The stars (1962)

friends of the ideal woman he was seeking — -"supersensual, spiritual, mystic." If ever he could find such a person he would mold her into the greatest star of all time — a woman who could personify all women, or at least the romanticized and idealized woman whom artists had been celebrating for centuries. She would be, as he described her to a friend, "sophisticated, scornful, superior, but under the shining surface humanely warm and womanly." He also thought that she should be able to create, at least subliminally, an aura of enigmatic soulfulness. Long before he found the girl of his dream he had, with the aid of an assistant, concocted a name by which the world would know her. The name he chose was Garbo. On the Gosta Berling set everyone wondered why Stiller was troubling so much with his new actress. Only a few realized that he had at last found the woman of his fantasies. A woman who worked at Svensk Filmindustri at the time recalled the making of a star for John Bainbridge, Garbo's best biographer. "She was really very attractive, especially her figure. That is what attracted people in Sweden, not her face. I can still see Stiller and that young girl — forever walking up and down, up and down, in the shade of that little grove just outside the studio. Stiller was always teaching and preaching, Greta solemnly listening and learning. I never saw anyone more earnest and eager to learn. With that hypnotic power he seemed to have over her, he could make her do extraordinary things. But we had little idea then that he was making over her very soul." Perhaps the last sentence is hyperbolic, but the essence of the reminiscence is true. What followed is well enough recorded. After Saga was finished, she appeared under Stiller 's direction in the German-financed Street of Sorrows; and Hollywood, in thrall to the new movie style being created on the Continent, hired Stiller as it had earlier obtained the services of Seastrom. Stiller made a contract for Garbo a condition of his signing. Louis B. Mayer, negotiating the deal, solemnly told Miss Garbo, through an interpreter, that she really ought to lose weight. "Tell her that in America men don't like fat women," he said. Garbo is reported to have smiled enigmatically at this advice. With Stiller, she arrived in America in 1925, and there was no special excitement about the occasion. In fact, M-G-M had no idea, now that they had the Swedes, what to do with them. Stiller never completed a picture for the studio, although he did a couple for rival companies with no success and eventually retreated to Sweden. Garbo's screen test did not impress Irving Thalberg, who had just come to Metro from Universal, and it required a set of still photos plus a new screen test to illuminate for him and his fellow moguls the elusive, magical and (to this day) undefinable quality she had. At any rate, they put her into Torrent, shocking and disappointing both Garbo and her mentor by not letting Stiller direct the film. The film, in retrospect, is quite poor fas indeed were all but a handful that Garbo made), but critics and public alike responded to the presence of the lady. Her second film, The Temptress, started under the direction of Stiller, but Fred Niblo, a handy hack, soon took over. This was the beginning of the end of Garbo's reliance on Stiller. In a very short time he would be back in Sweden, and the real building of the Garbo legend, based on her noted reticence, would begin. This legend, let it be stated clearly, fit neatly with the somewhat mysterious screen presence of the star. The two fed each other. Nearly always, she was cast as a woman of mystery, somewhat somnambulistic, yet hinting at a promise of sexual adventure on a plane higher than ordinary people could even fantasy. Similarly, off screen, despite her mannish clothes and her carelessness of appearance, she was enigmatic. No one knew exactly how she spent her time, although there were always hints of the most interesting sorts of suitors. No one knew any details of her life, except that she lived frugally (using only a couple of rooms in her large home, borrowing the butler's newspaper to save a nickel, owning so few clothes that she could travel all the way to Europe with just one suitcase) and in a manner totally different from any other star. It may be that her ability to be different is one of the factors that account for the undying interest of intellectuals in her work. But, of course, there is more to the growth of the Garbo cult than that. Alistair Cooke, the movement's unofficial recording secretary, called her "every man's harmless fantasy mistress. By being worshiped by the entire world she gave you the feeling that if your imagination has to sin, it can at least congratulate itself on its impeccable taste." Others called her "the supreme symbol of inscrutable tragedy." Still others "a super-human symbol of The Other Woman." Kenneth Tynan, writing long after Garbo's active career had ended, put it this way: "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober. She is woman apprehended with all the pulsating clarity of one of Aldous Huxley's mescalin jags. To watch her is to achieve direct, cleansed perception of something which, like a flower or a fold of silk, is raptly. unassertively, and beautifully itself. . . . Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker what he needs: her largesse is intarissable. . . . Fame, by insulating her against a multitude of experiences which we take for granted, has increased rather than diminished her capacity for wonder." 85