ALL THAT GLITTERS

A Cabinet full of tarnished dirty little secrets

by Nick Zegarac

Garbo never won an Academy Award. Neither did Alfred Hitchcock.

Alan Ladd, Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe were never even nominated.

Difficult to say what turns the crank of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS) – especially these days when such a target rich environment of raw talent is increasingly hard to come by. And who can justify what performance or film is more worthy of the little gold statuette when pitted against another running along side it, particularly when contenders are from a variety of genres. The Oscars are really the old apples to oranges analogy run amuck.


Reflecting ever so lightly on the hypocrisies associated with Oscar, director Peter Bogdanovich commented, “the way I see it, there’s only one place that does it right. Every year in Barcelona they give awards for poetry. The third prize is a silver rose…the second, a gold one. First prize, the one for the best poem of all, is a real rose.”

Bogdanovich was of course drawing a parallel between ‘real or genuine’ art and the ‘real’ rose, as opposed to manufactured business masquerading as art and the copy of a rose. But by its very essence, film is a copy without any original. It is shadow and light, a flickering spirit that suddenly appears with the dimming of the house lights that evaporates just as quickly after the final fade out. Contemporary talent is like that too. It’s disposable. The days of a Joan Crawford, chewing up the scenery for nearly five decades are decidedly over. And what is made in terms of film output for public consumption now is not so much film art but film product; a slick packaged bit of temporary diversion – often, not well-crafted.

But, back to Oscar, dear Oscar…Oscar Dearest. From the moment that golden boy appeared on the scene in 1927 he became a cultural relic of controversy for the idle idols in movie-land. In those early years the awards ceremony was a private affair, just a simple (at least by Hollywood’s standards) gathering either at the Ambassador Hotel or Cocoanut Grove, put on by the men and women in the industry to acknowledge one another for their ‘hard’ work. But by the late 1930s that ‘little’ ceremony had become the all-consuming festival of morbid fascination with fame - achieving and maintaining it through award status - that quickly extending its tenacity beyond the borders of make-believe.

“You know,” Cary Grant mused, “There is something embarrassing about all these wealthy people publicly congratulating each other.”

He was being polite. But mystery author, Raymond Chandler, whose books had successfully been translated into popcorn sellers, hit closer to the truth. “If you can go past those awful idiot faces on the bleachers outside the theater without a sense of the collapse of human intelligence; and…see half the police force…gathered to protect the golden ones from the mob…and still feel like the picture business is worth the attention of one single intelligent artistic mind, then in the picture business you certainly belong because this sort of vulgarity…from which the Oscars are made, is the inevitable price Hollywood exacts from each of its serfs.”

Yet how many people today recognize what the Academy is really all about. In truth, AMPAS began its life as a sort of ‘guild-busting company union’ – a private organization funded mostly by MGM’s vast resources and primarily designed to maintain control over its artists (or rather, keep them under the proverbial thumb of studios by maintaining a level of disproportionate productivity from its stars. Consider, that the average star personage in Hollywood during the 30s made no less than three movies a year, and, was expected to fulfill obligations on a coast to coast itinerary involving press promotions, public and radio appearances.

Rarely did stars choose these venues or, for that matter, the contents of the films they appeared in. Rather, they were assigned and moved about the lucrative game board of fame and residual returns by their mogul bosses like chess pieces, without any control over how their careers were handled. If any star protested the restraints, well…there was always AMPAS to suggest who should win and who should be excluded from Hollywood’s most coveted award’s ceremony. The less likely you were to receive a nomination, the less popular you became in the eyes of your adoring fans; the less popular, the less lucrative for the studio; the least lucrative resulting in a complete cancellation of one’s contract. Hence, stardom was predicated on a star’s compliance with a smile.

Even Academy-sanctioned columnist Murray Ross was hard pressed to maintain the façade for AMPAS as a benevolent awards provider, stating in print, “The Academy was obviously never meant to be a thoroughly democratic organization.”

And democratic it never has been. By the end of the 30s AMPAS was on the verge of collapse, thanks to the shortsightedness of studio moguls – who had lost the race against union guilds and therefore viewed their association with AMPAS dissolvable; their financial investment in it - pointless. By 1952, as an organization free of studio intervention – and badly needed studio funds - AMPAS was struggling to maintain its yearly honors.

