‘In Hollywood, where every tea table bristles with gossip-writers, what I might say might be misunderstood. So I am as silent as the grave about my private affairs. Rumours fly. I am mum. My private affairs are strictly private.’
After the hysterics of Gothenburg, Stockholm and New York, Garbo was intent on having a fuss-free welcome when she reached Hollywood on 26 March 1929. She cabled ahead to Mayer, informing him of the expected time of her arrival. He and Thalberg could not make it to the station but other studio executives were there, along with dozens of pressmen and several thousand fans, who cheered as the train pulled in. But Garbo was not on it – she had alighted at San Bernadino, where John Gilbert picked her up in his roadster.
Gilbert’s career was in decline, not helped by his womanising and heavy drinking. He needed a publicity boost to get him back on track and what better than the announcement that Garbo had finally agreed to become his wife. When he proposed again, the answer was the same as before, though Adela Rogers St Johns claimed that Gilbert had confided in her that Garbo had suggested they might live together again. ‘You are a very foolish boy, Yacky. You quarrel with me for nothing. I must do it my way but we need not part,’ she is supposed to have said, to which Gilbert responded, ‘Not this time, Greta. This time it’s going to be all or nothing.’187
Anticipating such a response, Gilbert had a ‘substitute’ waiting on the sidelines. He had begun dating actress and former vaudeville star Ina Claire (1892–1985) while Garbo had been on her way home. And Garbo, of course, knew he would never change, and that so long as they were together he would cheat and attract only the worst publicity. Now, he turned to Claire – the woman he would have dropped, had Garbo said yes. According to Gilbert’s daughter, Claire may not even have liked him when they first met – she is on record as dismissing his acting as ‘a kind of ham.’ Balancing the equation, so to speak, and unbeknownst to Gilbert, Claire was unofficially engaged to the scriptwriter Gene Marley – had Garbo accepted Gilbert’s marriage proposal, she would have wed Marley, who was now given his marching orders.188
On 15 April Garbo headed for Catalina Island to shoot the locations for her penultimate silent, The Single Standard, devised during her absence as a vehicle for the combined talents of Joan Crawford, Nils Asther and Johnny Mack Brown, who had recently triumphed in Our Dancing Daughters. During shooting, Joan made a play for both actors, who were less interested in her than in each other. Though she would work with Brown again, Crawford did not take kindly to being snubbed, and dropped out of filming. Subsequently, the two actors petitioned Irving Thalberg to offer the role to Garbo, who accepted it without hesitation, despite the imminent shooting schedule and her complaints that she was still feeling ‘travel weary’.
The film was heralded as Garbo’s first ‘100 per cent all-American’ role – obviously MGM had forgotten that she had played an American in Wild Orchids. Directing was John S. Robertson (1878–1964), a Canadian today best remembered for John Barrymore’s Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (1920). Garbo asked for him because he had directed Lars Hanson in his last big Hollywood picture, Captain Salvation. With William Daniels assigned to Norma Shearer’s new film, the cameraman was Oliver Marsh, who had photographed The Divine Woman. The Art Deco interiors were by Cedric Gibbons.
Arden Stuart is a modern San Francisco girl who believes in equality: if guys can fool around, so can she. Tommy Hewlett (Johnny Mack Brown) wants to marry her, but she finds him dull. More exciting is Anthony, her chauffeur, secretly the ace aviator son of a lord. (Why he is masquerading as such is not explained. The character is played by Fred Solm, a 6´ 3˝ German singer who showed great promise as a matinée idol, but disappeared with the advent of sound. In German and Scandinavian prints of the film his voice was added to the soundtrack to complement this scene, performing ‘Den Har Man Med Sej’.
Tonight Arden feels like doing seventy mph, so she takes Anthony for a spin in her convertible. They head for the dunes (where the moonlight catching Garbo’s hair makes her look lovelier than ever). At first they hug, then it is an all-out kiss – maybe the first time he has kissed a woman – a prelude to them making love on the beach.
Back at the house, Arden’s irate brother, Ding (Lane Chandler), confronts them. He gives Anthony a hard stare and tells him he is fired. That there is history between the two men is obvious: Anthony rewards Ding’s guilty glance with a satisfied smirk and then drives the car into a wall, killing himself – not what one would expect after a one-off tumble in the sand.
Several months elapse and Arden, still mourning Anthony, visits an art museum, where there is an exhibition by sailor-turned-artist and aspiring boxer Packy Cannon (Nils Asther). The attraction is instant. He invites her to his next (much speeded-up) fight, which he wins, then to his apartment, where she drifts around, caressing everything. Tomorrow he is taking his yacht (the All Alone!) to the South Seas, and a passionate kiss persuades her to accompany him. (None of Garbo’s co-stars kissed with the same rough, animal passion as Asther.)
The months fly by as we witness a truly beautiful couple in love: clad in white and lounging in each other’s arms on the deck, donning skimpy swimsuits (Asther’s leaving little to the imagination), diving off the yardarm and swimming underwater (both refusing stunt doubles), and Arden crawling across the deck on her hands and knees to nuzzle his thigh. Then Packy decides to end their romance and return to San Francisco, despite her pleas that they are both happy and single. ‘No, Arden, we must go on – alone! Our love has been so perfect, we must keep it so, always in memory,’ he tells her, before sailing off to China.
Three years pass, and Arden is now married to Tommy and has a small son. Packy returns and is horrified to see the child, which he thinks may be his. When he discovers that Arden wants to run off with Packy again, Tommy grabs a gun and confronts his rival on the All Alone. ‘Coffee and pistols for two?’ Packy jokes. Though by this point Tommy is willing to kill himself so that Arden might be ‘honourably free’, a mother’s love dictates the outcome of the situation (the intervention of the Hays Office, perhaps, as in Love) and she pronounces, ‘One man will always be first in my life, and he is my son!’
