WHY GARBO?
SHE WAS NOT AS POPULAR AS CHAPLIN and Pickford had been, and she was only in Hollywood for sixteen years (and twenty-four movies), yet the impact she had on the world was as great as theirs. Yes, her beauty was incomparable, but that wasn’t it. The mystery of her self-imposed seclusion was irresistible to the industry and to the world, but that was almost a distraction. Certainly it wasn’t her vehicles, so many of them clichéd or worse, or the opulent productions in which M-G-M swathed her (though in her first sound film, Anna Christie, the highest-grossing film of 1930, she’s a bedraggled whore on the dilapidated New York waterfront). Was she even an actress, or was she merely a glorious presence? (After Camille, with her universally acclaimed performance as “The Lady of the Camellias”—Bernhardt and Duse territory—that ceased to be an issue.)
M-G-M presented her first as a vamp, luring men on with her vampish ways, but she hated that.
Then she suffered, and redeemed herself through true love. Then she became an icon and an Event. But none of that goes to explain why more than any other star she invaded the subconscious of the audience: Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941 Garbo is in people’s minds, hearts, and dreams. You realize it as you come upon countless references to her in novels and memoirs of the period—from For Whom the Bell Tolls to the letters of Marianne Moore. Other Hollywood stars venerated her, accepting that she was Above and Beyond, and were as eager to meet her or just get a glimpse of her as your ordinary fan. After a while she even lost her first name—no more Greta, just Garbo: Garbo Talks! Garbo Laughs!
Who else has had this effect? No other actor until Marilyn Monroe (whom she admired and with whom she would have liked to work), and perhaps Elvis—but he was for kids, and he lost his last name, not his first. Garbo wasn’t for kids; she liked them, but she had never really been one and she never had one. (She never had a husband either.) She loved her work, but she couldn’t bear the surround, and she never really understood what had happened to her. She was a phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, but also a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard. She withdrew from the world when she was thirty-six, but the world wouldn’t withdraw from her, even though she spent half a century or so hiding from it. She’s still hiding—no one will ever know what was taking place behind those amazing eyes. Only the camera knew.
1
GARBO BEFORE STILLER
GRETA LOVISA GUSTAFSSON was born on September 18, 1905. She and her slightly older sister, Alva, to whom she was very close, and their somewhat older brother, Sven, lived with their parents in an unprepossessing building in Södermalm, one of the poorest neighborhoods of Stockholm, where they occupied a cold-water flat variously described as one-room, two-room, three-room, and four-room, but since 32 Blekingegaten was torn down more than fifty years ago, we’ll never be sure. (John Bainbridge, whose pioneering biography of Garbo appeared in 1955, seems to have gone to the building and met the tenants, also named Gustafsson though not related. He reports four rooms, although apparently when Greta was born, Sven’s bed had to be moved into the kitchen. Bainbridge also tells us that these Gustafssons had only recently learned of the Garbo connection and “were not overwhelmed by the intelligence.”)
There were no indoor toilets at 32 Blekingegaten—when nature called, it was down four flights of stairs to the outdoor privies and then back up. (No elevators, needless to say.) So the Gustafssons were poor. But they were not impoverished: Karl Gustafsson, the father, was a hardworking though unskilled laborer who, even if he drank, was a responsible provider. He came from a long line of farmers in southern Sweden, but he and his wife-to-be, Anna Lovisa Karlsson, who came from a similar background, decided in their mid-twenties that their increasingly hardscrabble agrarian life, in a bleak economy, was just too punishing. One account puts it this way: In 1898 “they moved to Stockholm in April, they married in May, and Anna delivered their first child, Sven, ten weeks later in July.” Perhaps embarrassment over Anna’s premarital pregnancy had something to do with the move, but perhaps not—illegitimate birth was not severely stigmatized in Sweden, then or now.
32 Blekingegaten, where Greta spent her childhood
Another account suggests that they may have met in Stockholm as early as 1896 and had settled down there together before Anna’s pregnancy. In any case, well before Greta was born they—Karl and Anna, eight-year-old Sven, and toddler Alva—were already in the Södermalm apartment where Greta lived until she left Sweden and where her widowed mother went on living for many more years, refusing her movie-star daughter’s efforts to move her into more comfortable surroundings. Anna, a practical, sensible, undemonstrative woman, was also a stubborn one—not unlike her famous daughter. At the time Greta was born, the family finances were so low that Karl’s employer seems to have offered to adopt the new baby. Anna to Karl: “If God gives you a child, he also gives you bread.” And that was that.
