Hollywood Studio Magazine (November 1971)

This is one of those famous 1926 leggy pictures of Greta Garbo, not yet in an American movie, when she posed with the famous track coach. Dean Cromwell, at the University of Southern California. And this is that personal photo made of a mere boy of a sports publicity director at USC, Teet Carle (left), with Coach Dean Cromwell and Jannes Anderson holding the letter Greta Garbo let him read that afternoon in 1926 on the athletic field at USC. BY TEET CARL Who was a publicist at M.G.M. when Greta Garbo just arrived in Hollywood. t The afternoon was one spring day in 1926, and I have remembered it, in retrospect, for forty-five years. The person was Greta Garbo, and even then she said nothing in English as I remember. She impressed me only in delayed reaction when, before that year ended, she was the sudden new talk of the motion picture public. What makes it all so unreal today is that I often contrast that day when she was taking orders from a brash photographer-publicist through an interpreter to four years I spent at Metro-Gold wyn-Mayer between September, 1936, and September, 1940. Miss Garbo was one of that company’s biggest stars and was making one movie after another. During those four years, I worked directly on few pictures, but mostly serviced out-of-town press and did follow-up campaigns. Never at any time did I see Garbo on a stage or walking or riding around the studio. That was not exactly unusual. She was so busy practicing the famous “I Vant to Be Alone” existence that few came close to her. I believe that the same production crew was with her for nearly every one of her pictures. (No strange faces.) Some became close to her. One was Bill Grimes, a still photographer, now deceased. Without Garbo’s trust in Bill, publicists would have had to dream up every item about her personal life. Each morning. Bill took the proofs of photographs he had shot the day before to Miss Garbo in her portable dressing room on the stage. She, like many other stars in those days, had the right to okay or reject every photo made of her. Garbo chatted with Bill during those sessions, dropping tid-bits about her off-screen activities. Bill passed these items along to the press agent. The squibs were always printed. Columnists, who also never saw or talked with Garbo, would run anything about the Swedish star. The best pubhcists on Garbo movies were the dreamers. They created things that “could have happened.” Sometimes, a Grimes tip built into something beautiful. It was a perfect setup for a publicist. No suspicious newsman (and God how many there used to be) ever could go to the source (Garbo) to check up on the press agent’s honesty. If Garbo ever read the true and the fanciful about herself, no pubhcist every knew. What went on with pubhcists and Garbo during the years before I was at MGM and afterwards until the lady retired I cannot say, but both of the men handling her films during my four years there said they never had had their eyes so much as meet her’s. One of the chaps, Otis Wiles, who was later killed in an automobile crash as an Examiner reporter chasing a story, once revealed with great elation, proof that Garbo actually knew he existed. He went on a closed location for “Camille” and was told, an hour later, that Garbo had asked that he come to the back of the studio because she knew he had come to write about her. “I sent back the message that I had come to see my friend, Robert Taylor, only, and I’d forget she was on the set.” All of this may read peculiarly to humans, but most publicists will 10