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Garbo and Cecile Rothchild at a vineyard 1983 |
Greta and Cecile
Garbo was always moody
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Garbo was always moody. Sometimes she was sad and sometimes down when she was in great mood, her good humor could be erased quickly by some faux pas:
The worst offense took place in 1983, when Cecile Rothchild took her to the family's Chateau Lafite vineyard. During a tour of the facilities, Garbo paid little attention but was enraptured by the caves, which reminded her of the Roman catacombs.
So far so good, but then came trouble, as Green recounts: It was the time of the harvest, the wine-selling season, when the growers invite the press and give lavish entertainments at all the chateaux for the buyers and people from Paris-Match to come and write about it. Cecile's cousin, Baron Philippe de Rothschild, who was known for his showmanship, invited us to dinner at his vineyard, Chateau Mouton, saying , It'll be a tiny little dinner. Garbo was full of trepidation.
She didn't want to go
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She didn't want to go, but everything was arranged by Philippe, who made sure we were captives. In the salon, there were hundreds of guests and press. Garbo made a beeline for the corner and sat down. I stood between her and everybody else, and she pretended to be in deep conversation with me. Baron Philippe did not arrive for nearly forty minutes. He was quite old and nearly blind and finally appeared at the top of the stairs of this huge long gallery, wearing an orange brocaded caftan.
Darling Greta |
Everybody hushed and turned around to look because they'd been waiting such a goddamn long time. Then he feebly descended the stairs and, like Moses, made his way through the crowd straight toward Garbo and said, Is that Greta, my darling? My Greta, the love of my life! It's so good of you to come back to your old friend ! And kissed her dramatically.
He'd only met her once before, briefly, in 1938. He was revealing that he barely knew her because no one who did ever called her by her first name. It was a set-up and an ugly one. The dinner started off with a seafood bisque, which she's allergic to, and went on to pork loin which she wouldn't eat. It was really awful, and there was one toast after another to beautiful Greta.
Complete silence |
But she behaved perfectly throughout the whole thing, and when dinner was over, she said thank you, embraced, kiss-kiss, down the stairs to the parking lot, and into Cecile's Citroen. On our way back in the car, complete silence. You could see the smoke. Cecile was really in the doghouse. It was a perfect example of why she didn't want to go anywhere.
Source - Barry Paris - Garbo |
