Garbo’s greatest (and oddest) passion
He was a gay British photographer. She was a bisexual Hollywood megastar. But, as a startling new book reveals, Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo had an all-consuming affair fuelled by jealousy, cruelty and obsession
dressed in the height of edwardian elegance, photographer and theatre designer Cecil Beaton, widely assumed to be homosexual, had fine features, a high nasal voice and exaggerated mannerisms.
His favourite posture, according to one observer, was to stand with his left foot turned out, like a dancing master.
Few knew that, aged 25 on a trip to America, he’d had sex for the first time with a woman — two, in fact, in the space of a week. The first had taken him on as a one-night challenge, while the second — the sister of dancing legend Fred Astaire — had lasted a little longer.
Indeed, Adele Astaire claimed to be enraptured, though she couldn’t resist telling friends that as he approached the bed, he was demurely holding a towel in front of his private parts.
Given Cecil’s gay background, it was all rather unexpected. Henceforth, Cecil would be bisexual, though of the three great loves of his life, two would be men — arts patron Peter Watson and American art historian Kin Hoitsma — and only one would be a woman. And not just any woman, but the most celebrated and mysterious of all Hollywood’s stars: Greta Garbo.
LonG before Cecil had even set eyes on the swedish-born actress, she’d become a full-blown obsession. In 1929, he’d arrived in Hollywood to gather photos for his latest project, The Book of Beauty, determined to engineer a meeting.
But although major stars from Gloria swanson to Joan Crawford agreed to pose for him, Garbo remained elusive, even when he persuaded several intermediaries to beg her for an audience.
‘she is the only person with glamour,’ moaned Cecil in his journal. ‘Women send orchids to her every day, men telephone on long-distance calls to try and hear her voice. she doesn’t give a damn — and the fact that she doesn’t give a damn and will not come out of hiding only increases the frenzy and, as with me, they are almost driven insane with desire to see her.’
For two years, her rejection continued to rankle. But he remained determined to meet the woman he considered the epitome of beauty.
His chance came in 1932, when he returned to Hollywood, this time staying with an english couple who knew Garbo. They asked her round one sunday, and she came — on the strict condition that she wouldn’t have to meet their guest.
Cecil was incensed. dressed in a white kid coat, snakeskin shorts and white shoes, he crept down to the drawing room, pretended to be surprised at Garbo’s presence, and sharply left the room.
As he’d hoped, his hosts called him back. It turned out to be a magical evening. Garbo complimented Cecil on his beauty, his shoes and his youth (though he was two years older than her), and they shared a kiss.
‘You are like a Grecian boy. If I were a young boy, I would do such things to you,’ she purred.
At one point, she gave him a yellow rose she’d filched from a vase. He pressed it in his journal, had it framed and hung it above his bed.
At dawn, Garbo left in her big car. ‘Then this is goodbye,’ Cecil cried plaintively. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so. C’est la vie!’ she replied.
He wrote in his journal: ‘I could hardly believe what had happened. The only concrete proof was the yellow rose she had kissed.’ Garbo, had he but known it, was bisexual, and involved with a lesbian playwright called Mercedes de Acosta.
CeCIL didn’t see Garbo again for 14 years. Then, walking into a new York party in 1946, he bumped into her. He was so taken aback by her beauty that he had to grasp the back of a chair.
To Cecil, now famed for his photographs of both the royal Family and exquisite beauties on both sides of the Atlantic, she seemed nothing less than a goddess. she was 41 and, true, there were lines when she smiled, he noted, but she remained as dazzling as ever.
seizing his chance, he whisked her up to the roof terrace for a long conversation, after which she promised to call him.
When they met again, Garbo told him she hated wearing underclothes or being restricted in any way. on their third encounter, Cecil asked her to marry him — to which she evasively replied: ‘Good heavens. I don’t think you should speak so frivolously’.
But she continued to see him, and asked if he’d take her passport photo. He did more than that, snapping away then sending some pictures to Vogue. A few weeks later, when Garbo left for California, he cried. To his chagrin, however, she was chilly when he called her.
she was furious that Vogue had printed more than one of her pictures — though Cecil always maintained she’d pencilled a cross on those she’d approved.
