The Happy Years (1944-48)

by Cecil Beaton

  We continued with a game of badinage that made little sense and yet was light and fantastic and to me, her abject victim, devastatingly entertaining. ‘Are you a cobbler?’ she suddenly asked apropos of nothing, ‘or are you a cutter?’ ‘No, I don’t think I am,’ I answered lamely, not yet on to the game. She certainly did not consider herself as an actress. ‘Being stared at by all those people is a pretty shabby business,’ she said, and went on to tell how once in Sweden she had gone to a theatre alone. The audience was well-dressed and they were watching an actor play ‘a well-dressed part’, but he had a tear in his coat. ‘That was so poignant! But then things can so often be so dismal, uncongenial and obnoxious.’ About a man with a goitre: ‘How can you laugh at a human being who is having trouble with his glands!’ Albinos: ‘They have such uneasiness with their eyes — they can hardly see. They are so pained and humiliated! Poor creatures of the world! Poor human beings!’

  The whole conversation had a rather wacky, inconsequential quality, but because the creature sitting by my side was so ineffably strange and beautiful one automatically and willingly accepted the idiom imposed by her. This wackiness took the place of wit and would change erratically from gay to sad. ‘A doctor once looked at me very carefully and asked: “Why are you unhappy? Is it because you imagine you’re ill?” Another doctor asked: “Are you bored?” I don’t know why he used so violent a word!’

  Another reason for my delight in her talk was that I was savouring, with a certain surprise, the still quite strong ‘arck-scentte’ with which she spoke the English language. The tongue seemed to strike the back of the upper teeth with greater force than when a native slurs over his sentences. It gave added point to words: ‘like fleet’ (‘likke-fleatte’), ‘luck’ (‘luckke’), ‘kid’ (‘kidde’), and ‘ring’ (‘wringge’). Certain vowels were invested with unusual importance. (‘Valuable’ became ‘vuargh-luobbhle’, ‘natural’ = ‘nahr-turreil’; while ‘o’ and ‘a’ became ‘u’ — ‘hospital = ‘huspitulle’, ‘standard’ = ‘stundadtt’). The Swedish version of ‘known’ sounds strangely Cockney (knewgnne), and ‘cooler’ and ‘cutter’ assumed quite an American blurring of the ‘r’s’. ‘D’ at the end of a word became a ‘t’ (‘wohrt’ or ‘bohrt’). These variations on what had become the usual to me were all wrapped in a mellifluous sweetness of sound.

  Apropos I know not what, she said: ‘My bed is very small and chaste. I hate it. I’ve never thought of any particular person in connection with marriage; but, just lately, I have been thinking that as age advances we all become more lonely, and perhaps I have made rather a mistake — been on the wrong lines — and should settle down to some permanent companionship.’

  This gave me the opportunity for which, subconsciously, I had been waiting. During the last few minutes I had known that — as the phrase has it — we were made for each other. Of this I was now quite certain. Not as a pleasantry, but to be taken very seriously, I asked: ‘Why don’t you marry me?’

  I had never before asked anyone to marry me, and yet to make this proposal now seemed the most natural and easy thing to do. I was not even surprised at myself. But Garbo looked completely astounded. ‘Good heavens, but this is so sudden!’ She went on to soften her reaction. ‘I once said to a friend of mine who invited me out to lunch: “Why, this is so sudden!”, and he looked so hurt. But really, this is very frivolous of you. I don’t think you should speak slightingly of marriage.’

  ‘But I mean it. I’ve never been more serious.’

  ‘But you hardly know me.’

  ‘I know all about you, and I want to tame you and teach you to be much happier.’

  ‘But we would never be able to get along together and, besides, you wouldn’t like to see me in the morning in an old man’s pyjamas.’

  ‘I would be wearing an old man’s pyjamas, too. And I think we would get along well together — unless my whistling in the bathroom got on your nerves?’

  ‘You’re being very superficial: one doesn’t plan one’s life on other people’s bathroom habits. Besides, you’d worry about my being so gloomy and sad.’

  ‘Oh no — you’d have to worry about why I was so happy, and you’d be the reason.’

