Frank Whitbeck was a big deal at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had acted in and produced a few big films for the studio but by the late 1920s was in possession of a key to the executive washroom as chief of the gloriously titled “Publicity/Exploitation Department.” Over the next two decades, he would feature as narrator in dozens of films and voice theatrical trailers for classics such as National Velvet and The Wizard of Oz, but it is what happened in a hitherto uninspiring meeting to discuss promotion for forthcoming major release Anna Christie that cements his place in movie history.
The suave 47-year-old said nothing. He simply picked up his fountain pen and drew a large rectangle on the back of an envelope in black ink to represent a billboard. And then, inside it, he wrote just two words: “Garbo Talks!”. In less than five seconds, he had delivered an unimprovable marketing slogan.
Anna Christie featured MGM’s (and, at that point, the world’s) most bankable and fascinating movie star, Greta Garbo, in a film that would make or break her career. Warner Brothers had released The Jazz Singer two years earlier, “talkies” were taking over and while MGM had begun to follow suit, they were worried that Garbo’s Swedish accent would stop her making a successful transition from silent films.
The actress shared their trepidation. At 2.30am on the day filming in sound began – October 14, 1929 – she called her young compatriot Wilhelm Sörenson and demanded he come round to her mansion on Chevy Chase Drive in Beverly Hills to drink coffee with her. At 6am, on their way to the studio, he heard a voice from underneath the rug beside him in the car. “[It was] the moving plaint of a little girl,” he recalled later. ‘Oh, Sören, I feel like an unborn child just now.’”
Yet the concerns of both studio and actress were laughably unnecessary. About 16 minutes into Anna Christie, the queen of working a pause and holding the attention of the audience enters a down-at-heel bar stage right, shoots a stare at the barkeeper and, clearly carrying heavy baggage both literal and metaphorical, slumps into a wooden chair. Pause. All eyes (and ears) on Garbo.
ANNA: “Gimme a whiskey. Ginger ale on the side… And don’t be stingy, baby.”
BARMAN: “Shall I serve it in a pail?”
ANNA: “That suits me down to the ground.”
Garbo’s Anna Christie is very far from being a “little girl” or any of the other characters she had become famous for playing during the silent era. As Robert Gottlieb, one of her many biographers, put it, she had been “the prima donna, the vamp, the spy, the flaunter of furs and jewels, the doomed driver of an Hispano-Suiza, the murderess, the mistress of Deco”.
For this part, the most important of her career, she was to play a cynical, shambolic, world-weary former prostitute seeking comfort from the bottom of a glass. The performance was sophisticated and acclaimed but almost lost to the reaction of an adoring audience finally putting a voice to the beautiful face they had already fallen in love with. The Herald Tribune gushed: “Her voice is revealed as a deep, husky, throaty contralto that possesses every bit of that fabulous poetic glamour that has made this distant Swedish lady the outstanding actress of the motion picture world.” American film magazine Picture Play went route one with “The voice that shook the world!”
Anna Christie helped earn Garbo her an Academy Award nomination for best actress in 1930. By the time Grand Hotel was released in 1932 she was the top box-office draw in the world. Less than a decade later, at the age of just 36, she would shock the world once again by announcing a complete withdrawal from Hollywood and the high-profile celebrity lifestyle associated with it – a “temporary retirement” that would last 49 years.
As exhausted ballerina Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel, Garbo had delivered her most iconic line: “I want to be alone”. It had been appropriated even before she retired as a shorthand explanation for her reluctance to give interviews and or be photographed in public, but now it survives as a de facto five-word epitaph and explanation for her incredible life and the sudden decision to turn her back on Hollywood. It lends her an enduring mystique, but is also key to a resurgence in her popularity among a new generation intrigued by the idea of one of the most glamorous and famous women in the world seemingly determined to reverse-engineer something like a normal life for herself.
Add rumours about her private life (she never married but had a number of documented love affairs including one with silent-movie star John Gilbert and, it has been suggested, liaisons with several women including Marlene Dietrich, Billie Holiday and writer Mercedes de Acosta), her subsequent status as both an LGBTQ+ icon (her lead in Queen Christina, playing up her androgyny to the max, is now regarded as a gay cinema classic) and an exemplar of timeless style and it is not hard to detect a note of longing and loss in the title of Sky Arts’ new documentary, Garbo: Where Did You Go?.
British film-maker Lorna Tucker had access to home movie footage from one of Garbo’s Swedish friends, archive phone calls and over 200 unpublished letters belonging to Garbo’s great-nephew Scott Reisfield, who has also just written Greta Garbo and The Rise of the Modern Woman. It joins at least another five other biographies published since 2020 but both Tucker and Reisfield present us with an unfamiliar Garbo, one that challenges the “I want to be alone” cliche.
