What Was So Special About Greta Garbo?

 

 

 

By

Margaret Talbot

The New Yorker

 Fame is so powerful that renouncing it can seem like the supreme power move. Celebrities who retreat from the public eye (Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger, Prince) will always be legends, no matter what else they may be. Rumored comebacks tantalize. Paparazzi circle. The mystery deepens. In 1941, at the age of thirty-six, Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, stopped acting and, though she lived for half a century more, never made another film. For a star who, more than any other, “invaded the subconscious of the audience,” as Robert Gottlieb writes in his new biography, “Garbo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), this was an abdication, a privilege of monarchical proportions. But it was also a decision made by one particular, peculiar person who had never been temperamentally suited to celebrity in the first place. There was a reason, beyond the exertions of the Hollywood publicity machine, that a single line she uttered in one movie—“I want to be alone”—became so fused with her image. What can look like a strategy for keeping the public interested can also be a sincere and committed desire to keep it at bay.

 

Few other performers have ascended

as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo

did—she started off the way most of us

do, with a first and last name, but the

first soon fell away, like a spent rocket

booster,in the ballyhoo surrounding her.

 

When she appeared in her first sound

picture, “Anna Christie,” the ads pro-

claimed,“Garbo talks!”;for her first sound

comedy, “Ninotchka,” it was “Garbo

laughs!” Quite why she became such a

phenomenon is a puzzle to which film

critics and biographers keep returning.

Garbo made only twenty­eight movies

in her lifetime. (By comparison, Bette

Davis made close to ninety, and Meryl

Streep has made nearly seventy and still

counting.) That slender output could be

part of the mystique, compounded by

her disappearing act.But Garbo had ac-

quired an enigmatic mythos even before

she ended her career—the Hollywood

colony treated her like royalty. Nor has

it seemed to matter that only a handful

of her movies are much watched or ad-

mired today.

 

What Garbo had to offer, above all,

was her extraordinary face,at a timewhen

the closeup, with its supercharged inti-

macy,its unprecedented boon to the emo-

tional and erotic imagination, was still

relatively new. Many of the shots cred-

ited as the first closeups were unlikely to

have set hearts aflame, since they were

often of objects—a shoe, a wrench. But

filmmakers soon grasped the centripetal

seductions of the human face in tight

focus.The screenwriter and director Paul

Schrader picks as a turning pointthe mo-

ment in a D.W. Griffith film from 1912,

“Friends,”in which the camera comes in

tight on Mary Pickford’s face, revealing

her ambivalence aboutwhich of two suit-

ors she should choose. “A real close­up

of an actor is about going in for an emo-

tional reason that you can’t get any other

way,”Schrader writes.“When filmmak-

ersrealized that they could use a close­up

to achieve this kind of emotional effect,

cameras started coming in closer. And

characters became more complex.”

 

A face as beautiful as Garbo’s—the

enormous eyes and deep­set lids,theway

love or tenderness or some private, un-

spoken amusement unknit her brows in

an instant, melting her austerity—was

almost overwhelming when it filled the

screen.She belonged, as Roland Barthes

wrote,“to that moment in cinema when

the apprehension of the human counte-

nance plunged crowds into the greatest

perturbation, where people literally lost

themselves in the human image.” This

is not to diminish her craft as an ac-

tress. But her acting was perhaps most

effective in her silent films or in non-

verbalscenesin talking picturesinwhich

her face is the canvas for emotion. In

the famous last shots of “Queen Chris-

tina”(1933),Garbo’s androgynous Swed-

ish ruler stands at the prow of a ship

bearing her away from her country; the

body of her lover, killed in a duel over

her,is laid out on the deck.Garbo stares

into the distance, her face a

kind of mask but no less el-

oquent for it.The film’s di-

rector,Rouben Mamoulian,

had told her that she must

“make her mind and heart

a complete blank,” empty

her face of expression, so

that the audience could im-

posewhatever emotionsthey

wanted on it. The scene

would then be one of those

“marvelous spots,”he said,where “a film

could turn every spectatorinto a creator.”

 

She was skilled at inciting such pro-

jection.More than one contemporary in

Hollywood noted that her magic truly

showed up only on celluloid,like a ghostly

luminescence undetectable until the film

was developed.ClarenceBrown,who di-

rected Garbo in seven films, recalled

shooting a scene with her, thinking it

was fine,nothing special,then playing it

back and seeing “something that it just

didn’t have on the set.” On her face, he

said,“You could see thought.If she had

to look at one person with jealousy, and

another with love, she didn’t have to

change her expression. You could see it

in her eyes asshe looked from one to the

other.”Garbo herself,with a kind of arch,

adolescent indifference,never wanted to

look at the rushes.According to Brown,

she’d watch only when sound pictures

were played in reverse: “That’s what

Garbo enjoyed.She would sitt here shak-

ing with laughter,watching the film run-

ning backward and the sound going ya-

kablom­yakablom.But as soon as we ran

it forward, she wouldn’t watch it.”

