High life
Cruising with Greta
Taki
This is Garbo week, so I may as well get my two bits in about a lady of whom one Paul Rosenfield writing in the Los Angeles Times said: 'What you see is so personal, so beautiful, it borders on be- trayal to describe it.' Well, perhaps I am not as sensitive as Rosenfield, so I will try and describe La Garbo the way she was when I met her aged 55, in Monte Carlo, and in the company of — who else Aristotle Socrates Onassis.
Although I know that one should never speak ill of a lady, especially one that is truly a living legend, I did find her a terrific bore. Onassis had pursued her and per- suaded her to come on board his boat for a summer's cruising in that single-minded way he had when going after what he considered to be big fish. Garbo had come with her friend George Schlee, the hus- band of Valentina, a Roman dress design- er. I found him even more boring. All he wanted to talk about was money, the one thing Aristotle Socrates did not. (Onassis loved lowbrow philosophy, 'I wonder what I would have been if the Turks hadn't pillaged my house and murdered my fami- ly' type of thing.) But Garbo did, some- thing that struck me as wrong. After all, she was very rich, supposedly cultured, and an actress, not a retired courtesan.
But I'm being a bit hard on her. She bothered no one and only spoke about how expensive things were in Monte Carlo. I thought she had a mad crush on Maria Callas, who teased her in return, and who had eyes only for Aristo, the love of her life, as well as her ruin as it turned out. The only way I can honestly describe Garbo's looks at the time is that she looked older than her years. Perhaps the way she dressed didn't help. In fact I know so. Mostly it was that Scandinavian sadness, the bleakness, that made her seem ancient to me. I was 23 at the time.
I never saw La Garbo again after that brief summer cruise, one that ended sud- denly for me when my host discovered a foolish prank of mine and became Orlando Furioso overnight. But I did enjoy these past two weeks watching her old films on television, especially Flesh and the Devil, probably because it's a silent flick, one that leaves one's imagination to run wild where beautiful sayings are concerned. Even bet- ter were some of the sub-titles: 'Are you willing to bear the ruin and disgrace of running away with me?' asks John Gilbert of La Garbo. Ruin? Disgrace? Can you imagine in today's world someone being ruined or disgraced for running off with someone else's wife? As old Sam Goldwyn once said, 'In two words, im-possible.'
Which brings me to Hollywood, a place the lady who was 80 last Wednesday fled from and to which she never once re- turned. Recently Interview magazine, a monthly which is making a fortune for its owner and chairman, Andy Warhol, by consistently underestimating the American public's taste, asked me to write something about Hollywood. The whole issue was about that ghastly place, all 298 pages of it, so an editor thought it would be fair to have a dissenting comment about horror city. Although Interview is not known for its literary achievements, I had a bad time writing for it. How on earth can one say something original about what is wrong with Hollywood, when heavy-hitters like Nat West, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Waugh, Shulberg and Norman Mailer have dealt with the ghastliness of the place, its wrong values, its false priorities, its greed and heartlessness? The answer is one cannot, at least not easily.
In brief, what I wrote was that Holly- wood fell in line with the kind of anti- Americanism practised by the media dur- ing the Sixties, and never got out of it. You know the line I mean, the one that portrays most military men as sadists, priests as charlatans and sexual perverts, small-town dwellers as red-necked bigots, and businessmen as total crooks. The same line that, on the other hand, portrays most black drug-dealers and Hispanic hit-men as sensitive souls who have gone wrong because of a traumatic experience when young.
Yes, although Miss Garbo may not have been the most exciting lady to be with on a rich man's boat, she at least was one of the most exciting women to watch on the screen. And to her credit she quit just before the wreckers took over, and has resisted their siren calls ever since. For that and that alone she should be honoured. She has good taste.
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