The documentary shows her relaxing and enjoying time with friends, larking about for the camera, guard dropped, being silly and enjoying life, while Reisfield’s letters reveal the domestic Garbo talking about moving back to Sweden with her family and buying a farm, the emotional Garbo who writes a note to herself on the death of longtime intimate George Schlee in 1964 and the ambitious post-retirement Garbo talking of future acting roles and directing films.
“The whole ‘Garbo is a recluse’ meme was a media creation,” laughs the 67-year-old from his home in Colorado. “Sure, she was private. But not in a JD Salinger kind of way… Yes, she did sometimes hold her hand up to ruin a paparazzi shot, but that then became the shot and the story around it would be: ‘This is a woman who never goes out,’ but she did go out.”
Tucker agrees. “She partied like mad but just at friends’ houses,” the director points out. “She was having a wild time, but in private.”
Garbo hated the constant harassment that began in earnest on a trip to New York in 1931 (a development many consider to be the birth of paparazzi-style reportage) and was aware of but powerless to resist the vicious circle that came with it. The more she kicked back against the attention, the bigger the story, the more valuable the next photo, the more photographers chasing the money, the more coverage and column inches she received, the more famous she became.
“There were plenty of people who stalked Garbo,” claims Reisfield, “And people who came to LA to marry her but there was no infrastructure, like there is in the current celebrity culture, to insulate her from that.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, she soon became psychologically intimidated by crowds to the extent that it became an issue she needed to work through with psychiatrists.
At the same time, chased everywhere by the world’s press, she had nowhere to hide but, as both documentary and book are at pains to point out, just because she wanted to be alone it did not necessarily mean she shunned personal contact. In fact, there is still a debate in certain quarters about whether her signature line in Grand Hotel was actually “I want to be let alone” rather than “I want to be alone”. Garbo had mischievously suggested as much in an interview shortly after the film was released. “There is all the difference,” she went on to add.
The actress had no children but was very close to Scott’s mother Gray Reisfield, her brother’s daughter, who inherited her entire estate in 1990. “I think of Garbo’s presence in my life as like a bonus grandparent,” says her great-nephew now. “I didn’t have the relationship with her my mom had, which was much closer, but she would come to our house or we would meet her in New York. I have a whole bunch of memories of her doing cartwheels or walking with her so she was in my life over decades and you just get a sense of a person even as a kid.
“That gave me background knowledge that other biographers do not have in order to strip out certain bogus sources that cashed in by talking to the press back in the day but who were not necessarily telling the truth. That’s when you get a different picture of Garbo. The real one.”
It’s the same person who emerges in the documentary: A woman tired of the studio (“MGM is pretty rotten”), its lack of artistic integrity (“Many of the directors here know nothing about emotional life”) and, of course, the whole Hollywood machine (“They’re marrying me for the 759th time, can you think of anything lower than the people who are in charge of this so-called art I’m part of?”). But not tired of life.
To answer the question posed by Tucker’s film, Garbo: Where Did You Go? directly, after she quit in 1941 she went wherever she could go to avoid the stalkers, fans and photographers. She moved to Manhattan in 1951, taking quarters in the Hotel Ritz Tower on Park Avenue and then Hampshire House before moving to the seven-room apartment at 450 East Fifty-Second Street in 1953 that she would call home for the rest of her life.
Hidden in plain sight, she loved to go shopping behind a large pair of sunglasses and/or a hat. She threw herself into collecting art (and at one point owned three Renoirs) and expensive pieces of furniture including a carved Louis XV chair that lived next to a dime-store blow-up snowman in her apartment. She dated, maintained relationships and was still being propositioned at the age of 80. She holidayed extensively but always to places where she knew she could be herself.
“Her year had a pattern and she did similar things at the same time every year,” says Riesfield. “So she would always go to Europe, in the 1950s it was mostly on the French Riviera but from 1960 on, even if she went to the Riviera for a couple of weeks, she then spent most of the fall in Klosters. She would always go to California or New Mexico and often Wisconsin because there was no media covering her there, but I think she thought of herself as more European than American, and then after that, maybe a citizen of the world.”
It doesn’t read much like a woman who has chosen isolation because she wants “to be alone”, does it? It reads more like the life of a modern and emancipated woman years ahead of her time and living life on her own terms with the financial freedom her own remarkable talent and hard work has earned.
One story has it that a fan recognised her at a road junction in Manhattan in the late 1950s and asked: “Are you Greta Garbo?” To which she simply replied, “I was Greta Garbo”. Then, without waiting for either the signal or a response, she crossed the street.
Garbo: Where Did You Go? is on Sky Arts, Freeview and streaming service NOW
Bill Borrows is a journalist, feature writer and columnist
