‘If you’re going to die on the screen, you’ve got to be strong and in good health.’
On 23 October 1934, Garbo signed a one-picture deal for MGM, her fee an unheard of $275,000. She had asked for David O. Selznick, married to Mayer’s daughter, Irene, to produce Anna Karenina, a remake of Love but adhering more faithfully to the Tolstoy novel. In anticipation, Salka Viertel was assigned to the script. Selznick was keen to work with Garbo but wanted nothing to do with this one, declaring costume dramas not just old hat, but unprofitable, too. He suggested that a better part might be that of Judith Traherne in Dark Victory – the stage play had opened in November 1934 with Tallulah Bankhead and Earl Larimore. Described by one critic as ‘Camille without all the coughing’, it was a far from happy tale – that of a flapper compelled to amend her scandalous lifestyle upon learning that she has cancer of the brain. Selznick commissioned playwright Philip Barry, not just to script Dark Victory but also a biopic of the controversial dancer Isadora Duncan, who had died tragically in 1927, when her trailing scarf got caught up in the wheel of her speeding car, strangling her. Garbo was interested only in Anna Karenina.
While shooting The Painted Veil, Garbo and Clarence Brown had settled their differences, but because the script was by Salka, who had scripted ‘dirty’ pictures like Queen Christina, he was compelled to have this one minutely scrutinised by the Breen Office, who gave it the thumbs down without even progressing beyond the title page. Joseph Breen’s first demand was that Anna should not be depicted as an adulteress, and when Brown argued that this was what the whole story was about, Breen capitulated – his condition being that this time Anna would be permitted to commit suicide as a way of atoning for her sins. Salka’s script was then passed to Clemence Dane to be ‘cleansed’. Dane (1888–1965) was a fuddy-duddy English crime novelist who was the first to admit that she was scarcely qualified for the subject she had been asked to write about – she had never been married or even had a love affair. As with Queen Christina, S. N. Behrman was hired to write the dialogue.
While everyone was squabbling over the script, Garbo spent a week with George Brent at La Quinta. Even at this late stage, David Selznick was hoping to get her to change her mind and ditch Anna Karenina in favour of Dark Victory. He drafted a long letter to Garbo and dispatched Salka to La Quinta to personally deliver it. Garbo, displeased that her sojourn with Brent had been so rudely interrupted, sent her friend away with a flea in her ear. The part of Judith Traherne eventually went to Bette Davis, with George Brent playing her love interest.
Garbo had decided that Fredric March (1897–1975) would be perfect for the role of Vronsky. She had known the Wisconsin-born actor for a while. A friend of John Gilbert, he and his domineering actress wife, Florence Eldridge, had often attended the weekend parties at Tower Grove Road. Initially, March turned the part down, not because he disliked her but because, like her other co-stars he was well aware that where fans and critics were concerned, in any Garbo film, it was only Garbo that anyone was interested in. A hefty fee persuaded him otherwise. And if March had feigned shock at seeing Garbo dive stark naked into Gilbert’s pool, he was not so fussy once shooting got under way. ‘We would bounce a medicine ball back and forth during breaks,’ he recalled. ‘One day she stripped to the waist to take the sun. Then she caught herself and asked if it embarrassed me. It did not.’ March enjoyed Garbo’s topless displays and developed a crush on her. When her gentle rebuffs fell on deaf ears, she took a more drastic measure, hoping that he would take the hint. ‘Before each love scene,’ Clarence Brown said, ‘Garbo put a small piece of garlic in her mouth. It worked.’282 283
For the part of the sadistic, heartless Karenin, David Selznick chose Basil Rathbone (1892–1967), the South African-born British actor who, since arriving in Hollywood, had achieved some degree of notoriety and adverse criticism brought about by actor-character confusion following his role as the abusive stepfather, Murdstone in David Copperfield (1935). Later, he would be feted as the definitive Sherlock Holmes. Though Garbo was courteous towards him on the odd occasion when they met away from the set, Rathbone was always of the opinion that she disliked him. Pre-Method aficionados might argue that she had a valid reason for this: Rathbone’s Karenin is so utterly loathsome, maybe Garbo felt that being too sociable towards him off-screen might affect her on-screen hatred of the husband who ultimately destroys her.284
Freddie Bartholomew, who plays her son, Sergei, was as far-removed from the earlier Philippe De Lacy as can be imagined. Born in Ireland, Bartholomew (1924–92) had been abandoned by his parents and raised by an aunt who brought him to Los Angeles, where David Selznick discovered him and, ‘on a whim’, cast him as the lead in David Copperfield, dropping American child star David Holt, whose accent would only have ruined the production. Bartholomew later triumphed in Little Lord Fauntleroy, earning so much money that his parents tried to reclaim him, only to lose most of it in the subsequent court battle. He always praised Garbo but she loathed him on account of his assuming, despite being advised against this, that his position of ‘Garbo’s son’ afforded him the right to enter her dressing room whenever he liked. Currently, the only people permitted through its hallowed portals were Borg and the eccentric English actress Constance Collier, to whom Garbo had taken a liking. Bartholomew went too far by asking Garbo for her autograph and, on the rare occasions when his name cropped up in conversation, she referred to him as ‘that little monster’.
The costumes for the film were provided by Adrian and if the tetchy couturier had been upset by Garbo’s comments about his hats for The Painted Veil, there were no hard feelings when the time came to fit her for her gowns. With Sigrun Solvasun dead and Geraldine Dvorak out of the picture for mocking her in Nothing Ever Happens, there was no stand-in for this one and Garbo ‘shocked’ Adrian by turning up at his workshop and taking him to dinner after the fittings. Shooting began on 25 March and despite the stuffy performance from Fredric March – so lacklustre, one wonders what Anna would have ever seen in him, let alone committed suicide because of him – Anna Karenina is far superior to Love. Indeed, the ‘love’ scenes with Bartholomew are highly poignant and convincing, all the more remarkable considering Garbo’s dislike of the boy.
The film opens at a rowdy military banquet in Moscow, where Vronsky drinks all the other officers – literally – under the table. After sobering up in the steam room, he and his friend Stiva (Reginald Owen) meet the train from St Petersburg. Among the passengers are his mother (May Robson) and Stiva’s sister, Anna Karenina (Garbo making a muted but spectacular entrance, wide-eyed and lost-looking, as she descends the steps and materialises through a great swirl of steam). The fleeting glances between Anna and Vronsky are a prelude of the drama to come.
Vronsky may be in love with Anna’s sister, Kitty (Maureen O’Sullivan), but it is Anna who partners him in the mazurka at a society ball, during which they fall in love. (The fact that Garbo danced this inordinately well, bearing in mind there was absolutely no rehearsal beforehand, is testimony to her exemplary acting skills.)
