‘It seems crazy that millions are being killed instead of a few thoughtful people getting together to try and sort out what’s wrong. But then there would have to be give and take, and no one wants to give.’
In December 1939, Garbo anonymously donated $5,000 to the Finnish Relief Fund. Finland had always been close to her heart, if only for the fact that it had given the world Mauritz Stiller. Throughout the conflict, she would find herself criticised in some circles for not doing more to help with the war effort. Marlene Dietrich entertained the troops in Europe, performing on the front lines where the fighting was most fierce. Garbo was not, however, one of the so-called ‘lazy sunbathers’, one of the many thousands of US residents who went about their business believing the war was someone else’s problem and nothing to do with them. Quietly and without boasting, she became one of the unsung heroines of World War II. Unable to travel to Sweden, she announced that she would be spending her usual between-movies vacation in New York. Absolutely no one other than those who had arranged her mission knew what she was really up to, that she was about to take on the role of a real-life Mata Hari and put herself in considerable danger, not even Gayelord Hauser and Frey Brown, who accompanied her.
Earlier in the month, Garbo had been approached, perhaps not for the first time, by the Hungarian-born British producer Alexander Korda (1893–1956), famed for The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) and Rembrandt (1936), both with Charles Laughton. Korda’s London Films had begun shooting The Thief of Baghdad in England and had moved the unit to Hollywood because of the war, or so everyone believed. He was in fact also working as an agent for British Intelligence (MI6) and throughout the war used his position as an excuse to visit ‘sensitive’ areas under the pretext of searching for locations for his films. The Hollywood establishment was already being closely monitored: Korda and the Liberal politician Sir John Pratt (Boris Karloff’s brother) had engaged director Victor Saville, among others, to flush out Nazi sympathisers believed to be operating in the major studios.
For Garbo, Korda organised a very special mission: gathering information on one of the world’s richest men, Swedish millionaire industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren, who had been for some time on a United States ‘economist blacklist’. Garbo had met him, courtesy of Willhelm Sorenson, during her last trip to Stockholm. Indeed, she may even have been working for Korda then.
Wenner-Gren (1881–1961) had amassed his fortune largely from the patenting of Electrolux vacuum cleaners. Rumoured to be a friend of Hermann Goering, since being blacklisted and having his assets frozen, he had retreated to an estate on Hog Island (now Paradise Island), off the coast of Nassau in the Bahamas. He was also a friend of the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII, who had abdicated the British throne in December 1936 to marry twice-divorced Wallis Simpson: in October 1937, the Windsors toured Nazi Germany and met Hitler at his country retreat, causing immense controversy by giving the Nazi salute. In August 1940, the Duke would be appointed Governor-General of the Bahamas, a position he held for five years, and rumours of his alleged Nazi leanings persisted throughout the war, and beyond.
Considering the fact that there had never been anyone in the entire history of Hollywood as secretive as Garbo and therefore as capable of absolute discretion, once she had agreed to help him, Korda put a call through to Sir William Stephenson, the London film executive and another agent with British Intelligence. Stephenson (‘Codename Intrepid’, 1897–1989) was a Canadian soldier, inventor and spymaster, British Intelligence’s senior representative for the entire Western world during World War II and thought to have been used by Ian Fleming as a model for James Bond. He had been providing Churchill with secret information regarding Hitler’s plans since the spring of 1936. In 1976, his biographer detailed at some length MI6’s decision to hire Garbo for a series of missions which, had she been caught, would almost certainly have cost her her life:
‘In some mysterious way, Hitler was expected by French and British leaders to wear himself out on the plains of Poland. Neville Chamberlain did everything not to antagonise the enemy,’ remembered Stephenson. ‘President Roosevelt was afraid Chamberlain might negotiate peace. There was not much the President could do to support those resisting both Chamberlain and Hitler. American public opinion was the target of Nazi propaganda guns, no less than Warsaw had been the target of Nazi bombs. And American opinion was against us.’ So Roosevelt wrote an astonishing letter to Churchill … A correspondence began on 11 September 1939, unique between the chief of state of a neutral power and an unrecognised foreign leader. The President acknowledged that although Churchill might be without power in Parliament, as First Lord of the Admiralty he was directing the secret warriors. The replies, during the next 150 days, called ‘the Phoney War’, were signed ‘Naval Person’ and went to POTUS, the President of the United States … If the President wanted to join this secret warrior, it would help if he gave him ammunition to fight Nazi and isolationist influences in the US … if the British needed inside information to convince his doubting service chiefs of Germany’s ambitions and Britain’s worthiness as an ally. Churchill therefore wanted to put Stephenson at the President’s side right away as director of British Secret Intelligence and as a practitioner of covert diplomacy. Stephenson could then prepare a base in the United States for an all-over direction of secret warfare if Britain fell, as seemed likely if the appeasers stayed in control. But Stephenson had his own order or priorities … A beautiful and secretive woman who prized her privacy gave him a clue. Greta Garbo was one of the many actors and actresses who, working in his studios, became his close friends. The Swedish actress had reported high-level Nazi sympathisers in Stockholm. The neutral port was ideal for German intelligence operations…332
Some believed that Wenner-Gren had tried to fox the Allies into believing that he was on their side by sending his yacht, the 360-foot Southern Cross – at that time the world’s largest, formerly owned by tycoon Howard Hughes – to pick up 300 survivors from the Athenia. It seemed too much of a coincidence, certainly so far as Stephenson, Alexander Korda and Garbo were concerned, that he happened to be in the vicinity, claiming to be en route from Scotland to Bermuda, when the ship had been torpedoed. It seemed more likely that his real reason for being there was that he had been behind the whole operation. While awaiting further instructions Garbo allowed Hauser and Brown to escort her around New York, showing her off to their society friends during a round of excursions to the Metropolitan Opera, the ballet, and the jazz-clubs around 52nd Street. One afternoon they dragged her along to take tea with the Vanderbilts at their Fifth Avenue mansion, with Garbo hating every minute of it, but persevering with the arch-snobbery so as not to arouse suspicion as to why she was really there.