But then came television; for a hundred thousand dollars NBC adopted Oscar as its yearly mascot and from that point on the awards became the property of the studio’s arch nemesis. Audiences stayed home in droves to see the yearly cavalcade of stars like Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman for free in the comfort of their living rooms. It’s not a pretty piece in Oscar’s ‘all that glitters’ history, but it is history nevertheless.

However, all this backstage intrigue paled to the horse race in front of the cameras. “I’m sure that Mary (Pickford) watched Janet (Gaynor) mount the podium and thought ‘Gee, that would be fun, I’ll have to get one’” TCM host Robert Osborne speculated while still a columnist for The Hollywood Reporter, “That’s all it took. And soon the competition was cutthroat.”

In the old days, Oscar voting was entirely a matter of studio support. Moguls decided which films and stars they would ‘push’ for the Oscar race, and which they would quietly shuffle to the back of their deck – regardless of the innate value in their performance.


Bette Davis figures prominently in an early Oscar scandal. When Davis proved, on loan out to RKO, that her performance in Of Human Bondage was statuette worthy pulp, her alma mater, Warner Bros. quietly refused to back her with votes. The edict on high had a trickle down effect to every star and contract player working at the studio. Nearly three times the size of RKO’s voting roster, the ousting of Davis from even a ‘nomination’ consideration was complete – despite the artistry infused into her craft. “My bosses certainly didn’t help by sending instructions to all their personnel to vote for somebody else,” Davis would bitterly exclaim decades later.

Yet, perhaps Hollywood itself was unprepared for the shifting balance of power; one that saw audience popularity gradually shift from its mature stars to the boy’s club seated in their director’s chairs. You see, the talent both in front of and behind the camera had grown younger throughout the late sixties and early seventies while AMPAS’s voting roster primarily remained the same; comprised of warhorses from the studio’s golden age. This is primarily why the overwhelming infusion of teen and twenty-something talent that set box office cash registers ringing in the early eighties (Molly Ringwald, Eric Stolz, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Michael J. Fox, Rob Lowe, Sean Penn, et al) were completely overlooked by their own studios when it came time to mount serious campaigns for awards contenders.

“To tell you the truth it burns my guts,” director Henry Hathaway explained in an interview, “A director is like a painter. In a painting it’s the skill and workmanship that stands out – not the painter…a director belongs behind the camera.”

His remarks were indirect references for Steven Spielberg and his meteoric rise in Hollywood. More popular than most of his contemporaries, Spielberg’s work was quietly despised by the alumni voters who unanimously boycotted such stellar efforts as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and even the director’s attempt to outdo the old timers with old time – though decidedly more masterfully crafted entertainment, with The Color Purple.

The latter was a particularly obvious snub. Spielberg failed to earn a Best Director’s nod even as The Color Purple racked up 11 nominations, including Best Picture. Hence, the L.A. Examiner, who had never been fans of Spielberg were forced to expose the oversight in print with “if a movie has eleven nominations, someone has to be responsible!”


None of Spielberg’s early works was considered beyond the nomination stage – a telling sign that Oscar remained a closed party for a very select controlling interest. In restrained reflection on his losses then, Spielberg confided, “There’s always a backlash against anything that makes more than $50 million…and history is always more weighty than popcorn.” That was Spielberg’s polite way of saying that he understood why the lugubrious epic, Gandhi beat out E.T. for the Best Picture of that year.

In recent years the Academy has attempted to refurbish their tarnished image in much the same way Hollywood and the city of Los Angeles have made strides to renovate their crumbling façade with a new coat of paint so that it more readily reflects the town built on make-believe, not winos and rent-by-the-hour love affairs that overtook its streets and alleys in the late 60s and 70s.

Oscar itself has returned to the ‘glory days’ of glamour that once made the ceremony seem more sedately supreme and regally opulent than any of the underpinning goings-on ever were. After the scant and minimalist downplaying of the 1980s, when most celebrities eschewed limousines for carpools and ignored their fans by descending unannounced into the cement bowels of a parking garage beneath the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the red carpet has once again been laid downtown, this time in front of the lavish Kodak Theatre.

