‘The story of my life is about back entrances and side doors and secret elevators and other ways of getting in and out of places so that people won’t bother you.’
In March 1971, ‘Harriet Brown’ flew to Rome, and checked in at the Minerva Hotel. Over the next few days there were secret meetings with the director Luchino Visconti, who wanted her for a cameo in a proposed Franco-Italian production of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Much of this was made by the Italian press, not least of all how the 65-year-old Garbo would photograph in close-up. In America, Time magazine announced:
Hardly since General Douglas MacArthur’s ‘I shall return’ has so momentous a comeback loomed … The role that caught her fancy: Maria Sophia, the sixtyish Queen of Naples, who will only have one scene. Nothing has been signed as yet, but Visconti sounded as if Garbo’s reappearance was already a fait accompli. Said he, ‘I am very pleased that this woman, with her severe authoritarian presence, should figure in the decadent and rarefied climate of the world described by Proust.’382
Sadly, the project was scrapped – not because Garbo backed out, but because the director’s delusions of grandeur for a film he predicted would run to four hours resulted in the projected budget being so prohibitive, Cinécitta feared that it would bankrupt the studio. Therefore it was back to ‘everyday’ life. While Hollywood stars of a lesser stature were waited on hand and foot by a coterie of servants, Garbo employed a staff of just one: a Swiss woman called Claire Koger, around her own age, recommended to her by Valentina Schlee and utterly discreet. Koger’s main duties were preparing her meals and answering the phone, which was unplugged when she went home at 4.30 on the dot. The cleaning duties they shared. Garbo had no use for a chauffeur: if one of her chevalier-servants was not available, she would call a cab.
In all weathers, she kept up her favourite pastime of walking. Her regular routine in New York was to rise at dawn, window-shop until the stores opened, then spend the afternoon at a gallery. Her three main walking companion-confidants were Robert Reud, Raymond Daum – a United Nations film producer who had lived next door to Gayelord Hauser and Frey Brown in Palm Springs, where he had seen her many times in the flesh (literally, from his bedroom window), but not been properly introduced until January 1963 – and Sam Green. Initially, though she asked for their telephone numbers to summon them whenever she wanted to go out, often at a moment’s notice, none of them were given hers or allowed to meet each other, for fear they might ‘swap’ their Garbo stories.
Boston-born Sam Green (1941–2011) was for many years the confidant most trusted by Garbo. A college drop-out, handsome and bearded, he was a pioneer promoter of Pop Art, particularly the works of Andy Warhol, while managing the Green Gallery (name unrelated) on New York’s 57th Street. In 1965 he was appointed director of Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art, a tenure he held for three years before returning to New York as cultural adviser to the Mayor. A sucker for a sugar-daddy, in 1970 he ‘retired’ to become Cecil Beaton’s chevalier-servant, accompanying him on his travels until tiring of his finicky ways and tantrums. Green was also a close friend of Cécile de Rothschild, and it was at her home in Saint-Raphael, in the South of France, that he first met Garbo on 18 September 1970, her 65th birthday. Green often stayed at Cécile’s various abodes but if a visit from Garbo was expected, was always requested to leave before she arrived. This time he was invited to stay, and Green recalled how Garbo surprised him while he was alone in the living room, fixing drinks:
I heard a door open behind me. I assumed it was the butler. When I turned around, there was Garbo, about six inches away from me. My jaw dropped and I stood there speechless. Garbo smiled. ‘Mr Green, I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,’ she said, in that throaty voice of hers. ‘I’m sure we’re going to have the most wonderful time together.’383
The two apparently got along well, though it would take them several more months to meet again, at New York’s Regency Hotel, and begin cementing the deep bond which formed between them. Garbo often stayed at Green’s house in Cartagena, Colombia: alternatively they retreated to his cottage on Fire Island, the gay district. Green was one of the few allowed inside her apartment, yet despite their closeness they always addressed each other as ‘Miss G’ and ‘Mr Green’. He was perhaps the nearest she had had to a factotum since Borg, although unlike Borg they were never amorously involved. Much of the time, when they were outdoors – on home territory and overseas – Green was there to protect her from ‘customers’, Garbo’s term for intrusive fans and journalists.384
Garbo for her part would be close at hand to comfort Sam Green in November 1972, in the wake of the fallout from a rather messy affair when the heiress Barbara Baekeland was stabbed to death by her son, Antony, in her London apartment. A few years earlier, Green had had an affair with both Baekeland – an unbalanced, alcoholic former starlet – and her equally neurotic son, Antony, a gay man she had tried to ‘cure’ by procuring him prostitutes and, when this had failed, by having sex with him herself.385
In 1974, in what would be her final serious offer, Garbo’s producer William Frye asked her to play herself in one of the first of a spate of so-called ‘disaster’ movies, Airport 75. The stars of the film were Charlton Heston and Karen Black. She considered the cameo for a few days, but the response was predictable and the part went to Gloria Swanson.