When Greta was a little girl, Stockholm was a bustling city but hardly a vast metropolis—the population was under four hundred thousand, and many of its inhabitants, recently transplanted like the Gustafssons from the country, remained very much in touch with nature. The Gustafssons, for instance, raised vegetables and grew flowers in a garden plot just outside the city—a long trolley ride and mile-long walk away. The whole family loved being there on weekends, and everyone pitched in—Greta, we’re told, raised strawberries and, when the local kids hadn’t stolen them, sold them herself in the city streets. Every extra krona helped, especially when Karl’s earning power decreased severely in light of his unrelentingly worsening health.
It was Karl whom Greta adored. Tall, handsome, with a refinement remarked on as out of the ordinary in an ordinary workingman, he was fun-loving and highly musical—a singer. And also a reader. Tragically, he developed a grave kidney disease, and he died of it at the age of forty-eight, when Greta was fourteen. In the time leading up to his death, while Anna and the older children went out to work, it had been Greta’s job to look after her father—to tend to him at home, and to accompany him to charity hospitals and clinics for medical help and in hopes of a cure. She never forgot the humiliations they endured as poor people in search of live-or-die attention. Years later, she would tell her friend Lars Saxon how her family’s endless weeping after Karl’s death angered her. “To my mind a great tragedy should be borne silently. It seemed disgraceful to me to show it in front of all the neighbors by constant crying. My own sorrow was as deep as theirs, and for more than a year I cried myself to sleep every night. For a time after his death I was fighting an absurd urge to get up in the night and run to his grave to see that he had not been buried alive.”
TOP AND BOTTOM (center): Karl Gustafsson
Greta’s mother and sister, Alva;
her brother, Sven, in later years
Karl’s death not only devastated Greta but ended her education. Not that she minded that at all: She had disliked school, although she did passably well in her studies (we have her report cards), except in math—“I could never understand how anyone could be interested in trying to solve such ridiculous problems as how many liters of water could pass through a tap of such and such width in one hour and fifteen minutes … The only subject I really liked was history.” Most of all, she was to say, she had never felt like a child, and “I don’t think anyone ever regarded me as a child … Though I am the youngest of three, my brother and sister always looked on me as the oldest. In fact, I can hardly remember ever having felt young.” Moreover, she was always big for her age—at twelve she had already reached her full height of five feet, seven inches, and was taller than all her classmates; she sticks out in every group picture from her early years.
So she was eager, almost wild, to get out into the big world: Childhood things (like school) were both boring and a waste of time. And she always knew where she wanted to go. From the first, she was obsessed with the theater, with acting. When she was still a little girl she told her Uncle David, “I’m going to become a prima donna or a princess.” And her Aunt Maria “one day found her five-year-old niece deep in thought and asked what was on her mind. ‘I am thinking of being grown up and becoming a great actress.’”
Greta (back row center) and playmates
Even as a really young child she was putting on little shows—organizing Alva and Sven and neighborhood kids into supporting her plans. She informed her classmate and friend Elisabet Malcolm that they were going to be actresses, even though Elisabet had no real interest in acting. Greta, Elisabet recalled, always took the lead roles and directed the other kids in the plays they put on. “You must come in like this and pretend you are very much surprised to see me and look like this,” she instructed Elisabet, and then, “This will never do … Now take that chair and sit down. You can be the audience and I’ll show you how one really acts.” What’s more, said Elisabet, “When we weren’t actually imitating actors and actresses we would dress up as boys, making good use of her brother Sven’s belongings. ‘I’m Gustafsson’s youngest boy, you know,’ Greta told a local shoemaker, ‘and this is a pal of mine.’” Sven would report that “we all had to dress up in old costumes and do as we were told. Usually she liked to play the part of a boy. Sometimes she would say terrible things. She would point to me and say, ‘You be the father,’ and then to my sister: ‘You be the mother.’ Then I would ask what part she was playing, and she would say, ‘I am your child who is drowned.’” She was always the leader, and things always had to be done exactly her way.
Her imagination was unflagging, even when she wasn’t “performing.” Elisabet tells us that on warm days the two girls would climb onto the roofs of the row of outside lavatories behind their apartment house and, ignoring the smells, pretend they were somewhere else: “We are on a sandy beach. Can’t you see the waves breaking on the shore? How clear the sky is! And do you hear how sweetly the orchestra at the casino is playing? Look at that girl in the funny green bathing suit! It’s fun to be here and look at the bathers, isn’t it?” The girls remained friends and in touch long after Greta went to America, but she ended the friendship abruptly—and typically—when in 1932 Elisabet “betrayed” her by offering these reminiscences to Motion Picture magazine.