Excitement too has made its comeback into the proceedings - even if it is cut from the same cloth of ‘mindless vulgarity’ that Raymond Chandler would have preferred remained forgotten and buried. And while the quality of film product (for it can hardly be considered more the art than the commodity these days) remains debatable, one thing is for certain – the hard sell and rigorous campaigning of studio PR can still put over the most iconoclastic bit of self-indulgent tripe as award-worthy. But I still prefer the days when all the rhetoric and politics of the likes of a Sacheen Littlefeather were played in the open for the generated shock value and muckraker’s embarrassment it personified. At least then the tone of dissension was both palpable and obvious. Today, who knows what’s going on behind that velvet curtain?


Pearls of Wisdom from the Oscar Closet

“For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me.” – Luise Rainer

“It’s really important to remember that we make films for artistic reasons and not to win a little gold statuette.” – Martin Scorsese

“Acting in films is not a goddamn horse race and that’s what makes the Academy Awards so very wrong!” – Richard Burton

“To hell with it! They didn’t nominate me so fuck it. Let’s have fun.” – Cher

“The real show is backstage and out there in the audience. It’s written on the faces of the losers, in the hearts of the winners and told in whispers behind perfumed hands.” – Dorothy Kilgallen

“The Oscar was a marvelous concept. It was supposed to make our business more dignified. But it quickly became just another monetary spectacle.” – Joan Fontaine

“It encourages the public to think that the award is more important to the actor than the work for which he was nominated.” – George C. Scott

@2006 (all rights reserved).

ESTHER WILLIAMS - in the swim of things

by Nick Zegarac

“I’m really lost about Esther Williams’ work in the movies. But if nothing else they had to be terribly dangerous.” – Time Magazine review for Million Dollar Mermaid (1952).

Today, Esther Williams would be among the first to admit that any snap analysis of her career as a serious actress is ‘all wet.’ “All they ever did for me at MGM was change my leading man and the water in my pool.” Though she was a ravishing beauty, seemingly flawless (at least on the surface) and groomed in the halcyon days of the star system, still waters ran very deep in both Esther’s life and career.

Her open admission that, at the behest of Cary Grant, she attempted radical psychotherapy with LSD (then a legitimate prescription medication) to alleviate depression is but one of Esther’s many no nonsense reflections. Of her three pragmatic divorces from husbands Leonard Kovner, Ben Gage and Fernando Lamas, Esther has since reassessed her “naïve expectations, misplaced trust, passionate love and need for a safe haven.” She has emerged like that on-camera persona of the sea nymph with formidable stealth above and below the waterline, a resilient and vital woman of perennial youthfulness and frank sophistication.

“I don’t know to this day how I managed to fit into those bathing suits when I was pregnant…diving off platforms with Ben (her first son) in Neptune’s Daughter, going underwater in silver lame with Kim (her first son) in Pagan Love Song and learning how to water ski with Susie (daughter) in Easy to Love…and somehow I stayed a size ten through it all.”

Born in Los Angeles on August 8, 1922, Esther Williams grew up with an innate love of swimming fostered by frequent visits to her local playground pool and beaches. By age 16 she had already racked up three national championships. Although she qualified for the 1940 Olympics, the encroachment of World War II forced a cancellation of the games and Esther’s hopes for international fame as a swimmer. Cheesecake photos taken for local newspapers caught the eye of legendary showman Billy Rose who co-starred Esther with another hopeful, Johnny Weismuller in his lavish San Francisco Aquacade.

The overwhelming success of this spectacle was not lost on MGM executives and talent scouts who offered Esther a screen test. As with a host of starlets that had gone before her (Judy Garland, Ann Rutherford, Lana Turner), Esther’s film debut was in a minor cameo opposite Mickey Rooney in Andy Hardy’s Double Life (1942). However, when screen scenarists approached the front offices with the concept of an entire film built around a swimmer (Bathing Beauty) the idea was met with skepticism from L.B. Mayer.

“How the hell do you make pictures in a pool?” Mayer reportedly asked. “The same way Darryl F. Zanuck does with Sonja Henie and ice skates,” he was told.

In the retrospective echelons of screen musicals, Bathing Beauty has since proven to be a minor sensation. At the time of its release it was both a colossal critical and commercial success – second only in box office returns to 1944’s reissue of Gone With The Wind. But contrary to popular rumor, it was not the first time a poolside spectacle had been attempted for the movies. That accolade falls first to Samuel Goldwyn’s The Kid From Spain 1932, and then Warner Brothers Footlight Parade (1933). The irony of having Williams water ballets staged by the man responsible for these lavish water sequences – Busby Berkeley – was not lost on L.B. Mayer who, though a gambling man, always believed in hedging his bets.

