‘I keep getting these frightening thoughts about the future. Still, each to his own. Maybe it wouldn’t be much fun if everything was easy.’
During the spring of 1946, Garbo was ‘reunited’ with the photographer Cecil Beaton – like Mercedes, Stokowski and Hauser another egotistical ‘star-fucker’ who took advantage of her naivety and increasing moments of weakness to further his own aims. Like this unscrupulous trio, Beaton (1904–80) claimed to have had a physical relationship with Garbo, one which almost certainly never progressed beyond his overworked imagination and the frequently exaggerated pages of his diaries, six of which were published during his lifetime. Beaton was gay, the great love of his life being the art collector Peter Watson, no less a reprobate than he and an aficionado of rough-trade and male prostitutes. Of his sexuality, Beaton observed in 1923:
My attitude to women is this. I adore to dance with them and take them to theatres and private views and talk about dresses and plays and women, but I’m really much more fond of men … I’m really a terrible, terrible homosexualist, and try so hard not to be.363
The chronicler Martin Greif hit the nail on the head some years later:
In these post-Stonewall days of macho gay males in matching ensembles of bulging muscles and hairy chests, it’s hard to know what to make of Cecil Beaton. Photographer, costumier, writer and raconteur, he was a snob, a man about town, a wit and a bit of a shit.364
Neither were Beaton’s diaries entirely authentic. Before they were published, he ‘spruced up’ much of their content (sometimes to remove libel) and many entries which had been written years earlier were doctored. His biographer, Hugo Vickers, observed: ‘An historian should always mistrust a diary edited by the diarist himself. In The Wandering Years, the first volume, entries were rewritten with hindsight, some extracts were added that do not exist in the original manuscript diaries, events were kaleidoscoped and even dates were tampered with.’365
Born in Hampstead, the son of a wealthy timber merchant, Beaton studied drama at Harrow and Cambridge, but failed to graduate. A member of the Bright Young Things, London’s young and carefree aristocratic and bohemian set, he was taken on by Vogue in 1927. Beaton snapped most of the great personalities of the day, along with royalty, most notably the wedding pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. During the early days of World War II he accepted a commission from the Ministry of Information, which resulted in one of the most potent images of the day: a three-year-old Blitz victim, clutching her teddy bear while recovering in hospital. This was one of the images which, when syndicated in the American press, helped encourage the US public to pressurise their government into helping Britain in its darkest hour.
Beaton claimed to have first met Garbo in 1932 at Edmund Goulding’s home. Initially, he said, she was reluctant to have anything to do with him, having heard what he had said about her during his first visit to Hollywood, two years earlier. He had asked Howard Strickling to sweet-talk her into participating in a photo-shoot. She had said no, and in the published, sanitised version of his diary Beaton observes: ‘No advice or pressure would be of avail – she could never be won by flattery.’ In the original diary he had written words not dissimilar to his outburst back then: ‘Hell. Damn. Blast the bitch … Bloody Hell to Garbo, the independent and foolish bitch. Perhaps someday she may wish she had been photographed by me.’ Of this meeting he had also gushed in his diary: ‘She pervaded the scent of new-mown hay and of freshly-washed children’, adding that, though he had detected an instant rapport, Garbo was unable to get away fast enough – making her excuses, she told him she never wanted to see him again, and left.366
Now, fourteen years on, on 15 March 1946, Garbo bumped into this catty, unpleasant man at the New York apartment of a mutual friend, Vogue’s society author, Margaret Case. Again, Beaton goes over the top in recalling the event:
As if someone had opened a furnace door on me, I had to almost gasp for the next breath. Then she had been like a large apricot in the first fullness of its perfection. Now the apricot quality had given place to vellum. Her eyes were still like an eagle’s – blue-mauve and brilliant, the lids the colour of a mushroom – but there were a few delicate lines at the corners.367
Of course, she failed to recognise him after all this time, not that this prevented him from pestering her to step out on to the roof garden, determined that she should remain there ‘until I struck a chord of intimacy … by touching the knobbles of her spine.’ Bunkum, for sure. Once again Garbo disappeared into the night, though not before promising to stay in touch with the camp photographer.
During the first week of April she turned up unannounced at his apartment and they went walking in Central Park. From then on, Beaton’s story gets even more nonsensical: Garbo confessed that she had always regretted being a spinster, and he popped the question. Her response is not on record, but it is not that hard to imagine. She did not however reject Beaton’s request to photograph her: her passport was due for renewal, and having him do the job was preferable to going elsewhere. Curiously, when applying for this she gave her address as Tistad and this appears on the document. Beaton recalled, ‘At first she stood stiffly to attention, facing my Rolleiflex full face as if it were a firing-squad.’ Those early shots are remarkable. Garbo wears no make-up, plain clothes – a biscuit-coloured two-piece and white crew-neck sweater – and looks pensive, reclining on the couch with a cigarette-holder, or with her now-longer hair cascading over the cushions. She was so thrilled with the results, Beaton claimed, that after choosing one for her passport she gave Margaret Case permission to publish them in Vogue.368
Beaton found himself faced with competition for Garbo’s affection when Gayelord Hauser introduced her to the fashion designer Valentina and her partner, George Schlee, whose pasts were suitably interesting and enshrouded in enough mystery to capture her attention. According to their story, which may or may not be entirely true, Valentina (Valentina Nicholaevna Sanina, 1899–1989) was born and raised in Kiev, in the Ukraine. A drama student in Kharkov when the Revolution broke out in 1917, she is supposed to have met George Schlee (1900–74) at the railway station in Sebastopol while fleeing the country with the family jewels. There has always been doubt as to whether they were legally married. After living in Athens, Rome and Paris, they arrived in New York in 1923, where Valentina soon became a prominent member of the city’s café society. Five years later, she opened her first couturier’s on Madison Avenue.
One of Schlee’s first moves as Garbo’s chevalier servant was to oust Leland Hayward as her manager and appoint himself as her financial adviser, suggesting how and where she should invest her vast wealth – in the summer of 1946, she was already worth in excess of $5 million. Gayelord Hauser was still dictating how she should eat and think, while Mercedes and Salka were still engaged in a battle royal over the direction they believed her career should have been taking. Bounced back and forth between these four, who were constantly at loggerheads with each other, Garbo was a confused woman. And now she had Valentina, telling her what to wear, while Cecil Beaton was fussing in the background, serving little purpose other than using her, as others had done before, as a lavender crutch, and never missing out on a ‘bitch-fest’ with Mercedes to pull her to pieces behind her back.