 

Much has been written about Garbo

over the years,but Gottlieb, a former ed-

itor of this magazine,has produced a par-

ticularly charming, companionable, and

clear­eyed guide to her life and work—

he has no axe to grind, no urgent need

to make a counterintuitive case for her

lesser movies, and he’s generous with his

predecessors.By the end ofthe biography,

IfeltI understood Garbo better as a per-

son,without the aura of mystery around

her having been entirely dispelled—and,

at this point, who would want it to be?

 

The actress who came to embody a

kind of unattainable elegance,who

would someday wear sumptuous period

costumes with a grace so offhand that

they might have been rumpled p.j.’s,grew

up in a cramped apartment

with no indoor plumbing,

in one of Stockholm’s most

impoverished neighbor-

hoods. She was born Greta

Lovisa Gustafsson on Sep-

tember 18, 1905, to parents

from ruralstock.Her mother

was, in Gottlieb’s descrip-

tion,“practical,sensible,un-

demonstrative”; her father,

an unskilled laborer, was

handsome, musical, and fun, and Greta

adored him.But he was stricken by kid-

ney disease, and Greta, the youngest of

three children, made the rounds of the

charity hospitals with him. “She never

forgot the humiliations they endured as

poor people in search of live­or­die at-

tention,”Gottlieb writes.She was four-

teen when he died, and she dropped out

of school,leaving her with a lasting em-

barrassment about her lack of formal

education. She went to work to help

support the family,first at a barbershop,

where she applied shaving soap to men’s

faces,then at a department store,where

she sold and modelled hats. She said

later that she was “always sad as a child

for as long as I can think back. . . .I did

some skating and played with snow-

balls, but most of all I wanted to be

alone with myself.”

 

Alongside her shyness and her pen-

chant for solitude, Greta harbored a

passionate desire to be an actress. As a

kid,she’d roam the city by herself,look-

ing for theatres where she could stand

at the stage door and watch the per-

formers come and go. The first time

Garbo was in front of the camera was

at age fifteen, in an advertising film for

the departmentstore that employed her.

Sweden had a thriving film industry,

and she soon quit her day job to appear

in a couple of movies. At Stockholm’s

Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which she

was accepted at seventeen, the young

actors were instructed in a system that

“scientifically” analyzed the semiotics

of movement and gesture.Remarkably,

some of herlecture notesfrom that time

survive—she jotted down that“the head

bent forward equals a mild concession”

or a “condescending attitude,” and that

“the throwing back of the head” con-

veys“a violentfeeling such aslove.”Barry

Paris,an earlier biographerwhom Gott-

lieb cites approvingly,notesthat“Garbo

in silent films would employ that sys-

tem of gestural meaning to a high de-

gree.” She did so in her sound pictures

as well. When she plays the Russian

ballerina in “Grand Hotel” (1932), her

body language is jittery, neurotic. De-

pressed,she lets her head droop as if it

were simply too heavy to hold up; sur-

prised by delight at the prospect of a

romance with John Barrymore’s gen-

tleman jewel thief, she tosses her head

back at giddy angles.It might have been

laughable, but instead it’s riveting.

 

In the spring of 1923, the gifted film

director Mauritz Stiller approached the

Stockholm theatre looking for actresses

to cast in his new movie, an epic based

on a Swedish novel,“The Story of Gösta

Berling.”Stiller came from a Jewish fam-

ily in Finland; orphaned young, he had

fled to Sweden to avoid being conscripted

into the tsar’s army. Garbo and he were

never lovers—Stiller preferred men—

but their relationship was perhaps the

most important in both of their lives.

 

With his commanding height, his taste

forluxury (full­length fur coats,a canary-

yellow sports car), and his domineering

style with actors, he had more than a

touch of the Svengali. But Stiller be-

lieved in Garbo at a time when, as one

veteran actress put it,Greta was“thislit-

tle nobody . . . an awkward, mediocre

novice,”and he loved her.(He also seems

to have been the one who suggested re-

placing “Gustafsson”with “Garbo.”)

