image has vanished from the screen Garbo is once more pensive and uneasy. Turning up her coat collar and pulling down the wide brim of her hat, she strides out of the museum, looking neither to right nor left, and back into a world that is not as real to her as the one she has just left.
     Garbo's inability ever to grasp the dimensions of her famous self to understand this personage who is one of the great ornaments and excitements of her age–derives in part from forces within her and in equal part from the very vastness of those dimensions. To understand fully the legend of Greta Garbo it is necessary to go back to the years when it was at its height.
     One day in 1933 a Scottish youth was arrested for stealing a photograph of Garbo from a movie theater in Glasgow. When the offender was brought to court and the charge against him read, the magistrate, whose name was Robert Norman Macleod, asked, “Who is Greta Garbo?” His question was considered so incredible that stories about it were cabled to newspapers around the world. Not to know, in the fourth decade of the 20th Century, who Greta Garbo was automatically marked a civilized man a freak–and with reason.
     For more than a quarter of a century Garbo's admirers on six continents have contended with one another in trying to describe her particular spell. At the peak of her film career, when she had just turned 30, she was, in the words of Alistair Cooke, “every man's harmless fantasy mistress.” “By being worshiped throughout the entire world,” Cooke said, “she gives you the feeling that if your imagination has to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste.”
     In 1932 the magazine Vanity Fair published, under the heading “Then Came Garbo,” a set of photographs of Joan Crawford, Tallulah Bankhead, Katharine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and several other stage and screen actresses, showing how they had looked before Garbo reached her ascendancy in Hollywood and how they looked a couple of years afterward. The pre-Garbo portraits show a collection of rather plump and perky young women with short, fuzzy bobbed hair, thick eyebrows and fussy make-up, all wearing expressions either fatuous or coy. In their post-Garbo portraits the same young women looked startlingly alike their hair now worn in long, loose style, their eyebrows mere pencil lines, their eyelashes artificially lengthened, their make-up of the simplest, and their expressions uniformly languorous and inscrutable, as if they were brooding over some abiding sorrow–or perhaps only over their inability to look even more like Garbo.
     The studied imitation of Greta Garbo was practiced not only by actresses but by shopgirls and ladies of quality as well. Her classic features became the standard in fashion drawings, and even the mannequins in store windows began to bear an arresting resemblance to the enigmatic actress.

     Crises big and little in her film career were the grist for thousands of words from the press services, gossip columnists and movie fan magazines. One day in 1935, when she stayed on the set of Anna Karenina 25 minutes past her accustomed quitting time, the Associated Press considered the event noteworthy enough to send out an item on it. Her talking-picture debut in the title role of Anna Christie in 1930 was described as the “most eagerly and fearfully awaited cinema event since talking pictures.” Her producer, M-G-M, considered two words sufficient billing for the picture, and those two words it blazoned across the U.S.: GARBO TALKS. When the film opened, Robert E. Sherwood, later a Pulitzer-prizewinning dramatist but then a film critic, voiced the general reaction. After noting that M-G-M was advertising Greta Garbo as “the greatest living actress,” he wrote: “While it is always a pleasure to any critic to dispute the extravagant claims of the press agents, I find myself unable, on this occasion, to utter a word of protest. ...”
     By the early 1930s, after less than 10 years in the U.S., Garbo had become not only a millionaire but the highest priced player in Hollywood, making $250,000 to $300,000 a picture. In the summer of 1932, when she left Hollywood to spend several months in Sweden, U.S. newspaper readers turned from their contemplation of breadlines and bonus marchers to read stories headed “The Crisis!” “Will Garbo Come Back?” and “Whither Garbo?” A typical item said, “For the moment the eyes of the entire industry are upon this exotic silent actress who has reached the extreme heights and now must decide–whither?” After nine months she returned–to an even more profit-able contract.
     Since her departure from the screen, nobody has taken her place, seriously tried to–or could. “She stood alone–there was no one like her,” said Lewis Stone, who appeared with her in Queen Christina. “She was Greta Garbo, and that said it all.” The late Lionel Barrymore, who appeared in four films with Garbo and was known as a man not given to flattery, called her “the greatest actress ever seen on the screen.”
     Searching for possible comparisons, critics likened her to two of the greatest actresses of another day, Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Garbo reacted to such praise in her own unique manner. Shortly after completing one of her most memorable films, Camille, she went to a small party with some close friends. One enthusiastically remarked that her performance of the role was even finer than Duse's. Without a word Garbo sprang from her chair, rushed from the room and went home.
     A thousand such incidents have combined to form the image of Greta Garbo as the most enchantingly mysterious woman of her time. In Hollywood, which expects its leading citizens to share their lives and loves and sorrows unsparingly with the public, Garbo for years signed no autographs, answered no fan mail, endorsed no products, and for a time kept her address a secret even from the studio that employed her.
     In her frantic efforts to lose her public identity Garbo has at different times traveled under the pseudonyms Harriet Brown, Karin Lund, Emily Clark, Mary Holmquist and Gussie Berger. Her desire to avoid playing the role of Garbo before strangers has been overpowering. She has apparently never fully understood the part.

