Loving Garbo

Cecil had completed a typescript by the summer of 1967, and in January 1968 he signed a contract with Weidenfeld & Nicolson. In due course the proofs were corrected, and the first extracts leaked into the American press in November 1971. McCalls published an excerpt and Newsweek picked it up. Cecil tried to come to terms with what he had done in his diary:

This piece is written as catharsis. Perhaps if I get some of it down on paper I will feel freer to go about everyday existence without a care. As it is I am suffering those awful qualms that send one’s bowels panting for release & one’s stomach positively aches. Bindie Lambton,^fn1 the angel, has telephoned from London to send her love, to say she knows I must be suffering, but that I must not explain or complain, that things will get worse before they are better . . .

Now that this bombshell has exploded, all my comfortings about a seven day wonder – & what is an article in [a] newspaper anyway? seem quite ineffectual. I am disturbed – & deeply so. I know it could have been avoided – & I am to blame, but I decided to be brave & damn all – but now the crunch has come it is difficult to know what is best to clear the matter from my mind. If I continue with my garden sculpture the figure becomes the embodiment of my troubles – if I start a painting in the studio likewise that becomes part of the general malaise.

It is a feeling that used to dog me more often in early life. When I had published a photograph that I knew shouldn’t be published there was an outcry & God how I suffered. Lately perhaps because I have grown more careful these crises seem further apart – mercifully – for I believe in spite of experiences with the press, I am more sensitive & easily upset than ever before . . .

The awful feelings of guilt & anxiety continued to dog me. I had headaches & felt very rotten. I couldn’t sleep without waking to think of some further detail in my Diary as published in McCall’s that would offend Greta or a great number of friends. Then when I thought the excitement had died down I opened the Telegraph & saw a photograph of Greta & myself. Oh no! My stomach went to water. I rushed to the loo . . .

Still worrying – but a bit more cheerful. Eileen [Hose, his secretary from 1953 to 1980] telephoned early the next day. There was some very good news in the post. A formal letter offering me a knighthood. Oh! this was almost too much to take in – I felt this poor human brain was at bursting point. The[se] last days the cup has been overfilled. Of course this was very pleasant. Secretly I had hoped for such an honour for many years. Although knights come down low in the scale it would be a great feather in an industrialist’s cap to be thus rewarded. It is not as a result of having friends at court (Weidenfeld with Wilson) or being gradually upgraded in some huge organisation. (Fred [Ashton] at Cov. Garden Opera house). This was a question of ‘Alone I done it’. I was sad my mother had not known of it – or even my Aunts Cada & Jessie. But I felt suddenly a good deal more elderly & eminent. Still it is a very nice tribute – & I feel I have deserved it – not for my talent – but for character, tenacity, energy – & wide reaching efforts.

Yet now that it has happened (or will it be taken away from me because of the Garbo article?) it is strange how little the elevation occupies my thoughts. The day goes by just as usual – & just every now & then I think ‘How impressive’ then I think of other knights, Redgrave, Rattigan, Helpmann & then I’m not quite so impressed. But I am happy about it – & must try to enjoy it as the culmination of a long span of work & I must enjoy the fact that a lot of people are going to be very happy about it too.2

Cecil’s knighthood was announced on 1 January 1972, and in due course he went to Buckingham Palace to be dubbed by the Queen. Thereafter matters were less easy. From the moment he published his Garbo revelations he was never quite sure when some old friend might turn on him, or cut him dead. One of those who was displeased with him was his hostess on the yacht, Cecile de Rothschild. On a Connaissance des Arts tour of North Germany in May 1972 Garbo’s friend weighed into the attack: ‘Let me ask you how much you made out of Garbo on the McCall’s, Times, Oggi etc world circulation. I mean how much with Vogue photographs et tout ça during the past twenty years have you made?’ Cecil tried to give a straight reply. He reckoned it to be about £4,000. The Baronne rebuked him: ‘“Not bad is it? I mean I wouldn’t mind being given £4,000 to spend on the kitchen.” She laughed that nasal choking voice. “Not bad eh? For someone who didn’t need the publicity. Even Stokowski didn’t sell his story to the papers.”’^fn2 ³

The Happy Years was published in London in June, and at first Cecil refused to read the reviews. There was a considerable amount of attendant publicity. By and large, the reviewers got the point of what Cecil was trying to do, not so much to boast that he had had an affair with Garbo, but to give a portrait of her, using all his considerable skills as an observer. Of those reviews that mattered, the important ones were by Beverley Nichols and Cyril Connolly. Beverley Nichols wrote in the Spectator: ‘This is either a true story or it is nothing. I believe it to be true from the first line to the last . . . Beaton has given Garbo a new dimension and greatly increased her stature in the history of our times.’⁴ Cyril Connolly, a more distinguished critic, reviewed the book in the Sunday Times: ‘I do not think he has behaved any worse than a painter who exhibits an astonishingly life-like portrait, without permission, of an incommunicata sitter.’⁵

