‘Don’t you think it is high time they let me end a picture happily with a kiss? I do. I seem to have lost so many attractive men in the final scenes.’
Garbo had socialised with none of her Marie Walewska co-stars: no invitations to her dressing room, no shared meals, very little laughter, and the only person she saw away from the set was cameraman Karl Freund, who it emerged had met her in Berlin when she was with Mauritz Stiller. Freund recalled a conversation he claimed he had had with Garbo, where she had been more forthcoming than usual:
FREUND: G.G., what do you do when you go home?
GARBO: I rest a bit, the maid brings me dinner, then I study the next day’s script and go to bed. I’ve been in my new house for three months and, would you believe it, I’ve never seen the living room. I eat, study and sleep.
FREUND: And what else do you do?
GARBO: I sometimes play checkers with myself.
FREUND: And what do you do about sex?
GARBO: Once in a while I go out, when I meet a man I like, who enjoys me. When he arrives I peek out at him to see what he’s wearing and then I dress accordingly. Many of the men who ask me out go crazy about my Swedish maid, who is very pretty. They pat her on the cheek and flirt with her, but for me, at the end of the evening they say, ‘Thank you Miss Garbo,’ and they tell me how wonderful it was but no one ever says, ‘Let’s go to bed.’310
But there was a new man in Garbo’s life. She first met the British-born conductor Leopold Stokowski on the set of Deanna Durbin’s One Hundred Men & A Girl during a break from shooting Camille – though why she should wish to visit another star’s set, when no other star was permitted near hers, remains a mystery. Stokowski (1882–1977) had studied with London’s Royal College of Music and first took up the baton in Paris in 1909, though he subsequently dispensed with this to conduct ‘free-hand’, most notably during his tenure at the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra (1912–36). His Hollywood movie debut, playing himself, was in The Big Broadcast of 1937, completed shortly before the Durbin film. A womaniser and a serial cheat, Stokowski’s first wife had been the concert pianist Olga Samarroff, but when he met Garbo he was married to the Johnson & Johnson heiress, Evangeline Johnson.
On meeting Garbo, Stokowski reacted like a starstruck teenager, fawning and lusting over a beautiful woman not much more than half his age. There has never been any real explanation as to what she saw in him, other than his promise to ‘show her the world’, which she was perfectly capable of seeing on her own. According to the writer Anita Loos, who arranged for Garbo and Stokowski to meet at her home – with other guests present so that she would not know she was being set up, if Loos’ matchmaking failed – seduction was the only thing on the conductor’s mind. Inasmuch as Marie Walewska had entered Napoleon’s realm without knowing what she was letting herself in for, so Garbo fell for the philosophies of this phoney charmer: he told her that, to get the best out of life one must enjoy it to the full and not sit alone and mope. And though by no means qualified to make such a diagnosis, he also accredited Garbo’s poor health and menstrual problems to her diet and the fact that she was eating far too much red meat. Within a week of meeting him, she turned vegetarian, which only made matters worse.
One of Loos’ party guests remembered,
Stoky didn’t waste much time with the overture. He told Garbo they were destined to have a history-making romance, like Wagner’s with Cosima. It was written in the stars … It was the direct attack mixed with a little mystical stuff. Any kind of mystical stuff made quite a hit with Greta in those days.311
Their next ‘date’ constituted a visit to Salka Viertel’s house, where Garbo’s friend was also attempting to recapture her youth – since splitting from Berthold, she had taken up with Gottfried Reinhardt, the producer son of Max, who at twenty-six was twenty-two years her junior. In his memoirs, Gottfried recalled Garbo kneeling at Stokowski’s feet, as she had with Erich von Stroheim, while the conductor regaled her with tales of his overseas adventures.
Being seen with Garbo at his side helped Stokowski through what appears to have been his mid-life crisis. Theirs was almost certainly a platonic relationship, not far removed from Garbo’s on-off liaison with Mercedes de Acosta. Like Mercedes, Stokowski was decidedly eccentric – he wore bizarre clothes, and looked odd with his sharp features and shock of prematurely white hair; like her, he was prone to boasting that there was more going on between he and Garbo than there really was. Garbo, he claimed, made him feel young again, while he made her feel intellectual and helped rid her of the guilt she felt at not having had a legitimate education. Problems occurred when one journalist claimed that Garbo had described Stokowski as her ‘boyfriend’, a fabrication, for she would never have been so forthcoming to the press. Stokowski’s wife, Evangeline, no less of a reprobate than he was and embroiled in a public affair with an exiled Russian prince, Alexis Zalsten-Zalessky, moved to Reno and on 1 December filed for a quickie divorce, audaciously citing her husband’s adultery. Garbo was not named as co-respondent, but seeing her name linked to his in articles made her feel relieved that she was about to leave for an extended visit to Sweden. Hopefully, she told friends, when she returned to Hollywood – if she returned – the scandal would have died down. In the meantime, to evade the press she moved into George Cukor’s house. One morning, as she was getting out of her car there, she was accosted by Jim Simmons of Photoplay, who wanted to know if the rumours were true that she and ‘Stoky’ planned to marry as soon as his divorce came through. Garbo tried to ignore him, but when Simmons took on an aggressive tone, she turned on him: ‘These rumours are absurd. I won’t deny that Mr Stokowski and I are very good friends. But as for marriage to him – no, that is out of the question!’312
A few days later, Stokowski accompanied Garbo to New York. For the first time, she was leaving Hollywood without having signed a contract, but MGM were not in the same financial quandary as before. Her last film had shown a substantial loss – mostly the studio’s own fault – but even Mayer was beginning to think that maybe she had passed her peak and might be better off staying in Europe. As usual, she gave no indication that she would be coming back. On 8 December, Stokowski settled her into her suite on the Gripsholm, reserved under the name ‘Jonas Emersen’, and ten days later she arrived in Gothenburg.