She spent a lot of time at the local soup kitchens—she was a regular at the Salvation Army—not only filling up on food but entertaining the people standing in line, at the age of nine putting on skits to amuse them, and even stretching to a musical revue “in which Greta portrayed everything from the Goddess of Peace to a three-year-old in red rompers.” Not that she had been exposed as a child to the theater—the Gustafssons were far too poor to waste money on entertainment. But when Greta would earn a few pennies, she would spend them on the movies and on movie magazines. (Earn them or beg them: One neighbor reported that Greta “was a real cadger in those days. On paydays when the men came home from work she would stand in the street smiling at them with an outstretched hand.”) And she would acquire postcards of stage stars from the nearby newspaper kiosk in exchange for running errands for the proprietress—her favorite was the charming leading man of Swedish variety shows Carl Brisson, who went on to appear on the London stage as Count Danilo in The Merry Widow and as the star of Hitchcock’s The Manxman (1929).
Many kids, of course, have dreams of becoming actors, and many kids put on shows for their families and the neighbors. And then there have been those like Mary Pickford and the Gish sisters who were themselves performing at a very early age to keep their families afloat—Mary was trouping at the age of seven, Lillian at nine. But it’s hard to believe that apart from Greta, there was ever a girl of eight or nine who would walk some distance to theaters in the evening and stand at the stage door, alone, for hours, just to watch the actors and actresses come in and go out. It would get so late that her father or brother or Uncle David, a taxi driver, would go look for her and convey her home, these late hours no doubt contributing to her routine exhaustion at school. Meanwhile, though, she was beginning to be recognized by some of the actors and actresses, and the stage doorman of the Southside Theater took a shine to her and one night let her go backstage. “At last, I caught wonderful glimpses of the players at their entrances, and first smelled that most wonderful of all odors to a devotee of the theater—that backstage smell, compounded of grease-paint powder and musty scenery. No odor in the world will ever mean as much to me—none!” Slowly she became a known quantity—and, given her charm, a welcome one—at these theaters.
She was consumed by her determination to become not only an actress but a great star. But how to get there? She was dirt poor, essentially uneducated, and had no connections. Yet it happened. Nothing could or would stop her, although along with her determination she suffered from an almost crippling shyness, especially with strangers. Indeed, her strongest impulse, she would say, was to be alone with her thoughts and dreams. “I was always sad as a child, for as long as I can think back. I hated crowds of people, and used to sit in a corner by myself, just thinking. I did not want to play very much. I did some skating and played with snowballs, but most of all I wanted to be alone with myself.” And she would spend much of her long life being exactly that.
As a result of this emotional independence, she could take her friends or leave them. And if she took them, it had to be on her terms. A girl named Eva Blomgren was one of her closest friends, and they corresponded when Eva went away to the country one summer—this was soon after Karl had died and Greta had just been confirmed (the Gustafssons, like everyone else, were Lutherans). “One thing I have to say,” wrote Greta. “If you and I are to remain friends, you must keep away from my girl friends, as I did from yours. I’m sure you wouldn’t like it if you met me with your most intimate friends and I completely ignored you. I did not mind your going out with Alva, but I realized that you intended to do the same with all my acquaintances. Eva, I am arrogant and impatient by nature, and I don’t like girls who do what you have done … If this letter offends you, then you don’t need to write to me again, but if it doesn’t and you will promise to behave as a friend, then I shall be glad to hear from you again soon.” And her next letter to Eva begins, “Well, so you promise to mend your ways. Then all can be as before, provided I have no cause to complain again.” This need to control her relationships with others—family, friends, lovers—would manifest itself for the rest of her life, with the unique exception of her bond with the director who “discovered” her, Mauritz Stiller.
Yet despite all this prickliness, we’re constantly hearing what a nice and pleasant girl she was—how full of fun! And how funny! Mimi Pollack, her closest friend from their days at Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theater Academy and for many years thereafter, said that “she was always gay and good-humored, always full of fun and ready for mischief.” She was also full of energy when she wasn’t lethargic and mopey. She swam, she sledded. “I was awful as a child!” she said. “We used to do all the tricks of ringing doorbells and running away … and I was the ringleader. I wasn’t at all like a girl. I used to play leapfrog, and have a bag of marbles of my own—a tomboy.”
Her first regular employment after her father died was as a “tvålflicka,” a face-latherer: Her job was to dab shaving soap onto the faces of the (male) customers. She was a big success at Arthur Ekengren’s barbershop, the largest in the neighborhood. Her pay was seven kronor a week (something like $1.50), and that money went straight to her mother, but she kept her tips for herself, often spending them on chocolate treats. (This and the following information about her life as a tvålflicka comes from Karen Swenson’s biography, the most thorough account we have in English of Garbo’s Swedish years.) According to Mrs. Ekengren, Greta was an immediate favorite at the shop: “Some clients would phone and make special appointments and then, if Greta was not there, find some excuse for postponing them.” Joking with the customers, she “filled the place with her laughter and vitality.”