Like Hauser, Valentina had amassed a Who’s Who of New York and Hollywood A-list clients: currently singing her praises and paying over the odds for her creations in these austere times were Marlene Dietrich, the Duchess of Windsor, Vivien Leigh, Norma Shearer, Paulette Goddard, Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson. Valentina also designed for top Broadway productions, most notably those starring Lynn Fontanne.
Since 1940, the Schlees had held court at Valentina Gowns, a four-storey building off Fifth Avenue. According to George’s rather incredulous account, he first fell in love with Garbo when he saw her standing stark naked in one of Valentina’s workrooms. As with Stokowski, Hauser, Beaton and Mercedes, the relationship which developed between them, though close, almost certainly never progressed beyond the platonic. On 6 July, they boarded the Gripsholm, where they would occupy separate staterooms. For the first time since arriving in New York with Mauritz Stiller, Garbo paused for photographs on the deck of a ship, some journalists taking this as an indication that they were probably seeing her for the last time, particularly as she had booked the passage in her own name. After a brief stopover in Liverpool, the ship reached Stockholm on 17 July. The usual throng awaited her at the pier, composed of fans who had also never expected to see her again. She and Schlee were collected from the lounge by Consul-General Axel Johnson, who drove them into the city, where they joined Max Gumpel.
Though the war had been over for almost a year, renegade Nazi sympathisers still infiltrated Stockholm society. Leaving Schlee to explore the city, Garbo, Johnson and Gumpel headed for the latter’s summer retreat at Baggensnas, where ‘matters of war’ were discussed. After this, Garbo spent time with Mimi Pollak and her husband, then she headed for Tistad where, face to face, she ended her friendship with Horke Wachtmeister. Though there seemed no reason at the time why she should have done this, her confidant Sven Broman later speculated that Garbo had fallen for Horke’s husband, Nils, and had needed to distance herself from the couple to prevent anything coming of this.
There was more drama when she received a call from Alexander Liberman, Vogue’s artistic editor, thanking her for the Beaton pictures. Garbo was livid, declaring that she had never given permission for them to be published. There was more: in February 1938, Beaton had published a sketch in the magazine, to which he had added an anti-Semitic caption, which included the offensive word ‘kike’. This resulted in Condé Nast having to withdraw 130,000 copies of Vogue from the newsstands. Summoned to their offices, Beaton had offered the lame excuse that the ‘gaffe’ had occurred because he had been tired and suffering from a cold, but they fired him on the spot. The Garbo photographs had been his method of worming his way back into their good books.
Perhaps on account of the rift with Horke, Garbo cut short her visit to Sweden. She and Schlee boarded the Gripsholm during the last week of August, arriving back in New York on 4 September, where she granted an on-deck press conference, lasting all of sixty seconds, just long enough to tell reporters, ‘I hate to be stared at. I know how animals in the zoo feel when they poke them with little sticks,’ and to respond when asked about her plans for the future: ‘I have no plans, not for the movies, not for the stage, not for anything. I haven’t even got a place to live; I’m sort of drifting.’
No sooner had she settled in at the Ritz Tower than she was bombarded with calls from Cecil Beaton. These got no further than the reception desk as Garbo had given explicit instructions that no calls from Beaton be put through to her suite, although she was accepting others. Not to be outdone, Beaton trailed her to Hollywood, where he claimed he cornered her, only to be told, ‘By your action, you have deprived me of a friend,’ and that she never wanted to see or hear from him again. For over a year, she would stick to her guns.369
At the end of the month, Garbo was again approached with The Paradine Case, scheduled to begin shooting in December. The script had been revised by Alma Neville, whose husband Alfred Hitchcock would direct. She seriously considered the project, only to back out again. The part went to Alida Valli, who was supported by Gregory Peck and Ann Todd.
During the first half of 1947, with no work offers coming in, Garbo socialised with friends but was rarely seen in public. There was a flurry of excitement among the media when it emerged that she and George Schlee had booked to sail on the Queen Mary. One rumour declared that he was about to divorce Valentina and marry Garbo in Europe, another that this time, when she visited Sweden, she would stay put. By the time the ship docked in Southampton on 16 August, the story had changed: she had ‘business meetings’ to attend to in London, but refused to say what these were about, only that afterwards she would not be travelling on to Sweden. Upon their arrival in the capital, the couple were driven to Claridge’s, where they had booked adjacent suites. The next morning, Schlee went sightseeing, while Garbo was collected from the hotel by Winston Churchill’s private chauffeur. After lunching with Prime Minister Clement Attlee at 10 Downing Street, she was driven to the Cabinet War Rooms, where she spent several hours in conversation with Churchill himself. This was almost certainly a debriefing, the minutes of which are currently housed in a vault at the Imperial War Museum.
Garbo’s next assignment in London, after tying up these loose ends regarding her work with MI6, was a visit to the offices of a well-known law firm. The previous October one of her most fervent fans, seventy-year-old Edgar H. Donne, had died, bequeathing her his fortune. His will proclaimed, ‘I hereby give my entire estate to Greta Lovisa Gustaffson, whose stage name is Greta Garbo, to her and no other. If Greta Garbo becomes my wife, then it goes to Greta Lovisa Donne.’ An Englishman and reportedly a descendant of the poet, John Donne, Edgar had emigrated to America at the turn of the century, apparently banished by his family for some misdeed. A Howard Hughes-style recluse, he spent his last years in a tumbledown house in Michigan, from where he had written to Garbo, on one occasion asking her to marry him. The Los Angeles Examiner reported her as saying:
I do not know Mr Donne. I vaguely recall that he sent me a letter some years ago which was returned to him. I don’t recall anything he said in it. I’m told that he once made a trip to Los Angeles to see me. I didn’t see him, nor did I talk to him.370
Garbo was probably being coy. It is a well-known fact that she never opened fan letters, therefore an admission that she vaguely recalled the one sent by Donne, among the thousands she received each week suggests there was more to this than she was letting on. Subsequently, she had become $75,000 richer, and the legal owner of 160 acres of oil-rich land in Michigan worth in excess of $120,000. Donne’s only stipulation was that she would have to travel to London to collect her inheritance. Hedda, Louella and other columnist hacks hinted that Garbo, who had done ‘so little’ for the war effort, was little more than a money-grabber, though they were slow in reporting what happened next. Meeting with Donne’s lawyers in London, once she discharged the requisite probate and inheritance taxes, she donated every penny of her windfall to the Sister Mary Kenny Polio Foundation.
