The Happy Years (1944-48)

by Cecil Beaton

  December 2nd, 1947

  Now that I am ostensibly so busy, Greta is no longer as busy as she was while I was not busy. At 3.30 p.m. she would meet me at Sixty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. She was wearing a mink coat. ‘Isn’t it obnoxious?’ she said, ‘it’s so frauen.’ I must admit it wasn’t suitable: it made her appear thick on the bosom with square shoulders. We strode into the park. Soon the lights started to fade and the landscape had no reality. It was like time out of time: a leaden grey sky with scurrying apricot clouds grew dark and tempestuous: it was as if mankind were going to be exterminated in violence for its wickedness.

  It was a strange walk and we seemed to have a relaxed feeling that we hadn’t enjoyed before. Occasionally we would stop dead in this grey winter landscape to kiss one another, but Greta was worried in case we were being watched, and when it became quite dark she was scared lest we should be ‘stood-up’ and robbed. At one interval for embraces she said: ‘Are you eaten up with passion?’ and then laughed and explained: ‘Nobody but myself would say that, and yet it’s quite feasible and natural.’ We walked back to the Plaza and had a chaser, but she could not stay as she had a date that I believed would bore her.

  December 3rd, 1947

  Telephone: ‘If you’ve got anything better to do today, I’m in rather poor shape so please make other plans.’ ‘No, I’ve already put off Mrs Kahn, and I hated lying in my teeth pretending I had a cold because she’s such a great old woman. No, I’ve nothing better to do, and please remember we’ve asked the Turkish lady to come and see us at six.’

  We met at a gallery to see the strange picture I had bought by that Englishwoman, Eleanor Carrington, who lives and paints in Mexico. G. liked the paintings very much. ‘What an extraordinary “funtussie” she possesses!’ said Greta who, without claiming to be a connoisseur, readily describes the excellencies or defects in any canvas. Although not particularly initiated in modern art she is surprised and shocked by nothing — rather is in full admiration of the latest demonstrations of force and vigour. G. told me of some of the paintings she has accumulated: a Rouault, very skilfully painted — ‘a packed canvas’; a Renoir; a blue period Picasso ‘of a horrible-looking woman’; and she likes abstract subjects. ‘Where have you hung them? In your bedroom?’ ‘No, in a room that I seldom go into: I never look at them.’

  We then returned to the hotel to await the Turkish Princess.[31] Suddenly Greta had the usual qualms: ‘Why did we ask her? It was a mistake.’ But the visit of the immensely tall and handsome Princess with the important nose of her ancestor, Suleiman the Magnificent, was a success. It brought G. out into the open and made her talk freely of when she was young and about to make her first picture in Turkey, but instead went to Hollywood. G. longed to return to the East for she felt that ‘those people’ were so much wiser than we, who became side-tracked hunting the dollar, and leading such superficial lives. G. had sent a locket of her hair to two young men in Benares so that she might one day go there: she felt that there she would find most sympathy and respect.

  The Princess, extremely shy by nature, sat with the nape of her neck very straight and her blue eyes staring with surprise as Greta fired a barrage of questions at her. ‘Are you very religious?’ ‘Are you Hindu or Mohammedan?’ ‘Does it give you great peace?’ ‘I expect you eat healthy meals. How clean your food is! So appetizingly served on palm leaves!’ The Princess threw back her head in a great girlish laugh. ‘Your entire way of life is so immaculate. It is typical that at the end of each meal the remnants are burnt.’ Again the Princess roared. ‘I’d like to end in India studying with a swatni. It’s not too late either. I knew a middle-aged woman who returned to Hollywood a completely transformed person, at peace with the world; she exuded serenity.’

  As G. later remarked, the Princess, although not a garrulous talker, had proved to be a person whom you knew had warmth and understanding.

  As usual G. was in a hurry not to be late. We went to dine at the bourgeois hour of 6.30 p.m. ‘If we are later there will be no table,’ said Greta. We dined at the Golden Horn, a Turkish restaurant, where a lush came up and embarrassed us in the extreme. G. remembered an occasion when a drunkard came up to her companion to know if she was with Greta Garbo: the drunk remained shaking hands and left, perfectly contented, without his answer.

