The mystery of Garbo. Since she has departed from the screen, nobody has taken her place, seriously tried to–or could. “She stood alone–there was no one like her,” said her co-star Lewis Stone, who appeared with her in Queen Christina. “She was Greta Garbo and that said it all.”
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 in the role was even finer that Duse's. Without a word Garbo sprang from her chair, rushed from the room and went home.
A thousand such incidents have combined to from the legend of Greta Garbo, the most enchantingly mysterious woman of her time. In Hollywood, which expects its leading citizens to share their lives, 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 frantic efforts to lose her public identity, Garbo has at different times traveled under pseudonyms. Her desire to avoid playing the role of Garbo before strangers has been overpowering. She has apparently never fully understood the part.
She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson September 18, 1905, in a poor section of Stockholm. Her father died when she was 14 and she went to work as a soap-lather girl in a barbershop. Later as a clerk for a department store, she was selected for a commercial film the store was making. This first film job led to a commercial for a bakery, then to a bathing beauty part in a film made by Eric Petschler, the Mack Sennett of Sweden. Greta studied at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School where she met musical comedy star Carl Brisson, on whom she had a schoolgirl crush. He recommended her to director Maurice Stiller who become her mentor, guide and friend.
Stiller renamed her Garbo and won for her a promise of an American movie contract when he was signed to direct for MGM. They arrived in America in 1925 and their arrival was recorded by photos in two New York newspapers. Other photos convinced the studio to give her the contract just as she was thinking of returning to Europe. She has a hit in her first film, The Torrent. She made 24 feature films in 16 years of stardom.
When Garbo first arrived in Hollywood she did her best to adjust to a code of behavior which demanded that stars maintain a unique glamour while constantly demonstrating that they were just folks. When MGM asked her to pose for publicity photographs, she agreed and during the same period even granted interviews. One of the enterprising journalists who got an audience with Garbo was a fan magazine writer. She described her 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 would 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. On the basis of this scanty material the writer came up with a sound prophecy: “Greta Garbo will fascinate people but I wager she will always remain more or less a mystery.”
Thus was the legend of come foreshadowed. 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–and therefore the more horly she was pursued.
After Garbo's second movie, The Temptress, as passionate as the title indicates, the studio executives found themselves being congratulated on their remarkable discovery. Garbo's third film, Flesh And The Devil, featured love scenes with John Gilbert that went far beyond the demands of either script or director, and the public appreciated it accordingly.
When the 220-year-old Garbo met the 29-year-old Gilbert on the set of this film in 1926, she was still a comparative newcomer and he was already famous as the “screen's prefect lover.” No sooner had shooting begun 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 lot in it.”
John Gilbert was a 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 charming 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 married twice and divorced twice, first to a movie extra and then to the well-known actress Leatrice Joy.
As Flesh And The Devil progressed, Garbo became a frequent visitor at Gilbert's Tower Road home in 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 word meaning Swedish girl. 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 from was unconventional, she developed into quite a good player. Gilbert's close friend, a Metro producer, shared Gilbert's house during this period, and with the two men Garbo seemed to fancy herself a kind of third musketeer. 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. Both times she bolted. After this the romance began to fade quietly and imperceptibly.
At the same time, Garbo had hired Gilbert's manager for herself. Harry Edington's skillful negotiating produced a contract that even by Hollywood standards was impressive but she showed no signs of extravagance aside from buying a secondhand, black Packard and hiring a chauffeur to drive it. Her legendary character was now endowed with another element: thrift.
Acting on the proposition that silence never betrays, Edington advised her to stop giving interviews since the stories that had been published about his new client revealed that her remarks in print did not always sound like conversational pearls. In addition, Edington used his influence at MGM to end the practice of using his client in circus-type publicity photographs.
By both design and by chance, Greta Garbo was gradually being fashioned into the legendary figure who would be known as “The Swedish Sphinx,” mysterious and wise. Because of her curious social behavior and simple tastes, Garbo's friends fell into the habit of referring to her among themselves as “The Peasant of Chevy Chase.” To the world however, Garbo was something quite different. This other self, the fabled creature of mystery, she regarded alternately with distaste and with quiet amusement.