The film was edited in record time, and premiered on 27 July. Despite sterling box-office receipts, the reviews – some journalists still lamented the loss of the Garbo-Gilbert partnership – were not always complimentary. Pare Lorentz, who had gushed over her performance in A Woman of Affairs, wrote in Judge:
For the first time since she hit these shores, grim Greta Garbo has done a good piece of work … she actually walks, smiles, and acts. I have never been able to understand the universal palpitation that has followed her slow but stupid appearance on the great American screen … Nice legs and much hair might be ‘it’, but it doesn’t make an actress. Nevertheless the lady can, and does, act in her latest movie, and the fact that she is homely and awkward while so engaged only makes me like her more.189
Variety, whose critic gives every impression of having skipped the scenes on the yacht, observed:
What some girls do today, and a lot more would like to, Greta Garbo does in The Single Standard … But the thousands of typing girlies and purple-suited office boys will find this made to their order … as Arden Stuart, throwing off the cloak of conventionalism for free plunges claimed so common in spots here and on the Continent, the actress is most unfeline in her brazen directness. While censors probably expect to leap on this point, when the picture gets to them, they will find no show, except a veiled peep at Arden’s garters. The star keeps well-wrapped throughout.190
At the end of April, John Gilbert announced his engagement to Ina Claire. The wedding was set to take place in Las Vegas on 9 May, after which the couple would be sailing for Europe on the Ile de France. The scriptwriter Lenore Coffee later said that she had been standing outside Harry Edington’s office when a call had been put through from a distressed Garbo, on location at Catalina Island. According to Coffee, who claimed to have heard every word through the half-open door – which given Garbo’s quiet, sultry voice one finds hard to believe – Garbo ordered Edington to stop the wedding, only to be told by him that she was the only one capable of doing this. The story was utter nonsense: Garbo had turned down at least a dozen marriage proposals from this man – for Gilbert, if the penny had not dropped by now, it never would. Her initial comment to the journalist who brought her the news was a sarcastic, ‘Thank you. I hope Mr Gilbert will be very happy.’ Another source quotes her remark to a young Swedish admirer (almost certainly Nils Asther) when their cars passed each other in the street, ‘Gott, I wonder what I ever saw in him. Oh well, I guess he was pretty!’ As with all Gilbert’s relationships and marriages, this one would not last. The rot set in immediately when Ina Claire tore a strip off the editor of a newspaper, which ran the headline, ‘JOHN GILBERT WEDS ACTRESS’. This, she declared, should have read, ‘Ina Claire Weds Movie Star’. Days after the wedding, when asked how it felt to be married to a great star, Claire barked, ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Mr Gilbert?’191 192
While shooting the film, Garbo and Nils Asther were virtually inseparable, retreating to her dressing room or his between scenes and always locking the door. When not working, there were treks into the mountains, or picnics in the country. Like Garbo, Asther frequently felt like a fish out of water in this strange town both had reluctantly adopted as home. ‘I am rather like Greta in that I like to be alone,’ he recalled. ‘I love peace and quiet. Hollywood is really no place for me; I stagnate there. I only really feel awake when the air is fresh and crisp, as in my native Scandinavia. I believe it is because Garbo is from Sweden that she feels the same.’193
Asther too was having problems with MGM. Aware that he was bisexual, and unashamedly so – but probably not aware that he was involved with the married Johnny Mack Brown – the studio pressured him to marry. Garbo herself had given the game away while shooting one of their love scenes on Catalina – when Asther grabbed her a little too roughly before kissing her she remonstrated, albeit in jest, ‘Hey, stop that! I’m not one of your sailor friends!’
Asther’s first American film in 1927 had been Topsy & Eva, starring Vivian Duncan of the Duncan Sisters vaudeville act. Since then he had been using her as a lavender date; her sister, Rosetta, had tagged along with Asther and Brown to make up a foursome. However, the rumours stopped abruptly when the press began reporting on a romance with Garbo, sparked off by the kiss on the set of The Single Standard – an affair which, though short-lived and not as highly publicised, proved no less passionate than the one with John Gilbert. Neither was this the first time that Asther had fallen for her. He recalled meeting her in Stockholm, when she had been studying at the Academy and he had proposed back then:
I didn’t notice anything special about her except that she had a wonderful voice, dark, almost plaintive. She lowered her eyes and when she finally raised them I was thunderstruck. I stared, bewitched and bewildered … Without mercy, she turned me down. She said she definitely would not marry me or anyone else for that matter. She had decided to dedicate herself to art, to film and the theatre.194
Had Asther made such a statement in 1929, he might have been accused of proposing to Garbo as a means of covering his tracks, as would happen the following year when he finally married Vivian Duncan – a marriage which lasted just over a year but produced a daughter. Because his remarks came after his Hollywood career was over, when he had nothing to lose, one may only assume that his feelings for Garbo were genuine and he really did want to marry her. During a long weekend break from shooting, he persuaded her to accompany him on a trip to Lake Arrowhead, where he rented a small log cabin. This was certainly no love-nest, and from his point of view there was no pressure for sex: while Garbo slept downstairs on the floor, Asther occupied the loft. By day, they swam naked in the lake, and on an evening relaxed and fantasised about building, ‘A Swedish log-cabin [of our own] high up on a hill, where we could withdraw from the rush of the movie colony.’ It was here that Asther proposed again. The response was the same as before – she had no intention of marrying, ever. Some years later, another close friend, Sam Green, further explained Garbo’s special affinity with gay and bisexual men, even when she was an old lady: ‘I didn’t want to marry or sleep with her, but she was the ideal romantic companion,’ he recalled. ‘You just wanted to put your head on her lap, or bury your face between her breasts or have her kiss you. It didn’t matter how old she was.’195
During the autumn of 1932, Garbo – in what would be the only feature penned by herself, partly in English, partly in Swedish – offered a rare and lengthy philosophical insight into what she believed were the benefits and pitfalls not just of movie marriages, but of marriage in general, and into Hollywood’s fascination with delving into the private lives of its stars:
Why are people so interested in the matrimonial status of film stars? After all, the marriage is nobody’s business except the two people concerned. It is strictly their private affair. Moreover, it is damaging to have the intimate details of their domestic life broadcast far and wide. It is particularly unfair (if not actually unwise for an actor who plays great lover roles) to stress having a wife and children, no matter how he dotes on them in private … Personally I should hate to have my husband lose his identity. Instead, I should want to forget I had ever been Greta Garbo. With so many broken romances littered about, Hollywood is not keen to draw attention to the love affairs of its players … What chance has a marriage in these circumstances? Can you wonder that film stars hesitate to exchange single-blessedness for wedded bliss?
The particular problem that faces the film star, however, is this: Have I the particular kind of genius and temperament that makes of matrimony a holy and lasting bond? Am I a fit person to be anybody’s ‘lawful wedded wife’? Can I make a success of married life? With a male star, it is different. When he marries, convention expects that his wife shall subordinate her interests to his…
How embarrassing, on the other hand, is the situation of a non film acting husband married to a famous film star! He is bound to lose something of his own identity. Imagine a man being known as ‘Mr Garbo’ – just that and nothing more! In sections of society still impressed by the false glitter of the limelight, and where the spectacle of a woman who has made her own way in the world is still a matter for surprise and idle chatter, this is what would surely happen…
Only a fool or a hero could abide such an anomalous position. The only good reason for two people getting married is so that they can be together most of the time. That is impossible for me so long as I remain on the screen…
A marriage contract which has to make the best of whatever is left over after the film contract has been fulfilled seems a makeshift affair. A husband needs his wife’s spiritual support as well as her physical presence. Unless one marries a fellow film artist, there is little chance of this ideal union of sympathy and interests. A star’s career is a whole time job …196
The sweeping changes continued. After four years of living at the Miramar, Garbo was looking to put down roots – though the threat of returning to Sweden would always be there. At the Miramar, she was surrounded by too many memories, albeit good ones – Stiller’s visits, the intimate soirées with Swedish friends, of whom only Asther and Borg remained. Though they would remain friends, she had ended her relationship with Lilyan Tashman, having been made aware of her indiscretion when speaking of her to others.