Two genuine friends who entered her life at this time and lasted the course were Jessica Dragonette and her sister, Rosalinda ‘Nadea’ Loftus. Like Salka Viertel, Jessica and Nadea ran an artiste’s salon at their 57th Street apartment: here, Garbo met the pianist Oscar Levant, who she liked – and Bishop Fulton Sheen, whose persistent preaching and requests for her to guest on his Sunday evening radio programme, The Catholic Hour, annoyed her. Dragonette (c.1900–1980) was America’s most popular radio star, an exponent of the light-operatic style popularised in the movies by the likes of Jeanette MacDonald. Bisexual, she married late in life – at almost fifty – though there is no evidence that she and Garbo were ever more than friends. Garbo spent Christmas and New Year with her, then early in February 1940 she, Hauser and Brown headed for Palm Beach, where they rented two suites at the Whitehall Hotel, and Garbo finalised her plans, putting a call through to Axel Wenner-Gren, who had a house in the Bahamas and explaining how bored she was with New York, and missing the California sunshine. The ploy worked: Gren invited the trio to Hog Island.
The next day, 17 February, Garbo chartered a plane to Nassau, where they boarded the Southern Cross with Wenner-Gren, his wife and several unnamed passengers suspected of being arms and munitions dealers. For ten days, the company cruised the West Indies, with Garbo making mental notes of conversations and reporting back to Sir William Stephenson each time the yacht docked. On 28 February the yacht reached Miami, at which point Garbo’s current ‘adventure’ ended. After spending three days in Miami, she and her companions flew back to Los Angeles, the first time she had made the journey by plane. As for her ‘romance’ with Hauser, the press were told that they had decided to cool things but remain friends. It is not known if Wenner-Gren let slip names of possible Nazi contacts in the United States or Europe, but Garbo’s mission must have been successful – Stephenson and MI6 would soon call on her services again. And clearly, her espionage work had shown her that there was considerably more to life outside a movie set. On 15 March she wrote to Horke Wachtmeister, ‘If peace comes, what I most want is to go home and not to make another film. I don’t even want to think about it.’333
On 9 April, Germany invaded Denmark and began bombing Norway, which put up a brave fight but eventually capitulated. Sweden, though mobilising its troops, opted to remain neutral. Garbo was distressed to learn that despite this and the banning of arms and munitions transportation to occupied Denmark and Norway, her country was still permitting Nazi soldiers to travel there via the Swedish rail network. She was also faced with another potential dilemma. MGM’s lawyers, who knew nothing of her work with MI6 and even less about European politics, were anxious over what would happen if Sweden – who they believed to be merely ‘sitting on the fence’ – formed an alliance with Germany. Almost certainly, they concluded, she would find herself arrested and detained as an enemy alien and the studio would lose a valuable source of income. She could of course have objected: protected by MI6, there was no way that any such arrest could have taken place, but to protest would have resulted in too many questions being asked, and her cover being blown. She therefore signed a Preliminary Declaration of Intent form, the first step towards becoming an American citizen, though it would take over a decade for her to be ‘called to the flag’, as she put it. On 4 September, she would be compelled to submit an Alien Immigration Law Registration application. Oddly, she gave her address as 165 Mabery Road – Salka Viertel’s home – and, despite the close proximity of her family, cited Salka as her next of kin.
Meanwhile, on 10 June 1940, the day Italy joined the war on Hitler’s side, Garbo was with MGM’s Walter Reisch and Victor Saville, her ‘next in command’, listening to the radio in Gottfried Reinhardt’s office, when President Roosevelt delivered his famous speech from the University of Virginia, accusing Italy of stabbing its neighbour in the back, and ending with the call for ‘effort, courage, sacrifice and devotion from Americans everywhere.’ Reisch recalled how, in an extremely rare show of public emotion, ‘FDR’s voice so moved Garbo she dissolved into tears. We were all looking at her to see her reaction, but she didn’t seem to care. “Does anyone have a Kleenex?” she asked.’ On 15 July, Alexander Korda contacted Garbo. Wenner-Gren, accompanied by his wife and sister-in-law, were en route to Los Angeles, aboard the Southern Cross. The next day, according to one source:
Garbo met them at the docks and took them with her in her Buick Sedan, Wenner-Gren sitting in front with the driver, FBI agent Frank Angell following them, to Paramount Studios. Garbo’s only contact here was Walter Wanger, who was working in the Korda-Saville network … She was keeping an eye on Wenner-Gren, as she had on the previous yacht voyage, looking for indications of admiration for Hitler. These loyalties became obvious very quickly. Garbo would soon wind up her contract and head for New York and neutral Sweden.334 335
In mid-December, Garbo received word from Alexander Korda that Axel Wenner-Gren was in New York and, it would appear, up to no good. Dashing off a letter to Horke Wachtmeister, after complaining that she had been suffering from a cold for five months, she added:
Just now I’m lying on a bench in the desert all on my own. I’m the only guest where I’m staying … I was invited to our friends in Nassau, Axel W, but I can’t travel. I’m off to New York soon for some sort of treatment. If it works, you must come and have it too … God, if only we could sit in some little corner at Tistad and tell tales from the never-ending story.336
Photographs of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor shaking hands with Hitler had recently appeared in the American press and, with the Duke now appointed Governor-General of the Bahamas and with one report declaring that Wenner-Gren may have been allowing the Germans to conceal U-boats on Hog Island, it may be that Garbo and/or Korda no longer felt it safe for her to be travelling there. What she meant by ‘some sort of treatment’ is not known, but may have been some sort of secret message – for if there was one person in the world whom Garbo trusted absolutely to confide in about her war work, as much as the constrained circumstances permitted, it was Horke. What is odd, too, is that this was the only one of Garbo’s letters home, so far as is known, to have been opened and certified ‘passed’ by the wartime censors.
