National Post (National Edition)
INDEPENDENT WOMAN
DID HOLLYWOOD’S GRETA GARBO REALLY WANT TO BE ALONE?
If there were ever a film star who would have enjoyed our time of self-isolation, it was Hollywood’s most famous hermit, Greta “I want to be alone” Garbo. Hugely popular for such films as Anna Christie, Grand Hotel, Ninotchka, Anna Karenina, and Mata Hari, the “Swedish Sphinx” — born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson — was a superstar when, in 1941, age 36, she shocked the world by retiring.
She spent the next 49 years as a recluse. After 1955, she granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premières and even refused invitations to the White House. In a 1955 letter, she admitted that she’d been reduced to “sitting in a little homemade house ... practically a prisoner because I don’t want anyone to know I am here.” She also dreamt of going “somewhere in fresh air (with) no clothes on.”
For most of the last four decades of her life, Garbo lived in a seven-room apartment in Manhattan (she occupied the entire fifth floor), overlooking the East River, in the company of a Renoir and her 18th-century French furniture. Money was never a problem. She invested wisely the fortune she had made from films — some in stocks and shares, some in property on Rodeo Drive, Los Angeles, which became one of the most sought-after streets in the U.S. The woman who had been ashamed of her latrine-cleaner father ended up with a $50-million fortune.
The doormen guarded her privacy. Fellow tenants followed an unwritten rule to avert their eyes whenever they encountered the star known in their residence as “The Face.” The only time they remembered being surprised by Garbo’s behaviour was the day she spent operating the elevator when the building staff were on strike.
Garbo rarely cooked — she used her casserole dish only to make coffee — and normally ordered food from a local Swedish delicatessen. She allowed a telephone in her apartment, but insisted it had to be black. “That’ll keep me awake at night, trying to decide the colour scheme,” she told a friend. “I do so little telephoning, it really doesn’t matter. Sometimes I don’t call anyone for weeks. I don’t answer the phone.”
The myth of Garbo-the-hermit soon overtook the reality. She disliked mixing with people, but she was always out and about, walking for long stretches every day, using careful disguises and aliases to shop and visit galleries.
In 1963, Garbo became good friends with Raymond Daum, a former combat photographer who later worked as Gloria Swanson’s personal archivist. They would sometimes walk all day and come back laden with shopping. Garbo’s friend Gore Vidal later said he didn’t believe she had been lonely, but rather that she’d spent half a century looking for the perfect sweater. “She was terribly lazy and terribly rich,” he said.
Daum would write a book called Walking with Garbo, in which he revealed that Garbo “could out-walk me.” He also revealed that she was “damn good” at tennis. She ate mainly vegetarian food, and was athletic enough to do cartwheels in her 50s. She regularly exercised at home, dressed in a floral all-in-one yoga costume. Daum recalls her dismissive remarks about the “pale and putty-looking” New Yorkers.
Occasionally, a stranger would ask whether she was Garbo. She would raise her index finger to her mouth and say: “Shhh.” She could be even more slippery. For many years, she also spent part of each winter in California (where she loved growing roses) and once, when she was staying at actor Anthony Palermo’s house, she took his young daughter to a coffee shop. A customer asked: “Aren’t you Greta Garbo?” She looked him straight in the eye and replied: “What would Greta Garbo be doing in a place like this?”
There was a part of Garbo that enjoyed the intrigue. William Stevenson’s 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War confirmed that, during the Second World War, she had helped British intelligence by identifying high-level Nazi sympathizers in Stockholm. She also provided introductions and carried messages for British agents. She got a kick out of disguises and aliases.
Details about Garbo’s tumultuous relationship with the British photographer Cecil Beaton recently came to light in Hugo Vickers’ authorized Beaton biography. Her seduction technique was blunt. Garbo told Beaton she hated wearing underclothes. After drawing the velvet curtains, she asked him: “Do you want to go to bed?” Although the relationship went well for a time — they used to bathe together — jealousy and rancour crept in. When Beaton told Garbo he was seeing an English widow, she reacted with fury, shouting: “I’ll come over to cut her head off.”
Life started to go downhill for Garbo in her 60s. Her letters are full of melancholy. “I suppose I suffer very deep depression,” she admitted in 1971. The following year, she wrote: “I am living in my usual rut again, seeing nobody ... I feel rather tired all the time but it could be from living such a monotonous life, never wanting anything ... I want to do things in my mind, but I always postpone things till tomorrow and tomorrow is the same story.”
It was not all doom and gloom. Her friend Edward Lozzi, a Beverly Hills PR executive who later became a White House press aide for George H.W. Bush, describes a more playful Garbo.
Garbo also drank a fair amount and her health declined. In her final years, she had to walk with a cane and suffered from heart and kidney problems. Only her closest friends knew that, toward the end, she was on dialysis three times a week. She died 30 years ago, at 84, in April 1990.
Daum had urged Garbo to socialize more, but she told him: “I want to do more with people, but I can’t. I can’t help it. I was born that way.” She was haunted for most of her life by the “alone” line uttered by the aging ballerina she played in 1932’s Grand Hotel. Those words were often misattributed to the actress herself, rather than to the character.
In 1955, giving a rare interview to Life magazine, Garbo insisted her real mantra was not quite the same. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference.”
We take breaking pop culture news and piece it back together at nationalpost. com/arts There seems to be a law that governs all our actions so I never make plans. — GRETA GARBO