Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,73
should be a scene with trousers. She put herself in others’ hands. First Stiller, then the actor John Gilbert, the lesbian clique of Mercedes de Acosta, and the producer Irving Thalberg. Louis B. Mayer was driven mad by all these advisers and intercessors; he thought she was too easily influenced. And yet what comes across on film is a resolute, inviolable selfhood, ultimately impenetrable by other people. The public felt it, and expressed it in their popular nicknames: “The Swedish Sphinx” and “The Divine.”
Flesh and the Devil (1926) was her smash hit, creating a Garbo model that the studio exploited for the next fifteen years. It is silent and possibly her best film. She was only twenty-one, but her world-weariness on-screen suggests an older woman, longed for and chased after by the puppyish John Gilbert, who was to become her real-life lover. This romance, as it was rendered on-screen, scandalized America: a young man lying underneath a more experienced woman who seemed to literally feed from his mouth as she kissed him. It was a ravishment—female moviegoers loved it. This was a new kind of woman. For this reason she was punished in the movies (in Flesh and the Devil she drowns in ice water; in Camille it’s tuberculosis; in Anna Karenina it’s that pesky train), but she was free in life. It was Gilbert who suffered when she refused to marry him; it was Mayer who went crazy when she went on strike rather than make a corny movie (Women Love Diamonds) that she didn’t like the look of.
What was the matter with Garbo? Mayer couldn’t understand it. Why wasn’t she thankful? But after Flesh and the Devil, the power had changed hands: Garbo was an MGM gold mine. Garbo’s imperial aloofness appealed to Depression-era women on a scale that even Mayer could not have predicted. They were dependent; she was beyond dependence. Whatever made her happy or sad, it came from within. Film critics often mention her unusual responses: where another actress would laugh, she cries, when they would be serious, she plays it light. She seems to respond to something deep inside herself, not to the actor she plays opposite. It was a world of her own she was in, and it was wonderful to watch.
There are two halves of Garbo’s career: before and after sound. She made the transition as late as she possibly could, in 1930. “GARBO TALKS!” announced the publicity, and luckily for MGM, the voice matched the face. Her first line (“Gimme me a visky, ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby!”) was delivered in that deep, miserable, sexy baritone that delighted her fans because they had, subconsciously, expected it. But a talking Garbo also revealed less fortunate traits. Her line readings are offbeat, bizarre; she had an unsteady grasp of the English language. She is a terrible reactor to spoken dialogue. If someone else is speaking, she simply looks bored. For the next ten years, her success in talkies depended on how much she was allowed to use her real strengths: her face, her eyes. This is why the silent final scene of Queen Christina (1933) is justly famous. Her lover, for whom she has renounced the throne, has just been killed by a jealous rival; she walks to the prow of the ship she is on and becomes a part of its helm—you may remember the image from Titanic. Where DiCaprio announces himself to the world, Garbo does nothing. Says nothing. Moves nothing on her face. It is a Swedish mix of cold water and private thoughts. The camera gets closer and closer. What you see there is humanized stoicism; she is going through what she is going through, deeply, personally and without public expression. She is resolutely herself.
This kind of interiority was soon to be under threat from a new breed of actress, women such as Joan Crawford, who projected everything they had outward to the public, leaving nothing in reserve. Crawford admired Garbo greatly but was already preparing to supplant her as the queen of MGM. She described an encounter on a staircase during the filming of Grand Hotel (1932): “She stopped and cupped my face in her hands and said, ‘What a pity. Our first picture together, and we won’t work with each other. I am so sorry. You have a marvelous face.’ If there was ever a time in my life I might have become a lesbian that was it.”