Reality, Or What Passes For It

As so often in troubled times, my dears, this last little while I've more than once had need of a Garbo Moment. Here we see her displaying a smile that, for me, rivals the one attributed to that Signora Gioconda about whom we hear so much.

Baubles, Bangles...

...and Swede.

For no good reason, other than that it's February-cold, midwinter-damp, and just generally a tad dreary, this seems like the kind of week that might require a Garbo moment. And so let's have one.

Pretty Pierrot

Yesterday, she would have been 110.

Beautiful Dreamer

I feel like it's been ages since we've shared a Garbo moment...

Otherwise Engaged

Sorry, kids - no time to write tonight.  Grand Hotel is on TCM...

Having a Moment...

...Greta Gustaffson style.  I love this shot; I don't think I've ever seen her looking so peeved.

She Goes Out Walking...

The woman who was for the last 20 years of her life Manhattan's most famous - if also most elusive - pedestrian would have celebrated her 107th birthday today.  For a while, I thought about putting together a book consisting entirely of New Yorkers' stories of encountering her on her daily constitutionals and calling it Garbo Walks.

Greta...

Miss Gustafsson if you're nasty.  Just because.

They Had Faces, Then

Sometimes I ask myself, "Have I spent enough time lately thinking about Garbo?"  If the answer is "no," I stop and stare at a portrait like this for a while.  I really do think one can argue that hers is one of the most architecturally perfect faces known, on a very short list with the likes of Nefertiti and one or two Renaissance grandees.

We finally saw The Artist last night (movies in which things don't explode tend either to take a very long while to arrive here, or they simply never do).  I thought it was simply splendid, and of course it stirred up all sorts of things, from childhood memories of my grandmother's descriptions of playing the piano for silents to the great joy that going to repertory houses in New York used to be.  How wonderful, I thought, as it started, to see a movie that's shaped right, that starts with credits, that... makes you happy to be at the movies.  It's a different experience, going to a movie that respects its audience, that wants it to be happy; you're drawn in, sit up, pay attention.  The long, lingering closeups give you the chance to devour the faces, take in the thoughts that flicker across them.

And when the faces look like this - or Jean Dujardin's, for that matter - is it any wonder people thought they were gods?

The Last Flapper

I just came across a remarkable obituary in that staple of the almost lost art of writing them, The Telegraph. Would you believe - and I very nearly don't - that the limpid-eyed young lady above has only just left us this month? She was the euphoniously named Frederica Sagor Maas, and at the time of her death she was, at 111, the third oldest person in California.

That alone is, to an extent, remarkable in itself. What has me gobsmacked, though, is that she was very likely among the very last links to the silent-film era at its most vibrant. A scriptwriter, she worked on films including the major Clara Bow vehicles The Plastic Age and It (generally identified, inaccurately, only with the hyperflorid writing of Elinor Glyn), as well as one of Louise Brooks's more notable Stateside efforts, Rolled Stockings (as evocative a Jazz Age title, in its way, as any, no?). She even had a hand in the great Garbo-Gilbert Flesh and the Devil.

She and her husband, Ernest, had a varied time of it, and while their work on Betty Grable's 1947 vehicle The Shocking Miss Pilgrim helped make that picture a hit, they left Hollywood, and Frederica spent the balance of her professional life in the somewhat less fraught field of insurance adjusting.

At 99, she published an autobiography that was, apparently, equal part bitterness and exposé, full of lurid tales of Paramount orgies and Metro misbehavior. She didn't think much, it seems, of most of the studio types she worked with, and she doesn't seem to have gone out of her way to have played the Hollywood game.

It's amazing to think that until just a couple of weeks ago there was someone among us who could have told us, first person, what it was like to watch Clara Bow at work and play, someone who was a peer and counterpart of Frances Marion, who was hard at work as a scriptwriter years before Dorothy Parker headed West. Not to mention someone who likely danced the Charleston and Black Bottom alongside Lucille LeSeuer in some LA nightclub and who was a friend of Norma Shearer's (before Mrs. Thalberg became the semi-petrified Boss's wife and no matter what she thought of the man she dismissed as a "mama's boy").

At 110, the Telegraph reports, she asked for "a large chocolate cake" on her birthday. She earned it.

Birthday Goddess

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale

Her infinite variety...

Women on the Verge

...Of serious and major transformations:

Into a predatory insect, for example.

I had a boss once who'd been Susan Cabot's roommate once when they both trying to Make It There - now there's a Terrible Hollywood Story. Susan's, that is, not my boss's (she ended up in Mexican movies and married a Philadelphia socialite, so some things do work out for the best).

