INTRODUCTION

HER STORY

QUOTES

Each week, Greta's faithful house servants, whom she had imported from Sweden, were dispatched to gather the fan magazines, newspapers, and rotogravure sections. So carefully did she read them that her houseman was sent back to the newsstand with any duplicates to collect a refund. It was the same when the magazines were found to contain nothing about her-- she would pout and send them back.

One afternoon a party of bigwigs from Washington was touring the studios as guests of Mayer. More than anything else they wanted to see Garbo. A junior executive, with twenty-eight people waiting for him outside, came over to the actress and pleaded, "We can't keep these people standing outside." "All right, let them come in," Greta answered. "And I will go home." The subject wasn't mentioned again.

In "Ninotchka," Garbo gave a brilliant comedy performance in one of MGM's best pictures to date. Louis B. Mayer sent her a huge bunch of flowers on the first day of shooting; she returned it without a word.

Just before "The Picture of Dorian Gray" was due to be cast, a photograph arrived on Louis B. Mayer's desk of a woman he recognized dressed as Dorian Gray. He turned the picture over. On the back, in a large, round childlike hand were inscribed the words, "This is the part I was born to play." The signature was Garbo's. She didn't get the part.

Garbo was prone to chronic depression and spent many years attacking it through Eastern philosophy and a solid health food regiment. However, she never gave up smoking and cocktails.

Letters and correspondence between Garbo and poet, socialite and notorious lesbian Mercedes De Acosta were unsealed on April 15, 2000, exactly 10 years after Garbo's death (per De Acosta's instructions). The letters revealed no love affair between the two, as had been fervently rumored.

She was as secretive about her relatives as she was about herself, and, upon her death, the names of her survivors could not immediately be determined.

Except at the very beginning of her career, she granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premieres, and answered no fan mail.

Clare Boothe Luce once likened Garbo to "a deer in the body of a woman living resentfully in the Hollywood zoo."

From the beginning of her career in America to the end 16 years later (in December 1941) only seven photographers were ever authorized to make portraits of her: Russell Ball, Arnold Genthe, Ruth Harriet Louise, Nickolas Muray, Edward Steichen, George Hurrell, and Clarence Sinclair Bull.

The appeal of Garbo was androgynous and enormous: at the peak of her success she was reputed to receive ninety thousand letters a month, 80 percent of them from women.

"The Kiss," the second film she shot upon her return from her unauthorized four-month stay in Sweden, was MGM's last silent movie.

Between scenes, Garbo would always sunbathe in a little screened-off place on MGM's back lot. She quit every evening precisely at 5:00 P.M. in order to go home, have dinner, and rest her muse. She never viewed rushes.

She liked to say that her favorite directors were the ones that left the set after the cameras began to roll.

You can't find her footprints in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood.

Garbo attended the premiere of "Bardeleys the Magnificent" with Gilbert, Thalberg and his date, Norma Shearer. It was the only premiere she ever attended.

In 1930 she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in both "Anna Christie" and "Romance," but Norma Shearer won the Oscar for "The Divorcée."

The story goes that Garbo's name (which means "spirit" in Swedish) existed in the mind of her mentor, Mauritz Stiller, for years before he saw her, and that the moment they met, he knew that she was the star for whom he had been saving it.

When Garbo returned to America in 1935 wearing her hair perfectly straight just above the shoulders, she very nearly precipitated a national hairdressing crisis- until a well-organized publicity campaign persuaded the female population that only Garbo could carry off this daring style and that others would have to have their ends curled under in a pageboy.

It is said that Garbo was so timid when she first came over to Hollywood that she insisted on learning English from her black maid.

Garbo supposedly only appeared in the studio commissary four times in her sixteen years at Metro, preferring to remain in her velvet-draped dressing room, where she would munch on raw vegetable salads and Swedish rye crisp, apple pie, cheese, and milk, or her favorite imported caviar, mixed with chopped onions and chives.

In 1924 Swedish director Mauritz Stiller was offered a job in Hollywood by L.B. Mayer but he would not accept unless Garbo was included in the offer.  Mayer agreed reluctantly, not realizing he had found a hidden treasure.