Borg was next. Exactly what he had done is not known – probably nothing. Since returning from Europe, Garbo was at her most paranoid that even her closest friends had talked about her during her absence – even this man, who had been her rock since the first day she had faced an American movie camera. There were no arguments. Borg helped her pack her meagre belongings, and drove her to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she rented a small apartment. Then he more or less withdrew from her life, returning to work at the Swedish Consulate until his film career as a character actor took off. During World War II, Borg was very much in demand, playing both Nazi officers and Scandinavian resistance fighters. He also appeared in two films with Errol Flynn, who became a friend.
Garbo’s move to the Beverly Hills Hotel proved a big mistake. Though she never used any of its facilities, the elevator down to the crowded lobby and the seemingly never ending walk through here to her waiting car proved a daily trip to Calvary, with newspapermen and fans keeping a round-the-clock vigil in the hope of snaring her for the interview or autograph they knew she would never give. The crunch moment came when a fan – identified only as ‘a dentist’s daughter from Milwaukee’ – having seen her leave the elevator, rushed outside and hid behind a clump of bushes, leaping out in front of Garbo’s car and screaming, ‘I love you, Greta!’ as it sped off to avoid the pursuing pressmen, forcing the driver to slam on the brakes and almost catapulting her over the windscreen. Once she had recovered from the shock, Garbo called Harry Edington and asked him to find her somewhere less intrusive to live – a house, this time, where she would be protected from such madness.
Edington found her a rented, two-storey Spanish-style property at 1027 Chevy Chase Drive, off Benedict Canyon Drive. The house was far too big: eight rooms including three en-suite bedrooms, a living room, dining room, library, two kitchens, a utility room and servants’ quarters. What attracted Garbo to it were the pool and the landscaped garden, planted with lemon trees and surrounded by a ten-foot concrete wall and cypress hedge – essential to protect her from ‘peeping Toms’ during those naked early-morning dips. To fool the neighbours, when inspecting the place she donned the ‘Alice Smith’ disguise she had worn on the train to New York, and was accompanied by her ‘family’ – MGM hair-stylist Sidney Guilaroff and his two children. She signed the lease, then brought in workmen to seal off the rooms she would not be using, having their doors padlocked, just in case intruders broke in through the barred windows.
At the Miramar, Garbo had managed with just her ‘personal maid’, Borg. Now, she asked Edington to hire a live-in couple. Naturally, these would have to be Swedish, and she would personally conduct the interviews in this language. She plumped for the first couple who applied – unusually for one so paranoid about her privacy and security, she never checked their credentials. Gustaf Norin (1905–88) hailed from Malmo, the son of Josef, a former prosthetics laboratory technician with the SF. The whole family had emigrated to Hollywood during the early twenties, but whereas Josef found work with one of the studios, his son was not so lucky. Later, Gustaf became a leading exponent of prosthetic and cosmetic make-up, working in over 700 films – including, with his father, The Wizard of Oz (1939). But for now, he and his wife, Sigrid, would be responsible for protecting Greta Garbo from the interfering outside world. The Norins’ first job was moving in her personal effects – a single journey which involved transporting two trunks, three suitcases, boxes of books brought over from Sweden and not yet opened, and Mauritz Stiller’s chair, chest of drawers and portrait. A few weeks later, Garbo hired MGM’s costume designer Gilbert Adrian to ‘do the place up’ – this involved fitting one carpet, rearranging what little furniture she had, and hanging curtains in the two rooms she decided to use.
At home, Garbo ran a tight ship. MGM were now paying her $5,000 a week but she allowed the Norins a household budget of just $25 a week. Initially this panicked them, until they realised that most of the time there would be just the three of them. Garbo never threw parties like other Hollywood stars – her only guests during her first month here were Harry Edington, the Jannings, and Nils Asther, who often stayed the night. She had also acquired several pets: two stray cats, whom she named Big Pint and Half Pint, a parrot named Polly, and a chow called Fimsy. Sigrid Norin’s job description called for her to cook and clean, and answer the door, always to announce that the lady of the house was not home, even if she was. She was also responsible for replenishing Garbo’s wardrobe, an uncomplicated task because most of the time she wore men’s clothes and, apart from the size of her feet, she was exactly the same height and build as Gustaf. Her specific requirements were cotton shirts and neckties, Oxford twill jackets and trousers, waistcoats and gabardine raincoats. Gustaf himself purchased her favourite brown brogues, essential for those long, solitary treks in the country. ‘Just the thing for us bachelors,’ he recalled her telling him, adding how she had given him and his wife a little black book, with instructions to list every purchase they made – and to include the receipt – then hand this over for her to check the figures at the end of each week.197
Gustaf’s first daily duty was a walk to the local drugstore to buy the day’s papers and magazines: Garbo flicked through these, and if there was no mention of her in them they were returned for a refund. Foreign publications were sent by friends and contacts in Europe to Harry Edington’s office, so that the mailman would not know who resided at 1027 Chevy Chase Drive. Just as she hid whenever the man came to clean the windows or tend the pool, Garbo never answered the telephone. Whichever of the Norins took the call would announce: ‘The Norin residence. Who’s speaking?’ The caller would then have to give a special secret code before the receiver was passed to Garbo. Callers blocked from speaking to her at home were Mayer, Thalberg, any actor or actress who was not Swedish, and everyone from the press. Garbo always left the studio at 5.30 sharp, whether or not she had turned up late for work that day. Sigrid Norin prepared her bath as soon as she arrived home. Then, after dinner, usually taken in bed, she read or listened to the gramophone. Her favourite singer was Sophie Tucker and often she played the same record twenty times in succession. By ten, unless she had guests, she would be back in bed. The next morning she would rise early, around six, and spend an hour in the pool before breakfast. This was a hearty, Scandinavian affair: fruit juice, a grapefruit, creamed chipped beef, fried potatoes, an egg, coffee and coffee cake, all eaten on china given her by Emil Jannings.198
After breakfast, Garbo often went for a walk, or asked Gustaf Norin to drive her to the riding stables. She especially loved these activities if it was pouring with rain – the bad weather, complimented by the obligatory dark glasses and wide-brimmed hat, offered her extra protection from passers-by who otherwise might have recognised her. She so loved the rain that she often stood in her garden, fully-clothed, until she was soaking wet – her only way of keeping cool, she said, in the oppressive California heat. If there was a prolonged dry spell, she turned on the sprinklers and stood under them. Invariably she caught colds, which she dealt with not by seeing a doctor, but by dosing herself with nasal sprays and hot chocolate. If the cold was severe, she made an appointment for treatment at one of the local Turkish baths where, she said, she would have less chance of being pestered if everyone was wearing just towels.
