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My teenage life was periodically dotted by melancholy little funerals, attended by me alone. I held one for Fred Astaire and one for Bette Davis and Cary Grant. On these occasions I would light candles in my room, cry a bit and mark the photo on the wall with a little cross in the right-hand corner. This time, less psychotically, I plan to spend the next few weeks watching every Hepburn movie and documentary that graces the television screen. I strongly recommend you watch as many as you can manage. She is the last of the great stars, the very last, and my God, I will miss the thrilling feeling of rewatching Adam’s Rib and knowing her to be still on the planet, still in that East Forty-ninth Street brownstone, still fabulous. When people truly feel for a popular artist-when they follow in their thousands behind Dickens’s coffin or Valentino’s-it is only the dues returned for pleasure given, and it never feels like enough. Few artists in any medium have given me as much pleasure as Hepburn. In fact, the marvelous weight of the pleasure e
2. NATURE’S WORK OF ART
September 18, 2005, marks the centenary of the birth of Greta Garbo, an icon both resonant and remote to us. It feels a perilous centenary. In twenty years’ time, no one will need to make an argument for the centenary of Marilyn Monroe, with her hourglass silhouette, her voluptuous blondness. It is different with Garbo: you have to make a case for Garbo. She resonates because hers was ultimately a career of photographs, and this we recognize. She is remote because the great photographs of Garbo are abstractions; they are not of a woman, they are of a face. Garbo’s body was an irrelevance. From our twenty-first-century icons we demand bodies: bodies are to be admired, coveted and-if one works hard enough-gained. You can have something resembling Mado
This face was memorably described by the philosopher Roland Barthes, who identified it as a transition between two semiological epochs, two ways of seeing women. Garbo marked the passage from awe to charm, from concept to substance: “The face of Garbo is an idea, that of [Audrey] Hepburn an event.” There was something essential, Platonic and unindividuated in Greta’s face. She was Woman, as opposed to Audrey, who was a woman, whom we loved precisely because her beauty was so quirky, so particular. Garbo has no quirks at all. A close-up of her face appears to reveal fewer features than the rest of us have-such an expanse of white-punctuated by the minimum of detail, just enough to let you know that this is flesh, not spirit. Her vulnerable, changeable face is what comes prior to the emphatic mask of a beautiful woman-she is the ideal of beauty that those masks attempt to capture. Post-Garbo, we have taken what resonated in Garbo’s fluid sexuality and mystery and hardened it, made it a commodity. Take Garbo’s heavy, deep-set eyelids: these have become the mark of the diva, passing down through Marlene, to Marilyn and, more recently, to Mado
Garbo’s equipment was not always so sublime. She grew up Greta Gustafs son, a lanky, overweight, big-footed girl from Sweden. Despite Hollywood’s later intimations of an aristocratic lineage, she was poor, sharing a four-room, cold-water flat with her family in a Stockholm tenement. When her gardener father died of kidney failure, fourteen-year-old Greta dropped out of school and began work in the millinery department at the Paul Bergstrom department store. She wanted to be an actress, always. Discovered by her manager modeling hats in the mirror, she was asked to appear in a commercial film to promote millinery, How Not to Dress. This led to other commercial shorts. In her capacity as shopgirl, she would look out for famous Swedish actresses in the store and make sure she waited on them.
It was through a co
Once she reached Hollywood, the fan magazines responded enthusiastically, not as much to the fiery sexuality she was asked to play in those early silents, but to the sadness that seemed to lie behind it. A typical headline: “What is wrong with Greta Garbo?” Whatever it was, she was unable to articulate it. She refused all interviews, and her few private letters are banal-she often complained about the vulgarity of American film but had few ideas of her own to bring to the table. To the director of Queen Christina (the story of the abdication of the Swedish queen, a pet project that Garbo was very anxious about), she could only offer the suggestion that there should be a scene with trousers. She put herself in others’ hands. First Stiller, then the actor John Gilbert, the lesbian clique of Mercedes de Acosta, and the producer Irving Thalberg. Louis B. Mayer was driven mad by all these advisers and intercessors; he thought she was too easily influenced. And yet what comes across on film is a resolute, inviolable selfhood, ultimately impenetrable by other people. The public felt it, and expressed it in their popular nicknames: “The Swedish Sphinx” and “The Divine.”