'I am not always happy'

WHEN Garbo first arrived in Hollywood from Sweden in 1925, she did her best to adjust to a code of behavior which demanded that stars maintain a unique glamor while constantly demonstrating that they were just folks. When M-G-M asked her to pose for publicity photographs, she agreed, and during the same period even granted a few interviews. One of the enterprising journalists who got an audience with her was a fan-magazine writer named Rilla Page Palmborg. Mrs. Palmborg described Garbo as “tall, awkward and self-conscious. She wore a plain little suit, badly in need of pressing. Her eyes were shaded with a green visor drawn down over her forehead. ... She said that the bright California sun hurt her eyes.”
     During the interview Garbo made one statement that might later be recognized as typical and revealing: “... In America you are all so happy. Why are you so happy all the time? I am not always happy. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” Otherwise Garbo's remarks consisted almost entirely of polite platitudes. But on the basis of this scanty material Mrs. Palmborg came up with a sound prophecy: “Greta Garbo will fascinate people, but I wager she will always remain more or less a mystery.” The article was published under the factitious but provocative title The Mysterious Stranger.
     Thus was foreshadowed the legend to come. What subsequently contributed to it more than anything else was the increasing secretiveness Garbo adopted as fame made more and more jarring impacts on her painfully retiring nature. The more famous Garbo became, the more her fans and the press badgered her; the more she fled from them, the more hotly she was pursued.
     Shortly after she had become a star, her fans discovered that she was living at the Beverly Hills Hotel. One day in 1929 a well-dressed young woman walked into the hotel lobby and sat down. Presently Garbo walked through the lobby to the porte-cochere, where her car awaited her. The determined fan scampered out the door and down the driveway, disappearing into the shrubbery a few yards ahead of Garbo's car. As the car started down the drive, the girl leaped from the bushes and threw herself across the road. Garbo's chauffeur slammed on the brakes and the car screeched to a stop a few inches before the prostrate form. The girl jumped up, ran to the car and thrust a pad of paper and a pen into the startled actress's face. After ascertaining that the courageous autograph hunter was unhurt, Garbo waved aside the pad and ordered her chauffeur to drive on.
     Often the struggle between Garbo and the public became pathetically absurd. Early one bright morning in late December 1931, while visiting in New York, she set out for a walk in Central Park. Wearing low-heeled shoes and a tweed topcoat with a collar that reached to her ears, she descended from her hotel room to find the lobby congested with reporters and photographers. Weaving her way through them with the agility of an athlete, she dashed outside and into a taxi. A stream of taxis carrying the newspaper folk followed.
     Approaching the Casino in the Park, Garbo ordered her taxi to halt, flung a bill at the driver, leaped from the machine and started to race across the greensward. The other taxis pulled up right behind and the newspapermen took out after their quarry. A few early morning strollers joined the chase. Now and then one of the crowd stumbled and fell but rose again to resume the fantastic pursuit. For some time the nimble actress was able to outdistance her pursuers, but finally she tired and turned to face the pack. “I can't say nothing,” she panted. “I am not allowed to say nothing. I feel so sorry for you. You have such a–tough job.” Hailing another taxi, she leaped in and lost the newsmen in the maze of park byways.
     In Hollywood, Garbo liked to exercise between scenes by walking around the lot, where she excited the same interest and curiosity she did everywhere else. Other stars stopped to stare at her; secretaries and normally jaded publicity men gathered at their office windows to watch her pass. On her excursions around the Metro premises she rarely spoke to anyone. She did have one unsettling encounter with Harpo and Groucho Marx in an elevator in the M-G-M administration building one afternoon. The brothers noticed that they were standing next to a tall, slender woman whose face was concealed by a drooping hat. Groucho playfully lifted the brim, revealing the classic Garbo features. “Pardon-me,” Groucho said, “but I thought you were a fellow I knew in Pittsburgh.” Garbo said nothing. Groucho gave up.