Wearing her Alice Smith disguise, Garbo spent a lot of time at the cinema. She loved Gary Cooper and would always regret not having worked with him. Her favourite director was Ernst Lubitsch, who she would one day work with. She enjoyed witnessing audiences’ reactions to her own films, deriving immense pleasure from the fact that they had no idea that the woman they were applauding was sitting among them. Garbo and Nils Asther also frequented some of the Hollywood clubs. Their favourites were the Russian Eagle, with its Slav theme nights, and the Apex, an establishment popular with black musicians. With Asther, she was never afraid of being accosted by fans or pressmen; as had happened with Borg, one hard stare from the big Swede was sufficient to keep most ‘intruders’ at a safe distance.
During the late spring of 1929, Garbo slightly extended her tight-knit circle of friends. British actor John Loder (1898–1988) had served at Gallipoli, been captured by the Germans, and spent time in a war camp. Soon after meeting Garbo he appeared in Paramount’s first talkie, The Doctor’s Secret. Loder was married to the Austrian actress Sophie Kabel, the first of five wives. He said of Garbo at the time, ‘There is no doubt that at times she is a most unhappy person but she has the divine flame that carries her along and makes her the great actress that she is.’199 Belgian director Jacques Feyder (1885–1948) had established a reputation as one of French cinema’s most innovative directors – most famously for Thérèse Raquin (1928), the film which led Mayer to invite him to Hollywood. Married to the temperamental French actress Françoise Rosay (1891–1974), he quickly became disillusioned with the American studio system, publicly declaring his disapproval and staying for just four years before returning to France – though he did get to work with Garbo. Another important friend was F. W. Murnau (1888–1931), the eminent German director who gave the world its greatest early horror movie, Nosferatu (1922).
With these friends, Garbo and Nils Asther held regular soirées at Chevy Chase Drive, where she was able to let her hair down and be her true self – not some miserable, anti-social recluse but a woman who loved music, laughter, and intellectual conversation. As the only language that everyone could speak with any degree of fluency was German, this was the language used at Garbo’s gatherings – with her or Loder acting as interpreter if she invited anyone else to join their circle.
In June 1939, Irving Thalberg added Garbo’s name to the cast of Hollywood Revue of 1929, an all-talking, part-technicolor, plotless mishmash showcasing the cream of the MGM roster. The Revue included musical numbers by Joan Crawford and Marie Dressler, comedy sketches from Jack Benny and Laurel & Hardy, John Gilbert and Norma Shearer – twice the age of the star-crossed lovers – hamming it up in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and the whole cast splashing about the set in a Singin’ in the Rain finale. Garbo refused to appear, and Thalberg attempted to pull rank until Harry Edington pointed out that she was yet to sign a contract with MGM obliging her to make sound films.
Meanwhile, there was Garbo’s final silent film to contend with before the studio began negotiating this new contract. Thalberg suggested The Woman Accused (subsequently changed to The Kiss), which she approved after reading the script. The storyline, a murder mystery, followed more or less the same pattern as her previous films: a young woman, married to an older wealthy man, becomes involved with rival suitors, the twist in the tail being that she ends up in the dock charged with murder. Garbo wanted Nils Asther to co-star, but he had been assigned to another film, so she once again ended up with Conrad Nagel, no less wooden here than he was in The Mysterious Lady.
Playing her young admirer was Lew Ayres, a discovery of Jean Harlow’s future husband, Paul Bern. Known as ‘Little Father Confessor’ on account of his puny build and fondness for listening to other people’s problems – though not always helping them to resolve them, or indeed facing up to his own – German-born Bern (Paul Levy, 1889–1932) was Irving Thalberg’s right-hand man at MGM. Sophisticated, intellectual but unattractive, his all-powerful position with the studio enabled him to date some of the biggest names in Hollywood of both sexes, many of whom owed their stardom to him. A rare failure was 29-year-old Barbara Lamarr, six times married, who in 1926 died of a drug overdose, ‘Hollywoodised’ for the press as ‘death by over-rigorous dieting’. Bern had moulded and promoted Joan Crawford to take over where the luckless Lamarr had left off, and put her into The Taxi Dancer, since which time she had not looked back. Now, he was hoping to turn his latest protegé, Minnesota-born Lew Ayres (1908–96), a former banjo player with the Henry Halstead Orchestra, into the new John Gilbert. Garbo was shown his screen test, and liked what she saw. To direct, she asked for Jacques Feyder, whose eccentricity appealed to her offbeat nature: instead of calling ‘Cut!’ like other directors, Feyder always waved a coloured handkerchief.
Like his character in the film, Lew Ayres developed a crush on Garbo. For the duration of the shooting schedule, which began on 16 July 1929, he became part of the ‘gang’ at Chevy Chase Drive. Because he was the only member of her entourage who did not speak German, and none of them wished to speak English, she acted as interpreter. Soon after working with her he was offered a starring role in All Quiet on the Western Front, the film which made him a household name.
At the Musée des Arts, snooty society matrons gossip as Irene Guarry (Garbo) and her lawyer lover André Dubail (Conrad Nagel) discuss their relationship. (It’s back to the Garbo of glamorous gowns for this contemporary story set in Lyons and the opening title, ‘Irene, we can’t go on meeting like this,’ gave the world a new catchphrase, still used today.) She wants to end their affair, or run away with him, but he is too honourable. He would rather confess all to her elderly husband, Charles (Anders Randolf ), who she fusses over as she would a grandfather – frowning, scowling, shoulders hunched, depressed – but Irene will not hear of this.
Then comes the obligatory mirror scene, this time as seen by the mirror itself: Garbo in extreme close-up, repairing her make-up as if shooting a commercial, mentally conversing with the camera as if saying, ‘I’m not really miserable. I’m beautiful and having fun, and all this is just play acting!’
Charles has hired a private detective, who sees her with Pierre Lassalle (Lew Ayres), the son of Charles’ business partner: the boy has fallen for her, though she will not take his attentions seriously until it is too late.
