
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 20, 1990                   TAG: 9004200704
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PRIVACY EARNED GARBO'S ESSENCE ON CAMERA A GIFT

AS FILM careers go, Greta Garbo's was both brief and limited to a small number of pictures; moreover, she had not made a movie since 1941 and thereafter pursued a life of determined privacy. But when she died at 84 last weekend she remained the incarnation of motion-picture stardom, a legend whose on-screen appearances, few as they were, were luminous with beauty, mystery and "glamour."

Few today under 50 are likely to have seen her films except on videotape or in rare retrospectives, and it may be that those limited screenings fail to reveal, to the extent anyone of my generation sees them, the qualities that made her so special, indeed unique a figure in film history. To us, however, and to a remarkable degree to those for whom she was only a legend from the past, she was what the silver screen was all about.

Her appeal is difficult to state exactly, let alone to analyze with confidence, and that may well be why she so dominated American films during the 1930s and has endured in the appreciation of countless millions afterward. Critic David Thomson, as acute as anyone about what makes great film stars, proposes that her "essence is a matter of myth and the conjunction of natural performance with legendary and supernatural personality. She speaks and appears on behalf of the millions of plain people who require a lofty She who must be obeyed, but who can secretly possess the goddess and see in her the elevated traces of their own inadequacy and diffidence."

That may be true, but her beginnings in Sweden were humble. She was a chubby adolescent of modest acting ability when discovered; and it was not until Mauritz Stiller, her country's leading director, cast her in "The Sage of Gosta Berling" that she attracted attention. With Stiller she soon moved to Hollywood, though Stiller, who had molded her looks and style, soon returned to Europe.

At M-G-M, which she never left, she had a skyrocketing career: a sensation in "The Torrent," "Love" and "Flesh and the Devil," as well as half a dozen other silents; and when sound came - an event that spelled the end of many a career, including that of her co-star and lover John Gilbert - M-G-M was nervous about how her heavy Swedish accent would make the transition. They need not have bothered. "Garbo talks!" the advertisements said of her in O'Neill's "Anna Christie," and the apex of her career was near.

Her specialty was doomed or disillusioned women in love, and in picture after picture she played unforgettable variations on the role: in "Grand Hotel" the jaded ballerina briefly aroused by John Barrymore; in "Mata Hari," where she gave her life for Ramon Novarro; in "Queen Christina," abdicating her throne, unable to forget Gilbert; in "Anna Karenina" (a sound remake of her silent "Love"), sacrificing everything, finally her life, for Frederic March; in "Camille," consumptive and dying, sparing Robert Taylor the ignominy of her love; in "Conquest," a martyred Marie Waleska to Charles Boyer's Napoleon.

She quit the screen still well under 40 and was nevr tempted back, though rumors flew for years that she would make a reappearance. Too much has been made, perhaps, of her reclusiveness. Privacy is something Americans seem no longer to understand in an age of publicity overkill; Garbo avoided attention by avoiding interviews and televised or other public appearances, but she seems to have enjoyed a busy and successful private life in New York and Switzerland. It became a game - in which I once joined, successfully - to "Garbo-spot" on New York streets, where she became a more familiar figure than she must have liked. But few dared approach her, even if they recognized her behind the dark glasses, big hats and floppy trousers.

No one, in any era of the movies, has quite achieved her status - though Bette Davis, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks came close. She had something the camera caught, as it does with all great film stars, something in the eyes that probably never appeared to the human eye in ordinary contact. That was what did it, probably, and it is a rare gift. She earned her solitude; but one would have liked - to name only two roles for which she was rumored - her Marie Curie or George Sand. They too were beautiful and mysterious.

by CNB