This time, there was no rented apartment, or hotel suite with a security guard posted outside the door. Garbo had realised her dream of becoming a ‘gentleman farmer’. Situated at Lake Gillen, Gnesta, in Sodermanland County and a 45-minute drive south-west of Stockholm, Harby was set in 1,000 acres of mostly forest, with around 150 acres of workable farmland. Sven Gustaffson and Horke Wachtmeister had found the place for her and she had wired the 276,000-kronor asking price without quibbling. Included in this had been a substantial stock of chickens, pigs and cattle. The house, on two levels, comprised fifteen rooms, all with bare red-brick floors, which one imagines would have been dreadfully cold during a Swedish winter.
Sven collected her from the ship and drove her straight to Harby, where her mother had effected a Christmas card welcome – with six inches of snow already on the ground and the roof, Anna had lined the drive with multicoloured lanterns and hung more of the same in each window. Garbo was incensed, though, that Emilie Danielson, a Swedish freelance photographer, had visited the property earlier in the day. Danielson subsequently sold her pictures to the highest bidder, Movie Mirror, whose editorial asked: ‘Can you imagine Mata Hari in such surroundings? Yet wouldn’t you expect the Viking Venus to choose a home as distinctive as this?’313
Though Garbo’s name was on the deeds, she had bought the property for her mother. For years, Anna Gustaffson had refused to move from Stockholm’s South Side, and only did so now because Sven and his family – his wife Marguerite and their daughter, Gray, born in 1937 – moved in with her. Garbo had a contract of employment drawn up employing Sven as Harby’s official caretaker, a job he apparently did not do very well. ‘I live in my brother’s place, which is a mess,’ she wrote to Salva Viertel. ‘I tried to find something that would have helped him in life, but it is not right. He can’t take care of it and now I don’t know any more what to do.’314
A few days before Christmas, Garbo received a visit from Screenland’s Hettie Grimstead, who had travelled on the same ship from New York and had taken this long to track her down. When Garbo refused to see her, Grimstead bribed one of the maids to inform her readers what ‘the world’s most mysterious woman’ was getting up to and reported back that Garbo had spent a lot of time with a woman painter friend (this was actually Mimi Pollak) and that the two liked to go ice-yachting and attend hockey matches. They had also visited the ski slopes at Fiskartorpet, north of Stockholm, and the Garboscope Cinema on the city’s South Side, named in her honour. She also mentioned that Garbo had frequently spent the night at this friend’s apartment. When Garbo learned that one of her staff had been speaking to the press, she was fired.315
Hettie Grimstead sneaked into an impromptu press conference forced upon Garbo in the lobby of Stockholm’s Grand Hotel at the end of January, when she expressed her admiration for the British actress, Flora Robson, whom she had recently seen as Queen Elizabeth in Fire Over England. She had been so impressed, she said, that from now on she would be content to leave the great dramatic and historical roles to others. Her mood changed when one of the reporters, who had obviously been contacted by Mercedes de Acosta, asked her why she had changed her mind when he had it on ‘good authority’ that her next role should have been Joan of Arc. ‘No,’ she snapped, ‘I am not going to play Joan of Arc. Has that silly story got to Europe, too? It is so idiotic. I am tired of period pictures and I want to do something modern now. My next film is to be a comedy!’ And with this, she had stormed across to the elevator.316
Upon hearing this, MGM went into meltdown. In their opinion, the last thing Garbo was capable of was making audiences laugh. A far better option, they declared, would be Marie Curie. Universal had bought the story for Irene Dunne but when it emerged that Garbo was interested in the role – or rather, that Salka Viertel was interested on her behalf – they sold it to MGM for a staggering $250,000. British writer Aldous Huxley was commissioned to pen the screenplay, on a salary of $2,000 a week. George Cukor was pencilled in to direct. Garbo considered him ‘lucky’ because his birthday was 26 July – the same as her brother Sven, Lars Hanson, and Borg. Luck, however, was not on his side here. According to MGM’s scripts department, Huxley submitted a 140-page treatment to Bernie Hyman’s office, but this got no further than a preliminary reading by Hyman’s secretary, who concluded on his behalf, ‘It stinks!’ The film would eventually be made in 1943, using part of Huxley’s script, with Greer Garson receiving an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the Polish-French physicist.
