The stars (1962)

Miss Garbo is, apparently, as sturdy an individual, as ruggedly self-sufficient, as any of the five generations of rural, small-landholding Gustafssons who preceded her. She continues to have friends, is apparently at ease socially if no one refers to her life as an actress. She is fond of small antique shops, of an occasional afternoon at the movies, of unannounced visits to friends. She is, finally, one of the last devotees of that totally engaging activity, walking the streets of the city, observing its endlessly fascinating life. "Sometimes, I put on my coat at ten in the morning and go out and follow people," she said once. "I just go where they're going. I mill around." Oddly, and perhaps a little too crudely, one could say that like any successful person Garbo has achieved, by dint of hard work, even perseverance, a style of life which suits her. What is left for a new generation is an attempt to understand precisely what she represented on the screen. Here Parker Tyler, in his brilliant, forgotten book, The Hollywood Hallucination, is a help. "Frigidity in a woman of beauty or charm is a direct challenge to male sexual vanity. Garbo's peculiar art has always been to say in essence to the male audience: 'Don't forget that I am only an image, and that is all I can be to you.' " So, beside Tynan's idea of the beautiful somnambule so enigmatic that she can be all things to all men (and women and children, as the script of one of her films has her say ) , one must set another, simpler image. At certain moments "her orthodox defenses are down, her will against seduction seems to melt, at last all her conscious, instinctive reluctance disappears. ... A few moments of pantomime rehearse the basic natural drama of sexually uneducated women and sexually educating man." In the eleven years during which she spoke, her power at the box office slowly diminished. The more she spoke the less enigmatic she became. Because of her hold on the imagination, her decline was slower than that of the other silent stars, but in the end her studio tried two desperate — and stupid — expedients. First they put her in Ninotchka, in which she, in effect, played her real self for the first time — distant, reserved, yet capable of warmth when correctly approached. In this film Melvyn Douglas, playing a perfect American type, finally accomplished what all others had failed to do — the sexual initiation of The Woman into American-type love making. Garbo had been taken before, but never cheerfully or without devastating consequences. Her fantasy value was destroyed. In the disastrous Two Faced Woman which followed, Garbo, now fully Americanized, was made to indulge in the kind of "cute" sex farce all too familiar to the moviegoer. A Metro executive once remarked, wonderingly, "Garbo was the only one we could kill off, . . . the women seemed to enjoy watching Garbo die." But, of course. It was the very essence of her screen nature that, through death or distance, she remained beyond ordinary sexuality. Her films, until the end, were the retelling of incidents, brief encounters, in which the male temporarily penetrated her masklike beauty, made her react like a real woman, for which crime common form demanded punishment. To wantonly disturb this pattern was an aesthetic crime. There is reason to believe that Garbo knows her career was mismanaged, and that from time to time the knowledge still disturbs her. The star as recluse: "Her life is ... a file of newspaper pictures catching her aghast . . . on the gangplanks of ships or the stairways to planes."