I want to be alone — with my enormous ego

BIOGRAPHY GRETA GARBO: DIVINE STAR by David Bret (The Robson Press £20 % £15.99) ROGER LEWIS

THinK back! if, in the years up until 1990, when she died at the age of 84, you encountered a brusque old lady in a black wig, dark glasses, and a turned-up collar with her hat brim pulled down over her face, who was calling herself Alice Smith, mary Jones, Harriet Brown, Fraulein Gussie Berger, Jonas Emersen, mademoiselle Hanson or miss Sorenson — then the chances are you met Greta Garbo.

i think i’d have been happy to give her a wide berth myself. David Bret’s portrait is of a humourless and egomaniacal woman who gave a new meaning to the word difficult.

When she arrived in Hollywood in 1925, she refused to visit the studio couturiers and hairdressers. She refused invitations to parties and receptions, ‘preferring to wander alone for hours on end, deep in thought’.

She refused to attend her own premieres or hold press conferences. She stopped giving interviews early in her career — which lasted in any case only until 1941.

if ticked off by the producers for her recalcitrance, she’d reply: ‘Fine. Then i will go home to Sweden.’ She never answered the phone or opened the mail.

one could argue that this was the most brilliantly successful public relations stunt ever devised.

The legend that is Garbo must be the envy of every superstar from madonna to Lady Gaga, by way of Posh Spice and Dame Edna. Garbo achieved immortal status by being invisible.

‘The creative artist should be a rare and solitary spirit,’ she commented. ‘my work absorbs me. i have time for nothing else.’

This sounds noble — but Garbo knew what she was doing. She was so anxious about her status, she returned magazines for a refund if she wasn’t mentioned in them. She was fully aware that being secretive got people talking about her, and the ‘tantrums, illnesses and indifference’ were deliberate ploys.

To keep the studio on its toes, she walked off the set of one film six times, once merely because an infuriated Clark Gable called her ‘a stuck-up broad’.

The sole words she spoke to Laurence olivier, incidentally, whom she fired from Queen Christina, were: ‘Life’s a pain, anyway.’

Greta Garbo was born in Stockholm in 1905 as Greta Gustafsson, the daughter of a Lapp peasant and a butcher. She spent her childhood ‘washing dishes, sweeping the stairs and cleaning the outside toilet’.

But even in those distant days she had mood swings. ‘i was up and down,’ she remembered. ‘Happy one moment. The next moment, there was nothing left for me.’ modern doctors would surely label her bi-polar and put her on pills.

Bossy and imperious, according to neighbours, Garbo never recovered from being beaten at school. ‘From that day, she shrank more and more into herself.’ She

worked in a barber’s shop, preparing the lather, and modelled hats in a department store. She was an extra in Swedish silent movies and was a student at the Royal Dramatic Academy, where ‘her stance was clumsy, her accent guttural and unrefined, she hardly ever brushed her hair, she dressed sloppily’. nevertheless, director mauritz Stiller could detect ‘beautiful raw material for him to shape into form’, and before his cameras, windblown and dishevelled, Garbo was instantly transfigured.

As Bret says rhapsodically, ‘swathed in furs, the snowflakes swirling about her in an icy wasteland, she creates a vision of loveliness’.

Louis B. mayer was visiting Europe, saw the footage, and immediately offered Garbo an mGm contract. in California, the actress ‘ quickly developed a tendency towards indolence, arrogance and rebelliousness’.

Gastonishing ARBo wouldn’t rehearse with other actors, for example, not even for dance numbers, instead ‘preparing her role in the privacy of her home’. As she put it herself: ‘Yes, i was alone. i always went away alone. That is what i like.’

Such was her paranoia for privacy, Garbo would book herself two seats at the theatre, positioned next to the aisle, so she’d have no one next to her.

To go out and about, she began adopting all those aliases and disguises. Her favourite pastime was staring out to sea, ‘ looking gloomy’. Tennessee Williams said Garbo had ‘the cold quality of a mermaid’.

She kept her friends separate, so they could never gang up behind her back ‘and swap notes’. They were also ‘sworn to the strictest secrecy regarding her movements’. Garbo’s emotional relationships, such as they were, were with women — mercedes de Acosta, Cécile de Rothschild, Gracie Fields ( Gracie Fields?) — and on one occasion she tried to throw the press off the scent by pretending to be having an affair with noel Coward. Presumably Kenneth Williams wasn’t available and Julian Clary hadn’t been born.

Though Garbo’s estate has suppressed her letters, ‘desperate that her bisexuality should remain buried in the annals of time’, it is on record that Garbo’s favourite roles, in Sweden, were the male parts in Russian classics.

She found it thrilling, ‘a woman dressed as a man’, and lolling beside the pool in Beverly Hills she’d puff on a pipe. She always wore trousers and men’s brogues.

nonetheless, Bret surmises that Garbo’s ‘tetchiness and seemingly persistent fatigue’ were due to numerous abortions, even that she had a secret child ‘which died at the age of five’.

A stunt double was used for long shots, when Garbo’s ‘ swelling figure might be detected’. The love child of Greta Garbo and noel Coward? Had it survived it might have been me.