Garbo's past catches up with her at 75
to reveal why she has never married
By PAT MALONE
GRETA GARBO, the screen goddess who became the world's most celebrated sphinx, has provided a fascinating insight into why she chosen a secretive life alone in preference to love and marriage.
The legendary actress, who was born plain Greta Gustafson in Stockholm, Sweden, on September 18, 1905, put her innermost thoughts on paper for the first and only time in her life almost 48 years ago.
And the long-forgotten article which she wrote for the now defunct Liberty magazine in October, 1932, still has an eerily prophetic air today – on the eve of her 75th birthday.
“I feel awkward, shy and afraid,” Garbo wrote at the age of 27, even though she was already then the acclaimed star of such classic movies as Flesh And The Devil, Anna Christie and Grand Hotel.
“In Hollywood, where every tea table bristles with gossip columnists, what I say may be misunderstood.
“So I am as silent as the grave about my private affairs. Rumors fly about. I am mum. My private affairs are strictly private.”
And although her celebrated romances with silent screen star John Gilbert, photographer Cecil Beaton and Swedish film director Mauritz Stiller have passed into cinematic history, she has remained silent.
Garbo-watchers who have pursued the elusive actress relentlessly for more than half a century never suspected she would remain true to the vow she made in 1928 when Stiller, her discoverer and mentor, died penniless at the age of 44.
“She declared: “I will be a rare and solitary spirit.”
It was Stiller who brought her to America as a 20-year-old unknown and groomed her for her stupendous success.
“I worshipped him,” she wrote four years after his death in her soul-searching examination. “There are some of course, who say it was a love story. It was more than that.
“It was the utter devotion which only the very young can know – the adoration of a student for her teacher, of a timid girl for a mastermind.
“In his studio, Stiller taught me how to do everything: How to eat, how to turn my head; how to express love – and hate.
'I became
a hermit
because I
didn't know
what to say'
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“Off the screen I studied his every whim, wish and demand. I lived my life according to the plans he laid down. He told me what to say, and what to do.
“When Stiller died I found myself like a ship without a rudder. I was bewildered lost, and very lonely. I resolutely refused to talk to reporters because I didn't know what to say.
“By degrees I dropped put of the social whirl of Hollywood. I retired into my shell. I built a wall of repression around my real self, and lived – and still live – behind it.
“In the gayest, maddest colony in the world, I became a hermit.”
Some say Garbo was not entirely blameless for Stiller's death. The unhappy director returned to Sweden after learning of her passionate affair with Gilbert, her leading man in the heavily-censored Flesh And The Devil, and died there a year later.
But Garbo was truly affected. As she wrote: “When I first went to Hollywood. I used to go to parties regularly and attend premieres. But soon I found my work began to suffer.
“After Stiller died, I did not go to parties anymore. I was too tired. I went to bed after my work at the studio was done.
“If I needed recreation, I liked to be out of doors: the trudge about in a boy's coat and boy's shoes; to ride horseback or shoot craps with the stable boys, or watch the sun set in a blaze of glory over the Pacific Ocean.
“Most hostesses disapprove of this trousered attitude to life, so I do not inflict it upon them. Besides, I am still a little nervous, a little self-conscious about my English. I cannot express myself well at parties. I speak haltingly.”
Garbo's addiction to fresh air and the great outdoors was reinforced by the fact that her only sister died of tuberculosis in childhood and she always feared she may also have disease.
Even today, Garbo maintains a strict life of diet and exercise – and close friends say that while her face shows her age, her trim, athletic body is still that of a young woman.
Throughout her life the world's most desired and mysterious woman has refused to marry because, she explained, no man could put up with being known as Mr. Garbo.
“The particular problem that faces the film star is this,” se wrote. “Have I the peculiar kind of genius and temperament that makes of matrimony a holy and lasting bond?
“Am I a fit and proper person to be anybody's lawful wedded wife? Can I make a success if married life?”
Today, as she vowed, she remains “a solitary spirit,” shunning photographers, refusing interviews and living up to the famous words she never uttered – “I want to be alone.”
She lives frugally in an apartment on Manhattan's fashionable East Side, even though her wealth is still vast – in 1937 alone, her movie earnings were a then-in credible $472,602. She shrewdly in vested all her money in Hollywood real estate and today owns large sections of one of the world's most expensive shopping areas, Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.
Garbo's rare public comments these days are limited to insisting that no amount of money could ever lure her back in front of the camera, not even if a perfect script came her way.
Offered the part of an aging movie star who plays herself in one of the Airport sequels, the famous actress replied simply: “What could be worse than playing a movie star?” |
