Greta Garbo - Press Articles (Vogue

Eternal style–her incomparable fascination… After forty years of tough-minded retreat from movie-making, Garbo's legend not only endures–it enriches us now… On these four pages, Greta Garbo today– a photographic essay by Ted Leyson; by James Wolcott, a surprising ‘80s appraisal

She's the guest every talk-show host longs to snare. The star every moviegoer longs to see emerge from parting curtains and take her place beneath the glare of studio lights, offering herself to the peel and probe of impertinent questions. But to the chatter of the modern age Greta Garbo has contributed not a jot; and it seems unthinkable that she would end four decades of silence for the dubious honor of being fawned over by Mike or Merv or Johnny, who sprinkle compliments as if they were pinches of fairy dust. Garbo dwells in silence, in a pool of calm and fashion. And she's managed to dwell in silence without exiling herself to the far side of the moon. Where J. D. Salinger remains holed up in New Hampshire, a ghostly eminence tramping through frost and dew, where Thomas Pynchon darts across the landscape like the shadow of a flitting bat, Garbo (as these photographs document) spends her days on the streets of New York in the prosiest of pursuits–walking, window-shopping, taking in the sights. She's a handsome and enigmatic presence in Manhattan, yet familiar, earthbound. She's like an archangel who's left her wings on the dresser and chosen to live among mortals, bowing to the inevitabilities of time and flesh.
If such language sounds extravagant, well, Garbo's allure has always inspired wooing extravagance. In perhaps the most eloquent tribute to her, critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, “Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives each onlooker what he needs: her largesse is intarissable.” (“Intarissable,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as inexhaustible, is one of those words so rare an lovely it seems to hover on the page like a pink-flecked moth.) Other sirens of the talkie era seem to have their well-trod stretches of turf: Bette Davis and Joan Crawford pace up and down the drawing room, cigarettes cocked for combat; Marlene Dietrich, legs unveiled, lets out her purring croak in cabarets thick with smoke and indiscretion. But in her films (comedies, tragedies, historical dramas), Garbo is both in the world and serenely above it. She's generous with her loving gaze, notes Tynan; she looks at “flowers, clouds, and furniture with the same admiring compassion, like Eve on the morning of creation.” No matter what rusty vehicle Garbo was strapped into (and they don't come much rustier than her last film, Two Faced Woman released in 1941), she never lost her aura of otherworldliness. Of current stars, perhaps only David Bowie has the same alien glamour, though he isn't a benign sprite like Garbo but a touch sulky and snittish. Garbo likes it her on earth (we're rather dear creatures); Bowie would prefer to be beamed back to the distant moon he calls home.

Walking down a city street, waiting at a traffic light… a look,
a gesture… Garbo. Of course. Leyson, eyeing her with his
camera, is her self-appointed iconographer, making her
every step his own. Here, the record of a marvellous
obsession

“Nearly all of the sex icons of our time have had this androgynous mystique–from Kate Hepburn with her tomboyish daring to Mike Jagger with his bitch-queen pout and strut, from Joan Crawford's hard mannish edges to Elvis Presley's honey-pie curves”

Garbo and Bowie share something else: a fine-boned androgyny–a flair for slipping in and out of gender without turning themselves into drag caricatures. Nearly all of the sex icons of our time have had this androgynous mystique–from Katharine Hepburn with her tomboyish daring to Mick Jagger with his bitch-queen pout and strut, from Joan Crawfords hard mannish edges to Elvis Presley's honey-pie curves. (If Albert Goldman's biography of Elvis can be trusted. Presley in his last days became a warped mirror image of his mother: a mascara'd ruin of soft feminine flab.) From the neck up, Garbo is woman supreme, her indelible face–amused crescent eyebrows, delicately etched mouth–dipping like a flower from her stem-like throat. From the neck down, Garbo is suavishly slim, her elegant lines uncontained even by the boxy uniforms she wore in the early sequences of Ninotchka. What gives Garbo her androgynous aura is that burr of huskiness in her voice, a huskiness that make her voice not masculine, exactly, but ambiguously cosmopolitan. It's the sort of voice that seems on intimate terms with rue and fatigue and erotic companionship. A voice that would be at home in a Colette novel.
The peril of androgyny is that it does harden into caricature. Garbo– wittily, seductively–toyed with androgyny in Mata Hari and Queen Christina but never allowed it to become an imprisoning style (as it did for Mae West, who became a drag parody of herself in the unfortunate Sextette). In an essay titled “The Face of Garbo,” Roland Barthes observes that in Queen Christina Garbo's makeup “has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster.…” For Garbo, it must have been liberating to free herself from that snowy mask and let it live as Image and Icon untouched by time while her own face aged into a weathered handsomeness.