From this point on the story is the same as in Love, save that this Karenin is considerably more repugnant than his predecessor and Anna’s spoilt son (Freddie Bartholomew) anything but likeable. And this time the ending is true to Tolstoy’s story – Anna, ejected from her home, trudges down the staircase, each footstep more leaden than the last, towards the door, beyond which lies her fate. ‘I face the truth … that one day I shall find myself alone,’ are her words to Vronsky; he is now more preoccupied with enlisting to fight than being with her. ‘I’m sick and tired of love,’ he snarls. Even so, she feels she must see him before his regiment leaves, and when her message to him is returned unopened she heads for the railway station. A joyous crowd is seeing off the soldiers, leading her to hold back and let him go. And so she waits for the next train, standing on the edge of the platform, her face barely moving as she hesitates only briefly before flinging herself under its wheels – leaving us as beautifully and as mysteriously as she arrived. Anna Karenina won that year’s Best Foreign Film at the Venice Film Festival, while Garbo was cited for Best Actress Performance at the New York Critics Awards. Many tipped her for an Oscar but this never happened – indeed, surely she had no need of such ‘gongs’ to prove herself to the movie world. Surprisingly few critics drew comparisons between this Anna Karenina and the first. William Boehnel observed in the New York World-Telegram: ‘Though Anna Karenina can hardly be called one of the best films she has ever made, it is as exciting as any because of the marvellously restrained performance she gives in the title role.’ Photoplay called it ‘a weak and dull picture’, but added that Garbo’s genius raised it into the class of art. Richard Watts Jr enthused in the New York Herald Tribune: ‘It would be unfair to you if I did not confess that my verdict on this picture is based in great part on prejudice’, in other words, whether the production was good or bad was immaterial to a man in whose eyes Garbo could do no wrong. A glowing appraisal also came from Eileen Creelman, of the New York Sun:
Greta Garbo, after several years of miscasting, is back at last in her own particular province of glamour and heartbreak … Clarence Brown may be responsible for the Swedish star’s return to enchantment … After four years professionally torn apart, years in which Miss Garbo wandered through such films as the clammy Queen Christina, the director-star team is reunited.285
On 30 May 1935, Garbo signed a new contract with MGM, for two films at $250,000 each. The big difference between this and the contract for Queen Christina focused on time which might be ‘wasted’ on costume fittings and retakes: her ‘work period’ would commence with her first consultation with Adrian (she had decided against having another stand in) and if this extended beyond twelve weeks because of retakes, the studio would be obliged to pay her an additional weekly fee of $10,000. Then there was the question of her films. The next one, Garbo stipulated, would be Marie Walewska, the story of the love affair between Napoleon Bonaparte and his Polish mistress. This would be followed either by Camille, based on Alexandra Dumas’ novel of 1848, La Dame aux Camellias, or A Woman From Spain, believed to have been a variation on the Carmen theme. Both, she insisted, would be scripted by Salka Viertel.
The next evening, ‘Karin Lund’ left for New York, accompanied by ‘Carter Gibson’, described as George Brent’s stand-in, though almost certainly Brent himself, who later escorted her from the Central Station to the SS Kungsholm, which set sail at noon on 4 June. Nine days later, Garbo arrived in Stockholm, where she took up residence in a rented apartment at Klippsgatan 6. This led to rumours that she might not be returning to Hollywood, especially when she announced that she had her eye on a rural property, where she said she would ‘settle down and grow potatoes’, while planning a new career as head of her own production company, which would see her making only the films she wanted to make.
As with her previous visit to Sweden, no one really knows what she was doing most of the time, or whom she was with. She does not appear to have spent much time with her family, and there were no reported reunions with Mimi Pollak and Max Gumpel, though she did visit an ailing Selma Lagerlöf. There were problems with an MGM ‘spy’ named Prinzmetal, of whom little is known save that the studio hired him to keep an eye on her. Unable to shake him off, Garbo sent him on a wild goose-chase by pretending to be having an affair with Noël Coward, who had recently arrived in town. With Coward and his current boyfriend, introduced as his secretary, Garbo attended an all-night party at the home of actor Gösta Ekman, where they were heard addressing each other in English as ‘my little bride’ and ‘my little bridegroom’, for the benefit of reporters who gatecrashed the event. But when Coward suggested throwing a similar bash for her thirtieth birthday on 18 September, Garbo was not interested and stayed home alone.
No sooner had Noël Coward left Stockholm than the proverbial bad penny, Mercedes de Acosta, turned up. Earlier in the year, Abram Poole had divorced her. The news was a surprise even to some of her friends, who had no idea that she was married in the first place. According to Mercedes, Garbo felt so guilty about leaving Hollywood without saying goodbye that she had written her a letter inviting her to dinner at the Grand Hotel and giving her eight days’ notice to get to Sweden. Mercedes had subsequently boarded the SS Europa, arrived in Bremen with just twenty-four hours to spare, caught a flight to Malmo, then travelled to Stockholm via train and taxi, arriving at the hotel only minutes ahead of her ‘date’ for the evening. It was of course just another of her wild stories. What had actually happened was that Mercedes had followed Garbo across the Atlantic, then waited until the coast was clear – on Coward’s departure – before making her move. That same evening, they attended a performance of White Horse Inn and the next day left for Horke Wachtmeister’s castle at Tistad. Horke, who could not stand Mercedes – in their letters, she and Garbo scathingly refer to her as ‘Swartzweise’ (Black-White) on account of her eccentric dress sense – put up with her for a week before asking Garbo to take her back to Stockholm, where there was yet another parting of the ways.
At the end of October, Garbo was reported to be seriously ill, suffering from exhaustion and flu-like symptoms. This news was relayed to Mayer by way of MGM’s Paris representative, Laudy Lawrence, with whom Garbo had been corresponding in the hope of getting him to persuade Mayer to offer her brother Sven a Hollywood contract, in spite of him having been earlier denounced as a ‘punk actor’ by Photoplay, a publication which carried some sway in the movie industry. Now Lawrence flew to Stockholm, under the pretence that Mayer had asked him to test Sven, the actual reason to find out if Garbo was genuinely ill or just ‘swinging the lead’. On 3 December, he reported back to the studio:
Sven is a nice boy, but that is all … his health is very bad. Incidentally, the entire family is in bad health, including Garbo … I believe her younger sister died from TB long ago, and Sven is in bed a whole lot more than out of it. Garbo is rather seriously ill.286
Garbo confirmed her malady in a letter to Salka Viertel, who had already begun working on the first draft of Marie Walewska:
I have been in bed for years, I feel. So, you have had troubles. I have no lovers, but I have troubles just the same. Mercedes has been here … I took her to Tistad as I didn’t know what else to do. She is more quiet than before but otherwise the same. I was a wreck after she went and I told her she must not write me. We had a sad farewell.287
On 8 December, she opened up a little more in a letter to Mayer: she told him that she had been bedridden much of the time since September – not entirely true – and there was a possibility she might need an operation. She further thanked Mayer for considering her brother for a Hollywood contract and informed him that, though she still wanted to make Marie Walewska, she wanted her next project to be Camille. The press on both sides of the Atlantic did not know what to make of the situation. If Garbo was suffering from the flu, or even something as serious as tuberculosis, why should this necessitate an operation? Again, there were rumours of an abortion. Later it emerged that she had undergone minor surgery to correct a gynaecological problem, almost certainly to alleviate painful periods.