Meanwhile, on 5 February, shortly before his ex-wife married her prince, Stokowski boarded the Conte di Savoia for Naples. From here, two weeks later, he called Garbo at Harby and asked her to join him. She actually met up with him in Rome on 24 February. The next morning, with Garbo at the wheel of their hired car, they drove the twenty-five miles to Ravello, the picturesque resort on the Amalfi Coast. Stokowski was independently wealthy, which suited Garbo when it came to ‘gallivanting’ as he would pay his own way and not sponge off her as some ‘escorts’ had in the past. Indeed, he had rented the opulent and extremely expensive Villa Cimbrone for a month. Within days the press were on to them. Stokowski claimed he had been accosted in the village by a reporter, who asked if the ‘Margaret Gustaffson’ staying at the villa was actually Greta Garbo and if the rumours were true that they had come here to marry. ‘Greta Garbo?’ Stokowski posed, ‘Oh, you mean the film star? I’ve no idea where she is right now. She most definitely isn’t here with me!’ Later, he would be suspected of actually approaching the press, such was his hunger for publicity and his desire to feed his ego by advertising the fact that the world’s most enigmatic star might have eyes for him alone.317
As had happened at Harby, two of the staff – the gardener and a chambermaid – were paid handsomely by the New Yorker’s E. W. Selsey and Martha Kerr of Modern Screen to keep tabs on the current mistress of the house, though by the time their stories hit the newsstands, the ‘affair’ was all but history. ‘Garbo has found love at last,’ Kerr reported, adding that her acceptance of Stokowski’s offer to see the beautiful things in the world was ‘proof enough of her greatest love for the man whose association she has secretly enjoyed these many months. And as we go to press, word comes to us that Garbo and Stokowski have silently stolen away from their retreat in Ravello and moved to Taormina, a seaside village in Sicily. Rumour is rife that here, under the shadow of the ever-smoking volcano, Mount Etna, they will be married.’318
Selsey went one step further. Her informant rifled through Garbo’s luggage, but was interested in what it did not contain: no dresses, blouses, coats and other outdoor apparel – just a pair of men’s pyjamas, and espadrilles. Clearly, she intended wearing as little as possible during this sojourn. And if Garbo was going to be walking around the place half-dressed or naked, the columnists concluded, it figured she and her middle-aged beau would be spending a lot of time having sex. Further ‘proof’ of this came from the elderly gardener, who could not understand why this mismatched couple, who also did their early-morning exercises in the buff, should insist on addressing each other as ‘Miss Garbo’ and ‘Mr Stokowski’. He did however find it amusing to hear her drilling him during their routine: ‘One, Two, Three, Bend! One, Two – Mr Stokowski, you are out of time! One, Two, Three, Bend!’ Much was made too of dozens of jars of a ‘strange preserve’ which Garbo had packed into one of her trunks – each morning she would tip the contents of one of these over her cornflakes, then fill the bowl to the top with black coffee, and eat the whole disgusting mess with relish. The preserve was made from lingonberries – a wild fruit she herself had picked in the Swedish countryside – not unlike loganberries and very rich in Vitamin C.
The real problems for Garbo and Stokowski came when a Rome newspaper (again almost certainly fed the story by Stokowski himself ) reported they were about to get married, and that Wallace Beery was flying out to be his best man. The village was besieged by hundreds of reporters. When they began climbing trees and lying in wait on neighbouring rooftops, Garbo hired armed police officers with dogs to mount a round-the-clock vigil outside the property. Next, a fan tossed a brassière over the gates, to which was pinned a request for her to wear it and throw it back. By 16 March, the day the ceremony was supposed to be taking place, she made up her mind to leave.
Stokowski persuaded her to change her mind, his theory – part of his ego-boosting plan – being that if she granted a brief press conference, these people would leave them in peace. The gist of this, with emphasis placed on Garbo’s infamous ‘catchphrase’, was reported in numerous columns around Europe:
I never had any impulse to go to the altar. I haven’t many friends. I haven’t seen much of the world, either. My friend, Mr Stokowski, offered to take me around to see some beautiful things. I optimistically accepted. I was naive enough to think that I could travel without being discovered and without being hunted. Why can’t we avoid being followed and examined? It is cruel to bother people who want to be left in peace. This kills beauty for me. I live in a corner. I am typically alone … I wish to be otherwise, but I cannot. I don’t like this. I only want to be left alone.319
The press promised to keep their distance and kept to their word – for two days. Also, there was another threat. Mercedes de Acosta had followed Garbo to Europe, travelling extensively throughout France, Germany and Poland while waiting for someone to call or wire her with news of her whereabouts. Now, thanks to the circus which had taken place at Ravello, she knew exactly where to find her. On 18 March, before dawn, Garbo and Stokowski drove to Naples, and caught the ferry to Capri. Here, they were taken in by British singer Gracie Fields, herself no stranger to controversy, having discovered the island some years earlier while touring Europe with her painter lover, John Flanagan, after splitting from her first husband, impresario Archie Pitt. For two days, Garbo languished next to Gracie’s pool at her Canzone del Mare complex and at night slept in one of the tiny chalets reserved for the staff rather than at one of the plush hotels where she knew she would be pestered by the press. She, Gracie and Stokowski also lunched with another of the island’s famous residents, the blind Swedish psychiatrist Axel Munthe, at the Villa San Michele, his home in Ana Capri.
On 22 March, Garbo and Stokowski returned to Naples, stayed the night at a guesthouse before driving to Rome, then spent four days here before sailing to Tunis, where they managed to evade the media for two weeks. A ‘friend of Miss Garbo’, in reality Garbo herself, threw reporters off their trail by revealing that the couple were about to leave for Vienna. The press should have had more important issues to deal with, as war-clouds darkened over Europe. Germany had mobilised its troops. France was calling in its reserves. The Führer had recently visited Mussolini in Rome. Neville Chamberlain had met with Hitler and had failed in his attempts to avoid the conflict. Yet for weeks the front pages had only been interested in speculating over whether Greta Garbo was sleeping with Leopold Stokowski.