  We went to the cinema, out of curiosity, to see a Cecil B. de Mille opus. First some trailers of forthcoming movies were shown: Tyrone Power in ‘the sensational all-record-breaking, etc. etc.’, and a shot was shown of a group of palpably phony historical characters. Greta said: ‘Oh no, I can’t go back and get mixed up in all this sort of thing again!’ The big film incredibly boring, but the evening was made momentous for me by the fact that I was sitting next to her, holding hands and behaving like any smalltown teenager.

  We soon left and wandered up Broadway, lost in anonymity. We stood outside a music shop listening to the records being relayed; we bought pears at a delicatessen, and disliked the Christmas displays in all the windows. We walked home to her Tower. Then, when we said goodnight and I left her, I was amazed to hear some laughing woman follow me. As I thought I was being molested, I did not bother to turn around. It was Greta, still young.

  December 8th, 1947

  We were going to a theatre and were late, but luckily Eugene hurried a ‘room service’ meal through in record time. Eugene is a nice, ugly little man with sad eyes and a nose like a toucan. Perhaps he is sad because he intended to be an electrical engineer, but after eleven years he gave up for ‘waitering’. He could not resist six dollars a day plus tips. ‘It’s not much of a life,’ he says, ‘and I haven’t got far, but my son is nine years old and will do better.’ Eugene is helpful and treats me as a favourite, but even he cannot improve the hotel food. We ate lamb that was rather like discarded chewing-gum as we talked about ourselves in slightly veiled terms. I was enjoying turning the tables on her. ‘You are so unreliable,’ I said, ‘I couldn’t ever marry you. You are not serious about me.’ ‘What a rebuff! And I adore you, Cecil — I love you — I am in love with you!’ We both laughed.

  The play was one that was contrary to everything that either of us enjoy — a raucous comedy about Mary loving John, with irate senators and their outraged wives, and the young getting into amorous scrapes and going against the army system. The audience squealed like pigs, but we laughed only occasionally, and then with weak hysteria, at some piece of ludicrous stage-business. The play has been running a long time, and the actors and actresses have become so stylized in their performances that they were almost inhuman automata.

  G. generally runs home early and is resentful of being kept up beyond her usual bedtime, but tonight it did not take much persuasion to inveigle her to a night club. Of all the hundreds in New York we could think of none being suitable, so we precipitated ourselves into the hubbub of an overcrowded Blue Angel. A cabaret performance was in progress and we were shown to seats so close to the performers that we were within range of their breath and spittle. By degrees we became accustomed to the close quarters and enjoyed each other’s reactions to the performance: I, out of the corner of my eye, admiring the flowing rhythm of the profile that watched the proceedings with such compassion or unquestioning happiness. Only when the night club was empty did we walk out into the crisp, refreshing night to visit Hamburger Heaven. Here we remained only for a short while, and ate only a crumb, for Greta found the lights glaringly harsh, and a drunk came up and asked for her autograph. ‘No, I never do — so sorry!’ The drunk bowed. ‘That’s quite all right.’ G. turned with a blank, amazed expression. ‘You see the unfairness of life. I have to apologize to him for coming up to bother me when I’m having my private supper.’

  On our way back Greta suggested: ‘Would you like an apple? I’ll give you a couple of apples,’ she said. Before I knew it, I was for the first time in the sacred precincts of the rooms in her hotel — in the forbidden Suite 26c. They were pretty, light-coloured rooms with large windows on m
ost sides displaying a panorama of New York. Everything was better than she had described. It was fascinating to discover what books she was reading, what appurtenances of life there were about the room. She would not allow the lights to be switched on so I peered into the gloaming: there were some of her hats lying around, a few bills and package slips, and copies of Life magazine and The New Yorker, and all the mail was addressed to ‘Harriet Brown’. ‘I live like a monk with one toothbrush, one cake of soap and a pot of cream.’ Greta went to her kitchenette and, in secret, prepared a meal. Everything was very immaculate and healthy: sweet butter unsalted, Swedish bread, ham and cheese. We drank beer and talked without restraint or inhibition. She discussed the passage of the years. ‘Something has happened to time; suddenly it goes so fast, so quickly. I wish the hours were twice as long — even the hours of the night.’ It was after three o’clock. We kissed one another for the thousandth time as if for the first time when, sadly, I had to leave the darkened apartment, with the two impersonal twin beds low on the ground, in their white candlewick covers.

