‘I can’t remember being young, really young like other children. I always had my opinions, but never told my mind. No one ever seemed to think I was young!’
She was born Greta Lovisa Gustaffson1 at 7.30 p.m. on 8 September 1905, at the Gamla Sodra BB Maternity Hospital in Södermalm, on Stockholm’s south side, at that time little more than a slum. Records show that she was a healthy, seven-and-a-half-pound baby, though this did not prevent her parents from insisting she should be baptised into the Lutheran faith (then technically Sweden’s only legal religion). For the first ten years of her life, almost everyone addressed her as ‘Kata’, the way she mispronounced her name.
Greta’s father, Karl Alfred, was born in Frinnaryd, a small farming community in the south of the country, on 11 May 1871. The few surviving photographs of him reveal a strong resemblance to his daughter: tall – around 6´ 3˝ – but not heavily built, with fair hair, angular cheekbones, an aquiline nose, full, almost feminine lips, deep-set eyes, and unusually broad shoulders. Karl Alfred preferred frowning to smiling – another Garbo trait – and enjoyed singing, but only when no one was listening.
Her mother was Anna Lovisa Karlsson, a plump, rosy-cheeked peasant’s daughter of Lapp stock – she was born in Högsby, a village in Värmland, central Sweden, on 10 September 1872. Garbo is alleged to have once remarked how fortunate she had been not to have inherited any of her mother’s traits other than her long, thick eyelashes and drooping eyelids – exquisite characteristics which would set her apart from just about every other Hollywood star. Karl Alfred and Anna Lovisa met in Högsby, where he was working on a local farm. They married on 8 May 1898, just ten weeks before the birth of their only son, Sven Alfred. Their other daughter, Alva Maria, was born on 20 September 1903, almost two years to the day before her more celebrated sister.
Covering the large island formerly known as Ason, Södermalm was one of the most densely populated areas of Scandinavia, and one of the poorest – a catastrophe of dilapidated buildings and narrow backstreets festooned with rubbish, the type of scenario which would not have been amiss in a penurious Brecht and Weill drama.
Home for the Gustaffsons was a shabby, three-room apartment, without its own facilities, in a tawdry tenement building at Blekingegaten 32 – on the third or fourth floor, depending on which account one reads (the block was demolished in 1972). The apartment was connected to an equally unbecoming courtyard by a series of stone staircases with rickety handrails. All five members of the family slept in the same room – Greta on a truckle bed in the middle, where there were fewer draughts blowing through the broken window frame.
Karl Alfred, not a healthy man despite his size, supported his family as best he could by taking on ad-hoc jobs, mostly helping out the local butcher or abattoir, evidence of which is supported by surviving photographs. In one, he and another employee wear butcher’s aprons. One holds a slaughter-hammer, while there is an entrails bucket in the foreground. Behind them stands a cow, about to be led into the abattoir – hanging from the wall are meat carcasses.2 Anna worked most days as a cleaner, skivvying for houses in a more opulent part of town. Alva, when she was old enough, did most of the shopping and cooking, while Greta was assigned to menial duties: washing dishes, sweeping the stairs and cleaning the outside toilet. This left her with a lifelong resentment of housework.
Garbo rarely spoke of her childhood. Indeed, the subject was broached with such reticence that one might be excused for thinking it might never have occurred! ‘I was born. I grew up. I have lived like every other person,’ she once said, ‘That’s all there is to anyone’s life story, isn’t it?’3 She also recalled her ‘games of pretence’, and her belief that children should be given as much freedom as possible to think for themselves and develop their young minds, a process which she was convinced would shape their future lives:
When just a baby, I was always figuring, wondering what it was all about, just why we were living. Children should be allowed to think when they please, should not be molested! ‘Go and play now,’ their mothers and fathers tell them. They shouldn’t do that. Thinking means so much, even to small children … I didn’t play much. Except skating and skiing and throwing snowballs. I did most of my playing by thinking. I played a little with my brother and sister, pretending we were in shows. Like other children. But usually I did my own pretending. I was up and down. Happy one moment. The next moment, there was nothing left for me.4
Over the years, nothing would change. In 1931 she told a Swedish journalist friend, Lars Saxon (1900–50), ‘I found my greatest pleasure in my childhood dreams. Unfortunately, as a grown woman I am still the same, finding it hard to adjust to other people.’5 Saxon knew more about Garbo’s childhood than most, but never betrayed her confidence, and therefore always had her respect. Not so Screen Book’s Peter Joel, a Los Angeles-based Swedish reporter who in 1933 earned her enmity after visiting Stockholm, and Blekingegaten 32, where, with the help of a few of the locals, he pieced together a scenario involving the young Greta Gustaffson before fame had beckoned, when she and her family had struggled to survive:
In a small courtyard, in the rear of an apartment house, a small girl plays with her dolls. She talks to them, admonishing, cajoling, threatening. She walks back and forth. Her hands move. Her mood changes. Her voice is soft, then high-pitched then laughing. She lives through various emotions. Pretending. Always pretending. The courtyard is no different than hundreds of others in Stockholm. A patch of green grass, worn to the soil in some places. A place where the sunlight comes filtering down with its cheer and warmth. A sheltered little place, especially in the sweet coolness of a summer evening. But the girl who plays with the dolls adds distinction to the courtyard. The girl is Greta Gustafsson.6
Joel might have been describing the Garbo of the future, in a downbeat scene from Susan Lenox: Her Fall And Rise, or Anna Christie. It was certainly not a scenario that she wanted the world to know had happened for real. Joel interviewed the Gustaffsons’ next-door neighbour, Mrs Emanuel Lonn, who recalled an amiable but somewhat bossy child who knew back then that she was going somewhere in life:
She was always so happy and full of life. She spent many hours here in my apartment, and I liked her very much. Everybody liked her … She used to get all the children together out there [in the courtyard]. And how the children loved her! They came from all around to have Greta teach them how to play games. You could tell then that she was a born actress … She mentioned it to me many times. She was so fond of pretending in her games … You couldn’t help but love her. And she was so pretty!
Another neighbour and friend, Agnes Lind, ran the tobacconists store which Greta visited every day to pick up her father’s cigarettes and study the dozens of photographs lining the walls: all the famous Scandinavian theatrical stars of the day. Her favourites, Mrs Lind said, were the actor Kalle Pedersen, with whom she would one day become involved, and the operetta singer Naima Wifstrand.7
Some years later, Garbo opened up – but only briefly – to another friend of sorts, Swedish writer and journalist Sven Broman, whom she befriended in 1985, five years before her death. To Broman, she recalled her fondness for the Salvation Army, and for selling copies of Stridsropet (the Swedish equivalent of Britain’s War Cry) in the streets of Stockholm. In later years, Garbo would drop in frequently at the Salvation Army Mission near her New York apartment.
