All Is Given

by Linda Neil

  ‘He’ was Robert Taylor, the dark-haired American actor who played Armand, Marguerite’s younger lover, a character based on Alexandre Dumas.

  They called his face the most perfect profile on earth, she continued, as if she were divulging something culturally important.

  Mum always liked pretty men; she noticed their curling eyelashes, their cherub lips, their lovely skin, their beautifully manicured hands. For me, though, old-time movie actors were of little interest – I used to tell her it was because they wore their pants way too high. In fact, it was the women who attracted me in these old films: Garbo, Dietrich, Stanwyck, Crawford, Davis and Leigh. Mum would reel off their first names like they belonged to members of a local netball team – Marlene, Babs, Joanie, Bette and Viv – but she always referred to Greta as ‘the divine Garbo’. I loved their glamour in the smoky absence of colour, the lack of sunlight in their worlds, the filtering out of anything too stark or too bright. Queensland was certainly too bright: sometimes even our brains felt cluttered by fire.

  That Sunday was what Mum liked to refer to as ‘another stinking hot one’, for which, as usual, we were inadequately prepared. She fanned herself with an old plastic fan, which was gold with red tassels – it was from her days on the stage, used as a prop in The Mikado. I remember this motion clearly because, at that precise moment, Greta was also fanning herself on screen. My rapture at watching Greta was momentarily diverted by the tandem fanning of these two women, who had such an impact on my life, despite being vastly different.

  When I later came to understand what Camille was about, I was amused that my conservative Catholic mother would have been so enthusiastic about the story of a high-class prostitute and her various lovers. But that also was the allure of Garbo and the fantasy of a black-and-white romance. I imagined that Greta’s self-possession helped her transcend the roles in which she was cast: a temptress, a spy, a prostitute, a drunkard, a woman of loose morals, a great artiste, a sinner, a saint. Anyone but someone ordinary – she would never, for instance, play a suburban housewife like my mother.

  Perhaps Greta was also the other for Mum: not the impossible other as she was for me, my opposite in every way, but the permissible other, who would be forgiven everything. And perhaps she even understood Garbo’s appeal to her strange, awkward daughter: a woman standing outside normal codes, outside culture itself, emanating a kind of freedom to those who wanted, or needed, to see such things within her cool beauty.

  In between sips of orange cordial, and the Iced Vo-Vos that Mum opened on special occasions, I observed an anomaly. Despite the subtle quicksilver movements of Greta’s face, it seemed perfectly at rest, as if the emotional narrative of life was only a projection, and behind it her inner being was full of peace. I was mesmerised by the sense that in the maelstrom of a full and difficult life she was relaxed. Even though I didn’t have the language for it at the time, I felt instinctively that I was witnessing a philosophy – that she had worked out how to move through the world by embracing rather than shunning the negative.

  This especially appealed to me in the bright Australian space I inhabited, which insisted on positivity, on keeping one’s spirits up, on showing the world one’s bravest face. It was as if Greta was preparing me practically, realistically, for life. I wanted to be able to veil myself too. To be able to find what I thought I saw in her face: the aloneness that would protect me, that meant I could not be touched, until I chose, until I desired, to be touched.

  *

  During those cold months in Paris, I pondered what it meant to be unable to smile. When I was twelve and enamoured of Greta, when I wanted to have the choice not to smile if I didn’t feel like it, I had never considered that you could take that ability for granted – or the way a smile could connect people.

  I have formed friendships on the basis of a smile exchanged on the street. I met one of my longstanding friends along Boulevard de Sébastopol in 2005, just down the road from where I was living in 2012. In Paris, my smile said oui: it encouraged a smile from another; it invited a oui in return. As an Australian woman it seemed perfectly normal to celebrate a warm summer afternoon by smiling at a stranger in the street – I thought nothing more of it. An hour later, at a gig in Les Halles, I encountered him again: this time our smiles were of surprise. We kept running into each other that evening – on the stairs, at the bar. When at last we found ourselves on the street outside, we agreed to do more than just smile at each other in passing. Those smiling ouis had connected us, and eventually turned into laughs as we went back into the bar.