A few days after writing to Horke, Garbo left for New York with Gayelord Hauser and Frey Brown and met up with Wenner-Gren several times. According to the industrialist’s biographer, Leif Leifland, who later unconvincingly attempted to exonerate him of suspicious wartime activities, they took tea at the Ritz, dined with the fashion designer Valentina and her husband George Schlee and never saw each other again. Leifland concluded, ‘My guess, but it’s only a guess, is that she was given a warning by the FBI or MI6 not to go to Nassau again and that she was told Wenner-Gren was suspected of being a German spy.’ Garbo, of course, had known this already.337
The box-office receipts for Garbo and Dietrich films were affected more during the first year of the war than those of their Hollywood contemporaries. Sixty per cent of their revenue had previously come from Europe and now that it had become impossible to distribute them there the studios were faced with a dilemma. It was no longer feasible to let Garbo and Dietrich go, as had been earlier anticipated: the success of Ninotchka and Destry Rides Again had changed all this. Universal had assigned Marlene to two adventure films: Seven Sinners with John Wayne and The Flame of New Orleans with Bruce Cabot. MGM’s initial instinct where Garbo was concerned was to return to the tried and tested formula and put her into the drama, A Woman’s Face. Based on Francis Croisset’s play, Il Etait Une Fois, this had been filmed in Swedish (En Kvinnas Ansikte, 1938) with Ingrid Bergman as facially disfigured murderess Anna Holm, who falls under the spell of a psychopath (Conrad Veidt), and at one point in the story plots to kill a four-year-old boy by pushing him out of a cable car. Directed by George Cukor, Melvyn Douglas was to play her love interest, the surgeon who restores Anna’s self-confidence by reconstructing her face – and this would have also enabled Garbo to achieve her long-standing ambition to work with Veidt.
Garbo was horrified – she was starting to become paranoid about losing her looks and there was no way that she was going to play a character who wanted to harm a child, even if Anna does come good in the end. The part went to Joan Crawford, and Mayer made a decision which, perhaps not inadvertently, would bring Garbo’s screen career to an end. With no one knowing how long the war would last – and with some Americans no longer wishing to hear European accents on the screen while the conflict was raging – Garbo would have to appeal exclusively to American audiences. The only way to make this happen would be to cast her, at thirty-four, as an ‘all-American oomph girl’. The film was Two-Faced Woman, a remake of Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman’s 1925 silent, Her Sister From Paris, itself based on a German play, The Twin Sister, by Ludwig Fulda, who during the spring of 1939 had committed suicide, aged 76, after being refused entry into the United States. The story told of a stuffy ski instructress who invents a sexy twin sister as a means of wooing her husband away from his mistress, getting him to fall in love with her, then revealing who she really is. The producer assigned to the project was Gottfried Reinhardt, in a privileged position, Bernie Hyman believed, as Salka Viertel’s lover, to sell the idea to her in the hope that Salka would be able to persuade Garbo to accept the part.338
Hyman took no chances with the budget, assigning just $320,000 to the production, of which Garbo would receive $150,000 along with the usual privileges, and Adrian and Cedric Gibbons were instructed to ‘go easy’ on the costumes and sets. George Oppenheimer was brought in to assist Salka with the script, and S. N. Behrman commissioned to write the dialogue. In retrospect, the project was never going to work: a story set in Renaissance Italy, written in German, transported to a modern day American setting and with the ‘all-American’ lead character pronouncing her lines with a marked Swedish accent. Garbo again chose Melvyn Douglas as her leading man: their first comedy pairing had worked so well, she did not wish to work with anyone else. The supports included Constance Bennett and Ruth Gordon, George Cukor was to direct, but Garbo did not get William Daniels to photograph her. Instead she was given Joseph Ruttenberg, who had recently worked with Cukor on The Women. In an attempt to transform her into some kind of Swedish Lana Turner, MGM gave Garbo a shorter fluffy hairstyle, a ‘contemporary’ wardrobe, and announced that she would be seen for the first time, extant of Peter The Tramp, in a swimsuit. Obviously the publicity department had forgotten the diving scene in Wild Orchids. Also, there would be no stunt double: she would actually be seen skiing, and performing an exotic dance – the chica-choca – which had been especially devised for her.
Shooting began on 18 June 1941 and proved a nightmare. Garbo had had fun making Ninotchka: Ernst Lubitsch had ruled the production with a gentle rod of iron and she had trusted him implicitly. Now there were constant spats between Gottfried Reinhardt and Salka, who were having relationship problems and taking it out on everyone else – and between Reinhardt and Cukor, on account of the former’s homophobia. ‘He was the type of man that I didn’t go for,’ Reinhardt recalled, ‘Even though I have had many friends who were homosexuals, his homosexuality bothered me. Perhaps above all because he was so ugly, and that made it ludicrous.’339 Garbo soon realised what a big mistake she had made. She disliked the cameramen and though she got along with her initially, came to loathe Constance Bennett for the trick she played on her.
Constance Bennett (1904–65) resented the fact that, formerly one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars, she was now ‘reduced’ to supporting a woman she had always looked down on as coarse and uneducated. She feigned friendship with Garbo by taking her under her wing and giving her ‘tips’ on how to dress in the film, claiming that although Adrian was the best couturier in Hollywood, he simply was not cut out for dressing this type of character. Garbo trusted her enough to listen, ignoring Adrian’s advice to the contrary. As a result, Garbo received some of the worst notices of her career and Bennett may even be accused of driving one of the final nails into the coffin of that career. She was also nasty towards Robert Sterling, whom Garbo took under her wing. A sensitive young man, he recalled one particular full-cast rehearsal: ‘“I’m serving tea in my dressing room,” Bennett said during a break. She thereupon invited each one, conspicuously omitting me. Garbo refused her invitation, and invited me to tea in her dressing room.’340 Bennett’s nastiness, as her career petered out, became legendary. A few years later, during one of her frequent visits to Capri, Garbo learned that the snooty actress had similarly attempted to sabotage Gracie Fields’ Hollywood career.341
The debacle would bring about the end of Adrian’s long association with MGM. The great couturier, who had dressed Garbo beautifully for thirteen years, recalled, ‘In her last picture they wanted to make her a sweater girl, a real American type. I said, “When the glamour ends for Garbo, it also ends for me. She had created a type. If you destroy that illusion, you destroy her.”’ Garbo is alleged to have told Adrian at the time, which one finds very hard to believe, ‘I’m very sorry that you’re leaving. But, you know, I never really liked most of the clothes you made me wear.’342 343
Magazine editor Larry Blake (Melvyn Douglas) is taking a break at a ski resort but is not interested in the sport – until he sees instructress Karin Borg, with whom he jokes and flirts, despite the fact that she remains standoffish. She tries to teach him to ski; however, he is hopeless and gets lost in a snowdrift. She disappears too, and for reasons known only to the scriptwriter, when next we see them they are married, living in a rented chalet with Larry’s business partner (Roland Young) and secretary (Ruth Gordon). Larry tells Karin, ‘The moment I saw you, I knew I wanted special instructions.’ To which she responds, ‘The moment I saw you, I knew I wanted to give them to you.’