In August 1912, unusually a month shy of her seventh birthday, Greta was enrolled at the Katarina Elementary School and barely tolerated the establishment:
I hated school and I hated the restrictions it imposed on me. There were so many things to do away from school! History I liked, though the subject filled me with all manner of dreams. My fantasies led me to shortening the life of a cruel king and replacing him with a romantic knight, or reawakening an unhappy queen centuries after her death. But I was afraid of the map – geography, you call it? I could never understand how anyone could be interested in faraway places, or in trying to solve ridiculous problems – such as how many litres of water could pass through a tap so-and-so wide in one hour and fifteen minutes. But I had to go to school like the other children!8
In school photographs, Greta is by far the biggest girl in her class and, as if aware of this, stands slightly hunched forwards, with her long hair reaching her shoulders. Indeed, because of her size she was always given the job of cleaning the blackboard – a task which delighted her because, she said, nothing pleased her more than obliterating the ‘rubbish’ the teachers had been trying to drill into her. That said, she appears to have been an able, but at times lazy pupil. Her school records and reports, dating from this time until June 1919, have survived. Her teachers deemed her well above average in most subjects – awarding her straight As in behavioural application, discipline, concentration, religious studies, reading, writing and arithmetic. On the other hand she received Bs (the lowest grades) for art and gymnastics.
The dolls phase was short-lived as Greta took possession of her brother Sven’s collection of tin soldiers. She was also the local marbles champion. Very much the tomboy, when not ruling her ‘courtyard mob’ she roamed the streets of Södermalm with her gang, frequently getting up to no good. She began wearing Sven’s clothes – because the family were so poor, hand-me-downs were obligatory, and Greta was too big to wear her sister’s cast-offs. One nosey, complaining elderly local lady who took on the ‘Gustaffson boy’ was rewarded by regularly having a bucket of sand and water flung at her window. Yet in direct contrast to this bravado there were reports of incredible shyness – bolting under the table, or hiding behind the drapes whenever a stranger visited the Gustaffson apartment. Also, the young Greta appears to have been always hungry and not averse to dropping in at the local soup kitchen whenever her father took sick, which was often, and there was no money to put food on the table.
The acting bug, Garbo said, bit when she was around six or seven. In 1927, in a very rare interview she told Ruth Biery of Photoplay how she had stumbled upon two theatres in Stockholm, the Soder and the Mosebacke, opposite each other in the same street. Because she had no money to buy a ticket, she lingered around the stage door – occasionally, if no one was around she would sneak inside and watch from the wings, but always make herself scarce the moment the curtain came down:
I would smell the greasepaint. There is no smell in the world like the smell of a backyard of a theatre. No smell that will mean that much to me – ever! … When I was just a little thing I had some watercolours, just as other children have watercolours. Only I drew pictures on myself rather than on paper. I used to paint my lips, my cheeks, paint pictures on me. I thought that was the way actresses painted!9
Greta’s best friend at the time, who sometimes accompanied her on her theatrical adventures, was Elizabeth Malcolm, with whom she stayed in touch after relocating to Hollywood – until Malcolm ‘betrayed’ her by revealing details of her childhood, albeit innocuous ones, to Motion Picture. According to Malcolm, on warm days she and the budding actress would scramble on to the roof of the row of outside lavatories in the courtyard of Blekingegaten 32 and, mindless of the obvious stench – these were earth toilets, shovelled out and emptied once a week by local workmen – pretend they were relaxing in some exotic location:
‘We are on a sandy beach,’ Greta would say, ‘Can’t you see the waves breaking on the shore? How clear the sky is! And do you hear how sweetly the orchestra at the Casino is playing? Look at that girl in the funny green bathing suit! It’s fun to be here and look at the bathers, isn’t it?’ Greta’s vivid imagination had no difficulty in transferring the tin roof into a glistening beach, the backyard with its clothes lines and ash cans into a windswept ocean, the raspy gramophone music floating through some neighbour’s open window into some sweet melodies from a fashionable casino orchestra. The children shouting in the yard were, of course, the bathers.10
Greta was well-versed in the lives of all the big American movie stars – so far as she could glean from their frequently faked (by studio publicity departments) biographies in the movie magazines. Her first glimpse of these stars in the flesh occurred in 1913 when Karl Alfred took her to Stockholm’s Bromma Airport, where she saw Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks, arriving for a Scandinavian tour. Not much more than a decade later, she would have eclipsed them both.
In 1914, war broke out, with Sweden opting to remain officially neutral. No one knew for sure how long the conflict would last, if or when the government would change its mind. Rationing was imposed and the country – particularly the poorer classes – suffered the same as elsewhere. Karl Alfred had an allotment on the outskirts of the city, close to the shore of Lake Arsta, and once a week he packed a picnic basket and treated the family to an ‘outing’ to tend the tiny plot of land. While their parents worked, the children swam in the lake – Greta was a powerful swimmer, and swam regularly, often in the ocean, until she was almost eighty – picked whatever produce was ready to be eaten, sold it locally, and used the money to buy household essentials. With the outbreak of war, these outings stopped: Karl Alfred could no longer afford the fare for the trolley-bus.
Greta was a big girl (by the age of thirteen she would have reached her full height of 5´ 7˝) and was eating almost as much as the rest of her family put together. The now daily diet of potatoes and bread – butter was expensive, and consumed only on Sundays – never affected her. Throughout her life, even when wealthy, she never ate extravagantly. She was a robust and healthy child, while everyone about her suffered from a variety of ailments: Anna and Alva were prone to chest infections, while her father and Sven were frequently stricken with intestinal problems attributed to their high-starch diet.
For the Gustaffsons, these were anxious times, as Garbo explained to Lars Saxon:
My father would be sitting in a corner, scribbling figures on a newspaper. On the other side of the room, my mother would be repairing old clothes. We [children] would talk in low voices, or remain silent, filled with anxiety as if danger was in the air. Such evenings are unforgettable for a sensitive girl.11
Greta coped with her hunger pangs by making more visits to the soup kitchens, though her intentions were far from selfish. To ease the boredom of those standing in line she and her frangine, Elizabeth Malcolm, put on little ‘street-cabaret’ performances, doubling as anti-war protests, which they believed earned them the right to the gratis meal on offer – forward thinking for nine-year-olds, though it was Greta who scripted and choreographed each piece. Draped in a white bed sheet, she appeared as the Goddess of Peace – her friend, the handmaiden who crouched subserviently at her feet – and delivered pacifist speeches and poems, decrying the shedding of blood and the needless loss of life which was happening in every country in the world (she believed) but Sweden. And on the rare occasions when someone threw a few coppers at her feet, she collected these not for herself but to buy food for her elderly neighbours on Blekingegaten.