  It was your smile that made me notice you, my friend told me later. Women in Paris don’t smile like that.

  I could tell you the story of what happened later, the things shared, offered and received. But I won’t. All I will say for now, for purely anthropological reasons, is that a simple smile can lead to so much more, and that years later we still exchange emails and meet in Paris when we are there at the same time. A smile has its own language: it can whisper and shout and invite and sing. But it also lights up a face and opens up a space between people, where one can approach and be approached by another.

  A few years before that first trip to Paris, I witnessed my mother’s face frozen because of Parkinson’s disease, an illness that would gradually make her whole body rigid. I had observed how her inability to smile signalled a threat to her existence as she knew it. But it was only when I myself couldn’t smile, during my winter in Paris, that I understood her anguish at watching that light fade, that space narrow, that approach from and to others grow impossible. And I also understood, with an ache, why, when I was eleven and tried to veil my feelings like Greta did, my mother went to battle for my smile; why she exhorted me to keep smiling, when it was still possible to do so.

  *

  Another reason I had decided not to smile when I was eleven was my teeth. I had realised that the two tiny incisors on either side of my front teeth, which had been called my ‘baby teeth’ for years after I was no longer a baby, were never going to miraculously straighten or grow any longer to match the rest of my teeth. In photographs where I opened my mouth to smile, my teeth looked misshapen and awful. ‘Little wolves’ teeth’ is how my elegant Aunt Lal had described them with mocking affection. Mum and Dad would never have dreamed of getting my teeth fixed, though. Not just because they didn’t have the money, but because you accepted what the good Lord gave you and that was that. That was certainly that as far as my smiling in photos went. If I did have wolves’ teeth, I was going to keep them to myself, as Greta had taught me it was possible to do: even though she had tiny, perfect teeth, she seldom showed them.

  If I was a wolf in private, though, I wanted to show the world I could also come in from the wild. One afternoon, while Mum was in the kitchen cooking and probably singing, I crept into her room, opened the top right-hand drawer of her dresser and grabbed the first lipstick I could find. It was called ‘A Coral Smile’. I also took the small hand-held mirror in which Mum sometimes checked the back of her curly head before going out. As a sudden last-minute inspiration I also snatched a tin of talcum powder. I stuffed everything into the waistband of my shorts before sneaking out the verandah door on my way to the backyard, where I hoped to find that most unusual thing in our loud, rumbustious household: some privacy.

  My stolen goods would take care of my face. What to do with my curls was another matter. Aunt Lal, who once tried to tame them with hairspray, said my curls had a mind of their own. I knew that sometimes my father flattened down his hair with something called Brylcreem. Knowing he kept his Brylcreem in the makeshift downstairs bathroom, I tiptoed there and discovered the small zipped bag in which it was always kept. I had a fleeting thought about how predictable my father’s life was as I rifled through the bag’s contents: a rusty razor, a toothbrush, a half-empty tub of Brylcreem. But I didn’t dwell on it, the fact that he possessed so little, that he had given everything he h
ad to the family, to us.

  Next to the Brylcreem, I found a small jar of Vaseline, which I quickly purloined as well. I didn’t know if people used Vaseline on their hair, but it looked, and smelled, strong enough to do the job.

  Juggling all the things I had stolen close to my chest, I sneaked down the side of the house, sat beside the big banana tree at the back and got to work. First, I smeared the coral lipstick across my lips, pulled my hair back from my face and turned to the side to check out my profile in the mirror. My full cheeks looked like moons, but there was nothing I could do about them. They were my genetic curse, or blessing, depending on whom you were talking to. They would always make me look wholesome and un-mysterious, no matter what I did. But I would change what I could. Copying what I’d seen my mother do on many occasions, I dabbed some of the coral lipstick below the corners of my eyes: the spot where Greta’s cheekbones were visible in most of her photographs. I dabbed and patted until I had created what I thought was a subtle, smudged texture, making the illusion of cheekbones where there were none.

