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Remembering Greta Garbo

She’s a gorgeous Hollywood superstar without a husband or even an official boyfriend. She shuns questions about her relationships, and her best-loved films are those in which her affairs with men ended tragically or are merely incidental to the larger story of her personal quest.

Her talent as an actress is legendary, but, unlike her celebrity peers, the topic of her personal life is largely ignored by an otherwise relentlessly tell-all press.

Yes, it sounds like Jodie Foster, give or take eighty years. But it’s actually a description of the legendary actress Greta Garbo, who perfected the art of being world-famous without really being known at all in the 1920s.

And to this day, her queer fans are the only portion of the population likely to know about her queer life.

Younger women of this generation may never have seen even one of Greta Garbo’s movies, but they recognize her name. This is due in part to Garbo’s self-imposed exile from Hollywood at the age of 36 and her infamous New York hermitage until her death at 86 in 1990.

But Garbo’s enigma can also be linked to the secrecy surrounding her sexual orientation.

Even today the mainstream media hesitates to delve deeply into her romantic life and has difficulty reconciling her movie goddess stature with the evidence of her love for other women.

Garbo was born in 1905 as Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Sweden. Her family’s poverty and her father’s early death led her to modeling for money by the age of 14, and her stunning looks caught the eye of gay filmmaker Mauritz Stiller.

Stiller recognized her potential and began grooming her for stardom. He urged her to change her name – first to Mona Gabor and finally to Greta Garbo – and directed the film that brought her to the attention of Hollywood’s Louis B. Mayer, The Atonement of Gosta Berling (1924).

Before departing for Mayer and Hollywood, Garbo filmed The Joyless Street (1925) with the legendary German director G.W. Pabst. According to Diana McLellan‘s dishy expose book The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood, it was on the set of The Joyless Street that the 19-year old Garbo met the 23-year old Marlene Dietrich.

Dietrich was her opposite – as wild and openly sexual as Garbo was naïve and prim. The nature of their relationship would be a source of contention (both denied that they had ever met, Dietrich denied that she was in the film at all) and gossip that would hover over both for the rest of their lives.

(Pabst himself caused a scandal when he directed 1929’s Pandora’s Box, shocking American audiences with the seduction of Hollywood pixie Louise Brooks by a rakish lesbian character that he reportedly modeled after Marlene Dietrich. The film made Brooks an international star.)

In The Girls, McLellan’s argues that Dietrich seduced Garbo and then gossiped to those in their circle about Garbo’s shabby undergarments and provincial attitude about sex.

Dietrich referred to Garbo as a “peasant,” and McLellan proposes that the ill-fated affair humiliated and traumatized Garbo. She theorizes that Dietrich’s scarring betrayal may have instigated Garbo’s lifelong denial of her sexual orientation and eccentric disavowal of all romantic liaisons.

When Garbo finally arrived in the United States at the age of 20, she made her first MGM studio film, The Torrent (1926). The film was an instant hit, and was followed in the same year by The Temptress, then Flesh in the Devil, her first pairing with actor John Gilbert.

Garbo supposedly fell in love with Gilbert only briefly, but Gilbert never got over her. In The Girls, McLellan writes, “He begged his ‘Svenska flicka’ (‘little Swedish girl’) to marry him. She was so lonely that she occasionally consented. But, always, she panicked at the last minute and bolted.”

Garbo literally left Gilbert at the altar in 1926, and it was through Gilbert that she soon met actress Lilyan Tashman. Tashman was an openly bisexual glamour girl who taught the notoriously frumpy Garbo how to look like a movie star.

She was also the first of her many female lovers in Hollywood. Other conquests included actresses Eva von Berne and Salka Viertel, comedienne Bea Lillie, writer Mercedes de Acosta, Swedish Countess Wachtmeister, and even Louise Brooks.

Many of these women were protected from public scrutiny by their “lavender marriages” to men, but not Garbo. As a result, John Gilbert became her “show beau,” and for years she strung along a host of other men who shared his unrequited devotion.

Garbo managed to cut her swath through the women of Hollywood and retain her status as one of the biggest movie stars of the era. She made her first film with sound in 1931, Anna Christie, and was one of the few silent era stars to transition successfully into talking pictures.

She followed with well-known films like Grand Hotel (1932), Queen Christina (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936), and Ninotchka (1939).

She retired from film permanently in 1941 with the George Cukor-directed comedy Two-Faced Woman (tagline: “Go gay with Garbo!”).

Of course, womanizing is a subject only mentioned in the highly unofficial version of Garbo’s life. If you read the New York Times biography on Garbo, you will learn only of her cancelled wedding to Gilbert, and that “the actress would have other romantic involvements, but would never marry.”

It’s typical of the Garbo party line.

In most mainstream publications, Garbo’s sexual orientation is alluded to only vaguely, with code words like “androgynous” and with references to her penchant for “masculine” clothing. One might even find a list of her paramours that includes actors Gilbert and John Barrymore, as well as gay photographer Cecil Beaton (self-described as a “terrible, terrible homosexualist.”)

But you will need to seek out McLellan’s The Girls for the details on Garbo’s affairs with women.

In fact, The Girls holds a wealth of information about the known (and rumored) lesbian loves of many of the stars of the Golden Era of Hollywood, including Alla Nazimova, Isadora Duncan, Tallulah Bankhead, Hattie McDaniel, Patsy Kelly, Lizabeth Scott, and notorious heartbreaker Marlene Dietrich.

The book is excellent fodder for a documentary, or — better yet — a feature film.

In the meantime, TCM (Turner Classic Movies) debuted this month a comprehensive new documentary about Garbo by director and film historian Kevin Brownlow. Narrated by Julie Christie, the film offers rare input from family and friends and depicts an earthy, funny Garbo that her legend belies.

It even touches on the taboo subject of Garbo’s sexuality.

Brownlow told The Orlando Sentinel last week, “The family wanted us to put in that she wasn’t lesbian, but nobody we spoke to was that definitive. … It’s one of those things you can’t be definitive about. All you can do is touch on it.”

As a result, The Sentinel reports, “The family doesn’t like the film’s take on the actress’ sexuality. Friends say Garbo enjoyed describing herself in masculine terms and amusing people with the gender confusion.”

But some of the biggest hints about her true sexuality were dropped by Garbo herself.

Quotes like, “Being feminine is a lovely quality which I may not have enough of” and, “You don’t have to be married to have a good friend as your partner for life,” were simply not the standard sound bytes for women seeking fame in her era.

Whatever secrets she kept, she lived out loud as an original, independent spirit who attained international success without ever being defined by her relationship with a man.

It’s a feat still rare for actresses in the 21st century.

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