At once, their marriage starts falling apart. Larry receives a call from an old flame, Broadway producer Griselda Vaughan (Constance Bennett). Sophisticated, dressed head to toe in haute couture and dripping with jewels, she is a complete contrast with the homely, sedately dressed Karin. Larry tells Griselda that he is married, and when she lets out a piercing scream and kicks a chair, we know there will soon be trouble.
Larry must return to the office in New York, but Karin wants to stay put, sensing that she might be more able to hold onto him while they are on ‘neutral’ territory. He orders her to accompany him; she refuses and goes swimming (Garbo wears a Valentina swimsuit and old-fashioned rubber cap, which, despite the adverse criticism, does not look that bad). When she returns, Karin accuses him of being two people: the poetic young man she loved and married, and the ‘Napoleon’ he has become.
Larry leaves for the Big Apple and, suspecting him of cheating, Karin follows. Wearing glamorous clothes, jewels and with a new hairstyle, she hopes to woo him back, but after tracking him down to the theatre where Griselda is rehearsing a new show and spying on them from the shadows, she realises that stronger measures are required. With the help of Larry’s secretary, she becomes Kathryn, her extroverted, worldly-wise twin sister. She is so convincing that Larry’s business partner asks to take her out.
Kathryn accompanies her date to the appropriately named Salka’s nightspot. Larry and Griselda are here too with their young friend, Dickie (Robert Sterling). Initially, Larry is taken in (the penny only drops when Kathryn loses her glove under the table and he picks it up for her, glancing at her painted toenails – a scene which unbelievably brought gasps of horror from Catholic critics). Aware that Larry is interested, Kathryn arouses his jealousy by flirting with the handsome but virginal Dickie. And when the snooty Griselda asks how she came by her beautiful clothes, pointing out that Karin, who Griselda has never seen, is only working-class, Kathryn declares, ‘I order what I like, I wear them and one day I find them paid for … Outside of love, everything is a waste of time. I like men, preferably rich men!’
Later, in the powder room, Griselda warns Kathryn to lay off Larry; otherwise she will call Karin and tell her what is going on. He, though, (in a supplementary scene which ruins the rest of the plot) has worked out who Kathryn really is, having called his housekeeper and learned that his wife is in New York. ‘Two can play at that game,’ he says.
Larry asks Kathryn to dance, knowing that Karin could not, and she responds by saying that she only dances with professionals. This leads to the film’s best sequence. Partnered by the in-house dancer (Robert Alton), Kathryn’s steps are clumsy, as Larry has expected, until she catches her heel in the hem of her dress. The band leader misinterprets her stamping as a signal to up the tempo, resulting in her on-the-spot invention of the ‘chica choca’ (which contrary to some reports at the time Garbo performs in its entirety, keeping perfect tempo throughout, without a stand-in). Larry flirts with her, hoping that if she goes too far she will be forced to reveal her true identity, while she flings herself at him, hoping that he will feel guilty and go rushing back to Karin (there is even a reprisal of the controversial cigarette-lighting scene from As You Desire Me). And, of course, a happy ending is somehow finally reached!
Shooting wrapped in the middle of September, and coincided with the first visit to Hollywood of the German novelist, Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970), famed for All Quiet on the Western Front and currently the amour of her great rival, Marlene Dietrich. Garbo had met him during her last trip to New York and he had squired her around town, bringing the snipe from Hedda Hopper, ‘Fur will fly if Garbo has taken Marlene’s beau away from her.’
A handsome, muscular Aryan who had served in World War I, before taking up writing, Remarque had enjoyed such diverse employment as making gravestones, flying an auto-gyro, and test-driving racing cars. He and Marlene had met in Venice in 1935 and built a relationship based on their loathing of what their country had become. Four years later she brought him to America. A manic depressive and heavy drinker, Remarque is said to have held so much information on the Nazi Party that, after giving orders for his books to be publicly burned, Hitler had personally added his name to their hit list. According to him, he and Garbo embarked on a brief but passionate affair. Writing in his journal after one ‘romantic’ episode, perhaps a little too prosaically for this to have been much more than wishful thinking, he observed, ‘She entered the bedroom, the light of the dressing room behind her, softly flowing over her shoulders, enchanting her outline … the absence of any form of sentimentality or melodrama – and yet full of warmth.’344
Two-Faced Woman was released in November 1941, and was at once condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, who released a statement: ‘This picture is offensive because of its immoral and un-Christian attitude towards marriage and its obligations with its impudently suggestive scenes, dialogue, situations and suggestive costumes.’ Founded in 1933, the movement’s goal was ‘the purification of the cinema’, though many of its early members were Jewish or Protestant and many more failed to practise what they preached. The Legion offered three main categories of rating: ‘A’ referred to ‘morally objectionable’, ‘B’ was ‘morally objectionable in part’, and ‘C’ – the category awarded the Garbo film – was ‘condemned’.