Sometimes, these propaganda trips took Greta as far as Fjallgratan, in Stockholm’s Italian quarter, where the mind boggles to think of a clumsy-looking but pretty girl stumbling among all manner of low life and poverty to remind them, in no uncertain terms, of the horrors of a war they were not interested in. She wagged school to embark on these escapades, and was so wrapped up in her ‘work’ that her father and brother had to go looking for her. Her parents never punished her for going walkabout, though she once received a spanking from her teacher for playing truant. One of her childhood friends, Kaj Gynt (of whom more later) held this incident responsible for her frequently crippling shyness later in life:
Before the whole class, the future queen of the screen had her small panties unbuttoned, was turned across the teacher’s knee, and while we all looked on was soundly spanked. The humiliation of that public chastisement wounded her beyond anything. From that day she shrank more and more into herself. It was the end of her childhood.12
To Ruth Biery, Garbo recalled a childhood incident when she had rescued her father. Karl Alfred had been out with friends, and when he failed to return home for his supper, Anna sent out a search party. Greta was apparently the only one who could handle him when inebriated:
I saw two men fighting. They were drunk. I can’t stand people who are drunk! One was big and the other little. The big man was hurting the little one. I went up and pulled on the big man’s sleeve. Asked him why he was doing it … The big man said to the little man, ‘You can go now. Here’s your little daughter!’ I ran away. I wasn’t his ‘little daughter’ anymore.13
Garbo almost certainly is being facetious here. Her father was one of the biggest men in the neighbourhood, but in her eyes, now that he had humiliated her by getting into a scrap – and coming off worst – she had demoted him to the ‘little man’ whom she would never see in the same light again. The episode also appears to have provided her with an almost pathological loathing of arguments and violence. ‘It’s just the same today,’ she told Ruth Biery, ‘If I see an accident or hear two people fighting, I am just sick all over. I never fight, and I won’t be doing any fighting in my pictures!’
In common with many of the poorer European communities, the one Garbo grew up in frequently staved off hunger pangs with an over-indulgence of tobacco and alcohol. She herself smoked from an early age, though she was never what would be called a drinker. Neither does her father appear to have been an alcoholic, except that his feeble constitution resulted in him getting drunk faster than most men. He could also be a nasty drunk, though Garbo always denied rumours that he had been physically violent towards his family.
Greta had always been closer to her father than her mother, but seeing this mighty rock being toppled during a scrap with a lesser mortal made her feel ashamed of him. She did not know at the time why he had been beaten by a weaker man – that he was in fact very sick. Therefore she began spending more time away from the apartment, and less time at school, now more than ever determined to become an actress. The major stumbling block towards achieving this goal, however, was that in Sweden not just anyone could step on to a stage and play Shakespeare or Ibsen. Unless one wished to augment one of the more disreputable players groups, one had to graduate via the Royal Dramatic Academy and, like L’Academie Française and other eminent European institutions, they were fussy about who they allowed through their hallowed portals. Besides which, Greta was too young to apply for a place there.
There was, however, another way: the movies. As was happening in Hollywood, each morning hundreds of hopefuls would gather in front of the studio gates in and around Stockholm in the hope of being ‘spotted’ by a casting director and hired as an extra. In February 1917, Greta and Elizabeth Malcolm set off for the Nordisk Studios, on the city’s Lidingö Island – not the easiest of locations to reach in winter, when there was twelve inches of snow on the ground.
Unless the studios specifically requested child actors by advertising in the movie magazines, the legal age requirement for extras in Sweden was eighteen. Therefore, wearing more make-up than might have been prudent, the two girls set off for Lidingö Island. Elizabeth Malcolm later recalled Greta’s logical way of thinking: if her (then) favourite movie star Mary Pickford could get away with playing child roles in her mid-twenties, then why could they not reverse the procedure? To get to the island, the friends took the trolley-bus to the toll-bridge, but could not go any further because they had no money to pay for the toll. No problem for Greta, who decided that they would walk across the frozen water to the island. They were halfway across, Malcolm said, when there was a sudden and violent snowstorm, forcing them to turn back and trudge home because the trolley-buses had stopped running.14
Vowing to return to the Nordisk Studios when the weather was more clement, Greta knuckled down to her studies. The war ended in 1918, and the Armistice coincided with Karl Alfred Gustaffson’s health taking a turn for the worse. Greta’s father had suffered from kidney stones for some time – unable to pay to see a specialist, he had taken a doctor’s advice to drink plenty of water and take long walks. Now, there were times when he was too ill to get out of bed. It is possible that he may have been a victim of the influenza pandemic which was wiping out millions worldwide, surviving the malady, but only just. Neither was Karl Alfred’s condition helped by the scandal which ‘rocked’ the Gustaffsons at this time.
Twenty-year-old Sven had fallen for a milkmaid named Elsa Hagerman while working at a local farm, and got her pregnant. One source claimed that, towards the end of her confinement, the family took Elsa in and offered her moral and financial support following the birth of her son, who was named Sven after his father. This seems unlikely: Garbo later claimed that the first time she had seen the boy, he had been ten years old.15
As there was no Public Assistance in Sweden in those days, it was a case of the rest of the family ‘mucking in’ to keep their heads above water. Anna was still cleaning the rich folks’ homes, while Alva and Sven took ad-hoc work wherever they could. Greta, who does not appear to have yet been told how seriously ill her father was, continued with her dreams of becoming an actress. In June 1919, she arrived home from school and announced that she would not be going back. Neither of her parents attempted to get her to change her mind and a few days later, so that she would not be there when the school inspector came around, she was sent to stay with Anna’s relatives in Högsby. Garbo would always regret leaving school early, and spend the rest of her life seeking out and socialising with people she considered more intelligent and intellectual than herself.
When Greta returned to Södermalm in January 1920, she took up where she had left off – helping her mother during the day, then doing the rounds of the theatres until the early hours. Two of her favourite stars were actor-singers Sigurd Wallén and Joseph Fischer, but it was at the Mosebacke, within comfortable walking distance of the South Side, that she met her biggest idol. Kalle Pedersen (1895–1958) was a handsome, 6´ 1˝ Danish ex-prizefighter. In 1915 he had been crowned Central European Amateur Middleweight Champion, but he had given up boxing to marry his childhood sweetheart, Cleo Willard, and to go on the stage, where he soon made a name for himself as a musical comedy star. In 1923, having changed his name to Carl Brisson, he triumphed on the London stage as Prince Danilo in The Merry Widow, and later carved a successful niche for himself in Hollywood. Whether he reciprocated Greta’s advances is not known. She may have lied to him about her age, and if she turned up at the theatre made up as in her later confirmation photo, Pedersen might not have felt it necessary to ask. The actor was appearing in the revue, The Count Of Soder, a variation of the one which he had been touring Scandinavia for several years – the theory being that, if the title was changed at every venue to incorporate the name of the city, the locals would be fooled into believing that they were about to see a new piece, written especially for them.
Greta was so infatuated with Pedersen that she collected every cutting and photograph she could find, and pinned these to the wall at Blekingegaten 32. And now she was no longer content just to hang around the stage door – she insisted the doorman let her in, claiming that she was a friend of the star. Flattered by the attention, Pedersen gave her a job as his prompter – each evening she sat in the audience and kick-started the applause when he walked on to the stage, then each time he began a song. According to Greta’s version of events, the ruse backfired one evening when a technician turned the spotlight on her and she fled from the theatre, horrified at having been made the centre of attention. Pedersen told a different story: Greta had begun taking him flowers, and one evening sneaked into his dressing room and drew a heart on the wall within which she scrawled, ‘Greta loves Kalle’. Subsequently, the next time they met he snarled, ‘Go home to your mother, little Kata!’