As queen of the movies, Garbo found herself at the close of the 1920's in an uneasy situation that is the lot of all who wear a crown. Hollywood was in the throes of a revolution set off by the advent of talking pictures. Old favorites, whose voices failed to satisfy the demands of the new medium, were banished. To survive in the new order was hard enough for stars whose native tongue was English. For many Europeans the challenge posed by American talkies proved impossible to meet. Public enthusiasm for the talkies had become so marked by the end of 1929, that Metro decided that Garbo's speaking debut should not be delayed longer.
With her approval the studio selected the vehicle for her first talking picture–Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Garbo's first speaking performance, described by one critic as “the most eagerly and fearfully awaited cinema event since the talking pictures got into their stride,” was a triumphant success. The reception of Anna Christie proved that Garbo talking was an even more magical figure than Garbo mute.
But the sense of remoteness that came across on the screen had its origins in her personal life. To the few people who knew her, she seemed to have become even more remote, moody and troubled. Her desire to escape from the eyes of the world became an obsession. She was no longer content with her life in Hollywood. Moving from house to house to avoid contact with the world, Garbo became almost frantically jealous of hat she called her “private life.” She refused to speak to former close personal and professional associates whom she suspected of having talked about her to anyone.
Garbo's fame as a goddess swelled fantastically as the thirties drew to a close. Her romantic attachments together with her celluloid triumphs made this period a golden era for the millions who worshipped at Garbo's shrine. To Garbo's great public, what she was doing on the screen at the time was of far less interest than what she was doing away from it. According to reports coming out of Hollywood, she had at last found what the newspapers called her “dream man.” The character thus imaginatively described was the noted conductor Leopold Stokowski. Once Garbo was convinced that she and Stokowski could, in a manner of speaking, make beautiful music together, she appeared with him often at private social functions. The customary matrimonial rumors began to take shape. They became widespread when Stokowski's second wife filed suit for divorce. Garbo denied them. “Such rumors are absurd,” she said. “I will not deny that Mr. Stokowski and I are very good friends. But as far as marriage to him–no. That is out of the question.” Stokowski also denied that there was anything to the stories that he and Garbo were to marry. And so another romance had ended.
In the middle of 1940, with the Continent embroiled in war, the lucrative foreign market for Garbo's films was all but gone. Her career was probably more seriously affected by the war than any other Hollywood star because her pictures had always earned more money abroad than in the United States. In these circumstances MGM was faced with the necessity of producing a Garbo film which, to make a profit, would have to appeal almost exclusively to American audiences. The studio executives came to the conclusion that the actress who had won her fame by portraying lovely, world-weary women had to be transformed into a vital, blooming, American glamor girl. Garbo gave her consent to this ill-advised enterprise and the vehicle selected for her debut as a sporting, fun-loving American type was called Two-Faced Woman. It was destined to be Greta Garbo's last moving picture.
The film was released ion 1941 and immediately ran into serious trouble. The Legion of Decency promptly condemned the film as immoral. It was the first time in several years that the leaders of the Catholic Church had put a blanket condemnation on a major Hollywood production. The purified version of Two-Faced Woman had its New York premiere on December 31, 1941, less than a month after Pearl Harbor. The timing was unfortunate. The critical reception inauspicious. It was declared an absurd vehicle for Greta Garbo. The film defied even Garbo's genius.
Thirty-six and at the height of her dramatic power, she made up her mind to withdraw from pictures until, she thought then, after the war. It was not the only irony of her life that she never returned.
Naturally and rightly, Garbo's abdication as the first lady of the screen has been widely lamented. Every major studio in Hollywood has tried repeatedly to entice her into making another picture. The beauty of Garbo, her genius, her mystery, her magic and undefinable charm make up her unconquerable legend. Already it is being passed on to another generation. A new crop of imaginative intellectuals has taken up perpetuating the most beautiful and exciting figure of her age.
The Legend of Garbo will live on. |