Why the Legion singled out this film, when others released at the same time were more racy, had much to do with Garbo’s insider knowledge of New York and Hollywood’s closeted gay community and in particular Francis Spellman (1889–1967), the Roman Catholic Archbishop (later Cardinal) of New York. His fear of her exposing him may have caused him to target her specifically. A close confidant of President Roosevelt, he was also a hypocrite and a phoney moralist – referred to as ‘Franny’ by intimates – who enjoyed liaisons with dozens of young men, mostly altar boys. The journalist Michelangelo Signorile denounced him as, ‘One of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the American Catholic Church’s history.’345 His biographer, John Cooney, gleaned much evidence of his secret life from the priests Spellman worked with – one revealing his long-term relationship with a chorus boy from the Broadway review, One Touch of Venus.346
Spellman denounced the film from the pulpit, while the Manhattan Catholic Interest Committee branded it ‘a danger to public morals’. After watching the film in Rhode Island, a group of ‘outraged ex-Garbo fans’ marched into the local police station, creating such a fuss that officers visited the establishment the following evening and closed it down. The film was banned in Missouri, Massachusetts and New York State: it was shown briefly in Australia and New Zealand, but withdrawn after complaints from religious groups there, one of which publicly denounced Garbo as ‘that Swedish trollop’. Finally, on 6 December MGM withdrew the film from circulation. Garbo was devastated. She had done absolutely nothing wrong, sticking to the script and following George Cukor’s instructions to the letter, yet here she was, victimised and made to appear dirty. MGM were accused of collaborating with the censor in an attempt to sabotage her career, the Breen Office having passed the script for public consumption, though she had no idea why they should want to do this. ‘They’ve dug my grave,’ she told friends.347
The next day, a Sunday, was one of the blackest days of the war. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, with a loss of 2,350 lives. Archbishop Spellman was less concerned with this than with attacking Garbo and this ‘ninety minutes of filth’. Despite his fear of flying, he flew to New York and demanded a meeting with the MGM executives and scriptwriters. The first thing Spellman saw when he marched into Mayer’s office was a huge portrait of himself hanging on the wall, Mayer’s way of proving to the outside world that he was on the side of the righteous. Later, he bequeathed Spellman $10 million in his will. For now, the cleric received a hefty pay-off to desist from making any more of a fuss and Mayer organised for Salka Viertel to rewrite the ‘offending’ scenes. He also commissioned a new scene in which Larry takes a phone call, where he learns that Karin and Kathryn are one and the same. To photograph this at a cost of $14,000 as Joseph Ruttenberg was working on another project, Mayer used Andrew Marton and Charles Dorian, who had been assistant director on Flesh and the Devil. A seething Gottfried Reinhardt recalled: ‘This prince of the Catholic Church … even more incensed than his minions, took time off from shepherding X-million souls to wage a one-man crusade – in a world torn by strife, with his own country on the brink of it – against my sinful Two-Faced Woman.’348
Meanwhile, Garbo had another ‘demon’ to deal with: Axel Wenner-Gren’s name had recently been added to the US government’s ‘List of Blocked Nationals’. This effectively prohibited him from doing business on both sides of the Atlantic by freezing his assets in Nassau’s Royal Bank of Canada. He did, however, have considerable holdings south of the border, and when Alexander Korda informed Garbo that Gren was in Mexico City, she called the industrialist and explained that she was ready for a holiday, but that because of the war she was unable to travel to Europe. An unsuspecting Gren swallowed the bait and invited her to spend time at the house he was renting there while Garbo applied for the requisite permit and arranged her flight. William Orr of MGM’s legal department, who had no business interfering now that she was no longer with the studio, learned of her plans – though not why she was going to Mexico – and advised her to reconsider. The country was believed to be a hotbed for Nazi sympathisers and dissidents, and Orr’s comments were recorded in the INS Travel Control Division’s ledger: ‘Learned it would be impossible for her to leave until the end of this month … explained the uncertainties that might arise in the meantime, and now it seems very unlikely that she will change her plans and follow the suggestion.’ Garbo, as usual, pleased only herself. Korda provided her with her permit, though who accompanied her on the flight, which took place around 12 December, or what she did in Mexico or reported back to Korda, is not known. So far as Orr and the press were told, she had gone to New York for ‘medical treatment’ – the term she frequently used when engaged in an espionage mission.349
The revised Two-Faced Woman premiered on New Year’s Eve 1941. MGM put out a publicity sheet, promoting sports equipment, ski equipment, and the benefits of having one’s own private instructor, and containing such ‘suggestive’ tag-lines as ‘Garbo Swims Like A Mermaid’ and ‘Garbo Skis & Finds Romance In A Wilderness Cabin’. It was, however, the slogan they used for the playbills which she loathed and tried, without success, to have changed: ‘Who Is The Screen’s Rhumba Queen Who No Longer Wants To Be Alone? A Gayer, Grander, GREATER Greta! Every Inch A Lady, With Every Other Man!’
For once, Mercedes de Acosta was spot on when she observed, ‘The studio made her feel that she should do a film for the American market, which meant appealing to a very low standard as far as Greta was concerned.’ The reviewer for PM, who had attended the original screening, hated the way the story had been hacked to bits. Applauding Garbo’s ‘loveliness, sensitivity, incandescence, timing and technical proficiency’, he rightly blamed the studio for saddling her with this mess:
And this is the woman, so unique in the movies that she’s no longer a person but become now a symbol, a legend whom Two-Faced Woman does everything it can to destroy. In its story’s frenzy to cover up its own emptiness, its sterility, its lack of any fine feelings, it makes Garbo a clown, a buffoon, a monkey on a stick. The fact that it’s a comedy doesn’t excuse its confused motivation, its repetition, its distasteful heartlessness.350
Time called the film, ‘An absurd vehicle for Greta Garbo,’ adding, ‘Its embarrassing effect is not unlike seeing Sarah Bernhardt swatted with a bladder. It is almost as shocking as seeing your mother drunk.’ The New York Herald Tribune said of her dancing, ‘Miss Garbo’s current attempt to trip the light fantastic is one of the awkward exhibitions of the season.’ The New York Times observed:
This is clearly one of the less propitious assignments of her career. Though she is her cool and immaculate self in the role of the clean-limbed ski instructress, she is as gauche and stilted as the script when playing the lady of profane love. No doubt her obvious posturings, her appallingly unflattering clothes and make-up were intended as a satire on the vamps of history – instead, her performance misses the satire and looks like something straight out of the movies of 1922. Mr. Douglas, who probably spends more time in pyjamas than any other male lead in history, continues to look as though a brisk walk in the open air in street clothes would refresh him. Apply that rule to the whole film, Messrs Cukor, Behrman, Oppenheimer et al: this is 1942, and Theda Bara’s golden age is gone.