Outbargaining Louis B. Mayer

GARBO had been in Hollywood less than 18 months when her bosses at M-G-M were made fully aware of another of her eccentricities–money. They had reluctantly signed her up for $400 a week in 1925 mainly to please the brilliant European director Mauritz Stiller. Stiller, probably the most powerful single influence on Garbo's life, was the man who had transformed a somewhat gawky young actress named Greta Gustafsson into the intriguing European player Garbo. When M-G-M tried to bring Stiller to Hollywood he refused until his protégé Garbo was included.
     After Garbo's first two U.S. movies, The Torrent and The Temptress, both as floridly passionate as their titles indicate, the studio executives found themselves being congratulated on their remarkable discovery. Garbo's third film, Flesh and the Devil, featured lovemaking between her and John Gilbert that went far beyond the demands of either script or director, and the public appreciated it accordingly.
     In the fall of 1926, as M-G-M was preparing for her fourth assignment, a work called Women Love Diamonds, in which she was again to be cast as what she called “a stupid seductress,” Garbo became increasingly moody about two things: she was tired of playing what she called “bad womens,” and her close friend Gilbert was getting $5,000 a week. Louis B. Mayer summoned her for a friendly chat. Casually he worked up to the subject of what she would consider a fair salary. Five thousand a week, she replied. A slight earthquake was recorded in the Hollywood area that afternoon. Unable to come to terms with Mayer, Garbo said she thought she would go home, and she did. Home in this case was the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica, and she stayed there five months.

     In the back of Garbo's mind at this time was the knowledge that Stiller and some of her other countrymen were making plans to return to Sweden, and she was seriously considering going with them. So she remained silent in the face of Metro's threats and blandishments, repeating when necessary that all she wanted was “more mon-ee.” The M-G-M executives finally became convinced they were up against truly complete indifference.
     At this point Harry Edington, John Gilbert's business manager, took over Garbo's side of the negotiations. He succeeded in producing a five-year contract calling for an eventual salary of $5,000 a week. It was the general practice in Hollywood for a player to be paid only 40 weeks a year; Garbo and Edington took the position that since she was available to work the year around there was no reason the studio shouldn't get up the money for 52 weeks. This original notion was worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars to the actress during the life of the contract.
     Edington next decided that at such a salary his client should be surrounded with more dignity. His first move in this direction was to institute the custom of referring to her simply and starkly as “Garbo.” Also, many leading actresses employed a maid to attend them in their dressing rooms, and after the strike ended Garbo arrived at the studio with two maids. To some of the people around the studio the presence of the dual attendants seemed amusingly over dignified, and one of the maids accordingly departed. In other respects Garbo's habits reflected her unusually tender regard for her purse. She did purchase a secondhand limousine and hire a chauffeur to drive it. It was not until two years later that she finally decided, mostly because she wanted to escape the fawning fans in her hotel, that she could afford to rent a home of her own. After finding a house on Chevy Chase Drive in Beverly Hills, Garbo hired a Swedish couple named Gustav and Sigrid Norin. Gustav and Sigrid helped their mistress move her belongings, which consisted of one trunk, three suitcases and a few assorted boxes, from the Beverly Hills Hotel to Chevy Chase Drive in a taxi. After she had lived in the house for several weeks, Garbo asked Adrian, costume designer at M-G-M, to come out and rearrange the furniture in the living room. He did the best he could, considering the rather commonplace objects he had to work with, and afterward suggested that some new drapes and slipcovers and some other refurbishing would help considerably. But in this idea Garbo showed no interest. “I don't remember that she bought one thing for the house, even a vase,” Gustav later recalled.