 

When Hollywood came calling—in

the form of Louis B. Mayer scouting

European talent forM­G­M—itwasn’t

clear whether Stiller was the lure or

Garbo; the director was certainly bet-

ter known.In any case,Stiller made sure

thattheywere a package deal(and,Gott-

lieb adds, later upped Garbo’s pay to

four hundred dollars a week, an “un-

heard of”salary for an untested starlet).

The two sailed for the United States in

1925, arriving in the pungent heat of

midsummer NewYork.(Garbo’s favor-

ite part of the visit seems to have been

the roller coaster at Coney Island.)Then

it was on to Hollywood by train.

 

The studio moguls gave an unknown

such as Garbo a very short runway.

M­G­M signed up the Swedish girl

for two pictures, “Torrent” and “The

Temptress,” and, as the film historian

Robert Dance writes in his smart new

book,“The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo

Conquered Hollywood”(Mississippi),

“if those first two films were unsuc-

cessful financially M­G­M would not

renew her contract for a second year.”

As it happened,both were hits.Motion

Picture was among the industry outlets

declaring her début “a complete suc-

cess.” (“She is not so much an actress

as she is endowed with individuality

and magnetism,” it said.) Garbo be-

came a fan favorite, even though she

was almost uniquely averse to the kind

of goofy stunts and mildly salacious

photo shoots that other stars put up

with.When she got to be as famous as

Lillian Gish, she told one interviewer

early on, “I will no longer . . . shake

handswith prize­fighters and egg­and-

milk men so they will have pictures to

put in the papers.”Instead,she worked

with consummate portrait photogra-

phers who lit her gloriously. Eventu-

ally,her films were earning enough that

she was able to negotiate an unusual

contract, one that gave her the right to

veto scripts,co­stars,and directors.And

she shunned interviews so consistently

that in the end her privacy became its

own form of publicity.

 

Despite such badassery,she never re-

ally adjusted to her new country or her

new destiny, at least beyond the movie

set. What looked like carefully culti-

vated hauteur was partly the product of

awkwardness, disorientation, and grief.

She hardly spoke English when she first

arrived, and, within a year, she learned

that her beloved sister, an aspiring ac-

tress herself,had died back home.Stiller

did not make a smooth adjustment to

Hollywood and,in a blow to them both,

he was not chosen to direct Garbo’s first

American picture. Garbo wrote to a

friend in Sweden about how miserable

she was: “This ugly, ugly America, all

machine, it is excruciating.” The only

thing that made her happy,she claimed,

was sending money to her family. At a

young age, Gottlieb writes, she found

herself “trapped in a spotlight extreme

even by Hollywood standards,”andwith

no psychological preparation for grap-

pling with the kind of fame—movie

stardom—that was new not just to her

but to the world.

 

Athletic and physically restless, she

soon took up the long nighttime walks

that became a refuge;with her hat pulled

low over her head,asit customarily was,

she would have been hard to recognize.

Stiller,who probably felt that his young

protégée no longer needed him,returned

to Sweden,where he died in 1928,at the

age of forty­five, reportedly clutching

a photograph of her. “He never seems

to have resented her dazzling ascent to

fame,” Gottlieb writes, “only wanting

her to be happy and fulfilled.” Back in

Sweden to mourn him, Garbo went

with his lawyer to the storehouse con-

taining his possessions,where shewalked

around touching his belongings and

murmuring about her memories.Gott-

lieb says that this episode must surely

have been an inspiration for the scene

in “Queen Christina”in which Garbo’s

character moves around a room at an

inn,touching all the inanimate remind-

ers of the lover she will never spend an-

other night with. On sets, she would

sometimes talk softly to herself about

what her mentor might have told her

to do—one director she worked with

referred to Stiller as“the green shadow.”

 

Garbo appears to have been emo-

tionally stunted in certain ways, dam-

aged by the loss of her father,her sister,

and Stiller,abashed by the limitations of

her English and her education.Though

she had a sense of humor,she emerges

in Gottlieb’s portrait as prickly, stub-

born, and stingy.The sudden onslaught

of celebrity made her more so.She never

married, had children, or apparently

wanted to do either; she had brief ro-

mantic relationships, mostly with men

(the actor John Gilbert, probably the

conductor Leopold Stokowski), and

likely with women, too (the leading

candidate seemsto have been thewriter

Mercedes De Acosta, the “ubiquitous

lesbian rake,”in Gottlieb’s words, who

had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and

many others). Her longest­lasting re-

lationships were with friends,especially,

as Gottlieb makes clear, those who

helped her logistically, advised her de-

votedly, and steadfastly refused to spill

the tea about her.In these,she had pretty

good, if not unerring, taste. Probably

the closest and most enduring friend-

ship was with Salka Viertel, the intel-

lectually vibrant woman at the center

of L.A.’s remarkable community of

refugee writers, composers, and film-

makers from Germany.