From London, Garbo and Schlee flew to Paris, where there was yet another uneasy reunion with Mercedes de Acosta, who had taken the liberty of booking three suites at the Hotel Crillon – Garbo’s under the name ‘Mademoiselle Hanson’. Mercedes did not get to see much of Garbo, though, as most of her time was spent with Jean Cocteau, whose play, L’Aigle À Deux Têtes, she was interested in bringing to the screen. In March she had seen the English adaptation at New York’s Plymouth Theatre, with Tallulah Bankhead in the role of the Bavarian queen who falls in love with Stanislas, the young man sent to assassinate her (played by German actor Helmut Dantine, who had replaced a mumbling, troublesome Marlon Brando). Cocteau’s lover, Jean Marais, had appeared alongside Edwige Feuillère in the original French production and Cocteau was currently directing the film version on location at the Chateau de Pierrefonds, where Garbo visited the set to watch them rehearse the final scene. The longest monologue in movie history, this saw the queen enacting a twenty-minute, 20,000-word speech before plunging head first down a huge staircase with a bullet in her heart, while her killer drinks a cup of poison.371
Upon her return to New York, while the scriptwriters were working on The Eagle Has Two Heads, George Cukor introduced Garbo to Tennessee Williams, who never found her less than daunting:
She goes by the name of Harriet Brown and sneaks around like the assassin of Bugsy Siegel … In appearance she is really hermaphroditic, almost as flat as a boy, very thin, the eyes and voice extraordinarily pure and beautiful. But she has the cold quality of a mermaid … She scares me to death.372
Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire was scheduled to open at the Eleanor Roosevelt Theatre at the end of the year, with Jessica Tandy in the central role of Blanche Du Bois and Marlon Brando as the rough-and-ready, sweaty Stanley Kowalski. Williams was being serious when he asked Garbo if she was interested in playing Blanche in the screen version and one may only shudder to think what she would have sounded like, playing a Southern belle, or how she would have got along with someone as difficult as Brando. She declined, declaring that she was ‘too masculine’ for the part. Williams tried to tempt her with another role: that of The Mistress in a script he was currently working on titled The Pink Bedroom. A difficult, noisy and argumentative piece, this sees an actress and her older mentor-lover slugging it out in the bedroom where they have been conducting an affair for the last ten years, each blaming the other for its failure, while the younger lover, waiting to take his place, waits in the next room. Garbo was interested, and kept in touch with Williams; she even agreed to be his ‘date’ for the premiere of Streetcar. She balked however at the completed script, when she saw that he had named the older lover Michael Stiller and had him commit suicide in the final scene, in the pink bedroom, after the actress has left him for his rival.
Early in 1948, Alexander Korda announced that he wanted to direct The Eagle Has Two Heads at Shepperton Studios, with Cecil Beaton designing Garbo’s wardrobe and assisting with the sets. When the deal inexplicably fell through, Korda offered her a London stage production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which, with her horror of appearing in public, was out of the question. Much of the spring and summer was taken up with other hoped-for projects, all amounting to nothing. Billy Wilder approached her with L’Inconnue de la Seine, which centred around the celebrated death-mask in the Louvre of an unidentified young woman whose body had been fished out of the river during the 1880s. Wilder had for the purpose of this film ‘identified’ her as a banker’s wife with a controversial past. ‘No wives of bankers,’ was Garbo’s sharp response. Wilder is said to have been furious, but still paid tribute to her two years later when he wrote and directed Sunset Boulevard for Gloria Swanson. In one scene, faded siren Norma Desmond enthuses while watching the silent screen, ‘We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces. There just aren’t any faces like that anymore. Only one – Garbo!’
Next, Garbo herself came up with the notion of playing a female Pagliacci, and even had Cecil Beaton photograph her dressed as a clown. No one was interested, or in her subsequent suggestion that she might play Francis of Assisi! Then, on 26 August, there was considerable excitement when news broke that Garbo’s seven-year hiatus from the movies was about to end: she had signed a one-film deal with Walter Wanger, who had produced Queen Christina and had been trying to purloin her from MGM for years.
The proposed film was The Lost Moment, recounting the love affair between feminist novelist George Sand and Frederic Chopin. Sand (Amandine Dupin, 1804–76) caused a sensation by smoking a pipe in public – which many believed was as low as a woman could sink – and by wearing men’s clothes, for no other reason, she claimed, than that they were cheaper and more practical than the voluptuous gowns of the day. This attire gained her admittance to society venues usually prohibited to women. In this respect, she and Garbo had much in common. Wanger had yet to find an actor to portray Chopin, but he settled on Robert Cummings to play another of Sand’s lovers, Alfred de Musset. Her sanitised story had been told three years earlier in A Song to Remember, starring Merle Oberon and Cornel Wilde; this one promised to remain as close to history as the Breen Office would permit. Wanger commissioned Salka Viertel to write the script, and Cecil Beaton for the costumes and sets, hoping this might make Garbo easier to handle, and unaware that they were not speaking.
Garbo had other ideas. She had recently seen G. W. Pabst’s recent drama about anti-Semitism, Der Prozess (The Trial) and was so impressed that she announced only he should direct The Lost Moment. Neither did she want Robert Cummings in the film. Back in March, she had seen Montgomery Clift’s new film, The Search, directed by Fred Zinnemann. This was set in post-war Berlin and tells the story of a sensitive American soldier helping a little boy search for his mother, last seen in Auschwitz. Salka knew Monty and effected an introduction. He and Garbo hit it off at once and would remain friends until Monty’s early death in 1966. Pabst had not seen Garbo since Die Freudlose Gasse and was only interested in having her play the dual roles of Circe and Penelope in his adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, with Orson Welles approached to play Ulysses. As Wanger wanted neither Pabst nor Monty involved with his film, the project was abandoned.