The European press also missed out on the big news story, which detractors in Hollywood predicted might bring her career to a premature halt. At the beginning of May, the Hollywood Reporter published its now-legendary ‘Box-Office Poison’ feature, a full-page report from the Independent Theater Owners of America, attacking studios and producers for ‘promoting stars whose public appeal is negligible, but who receive tremendous salaries necessitated by contractual obligation.’ Besides Garbo, the other names on the list included Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Edward Arnold, Mae West, Kay Francis and later, Fred Astaire. Paramount had already dropped Marlene, and RKO had dropped Hepburn. No one knew then who was behind the list but the culprit was subsequently named as Harry Brandt, the owner of a cinema chain. Anita Loos maintained that, had Thalberg been alive, Garbo’s name would not have been on it. Though they did not know it at the time, there would be no lasting harm as Brandt’s victims all found work with other studios and lost none of their popularity with the public.320
By 6 May the couple were back at Harby, after which their movements are sketchy until 24 July, when Garbo drove Stokowski to the railway station for the first leg of his journey home. Though they would sometimes speak on the phone, they never met again. Garbo herself arrived back in New York on 7 October 1938, granting what would be her final press conference, before leaving the ship. The war in Europe was foremost on the passengers’ minds: many were heading for America, terrified that Hitler might invade Sweden. As usual, Garbo had intended keeping to her suite throughout the entire voyage, but she had emerged from her self-enforced solitude on the second day to help deliver a baby. Henceforth, she spent several hours each day with the unnamed mother and child, and this and the recurring topic of marriage formed the basis of her ten-minute grilling by journalists:
QUESTION: Miss Garbo, are you actually married to Mr Stokowski?
GARBO: I wish you wouldn’t ask me that question. If I were married, you would know all about it, since nothing escapes you.
QUESTION: Do you ever intend to marry?
GARBO: If I could find the right person to share my life with, perhaps I would marry…
QUESTION: And the mother and baby you helped out with, here?
GARBO: I spent some time with them, of course. I am always very interested in babies. The birth of a baby is always a miracle.
QUESTION: And would you like to have babies of your own?
GARBO: No! The world is too difficult. I mean, partly because of the danger of war in the world. I would not want to raise a son or any children to go to war. But, I don’t want any more about that. I don’t know anything about politics…
QUESTION: Miss Garbo, do you hate all newspapermen?
GARBO: Oh, I might like all of you, removed from your jobs and your newspapers!
QUESTION: Miss Garbo – have you enjoyed your vacation?
GARBO: No! You cannot have a vacation without peace – and you cannot have peace unless you are left alone. And now, if you will excuse me…321
With this, shaking a few hands en-route, Garbo walked out of the ship’s library, then immediately set tongues wagging by being met at the bottom of the gangplank by Reginald Allen, Stokowski’s personal assistant, who drove her to the West 54th Street apartment of a composer friend, Richard Hammond, where she would stay before returning to Hollywood.
In New York she also met up with Robert Reud – the fan, now a close friend, who years earlier had offered to marry her to save her from deportation. He escorted her around the city, and a much-feted photograph of them appeared at the time, snapped while they were sitting in a corner of a restaurant. While Garbo instinctively grabbed her hat to cover her face, she forgot about the mirror next to her, through which the photographer captured her peeved expression. It did not take long for journalists to track her down and when this happened Hammond whisked her off on a week-long boating trip to Gloucester County. Again, the press caught up with her but not until the day she was scheduled to leave, with the New York Daily News running the headline, ‘GARBO GOES CRUISIN’ AND FINDS IT AIN’T AMUSIN’!’322
On 18 October, MGM received an official complaint from the Coiffure Guild, holding a convention in the city. Women all over America, they avowed, were emulating Garbo. By allowing their hair to grow straight, and by washing it themselves as she did, they were depriving the hairdressing trade of a living. ‘It is wholly unsuitable for wear by her or by the women of this country,’ their manifesto proclaimed of her unkempt locks. ‘And should such a style ever be popularised, this would have the effect of working vast injury to the hair-stylists of the United States.’ There had been a similar hubbub back in the Twenties when Rudolph Valentino – preparing for his role in The Hooded Falcon, subsequently aborted – had returned from a European trip sporting a beard. The Barbers Association had kicked up such a fuss that he had been made to shave it off. Garbo, however, was no pushover. What she did with her hair was her business and the Coiffure Guild were unceremoniously told to mind theirs.323
A few days later, Garbo left for Hollywood. Wishing to avoid a repeat performance of her brush with reporters the last time she changed trains in Chicago, she boarded the Broadway Limited, still bound for Chicago, but allowing her to alight at Gary, Indiana, then travel on to Joliet, Illinois, to board the Santa Fe Chief. Salka Viertel met her in Los Angeles and drove her to George Cukor’s house, where she stayed until moving home yet again, this time to a property on North Amalfi Drive. During her absence, MGM had assigned Salka to scripting her next film, Ninotchka, based on the novel by Melchior Lengyel, who was hired as co-writer. This tells the story of a humourless Russian female diplomat who finds romance in Paris and was a return to the old Garbo formula, save that instead of being rescued from the clutches of an older man by a younger lover, this one would see her rescued from the clutches of Communism.
Directing, at last, was her friend, Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch (1892–1947) was the German-born son of a Jewish tailor. He joined Max Reinhardt’s theatre group in 1911 and acted on the stage until bitten by the directing bug. His first important production, Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy, 1918) starred Pola Negri. Four years later, he arrived in Hollywood, first directing for Mary Pickford, then rapidly establishing a reputation for classy comedies of manners such as The Love Parade (1929). Lubitsch was doubly suited to Ninotchka, having visited Russia and experienced life in a Communist country, as opposed to having read about it in textbooks, travel guides and spy novels. Garbo did find him a little overpowering at times and his persistent bellowing of instructions, even when standing right next to her, unnerved her until she gently reprimanded him, in German so that no one else would understand: ‘Please, when you speak to me, please speak more softly!’ Lubitsch’s first move was to remove Lengyel and Behrman from the picture; while not wishing to change Lengyel’s story, he found his scriptwriting inadequate and Behrman’s dialogue not sharp enough to match Garbo’s innate sense of dry, offbeat and frequently caustic humour, which he had discovered during her visits to his home. The pair were replaced by Walter Reisch, who had recently scripted The Great Waltz, and who, along with Mayer remained to be convinced that Garbo would be capable of making people laugh. Mayer added that in view of the ‘box-office poison’ tag, there would be a drop in salary: she would be paid $250,000 for the one-off deal, though all the terms of her previous contracts would still be there: script and co-star approval, and the $10,000-a-week fee for retakes and delays. Garbo agreed to this when Mayer explained that, with war seeming inevitable now that Germany had invaded Austria, in these two countries at least, where much of MGM’s European revenue had come from, her films would no longer be permitted to be distributed.