Early in the New Year, Garbo cabled Mayer and asked for an extra month’s vacation to recuperate. The request was granted in a cable of 10 January, which failed to mention the shock event of the previous day. John Gilbert had died of a heart attack, aged thirty-six. In fact, she already knew. Besides a call from Borg, she had received the news that same evening while attending a performance of Schiller’s play, Maria Stuart. One report claimed her to have responded, ‘What’s that to me?’, which one very much doubts. Another suggests that she managed to stay until the end of the programme, after which she went to pieces and took to her bed for several days, which given her fondness for the man would be more likely.
Of late, Gilbert had been seeing a lot of Marlene Dietrich, who wanted him in her new picture, Desire. Directed by Frank Borsage, this saw her cast as upper-crust jewel thief Madeleine de Beaupré, a role which had at some point been earmarked for Garbo. Borzage had protested, declaring Gilbert unemployable but Marlene had taken him under her wing and promised to have him in good shape by the time shooting began in February. An expert with lighting, she had given precise instructions to cameraman Charles Lang about how to ‘iron out’ the lines on his face. She had even advised him to change his will. Though he bequeathed ex-wife Virginia Bruce two $50,000 annuities, the bulk of his estate was left to his eleven-year-old daughter, Leatrice, from his marriage to Leatrice Joy. Marlene was with him the day he suffered his first heart attack while swimming in his pool. She had given him emergency treatment while waiting for the ambulance and had doubtless saved his life. Ernst Lubitsch, who was producing Desire, did not want Gilbert dying on him halfway through the film and on 8 January replaced him with Gary Cooper. ‘In my opinion, that’s what finished him off. Within a few hours, he was dead,’ Marlene later said.288
Gilbert’s funeral took place on 11 January, two days after his death. Marlene and Cooper were among the mourners, and Garbo sent a wreath by way of Salka Viertel, her only public acknowledgment of how much she had cared about him. Marlene had witnessed Gilbert signing his will and later claimed this had substituted a previous one which saw Virginia Bruce acquiring the house on Tower Grove Road, and the bulk of the estate, while his daughter ended up with just $10,000. Soon afterwards, the property was ransacked by fans, most of the items not stolen were auctioned and the proceeds divided equally among his relatives.
Meanwhile, despite having told Mercedes that she never wanted to see her again, this grossly overbearing woman claimed in her memoirs that Garbo wrote to her two weeks before leaving Sweden, asking her to follow George Brent’s example and arrange for a ten-foot, impenetrable fence to be built around her home so that they would be afforded the ultimate in privacy. In fact, Mercedes had the fence erected around her own home, in the hope that Garbo would move in. ‘Poor Mercedes,’ she wrote to Horke Wachtmeister, ‘She has got an extraordinary ability to make people nervous. Even people who are not quite as unkind as me.’289
The Gripsholm docked in New York on 3 May 1936, and saw Garbo break her own rule by granting a ten-minute interview in the ship’s smoking-room. Not that she said much, or that any of the questions thrown at her were less than juvenile. ‘I don’t know why I should talk to people I don’t know, but I am beginning to learn that it is necessary,’ she said. She scoffed, when asked if the rumour was true that she had bought an ancient castle and that this was to be dismantled and shipped to Hollywood, stone by stone, ‘Can you imagine what a lot of little parcels, all neatly tied up, a castle could make?’ And that was it – Greta Garbo’s ‘major’ interview! She was met off the ship by Berthold Viertel, now separated from his wife, the troubles referred to by Garbo in her letter to Salka. With him, she spent the next month doing the usual round of theatre visits and together they boarded the Santa Fe Chief for San Bernadino. Here, having heard of the New York press conference, dozens of reporters scrambled on to the train, causing havoc with those passengers trying to get off. ‘Why do they insist she belongs to the public, like a park?’ Viertel yelled at no one in particular, before Garbo scowled at the little crowd and made it clear that she was interested in speaking to no one. Her escort then drove her, not to her own house, where she feared Mercedes may have been waiting, but to George Brent’s mansion at Taluca Lake.290
The reason for Garbo’s bad mood was a journalist named Kay Proctor, from Screen Guide. Proctor was dispatched to Barstow, in the Mojave Desert, where she boarded the train and waited until Garbo was alone before audaciously entering her carriage in the hope of acquiring an exclusive ahead of her Hollywood colleagues. Rather than summon the guard, Garbo granted Proctor just two minutes, which was spent mostly explaining why she hated being disturbed like this:
It has been a difficult trip. No peace, no rest. I am not well. I am coming back here to get well in the lovely sunshine … It’s not that I don’t like people. I do, believe me. But it does frighten me when hordes of strangers rush at me, stare at me. I do not want to be ungracious but they make it impossible for me to do anything but shut myself away where they cannot tear at me … I am a peculiar woman. I cannot do too much at once, think of too many different things. My health now. Next, the picture. Then maybe a house…291
Changes had been made to Garbo’s projects during her absence: Salka would continue with the script for Marie Walewska but would not be involved with Camille. Irving Thalberg brought in Zoe Akins, Frances Marion and James Hilton. George Cukor would at last get to direct Garbo, William Daniels would photograph her as usual, and Adrian would dress her. Robert Taylor would play her love interest. Nebraska-born Taylor (Spangler Arlington Brugh) was a former cellist who made his film debut in 1934 in Will Rogers’ Handy Andy. His big break came a year later opposite Irene Dunne in Magnificent Obsession. He and Garbo got along very well and she was enthusiastic about him at the time. Some years later, when Taylor was long dead, she revised her opinion, telling her friend David Diamond, ‘So beautiful – and so dumb.’ George Cukor did not want him in the film and blamed his on-screen ‘shortcomings’ on his youth, arguing that Armand should have been played by a middle-aged actor, which would of course have been contrary to the Garbo ‘formula’.292
Not for the first time, there were rumours that Garbo was having an affair with her co-star, particularly when Taylor told one journalist, ‘She has a great pair of eyes. In the scenes before the cameras, she seems to use her eyes so little. Yet, when those same eyes appear on the screen, they reveal that they are constantly performing miracles of expression.’ Such comments led to rumours that the woman in Taylor’s life, Barbara Stanwyck, was none too pleased. In fact, theirs was yet another ‘lavender’ relationship encouraged by the studios, who were well aware that both Taylor and Stanwyck were bisexual. Later, for a substantial remuneration, they took the charade a step further and married. Otherwise, pending extreme discretion, they were permitted to lead more or less separate lives. As one biographer put it, ‘When Stanwyck became involved with Bob, she had to abide by the same rules as he did, or walk away. She managed this by keeping her mouth shut.’293 294
Taylor also had another way of ‘affirming’ his heterosexuality besides pretending to date beautiful actresses; he would unbutton his shirt and expose his hirsute torso, which gay men were declared incapable of possessing. When this led to ‘curious’ reporters cornering him in the hope of a cheap thrill, the stock response would be a snarled, ‘Ask me anything except about Barbara Stanwyck or if I have hair on my chest!’295
In one respect, George Cukor was right about Taylor: in Camille his relative inexperience and occasional fumbling is vastly overshadowed by the magnificent Henry Daniell, the British actor playing the villainous Baron de Varville. Daniell (1894–1963) had worked for many years on the stage in London and in New York before making his film debut in 1929, opposite the ex-Mrs Gilbert, Ina Claire, in The Awful Truth. Here, as in almost every role he played, he presents the perfect blend of smarmy charm and simpering evil. Lionel Barrymore is miscast as Armand’s father, while Laura Hope Crews and Lenore Uric are perfect as Marguerite Gautier’s demimondaine sparring partners.