She was called The Divine, The Dream Princess of Eternity, and The Sarah Bernhardt of Films.

Stiller and Garbo were often referred to as Pygmalion and Galatea, Beauty and the Beast or Svengali and Trilby.

The original plan by MGM and L. B. Mayer was to promote Garbo as the All-American ourdoorsy type but once Garbo was behind the camera, only the mystic of mystery appeared.

Garbo and Clark Gable did not like each other, she found his acting wooden and he thought her a snob.

While filming "Wild Orchids" in 1929 Garbo received word that Mauritz Stiller had died in Sweden, she collapsed when she heard the news.

Gilbert Adrian helped glamorize the likes of Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow and Joan Crawford but no one inspired him like Garbo and when she retired from films he soon followed.

Garbo's favorite photographer Clarence Bull took his last picture of her on 3 October 1941 during the making of her final film film "Two Faced Woman".

While on location in Catalina Island filming "The Single Standard" Garbo learned that John Gilbert, her great love, had married Ina Claire.  She became hysterical and could not continue filming.

In Antoni Gronowicz's memoir of Garbo it states that two of her co-stars (Conrad Nagel and Gustav von Seyffertitz) from the 1928 film "The Mysterious lady" fought over her and were prepared to duel in the name of honor.

Would go to I. Magnin - the classiest store for women's clothing in L.A. - almost daily and never buy a thing. She always felt she deserved an item gratis by virtue of the fact that she was Garbo.

When John Gilbert first met her on the set, he said, "Hello, Greta, nice to meet you," and she responded, "I am Miss Garbo."

Had a brief affair with Marlene Dietrich while making "Joyless Street" together (even though Dietrich denied this until her death).

Left John Gilbert standing at the altar in 1927 when she got cold feet about marrying him.

She was the first choice to play George Sands in the movie biography of Chopin but she turned it down and the role went to Merle Oberon in 1945.

She had leading man, Laurence Olivier, fired from her film "Queen Cristina" and forced Louis B. Mayer to replace him with her ex-lover John Gilbert whose career was failing since the coming of sound.

In 1935 Garbo was approached by David Selznick to portray the dying heiress in "Dark Victory" (which went to Bette Davis) but Garbo preferred to do "Anna Karenina" which turned out to be one of her best films.

During filming, whenever there was something going on that wasn't to her liking she would simply say 'I think I'll go back to Sweden!' which frightened the studio heads so much that they gave in to her every whim.

Her first screen line was "Gimme a visky with a ginger ale on the side - and don't be stinchy, baby', in 'Anna Christy' (1930).

When Howard Dietz, not one of Garbo's favourite publicists, asked her once, "How would you like to come out for dinner on Monday?" she replied, "How do you know I'm going to be hungry on Monday?"

Louis B. Mayer wanted her to drop the name Garbo because he thought it sounded too much like garbage, but the lady proved durable.

Turned down the lead-role in "The Country Girl" (1954) which won Grace Kelly an Oscar.

On her arrival in Hollywood in late 1925, Garbo was sent to Max Factor seeking 'make-up dramatization' for her first American screen test. Of the early Garbo, Factor said, "She has natural eyelashes more lovely than any artificial lashes I can supply."

Garbo loved to disguise herself - 'Miss Harriet Brown' was one of her favourite alternative identities.  She was unconventional in even more provocative ways as well. If her whereabouts were a puzzle, her sexual orientation was a flat-out mystery. Of course, she may have deliberately fed the rumours by juxtaposing torrid affairs with her leading men with whispered liaisons involving beauties of her own gender.

Garbo's Hollywood career was characterized by financial success. Unlike many actresses of her era, Garbo successfully negotiated for lucrative compensation and artistic control. During the mid-1930's, she was America's highest paid woman.

Lived for nearly 50 years as a near-recluse in a luxury seven-room-apartment in Manhattan's East Side (450 East 52nd Street). She never went back to Sweden again after 1975, saying she feared being pestered by the press.

Died aged 84 in 1990. Her niece Gray Reisfield had her ashes kept in a mortuary in New York while she decided where they should go. In 1999, Garbo's ashes were interred in Skogskyrkogården, the cemetery in southern Stockholm where her parents are buried.