No sooner had Greta recovered from her ‘ordeal’ than she was given the devastating news that her father had but a few months to live. Her first concern was in getting him the medical care he needed – and that cost money. To raise this, she took a job as a tvalflicka (lather-girl) at Einer Wideback’s, the barber’s shop where she had often accompanied her father to read movie magazines. This was not as unusual an occupation for a woman as it seems. Most of the tvalflicka in Stockholm were female, as were many barbers. Neither were Greta’s duties restricted to lathering men’s faces. She was responsible for cleaning and laying out the razors and scissors, washing the towels, and cleaning the sinks. Besides Wideback’s, she worked at Ekengrens, whose owner recalled, ‘She was really one of the most beautiful creatures I have ever seen. She was more filled out in those days, almost buxom, and she simply radiated happiness. She was a sunbeam!’
Mrs Ekengren was of course speaking in hindsight, having seen her celebrated former employee on the screen, after enormous changes had been effected on her appearance. Photographs taken of Greta at the time reveal her to have been handsome, certainly, but not specifically beautiful. For Karl Alfred, however, it was too late. By late spring he was completely bedridden, at which point Greta gave up her jobs and hardly left his side. He died on 1 June 1920, of nephritis, aged just forty-eight.
Garbo later told a French friend, Roger Normand, who she met by way of Jean Cocteau, ‘It was a slip of a girl who travelled behind the hearse to the [Skogskyrogaarden] cemetery – but a mature woman who walked away from her father’s graveside.’16
The occasion also proved an exercise in ultimate self control, useful in her later life when, no matter what happened to her, no matter how dramatic or tragic, Garbo would never put on the slightest display of emotion while in public. Recalling the time when the bottom had dropped out of her world, she told Lars Saxon:
There was only sobbing and moaning to be heard in my home. My brother and sister would not even try to hide their grief. I frequently had to tell them to shut up. To my mind, a great tragedy should be born with silence. It seemed a disgrace to display grief in front of all the neighbours by constantly weeping. My sorrow was as profound as theirs – I cried myself to sleep for over a year. I also fought against the ridiculous urge to rush out in the middle of the night to look at his grave – to make sure that he hadn’t been buried alive.17
On 13 June, less than two weeks after losing her father, Greta was confirmed. For twelve weeks, she had attended classes given by Pastor Ahlfeld – reluctantly because she had been desperate to spend every precious moment with her dying father. The photographs taken during the ceremony belie her age. In them one sees the Greta who set out for Lidingö Island – fourteen, going on twenty-one, wearing too much make-up, trying to look sensual, her hair over-dressed – as one biographer observes, looking like the picture on a chocolate box. In one picture, wearing her white confirmation dress and holding a bunch of roses, she looks almost gargantuan as she sits on a wooden chair, which has been turned sideways. In the group picture, she towers above the other girls, the ribbons atop her head making her appear even taller.
In the weeks following her father’s death, Greta became increasingly paranoid about losing her mother and sister. Sven, she decided, had paved his own pathway to Calvary by getting his girlfriend pregnant, therefore it was up to her to look out for him from now on. Her possessiveness became such that, if she saw Anna talking to a neighbour in the street, she would distract her and drag her away. Alva, she declared, needed no friends while her ‘big sister’ was around. ‘I was the youngest, but they always treated me like I was the oldest,’ she remembered.18
This possessiveness resulted in a massive showdown – by Garbo standards – when she learned that a friend, Eva Blomgren, had been seeing Alva behind her back, as well as other friends of hers. Not only this, Eva had beaten her to meeting another of her idols, a popular actor-singer named Dalqvist. On 27 July, an irate Greta dashed off an imperious letter to the hapless Eva, part of which read:
One thing you must tell me. How did you meet Dalqvist? The ideas I have are such that I think it will be better for you if you do explain. One other thing I have to say. If you and I are to continue as friends, you must keep away from my girlfriends as I did from yours … I did not mind your going out with Alva, but I realised that you intended to do the same with all my acquaintances. Eva, I am arrogant and impatient by nature, and I don’t like girls who do what you have done. If you hadn’t written [to me first], I should never have made the first move toward reconciliation. And then you’re writing to Alva. Frankly, I think you’re making yourself ridiculous. If you hadn’t done that, perhaps my letter would have been more friendly … If this letter offends you, then you don’t need to write to me again. If it doesn’t, and you promise to behave as a friend, then I shall be glad to hear from you again.19
Like Marlene Dietrich (and speaking from experience as her confidante), later in life Garbo would go to inordinate lengths to ensure that her closest friends never got to know about each other, so paranoid was she that they might meet up or communicate and ‘swap notes’. There is also some evidence that the relationship between Greta and Eva may have progressed beyond the platonic, that this is why Greta had such a hold over her. In 2005, to honour Garbo’s centenary, some of her private letters and telegrams were made public, including those to lovers of both sexes. Though these did not include missives to Eva Blomgren, references were made by the author to a ‘lovers’ tiff’, detailed in letters which were believed to be in the possession of Garbo’s surviving family.
There is no record of Eva’s reply to Greta’s letter, but she must have apologised for her ‘indiscretion’ as Greta wrote to her again on 7 August, though she had by no means finished ticking her off:
Well, so you promise to mend your ways. Then all can be as before, provided I have no cause to complain again. I only do that when you behave like a child or make yourself ridiculous, that is, when I have reason to, not otherwise. But we can talk about that when we meet.20
Just days after admonishing Eva, Greta took her first steps towards venturing out into the real world, so to speak. Alva was now employed as a stenographer for an insurance company, and had friends who worked at the Paul Urbanus Bergstrom department store, more popularly known as PUB – the biggest in Sweden and the equivalent of today’s Harrods or Macy’s. This was situated in the Hotorget Placa, in the centre of Stockholm. The store had several vacancies, and citing Alva as referee, Greta applied for a job. On 26 July, she began her apprenticeship in the store’s packing department on a more than modest salary of 125 kroner a month – more money than she had ever seen in her life. She worked here until the end of November, when she was promoted to sales assistant in Ladies’ Coats & Hats. With the promotion came an increase in salary: three-quarters of her earnings were handed over to Anna, while the rest went on Greta’s twin passions – chocolate, and visiting the cinema and theatre.
Today, the PUB store remains a shrine for devotees who visit the city of her birth and take in one of the ‘Garbo’s Stockholm’ tours. In the display case in the third-floor millinery department are photographs of her taken at the time, along with copies of her employment record, and her signature at the bottom of her leaving document. Working for PUB did not diminish her aspirations of becoming an actress, though. ‘Can you imagine such a thing – me, a shopgirl?’ she wrote in her 7 August letter to Eva Blomgren, ‘But don’t worry. I haven’t given up on thoughts of the stage because of this. I’m just as keen as ever!’