However, Bathing Beauty (1944) did feature the first ‘water ballet’ in Technicolor; a splashy sequence involving fountains and fire, and a veritable army of swimmers bedecked in epic kitsch. The overwhelming success of the film launched Williams’ career as a movie star, making her the number one pin-up girl in the country and the most popular entertainer amongst film exhibitors for nearly two decades and 26 films.

“I always thought every picture I made was going to be the last one,” Williams mused. However, what is often overlooked about Esther Williams – the performer, is the fact that she is far more than a one note wonder. True, her forte was swimming. But she was also a spirited and vivacious dancer, a convincing dramatic actress and one of the wittiest raconteurs ever to appear on or off camera. Her adept comedic styling elevated many a mundane and conventional plot and, since her tenure at MGM, have made for colorful reflections about the film industry.

At MGM, Esther was given few opportunities to dry off. The public’s demand to see her in ever-increasingly lavish and more complex water ballets even necessitated the inclusion of a very brief and restrained pool sequence in the period musical, Take Me Out To The Ballgame (1949). By 1950, Esther had been effectively christened America’s Mermaid. Capitalizing on that moniker, MGM exploited her to spectacular effect in the biopic of Australian swimming sensation Annette Kellerman: Million Dollar Mermaid (1950). But the film also presented Esther with her first brush with death.

To date, every one of her underwater sequences had been meticulously pre-planned and storyboarded to allow Esther ample time to dive below surface, hit her mark and then come up for air. However, at the behest of Williams the sequences in Million Dollar Mermaid were stacked together, occasionally two or three at a time so that she would hold her breath for increasingly longer intervals. During one of these stacked sequences, Williams discovered what divers refer to as ‘the rapture’ – a sudden compression of the lung tissue that does not allow for more air to enter its passage ways.

Filming Esther through one of the many underwater portholes in the saucer pool, director Mervyn LeRoy and his staff were unaware that Williams was, in effect, drowning before their very eyes until she lifelessly sank out of camera range to the bottom. Reportedly, even then LeRoy was unconvinced as to what was actually taking place. “Esther…what the hell are you doing? We can’t keep you in focus at the bottom of the pool. We’re not lit for that!”

On her next project, Texas Carnival (1952) Esther again encountered a near fatal calamity during the filming of a dream sequence. In it, Esther is seen as the blithe spirit of co-star Howard Keel’s daydreams, effortlessly floating in and out of his bedroom in a white negligee. To achieve the effect, two identical bedroom sets were built – one on dry land, where Howard Keel pretended to take his nap; the other inside a blackened pool with a roof to sufficiently keep out excess light. Unfortunately, the designers of this set left no space between its ceiling and the water line. The only means of escape for air was through a single trap door that also had been painted black, making it virtually impossible to locate underwater. “I don’t think you know the meaning of panic,” Williams later mused, “…until you’re out of air and can’t see any way out.”

Though she was still a top box office draw and would continue to make aquacade movies well into the mid-1950s, Million Dollar Mermaid was the final unqualified success in Esther’s crown. By 1953’s Easy to Love, changing audience tastes, dwindling box office receipts from musicals in general, the end of the star system, and, the infusion of television culture had all conspired to undermine her reputation as a saleable commodity.

MGM thrust her into Jupiter’s Darling (1955) an abysmally miscast retread of the lover’s triangle between Fabius (George Sanders), defender of Rome, his lover Amytis (Williams) and the venomous conqueror, Hannibal (Howard Keel). Opposed to the project from the start, Esther’s rift with L.B. Mayer’s replacement, Dore Schary reached a critical junction shortly before filming began. “He (Schary) was very smooth, almost snide and very condescending, but in one way we were equal. I didn’t respect the pictures he made (and he knew it) and he didn’t respect the pictures I made (and I knew it).” The film’s critical and financial misfire effectively ended the studio’s cycle of ‘everybody into the pool’ decadence that had made Esther Williams an overnight sensation a mere decade earlier.