From MGM’s point of view there was the added bonus in that Garbo’s biggest rival, Marlene Dietrich, was out of their hair. Marlene had shrugged her shoulders at the box-office poison slur – if Hollywood no longer wanted her, she would find someone who would. In the spring of 1938 she returned to Europe, vowing never to make another American film. She had the more important issue of getting her mother and sister out of Nazi Germany to deal with, though sadly this would never happen. On the negative side, Mercedes had wormed herself back into Garbo’s affections, taking advantage of Salka Viertel’s sudden departure. Also anxious about her relatives and friends, most of whom were Jewish, Salka had returned to Poland. This suited Lubitsch, who considered Salka almost as bad an influence as Mercedes.
Salka was replaced by Charles Brackett, then president of the Screenwriters Guild, and Billy Wilder. Born in Sucha Beskidza, Austro-Hungary (now Poland), and a year younger than Garbo, Wilder relocated to Vienna when young and, after dropping out of university, moved to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist and taxi-dancer – charging well-heeled widows for his services, and not just on the dance floor – before trying his hand at screenwriting. After Hitler’s rise to power, he fled to Paris where, in 1933, he made his directorial debut with Mauvaise Graine, starring Danielle Darrieux. That same year he moved to Hollywood, where Ninotchka would become his first noteworthy success, followed by such classics as Sunset Boulevard (1950) with Gloria Swanson and Witness for the Prosecution (1957) with Marlene Dietrich. Some years later, he enthused about Garbo, while taking a slight dig at her acknowledged hausfrau rival, Marlene Dietrich:
It may be the goddamnest put-on of all time, yet Garbo is the quintessence of what a star should be. Today’s actresses tell us how they bring up their children and give us their recipe for scrambled eggs but Garbo stumbled on a much more compelling idea. She said and did nothing and let the world write her story. She was as incongruous in Hollywood as Sibelius would have been if he had come to write incidental music for Warner Brothers films.324
Garbo’s original choice of leading man for Ninotchka was Cary Grant, whom she admired tremendously. Despite eventually having seven wives between them, Grant and his actor ‘room-mate’ Randolph Scott remained lovers for many years and, as was her wont, while MGM were casting the other parts for the film, Garbo dropped in at their Malibu home, ‘Bachelor Hall’, unannounced to announce the good news. Grant was working at the studio, though she did have a pleasant surprise when Noël Coward answered the door – he and his latest male ‘secretary’ were spending a short holiday there. Coward tried to contact Grant on the set, but by the time he arrived home Garbo had grown tired of waiting: after a cursory nod and handshake, she got into her car and drove away.325
The supporting cast – Ina Claire, Sig Ruman, Felix Bressart, Alexander Granach and horror king Bela Lugosi – are mostly excellent. Garbo and Claire, contrary to some reports, did not get along. They were civil towards each other, but only until the ex-Mrs Gilbert took liberties by spying on her from behind the screened-off set, not once, but twice. The first time was when Ninotchka is about to receive flowers from her lover. Ernst Lubitsch asked her if she was ready for the take and Garbo gruffed, ‘As soon as Miss Claire gets out from behind that curtain.’ Claire was moved on by a technician, only to watch the scene where Ninotchka cries after receiving the censored letter from her lover, this time undetected, from another darkened corner. Catching up with Garbo later, she complimented her on her acting (condescending, perhaps, considering Claire’s own performance is lamentable), and added, ‘And damn you, I saw you cry!’326 This brought the surly response, ‘Very unmanly of me, wasn’t it?’ before Garbo turned her back on her and strode off. Throughout the remainder of the shoot, Claire found herself ignored. She also suspected Garbo of attempting to sabotage her career when Ernst Lubitsch cut two of her scenes after reading Hedda Hopper’s comment from the first preview on 24 August, in the Los Angeles Times, ‘Unless the film is slashed and parts redone, Ina steals it.’
Ninotchka was purposely scripted, with her wholehearted approval, to debunk the Garbo myth and poke fun at Russia and its Communist regime – the names of most of the main characters (Yakushova, Swana, Iranoff, Kopalsky, Bulianoff) are not even Russian. More important from a publicity angle was the simple caption flashed across trailers and billboards. For Anna Christie, MGM had proclaimed ‘GARBO TALKS!’, for this one they employed ‘GARBO LAUGHS!’ She had of course laughed many times before on the screen, but had never delivered a belly laugh as she does here, in a sophisticated comedy such as Lubitsch was acclaimed for. With Europe on the verge of war – actually at war when the film was released – its mockery of another dictatorial regime provided audiences with a welcome light relief against some of the horror stories, which began appearing in the press. The declaration of war also resulted in a few post-production changes, beginning with the opening credits: ‘This picture takes place in Paris in those wonderful days when a siren was a brunette and not an alarm … and if a Frenchman turned out the light it was not on account of an air-raid!’ Minutes into the scenario, a passenger alighting from a train pronounces, ‘Heil Hitler!’ while giving the Nazi salute.