Only days after receiving this, Eva was in hot water again. Since starting at PUB, Greta had insisted that her friend be waiting outside the store each evening at six, on the dot, to walk her home. When Eva complained – as much as she dared protest – Greta told her to get a job at the store, mindless of the fact that there were no vacancies. Next, the poor girl received a ticking off for going on holiday with her parents, without asking her permission:
I thought you were going to come back this month and begin at Bergstroms, so that we could go to work and come back together, to say nothing of the fun we would have there every day … I think you should come home soon, Eva. Why do you want to be in the country? Tell your mother you want to go home and work. Write when you’re coming and I’ll ring you up.21
Greta’s dream of stardom appeared to take a small step towards fruition when, in January 1921, she was invited to model for PUB’s spring catalogue. This was an important publication – not only was it handed to customers visiting the store, but 50,000 copies were dispatched to mail order clients all over Sweden. Greta modelled five hats, each of which was given a name: Vera, Margit, Vanja, Edit, and Olga. The prices ranged from 4.75 kroner (for the woman in the street) to 18 kroner (for the elegant society lady). She by far resembles the latter in the photographs, and, although still a teenager, looks every inch a woman in her early twenties.22
How much Greta was paid – if anything – for her first professional appearance in front of a camera is not known. The fact that she proved a natural, preening and posturing like the most sophisticated of movie stars, ensured her a more prominent position in PUB’s summer catalogue. Again she modelled hats, this time from the store’s more expensive (10–26 kroner) range, with the then high-class monikers Jane, Ethel, Helny, Solveig, and Clary.
‘I was really only interested in selling hats,’ she later enthused, when asked why she had never sought promotion, ‘I never seemed to have to think how to treat the individual whims of each customer. How I envied and admired the actresses among my customers!’23
It was almost certainly one of those customers who informed Greta that Mauritz Stiller, one of Sweden’s most eminent film directors, was currently on the lookout for fresh new talent. She had seemingly forgotten about making that return trip to the Nordisk Studios, and though at the time she regarded Stiller as no more important than any other, she was intent on meeting him. His custom-built Kissell Kar, painted buttercup yellow, was a familiar sight on the streets of Stockholm, so Greta had no difficulty in recognising it. Stiller was such a madcap driver that, as soon as other drivers saw him speeding towards them in his ‘Yellow Peril’ they would pull over until he had roared past. He was returning home from the studio one evening and had only just managed to pull up outside the gates to his house when Greta stepped out of the shadows and strode in front of the car. Politely, she requested an audition. Not so politely – still shaking after watching her almost get knocked over – Stiller suggested that she go home, and seek him out again once she was a little older and more experienced. She is said not to have taken the rebuff very well, though it was an ‘oversight’ on Stiller’s part which she was to forgive, for he would soon become the most important figure in her life.
By all accounts, Greta Gustaffson was a competent salesgirl, one who got along well with colleagues and customers alike. The latter, even the rude ones, were treated with the utmost reverence because there was always the chance that they were from the movie or theatre world. Often, Greta was asked to model a particular hat, and if it looked good on her, the client frequently purchased it without even trying it on.
An important client was John Wilhelm Brunius (1884–1937), the actor-director-scriptwriter who ran the Skandia Film Company. When Greta first saw him, Brunius was casting extras for his new production, En Lyckoriddare (Soldier Of Fortune), which tells the story of the seventeenth-century Swedish poet and adventurer, Lars Wivallius, portrayed by heart-throb actor Gösta Ekman. When Greta informed him that she could not discuss ‘business’ at work – it was strictly against the PUB rules to ‘moonlight’ in any way – Brunius asked her out. Greta, probably assuming that she might be expected to hop on to the casting couch, took along Alva for ‘protection’, while the director, his intentions never less than honourable, brought his actress wife, Pauline. Both Gustaffson girls were hired for the film: Alva is listed on the roster as ‘a servant girl’, while Greta appears as ‘a virgin’.
No print survives of En Lyckoriddare, and its successor, Karlekens ogon (Scarlet Angel), of which virtually nothing is known, appears to have suffered the same fate. Ironically, in 1934 when Brunius’s ‘discovery’ had become the world’s most feted female movie star, he made False Greta, featuring Karin Albihn as ‘Greta Gustafsson, Typist’, and Adolph Jahr as her businessman lover, a part clearly based on Max Gumpel, of whom more later.
News of Greta’s movie debut was kept from her employer until now, but when she learned that Paul U Bergstrom had commissioned a seven-minute short to advertise his store, she risked her job to ensure that he was made aware of her acting abilities. The director was Ragnar Lasse Ring (1882–1956), a former cavalry officer and novelist, famed throughout Sweden for his frequently offbeat promotional films.
The whole point of Herr Och Fru Stockholm (How Not To Wear Clothes) is confusing, particularly as it was devised to attract customers to the PUB store and not drive them away! Bergstrom’s budget permitted Ring to bring in one professional actress, Olga Andersson – one of Greta’s hats had been named in her honour – but Ring still needed someone to play the fashion mannequin, preferably a salesgirl with no acting experience so that she would look like ‘just another customer trying on clothes’. While Bergstrom was shortlisting employees, Greta found out where Ring lived and, as had happened with Mauritz Stiller, waylaid him outside his home during her lunch break. This time her cheek paid off and she was offered the part, though the other actor in the film, Ragnar Widestedt, tried to talk Ring out of hiring her. Later she recalled how Widestedt had walked up to the director and said, ‘You’re not intending to have that fat girl in the film, are you? She won’t fit on the screen!’ Some years later, when Greta had become Garbo, the two bumped into each other at a reception, and when Widestedt made as if to hug her she walked away, saying, ‘No, thank you. The last time we met you called me fat!’