Although she attempted – and for the most part succeeded in fabricating a legitimate camera persona as a serious actress in 1956’s The Unguarded Moment – an unremarkable ‘who done it’, and 1958’s maudlin melodrama, Raw Wind in Eden, tepid box office response to both projects effectively killed off the remainder of her options and MGM unceremoniously dropped her contract. Worse, mismanagement of her estate by second husband Ben Gage had left Esther in a financial debacle. She owed money everywhere, but chiefly to the IRS. Undaunted, Esther effectively retired from movies to be Mrs. Fernando Lamas on New Years Eve, 1969.

“It’s a lonely business…this stardom, because you never really feel that it’s safe to confide in anyone. Husbands don’t want to know, even if they’re not the source of the problem. Friends cant’ keep secrets. Even therapists were known to go to the press. You learned not to trust anyone with your confidences and risk busting that pretty pink bubble the studio had constructed around you and your outwardly perfect personal life. The public desperately wanted to believe that you lived a fairy tale…a projection of all their romantic fantasies, so much so that despite everything, you tried to believe it yourself.”

However, Esther proved that she had a head for enterprise. She indulged in lucrative department store modeling and attached her name to a line of above-ground swimming pools. She also developed her own line of swimwear. At product launches, openings and benefits she was easily a star attraction.

“When I go to business conventions for my products, it sometimes takes me over four hours to sign all the autographs and pose for pictures. Everyone wants a photo for their store, and I never turn anyone down, no matter how long it takes.”

Despite her considerable success, Esther’s bitter divorce from MGM festered for sometime afterwards. When the studio released its compendium tribute to the great MGM musicals of the past - That’s Entertainment! (1974), in which sequences from many of Williams’ films figured prominently, Esther sued the studio for their unauthorized use. By 1994, that rift had healed to the extent where Esther agreed to narrate one of the sequences for That’s Entertainment Part 3.

After Fernando Lamas’ death in 1982, Esther Williams took a very brief hiatus from the limelight. Though she committed to a Barbara Walters Special and guest appearances on the Dinah Shore Show, perhaps the best snapshot from this later period has Esther entering a local butcher shop, only to be asked the proverbial backstabbing question that befalls most stars in the autumn of their careers – “Didn’t you used to be Esther Williams?”

“Yes. I used to be” says Esther.

“What the hell happened to you?” the butcher continues, “You’ve gotten older.”

To which Esther replied, “Have you looked in the mirror lately? You’ve gotten older too!”

In her autobiography, Esther would conclude, “What the public expects and what is healthy for an individual are two very different things…I always took it for granted that there would be a life after Hollywood.”

And so there has. Frank funny and as vital as ever, Esther Williams has endured the waning years of stardom as a top attraction on the interview, lecture and talk show circuit. Her candid, self-effacing and unpretentious observations about Hollywood’s so called golden age are a unique glimpse into that otherwise mythological paradise. Despite, or perhaps, because of the hardships along the way, Esther Williams in life has emerged as something her on screen persona arguably never was; a truly great lady.

“I think the joy that showed through in my swimming movies comes from my lifelong love of the water. No matter what I was doing, the best I felt all day was when I was swimming. Of course I still swim. Only now I go in when I have the pool to myself.”

@2006 (all rights reserved).

GARBO

A LIFE APART

by Nick Zegarac

She was a legend in her own time, destined for immortality even before her stay on earth had ended. Today, the name Garbo continues to conjure that essence of a most elusive, enigmatic and mysterious woman – an androgynous, near mythological creature at odds with her own image and generation. Despite her filmic testaments that radiate a genuine luminosity and seemingly endless well of emotions on the silver screen, in life Greta Garbo was a very real, very problematic personality, often mired by inner contradictions that frequently made her unable to experience friendship or sacrifice anything for even those who were closest to her.

So completely removed from her own time and lost in the world around her, at the age of 36 Garbo fled into self-imposed exile from both the spotlight and the millions of adoring fans who had helped make her success. At the very zenith of her fame, she denied the world her presence – a move scrutinized by critics but one that made her all the more fascinating to her admirers.

She was born Greta Gustafsson in Stockholm Sweden on September 18, 1905. An amiable, charming, slightly fattish girl of working class parents who lived in a tenement at Blekingegatan 32, Garbo’s youth was spent attending Katarina Sodra Primary School. By all accounts she was a well-behaved mature and diligent pupil. Garbo also became fascinated with the theater and silent cinema in particular; her favorite actress - America’s sweetheart: Mary Pickford. At 15, Garbo joined the prestigious Royal Dramatic Academy, confiding her greatest personal insecurity to a close friend and fellow student. “I’m horribly uncultured.”

