Greta Garbo The World's Most Photographed

On a spring morning in 1990,

an elderly woman left her New York apartment.

Dressed in a large overcoat, hat and dark glasses,

she wandered alone through the city.

This had been her daily ritual for over 30 years.

But she was never completely alone.

Wherever she went, a silent, shadowy figure was watching,

waiting for the chance to take her photograph.

He had stalked her for ten years.

Now the game of cat and mouse was about to come to an end.

She was caught in the glare of his flash gun for the last time.

The reclusive old woman in the photograph

had once been the most famous movie star in the world -

Greta Garbo.

Greta Garbo was the most mysterious and secretive film star

of the 20th century.

She cast a spell over Hollywood in the 1920s and '30s

with her exotic looks and hypnotic presence.

At the centre of her appeal was her determination to remain an enigma.

Garbo was always ferociously protective of her personal life.

She felt that being photographed off the movie set violated her privacy.

But the more she tried to hide from the camera,

the more aggressively she was hunted down.

Her life would become a nightmare,

a disturbing parable of the 20th century obsession with celebrity.

Right from the start,

Greta Lovisa Gustafson was painfully shy.

A working-class girl from Sweden,

she always felt awkward and out of place -

taller and heavier than the other girls.

Very few pictures have survived from her childhood. The most amazing one

is probably a an incredibly strange picture of her

at her confirmation, in which she's got this giant bow in her hair

and a kind of gap-toothed smile, and looks a bit too plump.

But she felt awkward, she felt like that photograph looks.

Greta always preferred being alone.

She often hid herself away

and dreamed of escaping the austere reality of her home life

to become an actress.

After leaving school,

she started work in a department store in Stockholm in July 1920.

It was here that she would get her first break -

modelling hats for the store's spring catalogue.

All of a sudden this is no longer just the kind of self-conscious,

slightly overweight young girl.

This is a young woman who, glancing at the camera for some reason,

has a flash and produces a glance.

You can see the real Garbo emerging.

After the success of the catalogue shoot,

the department store asked her to appear in two adverts.

She was then cast in her first film,

a short comedy called Peter the Tramp.

Her dreams of becoming an actress were starting to come true.

In 1922, at the age of 17,

Greta won a place at Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre Academy.

It was here that she was noticed

by one of Sweden's leading film directors, Mauritz Stiller.

I think that what Stiller was most drawn to when he saw her

was first and foremost her face, rather than her body,

and secondly, in that face, on that face, those eyes.

The eyes of Garbo were mesmerising even then.

Stiller took a gamble on the shy young actress

and gave Greta the leading role

in his new film, The Saga of Gosta Berling.

The self-conscious girl from the hat shop

would be transformed into the beautiful Countess Elizabeth Dohna.

But there was one condition.

Stiller insisted that she lose 20lbs if she wanted the part.

Stiller, both as a man and a director,

lived up to his reputation for being a great taskmaster,

and also a great artiste, a great Svengali,

who took you under his wing at your own risk,

and at your complete submission to him.

Stiller realised that Greta could be his passport to Hollywood.

But first, she needed a new name to appeal to an international audience.

Greta Gustavson would now be known as Greta Garbo.

The film was such a success that it was showcased in Berlin.

This was Garbo's first trip away from home

and her first taste of being a film star.

Film offers flooded in,

including one from the head of the Hollywood studio MGM -

Louis B Meyer.

What he saw in Garbo was the exact same thing that everyone else saw,

which was a spell-binding face

and a style of acting that even at this early point seemed...

uh, original and unique and unusual, because it was.

This was a woman who did not overact

and who let her incredibly subtle facial expressions

do the acting for her.

In July 1925, before contracts were even signed,

Garbo and Stiller were on their way to New York.

When they arrived, Garbo felt more isolated and out of place than ever,

made worse by the fact that she spoke little English.

The euphoria of success in Europe was already a distant memory.

Stiller knew he had to raise her profile

and set up a meeting with one of New York's leading photographers -

Arnold Genthe.

In Genthe's photographs, you see a real ferocious intensity in Garbo.

You see the huge and shining fire in her eyes,

the thick mane of hair,

the confident holding of her chin.

You know, apparently Genthe let Garbo go a little bit free,

because she doesn't seem particularly posed,

the way she had with the European photographers.

Genthe's photographs were snapped up by Vanity Fair magazine.

Garbo was on her way to Hollywood stardom.

In Europe, Garbo was an actress, but in Hollywood,

she was expected to become a product.

Like every other aspiring starlet,

Garbo was put through the MGM publicity machine.

Diet advisors, wardrobe consultants and dentists

all played a part in the repackaging of Greta Garbo.

Once they'd worked their magic,

she reluctantly set off for her first Hollywood publicity shoot

with photographer Don Gillum.

He took her to the zoo.

There are well-known photographs

of Garbo sitting with the lion, looking very unhappy.

He took her to the beach.

In the end, it's a very unsatisfactory group of photographs

because Garbo was not comfortable with this.

In fact, she looked rather ordinary.

And the studio figured out pretty quickly

that they didn't want Garbo to appear ordinary.

They wanted her to appear spectacular.

Much to Garbo's relief,

the studio immediately abandoned these staged lifestyle shoots.

