Talking Screen (Jan-Aug 1930)

MYTH OF THE MOVIES MORE AMAZING THAN ALL . THL MYSTERY STUFF IS THE TRUTH — PRESENTED HEREWITH --CONCERNING GRETA The Greia Garbo-John Gilbert team (shown here in A Woman of Affairs) was one of the factors which helped make Greta such a towering and well founded success. Can you picture the seductive Garbo working in a barber shop? Or standing behind a counter in the Macy's of her home town, selling millinery? It doesn't seem , possible. Greta Garbo, queen of the studios, is, according to the author of this article, what movie officials call •'difficult." In other words, temperamental. YET because she can face a microphone withouL wreck ing it, the movie world goes mad. At least — madder. Upon what meat doth this our Greta feed that she hath grown so great? In a few brief years she has become one of the Great American Credos like those about the Noble Experiment, rhat We Won the War, Three Lights on a Match, All Men Born Free and Equal, and Clara Bow being a Red Hot Momma. In a garrulous nation she has kept silent. Amid a mob of magpies she's clam-like as Cal. And because she won't "give out", they've drooled her into mystery with more bilious bubblings than pop from a mud-geyser. No matter what else, Greta has had sense enough to play the pose. In a province of Pollyannas, she is Sweet Melancholy — the ever-fascinating figure of the Woman Who Walks Alone. So we are treated to_ the spectacle of an anaemic, overslender girl, with straight and rather stringy tresses, a skin kissed to washed-out pallor by the cold Northern Lights, shoulders too broad and angular for her frame, over-sized extremities, and a mouth knife-like to the point of cruelty, being hailed as the Beauty par excellance of Hollywood. Yet there is every type from Dove to Del Rio. She conjures sympathy with a pose of perpetual unhappiness. The boring posture of eternal loneliness. The stoic figure ever gazing toward the sea. And they build her into the Woman Who Walks Alone. Yet there is the plucky Swanson. They nominate her the "Volcano of Ice", the "Woman of Snow and Fire", and a thousand other catchy descriptions exactly Mmilai ro those slogans wliith sell cigarettes, soap and cinema stars. Yet there is Evelyn Brent. As a matter of fact, Greta should be bubbling over with happiness, and through sheer thankfulness and the great joy of living — of being allowed to live — she should be the life of the party. SHE herself tacitly admits being one of us when she m-oans: "'I was born in a house; I grew up like everybody else; I didn't like to go to school." It sounds human. And it seems she must have been human during those first fourteen years in that suburb of Sodertalje, over the Malar. Before the death of her father left her a widow's youngest of three orphans. Her family had no money — who's has.' — and as little Greta Louise was, shall we say, backward in the school she detested, Ma Gustafsson consented that she go to work. Not unlike the history of the girl next door, so far, is it.-* She worked in a barber shop, lathering mugs. An American girl would have been manicurist — or a "beautician." Tall for her age (the neighbors probably called it "gawky", "awkward"), she got a job in the local Macy's or Marshall Field's. In ladies and misses ready-to-wear. Later, in millinery. Contact with the hair-trigger wit of the sales-girls sharpened her own. She became smarter — more chic — and more critical of the customers and the whole world. It may be presumed that one so introspective as Greta began now to be a bit sneering and bitter toward the luxury surrounding her and marked "Verboten" to a mere vendeuse of hats. Just ten years ago she made her film bow. It was in what [^Continued on page 89 ~\ 33