The Breen Office kicked up a fuss about the script, though such was the reverence for Alexandre Dumas in Europe, where much of the film’s revenue would come from, that the studio were compelled to adhere to the novel or shelve the project entirely. Dumas is said to have based Marguerite on the horizontaliste Alphonsine Plessis (1824–47), with whom he had enjoyed a year-long romance. When this ended, she latched on to a Count Perregaux, who rescued her from the society she scandalised my marrying her, though they never lived together. He deserted her when she refused to amend her ways, leaving her to die in near-poverty, aged just twenty-three. Thalberg believed that he was rescuing Garbo when he ‘defended’ Marguerite, issuing a patronising – and positively insulting – statement: ‘Men marry whores in our present society – women who have been promiscuous – and they very often make marvellous wives. In this town you find them all over the place.’296
As had happened with The Painted Veil, Garbo mentally prepared herself for her role by ensconcing herself at the home of someone involved with the film, at George Cukor’s hillside Italianate villa. Set in six acres of very private, landscaped gardens, this provided a ‘pink retreat’ for the director, who invited all of his closeted gay friends here including actor William Haines, with whom he cruised for rough-trade sex, mostly sailors on leave, around downtown Los Angeles’ Pershing Square. While she was staying with him Cukor was caught in the act and arrested by the vice-squad, though any charges were quickly dropped when MGM’s police department stepped in with some substantial hush-money. Another regular visitor to Cukor’s home was Katharine Hepburn, who had had a crush on Garbo for some time. Maybe Hepburn believed that all her birthdays had arrived at once when Cukor drove Garbo to her house in Benedict Canyon, particularly when Garbo asked to be shown around upstairs. Feeling the lump in Hepburn’s bed formed by the hot-water bottle under the covers, she quipped, ‘Yes, I have one too. Vat is wrong wid us?’297
Production was well under way on 29 July when Garbo reported to the studio to shoot her first scene. The atmosphere on the set was reported to have been more relaxed than usual. When she detected that Zoe Akins and associate producer David Lewis were watching from a darkened corner of the set, she grabbed the director’s megaphone and demanded that they show themselves – then invited them to take tea in her dressing room. Akins was complimented on her ‘beautiful script’, and Lewis was greeted with a dry, ‘I expected someone a little older and a little uglier.’ These visitors were entertained with her latest musical obsession: Paul Robeson, whose records of negro spirituals were played constantly on the gramophone in her dressing room. She even insisted on lunching with the extras and technicians while shooting the locations in the Hollywood mountains, something she had never done before. She refused, however, to meet Robert Taylor until moments before their first scene together – she wanted to experience the same emotions, she said, as Marguerite Gautier might have experienced on seeing Armand for the first time, which would not happen if they were compelled to engage in idle chit-chat beforehand. The earth certainly ‘moved’ when they first faced the camera: the fuse box controlling the lights for the soundstage blew, showering everyone with sparks and compelling Taylor to grab her roughly by the arm and drag her to safety.298
If Taylor’s act of chivalry caused him to believe that he could get away with pulling a fast one where his leading lady was concerned, he would be mistaken. Several days into shooting, having been told that Garbo never signed autographs, he bought forty fountain pens and handed these out among the cast and crew, offering a prize to whichever of them returned first with that invaluable signature. The ruse backfired when Garbo summoned him to her dressing room: she had confiscated one of the pens and now grabbed a sheet of paper, which she ‘signed’ with a flourish, folded in half and handed to him. Taylor thanked her, and left. When he opened the paper, he observed that it was still blank – Garbo had removed the ink from the pen!
Neither was it all plain sailing with George Cukor away from the ‘pink ambience’ of his home. Cukor’s habit was to sit under the camera, the script on his lap, and mouth the lines to the actors while they were pronouncing them, waving his arms around if the scene was a lively one. Garbo was having none of this, and Cukor was relegated to working from behind a crack in the screen or curtains surrounding the set. Even so, she admired him more than she had most of her other directors because he was able to make her laugh, telling Horke Wachtmeister, ‘If I hadn’t been so out of sorts, Camille would have been one of my most entertaining memories, thanks to the director. He really is extraordinarily nice. He looks so funny with his huge hips and woman’s breasts. I’ll soon be finished the whole thing, and blessed be the memory.’ And she ended the letter, ‘That proves that I’m not always ungrateful!’299
Garbo’s portrayal of Dumas’ consumptive heroine was not the first, though it is generally regarded as the definitive one. Forty-two-year-old Alla Nazimova’s 1921 posturing opposite Rudolph Valentino’s moving Armand had been little more than a joke, those of Theda Bara and Norma Talmadge little better. On the stage, the most distinguished Ladies of the Camellias had been Eleanora Duse and Sara Bernhardt, while Maria Callas’ would offer the greatest operatic interpretation (as Violetta) in Verdi’s La Traviata. Garbo’s pre-Method style of injecting realism into her roles to the extent that she became the character she was portraying would be inherited by Callas. During the death scene, Callas deliberately cracked her notes and hit back at critics who lambasted her for this, ‘I was supposed to be dying, for God’s sake!’ During shooting, Garbo’s health took a downward spiral – a combination of exhaustion and her still debilitating period pains – resulting in several brief hospitalisations. By the time she got around to filming the death scene, she could scarcely stay on her feet. She asked for the sequence to be filmed twice so that she and George Cukor could decide which one to use – the one where she had several lines, or the one where she said almost nothing. Plumping for the latter, she told Horke Wachtmeister, ‘It really didn’t feel very natural talking that much when you’ve just about given up the ghost.’300
The action takes place in 1847 (the year of Alphonsine Plessis’ death), with Marguerite’s carriage stopping at a florist’s shop, where an assistant presents her with her favourite flowers: ‘For the Lady of the Camellias,’ she says. Inside the carriage, Marguerite’s best friend, Prudence (Laura Hope Crews), chides her for her extravagant spending. They head for the theatre, where Prudence, the matchmaker, hopes to fix her up with the Baron de Varville, who neither has seen. This leads to a case of mistaken identity: peering through her opera glasses, Marguerite’s gaze falls on the drop-dead gorgeous Armand Duval (Robert Taylor). ‘I didn’t know that rich men ever looked like that,’ she says.
