Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,74

others did, including Marlene Dietrich, the playwright Mercedes de Acosta and Louise Brooks, who described Garbo as a “completely masculine dyke.” Closer friends thought of her androg yny as more complicated, nearer to the character of Queen Christina, who, disguised as a man, shares a bed with John Gilbert. Gore Vidal, an acquaintance from the last twenty years of her life, claims: “She thought of herself as a boy with another boy, that was her sexual fantasy.” She habitually referred to herself in the masculine, as a “bachelor”; at parties she would ask: “Where’s the little boy’s room?”

In the movies they were still determined to make a lady of her. In Ninotchka (1939), playing a Soviet apparatchik, she goes from macho, humorless Russian to glamorous Parisian party girl. Famously, she laughs. She can’t laugh. When she satirizes her own European dolor, she is hilarious. (“The show trials were a great success,” she deadpans. “We are going to have fewer but better Russians.”) But when she becomes gay and carefree, the movie dies. Ninotchka was a huge success (mostly thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign), but the studio picked up on the wrong trait, the newfound gaiety. Two-Faced Woman (1941), in which a newly happy Garbo does the rumba and goes swimming, was a disaster. You don’t put the sphinx in a swimsuit.

It was to be her last movie. The uniformly bad reviews for Two-Faced Woman were terribly wounding to her, but more than this, she had spotted something in the mirror. Two faint lines on either side of her mouth, connecting her nose to her chin. The face was no longer eternal, ethereal. It was over. Garbo after 1941 is simply a tale of withdrawal. She stands high in the roll call of twentieth-century recluses. But it would be more accurate, her biographer Barry Paris suggests, to call her a “hermit-about-town.” She walked for miles through New York every day, window-shopping. In the 1960s, almost every Manhattanite had a Garbo-spotting story to tell. She described herself at this time as “a mollusc. I don’t move, I don’t do anything. I just am.” This is not quite true: she had friends, walking partners. She went to auctions and bought paintings and antiques for her lavish apartment (when she died she left a $32 million estate, which included two Renoirs). It is no story of tragedy. She wished to live, only not publicly. She dressed as she liked, did as she liked. In her own later years, Crawford told a journalist: “I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.” Garbo didn’t even look as good as the girl next door. Her face (though she refused to believe it) was still beautiful, her wardrobe less so: sweaters, hats, scarves, slacks, raincoats. She kept a screwed-up piece of Kleenex in her left hand to cover her face should anyone try to photograph her. If she saw a fan approaching, she would say to her walking companion, “We’ve got a customer,” and change direction. She wanted to be alone. Garbo, the icon, was over. Age made of Greta a person, and the personhood of Garbo was never for sale. She would be myth or nothing at all.

Eleven

NOTES ON VISCONTI’S BELLISSIMA

“Please don’t retouch my wrinkles. It took me so long to earn them.”

—ANNA MAGNANI

PR EFACE

In the Piazza della Madonna dei Monti, in the ombra di colosseo, expats gather to complain. Not about the piazza itself, generally agreed to be among the prettiest in Rome. The central café, shrouded in pink bougainvillea, looks out upon a two-tiered fountain, mercifully cherub free. The thin white column of a Ukrainian orthodox church is discreet, unexpected. Depending on the hour, we watch mighty-calved American kids drink cheap hock straight from the bottle; tanned Roman girls, chain-smoking, dressed in the sunset silks they bought in Mumbai; hipster gays en route to Testaccio; three boxer dogs; delighted German tourists who think themselves the first to discover the place; very old Italians of suspicious vitality; two boys who use the church door as a goal mouth; and a beautiful young man who has been sleeping rough here for six months after a disagreement with his girlfriend. The young man is much appreciated—he is the sort of local color for which we came to Rome in the first place. His stench is monitored: sweet in the first month, eye watering in the fourth, café clearing in the