When Greta Garbo said ‘I want to be alone,’ Peter Cook was merciless in his mockery of her as Emma Bargo, shouting through a loudhailer being driven through London, ‘I want to be alone!’
Garbo had indeed uttered that line in Grand Hotel (1932) but claimed shortly after, in an interview regarding her private life, ‘I only said I want to be let alone. There is all the difference’. This was just one of the insights from Garbo herself in a serialisation of Frederick Sands and Sven Broman’sThe Divine Garbo (‘The private world of Garbo’, 16 September 1979).
Garbo left Hollywood in 1941 aged just 36 and never made another film. ‘On her return from a visit to Sweden after the war, in 1946, she told reporters, “I have no plans, either for the movies or anything else. I’m just drifting.”’
To anyone trying to get her to change her mind she had one short answer, summed up in her remark to David Niven: ‘I had made enough faces.’
‘I am forever running away from something or somebody,’ confided Garbo to Sands in 1977. ‘Unconsciously I have always known that I was not destined for real and lasting happiness.’ Garbo, they wrote, put up barriers: ‘Her self-imposed isolation, her constant quest for privacy, her distrust of people, made her few friends…
‘Disliking domesticity in any shape or form, she never wanted a permanent home of her own, preferring to live in rented houses or hotels.’ She viewed possessions as ‘millstones around one’s neck’. (Though presumably not her Renoirs.)
Garbo’s New York apartment buzzer was identified by a solitary G. ‘Neighbours and building staff … do not speak unless she speaks first, they do not smile unless she smiles first.’ Surprisingly, given all the gloom, her apartment was a ‘light and airy study in pink’.