Hedda Hopper inadvertently glimpsed into the future, writing in The Los Angeles Times:
Her pictures are so far apart that Metro starts off each publicity campaign with a broadside, as if she’d been buried and dug up for the occasion. We’ve had ‘Garbo Talks’, ‘Garbo Sings’ [sic], ‘Garbo Dances’ and ‘Garbo Laughs’. No doubt her ultimate picture will be ‘Garbo Retires’ – and do terrible business from a public expecting a bedroom farce.
Hedda was not alone. Six years earlier, the British novelist Eleanor Glin – the creator of the ‘It’ girl immortalised by Clara Bow – had uncannily predicted what would happen if Garbo ever had the misfortune to appear in a picture like this:
If Greta Garbo were to play two parts in the same talkie, no matter how marvellous everyone found her acting, that magic fascination which she puts forth would immediately go. The public unconsciously would know it was ‘art’ and all illusion of her mysterious personality would vanish.351
Contrary to what has been written, Two-Faced Woman was not a flop at the box-office, and recovered its cost twice over. Neither did any of the reviews attack Garbo especially – the fans would have been content to leave the story just as it was, as had happened with almost all of her previous films. Adultery was her theme, the one she had made her own. Reading the reviews, and reflecting on the most miserable period of her career, Garbo concluded enough was enough at least until the war was over and she could return to making the sort of films she wanted to make. According to Mercedes, her exact words were, ‘I will never act in another film.’
Word of this got back to Mayer, who reacted with typical Machiavellian aplomb. Hedda Hopper wrote that he had told her, ‘As long as I’m head of this studio, Greta Garbo can go on making films here.’ Salka Viertel claimed that he had informed her, having boasted that all of his other female stars were made to do as they were told, ‘Only Garbo is difficult. I am her best friend. I want her to be happy. She should come and tell me what she wants. Then I’d talk her out of it.’ In fact, Mayer neither gave her the chance to go and see him, nor went out of his way to thank her for her years of dedication to the studio, or for the fortune she had earned him: at the end of the month he gave orders for her dressing room at MGM to be refurbished for Lana Turner – Garbo’s belongings were packed into cardboard boxes and dumped outside for her to collect.352 353
Much of 1942 saw Garbo ‘drifting’. Hollywood no longer appealed to her – indeed, it rarely had – and in the New Year she, Gayelord Hauser and Frey Brown travelled to New York. She was here on 16 January when news came in that Carole Lombard’s plane had crashed into Mount Potosi, thirty miles south-west of Las Vegas, killing all twenty-two people on board. Lombard was in the middle of a phenomenally successful tour selling war-bonds – in one day alone she raised over $2 million for the war-effort. Garbo sent a message of condolence to Clark Gable and secretly gave $10,000 to Lombard’s fund. She was also contacted personally by Eleanor Roosevelt, and invited to appear alongside Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich and Ronald Colman in March of the Dimes, a radio show scheduled to be broadcast on 24 January and to raise funds for the First Lady’s anti-polio campaign.354
Here, we come across another great Garbo mystery. Some sources claim that Garbo actually made the broadcast, but no recorded evidence has ever surfaced; others say a stand-in was substituted at the very last minute (possibly Geraldine Dvorak) because she had to leave New York unexpectedly. This tied in with at least one certified (as near as is possible) report that she was actually in England at the time, having flown to London around 18 January.
The Wheatsheaf Hotel, at Caperby in North Yorkshire, claimed that Garbo stayed there from 21 January 1942, while ‘making appearances’ with Henry Hall at the nearby Catterick Garrison. One soldier, Norman Taylor, recalled, ‘It was definitely the Greta Garbo, not that she did much. She walked on to the stage between numbers, mumbled a few words of encouragement from a piece of paper, bowed politely and walked off again. But it was very definitely her, and I think she was staying somewhere nearby.’ The hotel register certainly bears what looks like an authentic signature. But, one asks, what exactly was she doing in this part of the country, albeit this was Britain’s biggest Army base? Was she, as Norman Taylor suggests, merely offering the servicemen morale? Or was she in pursuit of someone in particular? It is now quite likely that we will never know.355
There were also two male spies operating in Europe under the name ‘Garbo’ during the war, which has given rise to some critics believing that Greta Garbo, spy, was no more than a myth. The first, Luis Calvo, was interned in February 1942, during Garbo’s visit to Britain. The second, a double-agent named Joan Pujol Garcia (1912–88), instrumental during the D-Day landings, was employed by MI5. Sir William Stephenson takes great pains to name her as ‘that beautiful Swedish actress’, and with his impeccable track record for honesty and detail, that she was the one hired by him.
Upon her return to New York during the late spring of 1942, Garbo alternated for a little while between staying with Jessica Dragonette and S. R. Behrman, by day reading scripts she probably had no intention of accepting, taking in a show or play most evenings. She rejected The Paradine Case, the story of the lawyer who falls in love with the proprietress of a Swedish barber’s shop he is defending on a murder rap. Then, when she announced that she was putting down roots in New York and when in the autumn Bernie Hyman, the only MGM executive she had really got along with since Thalberg, died suddenly, aged just forty-five, Mayer gave up all hope of her ever returning to the screen. She rented an apartment at the Ritz Tower, on Park Avenue. Mercedes de Acosta had an apartment nearby. Having heard that Garbo might be staying in New York for the duration, she had moved one step ahead of her, using her influence to wangle a job working for Victory, the armed forces propaganda magazine based in the city.
For once, Garbo did not have to try too hard to evade her troublesome frangine: she received word that two of her old Weimar friends, Valeska Gert and Marianne Oswald, had recently arrived from Europe, having fled from the Nazis. They opened a Sapphic nightclub in Greenwich Village: Valeska the Beggars Bar, where most people on the scene would end up, while Marianne entertained her clients with what Albert Camus described as her ‘songs of soot and flame’, largely the works of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, her interpretation of which was only rivalled at the time by Weill’s wife, Lotte Lenya, who also sometimes performed there.