In fact, though she almost certainly never found out, Garbo did have a three-minute cameo in a film made that year. Though it may not be the regular Garbo fan’s cup of tea, it is nevertheless important because it is her very last celluloid appearance. Adam & Yves was an XXX-rated gay pornographic feature, directed by Peter de Rome, and starring Marcus Giovanni and Michael Hardwick. Obsessed with Garbo, de Rome’s cameraman, Jack Devean, had filmed her through a telephoto lens on New York’s First Avenue and this was incorporated into the story. The lovers are in a post-coital mood when Yves (Giovanni) recalls to Adam (Hardwick) the most thrilling moment of his life, apart from the sex which has just taken place, was bumping into his elusive icon. ‘I saw her,’ he says, ‘I really saw her!’ Then Garbo appears: wearing a trenchcoat and hat, she strides along pavement, pauses to chat to a passer-by, then crosses the street.
In February 1975, Garbo flew to Hollywood where she learned – before the news broke in the media – that Susan Hayward, who had always wanted to meet her, was dying of brain cancer. Garbo spent several hours at her bedside: Hayward died on 14 March. History repeated itself in 1984 with Garbo Talks, directed by Sidney Lumet. In this, a cantankerous matriarch (Anne Bancroft), obsessed with Garbo and also suffering an inoperable brain tumour, wants to meet her idol before she dies. Then there would be considerable speculation that the faceless woman who appears at the end of the film was Garbo herself, but in fact it was former silent star Betty Comden.
That July, Garbo visited Sweden for the last time. Her first outing here was a sombre one – to Lars Hansons’ grave at Skogskyrkogården, accompanied by Mimi Pollak. She also spent a few days in Copenhagen, where she attended a recital at the Tivoli Gardens by the great Wagnerian soprano, Birgit Nilsson. Afterwards, she and Nilsson dined with friends and photographs of the event, taken against her will, were wired around the world and resulted in more offers of work, all turned down. There was also a brief reunion with Horke Wachtmeister, the last time Garbo would see or speak to her – she died in 1977.
Early in October, Sam Green’s cousin, Henry McIlhenny, invited him to spend a week at his estate, Glenreagh Castle, in County Donegal, Ireland. Green took Garbo and Cécile de Rothschild with him, and some years later the playwright Frank McGuinness used the visit as a setting for his hit stage play, Greta Garbo Came to Donegal, which premiered at London’s Tricycle Theatre in January 2010 with Caroline Lagerfelt in the role of Garbo.386
In the middle of the month, Garbo, Green and de Rothschild flew from Belfast to London, where they rented an apartment near Piccadilly for three weeks. While here, under extreme duress, Garbo agreed to pay Cecil Beaton a visit: the prissy photographer had suffered a stroke which left him confined to a wheelchair and virtually immobile and like Mercedes de Acosta, he was anxious to make his peace with her before he died. She and Green took the train from Waterloo, arriving at Salisbury just as it was getting dark, and continued the journey to Reddish House by taxi where, at the last moment she suffered a panic attack, believing this had been a set-up, and that Beaton had arranged for reporters to be hiding in the trees. Green calmed her down: the meeting with the man who duped her by selling her pictures to the press was emotional, and she agreed to stay the night, though she is said to have been ‘repulsed’ by watching him eat. The next morning, she paused in the hall and signed her name in his guestbook – one of the rare occasions when she actually volunteered her signature. Her sentiments, however, may have been questionable. The subject of her rejecting his marriage proposal must have been brought up at some time during the visit: according to Beaton’s secretary, Eileen Hose, before leaving, Garbo turned to her and pronounced, ‘Well, I couldn’t have married him, could I? Him being like this!’ Beaton lingered until 18 January 1980 when he died, shortly after his seventy-sixth birthday. As had happened with Mercedes, there were neither condolences nor flowers from Garbo.387
In the spring of 1976, Garbo flew to Antigua, where she stayed at the exclusive Gallery Bay Surf Club. The owner, Edee Holbert, took her request for ‘intense security’ literally, assigning a machete-wielding guard to stand outside her door at night and hiring her a jeep to drive around in. It was in Antigua that the press were introduced to her new frangine, her niece, Gray Reisfeld. Until this time, hardly any of Garbo’s intimates had ever seen her and she is thought never to have spoken to anyone about her family. Similarly, Gray and her husband, Donald, had never let on that they were related to the most famous Hollywood star of them all. Sam Green later said that Garbo never expressed any great fondness for her family, which of course had been proved by her lack of response to the deaths of her mother and brother.388