Next we see Marguerite’s friend of sorts, Olympe (Lenore Uric), so unscrupulous that she would ‘pick a dead man’s pocket’. (Mercedes de Acosta is thought to have been foremost in Salka Viertel’s mind when she scripted this scene, for while Prudence and Marguerite never have a good to thing to say about Olympe behind her back, to her face they are always gushing.) Olympe has seen the real Baron and wants him for herself, cattily warning Marguerite that unless she changes her ways, she will end up back on the farm where she came from. This draws a dry response from Marguerite: ‘Cows and chickens make better friends than I’ve ever met in Paris.’
Armand makes his way to her box. (Robert Taylor’s very first meeting with Garbo, bringing gasps of surprise from both.) He has worshipped her from afar for some time; she, however, soon loses interest on learning he is not wealthy.
The story moves forward six months and Marguerite is now the real Baron’s mistress – though he was not at her side while she was seriously ill, whereas Armand brought her camellias every day. The pair meet again in a book shop, where he presents her with a copy of Manon Lescaut, which she says will be auctioned after her death. She invites him to her birthday party, at which he is shocked by the vulgarity of her freeloading, fake friends. The festivities end abruptly when she suffers a fit of coughing while dancing the polka. ‘Aw, she’s always ill when anybody’s having fun,’ Prudence scoffs as everyone leaves, taking the food with them.
Armand wants to take her to the country to recuperate – on a monthly salary of 7,000 francs, he says, he can afford to. ‘I spend more in a month and I’ve never been too particular where it comes from,’ she replies. When he tells her how long his parents have been together, she says, ‘You will never love me for thirty years. No one ever will.’ She urges him not to get involved with a woman like her but, when she sees his sincerity is genuine, she agrees to go away with him.
After arranging to have supper together, she gives him a key so that he may let himself into her apartment. This does not happen: the Baron returns unexpectedly and Armand finds the door bolted. The ensuing scene is electric. Marguerite is at the piano when the Baron enters and messes up her favourite piece on account of the state he gets her into. The Baron knows her lover is waiting outside. He joins her at the piano, striking the keys like a maniac, his expression increasingly sardonic, the music reaching a crescendo as they argue and laugh by turns while the doorbell rings. When she stretches the beads she is wearing this becomes a metaphor for her stretching the truth. She asks him for money; he knows she is lying when she says this is to pay off her debts, but offers her one final handout – his condition being that after today, he never wants to see her again.
Armand takes Marguerite to the country, where she is happier than she has been all her life and appears to rally. (The scene where they arrive at the cottage had to be filmed twice – while carrying her from the carriage, Taylor tickled her, Garbo wriggled and he dropped her. In these scenes, Robert Taylor looks only marginally less effete than Nils Asther in Wild Orchids. Even so, they make an astonishingly lovely couple.) Their joy is short-lived, however – they learn that the local castle belongs to the Baron. Armand becomes suspicious when he sees Marguerite slipping notes to her maid, Nanine (Jessie Ralph), though she is actually selling her jewellery to pay for a friend’s wedding. Yet when he proposes, she turns him down: ‘Let me love you, let me live for you. Don’t ask any more from heaven. God might get angry.’
Marguerite receives a visit from Armand’s father. (Not one of Lionel Barrymore’s finest moments. In a lengthy scene, the final part of which would have benefited from a retake, he addresses her as ‘Margaret’.) Monsieur Duval considers her to be a gold-digger and beneath his son, ‘He has a career waiting for him and in his case he can’t serve his best interests by being tied to a woman he can’t present to his family or his friends.’ Until now, Marguerite has come across as a strong-willed woman; therefore it seems strange that she should now be willing to give up the man she loves without a struggle. (Ultimately, though the script adheres as closely as possible to Dumas’ work, this had less to do with turn-of-the-century Paris than a bigoted Hollywood under the watchful eye of the Breen Office and so Marguerite must choose between the lesser of the two evils: ruining the life of a decent young man, or consorting with her own ‘kind’.) If she tells Armand she no longer loves him, he will not believe her; if she leaves him, he will follow. Therefore the only way to set him free is for her to crawl back to the Baron. Armand begs her to stay – last night, she was ready to give up everything for him, but now her attitude is cold. ‘Well, that was last night … People say things they don’t mean sometimes at night. Life is something besides kisses and promises in the moonlight. Even you should know that. Wasn’t one summer all you wanted?’
Armand sees her at a gambling club with the Baron, looking miserable. When he wins his game, Armand flings the money at her – all, he says, she has ever been interested in. He and the Baron square up to each other, and the next morning they fight a duel. The Baron is wounded and Armand forced to flee Paris. When he returns six months later, Marguerite is dying; the Baron has deserted her, she has sold the rest of her jewels to survive but is still in debt and the bailiffs have moved into her home, ready to pounce the moment she expires. Her voice is reduced to a whisper as she asks Nanine to send for the priest. Armand arrives, and for a fleeting moment she convinces him that their love will make her well again and begs him to take her back to the country. Then, knowing this will never happen and remembering what his father has said, she tells him, ‘Perhaps it’s better if I live in your heart, where the world can’t see me. If I’m dead, there’ll be no stain on my love.’ And so she dies in his arms, beautifully, like no screen heroine before or since.
Shooting wrapped at the end of October, with Garbo declaring there would be no retakes. Marguerite Gauthier had exhausted her but was now dead; she wanted to bury her and look towards the future. She changed her mind after the Santa Barbara preview, when critics declared some scenes too lengthy and boring. One retake, in November, resulted in the headline: ‘GRETA GARBO CATCHES FIRE IN LOVE SCENE WITH TAYLOR!’ This was the scene where Marguerite is recovering from the coughing fit she suffers while dancing the polka. When Garbo stood too close to the fire, the hem of her dress caught alight and two technicians doused her with buckets of water to put it out. It was also meant as a double-entendre: the rumours concerning Robert Taylor’s sexuality could not have been true, if his presence could ‘set fire’ one of the world’s most beautiful women!