  ‘It’s a funny thing, but I don’t let anyone except you touch my vertebrae — they so easily get out of place.’

  When it was time for her to leave, I took her down to the street. Returning to my room I wondered had she really been here? Or had I, by some extraordinary wish-fulfilment, dreamt into actuality the scene that had passed?

  I looked around to see the proof that my imagination had not played a trick on me. Here was the reality: the tea cup with the lipstick, the ash-tray with the Old Gold cigarette stubs and the used matches — and the cushions against which she had leant. I would have liked to ask the hotel maid not to ‘tidy’ the room; I did not want her to puff out the cushions, but to preserve them just as they were now, or to cast them in bronze for always.

  Next day was a typically busy working one with my delightful and tactful secretary, Miss Cleghorn, helping me to answer the succession of telephone calls which consisted mainly of appointments being re-arranged or switched. Suddenly I was impatient for all this activity to close down and for nice Miss Cleghorn to leave, for an appointment had been made that was not to be rearranged or switched: Greta was to come in to see me at 5.30. I put a ‘Do not disturb’ signal on the telephone, and a few minutes later there was an impatient woodpecker knocking at the door.

  Greta’s mood was as inconsequential as yesterday’s. She had no information to impart, made no reference to my outburst of a proposal, and gave a spontaneous performance of sheer gaiety and nonsense. With no apparent context she recited little pieces of Goethe in an excellent German accent, used a few French words as if to the manner born, then came down to earth with American slang: ‘By heck!’ — ‘Shucks!’ — ‘Damn it!’ etc. She told me of any little oddment that had amused her: a woman wrote her a fan letter saying: ‘You have the character of a man, but the body of a woman — blast it!’ She could not help being amused at the brutal finality of the disbelieving New York cop who interrupted a long-winded bum by telling him to ‘beat it’. Her friend Molnar, the Hungarian playwright, tells comic stories wonderfully well, and has one in particular that amuses her, but it contains the use of a very crude word without which this story would not be funny. Therefore, although she objects to the use of coarse language in her presence, Greta excuses the word and whenever she sees Molnar she begs him to repeat the story; each time he does so, Greta turns her face away and laughs.

  Greta jumped from one conversational orbit to another and we talked about ourselves only in oblique terms. I tried, somewhat tentatively, to bind her down to plans that would necessitate our meeting one another continually in the near future. Would she not like to see a certain play, or go to see the Grecos in the Hispanic Museum, or to eat soft-shell crabs in a downtown restaurant? But her answers were deliciously vague, as if she never went to theatres, picture shows, or restaurants. I must be satisfied with the present and not bank upon any further dividends.

  When she came to take her leave, she gathered her belongings together saying: ‘I never wear white gloves. I simplify life like mad!’ I notice that when she puts on a hat she never looks to see how it is placed on her head. She is completely without feminine vanity though at times she is interested in clothes — the sort that she likes: she peers a lot at shoes in shop windows, and at leather coats and sweaters. Suddenly she turned and said: ‘I don’t know you from Adam [pronounced ‘Ardhumme’] and yet I was quite willing to stay here until breakfast time. That is, if you had remained with your head on the pillow beside me like a brother.’ Then very sweetly and humbly she asked: ‘May I be permitted to make a telephone call?’ and, when she lifted the receiver, doubtless to call ‘the little man’, the operator asked: ‘Are you now taking your calls, Mr Beaton?’ ‘Yes,’ Garbo replied. As G. was leaving the telephone rang. ‘Ah, there’s life!’ she
said, but for me life was leaving.

  We have started going out for walks together in Central Park. We ‘steppe outte’ for miles very fast — round the reservoir then all the way home from Ninety-Sixth Street to Fifty-Ninth. During these walks over the grass, under the early springtime trees, her mood becomes euphoric. To be part of nature gives her the same elation as champagne to a novice. She strides, leaps, laughs, becomes as lithe as a gazelle. She takes deep quaffs of water at the public fountains.