Whatever the truth, Garbo refused to answer his calls, letters and telegrams. ‘You cannot dismiss me like a recalcitrant housemaid,’ he protested. At other times, he poured out his love in long letters he never sent.
By then, in any case, Garbo was enmeshed in a bizarre relationship with a russian émigré, George schlee, who also acted for many years as her closest adviser.
They’d met when she went to his wife Valentina’s new York boutique — and stripped nude in front of him while trying on dresses.
Before long, a curious menage was established, with schlee seeing his wife and Garbo on alternate nights. Into this web stepped Cecil in the winter of 1947.
Finding himself in new York again for work, he called Garbo — and to his delight, she agreed to visit his hotel suite. excited, he filled it with flowers and her favour
ite cigarettes. She arrived late, and they chatted about inconse-quential matters. Each time he asked her a question, she replied: ‘I’m not going to tell you.’ Then she did something unexpected.
‘She suddenly drew the mustard velvet curtains,’ he recalled.
‘I was completely surprised. Within a few minutes of our reun-ion, after these long and void months of depression and doubt, we were suddenly together in unexplained, unexpected and inevitable intimacy.
‘I had to throw my mind back to the times when in my wildest dreams I had invented the scenes that were now taking place.’
After that first sexual encoun-ter, for the next few weeks, he took her for walks in Central Park. She was usually late, and his nose would go mauve with cold waiting. Back at his suite, they drank tea and she reminded him not to ask questions.
Once, he recalled: ‘Suddenly, as if it were the most ordinary ques-tion in the world, she stretched out her arm towards the other room and asked with disarming frankness: “Do you want to go to bed?” At other times, she’d say: “I must be going” — which was inevitably a prelude to sex.’
He soon found himself expected to bend to her whims and never entirely sure when he’d see her again. Cecil also sensed he was being used for his body.
When he confided in a friend, Mona, she told him to play Garbo at her own game — never hang-ing around waiting, but leaving his lover dangling.
He ceased contact with Garbo for four days. Fearing he’d been unfaithful, she came charging round on the fifth — only to be told he was taking Mona to a party. ‘Damn that cocktail party. Why do you go? I want you to stay here,’ said Garbo, no longer cool and in control.
Cecil went anyway, and contin-ued his phone silence. When she rang him, he deliberately waxed lyrical about Mona’s beauty.
‘I cannot feel pity, for the battle is still too desperate,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘ But it is quite remarkable what a difference the change of tactics has made.’
One day, he went away for the weekend without a word of expla-nation. This worked a treat: when they met on his return, Garbo asked many jealous questions — then drew the velvet curtains.
Another evening, at the theatre, she paid no attention to the play, staring at him throughout. ‘I think I’ll have to propose to you,’ she said. With assumed noncha-lance, Cecil replied: ‘Oh no, that wouldn’t work any more.’
That night, he wrote, he had to ‘ hold onto myself to prevent myself from being devoured.’ The tables had turned: Garbo told him over and over that she loved him, and he began to think they might marry. She was even letting him make love to her at her own apartment, though never letting him stay all night.
One Sunday morning, Garbo showed up unexpectedly. ‘In the brilliant light, she was as beauti-ful as ever,’ he wrote. ‘The eyes like an eagle’s of pale mauve blue. The skin on the neck and chest of the finest grain and as shiny as marble. Her legs long and like a young girl of 15. The skin is deep apricot in colour. We were very happy in our mutual ecstasy.’
Later, her hair tied with a yellow ribbon, she shared a bath with him. ‘We laughed a lot and I felt very happy.’ Aware he had a sexual hold on Garbo, he attrib-uted this ‘to the fact that I am so unexpectedly violent and have such unlicensed energy when called upon. It baffles and intrigues and even shocks her. May this last a long time!!’
Meanwhile, he was learning about Garbo’s idiosyncracies. She hated her Christian name, she told him. She adored sculp-ture, though her appreciation lacked finesse — ‘yum, yum, yum’ she’d say, gazing at the nipple of a female figure by Michelangelo.
