From time to time, as I may have mentioned, I will transcribe one of my old journal entries on a subject that, I hope, is of general interest. This is part of a culling process I am doing for a variety of personal reasons. So much of my writing was, is, ranting, I fear. But occasionally, I had some moderately interesting notes, and I guess I just want to share them.
This one is about Greta Garbo about a week or two after she died in New York at the age of 84. For generations of movie-goers beginning in the silent era to about the mid 1930s, Garbo was a defining star presence. She was probably most famous for words that I don't know she ever said at all in a movie, "I vant to be alone!" And she was, apparently, most of her life. She lived, after she withdrew from film, in a NYC apartment that I see has just recently gone up for sale. She was known as something of a hermit, something of a mysterious shadow of her supposed movie line.
When I wrote the following, there must have been a photo of her that I tried to find online, but could not. So, these are a couple just for context. Garbo when she was young and vibrant. And Garbo when she merged into NYC anonymity and then, like the rest of us, died, reminding us that no one, no matter how once famous, is spared.
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April 24, 1990, Tuesday, 11:50 p.m.
She is wearing a heavy fur coat over a soft, matronly body. Her white hair is long and loose, dry and in its style, a refusal to accept the reality of 84 years. It is a style of her 20s, 30s, or even 40s. But now it is a parody of her former self. She denies what is long past. And what was only an image.
She seems to pitch forward a bit. Her right hand on a sturdy cane; her left ,on a person, who is not pictured. Her eyes still heavy lidded but now protected by large rimmed glasses. Her face is otherwise broadened with age. She looks surprised, or is it afraid, wary? She reminds me of the character in the Twilight Zone who closed herself away to avoid death--as if by shutting herself up death could be kept out.
Just a photograph. And when I saw it, my heart jumped just a little, a shock, unreasonable really, that the myth, the illusion, the image of glamour, youth, fame, was this so typically elderly woman. Greta Garbo, a sad, little old lady. After seeing that picture in the Times, I will never be seduced by the myth again.
All the collecting, ambition, good life demanded and commanded, reduced so utterly.
She seems to have died a lonely old thing. What did she accomplish, one wonders, besides the fame created out of celluloid and the talk of the easily myth-fed public? Between the photos of 1928 and 1989 what was in her life exclusive of speculation, rumor, and outright lie?
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