The Antigua trip was manna from heaven for the photographer from People magazine who happened to be holidaying on the island, and who was less interested in the travelling companion than he was in training his telefoto lens on Garbo swimming and sunbathing in the nude and still looking good at seventy. This ‘picture of health’ was no longer evident later in the summer, however, when Garbo made her annual visit to Klosters and fell ill with bronchitis. Her doctors advised her to give up smoking – she was still getting through two packs a day, and trying to convince herself that they were doing her no harm because she had switched to a nicotine-free brand – but she refused. No sooner had she recovered than she developed a cancerous mole on her nose. This proved benign and was removed during a discreet trip to a clinic in Zurich.
In November 1977, Garbo was faced with a ‘cancer’ of another kind. Polish-born author Antoni Groniwicz (1913–85) had crossed swords with her in 1971 with the publication of his novel, An Orange Full of Dreams, which boasted a foreword by ‘Greta Garbo’. She had had nothing to do with the book: therefore when she learned that Gronowicz had signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to publish her ‘biography’ – that he was claiming she had collaborated with him on this, Garbo declared him a fraud and hit him with an injunction, which he initially ignored. On 7 February 1978, she signed a sworn deposition before a judge, avowing that she had neither met nor spoken with Gronowicz, nor collaborated with or supplied the foreword to his book. Simon & Schuster opted not to publish the work during Garbo’s lifetime.389
No sooner had Garbo recovered from this debacle than she learned that someone else was writing her life story – this time someone she did know. She had met British writer Frederick Sands by way of Salka Viertel during the summer of 1977. By his own admission, Sands was little more than an stalker and made no secret of the underhand method he adopted to con Garbo into confiding in him, using Salka and her rapidly declining health as a way of approaching the reclusive star. They met over afternoon tea at Salka’s home, got along well, and when the time came to leave luck was on Sands’ side – it was pouring with rain, he did not have an umbrella, and shared Garbo’s while he escorted her across the road to her house. She loaned him the umbrella because his car was parked several streets away. Sands asked her if they could meet again, and the next morning he accompanied her on her walk.390
What Garbo did not know was that Sands had hired a photographer, Ekhard Nitsche, to trail them, and snap them discreetly through a telephoto lens. This way, the public would be given the impression – no matter how much Garbo denied this – that she and Sands were genuine friends. By the time of the pair’s first of what would be several walks, Nitsche had already ‘cased’ the layout of the village, and Garbo’s house. He subsequently photographed them at Lake Davos then, when Sands returned to his hotel room, he wrote down everything they had discussed. The writer also had a cohort, operating in Sweden: Sven Broman was a journalist and the editor of Aret Runt (Year Round), one of the country’s biggest magazines. The result was The Divine Garbo, and she was all the more horrified because Sands and Broman had researched her largely undocumented childhood and youth by interviewing people she had known then. According to Irwin Shaw, Garbo acquired a copy of the book, showed it to a few friends, then burned it.391
Another pest who entered Garbo’s life at this time was a Hawaiian-born paparazzi photographer named Ted Leyson, who began stepping out of the shadows only occasionally to snap her when she was least expecting it. Over the years, however, he became a nuisance – lingering outside her New York apartment for hours, sometimes days, waiting for her to emerge. ‘That poor little man who’s always lurking,’ was how she referred to him. After being caught out a few times, she would always be ready for him, shielding her face with a newspaper, hat or tissue. As such, Leyson never took a single picture which was not blurred and at best mediocre. There were times when he made her life such an absolute misery that friends implored her to report him to the police, but she never did. Once, Leyson followed her for over an hour and to escape him she fled into a fruit store, where the owner asked her, ‘Do you want me to cripple him with a baseball bat?’ In 1987, Leyson boasted in an interview that she actually liked him, which one finds hard to believe:
Greta is my biggest challenge. I have to take care because if she sees me, she covers her face. She even tries to spot me in the reflection of shop windows. She’s very smart. What I like is that no other photographer is following her as intensely as I. I always say this may be my last picture of Garbo because she’s so old … I love her. Some celebrities wither so soon as I catch their image in my lens, but not Greta. She’s all mine.392
On 20 October 1978, Salka Viertel died at her home in Klosters, aged eighty-nine. She had been ill for some time, virtually uncommunicative during her final years, and almost certainly suffering from dementia when Garbo had last visited her. Even so, she had spent several hours of each day at Salka’s bedside, reminiscing over times past, even though her friend had no longer been aware of her surroundings. There was another shock on 19 February 1981, when Garbo received a call informing her of the death of Sven Hugo Borg, aged eighty-four. Exactly seven months later, on 19 October, word came to her that Nils Asther had died, also aged eighty-four. ‘Who knows, maybe I’ll be the one to make it three in a row,’ she told Roger Normand over the phone. ‘Eighty-four is such a good age to go, don’t you think?’393
In Paris, during the early eighties, Garbo discovered the delights of the Marais – the city’s elegant gay quarter, where she and her escort could stroll the streets ‘unmolested’. Sam Green recalls her saying the first time he accompanied her to the French capital, ‘Let’s go where the queens are. Someone once took me there – oh-la-la!’ That ‘someone’ was Roger Normand, who one day took her to the Marché aux Puces, at Clignancourt. Here they visited the antiques market, where Garbo purchased a genuine Louis XV wardrobe. Roger explained:
I told her how hideous I thought it was, and that she would have to pay the same again to get the thing shipped out to America. Then she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t buy it for me. I saw the little cupboard you had in your place, so I bought it for you!’ The last time I went to see my godfather, in 1999 just before he died, ‘Garbo’s wardrobe’ was still taking up almost an entire wall in his tiny Avenue Rachel apartment.
Garbo liked to visit because it was just yards from the Montmartre Cemetery, where she sometimes liked to go walking.394 395
On 2 November 1983, King Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden awarded Garbo the Nordstjärneorden (Commander of the Order of the Polar Star), one of the country’s most prestigious titles, created by Frederick I in 1748, and largely restricted to members of the royal family. The award was presented to her at the New York apartment of her friend, Jane Gunther, by Wilhelm Wachtmeister, the Swedish Ambassador to the United States and a distant relative of Horke.
In January 1984, a routine hospital check-up revealed breast cancer and a partial mastectomy was performed at a New York clinic. Three months later and after further treatment, doctors gave Garbo the all-clear. She had few ambitions left in her last years, apart from living as long and in as reasonably good health as was possible, and without being a burden to others. Most of the retainers, good and bad, were gone and towards the end of the year she learned that 89-year-old Gayelord Hauser was seriously ill with pneumonia. Frey Brown had died in 1977, since which time Hauser had deteriorated rapidly. Garbo spent Christmas with him, and she was at his bedside when he died on Boxing Day. Though she did not attend his funeral in Beverly Hills, it was she who organised it.
In Klosters during the summer of 1985, Garbo met her very last ‘confidant’. Sven Broman, holidaying in the resort with his wife, had co-authored The Divine Garbo with Frederick Sands, which makes her wanting anything to do with him all the more bizarre. According to Broman, after getting to know him better she forgave him for what he called ‘this mistake of my youth’. Broman was also her last link with her homeland – much of the time they spoke only Swedish. Over the next five years they met as often as her failing health permitted – when she stopped visiting Klosters, they ‘hooked up’ in New York.
Though it did not end completely, Garbo’s friendship with Cécile de Rothschild took a tumble on 18 September of that year, the occasion being her eightieth birthday and the party thrown by Cécile at her brother’s vineyard home, the Château Mouton in France’s Médoc region. Garbo was told this was to be a quiet, intimate affair – just a handful of friends. As she entered the salon, to the cries of ‘Surprise!’, to her horror she discovered over a hundred people, all complete strangers, and over fifty members of the press. Rather than flee, she ‘suffered a martyrdom through nine courses’ – Cécile’s one redeeming act having been that no cameras were allowed in the room. The incident destroyed Garbo’s trust: though she spoke every now and then to Cécile on the phone, she refused ever to see her again.