He told her about his homosex-ual past. For her part, she told him about a stranger who’d somehow found her number during the war and called her. She decided to go to see him, and discovered he was going into the forces the next day.
As he showed her round, she thought ‘why not?’ and asked about the view from his bedroom — with predictable results.
AT THE end of 1950, Cecil again asked Garbo to marry him. ‘I probably will,’ she said, ever the tease. The following year, he begged her to visit him in England, adding: ‘I feel my life very empty and lonely. I really want very much to get married.’
She came finally that October to stay for two months at his Queen Anne house near Salisbury, and met several of his friends.
Author James Pope-Hennessy recalled: ‘She has the most inex-plicable powers of fascination which she uses freely on all and sundry. She is only explicable as a mythological figure.’
As for Cecil, he’d later describe Garbo’s visit as ‘ a long and emotional autumn’ which ‘had reduced me to a jellied pulp’.
Part of the strain was keeping everything to do with her a dark secret, as she loathed publicity.
Months later, Cecil called her immediately after arriving in New York, but she petulantly refused to see him for a few days. When they finally got together, Garbo said she was livid because he’d written a few lines about her in a book 15 years before.
True, his words hadn’t been flattering — he’d speculated that she was selfish and incapable of love — but they’d been written long before he really knew her.
To his dismay, the affair cooled. But when they quarrelled again over what he’d written about her, he exploded. Contrary as ever, Garbo tried to kiss him — and when he blocked her, crooned seductively: ‘Don’t you want to come and live in this apartment when we’re married?’
Their relationship resumed, but Cecil kept his feelings in check. Predictably, Garbo tried to worm her way under his skin again. ‘I do love you and I think you’re a flop,’ she wrote to him. ‘You should have taken me by the scruff of the neck and made an honest boy of me.’
Was there hope for Cecil after all? In 1956, Garbo came to see him in London, but soon became restless and decided to leave.
‘I was terribly dejected. I had hoped that we might get mar-ried,’ Cecil wrote. ‘I [reminded] her that she had blamed me for not taking her by the scruff of the neck and marrying her. How could I now prevent her from making another mistake?’
‘Oh! I always make mistakes,’ was her insouciant response.
FINALLY,
he gave up. For a while, he toyed with the idea of marry-ing an attractive Eng-lish widow. When he told Garbo, she reacted with fury: ‘I’ll come over to cut her head off.’
As always, when she sensed his interest waning, she tried to reel him back. ‘ Give me another chance,’ she said in a sad little voice during one of their calls.
Cecil’s heart was breaking, but he could no longer envisage a future with Garbo. In the 1960s, he became famous for designing lavish sets and costumes for the film My Fair Lady, and photo-graphed everyone from Twiggy and the Queen to Barbra Streisand and Mick Jagger.
He also fell in love again — with male American art historian Hoitsma, who was half his age, but the relationship didn’t last.
In 1965, he and Garbo met again when both were guests on a yacht in the Greek islands. They hadn’t seen each other in two years.
She was demanding, tiresome, spoilt and selfish, he observed.
In 1974, at the age of 70, Cecil had a stroke which affected his memory and his right hand.
Amazingly, Garbo came to visit him the following year. He was delighted to see his former lover, her hair now grey and tied with a bootlace. She sat on his knee and snuggled up to him like a child.
But as Cecil made his slow progress to the dining room, she turned to his secretary and said: ‘I couldn’t have married him, could I? Him being like this!’
Garbo never saw him again. Cecil slipped peacefully away in his own bed in January 1980.
Friends who couldn’t attend his simple country funeral sent wreaths. From Garbo, there was nothing.
ADAPTED by Corinna Honan from Cecil Beaton: The Authorised Biography by Hugo Vickers, published by Hodder & Stoughton at £14.99. © 2020 Hugo Vickers. To order a copy for £11.99 (20 per cent discount, P&P free) go to mailshop.co.uk or call 01603 648 155. Offer valid until March 20, 2020. Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things is at the National Portrait Gallery from March 12 to June 7.