 

From the start of her Hollywood ca-

reer in silent pictures, Garbo was often

cast as a vamp—the kind of man-eater

who shimmied and inveigled and home-

wrecked herway through so many nine-

teen-twenties movies. (See the entire

career of ThedaBara.) AsRobert Dance

notes,“Adultery and divorce were cat-

nip to post World War I audiences.”

 

The parts quickly bored her:“I cannot

see any sense in dressing up and doing

nothing but tempting men.” Off the

job,she eschewed makeup and liked to

dress in slacks, men’s oxford shoes, and

grubby sweaters. Her closet was full of

men’s tailored shirts and ties.She often

referred to herself as a “fellow” and

sometimes signed her letters “Harry”

or “Harry Boy.” The movie role she

seemsto have liked bestwasthe learned

cross-dressing seventeenth-century

monarch Christina; it allowed her to

stride around in tunics, tight-fitting

trousers, and tall boots, to kiss one of

her ladies-in-waiting full on the lips,to

declare thatshe intended to “die a bach-

elor!”(As plenty of gender-studiesschol-

arswill tell you,thisis one queer movie.)

 

She expressed a longing to play St.Fran-

cis of Assisi, complete with a beard,and

Oscar Wilde’s vain hero Dorian Gray.

In today’s terms,Garbo might have oc-

cupied a spot along the nonbinary spec-

trum. Gottlieb doesn’t press the point,

but remarks,“How ironic if ‘the Most

Beautiful Woman in the World’ really

would rather have been a man.”

Her third American film,“Flesh and

the Devil” (1926)—the ultimate nine-

teen-twenties title—transformed her

into an international star. It’s about a

love triangle involving two best friends,

played by the magnetic John Gilbert and

the handsome Swedish actor Lars Han-

son, with Garbo at its apex. It, too, is

a pretty queer movie, though it seems

less in control of its signifiers than, say,

“Queen Christina.” As Gottlieb points

out,the two male leads are forever clasp-

ing each other fervently, bringing their

faces close together, as if about to kiss.

(It heightensthe vibe that,in silent-movie

fashion, Hanson appears to be wearing

lipstick some of the time, and Gilbert

eyeliner.)“Flesh and the Devil”also fea-

turessome of the most erotic scenesI’ve

ever encountered on film. There’s one,

in a nighttime garden, in which Garbo

rolls a cigarette between her lips, then

puts it between Gilbert’s,her eyes never

leaving his, as he strikes a match and il-

luminates their gorgeous,besotted faces.

 

There’s one where she lies back in sen-

sual abandon on a couch,Gilbert’s head

lolling against her lap, and he lifts her

hand and drags her fingers across his

mouth. And then there’s my favorite:

she and Gilbert are at a Communion

rail in church. By now, Gilbert’s char-

acter has killed her first husband in a

duel, and she has married the other

friend, but they’re still crazy about each

other,natch.Gilbert sips from the chal-

ice just before she does, and, when the

priest handsit to her,she turnsit around

to drink greedily from the side her lov-

er’s lips have just touched. Her expres-

sion is one of slow-burn ecstasy.

 

Gilbert and Garbo fell in love while

they were making the movie, but their

story is a sad one, mainly because Gil-

bert is a sad figure. He is often offered

up as an example of an actorwho couldn’t

make the transition to sound—his voice

wassaid to have been too reedy orsome-

thing. That turns out to have been an

urban legend: his voice was fine. The

trouble was that he was best at playing

boyish men undone by love at a time

when,as Gottlieb observes,Depression-

era Hollywoodwas more into “gangsters,

snappy dialogue, musicals.” Garbo and

Gilbert lived out a “Star Is Born”trajec-

tory. When they made “Flesh and the

Devil,” he was a big-name actor at the

height of his powers, and he helped

Garbo by making sure the camera an-

gles were right for her and each take of

her was the best it could be. One story

is that he planted a stand of trees on his

property in the Hollywood Hills to re-

mind her of the woods in Sweden, and

he apparently proposed to her repeat-

edly. (She professed herself puzzled

thatshe kept refusing a more permanent

bond,butshe did.)By the time she made

“Queen Christina,”in 1933, she had top

billing,and she insisted that Gilbert,who

was then married to someone else, and

professionally on the skids, play her ro-

mantic interest—rejecting the studio’s

choice, a young Laurence Olivier. Gil-

bert later remembered thatshe wastact-

ful and considerate with him on the set,

though he was drinking heavily, throw-

ing up blood,and nervous about his per-

formance.“It is a rare moment in Gar-

bo’s history,” Gottlieb writes,“when we

can fully admire,even love her,as a human

being,not only as an artist.”Gilbert died

three yearslater,atthe age ofthirty-eight.