The film opened in New York on 22 January 1937 to exceptional reviews. Harrison Carrol, sitting in the audience, observed, ‘When illness and tragedy overtake the heroine, she involves pathos so deep that many in the audience were openly weeping.’ Louella Parsons, also present, was similarly moved:
Perhaps it is the unexpected humour injected into her characterisation that gives her a warmth and a human touch noticeably missing from many of her previous performances. Even the hectically dramatic death scene has been treated with pathetic appeal, and if you can watch it without a tear in your eye, you have more fortitude than the crowds that poured into Grauman’s Chinese yesterday.
Frank S. Nugent wrote in the New York Times, ‘She is as incomparable in the role as legend tells us that Bernhardt was. Through the perfect artistry of her portrayal, a hackneyed theme is made new again, poignantly sad, hauntingly lovely.’ And from an anonymous British critic:
When she was dying, she had the appearance not merely of being ill, but of having lain in bed for months. In her weakness she could not smile, but retained the pride of a Bernini statue. There has been no diminution of Miss Garbo’s flaming genius during her recent absence from motion picture acting. Her command of the subtleties of an impersonation is even greater than it was in the past, and her voice has taken on a new range of inflection. The Marguerite she brings to the screen is not only the errant and self-sacrificial nymph conceived by the younger Dumas nearly a hundred years ago, but one of the timeless figures of all great art … It is likely that Miss Garbo still has her greatest role to play, but she has made the Lady of the Camellias, for this reviewer, hers for all time.301
Camille won Garbo her second New York Film Critics Best Actress Award, and an Oscar nomination. This year the competition was particularly strong: Janet Gaynor in A Star Is Born, Irene Dunne in a remake of The Awful Truth, Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas, and Luise Rainer in The Good Earth. Rainer won, not that Garbo cared about such things. Much more important to her was the Littris et Artibus medal, one of Sweden’s most prestigious honours. Previous recipients included soprano Jenny Lind and Sarah Bernhard and it was awarded by King Gustavus V at the end of the year. This should have been presented on his behalf by Borg’s former boss, the Swedish Consul-General, but when Garbo learned that the ceremony would take place in front of an audience in San Francisco, she sent her excuses and the medal was posted to her via registered mail.
Later, she would learn that Camille was one of Hitler’s favourite films and that he owned a private copy. Roger Normand recalled her reaction when this came up in conversation: ‘How I would have loved to have put on one of Marguerite Gauthier’s dresses and walked into the Reichstag and shot that animal!’302
The production was marred by Hollywood’s third major tragedy in four years. On 14 September 1936, four days before Garbo’s thirty-first birthday, MGM’s Boy Wonder, Irving Thalberg, suddenly, but not unexpectedly, died, aged thirty-seven, plunging the movie capital into a state of profound shock. Many of those who had worked with him genuinely grieved – though many more did not. A few weeks earlier, a simple cold had developed into lobar pneumonia. Clark Gable (ordered to do so, against his wishes) and Douglas Fairbanks were ushers at his funeral at the B’na B’rith Temple on Wilshire Boulevard and anyone who was anyone was there to pay their respects – or disrespects, depending on how they had got along with the precocious mogul. Only the crowd-hating Garbo was absent, sending her excuses by way of a huge wreath. Later she said, ‘I liked him. But he died much too early. The best die young.’303
Thalberg had died at the height of his powers, but with more of his stars hating than liking him, primarily because of his association with Mayer. This might have been about to change. There were rumours that he was planning to leave MGM and set up his own production company and that some of the studio’s biggest stars would have followed him: Norma Shearer without any doubt, Joan Crawford most likely, and Garbo almost certainly; though she had initially disliked him, during the last two years she had begun trusting him and they had developed a bond. As with Ernst Lubitsch and very few others, she had often dropped in at his house unannounced and her grief was genuine, some believed more profound than for John Gilbert. His death also set the sombre mood for the closing scenes of Camille. Later, Thalberg served as a model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, and from 1937 onwards the Motion Picture Academy would present an annual Best Producer Award in his memory.
Not long after Thalberg’s death, William Daniels’ father died suddenly, causing Garbo’s favourite cameraman to go on a three-day bender. When Mayer learned that he was in Chicago being comforted by friends, there was little sympathy; instead of being granted compassionate leave, Daniels was put on suspension and Jean Harlow’s ex-husband Hal Rosson brought in to replace him. Rosson had barely completed the wedding scene in Camille when Mayer replaced him with Karl Freund, of whom more later.
Thalberg’s replacement at MGM was Bernie Hyman, whose approach to making pictures was decidedly different: cash injections, glamour and expensive sets were, he believed, the only key to success. Hyman was faced with an enormous problem when he learned that his star player had taken his predecessor’s death so badly that she was consulting a psychiatrist, a daunting task for anyone attempting to unravel arguably one of the most complex minds in Hollywood history. ‘A little hunchbacked man who I am dragging down into the abyss of pessimism,’ was how she described him in a letter to Horge Wachtmeister.304
Marie Walewska (1786–1817) was the Polish mistress of Napoleon Bonaparte, who bore him a son he could never publicly acknowledge. Born into a wealthy family she grew up at Kiernozia, the family seat, where one of her tutors was Chopin’s father, Nicholas. In 1805, the year she met Napoleon, she married Count Walewska, almost four times her age. Reluctant to become Napoleon’s mistress, she was coerced into doing so by members of the Polish aristocracy, including her elderly husband, in the hope of getting the Emperor to help Poland regain independence from Prussia and the Russian Empire. After this happened, she recalled: ‘The sacrifice was complete. It was all about harvesting fruit now, which could excuse my wystepa position. This was the thought that possessed me. Ruling over my will, it did not allow me to fall under the weight of my bad consciousness and sadness.’ After her affair with Napoleon ended, she married Philippe, Count d’Ornano. The highly fictionalised account of this period of her life, based on Waclaw Gasiorowski’s Pari Walewska and coming in the wake of the phenomenally successful Anna Karenina and Camille, is generally regarded as one of Garbo’s poorer films, as was reflected in the box-office receipts.305
The first stumbling block concerned the title: neither the critics nor the public, Mayer declared, would be able to pronounce it. Garbo was insistent that it should not be changed, but later settled on a compromise: the title would be retained for British and European audiences, while in North America it would be released as Conquest. Irving Thalberg commissioned Salka Viertel for the script and S. N. Behrman for the dialogue. Between Thalberg’s death and the first day of shooting, 3 March 1937, fourteen other writers were roped into the project but the studio still was not satisfied. Another problem lay with casting Garbo’s leading man. Napoleon’s nickname had been ‘Little Corporal’ and he had been considerably shorter than his mistress. All of the old ‘chestnuts’ were considered, including John Barrymore and Claude Rains, until Garbo decided that her Napoleon would have to be authentically French – enter Charles Boyer.306
Boyer (1899–1978) worked on the French stage before being discovered by MGM’s Paris agent in 1929, though during his first few years in Hollywood he achieved little. His big break occurred in 1934 alongside Loretta Young in Caravan: more recently he had starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in her first Technicolor film, The Garden of Allah. Though not the most charismatic of leading men, MGM considered him perfect for the part of Napoleon solely because he was one of two available French actors in Hollywood at the time, the other being Maurice Chevalier. Initially, he wanted nothing to do with the film. ‘I would have been less hesitant if someone had asked me to play Jesus,’ he recalled. ‘Which would have been the harder role to play? For a Frenchman, I believe it would be Napoleon. I was fearful that to the French people, no performance of Napoleon Bonaparte, not even a perfect one, would be satisfactory.’307
As had happened with Fredric March, MGM’s offer of a hefty salary – allegedly almost equal to Garbo’s – enabled Boyer to change his mind. She was also ‘peeved’ to hear that Paramount would be paying Marlene Dietrich $450,000 for her next film, Knight Without Armour, almost twice what MGM were paying her unless she profited from the clause in her contract which guaranteed her an extra $10,000 per week for retakes and delays. In fact, there would be so many hitches during this one – nineteen days alone wasted because of her ‘indispositions’ – that by the time production wrapped after an astonishing 127-day shooting schedule, she would have earned $475,000, just beating Marlene whose new film, like Marie Walewska, would flop, resulting in Paramount terminating her contract.
