Greta Garbo
The icy glamor of Garbo's doomed heroines is truly iconic, but cinema's most famous loner could also make a comedy. A century after her first appearance – and 83 years since her last – here's why Hollywood missed her so much
Ella Thorn
One hundred years ago on Sunday, Greta Garbo made her first appearance on the screen. The Swedish silent film epic “The Saga of Gösta Berling”, released on March 10, 1924, is based on Selma Lagerlöf's bestseller and is about the misadventures of a disgraced ex-minister. The commoner Berling is banished to a wild estate in central Sweden and falls victim to a marriage conspiracy aimed at overthrowing the heir to the throne. Garbo – née Greta Gustafsson, who was renamed specifically for this appearance – plays the wife of the new heir to the throne. While she is still a hopeful student at a Stockholm drama school and is not yet prepared to be the wafer-thin model of a Hollywood leading lady, she probably steals the show. She's just as convincing in interior scenes as she is when she's dragged by wolves from a burning mansion over a frozen lake (the film is still revered for its set pieces).
When Gösta Berling reached MGM, the largest of Hollywood's major studios, two new employees were hired. One of these was the film's director, Mauritz Stiller, whose American career lasted only four years. The other was Greta Garbo. She soon became the industry's brightest star, a byword for the exotic and emotionally distant: vampires, Soviets, loner ballerinas, duplicitous foreign spies, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (twice), Dumas' sick Lady of the Camellias. In the midst of the Hollywood age of mass production, she made only 28 films – her last in 1941 at the age of 35. She then spent the rest of her life in retirement until her death in 1990.
Her final MGM role in George Cukor's mix-up screwball “Two-Faced Woman” was destined to go wrong. The film tried to build on the success of Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka, a deadpan Soviet prank and comedy for Garbo, but its script failed to capture any of his cosmopolitan charm. Even worse was the expectation that she would learn to dance for the film. When MGM arranged private lessons at her home, she hid in a tree.
Studio star…Publicity photo of the Garbo and Leo mascots for MGM studios, circa 1926. Photo: PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy
So Garbo disappeared forever. At least it is assumed. A recent biography by Robert Gottlieb reveals a busy social calendar. She seemed distant to old MGM acquaintances, but there were endless dates with the famous nutritionist Gayelord Hauser and the famous photographer Cecil Beaton. She was often spotted taking long walks through New York, where she had bought a spacious apartment. At the end of the day she always came home alone.
The literary habits of an exiled Garbo become clear when looking at the catalog of her estate auction. She owned two copies of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is the Massage, an illustrated treatise on the world of mass media, which she had inadvertently helped create. In addition to her collection of classic novels, there is a past life regression manual and Ellen Frankfort's “Vaginal Politics.” Close friends claim that she developed a fondness for MTV in her final years. Art dealer Sam Green remembers searching among her furniture for collections of carefully arranged troll dolls.
In the '60s and '70s, Hollywood began to look back at its crumbling star system. The studios greenlit a series of camp tragedies—part witchploitation, part hagiography—that would reinvigorate their biggest players. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford returned to the screen as feuding Miss Havishams in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Mae West, who had also made her mark in the early 1940s, came back into focus as a supporting actress in “Myra Breckinridge”. Garbo would knowingly never star in another film (“I've done enough faces,” she told David Niven), but this nostalgic interlude remains in her shadow.
“I’ve made enough faces”…Greta Garbo. Photo: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis/Getty Images
In Robert Aldrich's The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Kim Novak plays a genius thrust into the lead role in a biopic about a mysteriously deceased European actor. Context clues abound. The fictional Lylah Clare is shown in her late 1920s attire, drinking whiskey in solitude – a pastiche of Garbo's first talkie, Anna Christie. Lurking in the background is Rossella Falk, the cult Italian actress best known for her work as Fellini's muse, playing a lovelorn Mrs. Danvers character. (In real life, Falk became a pen pal of Garbo, who reportedly suggested they star in a joint biopic about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.)
The most obvious case of Garbosploitation can be found in Billy Wilder's Fedora (1978). Wilder, who had worked on the screenplay for Ninotchka earlier in his career, sends Garbo up because of her unavailability. The eponymous Garbo actor is pursued by a hopeful film producer on a sunny island somewhere in the Mediterranean. Her crazy, mostly German entourage (Hildegard Knef, Fassbinder regular Gottfried John) is reminiscent of Garbo's old Hollywood meetings in the house of the screenwriter Salka Quarter, where she came into contact with refugee greats such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. There are always references to Anna Karenina. A woman's exile becomes a symbol of the lost extravagance of an entire industry.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, Garbo had played her final role. It was in Adam & Yves, a gay porn film from 1974. A man dreams of the time he saw the star on a New York street. “One of the most exciting moments of my life,” he says. It can be seen from far above and runs at the speed of light. The camera follows her around several blocks and then zooms out as if to record her.
The role of Gösta Berling was comparatively small – she never got a second role as another woman – but the film is notable for foreshadowing Garbo's later career. The Nordic desolation of Gösta Berling would haunt her forever. She belonged to it, just as the silent star Theda Bara belonged to ancient Egypt. In Garbo's most famous American silent film, Flesh and the Devil, her character is punished for promiscuity by falling through a frozen lake. Later, as the reclusive Queen Christina of Sweden, she looks stoically at the Baltic Sea and faces exile. Garbo never really left Hollywood – no single character has ever symbolized the studio era to the same extent – but at the same time she was never quite there, always searching for something colder.
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