In camera's eye,
nobody's greater

By HARRY HAUN

Daily News Staff Writer

     The camera lies and mythologizes and plays favorites, and it was guilty on all three counts in creating the legend called Garbo.
     Hers was a myth made by machine, but man's imagination took it from there – to dizzying heights and unfathomable depths. She was, said Alistair Cook, “Every man's harmless fantasy mistress. She gave you the impression that, if your imagination had to sin, it could at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste.”
     When the Swedish actress crossed paths with the motion picture lens in the late ‘20s before the advent of talkies, a love pact was struck – a conspiracy that kept the world riveted and at respectful distance. Sound, which soon followed (“Garbo Talks!”) in “Anna Christie”, only seconded the illusion and deepened her mystery.
     Her face in closeup – like the hypnotic fadeout in “Queen Christina” – was spellbinding. She seemed not to be acting at all – indeed, maybe she wasn't (!) – but the camera conveyed her every emotion effortlessly, no matter how slight or subtle.

Just 16 years
     Clarence Brown, who directed her more than any other director, claimed to be as mystified as the next man about her mystique.
     “What she had you couldn't see with the naked eye,” he once said. “It was something in her eyes, something behind them that could reach out and tell the audience what she was thinking.”
     To be hard-eyed about it, her screen career lasted only 16 years and 28 films, but the legend lingered on relentlessly – a hand-me-down inheritance from one generation to another – right up to the very end yesterday, 48 years after her last film.
     There was only one truly great performance in the whole lot – her 1937 “Camille” – and a few fine ones along the way beyond that (the world-wary ballerina in “Grand Hotel,” the tragic “Queen Christina,” the love-enlightened “Ninotchka”).
     Most of her movies were hardly the stuff of which legends are made, but Garbo managed to be luminous anyway, quote independent of the circumstances in which she found herself. The property almost never mattered; the presence always did.
     “Subtract Garbo from most of her films,” Richard Whitehall once remarked, “and you are left with nothing.”
     Garbo, that enigma, got away – and she took her mystery with her.

     “Whatever cachet this block had, it just went,” said Tom Granville, 44, a fabric designer.

No parties

     “Oh my God, she was very private,” said a superintendent in her building who said he could not give his name. He said she had no parties, no pets and only occasional visits from her doctor.
     “She enjoyed being away from people in the way Howard Hughes did.
     “I never knew her to collect anything but memories.”
     The Swedish-born star, known for her sculpted beauty and husky voice, began her career in silent films and reigned as the supreme movie queen throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. She was rated by some critics as the finest screen actress of all time.
     Garbo never acted again after her retirement, but her luminous performances in more than 24films kept her name alive and made her a favorite of younger generations who saw in her an ethereal ideal of the ultimate woman.
     While “Camille” and “Ninotchka” became film festival staples, Garbo remained shuttered in her Manhattan apartment or at retreats in France and Switzerland.
     She had rarely suffered from any illness until later years. A health-food enthusiast, she enjoyed long walks.

Stalked by potogs

     When she traveled it was with the air of a phantom, slipping in and out of airports, wearing dark glasses and a slouch hat pulled down. She was usually only a few steps ahead of persistent photographers, who stalked her incessantly and occasionally managed to steal a quick shot of “The Face.”
     In comments published in Life magazine in 1989, Garbo described herself as a “sour little creature.”
     “I don't want any kind of attention from anybody, except that I know that someone likes me, and that's nice. Otherwise, it's sickening,” she said.
     Rumors of love affairs were plentiful but she never married and in her later years allowed only a few long-time friends to penetrate her solitude. Few would discuss the star, knowing they would lose her friendship if they did.
     She was born Greta Lovisa Gustaffson in Stockholm on Sept. 19, 1905, the daughter of an uneducated laborer who was often ill or unemployed. After her father died when she was 14, she left school to become a barber's helper and later a $25-a-month department store clerk.

Chosen for ad

     While clerking in the hat department, she was chosen to appear in a filmed hat advertisement. Stagestruck, the 17-year-old Greta enrolled in Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater Academy and haunted film studios seeking work. She won several bit parts, the first in a 1923 comedy, “Peter the Tramp.”     But her big break came when Mauritz Stiller, then Sweden's leading director, visited the academy and discovered the tall, angular beauty. He made her his protégé, changed her name to Garbo and starred her in his 1924 silent movie, “The Atonement of Gosta Berling.”     The film showed her wrapped in furs, huddled in a horse-drawn sled as it sped away from a pack of pursuing wolves. At first sight of her on film, Stiller said, “Her face, You only get a face like that in front of a camera once in a century.”     Stiller's film caught the attention of Hollywood movie tycoon Louis B. Mayer, who offered the director a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. Stiller agreed on the condition that Garbo be signed, too.
     She stepped onto American soil in 1925, and from her first American appearance in the silent film “The Torrent,” Garbo captivated audiences.
     Her career soared with such silent films as “Flesh and the Devil,” “The Divine Woman” and “Woman of Affairs.”

Sensual voice

     Talking pictures revealed her throaty, sensual voice and she became an international sensation, drawing rave reviews in “Mata Hari,” “Grand Hotel,” “Queen Christina” and many more

.     Many film buffs can recite her first spoken line, to a bartender at a waterfront saloon in “Anna Christie”:

     “Gimme a viskey – ginger ale on the side – and don't by stingy, baby.”

Her leading men included some of he greatest stars of the time – Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Fredric March, Robert Taylor and Charles Boyer.
     At times she was reported to be ready to marry actor John Gilbert, maestro Leopold Stokowski, health-food enthusiast Gayelord Hauser and director Rouben Mamoulian.
     Her career began to wane in the late 1930s but bounced back with the comedy “Ninotchka,” which prompted marquees across America to blaze: “Garbo Laughs!” But her next attempt at a humorous role in “Two-Faced Woman” flopped and Garbo announced her retirement. It was 1941 and she was 36.
     Garbo, a millionaire through many investments, had no need to work again. She never did.

Although nominated four times for Academy Awards, she didn't win one until 1955 – a special Oscar for “a series of luminous and unforgettable performances.” She did not appear to collect it.