H’WOOD’S ORIGINAL SINNER

New book reveals explosive love life of Greta Garbo

GRETA Garbo chose to never marry, but she sure loved to get around. The silver-screen icon went out with men and women, gays and straights, singletons and married people, and she did it all on her own terms.

After he enlisted in the military at the start of World War II, actor Gilbert Roland wrote in his memoirs that Garbo took him to bed to celebrate, giving him a pair of her underwear as a keepsake. Then, when he returned home months later, Garbo refused to take his calls.

It was widely known that she bedded the mostly gay fashion photographer Cecil Beaton. Starting in the mid-40s and continuing for three decades, they dated intermittently. Beaton gossiped about his liaisons with Garbo with author Truman Capote, who later told a biographer, “Curiously enough, Cecil was one of the few people who gave her any physical satisfaction.”

The actress’ exploits are detailed in Robert Gottlieb’s new “Garbo” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which dishes on the busy love life and iconic film career of the shy girl from Stockholm who became Hollywood’s biggest star.

Born Greta Gustafsson in 1905 to a poor family — Gottlieb describes Garbo’s father as “a hardworking but unskilled laborer,” with some sources saying he was a “latrine cleaner” — Garbo (which she later adopted as her stage name) never liked school but loved the theater.

In 1920, 15-yearwas old Garbo cast in a film for a Stockholm department store, and her charisma was so powerful a producer nearly collapsed at the sight of her, falling against a door.

“She is so beautiful that it really pains my heart just to

see her,” he said.

Garbo was only 15 when she likely took her first lover, Max Gumpel, a Swedish Olympian and man about

town. But she also walked past the Swedish royal palace most nights “because one of the royal princes might catch sight of me,” she explained to her friend Eva Blomgren.

In the early 1920s, Garbo filmed “Joyless Street” in Berlin, where she enjoyed the Weimar Republic’s glittery nightclubs and cabarets. During those months, Garbo either did or did not — to this day nobody knows — sleep with Marlene Dietrich, then an unknown actress living in Berlin. Whatever happened, there was bad blood between the two for the rest of their lives.

In “Marlene Dietrich,” the book written about her by her daughter, Maria Riva, Dietrich is quoted as saying she met one of Garbo’s male lovers and was not impressed: “He was drunk the whole evening, but if you have to go to bed with Garbo, you have to drink.”

In 1924, studio head Louis B. Mayer saw Garbo in “Joyless Street,” signed her to MGM and moved her to Hollywood, where for the next 15 years the actress ruled the film world, with classics like “Mata Hari” and “Anna Karenina.”

The actor Melvyn Douglas — who never slept with Garbo but did costar in three movies with her — said the actress’ popularity resulted from her sexual allure. “I have never played with a woman with

such an ability to arouse the erotic impulse,” he said.

Love ’em and leave ’em

Perhaps nowhere was that clearer than in 1926’s “Flesh and the Devil.” Garbo wasn’t initially enthused about the movie, until she met costar John Gilbert. “She hated the script, she hated her role, but she didn’t hate him,” Gottlieb writes.

Garbo and Gilbert ended up madly in love. Decades before Hollywood “intimacy coordinators” were a thing, their on-set performances were so incendiary it was “embarrassing” to watch, director Clarence Brown said in the Gilbert biography “Dark Star.”

“Those two were alone in a world of their own. It seemed like an intrusion to yell ‘cut!’ ” Brown recalled. “I used to just motion the crew to another part of the set and let them finish what they were doing.”

The initial heat between Garbo and Gilbert waned, partly because she rebuffed his numerous marriage proposals. By the time Gilbert died from alcoholism a decade later, Garbo couldn’t remember what all the fuss had been about. She explained to the playwright S. N. Behrman that she had got involved with Gilbert only because she was “lonely” and “didn’t speak English” after she moved to Los Angeles, and another time wondered to a companion what she ever saw in him.

“Well, I guess he was pretty.”