Cut to a society dinner, where André turns up and announces he is leaving for Paris – he will not be back. No sooner has he gone than Pierre arrives. He and Irene dance, and the next day they play tennis at his father’s house. He has just turned eighteen and tells her, ‘You women just don’t know how love affects a man like me’ – only to have her chide, ‘You’re just a boy, Pierre!’ (Garbo and Ayres were able tennis players, but MGM would not permit them to play in the film and used stock footage of professionals. And was it purely by chance or a coy reference to Ayres’ alleged endowment that the music played over this scene was ‘The Donkey Serenade?’) Tomorrow, Pierre returns to college and he wants a photograph to show his friends. When he calls on her later, after ensuring her husband is not there, she reveals a whole stack of 14 x 11 inch glossies for such requests. Her attitude is maternal until Pierre asks for a kiss. She obliges but he wants more, and she is fighting him off when Charles comes home. Charles gives Pierre a thrashing and knocks Irene about while she clings to his thigh, begging him to stop. The door closes on the camera and a shot is fired, but we will have to wait until the denouement to find out what really happens.
When we next see Pierre, he is stumbling home bloodied and battered, and we discover that Charles is dead. Irene is arrested for murder. (A huge blooper follows. When she is arrested, Garbo’s formerly long hair is now short, but has grown again when she arrives at the court house, then it is back to short for the scene, subsequently cut, that takes place in her jail cell. These scenes were filmed several weeks after shooting wrapped.)
In the dock, wearing her widow’s weeds, Irene is resolutely imperious towards the gossips and the judge – who assume that because she married a much older man, she must be a strumpet. (This haughteur is perfectly captured by William Daniels, who filmed Garbo from ground level looking up.) The circumstances of the shooting make it clear that Irene has committed a crime of passion, but André (the only available defence lawyer in town, despite the fact that he is supposed to have left Lyons for good) argues that Charles’ death was suicide, as that same day he had revealed to a friend that he was close to bankruptcy. (During a flashback, we see Irene fire the gun from the far side of the room. In the real world, André’s defence would never have been possible but in the film the investigating officers never check the weapon for fingerprints!) Exonerated, Irene faces the two men in her life, but it is André who walks off with the prize when, having told him the truth, she adds, ‘I couldn’t let him kill that boy.’
The film opened in New York on 16 November. Screenland observed, ‘The Swedish charmer carries this load of a mediocre story on her splendid shoulders and makes The Kiss worth seeing … Next to Greta, the most interesting thing is the film debut of young Lew Ayres, a smouldering boy who is a real find.’ The reviewer for Motion Picture, who found Ayres’ ‘display of adolescent passion’ almost too embarrassing to watch, was eager to hear what Garbo would sound like, observing, ‘The last stand of the silent pictures, the last hope of those who like ’em quiet is Greta Garbo … In spite of unworthy stories, in spite of her stubborn silence in this talkie day, I would gladly pay for my own ticket to see a Garbo picture – which is the greatest compliment a reviewer can pay!’200
While shooting The Kiss, Garbo received a parcel from Hubert Voight: unable to find a Swedish adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, he himself had paid to have it translated into a rough draft. Garbo read this quickly and informed Thalberg that this was what she had in mind for her first talkie, despite the fact that it was not the kind of scenario he would have chosen: set on a waterfront, with Swedish characters that could almost have come out of a Joyless Street scenario.
On 27 August, instead of attending a meeting with Thalberg to discuss the new film, Garbo spent the entire afternoon with Clarence Sinclair Bull (1896–1979), the head of MGM’s stills department and believed by many to have been the greatest American portrait photographer of his generation. With his assistant continuously replenishing the gramophone with Sophie Tucker records, Bull took 200 photographs – between now and 1929, there would be 4,000 more. During this first session, not one word passed her lips until she was ready to leave. Bull recalled, ‘As she rose and moved to the door, obviously tired yet somehow showing she had enjoyed our efforts, she said, “I was quite nervous, Mr Bull. I’ll do better next time.” At the door, I reached for her hand. It was as moist as mine. “So will I, Miss Garbo.”’201 One of Bull’s most celebrated portraits of Garbo came about as the result of an experiment, in 1931. For ‘The Swedish Sphinx’ he superimposed one of his close-ups of her over a photograph of the Sphinx at Giza, from which he had airbrushed out the face. Friends advised Bull not to show Garbo this, certain that she would take offence. Amused and delighted, however, she gave permission for its worldwide distribution and the picture sold many thousands of copies.
At a meeting that Garbo failed to attend, Thalberg assigned her a personal press aide. Katherine Albert (1902–70) had worked as a film extra before becoming a staff reporter for Photoplay. Garbo refused to have anything to do with her. Thalberg next urged her, by way of Harry Edington, to grant an audience with Hedda Hopper or Louella Parsons. Absolutely no Hollywood star worthy of their salt would have wished to risk career suicide by refusing to be interviewed by one or other of those harpies. Garbo did now, and in so doing earned their enmity, but also the respect of her contemporaries, who only wished they might have the courage to take a leaf out of her book.
On 16 September, Garbo received a cable from Wilhelm Sorenson, the young Swede who had squired her around Stockholm. Perhaps not expecting him to take her up on the offer, she had told him to look her up, should he ever visit Hollywood. Indeed, when in subsequent correspondence he had confided that he was hoping for a career in the movies, she had tried to put him off, declaring even she was apprehensive about the future:
If you really wish to come you are heartily welcome, but I must warn you that you may never understand me completely – how I really am, what makes me so. If I am working on a movie when you are here, we would not see much of each other because then I must be alone … They are making sound movies here now and nobody knows what is to happen to me. Perhaps I will not stay here much longer. Already some of the top stars intend leaving Hollywood, and it is questionable for how long I will remain a film tramp.202
Sorenson arrived in San Pedro by freighter and Garbo insisted on driving there alone to meet him. Very much the narcissist, he presented her with a bust he had commissioned of himself: this enjoyed pride of place on her piano next to Stiller’s framed photograph, for years the only ‘ornaments’ she possessed. That night she did not sleep alone, though early next morning Sorenson moved into a nearby hotel, where he stayed until his return to Sweden.
For ‘Soren’, as she called him, Garbo almost came out of her shell. He visited her house every day, drove her to and from the studio and socialised with her most evenings. After his first week in Hollywood he even fell in with her ‘early to bed, early to rise’ routine. He and Nils Asther were the only ones permitted to use her pool – all three swam naked, with the children who lived next-door selling tickets to their friends, who would climb on to the roof to watch. During the daytime, when Garbo was at the studio and the Norins out shopping, those same children broke into her garden and collected her cigarette butts, which they sold to fans. Sorenson also accompanied Garbo and Asther on their outings to the Russian Eagle.