  Sometimes photographs are more like people than they are themselves. Occasionally, when I am walking along with Greta, I suddenly see her as she appeared in a prized photograph cut out from an old movie magazine. Today there were many such flashes; and once, when she stopped to turn and look at the new moon, I could see something that I knew intimately before I had ever met her. I watched her face in the varying lights of afternoon, and I could not help revealing to her that I had seen that particular effect before in Queen Christina. This sort of observation she considers unnecessary; she does not relish allusion to her film career, and I must try to avoid the subject. It was typically humble and unassuming that she remarked: ‘Once in Hollywood — to mention such a distant place...’

  This afternoon the park air was so cold, but bracing, that we had almost to gallop in order to stay warm. On the spur of the moment we ran up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum to thaw and to look at the Apocalypse tapestries. Greta became so carried away that she was completely unselfconscious, as she whistled and sighed in admiration, while other visitors stared at her. She made birdlike noises of delight at the rabbits and butterflies and other small animals and insects woven into the needlework ground of wild flowers in the ‘Unicorn’ tapestries. Pointing to some draperies done in reds and rose and dull pink: ‘Those are now my most beloved colours. It’s incredible that human-beings can do such things!’ she said. ‘Think of it — it’s of an overwhelming elegance!’ ‘Quelle flamboyance!’ was her reaction to more formal Louis XIV designs. Although she may not speak any tongue grammatically, she has such an appreciation for words and sounds of words that she picks them from many different countries to use on the spur of a moment. ‘Ah, le petit chien!’ she said of a little white tapestry dog that was much more a chien than a ‘dog’. She often uses archaic words and, for example, talks about somebody’s ‘dwelling’, and she describes her own looks as ‘poor and beggarly’. On seeing a down-trodden bum, she would remark he was a ‘verflucht mench’.

  Her voice possesses a remarkable range of expressiveness: its warmth and sympathy is one of the major elements in this towering personality. She imagines she now has very little Swedish accent; it is only when people do imitations of her to her face that she understands she may be wrong. When I asked her to repeat a word that began with a ‘j’ (‘jolly’ she pronounces ‘yolly’) she said: ‘No, won’t do it! You’re trying to find out if I have a Swedish accent.’

  I was impressed by her spontaneous appreciation of the best. Perhaps it is that, being of such a fine quality herself, she has an affinity with works of art. She does not seem even to notice the second-rate.

  Soon we wandered among the plaster casts of the Michelangelo sculpture. Greta remembered from a sonnet that Michelangelo had said he liked only the things that would destroy lesser people. From this, and other scraps of odd information, she built up in vivid imagination a picture of an ugly little man, remote from sex and the ordinary contacts of life, who became to her as real as if she had known him. Her imagination is highly inflammable: given one spark she ignites into wild dreams and imaginings which can consume her completely. She often used to come to this sculpture room and stand for hours in front of these heads, which, if she stared long enough, became absolutely alive until she was almost mesmerized.

  When we looked at huge, over-life-size nudes, I realized how little the human body means to me in comparison to her. She was positively ravenous in admiration of the physical perfection of some of these figures which she judged as if they were fruit or succulent sweets. She flicked out her tongue as if to taste them.

  On the way back she quoted snatches of poetry, professing not to know the authors of the poems she recites in many languages: ‘It’s something I picked up years ago, and I’ve always been impressed by.’ In fact it is by Heine, or Michelangelo, or Sappho. Modestly she claimed that nowadays she seldom reads even newspapers — though she keeps them ‘for future use’. ‘I always have a pile of three-months-old papers. I don’t read them, but I collect them.’ However, she did admit that for a short while in the mornings now she is absorbed by the biography of a Swedish poet. ‘A young woman who died of tuberculosis, who wrote such adorable poetry, and whenever she referred to herself, or drew pictures of herself, she saw herself as a man. Her name was Harriet.’ This is no doubt the reason why, when Greta travels ‘incognito’, she uses the name Harriet Brown.

  Today she tried to quote a paragraph from Conrad, but she had forgotten most of it; it came, she said, from the story called Youth. I later found the quotation and read it over the telephone: ‘The strength of it! And the faith of it! And the imagination of it!’ But no — that was not it. I gave her several other quotes. ‘No.’ She said: ‘It’s the feeling that youth dies before you know it.’ Later I found the passage: ‘The glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small and expires too soon — too soon before life itself.’