A trio of inept envoys (Rumann, Bressart, Granach) arrive at a plush hotel to sell the Grand Duchess Swana’s jewels, confiscated by their government, so that the proceeds may buy farm machinery for the starving masses back home. Swana (Ina Claire) is here too with her playboy lover, Count Leon d’Algout (Melvin Douglas), who obtains an injunction to block the sale and bribes the three into cooperation by introducing them to a lifestyle unknown in Communist Russia.
The trio’s superior is forced to send special envoy Nina Ivanovna Yakushova, aka Ninotchka, to sort out the mess (Garbo, making her entrance twenty minutes into the film – straitlaced, humourless, wearing dowdy clothes and no make-up). The kind of woman she is is made clear when a porter explains that it is his business to carry her luggage and she retorts, ‘That is no business. That is social injustice.’
Having expected a man, the three feel they should have brought flowers. ‘Don’t make an issue of my womanhood,’ Ninotchka admonishes. And when asked how things are in Moscow she replies, ‘Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians.’ She disapproves of the fashions of the country in which she finds herself – seeing a modern hat in a hotel display cabinet, she opines, ‘How can such a civilisation survive which permits women to put things like that on their heads? It won’t be long now, comrades!’ And she is horrified by the cost of her room – the only one with a safe to store the jewels – declaring, ‘If I stay here a week I will have cost the Russian people seven cows. Who am I to cost the Russian people seven cows? I’m ashamed to put a picture of Lenin in a room like this.’ (The scriptwriter even permits Garbo a moment of self-parody, having one of the envoys ask, ‘Do you want to be alone, comrade?’) When Ninotchka asks for cigarettes, these are delivered by a trio of giggling girls who had entertained the envoys last night, causing her to utter her driest line yet: ‘You must have been smoking a lot.’
Ninotchka meets Leon in the street and asks for directions to the Eiffel Tower. He flirts with her, but she tells him, ‘Suppress it. Your type will soon be extinct.’ Later, however, she accompanies him to his house – he will make an interesting case study. She asks the elderly butler if Leon whips him, then there is more self-parody: ‘Go to bed, little father. We want to be alone.’ Of Leon she says, approvingly, ‘Your general appearance is not distasteful. The whites of your eyes are clear. Your cornea is excellent.’ And when Leon says he is falling in love with her, she confesses that she feels the same way, declaring, ‘Love is a romantic designation for a most ordinary or should we say chemical process … I acknowledge the existence of a natural impulse, common to all … Chemically, we are already quite sympathetic.’ Next comes a line that was almost cut. After recalling how, as a sergeant with the Third Cavalry, she was attacked by a Polish Lancer, who she bayoneted but kissed before he died, she asks, ‘Would you like to see my wound?’
Their romance seems destined to be short-lived when each discovers the other’s identity. However, determined not to give up on her, Leon follows her to a backstreet bistro, where he tries to get her to smile by cracking corny jokes. She remains stony-faced until he falls off his chair, causing her to laugh hysterically. (Cynics questioned at the time, and still do, the authenticity of the sound accompanying this scene. In previous films, whenever Garbo laughed, it was always silently, as she did in real life. Melvyn Douglas recalled, ‘She was unable to articulate so much as a titter during the shooting of the restaurant scene. I never learned whether the laughter, which must have been added in the dubbing room, was Garbo or not.’327)
Ninotchka is a changed woman. She buys the hat she hated, puts on a fashionable dress and wears lipstick for the first time. Leon takes her dancing and they run into Swana, who has brought along her snooty friends to mock ‘the Bolshevik’, expecting Ninotchka to look like a frump, rather than the belle of the ball (in one of the most sumptuous gowns Adrian ever created).
Ninotchka gets tipsy: ‘The closest I ever came to champagne was in a newsreel – the wife of some president was throwing it at a battleship.’ Back at the hotel she slurs that she does not deserve to be happy, that by kissing him she has betrayed a Russian ideal and should be shot. Leon stands her up against the wall, blindfolds and ‘executes’ her, popping the champagne cork in place of firing a gun. (This brief scene, in which she slides to the floor in slow motion, put Garbo on a par with the greatest screen comediennes. According to a report from MGM, during the first screening an audience member wrote on his preview card, ‘I laughed so hard, I peed in my girlfriend’s hand!’) Mistaking the safe for the radio, she ‘switches’ this on, turning the dial and thus unlocking it, and sees the jewels. ‘The tears of old Russia,’ she says.
The next morning Ninotchka receives a visit from Swana. The jewels are gone and the only way she will get them back, Swana says, is if she boards the next plane to Moscow. Putting her love of her country first, Ninotchka leaves. (Though the Breen Office had given explicit instructions that there should be no exterior scenes depicting Moscow, even ones fabricated on a set, Ernst Lubitsch ignored this and we are now introduced to MGM’s perception of life in Russia.) We see her once more in dowdy clothes, marching in the May Day parade and entertaining the envoys at her flat. For dinner she is making an omelette; a room mate asks, only half in jest, ‘An omelette? Aren’t you living above your ration?’ She switches on the radio but there is no music here, just propaganda speeches, so the friends make their own entertainment – we even get to hear Garbo singing a snatch of Mistinguett’s ‘Ça C’est Paris!’.
The story then moves forward and Ninotchka is dispatched to Constantinople by her boss (Bela Lugosi) because the envoys have messed up again – only this time they have hatched a plan with Leon, who is waiting for her there having been refused entry into Russia. The envoys have opened a restaurant and will not be returning home and, now that she has been reunited with her lover, neither will Ninotchka. ‘Once you saved your country by going back. Now you can only save it by staying here,’ says Leon. To which she replies, ‘Well, if it’s a choice between my personal interest and the good of my country, how can I waver? No one shall say Ninotchka was a bad Russian!’