Lunch in a brown paper bag

THE day Gustav went to work Garbo informed him that he was to be in charge of all the buying and that the monthly budget for all household expenses, including food, was not to exceed $100. By using considerable ingenuity and shopping at a cash-and-carry market, Gustav managed to hold the first month's expenditures down to $85. Using his own money, Gustav customarily bought a morning paper on the way home from driving Garbo to the studio. At her request he left the paper in her bedroom after he had finished with it. This sensible practice enabled Garbo to avoid a minor but regular daily expense. She achieved another economy by having Sigrid put up her lunch in a brown paper bag.
     Occasionally Garbo read a novel in Swedish, German or English, but her favorite reading matter during this period was movie fan magazines. Gustav had instructions to keep his employer supplied with all the latest issues of these; Garbo pored over them by the hour, marking the articles about herself. If, in his magazine shopping, Gustav made a mistake and bought two copies of the same issue, Garbo sent him back to the stationery store with the duplicate to get a refund. Once in a while he was given the chore of also negotiating refunds for magazines in which she had found no articles about herself.
     Sigrid was in charge of Garbo's wardrobe, which was not extensive. Her preference ran to plainly tailored tweed and jersey suits. With these she wore men's shirts and ties, of which she had a large assortment. She seldom wore anything except men's oxfords. “I used to buy most of her shoes,” Gustav has said. “I bet she had a dozen pairs of these tan shoes sitting in her closet. Often when I brought home a new pair she had ordered, she would say, ‘Just the thing for us bachelors, eh, Gustav?'”
     For company around the house Garbo kept several pets–a chow dog, a pair of black alley cats and a parrot. She thought the parrot very amusing, and spent hours teaching it to say “Hello, Greta,” to make a noise like a Bronx cheer and to imitate the throaty way she laughed.
     Most of Garbo's recreations were solitary ones–swimming in her pool, lying in the sun, horseback riding and walking. Despite her dark glasses and floppy hat, she was occasionally recognized on her walks. Once she was accosted a few blocks from her house by two ladies who fell into step on either side of her and started to babble that they were admirers and neighbors and wished to invite her to join their women's club. Garbo responded to this invitation by keeping silent and quickening her pace. Undaunted, the ladies stepped up theirs and continued prattling until Garbo finally took off at high speed and after sprinting a block or so handily outdistanced the winded clubwomen.

     When not working, she usually spent part of three or four afternoons a week on the bridle path in Bel-Air, where she opened an account at a stable. When her first month's bill came due, an employe of the stable asked for her address so that he could mail her a statement. Garbo told him simply to hand it to her.
     Accustomed to a cool, damp climate, Garbo could never get used to the long, dry spells common in Southern California. During these periods she often became restive. “I can't stand this dry weather any longer,” she would say. “I must have some rain or I'll go crazy.” Her solution to this problem, Gustav has said, was to "go out into the garden, turn on the sprinklers and walk through the spray until she was drenched to the skin. Sometimes she would put on her bathing suit. Often she was fully dressed. She did this time and again. She would play around in the spray so long that the garden was flooded."
     However soothing these watery romps may have been to Garbo's spirit, they sometimes had the effect of bringing on a cold, an ailment to which she was very susceptible. “The minute she felt a cold coming on,” according to Gustav, “she would make an appointment for treatment in a Hollywood Turkish bath, where the water came hot from a natural mineral spring. No one ever seemed to recognize her down there, and she went often. She often took the massages and baths when she didn't have a cold, especially if she was tired or nervous, as she usually was when making a picture.”
     Among Garbo's small circle of close friends in her early Hollywood years was Nils Asther, the Swedish actor with whom she had worked in a couple of pictures. She also got to know the English actor John Loder and his wife and found them attractive. Through Emil Jannings and his family she met Jacques Feyder, a Belgian director who had made a brilliant reputation abroad before coming to M-G-M, and his handsome French wife, a well-known actress on the Continent. Only with these people and a few others did Garbo sometimes feel free of her compulsion to play the part of the mysterious and inaccessible Nordic.
     Even so there were periods, lasting as much as a week or more, when she positively refused to see anyone, including these friends; for any reason. When this mood was on her, she would tell her butler, “Gustav, I am not at home to anyone. Remember, not anyone.” Then, regardless of who called–friends, studio, her business manager she remained strictly incommunicado. “After they had left,” Gustav has said, “she would call me to her and say, ‘Who was that, Gustav? What did he say? Do you think he believed that I was not here?' If I said I thought he suspected she was there, she would roll over on her side and laugh, as though she thought it a good joke.”
     When such moods were not upon her she occasionally went with her friends to dimly lighted, out-of-the-way restaurants not frequented by her fans. On Sunday afternoons she generally went to the movies, sometimes in Beverly Hills but more often in Pasadena, Long Beach or some other nearby town, where she felt the chances of not being recognized were fairly good. She was very much impressed by Gary Cooper's acting and seldom missed one of his pictures. She also made a point of seeing every film directed by Ernst Lubitsch and Erich von Stroheim–in her opinion two of the most gifted directors in Hollywood. She usually saw her own pictures two or three times.
     In the early 1930s one of Garbo's favorite movie-going companions was Wilhelm Sorensen, son of a wealthy Swedish industrialist. One Sunday afternoon she and Sorensen went to a theater in Beverly Hills to see The Love Parade, starring Maurice Chevalier and directed by Lubitsch. When they came out of the movie-house Garbo walked over to the curb and sat down on it. With her chin in her hands, she sat staring into space for several minutes. Sorensen finally asked what was bothering her. After a pause, Garbo said, “I must sit and think. I am so happy to know that pictures like that can be made.” Rising at last, she asked Sorensen to drive her to a florist's shop, where she bought five red roses. They then drove to Lubitsch's home. When Lubitsch came to the door, Garbo tossed him the roses, threw her arms around his neck, and said, “Ernst, I, love you, I love you for this picture.”
     Lubitsch insisted that she and Sorensen come and join his dinner guests. To Sorensen's surprise Garbo accepted. She and Lubitsch then sat down together and discussed the picture at length, completely oblivious of the other guests and of the food that was set before them.
     Some years later, after Lubitsch had directed Garbo in one of her most successful films, Ninotchka, he said of her, “I believe that Garbo is probably the most inhibited person I have ever worked with. When you finally break through this, and she really feels a scene, she's wonderful. But if you don't succeed in making her feel it, she can't do it cold-bloodedly on technique.”