At around this time, Garbo showed interest in an English-language version of The Girl from Leningrad, the story of a Russian resistance fighter, set against the Russia-Finland conflict. Mayer gave the project his seal of approval and Garbo signed the contract: she would be paid $70,000 immediately and $80,000 when the film wrapped. No one knows who Mayer commissioned to write the script – since the Two-Faced Woman debacle, Salka Viertel was no longer ‘representing’ Garbo and had left MGM to work as an uncontracted writer for Warner Brothers with a considerable drop in salary. Harry Edington was gone too, replaced by Leland Hayward, then married to Margaret Sullavan. Soon after and without warning, MGM announced that Garbo had dropped out of the production. She had almost certainly been advised to do so by Alexander Korda or Sir William Stephenson, who may have believed that portraying such a heroine on the screen might compromise her position in real life. By the terms of her contract, Garbo could have retained the $70,000 MGM had paid her. Now she returned the money, her proviso being that Mayer should donate this to the war-bonds fund. Mayer may even have known or suspected that she was working for British Intelligence. Earlier in the year, when questioned about her ‘mysterious and suspicious activities’ in New York by the US State Department, he responded with a personal letter, ‘Miss Garbo is a person of fine character and a thoroughly reliable and responsible individual.’356
Garbo was still working for MI6, reporting back to Korda or Stephenson anything suspicious she saw or heard while socialising. She liaised on a secret intelligence operation with future United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, a man who had intimate knowledge of MI6 operations in Scandinavia, providing him with the names of suspected Nazi sympathisers working in Stockholm, information she had gathered during that last trip home. ‘There were some things that happened a long time ago that we had to talk about,’ she told her friend Raymond Daum, though she was letting on no more than this, concluding, ‘It was very painful for me – but I can’t tell you that story.’357 The film historian Kevin Brownlow, speaking at a 2005 conference in Dublin to honour Garbo’s centenary, claimed to have been told by her family, who said they had proof, that she very definitely had worked for Intelligence, though curiously none of this was included in Garbo, Brownlow’s celebratory documentary – he claimed because he believed audiences would find such revelations ‘incredulous’.
Garbo’s biggest ambition, it would appear – the one, as previously mentioned, she spoke about to Roger Normand – was to perpetrate the ‘big one’, the assassination of Hitler. She later told Sam Green:
Mr Hitler was big on me. He kept writing and inviting me to come to Germany, and if the war hadn’t started when it did, I would have gone and I would have taken a gun out of my purse and shot him, because I’m the only person who would not have been searched.358
It was during this sojourn in New York that Garbo developed a passion for collecting paintings and antiques. In the past, she had frowned upon such ‘ornaments’ – the only ‘artwork’ in her possession being a pair of worthless flower vases and the framed picture of Mauritz Stiller on her piano. Now, with the help of Barbara MacLean – formerly Barbara Barondess who played the chambermaid in Queen Christina, and who had retired from the movies to take up antiques broking and interior design – Garbo began building an impressive collection. During her visit to a salesroom, so cautious where expenditure was concerned that even close friends sometimes dismissed her as a ‘tight-wad’, she bought a dozen canvasses – including two Renoirs which set her back almost $35,000. She made a point of never signing a document or delivery note, declaring the vendor would only end up making a great deal of money by selling this to collectors. By the end of the year, she had around thirty paintings in storage, declaring that once she relocated to New York, these would be hung on the walls of the apartment she was planning to buy.359
Garbo also appears to have been planning another trip to England, under the pretence that she was interested in making a film there. Hedda Hopper, who would not have known about the first trip, somehow got to learn about this one, though she got the date wrong, writing in her Los Angeles Times’ column, ‘Greta Garbo has finally got the role she’s been waiting for. She’ll sail sometime in September for England to play Joan of Arc in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, under the direction of Clarence Brown.’ This was picked up by the British press, who added that the film would be produced by J. R. Rank at the Pinewood Studios. Shaw, however, appears to have known nothing about the project – quite possibly because this was another espionage mission arranged by Alexander Korda who, upon hearing that Hedda had somehow got wind that Garbo was travelling somewhere, had ‘leaked’ news of the non-existent film to help cover her tracks. The trip was, however, aborted at the last minute.360
In August, Garbo put a call through to Stockholm from Alexander Korda’s office, where she spoke at some length to Niels Bohr (1885–1962), the Danish physicist she had met while working with Mauritz Stiller, and again with Max Gumpel. Bohr had for some time been smuggling Jewish physicists out of Germany and sending them to safe-houses in Copenhagen, from where they were transported to Britain or the USA. In September, Garbo went to the very top, calling Gustav of Sweden himself and begging him to grant Bohr an audience, wherein the King was persuaded to offer asylum to Danish Jews, resulting in a massive operation by the Danish resistance movement, which rescued over 8,000 from under the Nazis’ noses. Official figures reveal that over 95 per cent of Denmark’s Jewish population survived the Holocaust because of their combined effort. Capturing Bohr would have been an immense scoop for Hitler; because of Garbo he failed, for it was she, liaising with Sir William Stephenson, who personally arranged for friends to get him out of the country. Before contacting Gustav, however, Garbo is even known to have checked out the royal family, with the help of Gumpel – also helping the Allies to locate and destroy important munitions sites in Germany – and the Swedish Consul-General, Axel Johnson. Gustav’s Queen was German and with Norway and Denmark already under the jackboot, many believed Sweden might declare itself pro-German at any moment.
Later this year, Garbo was claimed to have had a fling with the actor Gilbert Roland, though as with many of her ‘affairs’, the physical aspect of this may have been the figment of an overworked imagination, as had almost certainly been the case with Erich Maria Remarque. Roland (1905–94) was serving in the US Air Force and was involved with aerial reconnaissance. He was also married to Constance Bennett, so in getting involved with him, Garbo may have been exacting her revenge for her dreadful behaviour on the set of Two-Faced Woman. In November 1995, The Los Angeles Times ran the headline, ‘If Underpants Could Only Talk’, and described how, as a kinky going-away present when he had been returning to his base from leave, Garbo presented him with a pair of her cream-coloured, monogrammed silk knickers, which had now been put up for auction by his estate, along with a clutch of letters. The last of these, dated 4 December 1943 and ending their relationship, explained that there were many reasons why she would be unable to see him again, begged him to forgive her, to ‘leave it all to fate’, and above all, not to be sad. Oddly, none bore her signature – in most of them she refers to him as ‘Little Soldier Boy’ and herself as ‘Eleanor’, ‘Harriet’ or ‘Mountain Boy’ – but this did not prevent them from fetching over $150,000 at auction.