The rift between Garbo and Cecil Beaton ended not long afterwards, when he waylaid her in the lobby at the Ritz Tower. Whatever was said is not known, save that she appears to have forgiven him for the Vogue incident. With typical Beaton hokum, he claimed that just hours later they were in bed, recording in the fantasy world of his diary: ‘She said firmly that she wanted to make a man out of me.’ According to him, they spent most of the festive season together: ‘I gave a toast to our marriage, our life together, but Greta did not elaborate on this theme and smiled a little diffidently,’ he observed of their New Year’s Eve ‘tryst’, adding their subsequent lovemaking had been ‘wild and tender’. In January, Garbo returned to Hollywood, Beaton following in hot pursuit. He claimed to have stayed at her house for twelve days, something that virtually no one would ever do, the only exceptions having been Borg, Nils Asther and Garbo’s family. He also invented an even more ridiculous scenario of seeing Garbo working stark naked in her garden, manuring her roses and mending the broken fence. At the end of the month he returned to New York, though Garbo would never learn: like Mercedes, Beaton would turn up time and time again and always find himself welcomed back with open arms.373
On 10 March 1949, Harry Edington suffered a stroke and died while Garbo was on her way to visit him in hospital. She had refused to travel to New York when Anna Gustaffson had died but she visited Edington’s widow, Flesh and the Devil co-star Barbara Kent, helped out with the arrangements and was one of the chief mourners at his funeral. Though he had stopped representing her, they had remained good friends and his death had come as a tremendous shock.
A few days later, Garbo was somewhat cheered when Walter Wanger proposed a film version of La Duchesse de Langeais, the second part of Honoré de Balzac’s trilogy, Histoire des Treize. Published in 1834, it tells the story of Antoinette de Langeais, the noblewoman-coquette who jilts her lover and gives up on the high life to become a nun, only to die at twenty-nine. First filmed by André Calmettes in 1910, there had been a thirty-five minute American version, The Eternal Flame (1922) by Frank Lloyd, starring Norma Talmadge and Adolphe Menjou, and four years later a German adaptation, Liebe, with Elisabeth Bergner. More recently (1942), it had been filmed with the much-revered Edwige Feuillère, the actress Garbo had admired in L’Aigle À Deux Têtes and, she was the first to admit, not an easy act to follow.
Max Ophuls was pencilled in to direct the film and Sally Benson – most famous for Meet Me In St Louis (1944) – was hired for the script. Garbo had met Ophuls (1902–57) in Paris and attended a private screening of his 1939 classic, Sans Lendemain. Ophuls also scored a massive scoop in persuading the only star of Garbo’s magnitude ever to agree to appear in one of her films, Edith Piaf, to perform ‘Pour Moi Toute Seule’. In a café-concert sequence inspired by Garbo’s visit to the Concert-Damia some years earlier, while Antoinette sits feeling dejected, Piaf was to sing, ‘Faded walls, joyless days … For me, all alone, a dream begins. It will end tomorrow, but for now I am fine.’ British actor James Mason was expected to co-star.
Garbo’s fee was the lowest it had ever been: $25,000 upon signing the contract, and a further $25,000 on completion of the film, but she would pocket a percentage of the box-office takings. The film was to be a joint Italo-American production, shot mostly on location in Rome and largely financed by Angelo Rizzoli and Giuseppe Amato. The former was Italy’s leading magazine publisher, the latter a producer of some distinction; their most famous film would be La Dolce Vita in 1960. They were a finicky pair who, before giving the go-ahead to release capital for the project, asked that Garbo submit to a screen test. The thought of asking her to do this filled Walter Wanger with dread, yet she was the first to admit that Rizzoli was within his rights to make such a demand since it had been a long time since Garbo had faced a camera. ‘If I disliked it all then, what would I feel about it now?’ Cecil Beaton claimed she asked him.374
In fact, three tests were made, running to a combined total of between twenty and forty minutes, depending on which account one reads. The released test, discovered in 1990, lasts less than five minutes. Because the footage has been mixed, it is not easy to distinguish one test from another. Garbo is seen wearing a checked shirt and scarf, sometimes against a plain backdrop, sometimes with props: a Grecian column, a table, a hood, a jacket, a cigarette. A wind-machine is switched on and she fidgets with her hair as her facial expressions alternate in rapid succession: frowning, pondering, anxious, arching one brow then the other, smiling, laughing, sniggering, turning aside to joke with the crew. And, at forty-three, still looking flawlessly gorgeous throughout.
Garbo had wanted William Daniels to test her, but Walter Wanger brought in Joseph Valentine, who had just photographed Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc. Valentine made the test at the Chaplin Studio on 5 May. No sooner was this in the can than he collapsed on the set, and on 18 May he died. Garbo was satisfied with the test, and declared it her personal tribute to Valentine’s memory, but Wanger declared it null and void and commissioned a second test from James Wong Howe for 25 May. Garbo protested and as a compromise two tests were made on this day, Howe’s during the morning, Daniels’ later in the day. These were done at the Universal Studios, where both photographers were currently working. Both tests, Garbo declared, would be submitted to the Italian backers.
Early in August, Garbo and George Schlee sailed for Cherbourg and from the ship cabled Walter Wanger to say that she no longer wanted Max Ophuls to direct. While in New York she had caught a performance of South Pacific, produced by Joshua Logan, and had been so impressed that she wanted him to direct her in La Duchesse. There was another more potent connection between Garbo and Logan: drafted into the US Army in 1942, he too had worked as an intelligence officer. Wanger cabled back to say that he would think about it. He and his business partner Gene Frenke, with whom he had set up International Productions to finance the film, were starting to tire of Garbo’s ‘finicky ways’, declaring that she was driving them to bankruptcy.