The troubled perfectionist

WHETHER dealing with film material that was shoddy or sublime, Garbo always approached her work with the single-minded purpose of the true artist. “She is so completely thorough in her art,” one of her directors, Richard Boleslawski, said, “that one finds her almost as marvelous as the camera itself.” Garbo's Nordic efficiency impressed her directors almost as much as her genius before the camera. She unfailingly arrived on the set at 9 o'clock, dressed, made up and letter-perfect not only in her lines but in those of the other players who would appear with her. She had privately rehearsed the business of every scene–how she planned to sit in a chair, walk across a room–before reaching the set. “She knew just what she had to do and how she expected to do it,” the director Clarence Brown has recalled. “If the director suggested changes, she listened respectfully, sometimes arguing quietly but never angrily. She always wanted to give the best she had. Everything was for the picture's sake.”
     She had, to be sure, a number of idiosyncracies. When studio executives felt obliged to escort friends or business associates to Garbo's set, she simply broke off the scene and retired to her dressing room, where she remained until the visitors had departed. More than once, when doing scenes involving hundreds of extras, she stopped work to remark to the director, “There are people here who do not belong here.” Usually it was discovered, sure enough, that one or more Garbo admirers had mingled with the mob in the hope of seeing their heroine at work.
     “Why do you mind people looking at you?” George Cukor, who directed Garbo in two pictures, once asked her. “When people are watching,” she replied, “I'm just a woman making faces for the camera. It destroys the illusion.” To help Garbo preserve the illusion, the sets on which she worked were sometimes surrounded by black cloth screens. Though directors generally like to work near the camera, Clarence Brown often found himself in the highly unusual situation of directing Garbo through a crack in one of these screens.