  Each and every outing is an adventure for me. It is as if I am learning a new language or discovering a foreign country. Each day I feel I am able to understand more clearly how this remarkable person differs from the rest of humanity. By degrees a few pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fall into place. Yet I have always the feeling of her elusiveness, that perhaps inadvertently I may let drop a remark that might create fear and cause this rare bird to fly away for ever. Thus danger is always present: one is always keyed to a pitch of high tension. Conversation is seldom direct and most often conducted on a children’s fable level. This gives rein to Greta’s flights of fantasy. I have also discovered that she is one of the fairest people, never indulges in prejudices, always sees the obstacles besetting her enemies, and therefore feels compassion.

  We walked to the Museum and saw the exhibition of Near Eastern costumes. The individuality of Greta’s taste has been developed so that she can spot in a flash something that is part of her idiom. ‘Oh, that’s got such chic,’ she said about a garment which, although of a design of many hundred years back, might have been created for her. ‘I’d like to have a hat like that,’ she said, pointing to a dunce’s cap made of the bark of a tree; ‘I’d wear that smack on Fifth Avenue’, and you knew she could, and that it would look marvellous on her. She was intrigued by the costumes of the veiled women who, to her, have such mystery and allure.

  We were stopped in the park by an old German actor, who appeared out of nowhere and said he had a wonderful film story for her. It must be really a very peculiar sensation to know that almost everyone one sees knows one by sight.

  Now that Greta has come to feel at ease in my company and can rely upon me as a companion, we go shopping around the neighbourhood. It comforts her to have someone to stand by and strengthen her moral courage while she looks at a sweater or tries on a pair of shoes. At first I felt extremely self conscious at being with someone so easily recognized, and it was disconcerting for me to notice the shop assistants winking at one another and whispering her name. I would be more taken aback than she when autograph-hunters approached her. But it delights me to see the sweetness with which always she refuses. ‘No, I never do,’ she says, with such a melting smile that no umbrage could be taken.

  She has perfected the technique of hiding her face, and it is amazing how quickly she sees people who know or recognize her — how adroitly she avoids them. Whenever any stranger advances to talk, even quite affably, Greta moans to herself, ‘Oh, no!’ — as if a child has had its toy suddenly smashed. Her distress is acute; it is like a personal affront — an insult to her pr
ivacy. She told of how in a shop today the girls at the counter had yattered: ‘Is it?’ ‘Of course it is!’ ‘Where?’ ‘Next to you!’ — right in her face as if she hadn’t existed.

  Later, when we were coming into my hotel, two horrible teenage fans chased her up the steps squawking like parrots. One of them asked me: ‘Is that Greta Garbo?’ I did not reply. The girls were furious and said: ‘She should be glad we recognize her.’ I would have liked to have hit them with the Gruyère cheese we had just bought at the delicatessen on our way home. It had enchanted me to go to the market with Greta while she bought her groceries. The list was brought out: ‘Two celery, two carrots, “ail”. How do you spell “ale”?’ It is a pleasure always to see how determinedly quiet and private she is in her taste: she does not know what it is to be pretentious. It is rare that someone endowed with riches and success retains such unswerving simplicity of character. Naturally Greta charmed all the store-people by her playfulness and high spirits: her laughter breaks my heart.

  ‘Right then — at three o’clock.’ ‘And what will you do if I’m a little late?’ I asked. ‘I’ll be lying full length on my sofa making out a grocery list with my hat on.’ But, although I had to hurry through a photograph sitting for Vogue with the Duchess of Windsor, I was not late. We went shopping. The shop assistant asked her: ‘Excuse me, but isn’t your face familiar to me? Have you anything to do with the movies?’ ‘Maybe I have,’ Greta replied. Later, out on the street, a man nodded curtly. ‘It’s so funny,’ Greta explained, ‘they think my face is familiar. They don’t know who I am, but they imagine they know me, and give a nod of recognition.’ She always has a realistic approach to everything and can never be flattered.