Shooting wrapped on 28 July, by which time MGM were ‘rocked’ by the news that Marlene Dietrich was making a surprise return to Hollywood. Universal had signed her to play opposite James Stewart in a remake of the 1932 Western, Destry Rides Again, which critics predicted would see her snatching plaudits from Garbo. In fact, both films proved smash hits, enabling both stars to shake off the box-office poison slur once and for all. Ninotchka opened at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on 29 October 1939 and, as usual, Garbo was unimpressed by her performance, believing that she could have done better. ‘My film is finished and I’m afraid it doesn’t amount to much,’ she wrote to Horke Wachtmeister.328 The critics disagreed. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune declared it the most captivating screen comedy of the year and rued her not having done this sort of thing before:
For in this gay burlesque of Bolshevics abroad, the great actress reveals a command of comic timing which fully matches the emotional depth or tragic power of her earlier triumphs … Whether it is deadpan clowning or the difficult feat of filling a tipsy scene with laughter; whether she is trading insults with a Grand Duchess or secretly trying on one of those current hats, she is a past mistress of comedy … There is an added verve and colour to her personality in a role such as this which makes her even more magically lovely than in the past.
Frank Nugent observed in the New York Times:
Stalin won’t like it; Molotov may recall his envoy from MGM. We will say Garbo’s Ninotchka is one of the sprightliest comedies of the year, a gay and impertinent and malicious show which never pulls the punchlines (no matter how far below the belt they may land) and finds the screen’s austere first lady of drama playing deadpan comedy with the assurance of a Buster Keaton.329
Ninotchka was nominated for four Academy Awards: Best Actress, Picture, Original Story, and Screenplay. This year, however, Gone with the Wind swept the board, delighting Vivien Leigh, who considered her Oscar a real slap in the face for Hollywood’s Number One Box-Office Star, while Garbo could not have cared less. Yet despite the adulation and the sterling reviews, she was far from content with her lot, writing to Horke Wachtmeister, ‘I still don’t know what I’m going to do about filming. I find working more difficult than ever. I don’t know why that’s so, but I get so embarrassed when I’m in the studio.’
Word of her anxiety reached MGM’s front office, where Mayer who, having expected it to flop without those all-important European returns to boost the coffers, until being made aware of the reviews and early returns for the latest film, had been resigned to letting her go back to Sweden for good if this was what she wanted. Now, eager to put her into another comedy, he went out of his way to help her as only he could, by coercing her into consulting a psychologist. Dr Eric Drimmer, married to the actress Eva Gabor, was considered one of the best in Los Angeles and Garbo went along with the idea because Drimmer was Swedish. Their sessions amounted to nothing, with Drimmer concluding – for a hefty fee – that Garbo’s psychological problems were linked to her intense shyness, her inability to communicate with strangers and her obsessive fear of crowds – something she was already aware of and not remotely interested in rectifying.
Meanwhile on 1 September, while Garbo was deliberating over what to do next, Germany invaded Poland. Her first concern was for Salka, who was still there, or so she believed. In fact, her friend was in Paris – she cabled Garbo to assure her that all was well, and that she had booked her passage on what would be one of the last sailings from Cherbourg to New York. Two days later, Britain declared war on Germany and suffered its first major tragedy of the conflict when the SS Athenia, en route to Montreal in Canada, was hit by a German U-boat sixty miles south of Rockall, Ireland. Of the 1,418 passengers and crew, 117 lost their lives or died soon afterwards of their injuries. Among the survivors were actresses Judith Evelyn and Carmen Silvera (who later appeared in the British television series ’Allo, ’Allo!), and Ernst Lubitsch’s ten-month-old daughter, Nicola, travelling with her nanny. All the studios urged their stars not to cross the Atlantic until it was safe to do so, not knowing when this would be. Garbo had been planning a trip to Sweden but now wired money to her family, urging them to put Harby on the market and board the next available ship. The Stockholm-New York route had been closed and on 24 October, Anna Gustaffson, Sven, his wife Marguerite and their seven-year-old daughter, Gray, set sail from Oslo on the Norwegian steamer, Stavangerfjord. This docked on 3 November and MGM laid on a plane to fly them to Los Angeles, something they had never done for Garbo, who put them up at her house for several weeks before finding them a place of their own. Initially, only Marguerite, an American by birth, spoke English.
The Gustaffsons were Garbo’s blood relatives, whom she felt it was her duty to support. Having them under her roof, however, when she had lived most of her adult life totally alone, severely affected her and she found herself spending more time with her ‘real’ family, the gay and Sapphic intimates she felt most comfortable with. There was also a new ‘beau’: the wealthy nutritionist Gayelord Hauser. Exactly how and where they met is not known. Hauser (Helmut Eugen Benjamin Fellert Hauser, 1895–1984) was a health food guru who had recently published his fifth book, Eat & Grow Beautiful – his reputation, and his bank balance, suitably enhanced by his having acquired several already beautiful sponsors including Carole Lombard, Marlene Dietrich, Clara Bow, Eva and Juan Péron, and Adele Astaire, sister of Fred.
Born in Germany, he had emigrated to Chicago in 1911, and soon afterwards almost died of tuberculosis of the hip. When conventional medicine failed to cure his condition, he put himself into the hands of naturopath Dr Benjamin Lust, whose methods completely cured him, and so began his passion for natural remedies. After studying at several European universities, he returned to Chicago to set up a clinic promoting his five ‘wonder foods’: wheatgerm, yoghourt, skimmed milk, brewer’s yeast, and blackstrap molasses, to which Garbo – with her passion for weird concoctions such as lingonberry jam mixed with black coffee – soon became addicted when Hauser served it to her mixed with broiled grapefruit. And if this sounds unpalatable, a few years later he devised a twice-daily ‘health drink’ for the Duchess of Windsor comprising a half-pint of herbs and warm garlic juice!