  Next, I damped down my hair and pinned it flat to my scalp with globs of Vaseline. This was relatively easy to do. The hardest part about taming my hair, I discovered, was dealing with the bits of frizz that framed my face like some kind of wiry halo. After much pulling and scraping and pressing, these rebellious hairs were stuck to my scalp, along with the rest of my curls.

  I then tackled the problem of my skin, which was pink and blotchy from all my squinting into the sun. My eyes also bore the faint indents of goggles, like pale bruises. All I had to cover these imperfections were Dad’s Brylcreem and Mum’s talcum powder. It seemed a stroke of symbiotic genius when I decided to mix the two together so I could smear it, like Mum’s Max Factor foundation, from their ‘Make-up to the Stars’ range, across my face.

  Carefully, though with what I imagined was the diligent zeal of a research scientist, I placed the upturned Brylcreem lid on the grass, daubed some white cream into it, sprinkled talc over the top and then mixed it together. Against the bright summer grass of our lawn, the resulting concoction looked disarmingly unnatural. By that point, though, I was spurred on by a feverish obsession to see if I could become not just like Greta, but like ‘Something Else’, something outside the reality of myself.

  With the mirror in one hand, I dabbed the mixture onto my skin – lightly at first, then more recklessly, hoping to produce the same magic in a Brisbane backyard that had been created on Greta decades earlier in a photographer’s studio somewhere in Hollywood. It was, of course, a disaster. But at the time, like so many things during that year, it felt like a triumph.

  At the end of the process, I looked again into the mirror. With my gleaming slicked-back hair, white moon face, coral lips and smeared cheekbones, I hardly looked human. I was a creature, just like Greta, without biological origins, who could not be defined or corralled as anybody’s something. I was no longer my parents’ daughter, with a crooked smile, curly-whirly hair and blotchy skin. I was the other that was me. Or so I imagined.

  My mother saw me – and reality – before my father did. She spied me through the window at the back of the house. After alternately laughing and being aghast, a confusion that reflected what I had tried to accomplish that day, she proceeded to yell at me as she ran along the side of the house to where I was grinning with glee. She smacked me a few times, hard, on the bottom, and told me to get over myself while, at the same time, warning me not to let my father see me like this. Somewhere underneath all her outrage, I could hear her humour, as if she understood the absurdity of what I was trying to achieve, and how such a seemingly ordinary woman, which was always how she liked to describe herself, could have produced a daughter who looked like I did that day. Dad, on the other hand, just gave me a mock-withering look (perhaps he was amused too) when he joined us in the backyard, and told me to get that muck off my face before dinnertime.

  I did neither. Not immediately. I barricaded myself in my room while they took turns telling me to let them in or, alternatively, to come out. I wasn’t ready to do either. Not until I’d had the chance to hold up Greta’s photograph next to my face and scrutinise our shared reflection in the mirror. It didn’t make much difference to me that I saw exactly what my parents saw – a grotesque, clown-like version of my old self. Within that grotesqueness I saw the possibility of something. Even if it was only for the worse, I had for the first time taken the steps needed to transform myself.

  Getting rid of what Mum called my ‘ridiculous get-up’ wasn’t so simple though. A jar of her Ponds Cold Cream was all that was needed to wipe my skin completely clean. But no matter how much she rinsed my hair under the shower, no matter how she yanked and pulled, we could not scrape all the Vaseline out of my curls. In a last-gasp attempt at reasserting her practicality, she took the pair of sewing scissors from the bathroom cabinet, said to me, not unkindly, Well, if you want a change I can help you, and proceeded to chop off all the bits of hair that she couldn’t scrub clean. In less than ten minutes of her barbering, most of my hair was gone. What was left looked like a frizzy swimming cap pulled down severely around my skull.