How Not To Wear Clothes is a comic mishmash which makes little sense. In her 100-second PUB changing-room sequence, Greta has great fun sending herself up. She appears wearing high-button-up shoes, an oversized three-quarter-length coat with gingham cuffs and matching cap, and a baggy gingham skirt. Smiling, she poses with her back to the mirror, unbuttons the coat, and this materialises into a riding habit.24
The production was screened, between features, in cinemas all over Sweden. Though no critical review survives, Ragnar Lasse Ring was suitably impressed – and amorously interested – to use Greta for at least one more publicity short. Konsum Stockholm Promo (Our Daily Bread) advertised a local bakery, and offered her another comedy role. In the first scene she and three other well-dressed girls sit at a table in the roof garden of Stockholm’s Strand Hotel, gorging on cakes, with Greta stuffing so much food into her mouth that it drops back on to her plate. It was not a cinematic moment upon which she would reflect with pride, though it gave her the opportunity to meet Lars Hanson who within a few years would figure very prominently in her life. He plays the handsome young man who sits at a nearby table, blowing smoke down his nostrils, with his back to the scene and therefore oblivious to the gluttony taking place. The second segment of the film sees the same girls taking a picnic on an island. Greta and two of them frolic at the water’s edge, while the fourth girl prepares the food and summons them to eat. Again, she spits and splutters as she tries to cram a large biscuit into her mouth, before washing it down with fruit juice – leaving the spoon in the glass so that it gets stuck up her nose!25
Another important man entered Greta’s life at this time. Max Gumpel (1890–1965) was a former swimmer and waterpolo player who had won several medals representing Sweden in the 1908, 1912 and 1920 Summer Olympics. They first met on the set of How Not To Dress when his seven-year-old nephew, Erick Froander, had played Greta’s brother. A big, strapping man and now a wealthy industrialist, Gumpel met Garbo again at the PUB store when he dropped in to pick up a hat for a friend. The two got along, Greta spoke to him of her aspirations, and they began dating. Eventually, he invited her to his plush apartment on Drottning Street, where she experienced the finer aspects of society dining: fingerbowls and artichokes, neither of which she had seen before. If they did enjoy a physical relationship, Gumpel could have been prosecuted for having sex with a minor, though, like Kalle Pedersen, he may not have been aware of her age.26
Max Gumpel showed Greta a side of life alien to her until now. At home, ‘going to the bathroom’ meant descending several flights of steep steps, then a trudge across a dark, smelly courtyard to the row of toilets which stank to high heaven in summer, and whose walls were thick with ice in winter; where bathing meant climbing into the tin tub, usually after everyone else, which had to be filled from the copper in the corner then dragged outside and emptied down the grate. In contrast, Gumpel’s apartment had gas mantles, the bathroom had brass fittings and a tub so large that she could get lost in it. ‘He filled the tub up and had a kind of liquid soap that made bubbles on top of the water,’ Greta told a friend, ‘I’ve never experienced anything so nice!’
Gumpel also bought her her first jewellery, a diamond ring which she described as: ‘As beautiful as a diamond in the English royal crown.’ Whether she interpreted this as some sort of marriage proposal is not known. Their affair ended as quickly as it had begun – though they would remain friends for life – and he returned to his girlfriend, whom he married the following year. Greta kept the ring.27
During her relationship with Gumpel, Greta’s other friendships had been cast aside. Now, with no one to fuss over her and succumb to her every whim, she returned to former stooge Eva Blomgrem and on 15 August dashed off another pleading, self-absorbed missive: ‘They [at PUB] look at me with astonishment because I’m only fifteen. If you were to come, I’ll bet they’ll all ask you if it’s true. Eva, you and I must go out and have fun together, otherwise I’ll die!’28
Yet there was really only one thing on Greta’s mind, as she concluded, ‘Whenever I’m left to myself, I long so dreadfully for the theatre. Everything I want is there!’ Eva did not heed the call-to-arms, and two weeks later Greta left Stockholm for what may have been her first proper holiday, a week-long stay in Nykroppa, in Värmland County. The trip was financed by Max Gumpel, by way of a parting gift, along with a second diamond ring, though it is not known if he accompanied her there. This time, the tone of her letter to Eva, the friend she assumed she could pick up and discard at will like an item of clothing, was even more condescending:
Eva, child. To be honest, I haven’t thought of you – for the simple reason that I don’t think of anything. I’m quite satisfied to be here, and don’t long to be back … I wanted to get to a place where there weren’t so many people, so that I could rest. I have had my wish very well fulfilled in that most of the company I provide myself!
Was the melancholia and neurasthenia most associated with Garbo’s later years and her quest for solitude already starting to take over at just fifteen? Or was she merely wishing to grab attention by feigning profound happiness one moment, self-pity the next? Neither was she prepared to allow any of her ‘intimates’ fulfilment in their own lives until her personal goals had been achieved.
Inasmuch as she had admonished Eva for befriending her sister, so Eva was now instructed to ‘save the situation’ when she learned that her brother Sven, fresh out of military service, was courting a local girl from the bakery where he worked – not only this, but there were rumours of wedding bells. Sven belonged to her, not some floozie who would only lead him astray, as had happened with the mother of his son. In this instance ‘saving the situation’ meant that Eva would be expected to seduce Sven, and have sex with him – moreover, that his girlfriend would have to catch them having sex. Eva may have been sufficiently obsessed with Greta to do anything to please her, but drew the line at this.
Greta had stalked Kalle Pedersen, Mauritz Stiller, and Ragnar Lasse Ring.29 Now, the tables were turned on her when, in July 1922, a man followed her from Blekingegaten one evening while she was on her way home from work. He made as if to approach her when she paused to look in a bookshop window, and when she entered the store to evade him, followed her inside. Subsequently she fled the building and ran all the way home. She had recently been promoted to junior sales assistant in the dresses department and the next morning the same man walked in, flanked by two young women – actresses Gucken Cederborg and Tyra Ryman – and introduced himself as Erik Arthur Petschler (1881–1945). Petschler was a well-known (although not by Greta) director of slapstick comedies, popularly nicknamed ‘The Swedish Mack Sennett’, and he offered her a movie contract on the spot. They met the same evening, and Petschler informed her that he was producing a comedy, Luffar-Petter (Peter The Tramp), and would like her to make a screen-test. Later he claimed that he had also asked her to recite a piece of her choice on the sales floor – highly unlikely, given Paul U Bergstrom’s strict ruling against such things.30 The test took place later in the week, Greta passed, and the day after receiving this news – 22 July – she handed in her notice. Her handwritten reason for leaving, scribbled in PUB’s employment ledger, was, ‘Left at own request to make movies.’
But Greta could have been cutting off her nose to spite her face. Her salary at PUB had risen to 180 kroner a month, while Petschler paid her just 50 kroner for her five days’ work on the film, with no guarantee that her movie career would progress any further, certainly not with him.
Luffar-Petter is a delightful, low-budget piece of whimsy which almost certainly would have disappeared without trace, if not for it being the first film to showcase the budding talents of Sweden’s – and later Hollywood’s – most famous femme fatale. Also appearing in the production were Petschler himself in the title role, and Tyra Ryman and Gucken Cederborg, the actresses who had accompanied him to the PUB store.