On 18 September, in the company of her Swedish beaus, Garbo celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday with lunch at the Ambassador Hotel. That same evening, they escorted her to a dinner party given in her honour by Pola Negri, at the home of the director Ludwig Berger. Who else was present is not on record, save that Garbo went to inordinate lengths to look good for her hostess. Instead of wearing her usual tweed trousers, pullover and brogues, she went to the couturier, and followed this up with trips to the beauty salon and hairdressers – probably Sidney Guilaroff, who gave her the style she sports in the out-of-continuity scenes towards the end of The Kiss. According to Sorenson, when someone at the party commented on how good she looked, Garbo responded drily, ‘You know, one often makes mistakes in life!’203
At some stage during Sorenson’s visit, Garbo took a week off and they headed for San Francisco in her car – she heavily disguised as usual – and checked into a hotel as brother and sister. They stayed there for several days, and spent much of their time strolling around the city’s Chinese quarter, where Garbo believed there would be less chance of her being recognised. She came unstuck when she tried to cash a cheque at a bank – the teller observed the signature and, believing this to be a hoax, asked for proof of identity. When Garbo showed him her passport, the man caused such a fuss that ‘Miss Sorenson’ made a hasty exit. As she had no intention of returning to Los Angeles until the end of the week, she and Sorenson headed for La Quinta, where she had stayed with Borg during her ‘indisposition’. Here, for three days she did nothing but sunbathe and read.204
Upon their return to Hollywood, Garbo and Sorenson attended a Sunday afternoon showing of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Love Parade, starring Maurice Chevalier. Sorenson recalled how, after leaving the cinema, she sat on the edge of the pavement for several minutes, telling him, ‘I must sit and think. I am so happy to know that pictures like that can be made.’205 Stopping off at a florist’s shop, she bought a bunch of red roses, and asked her escort to drive her to the director’s home. Here, a dinner party was about to begin. Flinging her arms around Lubitsch’s neck she exclaimed, ‘Ernst, I love you for this picture!’ Garbo, wearing her trademark tweeds, brogues and cloche hat, was hardly suitably attired for one of Lubitsch’s ‘black tie and evening dress’ events but he invited her in just the same and she soon coaxed him away from his other guests so that their conversation would remain private. Henceforth, she would drop in on Lubitsch when he was least expecting her but would never accept an official invitation to one of his parties.
It was at one of Ernst Lubitsch’s gatherings that Garbo met the scriptwriter Salka Viertel (1889–1978), arguably the best friend and closest confidante she ever had – one who would never stab her in the back, unlike some of the others. Born Salomea Steuerman into a wealthy Jewish family (her father was mayor) in Sambor, Galicia – then a part of Poland belonging to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today a part of western Ukraine – Salka was astute and intellectual, fluent in eight languages and had never wanted to be anything but an actress. She had played Mary Stuart and Medea on the stage in Teplitz in Southern Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), but on the outbreak of World War I gave up her career to volunteer as a nurse with her sister, Rose. Arriving in Vienna as a refugee fleeing from the Germans, she met the then-married writer and director Berthold Viertel (1885–1953), who subsequently divorced his wife to marry her in 1918. The couple would have three sons, of whom Peter (1920–2007) also achieved fame as a scriptwriter, besides becoming the second husband of British actress Deborah Kerr.
In 1922, the Viertels relocated to Berlin where, courtesy of Salka’s acclaimed pianist brother Edward, they were hired to work for the legendary Max Reinhardt. Six years later, the equally acclaimed F. W. Murnau summoned Berthold to Hollywood to script The Four Devils for Fox Pictures, a venture encouraged by the Feyders, who the Viertels already knew. Berthold subsequently directed Françoise Rosay in Fox’s last silent, The One Woman Idea. In Hollywood, the Viertels quickly integrated with the emigré intellectual clique – Murnau, the Feyders, Ernst Lubitsch (who they had known in Berlin), the Jannings, Conrad Veidt, Einstein, and eventually Garbo. Their base, where they held regular ‘anti-establishment salons’ similar to the ones they had hosted in Berlin, was an English-style house at 165 Mabery Road, in Santa Monica.
Garbo and Salka almost got off to a bad start when Salka confessed that she had seen only one of her films: Gösta Berlings Saga. Fortunately, she had said the right thing – according to Salka, Garbo responded that it was the only one of her films worth watching! The conversation then turned to their common interest – Berlin – though only minutes into this, Garbo suddenly excused herself and slipped away into the night, only to turn up at her house unannounced the next day. ‘Gaily, she announced she had come to continue the conversation of the last night, and stayed all afternoon,’ said Salka. ‘We went for a short walk on the beach and then sat in my room.’ The two women would remain close friends for life.206
Salka and Sorenson helped cushion the blow when Garbo began suffering panic attacks in the wake of John Gilbert’s infamous lampooning by fans and the press, which accompanied his transition to the talkies. His actual sound debut was in Redemption, based on Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse, a sombre tale of drinking, dissipation and suicide, almost a reflection of what the actor’s life had become. His marriage to Ina Claire had proved an abject failure. He was sleeping around indiscriminately with anyone from major stars to women he picked up in bars or off the street. Night after night he was drinking himself senseless, and always getting into trouble. Dissatisfied with the finished print of Redemption, MGM opted to delay its release until after Gilbert’s next film, His Glorious Night, a Ruritanian pot-boiler directed by Lionel Barrymore, released on 28 September. In one scene, Gilbert kisses love interest Catherine Dale Owen and three times in succession pronounces ‘I love you!’ in a tone that was not just high-pitched, but profoundly effeminate, bringing hoots of derision from audiences across America. In fact, Gilbert’s voice was nothing like this: it was widely rumoured that the sound had been sabotaged by a technician acting on Mayer’s orders – payback time for the actor hitting him at the aborted Garbo–Gilbert ‘wedding’.
This debacle took place nine days before Anna Christie went into production and Garbo was terrified that she would soon be heading in the same direction as Clara Bow and Nita Naldi, despite reassurances from friends and studio executives that she had absolutely nothing to worry about. Mordaunt Hall, who had briefly interviewed her, observed, ‘If any voice suits a personality, it is that of Miss Garbo. It is deep in tone, and her utterances are always distinct.’207 Yet even at the eleventh hour, Garbo held Mayer and Thalberg to ransom: unsure how she would sound pronouncing her lines in English, she declared that she would only make the film providing MGM allowed her to shoot an ‘export’ version in German, to be directed by Jacques Feyder and with Salka Viertel playing second female lead, Marthy Owens. German was still her second language after Swedish and the studio must have been aware of her reasons for wanting this – her first films with Stiller and Pabst had been smash hits in Germany, and if the Americans did not take to her in the English version of Anna Christie, she knew that the Germans would.