The previous August, the company had assigned a $250,000 budget to whatever project might have taken her fancy: a sizeable portion of this had already been wasted on the aborted George Sand movie, and besides financing Garbo and Schlee’s trip to Europe, the company had advanced Sally Benson $15,000 for the script of La Duchesse. Additionally, there were problems with James Mason, who was demanding $150,000 – three times what Wanger was paying Garbo – as well as top-billing in the film. Eventually, he would be persuaded to drop this to $75,000, which Garbo did not mind as Mason would not be netting a share of the profits, but there was no way that she or anyone else would have submitted to his name appearing above hers in the credits.
In Rome, despite her elaborate disguise, Garbo was recognised leaving the studio with Schlee by one pesky journalist, who spent the entire day trailing her:
There was a swish of revolving doors, and a figure that looks like a devotee of some less austere monastic order emerges. An enormous straw hat covers four-fifths of her face; there are sunglasses unseen beneath the brim. There is a loose one-piece dress, caught at the middle with a simple girdle. On the feet there are sandals. In one stride she is in the car. A man following takes one stride and is beside her. The high-powered roadster roars off, followed by three cars, two jeeps and a motorcycle … and [when she returned to her hotel] now Miss Harriet Brown sweeps through the swing-doors, and like a shot from a gun is in the lift, leaving the great bunch of flowers from her Italian producer where it has been since the morning, on the porter’s desk.375
In Italy, Garbo’s paranoia of meeting strangers worked against her, whereas in Hollywood, she had got most of her own way by using her quest for solitude, going into hiding, or threatening to go home as a bargaining counter. MGM had played her game because, as their most bankable star, they had needed her more than she needed them. Now, whenever she retreated into her shell, she was heartlessly forced out of it as Angelo Rizzoli and his team alerted the paparazzi to her every movement, forcing her to change her hotel three times within the space of a week. The ‘secret’ meeting she was supposed to have with Rizzoli and his project partner, Giuseppe Amato of Scalera Films, turned into a nightmare when she found herself surrounded by hundreds of reporters who blocked her entrance to the building until she smiled and pronounced, ‘I want to be alone!’
At a subsequent meeting she wore a veil over her face throughout the entire ordeal, like the mysterious character at the end of As You Desire Me, and was accused of mocking the backers. News next arrived that the Breen Office had condemned Sally Benson’s script as, ‘Obscene – a story of adultery, without any voice for morality.’ Rizzoli demanded a rewrite, at Wanger’s expense. By now the budget had risen to almost $500,000 and Wanger saw little point in throwing good money after bad. Rizzoli refused to compromise by injecting more of his own cash into the project and the plug was pulled on the project, the backers and Wanger screaming at each other over the phone, while Garbo and George Schlee slipped out of the city and headed for Paris. Here they retreated as best they could from the public spotlight, and on 2 October took the train to Le Havre. The next day they boarded the Ile-de-France for New York. James Mason never forgave Garbo for what had happened, though it was not her fault, arrogantly declaring, ‘They probably cancelled it because they just couldn’t deal with this crazy dame.’376
On 9 February 1951, Garbo finally became an American citizen. Her reason for doing so, bearing in mind that she had spent most of her career threatening to go home, owed more to her wanting to hold on to her Swedish investments than to any loyalty she might have felt towards the country. This was the Cold War, and with Russia posing a threat to Scandinavia, lawyers and friends such as Sir William Stephenson advised her that as a legalised American, such investments would remain protected. As part of the process she was questioned about her association with ‘known Communist’ Salka Viertel, whose name had recently been added to the Communist List compiled by the FBI. In fact, the ‘reds under the bed’ appear to have been Salka’s ex-husband Berthold and their son Peter (1920–2007) and, without a doubt Peter’s wife, Virginia Ray Schulberg, who, in the 1930s was publicly acknowledged as a major force in the Communist Party. Garbo confessed that she had known Salka while she had been working in the movies but that, since retiring almost ten years ago, they had gone their separate ways. Untrue, of course, but denouncing Salka allowed Garbo’s application to go through without further challenge. She signed the document and even allowed a photographer to record the event. Unable to shield her face with a newspaper or hat, she wore the veil she had worn for her last meeting with Angelo Rizzoli.
There would be few serious offers of work from now on, with those making the offers knowing full well what the answer would be. Garbo had devoted her entire career to MGM. She had tolerated their unscrupulous and conniving ways, they her threats to leave and multitude of mood-swings. She had felt it preferable to put up with two-faced executives that she knew how to cope with, rather than up sticks and move to another studio, where she would have to start all over again. For a little while, there was talk of remaking Flesh and the Devil, with Clarence Brown at the helm and even an American-Swedish co-production of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, to be filmed in Stockholm by her old Academy friend, Gustaf Molander, to avoid censorship issues but neither project ever materialised. Garbo also turned down $45,000 for five-minute spots on two television shows: CBS’ This Is Show Business and NBC’s The Kate Smith Hour.
For several years, Cecil Beaton had been trying to tempt Garbo to visit Reddish House, his home near Salisbury, in Wiltshire. His greatest ambition, he said, was to photograph her within the secluded grounds, to chaperone her around the beautiful neighbouring English countryside and, of course, to show her off to his snooty friends. Another ambition was to be the first to photograph her in colour, but she gave this commission to his rival, Anthony Beauchamp, the British society photographer married to Winston Churchill’s daughter, Sarah. Garbo and Beauchamp, who committed suicide six years later, met during one of her visits to 10 Downing Street. He took just six shots of her, one of which appeared on the cover of the June 1951 issue of McCall’s magazine. The commission was her way of exacting revenge on Beaton for selling her passport picture to Vogue.
