Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 17, 1990 TAG: 9004170328
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SHEILA BENSON LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Medium
Lovely phrase, the kind calculated to reflect generously on both its subject and its author. But is there champagne enough in the world for any woman to feel comfortable in such company - even for an instant? Unlikely.
Privately, or even publicly, a woman might be pleased about herself, about a memorable length of leg or first-rate cheekbones, burnished hair or a certain set to her eyes. But to be compared with Garbo . . . what presumption.
Now Greta Garbo is dead in New York; still cloaked - at age 84 - in the same mystery in which she lived, and we consider just what we've all lost. Very simply, the top of the line. Whenever we needed a standard of perfection, Garbo's image - elusive, enigmatic, deeply erotic - was there to oblige.
It didn't matter that the last Garbo movie was almost 50 years ago. There were still Garbo sightings in Manhattan as she tramped regularly up and down the length of the city. She was still there, that purity was still viable and it seemed easier to project our fantasies onto a living woman, whether she had the slightest interest in such foolishness or not.
"I've always wanted two lives," she brooded to a confidante, "one for the movies, one for myself."
Yet she was scrupulous that we know only one: a suffering, love-drenched woman shimmering there on the black-and-white screen, her head likely as not thrown back, her throat bared to accept the kisses of a dazed lover, drunk with his luck. And she succeeded, brilliantly. Has any actress been so tangibly present, her image so steadfastly the same, after nearly 50 years in exile?
Ex-film and television producer Raymond Daum, whose path crossed Garbo's in 1963 and who became her companion on those daily lopes about the city, came to know her extremely well. He suspected that her fascination grew "about 40 percent from her career and 60 percent from her lifestyle."
Because we had no private Garbo to draw on, we took everything we could get from her 29 films. And so our Garbo is damaged, amoral, tender, loyal, passionate, self-sacrificing, remote, reclusive, erotic, pessimistic - or as Alastair Cooke would have it, philosophic - and, just fleetingly, amused.
If we went to a Garbo movie to watch romantic suffering, what we got for our voyeurism was an intelligence as acute as it was sensual and an uncannily strong presence. Watch Garbo in one of her silent films and you believe you've heard her lines, uttered in that distinctive, throaty voice; that's a phenomenon unique to her.
As she traced one after another foredoomed heroine on the screen, there was no reason to believe that the actress was any less morose than her characters, yet the Garbo that Daum encountered was a different matter.
This was a woman who laughed easily and hugely and often at herself. A woman who adored flirtation and innuendo. A woman who loved slang; whose rallying cry for a walk was, "Git goin', kid!" A woman who investigated every church, synagogue or Buddhist temple on her route; "Come on with me," she would encourage Daum, "we might learn something." ("Walking with Garbo," Daum's reminiscences about her, are forthcoming from Harper & Row.)
Rather than simply wanting to be alone, Garbo felt that people understood that she liked quiet things. Undue emphasis made her nervous. Gloria Swanson, for example, was determined to get Garbo to her apartment for her legendary card games. "Oh my God," Garbo complained, "that woman would drain me - she has too much energy for me."
Is it possible to hate Greta Garbo? Only for vanishing from the screen when she was 36 years old. She hadn't meant to, of course. "Two-Faced Woman" was never supposed to be her last movie. Yet, pathetically it was; Garbo disappeared from sight before mortality, or even gravity, had the slightest claim on her. And so, while the rest of us adjust to a new surprise or two with each succeeding year, Garbo still walks in that blinding beauty that no marauding paparazzi would ever diminish. To give Kenneth Tynan the last word, "Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he needs."
by CNB