Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 16, 1990 TAG: 9004160113
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Garbo, whom critics and fans alike considered the most alluring, vibrant and yet aloof character ever to grace the motion picture screen, was 84.
In death, as in life, she was a paradox - a public figure who had lived clandestinely, avoiding publicity at any cost. Yet her near-hysterical desire for privacy had, by itself, made her one of the most publicized if least visible people in the world.
She probably made more money in fewer films than anyone else in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's history. The films were both silent and sound, and 23 of them ranged from adequate to superb in the eyes of critics; the 24th was a failure that sent her into retirement at 36, her classic features still unmarked by age.
And although her most quoted line was "I vant to be alone," she never was: neither as star nor as recluse.
More than 20 years after she fled Hollywood in 1942, directors and producers were sending her scripts, hoping to lure her from retirement.
She was the youngest of two girls and a boy born to Karl and Anna Gustafsson. He was a sanitation worker in Stockholm, Sweden, and the modest Gustafsson home reflected the family finances.
Karl Gustafsson died in 1920, when Greta was 14, and she went to work lathering customers' faces in a neighborhood barber shop. Later she worked in a fruit store, and it was there she began to display the devotion to privacy that would mark the rest of her life.
She refused to tell her friends where she worked and in a letter to one acquaintance, written before her 15th birthday, she admitted to being "arrogant and impatient."
What free time she had was spent hanging around local theaters or, as she told Photoplay magazine in 1928 in one of the few interviews she ever granted, "thinking."
"I wanted to be alone, even as a child," she said. "I used to go to a corner and think. . . . Thinking means so much, even to small children."
As a child she also was somewhat frustrated by her appearance. She was 5 feet, 7 inches tall and an awkward 130 pounds by the time she was 12. It was not the stuff of which stars are made, but ambition kept her going when looks and talent could not.
Somewhere around her 18th birthday she was modeling hats in a Stockholm department store when Erik Petschler, a producer of low-brow comedies, came in to purchase some gowns for a picture. She wound up auditioning for a part as a bathing beauty in "Peter the Tramp," in which her plump figure was shown to full advantage.
Petschler saw her potential and encouraged her to study drama. It was while she was studying at the Academy of Royal Dramatic Theatre and occasionally performing that she met Mauritz Stiller, the foremost director in the Swedish film industry.
Hers, he said, was a face he wanted for his next film, "Gosta Berling." But only if the figure supporting it weighed 25 pounds less.
He told friends he wanted to mold her career before she developed acting styles that displeased him. Stiller got her out of her contract at Royal Dramatic and began to shape his 18-year-old starlet.
At any rate, when Louis B. Mayer met Greta Gustafsson in a Berlin hotel in 1924-25, she had become Greta Garbo. Mayer had gone to Europe seeking talent for his Louis B. Mayer Pictures (soon to merge with Metro Pictures and the Goldwyn production company).
He had gone to get Stiller. But by then, Stiller informed him, he and Garbo were a package. The package came to America.
She and Stiller caught the ocean liner in June 1925 that carried her to immortality and him to despair.
Stiller prevailed on Irving Thalberg, MGM's boy-wonder producer, to view a film test Stiller had paid for. Thalberg almost immediately cast Garbo in her first American role, that of a peasant girl in "The Torrent."
What Thalberg may have sensed and Louis Mayer himself soon realized was that here was a unique face in the days of the Kewpie doll silent heroine.
After "The Torrent" had its premiere in 1926, Garbo found herself likened to Pola Negri and Norma Talmadge all rolled into one. Stiller, however, did not direct his protege's first MGM film. He was assigned to Garbo's next picture, "The Temptress," but was taken off it.
Within a week of the movie's release, MGM had sent her another script, for "Flesh and the Devil."
It co-starred John Gilbert, and the feeling he had sparked in Garbo when she saw him on the screen soon poured out on the set.
The relationship, played to the hilt by the Hollywood press corps, made "Flesh and the Devil" one of the top-grossing silent films of all time.
By now the once halting, backward immigrant was world famous (she had kissed Gilbert with her mouth open, an act that may have scandalized but also sold tickets).
She refused to marry Gilbert, and Stiller, the only other man in her life, had decided to return to Sweden. Garbo threatened to join him, but the studio agreed to raise her salary to $2,000 a week if she would start work on "Love," the silent adaptation of "Anna Karenina."
The transformation was complete. Gone was the gangly girl. In her place was a thinned-down goddess who breathed the art of seduction into the then-wordless world of film. After only four films, there was a "Garboesque" mystique loose on the land. The world fell in love with her almost masculine voice, as it had with her mute sensuality, with her first movie with sound, 1930's "Anna Christie."
Another film, "Two-Faced Woman" had only a $300,000 budget, for the onset of World War II presented film executives with a vastly diminished overseas market.
It was a farce not even Garbo could pull off. It opened in December 1941 to unfavorable notices and protestations from churches and women's groups that the film defiled the institution of matrimony.
It was her final film. She was a multimillionaire, a woman who had appeared on the screen as a bejeweled queen yet who confined her own expenditures to expensive antiques and valuable property in New York and Los Angeles. She had always lived and dressed simply, and her wealth permitted her to eschew the film offers that followed her into retirement.
Contrary to public perception, she "vasn't alone" but with some of the world's most glamorous men - photographer Sir Cecil Beaton, whose marriage proposal she rejected, and Aristotle Onassis.
The aged Garbo, if seen at all, appeared in floppy hats and baggy clothes. The epitome of filmed grace swaggered like a man off-camera. The woman who in retirement refused all public appearances, even those for charity, did however give large sums to favored charitable institutions.
by CNB