Beaton was furious, but kept on pestering Garbo all the same, and in October, after selling her Hollywood home, her way of saying goodbye to ‘Tinseltown’ forever, she gave in. Even so, she never completely forgave Beaton for what he had done, and in her suitcase packed a copy of Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook, which she would read aloud to whoever happened to be present whenever he started getting on her nerves, which appears to have been often. Compiled and published in 1937, after he had met her, the section of the book devoted to Garbo starts off well enough. He describes her as ‘as beautiful as the aurora borealis’, applies over-syrupy praise to her acting abilities, goes into great detail when discussing every aspect of her physique, then spoils it all by launching a savage attack on her personality:
She has a sense of humour, a sense of fun, but she is unhappy, neurasthenic, morbid … She is not interested in anything or anybody in particular, and she has become as difficult as an invalid and as selfish, quite unprepared to put herself out for anyone … She is superstitious, suspicious and does not know the meaning of friendship. She is incapable of love.377
Through Beaton, Garbo met an upper-crust fop even more insufferable than he was: his neighbour, Stephen Tennant (1906–87). Tennant was a former Bright Young Thing, a poet, painter, novelist, agoraphobic, hypochondriac and arch snob. This peculiar man had spent most of his long life ‘retreating from society’ and had spent the last fifteen years in bed, for no other reason than he was lazy and wished to be waited on hand and foot. Terrified of leaving his home, yet eager to meet Hollywood’s most illustrious star, Tennant called Beaton and demanded that he drive her over for dinner, whether Garbo wanted to see him or not. Such was her curiosity that she agreed, her only stipulation being that no one else should be there. The two got along well, so much so that Tennant accepted an invitation to dine at Reddish House, the first time he had left his room in months. Beaton also introduced Garbo to his sisters and octogenarian mother, to Princess Margaret, the Marquis of Bath, and to one of the doyennes of British society, Diana Cooper. All took an instant dislike to her, a feeling which was mutual. Garbo and Beaton, sometimes accompanied by his on-off lover Peter Watson, visited Bath, Oxford, Eton and Cambridge, getting immense pleasure from meeting the students in their ‘spiffing’ uniforms, but always refusing to pose with them for photographs or sign autographs. According to Beaton, during this trip he once again asked Garbo to marry him, getting the same response as before. Alone, she lunched with Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill at 10 Downing Street, two weeks before the latter was elected to serve a second term. In 1952, Garbo came close to playing the central role of the contessa suspected of murdering her husband in the screen adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s best-selling novel, My Cousin Rachel. This would have seen her playing opposite Richard Burton in one of his early leads, had she not decided that she would never succeed in effecting a credible Cornish accent.
In the autumn of 1953, Garbo forked out $38,000 for a seven-room apartment on the fifth floor of The Campanile, a 14-storey, pre-war tower block situated at 450 East 52nd Street, in New York’s Sutton Place area. This remained her home for the next thirty-seven years. It was not a mausoleum, like her previous residences, but an opulent, comfortable and well-furnished abode where she could relax, surrounded by her paintings and objets d’art, or lounge on her terrace and enjoy panoramic views of the East River and Manhattan. The musical-comedy star Mary Martin was a near neighbour and, more importantly, George and Valentina Schlee had an apartment on the ninth floor.
Initially, Garbo had the apartment refurbished by Barbara MacLean, but over the next few years she hired several interior designers, most notably Billy Baldwin (1903–83), one of the best – and costliest – in the business, who later worked for Jacqueline Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. In his memoirs, Baldwin described the finished effect: ‘All the colours were rosy and warm: there were beautiful curtains of eighteenth-century silk, a Louis XV Savonnerie carpet, the finest-quality Régence furniture and wonderful Impressionist paintings.’ He recalled how Garbo had come up with the unusual colour-scheme for her bedroom. During a trip to Sweden, she was so taken with the mulberry-coloured lampshades in the dining-car on the train that she ‘lifted’ one, and now asked Baldwin to replicate it: ‘She lit a candle and held it beneath the shade. Our job was to paint the room the colour that resulted from the candlelight shining through the silk.’378
The drifting and socialising continued. As happened with Marlene Dietrich when she retired – ‘Address all letters to Mrs Sieber,’ she told friends, this being her married name – Garbo very quickly ‘put the star to bed’, save that, while Marlene bowed out at almost eighty, Garbo had done so at thirty-six. And like the great stars who had died before their time – Valentino, Harlow, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe – to the world outside her intimate circle she was able to remain eternally young, while still alive. As the years passed, fans may have wondered what she looked and sounded like, extant of the blurred paparazzi photos which cropped up periodically, but all they really saw in their mind’s eye were the beautiful images in Camille and Queen Christina.
In retirement, even Garbo’s closest friends were told to address her as Harriet Brown. She never entertained at home, though she was a welcome if not communicative guest at others’ social events, providing she knew everyone present: the slightest whiff of a stranger and she would flee into the night. She still saw a lot of Salka Viertel and she was hardly ever away from George Schlee, mindless of his wife Valentina’s increasing chagrin. She grew close to David Niven and his Swedish wife, Hjordis, and often visited Montgomery Clift. Another intimate was Jane Gunther, the former editor of Reader’s Digest, and every now and then, she enjoyed a reunion with Sven Hugo Borg. Then there were the frangines, usually defined as belonging to two categories: the ‘butch’ including Mercedes, Marianne Oswald and Valeska Gert, and the ‘fems’: Cecil Beaton, Gayelord Hauser and Frey Brown.
Because Garbo avoided public functions, she did not have to care how she looked and no longer bothered to keep up with the latest fashions, though she did own a collection of stunning Valentina gowns. When Harriet Brown showed up at a party, it was in slacks, sweater or shirt, flat shoes and, more often than not, with her hair unkempt and windblown. Friends have said that she rarely talked about her films or about Hollywood and that if she did, she spoke about herself in the third person. During the early to mid-Fifties, her mystique saved her from the unethical probings of slander mags like Confidential – their editors’ opinions being there was no dirt to dish on Garbo because, away from Hollywood, she had never done anything.
In the spring of 1955, the Motion Picture Academy awarded Garbo an Honorary Oscar. No one expected her to turn up at the 30 March ceremony, though the Academy hoped that she would allow them to tape a brief acceptance speech. She refused: the Oscar was accepted on her behalf by actress Nancy Kelly, and handed over to her friend, Minna Wallis (sister of producer Hal), for safe keeping. It took Garbo another two years to enquire about the statuette, which she shoved into the back of a drawer and promptly forgot about.