But there were hostile voices too: E. S. Turner, writing in the Listener: ‘To this reviewer the picture of Mr Beaton fondling the vertebrae of La Divina is as near-sacrilegious as that of Mr Eric Linklater bussing Botticelli’s Primavera when he found her in her wartime hiding-place.’fn3⁶ And old rivalries die hard, as was proved by Auberon Waugh, writing two reviews, the first for Harper’s & Queen: ‘For all that it has plainly been most carefully revised and edited, and for all the fact that it seems studied and over-cautious in places, this volume is warmly recommended for its account of some dismal years of British history, most engagingly told.’⁷ A year later, in the Chicago Tribune, Waugh was more savage with the American edition of the book:

The saddest and most bizarre part of the Beaton story comes in his description of a love affair which apparently blossomed between himself and Greta Garbo. As these two social and emotional waifs act out their chosen parts – he as the flamboyant but sensitive extrovert in the throes of an ideal passion, she as the startled fawn – we see the Beaton predicament in a hideous, cold light: first we see that beyond the affectation and the false values there is an emotional desert of sadness and loneliness; then we see that beyond the sadness and loneliness there is an object of the cruelest and most unutterable comedy.⁸

The latter review hurt Cecil when he read it during a particularly gruelling publicity tour in the spring of 1973. But before that the evernervous photographer had worse nightmares to endure. He began to see Garbo look-alikes everywhere, on aeroplanes and in the streets. This became an obsession. In his later diaries he devoted much space to an analysis of what he called ‘my crime’, and though he declared steadfastly that given the chance to reconsider publication, he would still have gone ahead, there were periods of deep remorse.

One of his worst moments came in Venice in the late summer of 1973. He was walking along with an American friend, the art-dealer Sam Green, and saw Valentina Schlee approaching, wearing dark glasses:

This was the first time I’d encountered her since the publication of the Diaries with so many allusions to the little man (her husband) in them. Would she slap my face? Would she give me the cut direct? We passed nearer and nearer. She eyed me coldly. As we passed one another I very exaggeratedly doffed my straw hat. ‘Oh my Darlink Cessaille. Oh my Heavens!’ We kissed, laughed, made banal observations. Was she having a holiday, I asked. ‘Are there any holidays any more?’ she asked.9

Sam Green commented: ‘Cecil really thought she was going to strike him.’¹⁰

Garbo never commented publicly, nor resorted to her lawyer, but Cecil lived his last years under a burden of guilt. He took some comfort from a description of Garbo sent to him by Patrick O’Higgins, almost an Upper East Side neighbour. He described Garbo shopping in a nearby Italian greengrocer in April 1973: ‘She had two bags in which she put the vegetables she was buying. She wore dark glasses but was full of smiles and everyone very solicitous of her though respectful of her wish for anonymity.’¹¹ This image, a little reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn in the opening scenes of the film, The Madwoman of Chaillot, was almost the last of the woman who had so long pre-occupied him. But there was to be one final meeting.

For some years Cecil had been suffering blinding headaches. In July 1974 he suffered a serious stroke, which removed the use of his right hand, impaired his memory for names and caused him to lose his former elegant poise. He fought to overcome his difficulties and gradually learned to write with his left hand, to draw and take photographs.

In October 1975, Garbo came to England with Sam Green, who was at this time her most faithful companion. Sam often travelled with Cecil too, and was determined to cheer him up by bringing Garbo to visit him. ‘I figured it would do him good,’ he said. ‘And she wouldn’t suffer from the experience either.’¹² The pair reached Salisbury Station, whereupon Garbo panicked and began to speculate on the danger that Cecil might have organised to have a photographer up a tree: ‘But he’ll use it in some way.’¹³ Sam announced that he was certainly going to Broadchalke. She had no choice but to come along.

Cecil was delighted to see her, and Garbo herself snuggled up to him, sitting on his knee, her grey hair tied in a boot-lace. But as Cecil made his slow progress to the dining-room, Garbo turned to his secretary, Eileen, and commented: ‘Well, I couldn’t have married him, could I? Him being like this!’¹⁴

The next day, as Garbo prepared to leave for London, Cecil made as if to hug her, saying: ‘Greta, the love of my life!’ Deeply embarrassed, Garbo spotted the visitors’ book. She shunned the embrace and broke the rule of a lifetime, signing her name in full. She made sure she never saw Cecil again.

^fn1Viscountess Lambton, niece of Freda Dudley Ward, married to the Conservative politician, Lord Lambton.

^fn3Eric Linklater (1899–1974), novelist and playwright. Worked in Directorate of Public Relations, War Office 1941–1945.