Garbo was characteristically unsenti-

mental.“Gott,I wonder what I ever saw

in him,”she remarked while he was still

alive.“Oh well,I guess he was pretty.”

 

Why did Garbo stop acting? It

wasn’t as though her star was

truly on the wane. It had been years

since she’d made her successful transi-

tion to talkies, with a dialogue-heavy

adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna

Christie.” (From the moment she ut-

tered her first lines, “Gimme a whis-

key—ginger ale on the side—and don’t

be stingy,baby,”her accent proved to be

a sexy asset.) She’d been nominated for

four Best Actress Oscars.In 1939,she’d

made “Ninotchka,”the romantic com-

edy in which she played a Soviet appa-

ratchik on a mission to Paris who falls

in love with a playboy count and dis-

covers, as the pitch for it went,“capital-

ism not so bad after all.”It was a huge

hit—more than four hundred thousand

peoplewentto see it atRadioCityMusic

Hall during a three-week run,Gottlieb

says. Garbo is very funny, deadpanning

her way through the first half of it in

boxy jackets,rationally assessingMelvyn

Douglas’s charms. (“Your general ap-

pearance is not distasteful.”) As one bi-

ographer,Robert Payne,wrote,the per-

formance worked so brilliantly because

it satirized “Garbo herself,or rather her

legend:the cold Northerner immune to

marriage, solemn and self-absorbed.”

 

The next and last movie she made,

“Two-FacedWoman,”a clumsy attempt

to re-create comedy magic with Doug-

las, was a turkey, but she could surely

have survived it. Instead, she consid-

ered projects that fell through, turned

down others (offered the female lead

in Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case,”

Gottlieb writes,she is supposed to have

sent her agent a telegram saying “No

mamas.No murderers”), and slowly

drifted away from the business of movie-

making. She had never liked the lime-

light and, Gottlieb says, lacked the

relentless drive that animated contem-

poraries such as Marlene Dietrich or

Joan Crawford. She doesn’t seem to

have been particularly vain about her

beauty, but she was practical enough to

know its precise value, and to antici-

pate the cost of its fading.And,though

she seems to have enjoyed acting, she

was neversatisfiedwith the results.“Oh,

if once, if only once I could see a pre-

view and come home feeling satisfied,”

she remarked after one film screening.

Garbo was no Norma Desmond, view-

ing her old films over and over to ad-

mire her own image. Screening some

of them years later, at MOMA, Barry

Paris reported,she got a kick out of im-

itating herself: “R-r-rodney, when will

this painful love of ours ever die?” She

once told the actor David Niven that

she’d quit because she had“made enough

faces.”The analysis wastypical of her—

unreflective, cryptic, deprecatory.

 

Shewas,TennesseeWilliamsthought,

“the saddest of creatures—an artistwho

abandons her art.” Yet Garbo doesn’t

seem to have seen herself that way.Per-

haps attuned to the perils of growing

old in Hollywood, she moved to New

York,to an apartment on the East Side,

spent long stretches of time in Europe

with friends who were wealthy or witty

or both, went to the theatre, collected

a bit of art. She did not reinvent her-

self as a memoirist or a philanthropist

(though her estatewas valued atroughly

fifty million dollars when she died, in

1990) or an ambassador of any sort of

good will. People loved the mystery of

it all; photographers were always chas-

ing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding;

she got out.One wag called her a “her-

mit about town.”

 

Did Garbo have a rich inner life to

sustain her for all those years? There

isn’t much evidence of it. She was not

a remarkable or notably confiding let-

ter writer, journal keeper, or conversa-

tionalist;she does not seem to have had

a surfeit of intellectual curiosity.In the

movies,she had always been able to con-

vey a sense of hidden depths, of mem-

ories and emotions lighting room after

interior room, never quite surfacing to

be articulated.Were those feelings com-

plex, interesting? We were persuaded

they must be.The relationship to fame

that she enacted in the last decades of

herlifewassomething similar: it looked

profound,perhaps even spiritual—a re-

nunciation of celebrity’s blessings aswell

as its scourges.But who knows? Maybe

she was just tired of making faces. 

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