There was also another frangine waiting in the wings for George Schlee to bow out, having heard all was not always well between him and Garbo. For some time, the Schlees had been going their separate ways, while refusing to divorce. The reason for this, according to some sources, was that they had never married in the first place. For once, the new ‘guardian’ was not out for all she could get by associating with her: Cécile de Rothschild was a member of the fabulously wealthy dynasty and owned several ‘official’ residences, including a house in Paris, on the rue Faubourg-St-Honoré, next to the Elysée Palace. Each year from 1955, Garbo spent several weeks here and several more at Le Roc Fleury, a sumptuous villa at Cap d’Ail, which Schlee purchased for $50,000, probably with Garbo’s money. An early visitor here was Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who owned the casino at nearby Monte Carlo, and famously allowed Garbo to enter the establishment wearing slacks, just weeks after they turned away Marlene Dietrich and Edwige Feuillère for doing the same. That first summer, while the villa was being refurbished, Garbo and Schlee enjoyed a vacation on Onassis’ sumptuous yacht, the Christina. In July, they visited Capri, and while everyone else stayed at one of the island’s most exclusive hotels, Garbo stayed with Gracie Fields at her restaurant complex, not in a staff chalet this time, but at the singer’s home. In September, off the coast of the island of Itáki, and with little fuss, Garbo celebrated her fiftieth birthday.
In New York at the end of 1958, there was yet another reconciliation with Mercedes de Acosta, who had fallen on bad times. The previous year she had been hospitalised with a serious eye infection, which resulted in her wearing a black patch and, to pay the medical bills, she had given up her Park Lane apartment and moved into a much smaller one. She was also adding the finishing touches to her memoirs, Here Lies the Heart, and was anxious to get everyone on side for when the explosion occurred. Marlene Dietrich and Cecil Beaton had, she declared, read and approved the unedited script and, terrified that she might die before the book was published, she now needed Garbo’s blessing to let the world in on their ‘more intimate’ moments. But Garbo was horrified: even when told that Mercedes might have to sell her jewels to pay for an operation to remove a brain tumour, she declared that she neither wanted to see nor hear from her ever again. This time she meant it.
In October 1960, not wishing to be in America when Mercedes’ book was published, Garbo flew to Switzerland, where she visited the ski resort of Klosters for the first time. Salka Viertel had moved there to be close to her son, Peter, who lived there with his new wife, British actress Deborah Kerr. Cécile de Rothschild had a chalet in St Moritz, a two-hour drive away. Garbo fell in love with the then largely uncommercialised retreat and returned here most years, always in summer, always leaving before mid-September when the tourist season began. Here, Salka ran a smaller version of the salon she had presided over in Hollywood, though few of her regular guests were household names: writers Irwin Shaw and Gore Vidal, actors Jack Larson, Yul Brynner, Brian Aherne and Richard Burton – the latter never with Elizabeth Taylor, who Salka disapproved of. Garbo never stayed with her friend, preferring her own space – a rented chalet or flat. She rose at dawn to go walking, covering four or five miles before breakfast, mostly alone and unhindered because the locals were less intrusive here than in New York.
Garbo had just returned to New York when on 18 September 1961 – her 56th birthday – news broke that her friend Dag Hammarskjöld, also fifty-six, had been killed with fifteen others in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Since working with him on espionage missions during the war, they had kept in touch and she would always believe that his death had not been an accident. Others thought the same, though three subsequent Official Enquiries failed to prove otherwise.
In January 1962, Garbo returned to Sweden for the first time in sixteen years and there were rumours that she might have been about to make her movie comeback. The reason for this was her meeting with the country’s most important director, Ingmar Bergman, at Stockholm’s Grand Hotel. After dining together, they collected Mimi Pollak and Vera Schmiterlöw, and spent the morning ‘discussing possible projects’ in Mauritz Stiller’s former office at the Svensk Filmindustri Studios before heading off for the locations where Gösta Berlings Saga had been filmed. Sadly, nothing ever came of this.
Only Garbo could have turned down three invitations to the White House and still be asked again, on 21 October 1963, when Jackie Kennedy ‘twisted her arm’ and she capitulated. Who she met there, apart from the President and First Lady, is not known – there were rumours that she took off her shoes and ‘bounced’ on Abraham Lincoln’s bed and that she left early because she did not wish to become another notch on the infamous Jack Kennedy bedpost, but such stories may be speculation. What is known is that she was devastated when Kennedy was assassinated, just weeks later. Garbo wrote Jackie a letter of condolence and sent flowers to the funeral, and for a few years the two women stayed in touch – until Aristotle Onassis, the man who had once had designs on her, dumped Maria Callas and moved in on the President’s widow.
Garbo had known television producer William Frye for over a decade as he sometimes escorted her around New York when Gayelord Hauser and Frey Brown were unavailable. Early in 1964, Frye asked her to appear in his first major film, The Trouble With Angels, a coming-of-age drama set in a convent. Garbo was to play the mother superior and Ida Lupino would direct. ‘She would have been perfect,’ Frye recalled. ‘No hair problems, no costume changes and, best of all, no leading man to worry about.’ The script was commissioned, Frye flew to New York, presented it to Garbo personally, and the next day they went out on a ‘date’ to a performance of Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand at the Winter Garden Theater. She spent several minutes chatting to Streisand in her dressing room and outside the theatre was mobbed by hundreds of fans. For whatever reason, she changed her mind about the film.379
On 3 October, Garbo suffered the first of a trio of tragedies which hit her hard. George Schlee had been ill for some time. In friendlier days when he had twice been hospitalised, she and Valentina had taken turns to sit at his bedside. She and George Schlee had just dined with Cécile de Rothschild and were taking a stroll before returning to their suite at the Hotel Crillon when he complained of chest pains. Minutes later, he suffered a heart attack. An ambulance was summoned, while Garbo fled back to Cécile’s house. A few hours later, at the Hôpital Lariboisière, he died alone.
Valentina’s treatment of the woman who had only ever been her partner’s closest friend was abhorrent. The next day, she flew to Paris to collect her ‘property’, and on 7 October Garbo arrived back at New York’s Idlewild Airport to learn that the funeral was taking place that day and that instructions had been given not to admit her to the ceremony. Valentina had also tried, but failed, to obtain an order prohibiting her from ever visiting his grave at the Ferncliffe Cemetery. Later, she collected every item of ‘Garbo memorabilia’ from the East 52nd Street apartment – including valuable antiques – had these crated up, driven to a patch of wasteland and incinerated. And as if that was not enough, she brought in a Russian Orthodox priest to have Garbo’s ‘presence’ exorcised, a procedure which was repeated at Le Roc, in France. Over the next twenty-five years, bearing in mind they inhabited the same building, it was inevitable that the paths of the two women in George Schlee’s life should cross. Whenever this happened, Valentina would make the sign of the Cross and hurried past the woman she had baptised ‘The Vampire’. Schlee’s place as Garbo’s unofficial ‘business manager’ would be taken by her niece, Gray Reisfield, and Anthony Palermo, the director of Gayelord Hauser’s Modern Products food company. Garbo is said to have been worth around $15 million in 1964, her investments steadily increasing with little active involvement from herself. She was netting an average of $20,000 a month from property rentals alone, much of which was ploughed back into her very impressive collection of paintings and antiques.