Garbo was therefore in no mood for what happened next with Sam Green, who during the space of a brief telephone conversation found himself transformed from best friend to treacherous foe. There had been a ‘scare’ in 1978 when, after a trip to Green’s house in Colombia, a piece appeared in the New York Post’s ‘Suzy’s Column’ hinting that she and Green were more than just friends. Garbo had taken much convincing by Green that he had not spoken about her to the press. The feature penned by Leon Wagener in the 29 October issue of the Globe convinced her otherwise:
GARBO TO WED AT 80! Sources close to the couple say that the aging screen legend and Sam Green, thirty years her junior and who has been her constant companion for over a decade, will be wed at Christmas in Paris – at the home of Baroness Cecil [sic] de Rothschild, an old friend … When she is with Sam, she has no fear of the photographers who have hounded her since her retirement [sic] in 1928. She’s terrified if she’s alone, but with him, it’s a joke. They laugh and run like kids. Also, she has decided that she does not want to spend the rest of her years alone, sad and lonely.396
Green maintained that the news of their ‘engagement’ had been leaked by a disgruntled former secretary, Bart Gorin. Not that it made much difference for Garbo found out that Green had been recording their telephone conversations – worse than this, that he had played a tape of one of these to friends at a party. Green called her and attempted to explain, and when he asked her what he should do next, she responded abruptly, ‘Hang up!’ They never spoke again.
It was at around this time that I met Garbo for the one and only time: under an awning outside a Paris theatre in the pouring rain. The occasion was a performance of Lily Passion, an intense musical drama featuring Barbara (Monique Serf, 1930–97), France’s most famous singer after Edith Piaf, and one of my closest friends. Indeed, because of her mystique and intensely private life, Barbara was known as ‘La Garbo de la Chanson’. The piece told the story of the singer who falls for the Ripper-style thug, David (Gérard Depardieu) who, each time he hears her sing, stabs a woman to death! The piece ended with her achieving her greatest ambition – being killed by David after giving the greatest performance of her career.
After the show, Barbara came up to us in her dressing room and whispered in my ear, ‘There’s an old lady standing outside the side-door. It’s Greta Garbo and she wants to talk to you. Whatever you do, don’t breathe a word to anyone!’ Though it was dark outside, Garbo was wearing shades. She had on a trench coat, men’s brogues, a purple scarf was wrapped several times around her neck – and she was wearing gloves of different colours. I smoked in those days, and offered her a Gitane, which she politely refused. Then she indicated my camera, which I instinctively shoved into the bag I was carrying. This seemed to relax her. Looking me in the eye, she pronounced in a voice almost a whole octave lower than the one I had heard in her films, ‘You don’t look like a killer to me!’ To explain, Barbara had used me as a basis for her knife-mad thug in the play because, she said, David was not a name one usually associates with killers, and because the psychopaths she had read about were invariably dark-haired, never blond! It was a back-handed compliment, which I proudly accepted. Throughout our ten-minute conversation, Garbo and I talked only about Barbara – how much she admired her, how she loved her theme-song, ‘Ma Plus Belle Histoire D’Amour’, what a ‘strapping fellow’ Depardieu was. Then she extended her hand, signalling that it was time to say goodbye: ‘Well, mister, it was good meeting you!’ I kissed her on both cheeks, and that was that. My wife and I went back into the theatre, and ten minutes later, the news of Garbo’s presence having been leaked, I was approached by one of the reporters who had been there to interview Barbara. What had Garbo’s face looked like? How had she sounded? What kind of a handshake did she have? Had she talked about her movies? On and on he went – and I said nothing. It had been our moment, one I did not wish to share.
In March 1987, Garbo tripped over a vacuum cleaner in her apartment, and badly sprained her ankle. This put paid to her daily walks for a while, and she never really recovered – henceforth she would almost always walk with a cane. In April 1988, Sweden’s King Gustav XVI and Queen Sofia made a state visit to New York, and naturally wanted to meet their country’s most famous export. The meeting took place at Garbo’s apartment, with no press present. Soon afterwards she ‘severed her ties’ with her homeland in a letter to Mimi Pollak, now eighty-seven and herself ailing. Pollak never revealed what her friend had written, only that the tone of the letter was loving, and closed with the promise that there would be no more.