  I walked almost in a trance: for the past ten hours I have been in the highest realms of happiness: now I wondered how the present situation could be consolidated into something definite and binding. Thus it is that we always try to pin down something exquisite and ethereal. No matter what happens there will always be the memory of big eyes gazing, and the broad big smile.

  Miss Cleghorn, wonderfully tactful, calls me at the studio, in the middle of a frantic fashion sitting, from my hotel room. ‘I thought you would like to know “Miss Brown” called you.’ I hurried through the rest of the sitting, the models suddenly appearing so colourless and banal. When I returned to my rooms she said: ‘Miss Garbo called you again.’ I telephoned the Tower. ‘Would you like to come for a walk?’ she asked. I dashed out. The lights were up on Third Avenue while the sky was yellow on the horizon and periwinkle-blue above. The ‘el’ rushed along at alarming speed making a ghastly noise. ‘This is hell,’ Greta admitted — yet it is where she chooses to spend most of her time. To me it is inexplicable that someone who loves the countryside, with the feel of grass beneath her feet, must trudge along these squalid pavements. We peered into the windows of really awful so-called antique shops where nothing was what it purported to be; everything was ‘nachtgemacht’, to use her word. She went into one such shop to see about a lamp she had bought, a pink Victorian vulgarity for which a shade must be made. I longed to tell her to stop wasting her time among this junk, but it seems to absorb her, so I must look on with benign countenance.

  At last in one shop, owned by a rather pathetic young Englishman, I noticed a pink and red tea cup and saucer which, since these were her favourite colours, I would buy for her. But she tried to convey that she didn’t want me to buy them: she kept winking and saying: ‘There’s too much white in it.’ ‘But they’re your colours,’ I persisted. ‘Don’t you like it?’ Outside I again asked: ‘Don’t you really like it?’, and she said: ‘I told you I thought there was too much white in it. And I meant it. It’s a very simple fact.’ (‘Fucktte.’) ‘I wasn’t trying to explain an Eastern theory. I just meant what I said: There’s too much white in it.’

  The night descended. It was too late to go into the park: she was scared — quite rightly — of unseen things. So we walked along looking into more windows, although we did once enter a shop to buy some Swedish bread and cakes. Here Greta was served by a young Swedish blonde and, for the first time, I heard her talking her native tongue. It was both delightful and comic to my ears — like birds spitting. The whole atmosphere of the shop was very charming, simple and pure, and gave the impression of being far from New York.

  In side streets we suddenly stopped still and embraced one another, then would walk on with a businesslike tread, and my ears would tingle with the sound of my Christian name whispered in my ear.

  When she returned to her hotel I telephoned. She was very giggly and — though she did not own up to it — in the middle of cooking herself a dinner. ‘I’m just going to leave you a minute to attend to something.’ ‘Is it sizzling?’ I teased.

  Wednesday, December 10th, 1947

  Seats for the theatre are a good way of binding her down to a certain date: otherwise promises are apt to be vague. Tonight Antony and Cleopatra tickets — five o’clock rendezvous. I had become absorbed doing some sketches of my room and, only when I stopped, realized I had become chilled to the bone. In order to thaw myself out, I started to drink a cup of tea. I opened the door with a cup in my hand. Her face was cold from the rawness outside: she had bought some face powder, or some unguent, that smelt of gardenias — very foreign to her.

  We found ourselves once more battling with the clock — no time to go to that nice little cellar off Third Avenue. We descended into the bowels of my hotel and had an elegant dinner in the red and orange glow of the night club. The place, as well as being convenient, was sympathetic.

