A glimpse of Garbo

Press, 19 April 1989, Page 20

A glimpse of Garbo

lAN BALL

reports from New York for the “Daily Telegraph”

GRETA GARBO was born the year the Japanese Navy trounced the Tsar’s fleet off Port Arthur. What should we deduce from the fact that, 84 years later, Karl and Anna Gustafsson’s third child still sends a frisson of excitement through a crowd of blase New Yorkers whenever a “sighting” is made* in the elegant Sutton Place area of Manhattan? Her hold over us is such that a London friend, seeking my advice on how she might use the last few hours of a stay in New York, asked whether it was worth while staking out Garbo’s apartment block in the East Fifties in case the star slipped out to the delicatessen.

Garbo made her last film, a fairly disastrous comedy, “Two Faced woman,” in 1941. She has not given a real interview in almost half a century. Yet American teenagers today know all about the Silent Swede, the Divine One. Almost mystically (since Garbo movies do not show up too frequently on latenight telly), she is as clear a symbol to sophisticated young people in New York as she was to a generation for whom “Flesh and the Devil,” “The Kiss,” "The Mysterious Lady” and “A Woman of Affairs” were current releases.

“Garbo ain’t gonna be dead for a long, long time,” her best friend, Gaylord Hauser, assured us a few years back. Certainly, she looked agile enough when I last saw her, my second “sighting” in 33 years of living and working close to Garbo territory. The alarm had been sounded by a middle-aged woman who sprinted past me, muttering — in that odd act of explanation New Yorkers feel is owed to strangers whenever they resort to sudden movement on the street — “It’s her — Garbo!”

I quickened my step and was rewarded with a glimpse of her entering her nondescript apartment building; nicely cut black heavy wool coat, flat-heeled shoes, her grey hair pulled back with an elastic band under a

scarf, dark glasses (of course), a bag of groceries from Salnet Produce on Second Avenue, a small black handbag swinging from the other hand.

Thre are some age spots and the inevitable lines spreading out from the twentieth century’s most famous smokey eyes. But the face is still recognisable as Garbo. Somehow, the confirmation sets the adrenalin flowing. Recently, Raymond Daum, a documentary film producer who is one of her small circle of friends, set down for “Life” magazine some new Garbo-isms, the fruit of detailed notes he has kept of their conversations over the past two decades. The snippets offer insights into a fragile but still fascinating personality.

Her fundamental need to be left alone remains unchanged: “I have no idea where one can go, to pack up and go, but to run from place to place is not what I’m looking for. I can’t take it. If I was 20 probably I could, but I can’t now. It’s just not possible. You have to show passports, and someone might say, ‘Oh, that’s the one who used to be in the movies’.” On faith: “I wish to God I was religious. I wish I were assured, then I wouldn’t be in such a

mess, and 50 billion billion other people wouldn’t either. If I only knew what to focus on ... You don’t have to go to church, if you have it in you, you don’t need nuttin’.” On fate: “What I believe in firmly is that you are made the way you are by fate, and what is inborn in you is there. Since I was very young I believed that we are made in a certain way. You’re born with very good glands and you function very well; you can go out to nightclubs, go do whatever you want to do and nothing affects you. Still, no matter how well made you are, one hasn’t got the ultimate, a sureness that nothing can harm you.” And a brooding Scandinavian reflection on life: “I trotted out to get some things and looked at the human beings today a little more. I usually just race through looking at the soot under my feet, to see that I don’t step into too many puddles. The faces are really the way you think ... that people here are all being killed off by the air pollution. “They all look absolutely pale and putty. I took out my mirror and said, ‘You look the same?’ and I said, ‘Yeah.’ Well, poor little people. Poor little people.”