GARBO RENTED EIGHT-ROOM BEVERLY HILLS HOME IN 1929, CLOSED OFF TOP FLOOR, ALMOST NEVER ENTERTAINED

     Because of her fear of strangers, Garbo insisted that the technical crews on her pictures always be made up of the same people. The studio permitted her to choose her own cameraman; her favorite was William Daniels, who photographed all or part of 22 of her 24 American movies. Between Garbo and Daniels there developed a great fondness and professional respect. Whenever possible, Garbo wore an old pair of carpet slippers on the set for the sake of comfort. Before a scene was shot, she always asked Daniels, “Is the feet in?” If they were out of camera range, she kept the slippers on, regardless of what luxurious Adrian creation she was wearing.
     Though the usual quitting time in Hollywood studios was 6 o'clock, Garbo refused to work a minute beyond 5. At that hour, even if she was in the middle of a scene, she abruptly left the set. Despite this abbreviated working day, the actual shooting time on Garbo's films was considerably shorter than that of most other comparable productions. Because of her painstaking preparation, retakes were seldom necessary. She also saved time because she was not burdened with what Ernst Lubitsch called. “a slavish devotion to the mirror,” a common failing, he once remarked, of women stars. “They are so much concerned about their looks,” said Lubitsch, “that they exhaust their vitality. Some of them take a terribly long time to powder and make up.” Off the set Garbo's only beauty routines were the application to her face of an ice cube or an occasional dab of powder.
     Garbo's directors credit her with an almost unique ability to strike the proper attitude before the camera. The most moving scene in Queen Christina is the finale when the queen, taking leave of her homeland after the death of her lover, stands gazing from the bow of the ship that is to bear her on what promises to be a long and lonely pilgrimage. Here, according to one student of the cinema, Garbo's performance is marked by “a symbolism brushed with poetry.” Director Rouben Mamoulian achieved this result, after the scene had been shot again and again, by finally telling Garbo to make her mind a blank, completely vacant, to think of nothing; then the memorable scene was shot.

Her most volcanic romance

THE filming of Queen Christina marked Garbo's last professional encounter with the Hollywood star whose name and hers had been linked in the most fabled romance of the 1920s–John Gilbert.
     When the 20-year-old Garbo met the 29-year-old Gilbert on the set of Flesh and the Devil in 1926, she was still a comparative newcomer and he was already famous as “the screen's perfect lover.” No sooner had shooting begun than reports of a heady romance between Gilbert and his new leading lady began to circulate. Clarence Brown, who was directing, explained rather breathlessly, “I am working with raw material. They are in that blissful state of love that is so like a rosy cloud that they imagine themselves hidden behind it, as well as lost in it.”
     John Gilbert was as well cast for an affair of this sort as he was for the movie. Extremely handsome, with coal-black hair, dark burning eyes and flashing white teeth, he was the most popular male star of the silent screen. To his friends in the film colony, the reckless, temperamental Gilbert was a rollicking companion, a convivial host and a man who, a friend said, “had a tendency-to overcapitalize romance both on the screen and off.” Before encountering Garbo, Gilbert had been twice married and twice divorced, first to a movie extra and then to the well-known actress Leatrice Joy.

Musketeers in polo coats

AS Flesh and the Devil progressed Garbo became a frequent visitor at Gilbert's Tower Road home overlooking Beverly Hills. Sometimes when they were not working they took off for a day's drive and picnic in the mountains. Gilbert's pet name for Garbo was “Fleka,” irregularly derived from the Swedish svensk flicka, meaning “Swedish girl.” Another was “Gee-bo,” or “The Swede,” or just “Swede.” Her nickname for him was “Jacky,” which, because of her difficulty with the letter “j,” she pronounced “Yacky.” Gilbert taught Garbo how to play tennis, and though her form was unconventional–she grasped the racket around the middle of the handle instead of at the end–she developed into quite a good player. Gilbert's close friend Carey Wilson, a Metro producer, shared his house during this period, and with the two men Garbo seemed to fancy herself a kind of third musketeer. Both Gilbert and Wilson had adopted the then fashionable loose-fitting, wraparound polo coat with a belt that tied like a sash. One day Garbo showed up wearing a coat exactly like theirs. “Now I'm one of the boys,” she announced. In their identical coats, the trio often went out together to the movies. “Here we go, three fellows out for a good time,” Garbo would say as they roared off in one of Gilbert's cars.
     Sometimes, when the three were sitting around after dinner, she would suddenly get up and say, “I take a walk.” It was understood that she liked to walk by herself, and she would disappear alone into the hills above Gilbert's house. Often she stayed away until long after dark, and more than once Gilbert and Wilson set out to look for her. This always amused her greatly. When they tried to warn her that there were snakes in the hills, her reply was, simply, “So?”