  Our talk suddenly became intent. What was there to stop our living the rest of our lives together? It was so easy: it was indicated. ‘No, it’s not easy,’ said Greta. We almost found ourselves arguing with each other. ‘You have not had a difficult life as I have. Everything has been smooth for you: it’s easy for you to be gay and happy. Occasionally you may have been sad, when someone has not loved you as much as you loved them. But life has been difficult for me.’ Greta explained: ‘You must realize I am a sad person: I am a misfit in life.’

  ‘But if you were to come to Europe, and live among creative people and congenial souls, you wouldn’t be like that. You are so out of your element here with the pavements under your feet and smuts in your eyes.’

  ‘Perhaps it was all that could happen.’

  ‘Maybe if you had made films in Germany or France, things would have been easier. You have succeeded in spite of Hollywood taste, but it’s only natural you hate everything about it.’

  ‘I don’t hate Hollywood — any more than I hate Mr Louis B. Mayer. I don’t hate anyone, of course, but I don’t like Mr Mayer — though I see his point and I don’t blame him for doing to me what he did.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I knew that to ask such a point-blank question was extremely risky, and I waited anxiously in the interval before she replied slowly:

  ‘Well, he made me sign a long contract — five years — and I was terrified and very unhappy for it seemed like a life-term. When I had finished the contract I said to him: “This is the end. I don’t want to continue: I want to get out of pictures.” He and his minions were all so worried! They had these long discussions with me, and we walked up and down outside the sound stage, and they said: “You can’t quit now: we won’t let you. You’re at the very peak of your career.” But I was all set. I was so unhappy. And then, in 1928, the bank where I had all my money failed. That was the time of the Wall Street crash. Somebody joked that Mr Mayer made my bank fail so that he could get me back. I had to sign another contract with Mr Mayer, but I told him to do pictures that I’d like, and he agreed to pay me a cheque for half my next picture in advance. He wrote out the highest cheque I have ever seen. But I had nowhere to put it — no pocket, no bag, so I tucked it into my open shirt, and went home to Sweden while they prepared my next film, and that was Christina.’

  Twice in her career Greta had come to the crossroads: once when she had wanted to leave, and again when the war cut off the European market and her last film, The Two-Faced Woman, through no fault of hers, was a complete and deserved failure.

  The fact that she is, I suppose, financially independent, is an incentive for her to turn down every script that is now offered. ‘It’s so much harder for me now. I had it all my way, and did it in my own fashion. I never rehearsed with the director. I used to see him going through the script with other actors, but I couldn’t do it if I had to rehearse — it frightens me. I could only do something when it was strange to me: I didn’t even know what it was all about: I didn’t like to know what the lines meant. Sometimes I would cross
them out. Whenever the script read “Listen”, “Listen to me”, or “So then”, I would shuffle over to the next thing. I did anything that came into my head and made a kind of fantasy of it, but I never knew what I was doing, and I didn’t want to know the people I was acting with. I couldn’t go out to dinner with my leading man and hear about his wife and family: I just wanted to meet the others as strangers on the set. Now, perhaps, it would all have to be different.’

  She then talked of the inadequacy of her achievement — the high hopes she had had as a girl when first under the spell of Maurice Stiller (only, of course, she did not mention him by name). She would never recover from his death for he had had such a great influence: in her family life there was never any interest in the things that she liked: it had been a revelation to know him. Then when she had arrived in Hollywood she was abysmally disappointed. The light was reflected off the pavements, off the walls, on all sides. It was so hard — so different from one’s fantasy! ‘I spent my first night in the Hotel Biltmore, looking out of the window, frightened and alone. Then I went to Santa Barbara and I became friendly with a nice person who asked me to marry him, but thank heavens I didn’t — we would have been miserable!’

  She went on: ‘I used to quake at the knees when the studio called me up, and once inside those gates I was so sad. I would be called for a conference and they’d sit around the table, cigars in their mouths, and they’d growl and bark: “Now, Garbo, we’ve got the script and we think you’d do it well. Now read it, but, first of all, imagine how different it will be.” They then talked by the hour, and we wouldn’t get anywhere. Well, if I disliked it all then, what would I feel about it now? In those days I didn’t have to bother about camera-angles or anything; now I’d feel so forlorn with everyone staring at me: I’d be conscious of all the things in my face that weren’t there before.’