Garbo was eighty-four. Just how her ‘rival’ Marlene Dietrich found out before the news made the press, I shall never know. At 12.15 a.m. I received a call from Paris. ‘That other woman is dead!’ Marlene boomed, and promptly hung up.
Within hours of her death, Garbo’s body was taken to the Garden State Crematorium in New Jersey, cremated at once, and her ashes placed in storage until the Reisfields decided what to do with them. (After a lengthy legal battle, in 1999 they would be interred at Skogskyrkogården, not far from Lars Hanson’s final resting place.) On 17 April, a memorial service was held at Campbell’s Funeral Home, in New York, attended by family and close friends.
Garbo had signed her will on 2 March 1984. Aside from a few small bequests – these included the doormen at the apartment block who had escorted her to and from the elevator and kept unwelcome intruders at bay, and the faithful Claire Koger, who was also left an annuity – she left her entire fortune to Gray Reisfield. As much of her real estate – including several shops along the fashionable Rodeo Drive – had been sold off years before, this mostly amounted to paintings and antiques. The sale which took place at Sotheby’s on 13 November raised just under $20 million – her two Renoirs alone fetching over half of this. Garbo’s ‘nick-nacks’ brought in over $1 million – candlesticks, ornaments, lamps and clocks and other paraphernalia probably worth only a few hundred dollars each sold for several thousand simply because they had belonged to her. Additionally there was a wealth of stocks and shares – Time Warner, Texaco, General Motors, Eastman Kodak, and the Federal Farm Credit Bank figured among her major holdings, but there were many more, bringing the total to around $8 million. Garbo’s bank accounts contained around $650,000. She had set up a number of trust funds, but to whom and for how much has never been revealed by her estate.398
Some resented Garbo leaving everything to a niece she appeared to have grown close to only later in life – though it must be said that Gray Reisfield had been her rock during her last years. Anthony Palermo, Gayelord Hauser’s former business partner who handled her financial affairs, and who claimed that he had been the one to persuade her to have dialysis treatment, was peeved not to have been left one cent and complained, ‘I worked for her for fourteen years, for nothing because I was promised to be in the will.’399
A clause in Garbo’s will stipulated that no claims would be considered by relatives extant of Gray and her children. In March 1984 she was thinking specifically of Sven Gustaffson Jr, but he died in 1988 and a subsequent codicil was added citing a new name, Ake Fredriksson, her brother Sven’s love-child, the result of a liaison with a maid at Stockholm’s Grand Hotel in 1926. Frederiksson, who lived in Oxelösund, contested the will in the most hostile manner, declaring Garbo had been ‘unsound of mind’ and ‘prone to alcohol-related episodes’ when she had signed it – also, that Gray Reisfield had manipulated her aunt into bequeathing everything to her. His claim was quickly dismissed.
The tributes and eulogies were legion. Some were syrupy and long-winded, others offered retrospectives of Garbo’s long life and comparatively brief career – extant of the early Swedish shorts and Peter the Tramp, just sixteen of her eighty-four years. The New York Times called her, ‘The Screen’s Greatest Sufferer’. The Sun, more used to reporting the more scandalous episodes in a deceased star’s life, made an exception with Garbo. Their headline ran, ‘GOD, SHE WAS GORGEOUS!’ – and accompanying the moving script was a cartoon, Garbo floating on a cloud outside the gates of heaven. The caption was, ‘SHE STILL VANTS TO BE ALONE!’
The Daily News observed, ‘Hers was a myth made by machine, but man’s imagination took it from there to dizzying heights.’ Bette Davis, who regretted never having worked with Garbo, despite the fact that she would have eclipsed even her on the screen, said, ‘Her instinct, her mastery over the machine was pure witchcraft. I cannot analyse this woman’s acting. I only know that no one else so effectively worked in front of a camera.’
Garbo is unique, and will never be replaced. Not one actress has come close to surpassing her, nor ever will. Such was the depth of emotion within her performances that cinema-goers could see into her soul, a power that the years and modern movie techniques, where special effects all too frequently replace acting ability, have not diminished whether one is watching Garbo on a fifty-foot screen, a front room television set, or one’s laptop computer.
For many who did not witness her clomping through the streets of New York, or one of her social gatherings, Garbo is not dead: she simply disappeared from view in 1941, vanishing into a cloud of mystery to leave an electrifying spirit that will live on forever.