But by 1920, Garbo had taken her first unlikely step toward stardom, appearing as a fashion model in a catalogue for PUB, a reputable department store. She also appeared in a film commercial for that establishment. It brought her to the attention of Swedish film director, Mauritz Stiller. Already reputed as a genius, Stiller’s approach to molding Gustafsson into his vision of a great actress began with a strict regiment of exercise and diet to rid her excess weight. It also included a name change – from Gustafsson to Garbo. Today, the origins of that alteration remain as mysterious as the lady herself, though some have speculated that the moniker derived from Erica Darbo – a then popular Norwegian operetta star.

Newly rechristened, Garbo appeared for Stiller in Gosta Berling’s Saga (1924) a silent melodrama based on Selma Lagerlof’s popular novel. By now, director and star were lovers and Stiller’s romantic fascination with his young protégée grew into a highly protective shell. Though the reviews Garbo received from her Swedish critics were unanimously harsh, outside interests generated by the film were favorable to very good. Garbo next appeared in The Streets of Sorrow (1925), shot in Berlin for German director, G.W. Pabst.

It was at this junction in Garbo’s early career that Stiller was offered a contract in Hollywood by L.B. Mayer, then head of the newly amalgamated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Despite a lack of interest in Garbo as a saleable commodity, Mayer reluctantly agreed to import the actress along with her mentor. The two arrived in New York in July 1925 for what regrettably developed into a lengthy fallow period in both their careers. Upon departing the ship, Stiller was shocked to discover that only a single photographer had been assigned to immortalize the occasion. MGM was in a state of chaos and quite unequipped to provide the sort of fanfare either Stiller or Garbo had expected.

Despite this early setback, Garbo and Stiller’s next reception in Los Angeles proved more inviting, with a select cast of Swedish immigrants (most of whom worked at the studio) cheering and offering flowers as they stepped from the train. L.B. Mayer however, was unimpressed by what he deemed an awkward peasant girl. “Americans don’t like their women fat,” he reportedly told Garbo, “…and get your teeth fixed.”

As Garbo and Stiller lay dormant on the studio’s roster of things to do, Stiller became increasingly impatient. For Garbo, this waiting period only served to put her own insecurities more ill at ease. She found the vast and sprawling acreage of MGM foreboding, cold and monolithic. The studio system – then in its infancy – frightened her. “I have become afraid of life” she wrote in a letter home, “It’s as if someone has cut off part of me. I’ve tried to get permission to go home but everyone advises me not to.”

Mayer’s early involvement in Garbo’s career did little to ease her apprehensions. Unable to get a pulse on how best to exploit his new starlet, MGM’s publicity department attempted to fabricate an athletic persona for her by photographing Garbo with male athletes from the University of Southern California and even Leo, the MGM lion. Though Mayer assigned two of the studio’s premiere cameramen, William Daniels and Hendrik Sartov, to lens her screen tests, after much prodding it was Stiller who secured Garbo her American debut in The Torrent (1925) though his involvement with the film ended there.

Groomed as the next vamp, Garbo nevertheless managed to transcend the limitations of that stereotype and infuse her character with an ambiguous sexuality that was both feminine yet highly assertive. Directed by Monta Bell, The Torrent radiated eroticism unlike any seen on the screen. It was an instant success.

Mayer, a highly righteous individual who frequently did much of his reasoning with a pair of fists, did not particularly mind a little naughtiness for the camera. But he did abhor the thought of Garbo (whom he now deemed as his discovery) living in sin with Stiller. Reluctantly, Mayer purchased the home that Garbo and Stiller shared on the coast, a lavish bungalow with secret passages designed to conceal their illicit romance from prying eyes.

As for Stiller, his popularity at the studio had quickly begun to cool. Frequently misunderstood and in conflict with his superiors at MGM, Stiller was first assigned to, then removed from, Garbo’s next project, The Temptress (1925). Stiller left MGM in 1927, frustrated, tired and with his reputation as a brilliant director dismantled. He would die one year later.