In his unpublished memoirs, Roland claimed to have bumped into Garbo in the street but while he had acknowledged her, she carried on walking. Then, a few days later, while visiting his Beverly Hills tailor, he was shown a pair of slacks the tailor had made for her, and offered to deliver them personally. Garbo refused to see him then but later called at his house when he was alone to thank him. According to the actor, she had stayed for dinner and:
We sat there on the patio in silence. I went close to her, and found the lips of my desire. We went upstairs. The moon was full, the windows opened. I could see her shadow by the moon, and mine, then the two met. So it was, and [the next morning after he had given her his mother’s gold ring and she had given him her underwear] … we kissed goodbye. I boarded the Army Transport plane back to the field, her panties inside my coat pocket.361
Roland claimed to have kept Garbo’s panties in his knapsack for two years, and that they saw each other each time he came home on leave, before eventually going their separate ways, in March 1944. This was the month she bought Loretta Young’s former house at 904 Bedford Drive, and hired Barbara MacLean to decorate, her first task being the removal of Loretta’s overtly strong ‘religious presence’, the shrines and holy water-stoups installed in almost every room.
In June, there was no comment from Garbo when journalists tried to interview her, as she was pulling into her drive, in the wake of the D-Day landings. Neither did she have much to say about Salka’s Viertel’s divorce from Bertholt, or of the event a few weeks later when she woke up in the middle of the night to find a man standing outside her bedroom door. Calmly, according to the report in The Los Angeles Times, she locked the door from the inside, called the police, then opened the window and shinned down the drainpipe. The man, a fan searching for keepsakes and not interested in the $500,000 worth of paintings in the sitting room, fled and in his haste dropped his stolen treasures – a few jewels and Garbo’s ration book with her signature on it – in the front garden. She specifically asked the police not to look for him.
Garbo was similarly unfazed on 18 October, when her mother died of a heart-attack in Scarsdale, New York, aged seventy-four. Indeed, even some of her closest friends never learned of Anna Gustaffson’s death until several years after the event. The dutiful daughter, she had brought Anna over from Sweden to spare her the possible danger of the war, but after those preliminary months in Los Angeles had little to do with her or the rest of her family. Greta Garbo, mysterious movie star, had nothing in common with the Greta Gustaffson they had known. Indeed, for the remaining months of the war she kept a low profile, her only notable excursion an invitation to an artists’ party, which would not have appealed to her had she not learned that Salvador Dalí had also been asked to attend. He turned up in a white suit, she in white slacks and tennis shoes. Walking up to the eccentric painter, Garbo looked him in the face and pronounced, ‘One of us has got it wrong,’ – and promptly left.362
Notes
332 ‘In some mysterious…’: William Stevenson: A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1976).
333 ‘If peace…’: Sven Broman, Garbo on Garbo (Bloomsbury: 1990).
334 ‘FDR’s voice…’: Norman Zierold, Garbo (Stein & Day: 1969).
335 ‘Garbo met…’: Wenner-Gren main file, Charles Higham Collection, USC.
336 ‘Just now I’m lying…’: Broman, ibid.
337 ‘My guess…’: Leiland, 1993, quoted in Karen Swenson, Greta Garbo: A Life Apart (Simon & Schuster: 1997).
338 Among those titles rejected were: Turns, The Gay Twin, Naughty Today & Nice Tomorrow, Anna & Anita, Her Weekend Sister, One-Day Bride and I Love Your Sister.
339 ‘He was the type…’: Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life (St Martin’s Press: 1991).
340 ‘I’m serving…’: Zierold, ibid.
341 Constance Bennett shared top-billing with Gracie Fields in the 1945 wartime drama Paris Underground, and recalled, ‘That woman was a devil. She tried to make me face the opposite way, so the camera didn’t get my best profile. There was never any compromise – she always had to be the centre of attention.’ David Bret, Gracie Fields (Robson Books: 1995).
342 ‘In her last…’: John Bainbridge, Garbo (Doubleday: 1955).
343 ‘I’m very sorry…’: Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (Sidgwick & Jackson: 1995).
344 ‘She entered…’: Julie Gilbert: Opposite Attraction: The Loves of Erich Maria Remarque & Paulette Goddard (Pantheon: 1993).
345 ‘One of the most…’: ‘Cardinal Spellman’s Dark Legacy’, New York Press, May 1902.
346 John Cooney, The American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman, Dell, 1984.
347 ‘They’ve dug…’: Bainbridge, ibid.
348 ‘This prince…’: Gottfried Reinhardt, The Genius: A Memoir of Max Reinhardt (Knopf: 1979).
349 ‘Learned it would…’: INSTCD Ledger, November 1941.
350 Press releases, January 1941.
351 ‘If Greta Garbo…’: Motion Picture, January 1933.
352 ‘As long as…’: The Los Angeles Times, January 1942.
353 ‘Only Garbo…’: Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1969).
354 Marlene Dietrich stressed that the only time that she and Garbo had ever shared the bill had been in Die Freudlose Gasse.
355 ‘It was definitely…’: Norman Taylor to author, July 1995.
356 ‘Miss Garbo is…’: Mayer’s letter, March 1942, quoted in Alexander Walker, Garbo (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 1980).
357 ‘It was very painful…’: Broman, ibid.
358 ‘Mr Hitler…’: Sam Green, quoted in Paris, ibid.
359 In 1990 ‘L’enfant en Robe Bleue’ sold at Sotheby’s for over $7 million.
360 Greta Garbo has finally…’: The Los Angeles Times, May 1943.
361 ‘We sat…’: Gilbert Roland, unpublished memoirs, quoted in Kathleen O’Steen, ‘Commitments: A Brief Affair, Greta Garbo & Fellow Actor Gilbert Roland’, The Los Angeles Times, November 1995.
362 ‘One of us…’: Meredith Etherington-Smith: Salvador Dalí: A Biography (Sinclair-Stevenson: 1992).