I've never heard of a blonde voodoo priestess in a strapless cocktail gown, but maybe it's just that that makes her Weird. Go ask Lon Chaney - if anyone would know, it's he...

Never having had the nerve to see this one, I had no idea that the twin-concept imposed on Miss Garbo involved playing a lady baseball player and a truck driver in drag. No wonder Melvyn Douglass looks so surprised.

That Kind of Woman is apparently the kind who ditches her picture hat, pearls, and gloves at the first opportunity to kiss a GI.

Given that the kissee is Tab Hunter, he probably went home with the accessories, not the Woman. Although if you're ever going to make an exception for anyone, Sophia Loren is pretty much the choice to go with.

The terrifying story of a woman whose Guilty Secret appears to have consisted of wanting to imitate Margaret Hamilton's makeup. Actually, if all you had to choose between was George Sanders and Louis Hayward, you'd probably be Strange, too. But not, I hope, green - even on La Lamarr, it's not terribly flattering.

As opposed to being a Cobra, which proved enormously successful for Miss Montez. Everyone knows this particular Woman picture...

But even I hadn't known it had a sequel, of sorts...

...not to mention a blatant stealing of the concept (if not, if this poster's any evidence, the fabulousness). I don't really want to imagine what kind of horror Snake Woman can spread with her forked tongue.

I suspect that, for poor Jean Harlow, having to go red was almost as bad as having to go Wasp or Cobra. Ginger just doesn't go with white satin bias-cut gowns the way platinum does, after all. Especially when the most you hope to impress is Chester Morris, who isn't exactly Clark Gable, if you know what I mean. But then again, if you listen to Carole Lombard, even Clark Gable wasn't exactly Clark Gable.

They certainly don't seem to make many pictures about Women turned into cute, fluffy creatures, do they? No Bunny Woman, Panda Woman, or West Highland Terrier Woman; oh, no - it's all snakes and cobras, wasps and - possibly least inviting of all - leeches. Bleech. No wonder Coleen Gray retired. And how did an ex-Mr. Joan Crawford turn up in this?

Acquanetta! The greatest star ever named after an off-prime grooming-product brand. It's nice to know that she rated special billing, although I don't think there was much question in that cast who would be appearing "as The Jungle Woman," really, is there?

From the Jungle to the Front Page; it certainly can't be argued that Hollywood's Woman didn't get around.

Never in a million years did Davis have gams like that. Maybe she borrowed them from Susan Cabot.

Another stint in the urban jungle, this time with not one but two formidable Women, even if only one made it up above the title. And no, children, this was not the inspiration for the Dixie Carter-Delta Burke (et al) television series.

After all these turbid goings-on, invisibility seems like a relief, a sentiment likely not shared by Virginia Bruce. It was never a terribly interesting film career, and it's all downhill from there. Although even she never had to play a Leech.

Goddess in the Afternoon

There is always something illicit about any photograph of Garbo taken after '41. So few were taken, as apparently this one was (Beaton? I'm not sure, but it seems likely), willingly, and they all show a woman who spent so much of her energy not being seen.

They are, even more than other such pictures, innately voyeuristic; you find yourself searching the face for signs of age, for indications that she made the right choice by retiring, or for vindication of your belief that she should have gone on forever, secure in the knowledge that, for better or worse, she was given the most architecturally perfect face in recorded history.

I'm reading, these days, the journals (more of which, I hope, anon) of Leo Lerman, a bon vivant of the last century who knew everyone and everything. He writes about an incident related to him by his friend Marlene Dietrich. Sometime in the late fifties (I'm lazy; the book is not at hand), she became convinced that she and Garbo should star in an adaptation of Isak Dinesen's wartime novel The Angelic Avengers, a tale of two sisters, one beautiful and one brilliant.

She took the book to Garbo, who was not uninterested. But, came the question, who would play which role? Ah, says Marlene, you should be the brilliant one, it's a far more interesting part. Mmm, says Garbo - I don't think I make this film...

Garbo

Accept no substitutes. As if there were any...

Suddenly, Susans

Susan. Susan, Susan, Susan. Seems like a demure enough name, no? And when you've got a list that includes Debbie Reynolds, Joan Fontaine, and Garbo, you would think that things were fairly upscale, wouldn't you?

Nope. Somehow, being Susan brings out the inner Madonna in a whole lot more people than just Rosanna Arquette.

