“I still don't know what I'm going to do about filming,” she told her friends by end of 1939. “I find working more difficult than ever. I don't know why that's so, but I get so embarrassed when I'm in the studio.”
Many don't know, but Garbo did indeed began a treatment with a Swedish psychologist. It was in late 1939, after the premiere of Ninotchka. Garbo's physician was a swede Eric Drimmer. He later married actress Eva Gabor.
Garbo working on Ninotchka
Garbo was still plagued by anxiety and moodiness, so she began seeing Dr. Eric Drimmer, a Swedish psychologist who had opened a practice in Los Angeles that year and was treating, among others, Robert Taylor and Clark Gable. Drimmer's initial notation about Garbo was that she was seeking “relief from nervous tension.”
Six months of treatments followed, underwritten by M-G-M in the hopes that Garbo would feel well enough to make another Ninotchka.
“As I became familiar with her problems,” Drimmer wrote in 1959, “I grew increasingly convinced that Greta Garbo suffered from a shyness vis-à-vis the world around her that bordered on the pathological.
During our many long conversations, I also came to realize that the first step towards a change for the better in her health had to come from within herself. She had to openly reveal her fear, not hide behind it or call it something else.”
Drimmer believed that Garbo's celebrity was the true cause of her anxiety, and that she should publicly avow her fear of strangers . “If a normal human being is suddenly faced with a dangerous wild animal, that person will experience intense fear. That is exactly what Garbo felt when faced with a crowd of people. A few strangers pushing forward to get autographs, and even her colleagues on occasion, could fill her with terror. Her sole impulse was to turn and flee.”
At the conclusion of his work with Garbo, Drimmer held out little hope. “Perhaps the myth of her solitude was too firmly entrenched,” he wrote.
Source: Karen Swenson - A Life Apart |