Thalberg paid Eugene O’Neill a whopping $570,000 for the screen rights to Anna Christie, and brought in Frances Marion to write the script. The familiar Garbo formula was amended slightly: replacing the older love rival was Anna’s cantankerous father, Kris Kristofferson. Clarence Brown directed, and there was never any question of Garbo not being photographed by William Daniels. The play had opened on Broadway in 1921, with Pauline Lord in the title role, and George F. Marion as Anna’s father – a role he had reprised for the 1923 film version. Then, the New York Times had enthused of Blanche Sweet’s Anna: ‘It would be difficult to imagine any actress doing better in this role.’ Little did they know!
The part of Garbo’s brash Irish love interest, Matt Burke, was given to Charles Bickford (1891–1967), himself a rough-and-ready character. At the age of nine he had been tried (and acquitted) for the attempted murder of a trolley-bus driver who had killed his dog. After years as a drifter, he ended up working in burlesque, then in supporting roles on Broadway. Anna Christie made him a star.
Unquestionably, the film’s coup de grâce was veteran Canadian actress, Marie Dressler (Leila Marie Koerber, 1868–1934), who plays Kristofferson’s dilapidated elderly lover, Marthy. Dressler was a tragi-comic genius who had worked in vaudeville then for many years on the legitimate stage, and who arrived in Hollywood way too late – not making her first film until the age of forty-two. With her ‘lived-in’ features and ‘fuller figure’, Dressler was unrivalled at playing loveable harridans, as she does here. Garbo adored her, not just as a person but for her supreme professionalism, and the feeling was reciprocated:
Greta works almost to the point of exhaustion, and her capacity for work is contagious. The fact is, an actor must put forth every last ounce of effort every minute of his working time, or his role will fall short miserably in comparison to Greta’s uniformly splendid work. There are several actors who, for this very reason, have risen to great heights when playing opposite Garbo, only to fall back to their natural levels when appearing in other casts.208
Within a year of finishing Anna Christie, Dressler would be hailed Hollywood’s number one box-office draw after Garbo, a position she retained until her death, winning an Oscar for Min & Bill (1931), in which she starred with Wallace Beery and scored further hits with him in Tugboat Annie and Dinner at Eight (both 1933). While working on the latter she was taken ill and Mayer had her examined by his personal physician. Incurable cancer was diagnosed, but the news was kept from her to keep her working. When Dressler finally found out, Mayer offered fake sympathy by imposing a three-hour working day so as not to tire her, and promised her a $100,000 bonus – so long as she promised to ‘hang on’ and complete the three films he had earmarked for her. She did, only to have Mayer go back on his word and pay her just $10,000 shortly before her death in July 1934. Because of this, Garbo is said to have loathed him more than any man on earth.
On 7 October, Clarence Brown assembled the entire cast of the film for a week’s rehearsals. Garbo had never done this before and he had a tough task persuading her to turn up: in the past, she had rehearsed each scene at home – a chair or some other inanimate object standing in for whoever would be in the scene with her – then improvised when it came to doing the scene in front of the camera, always getting it right. Then, she need not worry about dialogue – or rather, her co-stars fluffing their lines. Nine days later, Wilhelm Sorenson drove a very apprehensive Garbo – hiding on the floor of her car – to the studio for her voice-test, and to shoot Anna’s first scene in the picture, the one with Marie Dressler. Many years later, he recalled the event for a British newspaper:
Suddenly it occurred to me that she must have stage fright, though she didn’t betray herself with a word. I did not say anything either … Then I heard a voice from underneath the rug in the car. Instead of a rich, deep timbre I heard the moving plaint of a little girl. ‘Oh, Soren, I feel like an unborn child just now!’ … Just before noon, Garbo called me up to her dressing-room. ‘Well, it wasn’t really so bad,’ she said, ‘Though I became a little scared when I heard my own voice. I almost jumped out of my chair when I heard those lines played back to me … and you should have seen how the others reacted. Alma [her maid] makes a dramatic gesture towards her forehead and appeals to the Lord. Billy [her make-up man] gets hysterics and runs out. Some of those tough boys on the set start clearing their throats. [Clarence] Brown comes up, gives me a big kiss and says, ‘Wonderful, Greta!’209
The film opens with Kris and Marthy enjoying a spat. Anna, the twenty-year-old daughter he has not seen since she was a child, is on her way here from Minnesota, where he left her with relatives, and Marthy does not want to get in the way. While deciding what to do they head for the local bar to get plastered.
When Kris has gone home to sober up, Garbo makes her much-anticipated entrance, fifteen minutes into the film. World-weary, she drops her battered suitcase, slouches over the table and drawls the now infamous line, ‘Gimme a visky. Ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby!’ Henceforth her speech will be entirely in the vernacular – she utters phrases with which even some American audiences were unfamiliar, all in a thick Swedish accent that offers a delicious touch of tragi-comedy to whatever situation she is in. The two women strike up a conversation, without Marthy letting on who she is, though not before flinging a few home truths. ‘I got your number the minute you come into the room,’ Marthy admonishes, while the streetwise Anna responds, ‘I got yours, without no trouble. You’re me, forty years from now.’
Anna has been somewhat economical with the truth when writing to Kris. He thinks she is a nurse because she is ‘yust outa hospital for two weeks’. The reality is that she ran away from the farm after a cousin raped her, and ended up working as a prostitute. The hospital is, in fact, a prison hospital, where she has been since she was picked up by the vice squad: ‘The yudge gave all us girls thirty days … If my old man doesn’t help me, it’s men again. Men all the time. Oh, how I hate them, every mother’s son of them!’
At this point, Kris returns and the barman assures him that Marthy is still here, ‘and another tramp with her.’ While he wants to get to know his daughter, she sees living on a coal barge as an unwelcome but necessary temporary arrangement: ‘I could rest up for while until I felt able to get back on the yob again.’ (This gave British moviegoers a new vernacular phrase for sex.)
The next morning, father and daughter set sail. They run into a storm and are forced to rescue a group of shipwrecked sailors, one of whom is Irish loudmouth Matt Burke (what happens to the others once they are on board is not explained, nor why Kris’ skipper, Johnson, appears only in this scene). Burke tries to molest Anna, she knocks him out, and he concludes that for the first time in his life he is in the presence of a real lady.
They dock in New York and head for Coney Island. (Garbo having fun on the Big Dipper – an image few fans expected to see on the big screen!) Back on the barge, Anna kisses Burke, telling him this is her way of saying goodbye: she has never loved a man as much as him, which is why she cannot marry him. Then, when the two men in her life begin fighting, Anna goes into meltdown. Actress and character merge as Garbo delivers one of her personal philosophies: ‘You can go to blazes, both of you … Nobody owns me, see, excepting myself. I’ll do what I please. And no man, I don’t give a darn who it is, can tell me what to do … I am my own boss. Now, put that in your pipe and smoke it!’ Anna admits that she has been raped and for two years she has worked in the same kind of ‘house’ that Kris and Burke visit while on shore leave – she only ended up in such a mess because her father abandoned her, she says. She decides to return to her former life, while the two men aim to give her and each other some space by sailing for South Africa, though ironically they end up signing to serve on the same ship. In the end, all turns out reasonably well: Anna swears on Burke’s crucifix that she never loved any of the men she slept with – an oath which means nothing because she is Lutheran – and the men begrudgingly make up, leaving us with the impression that the wedding will take place when they come home.
