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Flesh and the Devil (1926) was her smash hit, creating a Garbo model that the studio exploited for the next fifteen years. It is silent and possibly her best film. She was only twenty-one, but her world-weariness on-screen suggests an older woman, longed for and chased after by the puppyish John Gilbert, who was to become her real-life lover. This romance, as it was rendered on-screen, scandalized America: a young man lying underneath a more experienced woman who seemed to literally feed from his mouth as she kissed him. It was a ravishment-female moviegoers loved it. This was a new kind of woman. For this reason she was punished in the movies (in Flesh and the Devil she drowns in ice water; in Camille it’s tuberculosis; in A
What was the matter with Garbo? Mayer couldn’t understand it. Why wasn’t she thankful? But after Flesh and the Devil, the power had changed hands: Garbo was an MGM gold mine. Garbo’s imperial aloofness appealed to Depression-era women on a scale that even Mayer could not have predicted. They were dependent; she was beyond dependence. Whatever made her happy or sad, it came from within. Film critics often mention her unusual responses: where another actress would laugh, she cries, when they would be serious, she plays it light. She seems to respond to something deep inside herself, not to the actor she plays opposite. It was a world of her own she was in, and it was wonderful to watch.
There are two halves of Garbo’s career: before and after sound. She made the transition as late as she possibly could, in 1930. “GARBO TALKS!” a
This kind of interiority was soon to be under threat from a new breed of actress, women such as Joan Crawford, who projected everything they had outward to the public, leaving nothing in reserve. Crawford admired Garbo greatly but was already preparing to supplant her as the queen of MGM. She described an encounter on a staircase during the filming of Grand Hotel (1932): “She stopped and cupped my face in her hands and said, ‘What a pity. Our first picture together, and we won’t work with each other. I am so sorry. You have a marvelous face.’ If there was ever a time in my life I might have become a lesbian that was it.”
Crawford did not succumb, but many others did, including Marlene Dietrich, the playwright Mercedes de Acosta and Louise Brooks, who described Garbo as a “completely masculine dyke.” Closer friends thought of her androg yny as more complicated, nearer to the character of Queen Christina, who, disguised as a man, shares a bed with John Gilbert. Gore Vidal, an acquaintance from the last twenty years of her life, claims: “She thought of herself as a boy with another boy, that was her sexual fantasy.” She habitually referred to herself in the masculine, as a “bachelor”; at parties she would ask: “Where’s the little boy’s room?”
In the movies they were still determined to make a lady of her. In Ninotchka (1939), playing a Soviet apparatchik, she goes from macho, humorless Russian to glamorous Parisian party girl. Famously, she laughs. She can’t laugh. When she satirizes her own European dolor, she is hilarious. (“The show trials were a great success,” she deadpans. “We are going to have fewer but better Russians.”) But when she becomes gay and carefree, the movie dies. Ninotchka was a huge success (mostly thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign), but the studio picked up on the wrong trait, the newfound gaiety. Two-Faced Woman (1941), in which a newly happy Garbo does the rumba and goes swimming, was a disaster. You don’t put the sphinx in a swimsuit.
It was to be her last movie. The uniformly bad reviews for Two-Faced Woman were terribly wounding to her, but more than this, she had spotted something in the mirror. Two faint lines on either side of her mouth, co