    With the two men or with Gilbert alone Garbo was talkative, natural and seemingly content. When Gilbert invited other guests to his house she was stricken speechless and displayed an uncontrollable urge to flee home or into the hills. Gilbert's Sunday buffets had become a kind of local institution and were usually attended by two dozen or so actors, actresses, producers, directors and other film people. Congregating late in the morning, Gilbert's guests played tennis, swam, talked shop and wound up the day with a buffet supper. Gilbert hoped that Garbo would lose some of her shyness in the casual and relaxed atmosphere of these gatherings. “She tried to play the role as Jack wished,” Carey Wilson has said, “but what was second nature for him was agony for her.”
     Time after time Gilbert pressed Garbo to marry him, and time after time she refused. On at least two occasions he seemed close to success. Once, according to Wilson, Gilbert was sure he had convinced Garbo that they should marry, quit everything and go away on a year's yachting trip through the South Seas. So certain was he that he spent over $100,000 in buying and outfitting a handsome new yacht, but the intended bridal craft never put to sea bearing the newlyweds.
     On another occasion he thought he had persuaded Garbo to elope. To minimize the chances of a change of heart, he hurried her into his fastest car and drove at high speed to Santa Ana. But when they reached the marriage license bureau she bolted, ran to a hotel and hid in the ladies' room until Gilbert disconsolately gave up. Then she took a train back to Los Angeles alone. After this the romance began to fade quietly and imperceptibly.

End of the affair

IT was while on location at Catalina Island during the shooting of The Single Standard in 1929 that Garbo learned of Gilbert's sudden marriage to the well-known actress Ina Claire. Garbo got the news from an eager reporter who chartered a plane and flew to Catalina carrying the first edition of the newspaper with its headline “John Gilbert Weds Actress.” Finding Garbo on the set between takes, the reporter handed her the paper. She glanced at the headline, scanned the story and returned the paper. “Thank you,” she said. The reporter began firing questions. “I hope Mr. Gilbert will be very happy,” she said, and walked away.
     One day several months later Garbo was driving down Sunset Boulevard when Gilbert passed her in his convertible. “Gott, I wonder what I ever saw in him,” she said to her companion. “Oh well,” she added, “I guess he was pretty.”
     The phenomenon that had so enhanced Garbo's career–talking pictures–simultaneously ruined Gilbert's. His decline started with his first sound picture, His Glorious Night. When the great screen lover first said “I love you” in his high, thin voice, audiences snickered. Some laughed cruelly and uproariously. From then on, a movie oldtimer remembers, “he was worth less at the box office than a bag of popcorn.” Probably no man in Hollywood ever fell so far so fast.
     So when, four years after his marriage to Ina Claire, Garbo suggested that Gilbert play opposite her in Queen Christina, touching stories went around that she had made a generous sentimental gesture. The fact was that careful consideration had been given to a number of more likely candidates, and Laurence Olivier had been definitely chosen for the part. After Garbo had rehearsed some love scenes with him, it was decided that he wouldn't do. It was then that she suggested that Gilbert be given a chance.

     Gilbert and Garbo had not appeared in a film together in five years. Meanwhile he and Ina Claire had been divorced, and he had taken as his fourth wife Virginia Bruce, who bore him a daughter a few days before the filming of Queen Christina began. The reunion of Garbo and Gilbert was the occasion for considerable publicity about their “stormy, historic and once glorious romance.” Garbo's attitude toward Gilbert on the set was friendly but professional. At one point the script called for a love scene of the uninhibited kind that had done much to make the two famous, and Gilbert began to enact it with his old enthusiasm. Garbo thereupon suggested to the director, Rouben Mamoulian, that the scene be played with somewhat less intensity. “Mr. Gilbert is a married man now, with a wife and baby,” she remarked.
     When Queen Christina was released, not only Garbo's performance but the scenario, direction, supporting cast and nearly everything else in the production were extravagantly praised–all except the work of John Gilbert. After Queen Christina Gilbert appeared in but one other film, an inconsequential work called The Captain Hates the Sea.. Divorced by his fourth wife, his fortune disappearing, Gilbert died of a heart attack in 1936, at the age of 38.
     His death aroused no visible emotional tremor in Garbo. For several years before this she had been beset with a growing., almost somnambulistic, moodiness that pervaded both her personal and professional lives. Once a director approached her on the set where she had been working for several hours. “You look tired, Miss Garbo,” he said. “You'd better go home. You must be dead.”
     There was a long pause before she replied. “Dead?” she finally said. “Dead? I have been dead many years.”

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NEXT WEEK:
THE CREATION OF GARBO

In the second instalment of this series John Bainbridge goes back to the bleak childhood and stagestruck adolescence of Greta Gustafsson. He tells how she was discovered and renamed by the director Mauritz Stiller, under whose hypnotic influence she came to Hollywood.

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from:   LIFE      January 10, 1955
© Copyright by  LIFE