Shooting wrapped on 18 November on what had been for Garbo her toughest schedule to date: five-day blocks comprising two days of rehearsals, two days shooting, and a day off while Clarence Brown filmed scenes not involving her. Unable to come up with a suitable tag-line for a movie about an ex-prostitute which would not offend moral and religious groups, Irving Thalberg plumped for the obvious: all over America, hoardings proclaimed in large letters, ‘GARBO TALKS!’
Thalberg also warned Harry Edington that his client had better turn up for the previews, if not the actual Hollywood premiere, fixed for 22 January 1930. This was an important milestone in MGM’s history and absolutely everyone involved with the production would be there – even the sound stage cleaners. Garbo ignored the command – though ‘Alice Smith’ is known to have sneaked in to watch the film when it went out on general release.
One of Garbo’s fiercest and most unrelenting critics who emerged at around this time was Mary Cass Canfield, the influential sister of publishing executive Augustus Canfield, president of Harper & Row. Her ‘Letter To Garbo’, later published in Theatre Arts, was very definitely not appreciated by its subject, and fortunately appeared too late to damage her reputation as a serious actress. While applauding Garbo’s grace, glamour and finesse, Canfield did not reckon much to her performance here:
Emotionally, Miss Garbo, you were walking in your sleep. Your Anna Christie was a wind-blown dryad, quite adequate in make-up and attitude, and never once touched the core of the character. Those of us who remember Miss Pauline Lord in the original theatre production will always celebrate her Anna: the infinite patience of her suffering, her foiled affection indicated with that reticent, glancing beauty … You gave no such wistful overtones, no sense of being a lost soul at bay. Your acting was in one competent dimension, without vistas or variety. Your performance was picturesque, but there was no wisdom in it and there were no tears.
Many would have argued that Garbo played a ‘lost soul at bay’ in virtually all of her films. The plot of Anna Christie could almost have been inconsequential. The costumes, accredited to Adrian, were, aside from the one Garbo wears during Anna’s trip to Coney Island, little better than could be purchased at the bargain counter in any department store. The acting, Garbo and Marie Dressler aside, is lamentable. George F. Marion looks and sounds silly much of the time – his pronouncing his daughter’s name at the end of almost every line, and his persistent reference to the sea as ‘that old devil’ soon becomes monotonous. One also finds it hard that even an allegedly hard-bitten prostitute such as Anna Christie would have looked twice at an ever-yelling oik like Matt Burke extant of her patch. It was of course the Garbo voice that everyone was interested in and whether this would disappoint, as had happened with the near-defunct Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, and of course John Gilbert. Richard Watts Jr observed in the New York Herald Tribune, ‘Her voice is revealed as a deep, husky, throaty contralto that possesses every bit of that poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world.’210 Mordaunt Hall, who had applauded the quality of Garbo’s voice long before the public heard it, wrote in the New York Times:
Whether she is dealing with straight English or the vernacular, she compels attention by her deep-toned enunciation and the facility with which she handles Anna’s slang … She is a real Anna, who at once enlists sympathy for her hard life. The words and expressions of this girl make one think of her in character, and cause one almost to forget that she is Miss Garbo … who proves here that she can handle a forceful role with little or no relief in its dull atmosphere just as well as she can play the part of the fashionably dressed, romantic wife of a moneyed lawyer.211
The review which amused Garbo the most came from Norbert Lusk of Picture Play because, having witnessed John Gilbert’s vocal downfall, Lusk assumed that studio wizardry was again involved, but this time to the star’s advantage:
The voice that shook the world! It’s Greta Garbo’s, of course, and for the life of me I can’t decide whether it’s baritone or bass … and there isn’t another like it. Disturbing, incongruous, its individuality is so pronounced that it would belong to no one less strongly individual than Garbo herself. Yet it doesn’t wholly belong to her, but seems a trick of the microphone in exaggerating what in real life is merely a low-keyed voice, slightly husky…
Of Garbo’s acting skills, however, Lusk was in no doubt:
The Swedish star attempts one of the most difficult roles in the contemporary theatre. The part is almost a monologue, a test for an actress experienced in speech, a brave feat for one who is not … a magnificent effort, a gallant fight against great odds. She emerges not quite victorious but crowned with laurels, nevertheless, for her courage.212
187 ‘You are a very foolish…’: St Johns, ibid.
188 Leatrice Gilbert Fountain & John R. Maxim, The Dark Star (St Martin’s Press: 1985).
189 ‘For the first time…’: Pare Lorenz, Judge, July 1929.
190 ‘What some girls…’: Variety, August 1929.
191 John Bainbridge, Garbo (Doubleday: 1955).
192 Lenore Coffee, Confessions of a Hollywood Screenwriter (Cassell: 1973).
193 ‘I am rather like…’: Picture Show, October 1935.
194 Karen Swenson, Greta Garbo: A Life Apart (Simon & Schuster: 1997).
195 ‘I didn’t want…’: Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (Sidgwick & Jackson: 1995).
196 ‘Why are people…’ Garbo, writing for Liberty, ibid.
197 ‘Just the thing…’: John Bainbridge, Garbo (Doubleday: 1955).
198 ‘Fruit juice…’: Alexander Walker, Garbo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1980).
199 ‘There is no doubt…’: Rilla Page Palmborg, The Private Life of Greta Garbo (Doubleday: 1931).
200 Press reviews, November 1929.
201 ‘As she rose…’: Clarence Sinclair Bull & Raymond Lee, Faces of Hollywood (A. S. Barnes: 1968).
202 ‘If you really…’: Sven Broman & Frederick Sands, The Divine Garbo (Grosset & Dunlap: 1969).
203 ‘You know…’: Bainbridge, ibid.
204 Fritiof Billquist, Garbo (Putman: 1960).
205 ‘I must sit…’: Bainbridge, ibid.
206 ‘Gaily…’: Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1969).
207 ‘If any voice…’: Mordaunt Hall, New York Times, December 1927.
208 ‘Greta works almost…’: Paul Hawkins, ‘A New Slant On Garbo’, Screenland, June 1931.
209 ‘Suddenly it…’: Anon, ‘The Day That Garbo Dreaded’, Sunday Express, June 1955.
210 ‘Her voice is…’: New York Herald Tribune, January 1930.
211 ‘Whether she is dealing…’: New York Times, January 1930.
212 ‘The voice that shook the world!’, Picture Play, February 1930.