Garbo asked for Clarence Brown to direct – this would be their seventh and last film together – but she did not get William Daniels, who was working with Jean Harlow. Instead, Bernie Hyman brought in Karl Freund, the photographer who had completed Camille. Bohemia-born and Berlin-raised, Freund (1890–1969) worked on many German Expressionist films including The Golem (1920) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). His first big hit in Hollywood was Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and he had also tried his hand at acting, playing an art dealer in Carl Dreyer’s Mikael (1924). Fireworks were expected between Garbo and Freund, who had won an Oscar for The Good Earth, an award she believed would have gone to William Daniels, had he not gone AWOL. The two got along fine, however, as did Garbo and veteran Russian stage actress Maria Ouspenskaya (1876–1949), who plays her dotty aunt in the film. Trained by Stanislavski, she had arrived in New York in 1922 and worked on the stage for over a decade before making her Hollywood debut. In her later years, she opened her own drama school.
Garbo did not like the actor playing her son in the film. Hailing from Oakland, California, Scotty Beckett (1929–68) had been a regular in the Our Gang comedy shorts from 1934 to 1935: children all over America had emulated his character with the lopsided baseball cap and oversized black pullover. In 1936 he played the young Anthony in Anthony Adverse and had since played an Indian boy in The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Ouspenskaya, Beckett and Boyer all met tragic ends. The elderly actress died in 1949 following a stroke brought on by severe burns she received in a house fire after smoking in bed. Beckett made a successful transition from child to adult star. In 1947 he appeared in Marilyn Monroe’s first film, Dangerous Years, though by then he was already going off the rails. His later career would be blighted by drink-driving charges, failed marriages, violent episodes and drug addiction. On 8 May 1968 he checked into a Hollywood clinic after being beaten up and two days later, overdosed on a mixture of alcohol and barbiturates. In 1934, after a whirlwind romance, Charles Boyer married British actress Pat Paterson, a marriage which lasted until her death from cancer in August 1978. Two days later, unable to continue without her, he took an overdose of Seconal. Their son, Michael, had died in 1964, during a drunken game of Russian roulette at his twenty-first birthday party.
Garbo had her own theory as to how Marie should be portrayed on the screen and pleaded with Salka Viertel, ‘I have a great longing for trousers, and if I ask you in time maybe you can put in a little sequence with trousers, maybe her dressed as a soldier, going to Napoleon’s tent at night, or something.’ Thalberg, who had sanctioned the Sapphic scenes in Queen Christina, might have approved the request, but Bernie Hyman made it clear that one of the most beautiful Frenchwomen of her day would not be presented to the public as a ‘baritone babe’. The Breen Office also had their say, declaring the film’s adulterous content should be ‘removed unreservedly’. MGM protested that, as a political pawn, Marie had been ordered to have an affair with Napoleon in the hope of saving Poland from oppression. Joseph Breen capitulated when Hyman assured him that the script made it quite clear that Marie had only succumbed to Napoleon under extreme pressure, and very much against her will.308
Shooting began on 3 March 1937, six weeks later than scheduled, partly due to Garbo’s unspecified health issues and problems with the script, which was still being polished when the cameras started rolling. Garbo’s mood-swings were not helped by the unwelcome attentions of Mayer and a drunken John Barrymore. Mayer is known to have made a pass at her and received short shrift when summoning her to his office on the pretext of discussing the script. She found Barrymore sozzled at nine in the morning, chatting to Clarence Brown outside her dressing room. The fading actor rushed up to her, threw his arms about her and proffered a kiss. Garbo smiled, shrugged herself free, and without saying a word walked into her dressing room and locked the door. Another unwelcome visitor was John Gilbert’s teenage daughter, Leatrice. When Garbo learned that she was there to discuss her father’s will, she refused to see her. There were no such problems when Clark Gable and Borg dropped in for a chat: they were invited into her dressing room and, in Borg’s case, the door locked for a different reason.
There is no love-triangle in this film, which may be why many fans disliked it. They also disliked Charles Boyer who, though possessed of a powerful on-screen presence as the cold and calculating Napoleon, has no charisma. Indeed, the only males here with any degree of warmth are George Houston, playing Duroc, and Australian actor Alan Marshal as Marie’s future husband, Captain d’Ornano, both of whom died tragically young.
The story opens in 1807, with Russian soldiers attacking the home of Count Walewski (Henry Stephenson). Having wrecked the place and ravaged the servants, they encounter the elderly pacifist owner and his wife Marie (Garbo making another muted appearance, descending the staircase and addressing the invaders in little more than a raised whisper). The rabble leave upon learning that the Polish Lancers are on their tails, captained by Marie’s brother, Paul (Leif Erickson), who she has not seen since childhood.
When Paul appears he informs her that their saviour, Napoleon Bonaparte, has arrived in Poland. Marie travels to see the Emperor for no other reason than hero worship and they happen to meet later at a ball. The Emperor is shocked to see a voluptuous young woman married to a statesman fifty years her senior, with a grown-up family: ‘I congratulate you, madame. For a grandmother you are extraordinarily well-preserved. I regret I did not know you when you were younger.’
Also at the ball is Captain d’Ornano (Alan Marshal), who is enamoured of Marie, but she is coerced by the nobles into dancing with Napoleon instead. They have plans for her: if she becomes Napoleon’s mistress, they will have a better chance of getting him on side to rid them of Russian tyranny. The little man flirts with her but she is faithful to her husband, of whom she says: ‘He has his dignity, he has his honoured name, and so do I.’ No one has snubbed Napoleon before and he is offended, therefore the nobles apply pressure. ‘Are you suggesting that I can succeed where the Polish legions have failed?’ Marie naively asks. ‘Perhaps you have been made beautiful, that Poland may be made free. You are a woman. Napoleon is after all only a man,’ is their answer.