By the summer of 1926, Garbo was already a minor fascination amongst the international elite, thanks to her latest assignment, Flesh and the Devil which teamed her with two of her greatest co-collaborators; director Clarence Brown and matinee idol John Gilbert. “I never directed Garbo in anything above a whisper,” Brown later explained in an interview, confiding that he was never quite satisfied with her understated performance until he saw the film rushes, “…but there was something behind the eye that told the whole story.”

Indeed, Garbo and Gilbert’s love scenes smoldered on camera, primarily because the two had become intimate behind the scenes. However, when Gilbert jumped the gun, announcing to all that he would marry Garbo – only to have the bride not show up at the reception – his humiliation as a romantic leading man became complete. “Sleep with her,” Mayer reportedly told Gilbert, “But don’t marry her.”

At the behest of studio publicity, Garbo dined with Sweden’s Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf and Princess Louise while on their American goodwill tour, later musing, “I arrived 15 minutes late…wasn’t my fault that I worked – a scandal! He (the prince) was very friendly and I poured out all sorts of foolish things.” Yet, in retrospect, Garbo’s complicity in attending this dinner for the purposes of self and studio promotion seems off kilter with her more usual reservations about indulging in what she considered utter nonsense.

Indeed, when Mayer ordered Garbo (along with every other star under his tutelage) to attend his 4th of July birthday party, she quietly ignored the ‘invitation’ and remained absent from the event. Her frequent noncompliance to such seemingly harmless and casual requests was eventually threatened with deportation. Possessing a strong will, Garbo instead chose to go on strike and even agreed to being deported. Her timing was perfect. By 1928, the box office grosses from her films accounted for roughly 12% of the studio’s total profits. She was too hot a property to discard in haste and she knew it.

However, the biggest question concerning Garbo in 1929 was not how far she would allow the studio to push her vibrant independence, but whether or not she could talk. Sound recording had rendered most of the studio’s roster of European talent mute – their thick awkward accents speaking fractured English had become the cornerstone of much consternation and considerable loss of studio revenues.

Though MGM tested the viability of virtually all of their stars, except Garbo, in 1929’s talkie The Hollywood Revue, after much reluctance and planning, V.P. in charge of production – Irving Thalberg, chose Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (1930) as Garbo’s sound debut. The seedy waterfront melodrama proved an ideal springboard for Garbo’s low husky voice and the public – who had thus far embraced her as their own – now fell into an immediate fit of mass hysteria.

Calculating her every career move, Garbo relied on Irving Thalberg’s judgment to secure her prominent roles. In 1932’s all-star Grand Hotel, she was cast as a temperamental ballerina whose ill-fated love affair with a baron (John Barrymore) ends in his death. Initially, Garbo had expressed misgivings about costarring opposite Barrymore (whom she regarded as a far greater talent than her own) – apprehensions that were reciprocated by Barrymore (who had heard through the grapevine that Garbo was difficult to work with). One day, the two met off camera to get acquainted before shooting on the project began. They instantly became the best of friends and ardent admirers of one another’s talents. Garbo would later tell Barrymore, “You have no idea what it means to me to play opposite so perfect an artist.”

What was becoming increasingly problematic for Garbo during this period was her inability to take a firm grasp of her own stardom. Fame frightened her. Her reclusive nature and refusal to give interviews or sign autographs had ignited a nationwide fervor to get closer to her. Papers and magazines of the day reported that a Midwestern farmer had died and left Garbo his entire fortune. It was also claimed that a young girl had thrown herself in front of Garbo’s moving car in a fit of passion, declaring “I love you.” Frantic for some sort of semblance, Garbo departed for Sweden, a move that only served to stir more erroneous speculations. Had she retired? Was she going to marry a prince? Why did she want to be “left alone?”

By now, MGM had renegotiated her contract and Garbo returned to the studio to film Queen Christina (1934), by far her most androgynous role. In it, Garbo’s character is propositioned by a young maiden (who thinks her a man and a commoner) while staying at a country inn. The queen also refuses to marry the man the state has chosen for her, declaring to her ambassadors “I have no intention of dying an old maid…I shall die a bachelor.” At one point, Garbo’s queen even expresses overt jealousy over her lady in waiting, whom she has kissed on the lips.

In retrospect, it is primarily for this role – and Garbo’s ability throughout her career to poke fun at her own sexuality when pressed on the point - that has made some film scholars since her time appropriate the Garbo mystique to lesbian and bisexual literature. However, such misappropriation is purely speculative – since Garbo’s list of lovers in life is exclusively populated by men (Stiller, Gilbert and conductor, Leopold Stokowski).

