"Greta Garbo" is just one of those celebrity names I don't remember ever in my life NOT knowing, and yet since
stumbling upon this article about her maybe 4 minutes ago I'm realizing I know pretty much nothing about her. I had a vague, gauzy sense of what she was, a Hollywood starlet during the movie studios' glory days, but other than that the only thing I thought I knew about her came from a verse in Ray Davies' eternally beautiful Kinks' classic,
Celluloid Heroes:
Don't step on Greta Garbo as you walk down the Boulevard
She looks so weak and fragile that's why she tried to be so hard
But they turned her into a princess
And they sat her on a throne
But she turned her back on stardom
Because she wanted to be alone
I've always taken Davies' words as being somewhat true but more importantly remarkably beautiful and poignantly
(sort of) tragic no matter who the subject may be, but it turns out he was pretty dead on:
She was, Tennessee Williams thought, “the saddest of creatures—an artist who abandons her art.” People loved the mystery of it all; photographers were always chasing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding; she got out. One wag called her a “hermit about town.”
In the movies, she had always been able to convey a sense of hidden depths, of memories and emotions, never quite surfacing to be articulated. Were those feelings complex, interesting? We were persuaded they must be. The relationship to fame that she enacted in the last decades of her life was something similar: it looked profound, perhaps even spiritual—a renunciation of celebrity’s blessings as well as its scourges. But who knows? Maybe she was just tired of making faces.
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