Marie obeys the command. Napoleon says she is the only woman whose favours he has ever had to beg for and for a moment behaves like a rational human being. Even so, she does not wish to sleep with him and says that she is only here to beg for her people. But her pleas only excite him and when she tries to leave, he drags her back into the room and, we assume, has his way with her.
Such is her husband’s disgust when Marie returns home that he announces he is having their marriage annulled, but that she may keep the house. (In real life, it was Marie who divorced Walewski – in 1812, after her affair with Napoleon, and having accepted responsibility for raising their love-child as his own. This essential historical fact was changed upon Joseph Breen’s orders to make Marie ‘atone for her sins’; in the eyes of her countrymen, her exploits with the Emperor turned her into a national heroine.) Napoleon turns up, tries to woo her by telling her how lonely he feels and she suddenly finds her mettle: ‘Am I to understand that the Master of Europe who can command a million men to die for him cannot command one of them to be his friend? … You say you are lonely. Where would you receive a friend? In your heart? It’s too full of yourself. In your mind? It’s too full of the world. And your desires are unworthy of friendship. You will always be lonely, but you’ll bear it. You’re pitiless, even to yourself!’ However, after he speaks of his dream for universal peace and spins her a yarn about his miserable childhood, Marie yields to his phoney charms. ‘I shall never yearn for spring again,’ she drawls, for she knows they will be together only during the winter, after which he will leave on his next campaign.
But everything changes when Marie falls pregnant. She visits him to impart the good news. ‘I shall never be unhappy again,’ she starts – but she never gets to tell him about the child because he drops a bombshell: though nothing need change between them, he must secure his dynasty by marrying into one of the powers he has conquered. His offspring, he says, must be of royal blood, and so he will take Princess Marie-Louise of Austria as his wife. ‘Think, the son of Napoleon, born of Habsburg blood,’ he beams. She responds with a weariness born of disappointment, ‘Ancient blood. Thin, cold, watery. A dead house, and you are going to live in it. A tomb, with a bride who hates you and a family that despises you. Do you think they’d forget that you’d beaten them? How they will hate you for forcing yourself on them … The liberator of Europe has become a son-in-law!’
Their affair over, Marie leaves, and the narrative zips through several crucial years of European history as if of no importance: Napoleon’s wedding, the birth of Marie’s son and that of the Emperor’s legitimate heir, his army’s retreat across a snowy Polish wasteland and, finally, Napoleon’s exile to Elba, where he is mollycoddled by his mother while he waits for the ship that will reunite him with his Empress and son. Instead, he receives a visit from his bastard, Alexandre, accompanied by Marie, who feels that they might have some kind of life together now that his campaigning days are over. He manipulates her into helping him to escape and goes on to fight the British at Waterloo (the famous battle taking up just six seconds of screen time), then, having lost, he is captured and sentenced to exile in St Helena, where he can do no more harm. Again, Marie offers to help him to escape; he refuses to run away like a coward and as he is escorted to the ship by his captors, she tearfully waves him off through the window.
The film opened in New York on 4 November 1937 to some of the worst reviews Garbo had ever received. Announcing that it was the costliest film MGM had ever made, the Motion Picture Herald concluded, ‘It is super colossal magnifico – but a dog at the box-office.’ Louella Parsons observed, ‘Garbo is completely overshadowed by Charles Boyer – who takes the picture, wraps it, and walks away with it.’ Of Garbo’s appearance she added, unfairly and erroneously, ‘She has lost so much weight that there are scenes where she is almost emaciated-looking.’ John Mosher, writing for The New Yorker, was in agreement: ‘Madame Garbo’s anaemia, I fear, can pull a little. Her performance seems static, though the story covers a period of years … I think that for the first time Madame Garbo has a leading man who contributes more to the interest and vitality of the film than she does.’309
Marie Walewska remains the only Garbo film to have shown an actual loss. Indeed, it was MGM’s biggest money-loser to date: though it took $2 million at the box-office, its hugely inflated $3 million budget resulted in a reported loss of $1,397,000. Her next film, however, would see her in a sparkling and much more profitable return to form…
Notes
282 ‘We would bounce…’: Norman Zierold, Garbo (Stein & Day: 1969).
283 ‘Before each…’: Zierold, ibid.
284 Peter Hanning, The Legend of Garbo (W H Allen: 1990).
285 Press reviews, September 1935.
286 ‘Sven is a…’: Letter from Lawrence to MGM in Alexander Walker, Garbo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1980).
287 ‘I have been…’: Letter from Garbo to Salka in Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (Sidgwick & Jackson: 1995).
288 ‘In my opinion…’: Dietrich to author.
289 ‘Poor Mercedes…’: Sven Broman, Garbo on Garbo (Bloomsbury: 1990).
290 ‘I don’t know why…’: Interview on ship, various syndicated columns, May 1936.
291 ‘It has been…’: Kay Proctor, Screen Guide.
292 ‘So beautiful…’: Paris, ibid.
293 ‘She has a…’: quote subsequently included in the feature, ‘The Truth About & Garbo Me’, Picturegoer Supplement: Camille, September 1937.
294 ‘When Stanwyck…’: Jane Ellen Wayne, Barbara Stanwyck (JR Books: 2009).
295 ‘Ask me…’: Wayne, ibid.
296 ‘Men marry…’: Thalberg, quoted in Karen Swenson, Greta Garbo: A Life Apart (Simon & Schuster: 1997).
297 Katharine Hepburn, Me: Stories of My Life (Alfred Knopf: 1991).
298 ‘I expected…’: Swenson, ibid.
299 ‘If I hadn’t…’: Broman, ibid.
300 ‘It really didn’t…’: Broman, ibid.
301 Press reviews, February 1937; anonymous British review, in John Bainbridge, Garbo (Doubleday: 1955).
302 ‘How I would have…’: Roger Normand to author.
303 ‘I liked him…’: Broman, ibid.
304 ‘A little hunchbacked…’: Broman, ibid.
305 ‘The sacrifice…’: quoted in Frederic Masson, Marie Walewska (Ed. Guillaume: Paris, 1897).
306 Other rejected titles included: The Road To Waterloo, The Woman Before Waterloo, The Great Surrender, The Captains & The King, Man Without A Country, The Gods & The Flesh, Less Than The Dust, Symphony Without Music and A World Is Born.
307 ‘I would have been…’: Larry Swindell, Charles Boyer: The Reluctant Lover (Doubleday: 1983).
308 ‘I have a great…’: Letter to Horke Wachtmeister, July 1935, quoted in Paris, ibid.
309 Press reviews, November 1937.