While the public of its day relished Queen Christina, Joseph Breen and the Censorship Offices were shocked and appalled by the aforementioned transgressions. MGM was ordered to trim the film but miraculously declined and released it in its entirety – the last time they would be afforded such a luxury. By 1935, the code had tightened its strictures on all films produced under the studio system.

Hence, Garbo’s next film, Anna Karenina (1935), a remake of Love (1927) was a highly sanitized adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s passionate novel. 1937’s Camille pursued the image of Garbo as a great tragic actress. The film proved popular with audiences and critics alike. As the doomed courtesan Maurgurite Gautier, Garbo’s technical proficiency infused a subtle hint of delicate perversity and dramatic irony into the role. Women championed her performance as redefining femininity. Men in general, however, were remote over her more masculine stance.

Garbo had become too highbrow and cultured. Though her films continued to be wildly popular in Europe, in America she was considered something of an embarrassment that went against the grain of that more popular trend for brash and buxom leading ladies. A scathing article in Daily Variety proclaimed her box office poison.

As a last ditch effort to resurrect her waning popularity, MGM launched Garbo in her only comedy, the effervescent Ninotchka (1939) directed by Ernest Lubitsch. Cast as a Russian commissar who is assigned to secure her three comrades from the wiles of decadent Paris, Garbo managed to poke fun and irony at many of her own highfaluting airs. The film’s overwhelming success seemed to guarantee another project with Lubitsch. But instead, MGM miscast Garbo in Two-Faced Woman (1940) a horrific debacle in which she played twin sisters.

Upon its release, one critic remarked, “It’s as shocking as seeing your mother drunk!” Indeed, the pendulum in her career had swung too far in the other direction. Garbo, who had never known professional failure, quietly approached Mayer to ask for a release from her contract. Possibly she was conscious of the fact that with World War II raging overseas, the bulk of revenue from whatever future projects the studio had planned for her (which had always come from the European market) had been thwarted. But there also remains the very real possibility that Garbo was genuinely tired of Hollywood itself and the adulation that had made her a prisoner of her own popularity.

Whatever the case, Garbo left MGM after Two-Faced Woman for what was then referred to as 'an extended stay.' She never returned.

Though frequently given proposals for films throughout the forties Garbo turned down virtually every project. In 1949, she reluctantly agreed to screen test for Walter Wanger in what remains the last appearance of Garbo on celluloid. Exuding the radiance and magic she had cultivated as her hallmark nearly a decade before, the return of Garbo to films seemed a foregone conclusion. But the undisclosed project ran into financial difficulties that deeply saddened the actress and eventually caused her to withdraw for the last time. “I realized I didn’t matter anymore,” she later commented, “They couldn’t get enough money because it was Garbo.”

Installed in her fashionable New York apartment, Garbo’s final decades were affectionate dubbed as “the recluse about town.” For although she continued to profess a loathsome rejection of publicity, Garbo almost daily went for long walks about Manhattan, frequenting shops, sometimes with walking companion, Sam Green who had never seen a Garbo movie prior to befriending the actress.

In 1954, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did get around to bestowing an honorary Oscar for her body of work, but Garbo was not on hand to personally accept this award. Instead, she lived a life apart from her past, indulging in a bit of gardening when she felt like it, and, collecting rare art simply on the basis of what she found personally agreeable to her home décor. In 1990, after penning her biography, the denial of her own fame was made complete when Greta Garbo quietly died of natural causes at the age of 84.

Today, it seems unfathomable that Garbo ever really existed. For any retrospective of her filmic work tends to conjure up more questions than answers about what Garbo was genuinely like behind that fabricated façade. What is revealed about the woman is a haunting – perhaps haunted - tragic and sad beauty to which some deep seeded secret longings, desires and passions are only glimpsed at from behind her guarded soul. Garbo is indeed, as one clever artist so accurately depicted her at the height of her popularity; the Sphinx of the 20th century. She is like Chaplin – man, woman and child all rolled into one; an enigma that remains profoundly elusive in her ability to maintain that mystery so desperately desiring to be ‘left alone.’

@Nick Zegarac 2006 (all rights reserved).