A century ago on Sunday, Greta Garbo made her first appearance on screen. Swedish silent epic The Saga of Gösta Berling, released on 10 March 1924, was based on Selma Lagerlöf’s bestselling novel and follows the misadventures of a disgraced ex-minister. Exiled to a wild estate in central Sweden, the commoner Berling falls victim to a marriage plot intended to unseat the heiress apparent. Garbo – born Greta Gustafsson, renamed especially for this appearance – plays the wife of the new intended heir. Cast while still a hopeful student at a Stockholm acting school, and not yet groomed into the rake-thin model of a Hollywood leading woman, she arguably steals the show. She is just as compelling in interior scenes as she is when pulled from a burning mansion over a frozen lake, pursued by wolves (the film is still revered for its set pieces).
When Gösta Berling reached MGM, the biggest of Hollywood’s major studios, two new recruits were made. One was the film’s director Mauritz Stiller, whose American career lasted only four years. The other was Greta Garbo. She soon became the industry’s brightest star, a byword for the exotic and emotionally distanced: vamps, Soviets, loner ballerinas, ambiguously foreign spies, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (twice), Dumas’ ailing Lady of the Camellias. In the midst of Hollywood’s mass-production age she made only 28 films – her last in 1941, at the age of 35. Then she lived out the rest of her life in retirement until her death in 1990.
Her last MGM role, in George Cukor’s mistaken-identity screwball Two-Faced Woman, was destined to turn sour. The film attempted to capitalise on the success of Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, a deadpan Soviet caper and a comedy first for Garbo, but its screenplay captured none of its cosmopolitan charm. Even worse was the expectation that she learn to dance for the film. When MGM arranged for private lessons at her home, she hid up a tree.
Thus Garbo disappeared forever. Or so it is assumed. A recent biography by Robert Gottlieb reveals a packed social schedule. To old MGM acquaintances she appeared distant, but there were endless engagements with celebrity nutritionist Gayelord Hauser and famed photographer Cecil Beaton. She was often spotted on long walks through New York, where she had bought a lavish apartment. At the end of the day she always returned home alone.
The literary habits of an exiled Garbo become clear upon a glance at the catalogue for her estate auction. She owned two copies of Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage, an illustrated tract about the mass-media world she inadvertently helped to create. Jumbled with her collection of classic novels is a past-life regression handbook and Ellen Frankfort’s Vaginal Politics. Close friends claim that in her final years she had developed a taste for MTV. Art dealer Sam Green remembers looking under her furniture to find collections of meticulously arranged troll dolls.
In the 60s and 70s Hollywood began to look back at its crumbling star system. Studios greenlit a series of camp tragedies - half-hagsploitation, half-hagiography - that would revive their greatest players. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford returned to the screen as warring Miss Havishams in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Mae West, who had also made a run for it in the early 40s, floated back into view as a supporting actor in Myra Breckinridge. Garbo would never knowingly star in another film (“I have made enough faces,” she told David Niven), but this interlude of nostalgia is cast in her shadow.
In Robert Aldrich’s The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968), Kim Novak plays an ingenue who has been pushed into the starring role in a biopic of a mysteriously dead European actor. Context clues abound. The fictional Lylah Clare is shown in late-20s frills, drinking whisky in solitude – a pastiche of Garbo’s first sound film, Anna Christie. In the background, playing a lovelorn Mrs Danvers-type character, lurks Rossella Falk, the cult Italian actor known best for her work as a Fellini muse. (In real life Falk became a penpal of Garbo, who allegedly suggested they star in a joint-effort biopic of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.)
The most obvious case of Garbosploitation is in Billy Wilder’s Fedora (1978). Wilder, who had worked early in his career on the screenplay for Ninotchka, sends Garbo up for all her unavailability. The titular Garbo stand-in is stalked by a hopeful film producer on a sunny island somewhere in the Mediterranean. Her zany, mostly-German entourage (Hildegard Knef, Fassbinder regular Gottfried John) brings to mind Garbo’s old Hollywood minglings at the home of screenwriter Salka Viertel, where she socialised with refugee-luminaries including Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht. There are recurring references to Anna Karenina. One woman’s exile becomes shorthand for the lost extravagance of an entire industry.
Meanwhile, Garbo had, unbeknown to her, played her final part. It was in Adam & Yves, a 1974 gay porn film. A man fantasises about the time he saw the star on a New York street. “One of the most exciting moments of my life,” he says. She is shown from far above, walking at the speed of light. The camera follows her around several blocks and then zooms out, as if to take her in.
The Gösta Berling role was comparatively small – never again would she receive second billing to another woman – but the film is remarkable in its foreshadowing of Garbo’s later career. The Nordic desolation of Gösta Berling would follow her forever. She belonged to it, just as silent star Theda Bara was supposed to belong to ancient Egypt. In Garbo’s most famous American silent film, Flesh and the Devil, her character is punished for promiscuity with a tumble through a frozen lake. Later, as Sweden’s reclusive Queen Christina, she stares stoically on to the Baltic sea, poised for exile. Garbo never really left Hollywood in the first place – no single figure has ever symbolised its studio era to the same extent – but at the same time she was never fully there, always in search of something colder.