  I would have been more shocked had Mum not already told me that she planned to get my hair cut short before school started again at the beginning of the upcoming year. Life was going to get more complicated: I’d have to get up earlier; I’d have to learn to become more organised. And, as Mum informed me, there certainly wouldn’t be time anymore to take care of curls, especially the kind my grandmother wore when she was a little girl. My mother may have cut my hair to make a point. But it was destined to be shed anyway, along with so many other things that year.

  *

  The other film of Greta’s that was showing at the Forum des Images was Ninotchka. It was first released in 1939, a golden year for films. Historians refer to it as ‘landmark’, ‘momentous’, ‘outstanding’ and ‘the greatest single year in the history of cinema’ both in terms of artistic quality and audience appeal. The ten films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards are all still considered classics:

  Dark Victory

  Gone with the Wind

  Goodbye, Mr. Chips

  Love Affair

  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

  Of Mice and Men

  Stagecoach

  The Wizard of Oz

  Wuthering Heights

  and

  Ninotchka.

  The movie site Film School Rejects laments that the glut of brilliant films in 1939 has made Ninotchka a ‘neglected masterpiece’. Unlike the Best Picture–winning Gone with the Wind, which featured famous location shoots and was screened in ‘Glorious Technicolor!’, Ninotchka was a small, old-fashioned studio picture shot on the Hollywood backlots in black and white, perhaps the perfect medium for Greta’s face.

  Ninotchka is often regarded as Greta’s ‘comeback film’, reconfiguring her public image from the cool aloofness she was known for to someone who, as my mother might have said, had finally ‘climbed down off her high horse and got real’. A woman who didn’t just smile, but laughed! Who guffawed! Who spluttered with uncontrollable mirth! By the end of the ’30s, the decade of the Great Depression, its slow recovery and the onset of war in Europe, her smile’s absence and languid physicality had become a liability. The public no longer wanted aloof, idealised, aspirational heroines, but more relatable, modern, embodied women, who could, if needed, wield a rifle or heavy machinery in the coming conflicts.

  Garbo needed a hit and Ernst Lubitsch, the director of such caustic and brilliant frivolities as To Be or Not to Be, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife and Heaven Can Wait, created one especially for her. The very catchphrase of the film’s publicity campaign was Garbo laughs! They might as well have said: Garbo becomes like one of us!

  I could have told them, even as an eleven-year-old, that Garbo, the divine Miss G, my Greta, was not one of us. She was something
to consult as one would an oracle, not to discover, spluttering, right next to you.

  Nevertheless, Garbo laughs in Ninotchka, as a surrender to the sensual pleasures of Paris, the debonair charm of a lover, the heady temptations of capitalism, and the lure of a ridiculous hat, all played out in proximity to the Eiffel Tower and Maxim’s. In this cartoonish depiction of Paris, she comes in from the cold of her perfection with her laugh. Ninotchka and her laughter were to signify the apotheosis of her career, but two years later she retired from cinema and never made another film. Laughter, it seemed, could both resurrect and destroy.

  *

  Eventually the weather did change. While I waited for spring, I went often to the Forum des Images and reacquainted myself with the magic of sound and light. I watched Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance on rollerskates; Fred, in an epic solo, danced up the walls. It may have been trick photography, but while I was watching him dancing on the ceiling I truly believed he had defied the laws of gravity. I also watched Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, for which my friend Anne had done the production design. I watched the Marx Brothers go crazy in Duck Soup, Humphrey Bogart in love with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, and Garbo die in Camille. Without really noticing it, my body started to soften in the warmer days, and sleeping became easier, as the charm of Paris revealed itself.

  One evening, I went in search of perfume and lipstick to bring home as presents. Since my arrival, I had avoided the quintessential tourist ritual of going to the Champs-Élysées. Infirmed by the cold, I stayed around the Marais area, which became like a village – my village, I thought, with its cobblestones and sandstones and blue and white street signs. The Champs-Élysées was the other Paris, the dream Paris, where tourists went to discover their fantasy of the city, in the glittering designer shops, under the perfectly coiffed trees, or among the handsome waiters and their imperious ways, acting as if they were the President of France more than the new Socialist president ever would.