Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 7, 1994 TAG: 9403070142
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Frank Rizzo The Hartford Courant
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Long
To Sam Green, Garbo was a friend. They walked together. They traveled together. They spent hours on the telephone.
Their friendship, which began in 1970 when he was 30 and she was 65, lasted 15 years - ending abruptly four years before her death in 1990 at age 84. But during much of that friendship, Green recorded their telephone conversations.
Those tapes - more than 100 hours of conversation - are being given to the Wesleyan Cinema Archives at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn. Intimate, sometimes profound and often mundane, the recorded glances of Garbo offer film historians and fans a rare peek into the personality of one of this century's most elusive stars.
The Garbo-Green tapes will be transcribed for future use by students and cinema scholars. A taped excerpt - the first time Garbo's voice has been publicly heard since 1941 - will also be made available later this year to the public, according to Jeanine Basinger, professor of film studies and curator and founder of the archives.
``We're thrilled to have these tapes,'' says Basinger. ``They're a valuable record of a leading figure of the cinema, and the only recording of her personal life.''
Though she never discussed Hollywood or the movies, the tapes, which are filled with the minutiae of everyday life, still offer the first truly personal look at the seemingly secretive woman who mesmerized fans, mystified Hollywood and confounded the press.
Listen to Garbo speak about aging:
``You know, it's so strange how life is. You go along and you accept whatever is there as fact. You put on your face and your makeup and everything and you get going. All of a sudden, one day, there's a hand that comes - in my imagination, every seven or 10 years or whatever - a hand that goes over the face and changes it a bit, puts more weakness in it. ... And it's equally revolting each time. The face - the hand has come to push it about.''
Or this exchange:
Garbo: I got a horrible article sent to me this morning.
Green: What kind of article?
Garbo: Well, my latest boyfriend is Van Johnson. ... You know who that is, don't you?
Green: I think it's the old actor who wears red socks.
Garbo: Old - don't say that. (Laughs). And don't call him an actor. Absolutely ghastly. (The press makes) you into such an idiot, you can't believe it. I wonder what prompts people to sit down and write those sort of things. ...
Green: Met him, yes. He lives down on First Avenue or something. Once in a while, twice a year, I meet him on the street. ...
(She and Green agree to get together later that day.)
Garbo: I'll bring Van Johnson, too. Can't live without Van Johnson.
Garbo's voice, says Green, was similar to the clear, low-register huskiness that she possessed in the movies nearly a half-century earlier. ``The accent was still there, and because she was Swedish she had more of a sing-songy, musical quality to her speech,'' Green says.
Above all, says Green, ``she was still a consummate actress.''
``She used her voice and all its varieties. She could in one sentence go from pathos to tragedy to high comedy to whatever she wanted to express. She had the right instrument and she was a virtuoso at playing it.''
Green says it was not until he was interviewed by Barry Paris for a Garbo biography, which is scheduled for publication in June by Knopf, that he remembered he had the telephone tapes - recorded from 1971 to 1981 - in his attic.
``This is the most important historical record of Garbo,'' says Paris. ``The tapes are both fascinating and boring, and I think the true Garbo lies in between. But at least we know something about her in her own voice that we didn't know before.''
Green says he informed Garbo of his telephone tapings, for business purposes, and that she made no protest. It was understood that if anyone exploited her friendship, they would be given the Swedish deep-freeze forever.
``Now that she's dead a good time, I don't think it's a particular invasion of her privacy,'' Green says from his East Side apartment. ``Nor did she say anything particularly private. Nor did she have the kind of life that was of interest to people to snoop into. I think her biggest secret was that she didn't have any secrets.''
[(Optional add end)]
Green says he has never received financial rewards for the tapes. When Paris, an acquaintance of Basinger, suggested that the tapes be given to Wesleyan, Green readily agreed. Green, 53, grew up surrounded by Wesleyan, because his father, Samuel Green, established and ran the university's art department.
``Garbo wasn't friends with anyone particularly,'' he says. ``The only person who could get her up and out was the British actor Brian Ahern (who died in 1986). She couldn't refuse him.''
The once-glamorous star dressed more for hausfrau comfort than for fashion, both at home and away. ``She wore what I call `brothel creepers,' suede desert boots that came up to the ankle with a flat heel.''
Instead of a purse, she would often carry a plastic shopping bag. Her long, gray hair would sometimes be tied with a shoelace. And always on hand was a crumpled Kleenex to shield her famous face from the omnipresent paparazzi.
Green was a frequent visitor to the seven-room, fifth-floor apartment where Garbo had lived alone since 1953.
``She had a very interesting art collection and an interesting eye,'' he says. ``She bought what I would call difficult paintings (such as those by Jawlensky and Robert Delaunay). She spent 10 years going to galleries and museums and haranguing dealers and waiting for just the right price. She had two corny Renoirs, but everything else showed a very educated taste, well defined, and leaning towards the difficult and abstract.''
Green was shocked to one day accidentally find that a woman of such taste would have a collection of troll dolls hidden under her couch.
In 1985, Garbo suddenly broke off her friendship with Green when a tabloid ran an article saying she was going to marry a man half her age, ``which was me, and which was ridiculous,'' Green says.
In retrospect, Green has his own theory of the breakup.
``I think she was using that as an excuse to break off, because she broke off with almost everyone about that time,'' he says. ``My feeling is that she had a great sense of personal dignity and she realized she was in failing health and she was not up to her standard of either good company or an attractive person to be with.''
Green says Garbo had it her way to the end. He says he remembers her as a vital, funny, lovely, intelligent woman who was idiosyncratic, but hardly mysterious, who sometimes, but not always, wanted to be alone.
by CNB