Robert Gottlieb - Garbo: Her Life, Her Films

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

for Irene Mayer Selznick

SHE WAS NOT AS POPULAR AS CHAPLIN and Pickford had been, and she was only in Hollywood for sixteen years (and twenty-four movies), yet the impact she had on the world was as great as theirs. Yes, her beauty was incomparable, but that wasnt it. The mystery of her self-imposed seclusion was irresistible to the industry and to the world, but that was almost a distraction. Certainly it wasnt her vehicles, so many of them clichd or worse, or the opulent productions in which M-G-M swathed her (though in her first sound film, Anna Christie, the highest-grossing film of 1930, shes a bedraggled whore on the dilapidated New York waterfront). Was she even an actress, or was she merely a glorious presence? (After Camille, with her universally acclaimed performance as The Lady of the CamelliasBernhardt and Duse territorythat ceased to be an issue.)

M-G-M presented her first as a vamp, luring men on with her vampish ways, but she hated that.

Then she suffered, and redeemed herself through true love. Then she became an icon and an Event. But none of that goes to explain why more than any other star she invaded the subconscious of the audience: Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941 Garbo is in peoples minds, hearts, and dreams. You realize it as you come upon countless references to her in novels and memoirs of the periodfrom For Whom the Bell Tolls to the letters of Marianne Moore. Other Hollywood stars venerated her, accepting that she was Above and Beyond, and were as eager to meet her or just get a glimpse of her as your ordinary fan. After a while she even lost her first nameno more Greta, just Garbo: Garbo Talks! Garbo Laughs!

Who else has had this effect? No other actor until Marilyn Monroe (whom she admired and with whom she would have liked to work), and perhaps Elvisbut he was for kids, and he lost his last name, not his first. Garbo wasnt for kids; she liked them, but she had never really been one and she never had one. (She never had a husband either.) She loved her work, but she couldnt bear the surround, and she never really understood what had happened to her. She was a phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, but also a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, nave, and always on her guard. She withdrew from the world when she was thirty-six, but the world wouldnt withdraw from her, even though she spent half a century or so hiding from it. Shes still hidingno one will ever know what was taking place behind those amazing eyes. Only the camera knew.

GRETA LOVISA GUSTAFSSON was born on September 18, 1905. She and her slightly older sister, Alva, to whom she was very close, and their somewhat older brother, Sven, lived with their parents in an unprepossessing building in Sdermalm, one of the poorest neighborhoods of Stockholm, where they occupied a cold-water flat variously described as one-room, two-room, three-room, and four-room, but since 32 Blekingegaten was torn down more than fifty years ago, well never be sure. (John Bainbridge, whose pioneering biography of Garbo appeared in 1955, seems to have gone to the building and met the tenants, also named Gustafsson though not related. He reports four rooms, although apparently when Greta was born, Svens bed had to be moved into the kitchen. Bainbridge also tells us that these Gustafssons had only recently learned of the Garbo connection and were not overwhelmed by the intelligence.)

There were no indoor toilets at 32 Blekingegatenwhen nature called, it was down four flights of stairs to the outdoor privies and then back up. (No elevators, needless to say.) So the Gustafssons were poor. But they were not impoverished: Karl Gustafsson, the father, was a hardworking though unskilled laborer who, even if he drank, was a responsible provider. He came from a long line of farmers in southern Sweden, but he and his wife-to-be, Anna Lovisa Karlsson, who came from a similar background, decided in their mid-twenties that their increasingly hardscrabble agrarian life, in a bleak economy, was just too punishing. One account puts it this way: In 1898 they moved to Stockholm in April, they married in May, and Anna delivered their first child, Sven, ten weeks later in July. Perhaps embarrassment over Annas premarital pregnancy had something to do with the move, but perhaps notillegitimate birth was not severely stigmatized in Sweden, then or now.

32 Blekingegaten, where Greta spent her childhood

Another account suggests that they may have met in Stockholm as early as 1896 and had settled down there together before Annas pregnancy. In any case, well before Greta was born theyKarl and Anna, eight-year-old Sven, and toddler Alvawere already in the Sdermalm apartment where Greta lived until she left Sweden and where her widowed mother went on living for many more years, refusing her movie-star daughters efforts to move her into more comfortable surroundings. Anna, a practical, sensible, undemonstrative woman, was also a stubborn onenot unlike her famous daughter. At the time Greta was born, the family finances were so low that Karls employer seems to have offered to adopt the new baby. Anna to Karl: If God gives you a child, he also gives you bread. And that was that.

Karl Gustafsson

When Greta was a little girl, Stockholm was a bustling city but hardly a vast metropolisthe population was under four hundred thousand, and many of its inhabitants, recently transplanted like the Gustafssons from the country, remained very much in touch with nature. The Gustafssons, for instance, raised vegetables and grew flowers in a garden plot just outside the citya long trolley ride and mile-long walk away. The whole family loved being there on weekends, and everyone pitched inGreta, were told, raised strawberries and, when the local kids hadnt stolen them, sold them herself in the city streets. Every extra krona helped, especially when Karls earning power decreased severely in light of his unrelentingly worsening health.

It was Karl whom Greta adored. Tall, handsome, with a refinement remarked on as out of the ordinary in an ordinary workingman, he was fun-loving and highly musicala singer. And also a reader. Tragically, he developed a grave kidney disease, and he died of it at the age of forty-eight, when Greta was fourteen. In the time leading up to his death, while Anna and the older children went out to work, it had been Gretas job to look after her fatherto tend to him at home, and to accompany him to charity hospitals and clinics for medical help and in hopes of a cure. She never forgot the humiliations they endured as poor people in search of live-or-die attention. Years later, she would tell her friend Lars Saxon how her familys endless weeping after Karls death angered her. To my mind a great tragedy should be borne silently. It seemed disgraceful to me to show it in front of all the neighbors by constant crying. My own sorrow was as deep as theirs, and for more than a year I cried myself to sleep every night. For a time after his death I was fighting an absurd urge to get up in the night and run to his grave to see that he had not been buried alive.