Petschler had wanted to shoot the film in Stockholm itself, to cut down on costs and complete the project as quickly as possible. Bathing, however, was not permitted within the city boundaries, so the locations were filmed at Dalaro, an hour’s journey from the city by steamer. Here, Petschler said, while the other actors were reluctant to go near the water for fear of catching colds, Greta would not keep out of it. He recalled a sudden rainstorm, where everyone but she and Tyra Ryman dashed for cover: ‘As we others crouched unhappily under our chance shelter, Greta and Tyra in their bathing-dresses improvised a wild Indian dance in the pouring rain. It was a stimulating sight for the gods.’31
The most historically enduring section of this nonsensical production comes when Greta and her on-screen sisters are enrolled at a gymnastics academy – an opportunity for the trio to strut and stretch in black shorts and vests and, later in the film, skimpy (for the day) swimsuits. The original running time is listed as seventy-five minutes, though surviving prints run to around half this length. It does have its moments, though when watching it today, one wonders what Petschler actually saw in this tall and ungainly, rather plain-looking girl with her thick thighs and waist, unkempt hair and protruding front teeth. She was certainly not femme fatale material at this stage, though Petschler must have recognised some potential to suggest that she audition for the prestigious Royal Dramatic Academy:
She was a very determined girl and very willing and anxious to please. She was a bit shy and uneasy at the beginning, which is natural, but when we started shooting she really came to life. She had had no training … and her movements were quite awkward, but I think she showed signs of having a knack for acting. At least she had the desire, which is not the least important thing.32
The government-funded Kungliga Dramatiska Teater, to give it the official title, had been founded by King Gustavus III in 1787. Its future alumni would include Ingrid Bergman, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, Signe Hasso, and acclaimed film director Alf Sjöberg – all of whom, with the exception of Bergman, would be vastly overshadowed by Garbo. Petschler introduced Greta to the Academy’s elderly former director, Frans Enwall, retired through ill-health and working as a part-time private coach but still carrying some weight with the Academy. This enabled her name to be added to that year’s auditions list, which had just closed, with the auditions scheduled to begin taking place on 22 August. Enwall declared that she needed a major overhaul if she was expecting to make the grade as an actress: her stance was clumsy, her accent guttural and unrefined, she hardly ever brushed her hair, she dressed sloppily – and of course, there were those sticking-out teeth. He took Greta under his wing, and coached her until his failing health forced him to stop working altogether – he died the following year and his protégée was assigned to the tutelage of his drama teacher daughter Signe, who later observed:
The fact that her knowledge of [this] drama wasn’t wide didn’t matter. What really counts in an actress is contact with real, everyday life and an ability to feel and understand it. In that sense, Greta was probably extremely well-equipped. She was very mature for her age.33
Entrance for a maximum three-year scholarship with the Academy was by way of a gruelling audition comprising three five-minute scenes chosen by the student. Out of 300 applicants listed for 1922, only ten were accepted. The auditorium where these tests took place was vast, cold and draughty, and empty save for the long table accommodating the twenty stone-faced judges. Greta, wearing Max Gumpel’s diamond ring for luck, would have backed out at the last minute, had it not been for her brother Sven, who insisted on accompanying her. ‘All I could see was that black pit, that black open space,’ she recalled, ‘I said my piece, then I just ran off. I forgot to say goodbye.’34
The students were auditioned in alphabetical order, therefore Greta did not have to wait too long before her name was called. Signe Enwall had prepared selections from Vittorien Sardou’s Madame Sans-Géne, Selma Lagerlöf’s The Fledgling, and Ibsen’s Lady From The Sea. She finished the first piece to a glacial silence, and was about to continue when the usher was instructed to call for the next student. Convinced she had failed, such was Greta’s hurry to get away that she forgot her obligatory curtsey to the jury – in itself sufficient for them to fail her. Three days later, she received notification informing her otherwise, and that her first class would begin on 18 September – her seventeenth birthday. Her joy was ecstatic: ‘Oh God, I was happy! I almost died! Even now, I can hardly breathe when I remember. For now, pretty soon I knew I was to be a real actress!’
The rules of the Academy were rigid. First-year students were on probation and were expected to devote themselves wholeheartedly to their work, which comprised an eight-hour day broken into segments: drama and theatre history, deportment, vocal projection, elocution, make-up, gesture, dance, fencing, personality development, physical training and posture. Most evenings, they and the next-year students put on in-house productions, which left little time for socialising – which in any case was discouraged, particularly any forming of relationships with members of the opposite sex. Suffice to say, discreet liaisons among the students were commonplace and, as each student was paired up with another of the same sex so that they could bounce ideas off each other, homosexual relationships were inevitably formed. During their second year, students were officially added to the roster, paid a monthly stipend of around 150 kroner, and allowed to accept bit-parts in productions extant of the Academy. Some were loaned out to the film studios. By the time they had completed their third and final year, the ones who had made it thus far were permitted to call themselves legitimate thespians.
Greta, as a probationary student, received no fee. However, her tuition was free, so there was no strain on the Gustaffson family budget: Sven and Alma were bringing in decent wages, and Anna had money set aside from the excess board and lodgings which Greta had been handing over while working at PUB. During her few months at the Academy she preceded the later American exponents of Stanislavsky (Dean, Brando, Clift) in that she very quickly developed a tendency towards indolence, arrogance and rebelliousness, while never losing sight of her essential craft. Film critic Alexander Walker observed, ‘To read some of Stanislavsky’s manuals on the art of acting after seeing a Garbo film is to find the nature of the performance already analysed, which is not to suggest Garbo consciously employed The Method. It was hers by instinct: Academy training only sharpened it.’35
If anything, Greta’s off-the-wall behaviour while working, now as later, reflected the part she was rehearsing or playing, which was of course pure Method. If the part called for her to be miserable, she took it out on everyone else until she had left the platform or studio. When studying a comic role, she was giddy towards the point of distracting the whole class with her pranks and jokes. During her first year (billed as Greta Gustavson) she played a whore in a local repertory group’s production of Schnitzler’s Farewell Supper, a lady’s maid in J. M. Barrie’s The Admiral Crichton, and Hermione in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. Her favourite roles were the male parts in the Russian classics. ‘Though I do not like to see men dressed as women, there is something especially thrilling about seeing a woman dressed as a man,’ she said.36
Greta made few friends at the Academy – she was said to have been too moody for anyone to wish to spend more time with her than they had to. She rejected the advances of Holger Lowenadler, a student who claimed he had been enchanted not so much by her physical attributes as by her ‘pompous mannerisms and beauty of voice’. A young banker named Gösta Kyhlberg, dissatisfied with the way she dressed, eschewed the usual flowers and presented her with a lurid green dress to wear on their next date. Greta obliged, wore it for a publicity photograph, then dyed it black. As for the second date, this never happened. At this time, Greta was more interested in relationships with women: Mona Mårtenson (1902–56) was a pretty, dark-haired student three years her senior; and Vera Schmiterlow (1904–87) had already appeared in her first film, and a few years later became a sizeable star in Germany. She and Greta were hired for a photographic assignment advertising the latest Lancia car, talking turns to pose behind the wheel, though neither could drive yet. Vera recalled how, as neither of them had a bathroom at home, they would make weekly visits to Sturebadet, the public baths in Stockholm’s city centre, at the time something of a Mecca for lesbian and gay encounters, much like the later bath-houses in Budapest and Los Angeles.37
Greta’s most profound liaison at this time was with Mimi Pollak (1903–99), a plain-looking Jewish girl from Hammarom in Värmland. As had happened with Eva Blomgren, Greta was the dominant partner in their relationship. They remained close for sixty years, exchanging a long series of letters, telegrams and cards. Some of these, sent by Greta would be auctioned in 1993, while Mimi’s correspondence was made public to commemorate Garbo’s centenary in 2005. In most of these, the two women scarcely conceal the fact that they were once an item – while other Garbo letters were allegedly considered so revealing by her surviving relatives, desperate that her bisexuality should remain buried in the annals of time, that they have never been made public. The Academy class photograph, taken in October 1922, says it all: while the other students smile and face the camera, Greta looks only at Mimi, and they are holding hands. In years to come, this segment of the photograph would be clipped and appear in newspaper articles and magazines, with no indication that it had once formed part of a larger shot featuring ten other people.38
Greta’s nickname for Mimi was ‘Mimosa’, while Mimi called her ‘Gurra’, short for Gustav. ‘The letter from you has aroused a storming of longing within me,’ Greta responded to an early missive, when they had not seen each other for a while. Another billet-doux reads: ‘I keep thinking of you, Mimosa, and thinking that I will meet you any second out in the corridor!’ Later, when her fame had forced them to part, she agonised, ‘I dream of seeing you and discovering whether you still care as much about your old bachelor. I love you, little Mimosa!’ And when Mimi entered into a ‘lavender’ marriage, and wrote that this was going well and she was pregnant, the message was even more poignant, proof that they had enjoyed a love affair: ‘We cannot help our nature, as God created it. But I have always thought that you and I belonged together.’