Ted Leyson

     Harold Rosenberg wrote that in America life is what goes on behind the billboard, and Garbo's face was–is–the greatest billboard ever erected. In these photos, which show Garbo taking pleasure in the common day, we're given a rare glimpse of the life lived in the shadow of that billboard. From Garbo. tantalizing glimpses are all we are ever given.
     Not only has Garbo managed to shroud her past in mist and legend, but she's fended off all attempts to nose into her post-Hollywood life in Manhattan. She resists all invitations for interviews and photo sessions, which brings out wolfish instincts in some. A few years ago, a camera crew stalked Garbo through East Side streets, shooting footage that had the graininess of a 60 Minutes stakeout of a reputed underworld figure: you almost expected to see a black strip appear across Garbo's eyes.
     What are the rules on pestering celebrities who vant to be alone? It's a tricky borderline business. In a recent issue of The Paris Review is a rather dippy account by journalist Betty Eppes of her brief–and strained–encounter with J.D. Salinger, whom she managed to persuade to meet her near a covered bridge in Windsor, Vermont. Salinger, antsy and ungiving throughout the interview, snorts clouds of indignant steam when all the attention stirred by Eppe's visit cause a stranger to come up and actually talk to him. “Because of you, this man I don't now, have never even met, has spoken to me… Walked up and put his hand on my arm and spoke to me.”
     Touchy, touchy, touchy.
     Even discounting Salinger's almost melodramatic squeamishness, Eppes did, I think, go too far. But her pestering stubbornness did result in a coup: she was able to take a shot of Salinger as he walked back to the bridge, hands tucked in pockets; a shot which (eerily, comically) reminds one of those pictures purporting to show Big Foot crashing through the forest, retreating from human company. Lonesomeness hangs on Salinger like a yoke.
     In these photographs (which, we're assured by the photographer, were nit snapped under such trying circumstances), Garbo too cuts a solitary path–but her stride is brisk and spirited, her posture still athletically erect. Rather that intrusions upon her privacy, these photographs seem like emblems of her isolation–they reveal that even in the most commonplace moments, Garbo is beyond our reach, an arrow forever pursuing its own true line of flight. Strolling beneath a row of rippling flags, crossing the street in a treacherous flare if light, Garbo seems to be travelling through a city in which all the other residents have been banished briefly to help clear a space for her peregrinations. The purity of her solitude has stripped the street of other traffic.
     One of the unhappy truths of our times is that it's nearly impossible for the famous to hold on to their secrets: husbands and wives write memoirs, friends and co-worker write memoirs, even those who change the linen write memoirs (both Elvis' and Marilyn Monroe's soiled sheets have been given airings in recent books written by former employees). But I suspect that no memoirs written about Garbo will dispel her mysteriousness, will reduce her to mundane measure. Her life and legend are free of fingerprints and smudges, chaste in a way almost no career in our time has been. Of her inner life no curtains have parted, perhaps none will ever part. She is as she is here, a retired immortal, a walker in the city, a crisp blur of movement on a Manhattan afternoon.


Eternal style–her incomparable fascination… After forty years of tough-minded retreat from movie-making, Garbo's legend not only endures–it enriches us now… On these four pages, Greta Garbo today– a photographic essay by Ted Leyson; by James Wolcott, a surprising ‘80s appraisal She's the guest every talk-show host longs to snare. The star every moviegoer longs to see emerge from parting curtains and take her place beneath the glare of studio lights, offering herself to the peel and probe of impertinent questions. But to the chatter of the modern age Greta Garbo has contributed not a jot; and it seems unthinkable that she would end four decades of silence for the dubious honor of being fawned over by Mike or Merv or Johnny, who sprinkle compliments as if they were pinches of fairy dust. Garbo dwells in silence, in a pool of calm and fashion. And she's managed to dwell in silence without exiling herself to the far side of the moon. Where J. D. Salinger remains holed up in New Hampshire, a ghostly eminence tramping through frost and dew, where Thomas Pynchon darts across the landscape like the shadow of a flitting bat, Garbo (as these photographs document) spends her days on the streets of New York in the prosiest of pursuits–walking, window-shopping, taking in the sights. She's a handsome and enigmatic presence in Manhattan, yet familiar, earthbound. She's like an archangel who's left her wings on the dresser and chosen to live among mortals, bowing to the inevitabilities of time and flesh. If such language sounds extravagant, well, Garbo's allure has always inspired wooing extravagance. In perhaps the most eloquent tribute to her, critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, “Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives each onlooker what he needs: her largesse is intarissable.” (“Intarissable,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as inexhaustible, is one of those words so rare an lovely it seems to hover on the page like a pink-flecked moth.) Other sirens of the talkie era seem to have their well-trod stretches of turf: Bette Davis and Joan Crawford pace up and down the drawing room, cigarettes cocked for combat; Marlene Dietrich, legs unveiled, lets out her purring croak in cabarets thick with smoke and indiscretion. But in her films (comedies, tragedies, historical dramas), Garbo is both in the world and serenely above it. She's generous with her loving gaze, notes Tynan; she looks at “flowers, clouds, and furniture with the same admiring compassion, like Eve on the morning of creation.” No matter what rusty vehicle Garbo was strapped into (and they don't come much rustier than her last film, Two Faced Woman released in 1941), she never lost her aura of otherworldliness. Of current stars, perhaps only David Bowie has the same alien glamour, though he isn't a benign sprite like Garbo but a touch sulky and snittish. Garbo likes it her on earth (we're rather dear creatures); Bowie would prefer to be beamed back to the distant moon he calls home.
	Walking down a city street, waiting at a traffic light… a look, a gesture… Garbo. Of course. Leyson, eyeing her with his camera, is her self-appointed iconographer, making her every step his own. Here, the record of a marvellous obsession