Gayelord Hauser lived with his ex-lover, former actor Frey Brown, at his Sunrise Estate in Coldwater Canyon, though so far as the public were aware, Brown was his manager. Tall, handsome, muscular and imposing, Hauser hid his homosexuality for many years by ‘dating’ a host of beautiful, high-profile women. When in danger of being ‘outed’, he simply told journalists that he and his current flame were about to marry, the ‘relationship’ would fizzle out and he would move on to the next wealthy sponsor. He and Brown, who remained partners for life and who are said never to have cheated on each other, owned a second home in Palm Springs, its grounds well-hidden from the public gaze, where they and their friends could indulge in their favourite passions – partying and nude sunbathing – without being disturbed.
Cynics persistently mocked Hauser – he had added ‘Dr’ to his name though he had no qualifications and, while he enjoyed an extremely opulent lifestyle, the ones he boasted of helping the most were working-class Americans struggling during the Depression to afford the costly foodstuffs he prescribed in his books. His method of ‘curing’ Garbo involved not just teaching her what to eat, but how to face her problems and insecurities head-on. If she developed a headache or experienced period pains, instead of taking painkillers prescribed by her doctor, he got her to swallow one of his wheatgerm and celery concoctions. If she was suffering from fatigue, instead of going for a lie down, he encouraged her to go for a walk. That Hauser took advantage of her occasional naivety and brainwashed her, much as Mercedes and Salka had done, goes without saying. As one biographer cynically observed, ‘Famous names with declining reputations and self-confidence had been cured by his yoghourt and spinach. Having brought happiness to the millionaires of Florida and acquired a considerable fortune and international reputation, he intensified his attacks on Garbo.’330
Garbo had always been a health freak, obsessed with vitamins, potions, and terrified of dying young like her sister and Mauritz Stiller – although to today’s reader, her refusal to give up her two-pack-a-day smoking habit seems directly at odds with this. Hauser convinced her that her neurasthenia was linked to her vegetarian diet, recalling in his self-applauding memoirs:
She was at that time following a diet consisting mainly of boiled vegetables and thou-shalt-nots. In spite of her radiant beauty, this diet had had a marked effect on her vitality; she was suffering from overtiredness and insomnia, and was in danger of serious illness … I made it my task to wean her away from strict vegetarianism and coax her back to intelligent eating – no easy chore with a woman who has a will of steel.
Garbo would adhere to his strict regime for the rest of her life.331
Hollywood’s oddest quartet – 6´ 3˝ Gayelord Hauser and Garbo, and the equally strapping Frey Brown and the skinny, mouse-like Mercedes – lived life to the full during the winter of 1939–40: skinny-dipping on the sheltered beaches, hitting the clubs around Sunset Boulevard by night, driving out to Reno to shoot craps in the casinos, and on one occasion hiring a roadster and taking everyone to a rodeo. On 15 November, the press reported that Hauser had presented Garbo with a diamond ring, with Hedda Hopper claiming to have seen a photograph of her wearing it on ‘the right finger’ (though no such picture has ever emerged) and to have been given the exclusive that the couple were soon to be married. Hauser had given her a ring, but it was not an engagement ring, and the first Garbo heard of the impending ‘nuptials’ was when she read it in a newspaper.
The mere fact that Hauser had spoken about her behind her back – and to a reporter – would normally have given Garbo grounds for ousting him from her life for good, as had happened with so many who had betrayed her trust. She, however, had a solid enough reason for wanting to hang on to him for the time being.
310 ‘G.G. What do…’: Norman Zierold, Garbo (Stein & Day: 1969).
311 ‘Stoky didn’t…’: John Bainbridge, Garbo (Doubleday: 1955).
312 Jim Simmons, ‘I Won’t Marry Stokowski, Says Greta Garbo’, Photoplay, January 1938.
313 Emilie Danielson, ‘The Swedish Home Of Greta Garbo’, Movie Mirror, April 1938.
314 ‘I live in…’: quoted in Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (Sidgwick & Jackson: 1995).
315 Hettie Grimstead, ‘With Garbo At Home’, Screenland, April 1938.
316 ‘Don’t you think…’: Grimstead, ibid.
317 ‘Greta Garbo? Oh…’: Various Italian tabloids, March 1938.
318 Martha Kerr, ‘Garbo Finds Love’, Modern Screen, June 1938.
319 ‘I never…’: Various Italian tabloids; Bainbridge, ibid.
320 Hollywood Reporter, March 1938.
321 Press-conference: the questions and responses, in no particular order, as detailed in various syndicated columns.
322 ‘Garbo Goes Cruisin’…’: Daily News, October 1938.
323 ‘It is wholly…’: New York Times, October 1938.
324 ‘It may be…’: Zierold, ibid.
325 Nancy Nelson, Evenings with Cary Grant (William Morrow: 1991).
326 ‘And damn you…’: Zierold, ibid.
327 ‘She was unable…’: Melvyn Douglas & Tom Arthur, Melvyn Douglas: See You at the Movies, (University Press of America: 1986).
328 ‘My film is…’: Sven Broman, Garbo on Garbo (Bloomsbury: 1990).
329 Press reviews, November 1939
330 ‘Famous names…’: Fritiof Billquist, Garbo (Putman: 1960).
331 ‘She was at…’: Gayelord Hauser, Gayelord Hauser’s Treasury of Secrets (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 1963).