“A good soap girl did more than simply put lather on the faces of students, sailors, and businessmen,” explains Swenson. “She gently rubbed the soap into the skin, massaging each man’s face and preparing him for the barber. It could be an enjoyable, even sensual experience for the patron and certainly put a teenage girl in the position of dealing with unwelcome advances.” Even so, one of her co-workers at Ekengren’s reported that Greta “always kept her dignity and never allowed men to get fresh with her.”
Spending her life lathering men, however, was not her ambition. Deciding to move on to a grander (and better-paying) job, she applied to one of Stockholm’s premier department stores, known as the PUB—it was owned by Paul U. Bergström. She was accepted, and on July 26, 1920, she began work at the store and was soon promoted to the millinery department. She was still fourteen but claimed to be fifteen and looked considerably older. Her emerging beauty cannot have hurt her chances. Writing to Eva, she said, “Can you imagine me as a shop girl? But don’t worry, I haven’t given up my ideas about the theater … I’m just as faithful to them as before.”
Modeling hats at PUB
The supervisor of the women’s clothing department was a sympathetic lady named Magda Hellberg who remembered “employee #195” as “very conscientious, quiet,” and as one who “always took great care about her appearance.” When the store manager asked Miss Hellberg to suggest someone to model hats for the upcoming spring catalogue, she immediately replied, “Miss Gustafsson should be perfect for that. She always looks clean and well-groomed and has such a good face.” (This may be the last time anyone referred to Garbo’s face as merely “good.”) Greta grabbed at the opportunity. “Aunt Hellberg can arrange anything for me,” she exclaimed. “Oh, how happy I am!” Hellberg remarked that this was “probably the longest sentence I ever heard her say at one time.”
The shots of Greta modeling five different hats were a success, and she was asked to repeat the experience for the next catalogue. As a result, she began modeling clothes at PUB fashion shows, and then in other stores as well. When a Captain Ragnar Ring, known as Lasse, turned up—he was making short films and commercials to be shown in movie houses—the advertising manager pointed out “a girl here who has done very well modeling hats for us; perhaps we could use her.” Ring had already chosen a girl to model hats, but he hired Greta (for ten kronor a day) to play a small part. Then came another advertising film in which she played a girl who looked goofy in a deliberately outlandish costume that didn’t fit or suit her. They were thinking of dropping this comic scene from the picture (and eliminating Greta entirely) when they recalled how hard she had worked and how effective she was. And then the film’s producer arrived on the set and, when he saw Greta under the lights, grabbed hold of the doorpost. “She is so beautiful that it really pains my heart just to see her.”
Another man who noticed her on that set was a youngish, good- looking, rich contractor—an Olympic medalist for swimming and water polo; a well-known “man-about-Stockholm”—named Max Gumpel. He had come to the store because his nephew was playing Greta’s younger brother and “of course, I went to PUB to see the film being made,” as he wrote in an unpublished memoir.
She was lovely. I invited her home to dinner. She came and I remember that we had crown artichokes, which were new to her. After that we met quite often, and I willingly admit that I was very keen on her, so much so, indeed, that I gave her a tiny gold ring with a tiny diamond in it … and she flattered me by thinking that it gleamed like one of the British crown jewels. After a few years we parted, good friends as we had always been … Ten years went by; I had been married and was divorced. The star came to Sweden [this was in 1932]. One day I received a phone call at the office. A woman’s voice asked if I would dine with an old friend. She was mystifying, but eventually told me who she was. At that I became very cautious, for it could easily have been someone trying to make a fool of me. Anyway, I asked the voice to put on an evening frock and come and dine in my home. When she said she did not possess such a thing, I told her just to make herself as beautiful as she could. She came—and it was she. The only jewelry she had on was my little diamond ring.
Their friendship flourished, lasting until Gumpel’s death, in 1965. Along the way he did many things for her—loaned her his villa, escorted her around town, advised her on real-estate investments, even apparently worked with her during the war, passing on information about Nazi-leaning Swedish industrialists to the Allies. And she became friendly with his family. It’s almost certain that he was her first lover. She was only fifteen when they met—he was thirty—but she looked older and claimed to be older, and he probably had no idea of her real age. Besides, the age of consent in Sweden was fifteen then—and still is. Her close friend Vera Schmiterlöw confirmed that Max “was Greta’s first great love,” and even that later on there had been talk of an engagement, given the appearance of a diamond engagement ring. Nothing, of course, came of it. One thing is definite: Whenever Garbo was in Stockholm, she and Max played a great deal of tennis together.
As a girl she was definitely aware of the other sex—she was popular with the boys in her neighborhood and, as we have seen, knew how to charm the older men whom she was lathering as a tvålflicka. And, Eva Blomgren informs us, when she was walking home every night from PUB, she deliberately walked past the royal palace. “One of the princes might catch sight of me,” she explained.
Copyright © 2021 by Robert Gottlieb