Mimi Pollak may well have been the first to coin the phrase ‘Garbo-esque’, when later describing her lover. Greta, she recalled, always wore black for dramatic effect. Her favourite item of apparel was an ankle-length, man’s black velvet cloak whose purpose was two-fold: when visiting other theatrical productions using her gratis Academy pass, the cloak added to her air of sophistication and imperiousness – but also covered the threadbare clothes she had on underneath. And Greta, who during her first weeks at the Academy never stopped talking about her family and upbringing, very soon refused to acknowledge that she had a family. The reason for this, Mimi believed, was that she did not want the other students – many from well-to-do-backgrounds – to know how poor hers had once been. Indeed, to throw them off the scent, she made a point of always wearing Max Gumpel’s diamond ring.39
Greta was similarly embarrassed about her lack of education and the fact that she had left school early, as her voice coach, Karl Nygren, revealed:
In the classroom she was very quiet. Sometimes I wished she would show more initiative. I remember that now and again she seemed very depressed and troubled. She often blushed, especially when we were discussing things that she wasn’t acquainted with. I think that this was probably due to the fact that her formal education had been meagre, and she was acutely conscious of that … But when I would meet her by chance in the halls or the theatre she was not at all bashful.40
Mimi Pollak remembered Greta’s fanaticism for walking – not just to save on cab fares, but because of her intense shyness, terrified should the driver suddenly attempt to have a conversation with her. Often, she said, she was so paranoid about being out in the street that a friend had to be with her, whether they wanted to be with her or not. Yet she would have no problem stopping to chat with a beggar, and would always drop a few coins into his hat. On 22 December, Greta travelled with Mimi to Hammaro, where they spent the festive season with Mimi’s parents – Greta’s first Christmas away from home. The friends participated in a concert at Mimi’s former high school, with Greta led to believe this would be just another run-of-the-mill end-of-term show. In fact, it was the cultural event of the Hammaro winter season. Such was her stage fright that she had to be virtually carried on to the platform. What she sang or recited is not on record – only that she was paid 100 kroner for doing so. They returned to Stockholm on Boxing Day, where the premiere of Luffar-Petter took place at the Odeon Cinema. The only half-decent review came from Swing magazine, which observed by way of a backhanded compliment:
Though American bathing beauties may be lovelier and more subtle, our Swedish ones have more freshness and charm … Greta Gustafsson may become a Swedish movie star – but only because of her Anglo-Saxon appearance.41
Little did they know…
Notes
1 The family name. Some biographers insist this was spelt ‘Gustafson’. In early Swedish playbills it is frequently printed ‘Gustavson’. However, it is spelt ‘Gustaffson’ on Garbo’s birth certificate and employment contract for PUB (which she signed) and on her father’s death certificate – therefore it is spelt thus throughout this book.
2 This photograph of Karl Alfred Gustaffson appears in Alexander Walker, Garbo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1980).
3 ‘I was born…’: Garbo interview (unedited), Ruth Biery, 31 December 1927.
4 ‘When just a baby…’: Biery, ibid.
5 ‘I found my greatest…’: Garbo interview, Lars Saxon, March 1931.
6 ‘In a small courtyard…’: Peter Joel, ‘The First True Story Of Greta Garbo’s Childhood’, Screen Book, 1933.
7 John Bainbridge, Garbo (Doubleday: 1955).
8 ‘I hated school…’: Saxon, ibid.
9 ‘I would smell the greasepaint…’: Biery, ibid.
10 ‘We are on a sandy beach…’: Elizabeth Malcolm, Motion Picture, June 1932.
11 ‘My father would be sitting…’: Saxon, ibid.
12 ‘Before the whole class…’: Kaj Gynt, to Adela Rogers St Johns (unedited), Liberty, summer 1934.
13 ‘I saw two men fighting…’: Biery, ibid.
14 ‘Unless the studios…’: Elizabeth Malcolm, ibid.
15 Quoted in Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (Sidgwick & Jackson: 1995).
16 ‘It was a slip of a girl…’: Garbo to Roger Normand, 1970.
17 ‘There was only sobbing…’: Saxon, ibid.
18 ‘I was the youngest…’: Saxon, ibid.
19 ‘One thing you must tell me…’: Fritiof Billquist, Garbo (Putman: 1960).
20 ‘Well, so you promise…’: Billquist, ibid.
21 Tin Andersén Axell, Djavla Alskade Unge!, 2005.
22 Hatter For Dammer Och Flickor, PUB Catalogue, March 1921, p.109.
23 ‘I was really…’: Ake Sundborg, ‘That Gustafsson Girl’, Photoplay, April–May 1930.
24 Though Garbo appeared in the Brunius films before the PUB short, this was the first to be released.
25 Paris, ibid., p.28, footnote. There may have been a short, English title, From Top to Toe, made to celebrate PUB’s 40th anniversary. This had Greta ‘as one of the daughters in the story of a family whose house burned down and then who visit PUB to replace their lost clothing’.
26 As related to Vera Schmiterlow, quoted in Sven Broman, Garbo on Garbo (Bloomsbury: 1990).
27 ‘As beautiful as…’: Billquist, ibid.
28 ‘They look…’: Billquist, ibid.
29 Saxon, ibid.
30 Billquist, ibid.
31 ‘As we others…’: Billquist, ibid.
32 ‘She was a very…’: Bainbridge, ibid.
33 ‘The fact that her…’: Enwall, speaking with reference to Greta’s in-house interpretation of Madame Sans-Géne, quoted in Walker, ibid.
34 ‘All I could see was…’: Biery, ibid.
35 ‘To read some of…’: Walker, ibid.
36 ‘Though I do not…’: Normand, ibid.
37 Andersén Axell, ibid.
38 This photograph appears in Sven Broman & Frederick Sands, The Divine Garbo (Grosset & Dunlap: 1969).
39 Mimi Pollak, Swedish TV interview, 1993.
40 ‘In the classroom…’: Bainbridge, ibid.
41 ‘Though American bathing…’: Swing, December 1922.