A reliable stab at setting the record straight and filling in the gaps

Paris’ biography was published in 1995, five years after Garbo’s death aged 84 years in a New York hospital on April 15, 1990, and half a century-plus after the final film. A major selling point is his access to 100 hours of taped conversations between the secretive ex-actress and her friend Sam Green, an art curator, and 67 “affectionate, revealing” letters from a 50-year correspondence between Garbo and her closest friend, actress-screenwriter Salka Viertel.

This book is well regarded, and stays in print. The author quicky gives his firm opinion, calling  Garbo “The greatest phenomenom in film – if not all twentieth-century art”. That’s a huge call. She was, by her own design, the least known, Paris contends, and the first actress to touch the erotic consciousness of  men and women across all boundaries while remaining the most misunderstood. “But was that due to her ’mystery’ or to our ignorance? And speaking of ignorance, what did Garbo do with and during the last fifty years of her life?”

Considering that since 1931 there had been two dozen books on her, plus thousands of newspaper and magazine stories (and counting – editor), Paris had to contend with many queries as to whether he had “Found anything new yet?” or “Hasn’t she been done to death?”.  His defence was that the only serious biography had been published by writer John Bainbridge in 1955, with Norman Zierold taking an honest stab in 1969 and Alexander Walker crafting a solid MGM-approved portrait in 1980. Apart from the tapes and letters, Paris says hundreds of people helped him, including first-hand memories. His book is not “authorised”.

Paris needs to be objective too, and he can be, such as quoting from “The Great Garbo” by Robert Payne, published in 1976, with Payne stating, “she could legitimately be proud of perhaps ten minutes of ’Flesh and the Devil’, a quarter of an hour of ’Anna Christie’, twenty-five minutes of ’Grand Hotel’, and a single minute of ’Mata Hari’. The rest [was] kitsch.”

Payne was commenting on her career up to “Queen Christina” in 1933, after which there came only six more films, so it is informative that Paris answers this with: “Harsh, but largely true – until now.” Paris says “Queen Christina” was arguably her finest role and certainly the dearest to her heart. Earlier, he opined – “… and if the film results thus far [about 1928] were not high art, it was clear that she was inventing a profoundly different woman through her face, her walk and her subtle mannerisms”. But, as known, she mostly disliked her own films.

By the by, while Paris is unequivocal on Garbo’s elevated status, The Budapest Times notes with interest that in 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her fifth of the greatest female stars, behind Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Audrey Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman, in that order, and ahead of Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford, from six to 10. We happily watch and read about them all, as well as Garbo.

Well, that list seems worth noting. Another small point is that Paris’ book refers to Garbo’s 27 feature films but our count is 29 – three in Sweden and Berlin from 1922 to 1925, 11 silents in Hollywood from 1926 to 1929 and 15 talkies there from 1930 to 1941. Two of the 29 are “lost”, so it could be said the total is 27. “Lost” are “Luffar-Petter” (“Peter the Tramp”, 1922),  with just 4.48 minutes extant, and “The Divine Woman” (1928), with 9.11 minutes surviving. And recall the English and German “Anna Christie”s in 1930, having two casts but one Garbo.

Paris isn’t exactly complimentary about the quality of many of the films into which MGM put Garbo, but he makes an interesting point that she needed fewer intertitles to convey emotion than any other silent-era actor. He says her pathological mistrust of the press was due to MGM’s early mishandling of her, and another obssession, her refusal to sign autographs, was because she hated her own penmanship.

Eventually she became MGM’s highest paid and most powerful actor, though this then caused her frequent concern about her parts, her directors and her leading men.

Anecdotes and accuracy maketh the book. The accepted legends are generally already known – Garbo laughs!”, “Garbo talks!”, “Garbo quits!” and so on – but Paris assures that for our sake as well as his own he tried to streamline familiar details, if correction or clarification were necessary. But, he points out, discrepancies are the rule rather than the exception when it comes to Garbo literature and he had to make a thousand decisions on authenticity.

Encounters with her could be nerve-wracking. Salvador Dali managed to have a meeting set up in 1942 and he agonised over what to wear, eventually opting for a white suit, lilac silk shirt and extra-heavy waxing of the moustache. Garbo showed up in trousers and tennis shoes, took a long look at him, said “One of us has got it wrong”, and left.

One story, verified by Sam Green, is that Adolf Hitler loved her films and sent fan mail. Garbo  said she would be willing to meet him and try to convince him to end the war. She felt the power of her personality could alter the course of history but “if not – I could shoot him”.

After finishing “Mata Hari” in 1931, MGM promised exhibitors in the Netherlands and Indonesia (the female spy having been Dutch)  that Garbo would phone the opening night audience in Java. Not surprisingly, the recalcitrant star refused, so a secretary named Miss Pilkington, who was known around the studio for her  great imitation of Garbo’s voice, made the call instead, and the Indonesians never suspected a thing.

Paris’ substantial 650-page biography is a veritable encyclopaedia of all things Garbo, examining her talk, her walk, beliefs, her wage strike, diet, melancholia (and occasional joy), aloofness, mood swings, idiosyncracies, sexual slant, self-centeredness and penny-pinching (and generosity and magnanimity), clothes sense, musical and literary tastes, social circle, art purchases, travels, assets, sickness, the corrected teeth, even her shoe size.

Shoes? Take your pick between guesses of 7AA, 7AAA or 6½AA. When Garbo asked a sales assistant for mocassins, he brought sizes 8 and 9. She said, “These are too big for me,” and he looked at her, very disappointed, and replied, “Oh, I thought you were Garbo.”

And so, Greta Lovisa Gustafson was born in Stockholm on September 18, 1905, the youngest of three siblings in a family described as recently urbanised peasants who had tilled Swedish soil since 1700. Paris’ book is generously sprinkled with photographs, and we see parents Karl Alfred and Anna Lovisa, circa 1905, and a 1906 postcard of the building housing the walk-up, four-room, cold-water, fourth-floor flat that was Greta’s birthplace and family home until she left Sweden in 1925. “I was always inclined to melancholy,” Garbo recalled. “Even when I was a tiny girl I preferred to be alone.”

From Sweden to Hollywood to Manhattan, where she was no less mysterious than before, always unpredictable, walking the streets incognito daily and scuttling away if approached. Paris says that memoirs about this enigmatic actress who continues to fascinate are either photographic or just error-ridden rehashes of previous material, and her last half-century living elusively in New York City is unplumbed until now. Probably, the average reader cannot assess what is new here and what isn’t, but Paris’ account is surely as trustworthy as can be.