On 8 April 1965, Garbo received word that Lars Hanson had died after a short illness, aged seventy-eight. Though he had had numerous affairs, including the one with Garbo, he remained married to Karin Molander for over forty years. Despite numerous offers from Hollywood, he had refused to return there, preferring to work in his own language on the stage and screen, and was one of the earliest recipients of the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Award. Along with Mimi Pollak and Max Gumpel, Hanson was one of the few old flames she spent quality time with during her return trips to Sweden. He was buried at Skogskyrkogården (The Woodland Cemetery), which would eventually be chosen by her family as Garbo’s final resting place. Gumpel and Pollak attended the funeral and took a wreath on her friend’s behalf. Then, on 3 August, Garbo learned that Gumpel had also died, aged seventy-five.
As if she had not lost enough loved ones, 67-year-old Sven Gustaffson was next. Garbo’s brother had been suffering from congestive heart disease for some time and on 27 January 1967, while undergoing treatment at the Desert Hospital, Palm Springs, suffered a fatal coronary. Sven left his entire estate to his widow, Marguerite, and did not even mention his sister in his will, mindless of the fact that she had paid his way most of his adult life. Neither did he (nor his estate) publicly acknowledge Sven Jr, his illegitimate son by Elsa Hagerman. Indeed, the young man was not informed of his father’s death until 1971, when he legally changed his name to Gustaffson.
Inasmuch as Here Lies the Heart had ended her friendship with Mercedes, so Garbo – along with many others, including members of the British royal family – severed ties with Cecil Beaton towards the end of 1967 when he announced that he was compiling The Happy Years, the third volume of his diaries, covering the period 1940–48. Having heard of her tantrum over Mercedes’ book, Beaton desperately wanted her blessing for this one, while making it clear that nothing he had written about her would be changed. He called her apartment, but Garbo refused to come to the phone. Salka Viertel, on the other hand, she helped and encouraged in writing her memoirs, The Kindness of Strangers, well aware that her best friend would never betray her confidences.
On 13 April 1968, at one of George Cukor’s ‘pink tea-parties’, the host asked Garbo who in the whole world she would most like to meet. Never more serious she replied, ‘Mae West!’ Mae, arguably the most controversial Hollywood star of them all, was preparing her movie comeback. Her last film, The Heat’s On (1943), had suffered the same critical panning as Two-Faced Woman and now, courtesy of Gore Vidal, she was to appear with Raquel Welch in the screen version of his novel, Myra Breckinridge. The sex-change subject fascinated Garbo. Cukor made the arrangements and the meeting took place a few weeks later. Also present were Gayelord Hauser and Frey Brown, Roddy McDowall, and Jayne Mansfield’s muscleman ex-husband, Mickey Hargitay. Garbo recalled what appears to have been a boring evening to her producer friend, William Frye:
During dinner, all Miss West discussed was monkeys. I don’t know anything about monkeys, so I didn’t talk … After dinner all she talked about was musclemen. I don’t know anything about musclemen, so I didn’t talk then either. I was home at 10:30, and I didn’t say a word all evening.380
On 9 May, Mercedes de Acosta died, aged 75. She had been ill for some time, and had never stopped believing that Garbo would drop by and all would be forgiven. Today, her lasting legacy is an exaggerated memoir which frequently sells for more than it may be worth over the internet, simply on account of its who-did-who curiosity value. In the original introduction, Mercedes offered her excuses for shopping her friend: ‘To write of Greta and things connected with her is the most difficult task I have had … No one knows better than I how much she dislikes being discussed, but I cannot write my life and have her out of it.’ More controversial were a set of topless photographs taken of Garbo during their Silver Lake vacation. These were discovered among Mercedes’ effects and soon winged their way into the sleazier tabloids and movie magazines. Garbo neither commented on her death, nor sent flowers to her funeral. So far as she was concerned, Mercedes had died in 1960 when she had published her book.381
Notes
363 ‘My attitude…’: Cecil Beaton, Self-Portrait With Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1926–1974 (Times Books: 1979).
364 ‘In these post…’: Martin Greif, Gay Book of Days (Main Street Press: 1982).
365 ‘An historian…’: Hugo Vickers, Loving Garbo (Jonathan Cape: 1994).
366 ‘No advice or…’: Cecil Beaton, Diaries, published and unpublished; Vickers, ibid.
367 ‘As if someone…’: Beaton, ibid.
368 ‘At first she stood…’: Beaton, ibid.
369 ‘I have no plans…’: Croswell Bowen, New York Herald Tribune, September 1946.
370 ‘I do not know…’: Los Angeles Examiner, March 1947.
371 Chateau de Pierrefonds, near Compiègne, best-known for the Merlin television series.
372 ‘She goes…’: Tennessee Williams, Letters To Donald Windham, 1940–1965 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston: 1977).
373 ‘She said firmly…’: Beaton, ibid.
374 ‘If I disliked…’: Beaton, ibid.
375 ‘There was a swish…’: Walter Lucas, Sunday Express, September 1949.
376 ‘They probably cancelled…’: quoted in Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (Sidgwick & Jackson: 1995).
377 ‘She has a sense…’: Cecil Beaton, Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook (Batsford: 1937).
378 ‘All the colours…’: Billy Baldwin, Billy Baldwin Remembers (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich: 1974).
379 ‘She would have been perfect…’: William Frye, ‘Classic Hollywood: The Garbo Next Door’, Vanity Fair, April 2000.
380 ‘During dinner…’: Frye, ibid.
381 ‘To write of Greta…’: Mercedes de Acosta, Here Lies the Heart, (André Deutsch: 1960).