“Nearly all of the sex icons of our time have had this androgynous mystique–from Kate Hepburn with her tomboyish daring to Mike Jagger with his bitch-queen pout and strut, from Joan Crawford's hard mannish edges to Elvis Presley's honey-pie curves” Garbo and Bowie share something else: a fine-boned androgyny–a flair for slipping in and out of gender without turning themselves into drag caricatures. Nearly all of the sex icons of our time have had this androgynous mystique–from Katharine Hepburn with her tomboyish daring to Mick Jagger with his bitch-queen pout and strut, from Joan Crawfords hard mannish edges to Elvis Presley's honey-pie curves. (If Albert Goldman's biography of Elvis can be trusted. Presley in his last days became a warped mirror image of his mother: a mascara'd ruin of soft feminine flab.) From the neck up, Garbo is woman supreme, her indelible face–amused crescent eyebrows, delicately etched mouth–dipping like a flower from her stem-like throat. From the neck down, Garbo is suavishly slim, her elegant lines uncontained even by the boxy uniforms she wore in the early sequences of Ninotchka. What gives Garbo her androgynous aura is that burr of huskiness in her voice, a huskiness that make her voice not masculine, exactly, but ambiguously cosmopolitan. It's the sort of voice that seems on intimate terms with rue and fatigue and erotic companionship. A voice that would be at home in a Colette novel. The peril of androgyny is that it does harden into caricature. Garbo– wittily, seductively–toyed with androgyny in Mata Hari and Queen Christina but never allowed it to become an imprisoning style (as it did for Mae West, who became a drag parody of herself in the unfortunate Sextette). In an essay titled “The Face of Garbo,” Roland Barthes observes that in Queen Christina Garbo's makeup “has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster.…” For Garbo, it must have been liberating to free herself from that snowy mask and let it live as Image and Icon untouched by time while her own face aged into a weathered handsomeness.

Ted Leyson
Harold Rosenberg wrote that in America life is what goes on behind the billboard, and Garbo's face was–is–the greatest billboard ever erected. In these photos, which show Garbo taking pleasure in the common day, we're given a rare glimpse of the life lived in the shadow of that billboard. From Garbo. tantalizing glimpses are all we are ever given. Not only has Garbo managed to shroud her past in mist and legend, but she's fended off all attempts to nose into her post-Hollywood life in Manhattan. She resists all invitations for interviews and photo sessions, which brings out wolfish instincts in some. A few years ago, a camera crew stalked Garbo through East Side streets, shooting footage that had the graininess of a 60 Minutes stakeout of a reputed underworld figure: you almost expected to see a black strip appear across Garbo's eyes. What are the rules on pestering celebrities who vant to be alone? It's a tricky borderline business. In a recent issue of The Paris Review is a rather dippy account by journalist Betty Eppes of her brief–and strained–encounter with J.D. Salinger, whom she managed to persuade to meet her near a covered bridge in Windsor, Vermont. Salinger, antsy and ungiving throughout the interview, snorts clouds of indignant steam when all the attention stirred by Eppe's visit cause a stranger to come up and actually talk to him. “Because of you, this man I don't now, have never even met, has spoken to me… Walked up and put his hand on my arm and spoke to me.” Touchy, touchy, touchy. Even discounting Salinger's almost melodramatic squeamishness, Eppes did, I think, go too far. But her pestering stubbornness did result in a coup: she was able to take a shot of Salinger as he walked back to the bridge, hands tucked in pockets; a shot which (eerily, comically) reminds one of those pictures purporting to show Big Foot crashing through the forest, retreating from human company. Lonesomeness hangs on Salinger like a yoke. In these photographs (which, we're assured by the photographer, were nit snapped under such trying circumstances), Garbo too cuts a solitary path–but her stride is brisk and spirited, her posture still athletically erect. Rather that intrusions upon her privacy, these photographs seem like emblems of her isolation–they reveal that even in the most commonplace moments, Garbo is beyond our reach, an arrow forever pursuing its own true line of flight. Strolling beneath a row of rippling flags, crossing the street in a treacherous flare if light, Garbo seems to be travelling through a city in which all the other residents have been banished briefly to help clear a space for her peregrinations. The purity of her solitude has stripped the street of other traffic. One of the unhappy truths of our times is that it's nearly impossible for the famous to hold on to their secrets: husbands and wives write memoirs, friends and co-worker write memoirs, even those who change the linen write memoirs (both Elvis' and Marilyn Monroe's soiled sheets have been given airings in recent books written by former employees). But I suspect that no memoirs written about Garbo will dispel her mysteriousness, will reduce her to mundane measure. Her life and legend are free of fingerprints and smudges, chaste in a way almost no career in our time has been. Of her inner life no curtains have parted, perhaps none will ever part. She is as she is here, a retired immortal, a walker in the city, a crisp blur of movement on a Manhattan afternoon.

from: VOGUE December 1981 © Copyright by VOGUE


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