Independent woman
Did Hollywood homebody 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 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. 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.
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 latrinecleaner 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 and normally ordered food from a local Swedish delicatessen.
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 allin-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.
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 age 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.”