But Garbo was never short of lovers. When MGM hired Sven Hugo Borg to be her interpreter in LA, she quickly welcomed the handsome translator into her bed. In the 1934 movie “The Painted Veil,” George Brent’s character seduced the unhappy wife portrayed by Garbo, while in real life “Greta and George enjoyed a romantic interlude for a while — she even moved in with him,” Gottlieb writes.

At a 1941 New Year’s Eve party, Garbo met Erich Maria Remarque, the married author of “All Quiet on the Western Front. He romantically described his first interlude with Garbo in his journals.

“She entered the bedroom, the light of the dressing room behind her, softly flowering over her shoulders, enchanting her outline, the face, the hands, the trembling, something imperceptible shook her, then the voice . . . the absence of any form of sentimentality or melodrama — yet full of warmth,” he wrote.

It’s lovely, although Gottlieb also writes how Remarque would later snark to his wife, screen star Paulette Goddard, that Garbo had been “lousy in bed.”

Later in the war, Orson Welles briefly dated Garbo — that is, until he saw her refuse an autograph request from a uniformed soldier on crutches.

In 1934, Rouben Mamoulian directed Garbo in “Queen Christina” while also enjoying intimate relations with his star. But Condé Nast writer/editor Leo Lerman reported in his journal, “The Grand Surprise,” that Dietrich told him the director gave Garbo gonorrhea.

“I was in the hospital with a strep throat, and she was in a room above me . . . with the clap,” Dietrich said. “She got it from Mamoulian.”

Among her leading ladies: Billie Holiday

As for her lesbian leanings, Garbo had documented dalliances with Tallulah Bankhead, Billie Holiday and Louise Brooks and a rumored affair with Josephine Baker. But the actress’ enigmatic love life was perhaps best summed up by her alliance with the poet Mercedes de Acosta. According to Gottlieb, de Acosta was a “ubiquitous lesbian rake” who claimed to have had flings with Dietrich, Bankhead and author Edith Wharton.

For more than three decades Garbo and de Acosta were friends and, maybe, lovers. Along with her on-and-off affair with Beaton, the relationship with de Acosta was one of the most longstanding in Garbo’s life, even though they never had any official relationship.

And while de Acosta was known to have taken a photo of a topless Garbo, getting the actress naked was apparently not hard to do.

“Garbo was famous for shucking off her clothes to swim — in her pool, in the ocean, wherever,” Gottlieb writes. “She was never embarrassed by being naked.”

The author believes that “Mercedes was madly in love; Greta was responsive, then fed up with her friend’s stifling and dramatic jealousies and sufferings.”

Between 1926’s “Torrent” and “Two-Faced Woman” in 1941, Garbo starred in almost 30 movies and was nominated for three Academy Awards. (She never won, but was given an honorary Oscar in 1955.) But WWII changed everything, including Hollywood — with the movie industry losing interest in its Swedish star and the reclusive Garbo seemingly losing interest in acting. She never officially retired but never agreed to another role, leaving California for New York City in 1953.

Of the seven-bedroom apartment she bought on 52nd Street, Gottlieb writes that Garbo had all the same troubles as the rest of the city’s residents when it came to real estate.

“I had a hard time getting this,” Garbo said. “They don’t like actresses in this building.”

Until her death in 1990, Garbo enjoyed a private Manhattan life, with one source describing her as a “hermit about town,” Gottlieb writes. She took long walks most days, bought art — including three Renoirs — and, according to the sportswriter Tony Kornheiser, enjoyed regular New York Rangers games as a season-ticket holder.

She never had kids, never married, never really even had a relationship that could’ve been described as serious. Over the years no one could really figure out her love life, and no one was more confused about Garbo’s laundry list of lovers than her old rival Dietrich.

“I don’t understand how she gets them all,” Dietrich wrote to her husband, Rudolf Sieber.

The notoriously private Garbo, meanwhile, never cared to explain herself to anyone. And neither did she give much thought to Dietrich. Asked by a reporter late in her life about the “German Garbo,” the Swedish original coyly demurred.

“Who is this Marlene Dietrich?”

I have never played with a woman with such an ability to arouse the erotic impulse. — Actor Melvyn Douglas on Greta Garbo