Of course, it doesn't take a whole lot to tease the tempestuous out of Miss Connie Stevens (and at least she's waxing melodramatic over the sole member of Henry Willson's legendary stable who's at least somewhat likely to respond).*

When your most demure example is embodied by Joan Crawford, you know there's something serious going on. This might be, by the bye, the least satisfying Crawford picture ever, if only because the denouement is all about how nice she really is at heart. Who goes to a Crawford picture for that?

When playing a character called Susan can put that look into Debbie Reynolds's eyes, something's definitely afoot. It certainly seems unlikely to have been her leading man, Dick Powell.

Even the quintessential lady (except when discussing her sister), Joan Fontaine, is caught up in the madness - the very idea of Susanness inflaming her to the point of trying to vamp George Brent, a pointless endeavor if ever there was one.

Garbo's Susan falls and rises - no surprise there, since that's basically what Garbo heroines always did - but the neon diner-sign font does give it a slightly tawdry air...

It's a sign of the name's potency that the outright trashy movies incorporate the name into titles no more risqué, really, than the ones starring Reynolds or Fontaine...

...and this one sounds like it could almost be a 20s campus romp starring Nancy Carroll or some such. But it's not - because of the dangerous power of "Susan."

* Did you remember that Troy Donahue was married to Suzanne Pleshette? I had totally forgotten.

Bibliomane's Delight

Imagine flipping idly through a pile of battered '30s books at your local used-book haven - novels, cookbooks, maybe a health-fad or other self-improvement tome or two - and opening one at random...

...to find this pasted inside. I don't know about you, but you'd very likely have to call the paramedics for me.

After, that is, I had a quick look at every other other volume in the vicinity just to make sure and then made it sucessfully past the suspicious woman at the register who wonders what possible interest I could have in Dr. Parringer's Infallible Celery Diet that I didn't even try and bargain her down from $2.50.

Having a Moment

A Garbo moment. Than which there is no finer kind.

Have You Had Your Fix Today?

Your Garbo fix, that is. Neither had I.

Now we can all feel that much better, having basked for a moment in those eyes.

It's not a Dream...

Marguerite: It's you. It's not a dream.
Armand: No, it's not a dream. I'm here with you in my arms, at last.
Marguerite: At last.
Armand: You're weak.
Marguerite: No, no. Strong. It's my heart. It's not used to being happy.

I think the highlight of this week's orgy of movie-watching was revisiting, for the first time in many, many years, Camille (that most curious of all titles, in that there is, of course, no character in it called Camille. Why do you suppose the real title, Lady of the Camellias, has never caught on in English?).

The biggest surprise, I found, was what an extraordinarily good film it is. It's become something a cliché that, yes, Garbo is Garbo is Garbo, and immortal, but her films... Ninotcha aside ... are something else. This, though, is something different, and far, far more than just a vehicle (although it is that, too, and a very handsomely appointed one).

It has the best of everything that MGM could throw at a project in 1936, from a top-notch director in George Cukor to the A-est of the day's leading men, Robert Taylor, to sets and costumes that have rarely, if ever, been matched for their combination of extravagance and exquisite taste.

The script, credited to Zoe Akins, Frances Marion, and James Hilton in addition to Dumas fils, packs an astonishing amount of incident, banter, and period flavor on top of the surefire plot, making the film seem at once a languorous romance and a surprisingly lively peek into the underside of life in nineteenth century Paris.

And the character players! Laura Hope Crews banishes all thoughts of Aunt Pittypat as a debauched, greedy old harridan; Leonore Ulric simpers and scowls as Garbo's rival demimondaine; Lionel Barrymore is at his lionelbarrymost as Monseiur Duval. Add in Henry Daniell, Elizabeth Allan, and, in there somewhere, 40s favorite Joan Leslie in her debut, and it makes for a savory package.

And then there's Garbo. Who is, simply, incredible.

In the first scene or so, before she has met Robert Taylor (the man who will undo her), she is heavy, lifeless - worldly, but weary. Then they meet - and it's like watching the clouds part for the sun. Her performance builds to a fever pitch as the story plays out, until her final collapse. She fades and - surely this can't be considered a spoiler? - dies as affectingly as anyone on screen ever has, without affectation or pretense.

I'll have to check out a couple of her acknowledged stinkers - Two Faced Woman being of course the most notorious - and see what she brings to something that doesn't have all of Camille's glories to set her off.

Birthday Girl: The Greatest of Them All

She would have been 103. If anyone could have carried it off, it would have been she.

I'm grateful to have lived in New York when it was still a very real possibility that one could, in the course of an ordinary afternoon - shopping on Madison, say, or walking to a friend's place over toward the river - encounter a solitary walker, usually in a gray trench with a scarf or hat pulled low, and realize, usually just a moment too late, that it was in fact Miss G.