That August, at Klosters, Garbo suffered what is thought to have been a mild heart attack, which she laughed off as acute indigestion. There would be no more trips to Switzerland. On 5 January 1989, she was admitted to the New York Hospital, in severe pain. Doctors diagnosed kidney failure, but she refused further treatment and after an overnight stay returned to her apartment, where over the next few months she received twice-daily visits from a private nurse. Her condition worsened: she developed diverticulitis and became so ill that she could barely keep anything down. In May she began a thrice-weekly course of dialysis at the Rogin Institute. Claire Koger, who until now had adhered to a strict nine-till-five routine, began spending the night at the apartment – if she could not stay, Gray Reisfield took her place.
On 14 September, four days before what would be Garbo’s last birthday, Valentina Schlee died of Parkinson’s Disease in ‘the apartment upstairs’, aged ninety. Surprisingly, considering they had avoided each other for years, extant of the hard stares if they crossed paths in the foyer, Garbo was upset. Acutely aware of her own mortality, she told Sven Broman,
People learn to accept death. If you live in good health, then you have not been trained nor made ready for death … I often think about death. I really wish I could believe, but I can’t. For me, it’s over when it ends. Maybe I am too prosaic. And yet I do feel that life has been good in my old age.397
On 9 February 1990, in tremendous pain though desperately trying not to show it, Garbo spent the afternoon at Katharine Hepburn’s house, reminiscing over old times with the actress who had had a crush on her all those years ago. There were few outings after this. She was last seen walking, leaning heavily on Gray Reisfield’s arm, on 1 April. Ten days later, with a raging fever, she was admitted to the New York Hospital. The pesky Ted Leyson was lurking in the shadows opposite her apartment when she left for the last time – he reached the hospital before she did, and his last pictures prove what a reprehensible human being he was. In each shot, Garbo positively glares at him.
No sooner had Garbo been settled into her private suite than her condition worsened and she developed pneumonia. She, who had longed for solitude almost her whole life, was not left alone for a single moment as the Reisfields kept a vigil at her bedside. The end came peacefully. At 11.30 on the morning of 15 April, Easter Sunday, the greatest movie star the world has ever known slipped away.
382 ‘Hardly since General…’: Time, March 1971.
383 ‘I heard…’: Sam Green, ‘I Wasn’t To Blame For Heiress Murder’, Daily Mirror, July 2008.
384 More of his friendship with Garbo, with verbatim accounts of some of their (one assumes recorded) conversations can be found in Barry Paris, Garbo: A Biography (Sidgwick & Jackson: 1995), pp.473–83.
385 Antony Baekeland was defended by Rumpole of the Bailey writer John Mortimer and sent to Broadmoor for eight years. Days after his release, he returned to New York, stabbed his grandmother, into whose care he had been discharged (she survived) and, while awaiting trial, self-suffocated, aged thirty-five. The tragedy was brought to the screen in 2007. In Savage Grace Hugh Dancy played Green, described in the publicity as ‘a homosexual walker who spends his time tending to the needs of very rich women’. Green sued the studio, but died before the matter was resolved.
386 McGuinness moved the scenario back to 1967, the year homosexuality was legalised in Britain, and a time when Ireland was on the cusp of violent change. The action is set in the house of a gay artist and deals with problems encountered by his household, into the midst of which Garbo appears, effecting a calming influence.
387 ‘Well, I couldn’t…’: Hugo Vickers, Loving Garbo (Jonathan Cape: 1994).
388 Paris, ibid.
389 In 1984 Gronowicz ran into trouble with the publication of God’s Brother, an ‘autobiography’ of fellow countryman Pope John Paul II, who he claimed to have interviewed. Condemned as ‘totally fraudulent’ by the Vatican, this was withdrawn from sale and all remaining copies destroyed. His equally fictitious Garbo, Her Own Story was published shortly after her death in 1990, and five years after his own death.
390 Sands’ conning of Garbo is explained by himself in his book, The Divine Garbo (Grosset & Dunlap: 1969).
391 Karen Swenson, Greta Garbo: A Life Apart (Simon & Schuster: 1997).
392 ‘Greta is my…’: Lisa Braestrup, ‘The Man Who Stalks Garbo’, unpublished, 1987.
393 ‘Who knows…’: Garbo to Roger Normand.
394 ‘Let’s go…’: Green, quoted in Paris, ibid.
395 ‘I told her how…’: Roger Normand to author.
396 ‘GARBO TO WED…’: Leon Wagener, Globe, October 1985.
397 ‘People learn…’: Sven Broman, Garbo on Garbo (Bloomsbury: 1990).