Did Garbo really want to be alone?
Greta Garbo is famous for saying “I want to be alone”, but how reclusive was she really? Martin Chilton reports
You might imagine that Hollywood’s most famous hermit, Greta “I want to be alone” Garbo, would cope well in our time of self-isolation. But although she did do everything possible to avoid publicity after quitting acting at 36, the image of her as a total recluse is a myth. She remained a paradox to the end – but for someone who supposedly lived in voluntary lockdown, she actually walked for miles every day, using careful disguises and aliases to shop and visit art galleries, and even played energetic games of tennis.
Garbo was 84 when she died on 15 April 1990 – 30 years ago last month. She quit acting in 1941, after the last of her 30 movies, a disappointing comedy called Two-Faced Woman. The “Swedish Sphinx” was a superstar at the time, famed for such films as Queen Christina, Grand Hotel, Anna Karenina and Mata
Hari. For the next 49 years, she stayed out of the public eye. She granted no interviews after 1955, signed no autographs, attended no premieres and even refused invitations to the White House. In a 1955 letter to Salka Viertel, Garbo told her friend she had been reduced to “sitting in a little house... practically a prisoner because I don’t want anyone to know I am here”.
This clichéd hermit-like image stuck – but how accurate is it? She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm on 18 September 1905. For most of the last four decades of her life, she lived in a seven-room apartment overlooking Manhattan’s East River. Her home was full of prized possessions, including a Renoir and pieces of 18th century French furniture. Money was never a problem. She invested her movie earnings wisely – including on a portfolio of stocks and property on LA’s Rodeo Drive, long before it became one of America’s most sought-after streets. The woman who had been ashamed of her poor latrinecleaner father ended up with a $57m fortune.
The doormen guarded her privacy; fellow tenants followed an unwritten rule to avert their eyes whenever they encountered the star they knew as “The Face”. Garbo was not domestic – she rarely cooked and normally ordered food from a local Swedish delicatessen. But while she may have been quirky, she was not housebound. She went out every day, usually in long trousers, a plain coat and loafers, her face hidden by a fedora, scarf and sunglasses. By 1963, she was friends with Raymond Daum, a photographer who became Gloria Swanson’s archivist. The pair would walk up to 11 miles a day, windowshopping and visiting galleries, coming back laden with bags. Garbo’s friend Gore Vidal later said he didn’t believe she had been lonely, but that she had spent 50 years looking for the perfect pullover.
Daum later revealed she was also “damn good” at tennis, and would play “strenuous” matches at the home of a friend. She mainly ate vegetarian food, and could do cartwheels in her 50s. She regularly exercised at home, dressed in a floral yoga costume. Occasionally on their walks, a stranger would ask whether she was Garbo. She would raise her finger to her mouth and say: “Shhh”. She could be even more slippery. For many years she spent part of each winter in California, where she liked to grow roses. Once, a customer in a coffee shop asked her: “Aren’t you Greta Garbo?” She looked at him 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 War, she helped the British identify high-level Nazi sympathisers in Sweden. She also provided introductions for British agents. In the 1950s, she travelled to her holiday home in Klosters, Switzerland, under the alias Harriet Brown; other aliases included Gussie Berger, Mary Holmquist and the male name Karl Lund.
Garbo never married, and there were endless stories about her sexuality. “Women liked her. Men hated her,” said Vidal, who thought she had an “androgynous charm, the lesbian side of her nature”. Details about her tumultuous relationship with British photographer Cecil Beaton came to light earlier this year in Hugo Vickers’ biography. Garbo told Beaton she hated wearing underclothes. Her seduction technique was blunt. 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 crept in. When Beaton told her he was seeing an English widow, she reacted with fury, shouting, “I’ll cut her head off”.
Life started to go downhill in her 60s. She was bothered by noise, and her letters are full of melancholy. “I suppose I suffer very deep depression,” she wondered in 1971. Garbo also drank a fair amount – especially neat vodka and what she called Guttysark (Cutty Sark) scotch – and her health declined. In her final years, she suffered from heart and kidney problems. Only her closest friends knew that towards the end she was receiving thrice-weekly dialysis treatments at New York Hospital’s Rogosin Institute – where she eventually died, leaving her estate to a niece.
Daum said Garbo once 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 that single, memorable “alone” line, in 1932’s Grand
Hotel. In fact, the line was always misquoted. In 1955, Garbo gave a rare interview, attempting to set the record straight. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference,” she added, to no avail.
A version of this article appeared in The Daily Telegraph. © Telegraph Media Group Limited 2020.
“I want to do more with people – but I can’t,” she once told a friend. “I can’t help it. I was born that way”