From now on, Garbo would only be photographed

in highly-controlled studio-based sessions.

She was introduced to Hollywood's only female photographer,

Ruth Harriet Louise.

Over the next four years, she would help to establish

the enigmatic Garbo look - cool, sexy, sophisticated.

A modern woman for a new era.

Louise exploited Garbo's beauty

by simplifying her,

by not photographing her with any props,

with very simple black or white backgrounds,

by covering her with either a very simple shirt,

or often with a drape,

and concentrating exclusively on her face,

and lighting her very softly

and gently and elegantly.

The camera could get closer and closer and closer,

and she just looked better and better and better.

Garbo's first films were huge hits

and the public soon started to clamour for more photographs

and gossip about the new star.

But she was already starting to feel threatened

by the public's interest in her private life.

The game of cat and mouse had begun.

When she began an affair with her co-star John Gilbert,

it was the hottest story in Hollywood.

Garbo recoiled from the endless crackle of the camera flash.

She was like, you know, when you drop a pebble into an oyster,

she just reacted immediately, shut up in herself and tried to get away.

She arranged her life so that this didn't happen very often,

so that people didn't break through.

Greta was afraid that John Gilbert was only in love

with Garbo the movie star -

not the real woman beneath the glamorous surface.

When he proposed to her, she turned him down.

Subsequent to that, the number of sexual, true sexual experiences,

and affairs in Garbo's life, I think,

could be counted on the fingers of a mutilated one hand.

There weren't that many.

Despite her personal insecurities, Garbo was still supremely confident

in the controlled environment of the photographic studio.

She could even be recklessly provocative.

In 1929, photographer Nickolas Murray asked her

to come to a shoot in a low-cut evening dress.

So she came in wearing a white shirt with a collar,

and he asked her, "Miss Garbo, would you mind just

"pushing the collar down, so we can just focus on your face?"

With that, as the story goes, she took the shirt off altogether.

Garbo was a sensation.

The public adored her.

Every film she released was a box-office hit.

MGM's new chief photographer, Clarence Sinclair Bull,

was now helping to perfect the Garbo look.

Garbo does not seem to be particularly temperamental

about her photograph.

When she and Bull were working together, there's a sense

that at the moment that he snapped his shutter

she knew what he was recording, and he knew what he was recording,

that they were really collaborating almost perfectly.

Over the next 12 years,

they produced over 4,000 portraits together.

And it was Clarence Sinclair Bull who created the image

that would immortalise Garbo as a Hollywood legend.

What he did is he took a portrait from a film called Inspiration,

and he transposed it on a photograph of the Egyptian Sphinx.

Apparently, Garbo loved the image.

She became very quickly, after this, known as the Swedish Sphinx.

Garbo was confirmed as the ultimate elusive and mysterious star.

She was a riddle, an enigma. She seemed unstoppable.

But a revolution was sweeping through Hollywood.

The "talkies" had arrived, destroying the careers

of many of the most successful silent-movie stars.

All of a sudden, nothing mattered

but how these actors and actresses sounded.

Not even... All those beautiful qualities of Garbo -

her face, the subtlety, the expressions...

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, what have you done for me now?"

And what you needed to do for them now

was to have a voice that worked in talkies.

Garbo was one of the last MGM silent stars

to risk the perilous cross-over.

The studio feared her foreign accent would turn audiences against her.

But with each new movie, Garbo's husky, heavily-accented voice

only added to her appeal.

I thought you'd understand when you saw me again what had happened,

that it had been so enchanting to be a woman,

not a queen, just a woman in a man's arms.

Her stardom increased to a degree that had never been seen before

anywhere, in any film person in the world.

It took its toll on her.

She truly didn't understand then,

and never understood for the entire rest of her life

why they would "make such a fuss".

But while she complained about the fuss,

her social life was attracting even more attention.

She was often seen in public with the bi-sexual writer and socialite,

Mercedes de Acosta.

Paparazzi shots of them emerging together from a men's tailor,

with Garbo wearing trousers, created a scandal.

Women didn't wear trousers in public, for the most part.

And Garbo was someone

whose fashions mattered a great deal to movie-goers.

And the idea that you would go to a men's tailor

to have these clothes made was not...

It was shocking.

Garbo developed an intimate friendship with Mercedes de Acosta.

She had started to let down her guard.

You have to keep in mind that this was a woman who was afraid

to see you, or to shake your hand, let alone to go to bed with you.

To her, this was the most monumentally dangerous

and threatening thing in the world, and she did it very rarely,

especially after the publicity over her affair with John Gilbert.

On holiday together in the Sierra Nevada in 1932,

Garbo even allowed Mercedes to take her photograph -

topless.

It's very significant that Garbo allowed Mercedes to photograph her.

She was famously controlling of her own image.

It suggests a certain amount of intimacy,

and the fact that they were relaxed together.

Interest in Garbo's private life was turning into a public obsession.

By the mid-'30s, Garbo was becoming reclusive.

She rarely gave interviews and shunned publicity,

even refusing to attend premieres of her own films.

Wherever she went, she was pursued by photographers.

I don't think she cared a bit about her image.

She cared about her privacy.

She didn't want to be violated any further.

I want to be alone.

Where have you been?

I suppose I can cancel the Vienna contract.

I just want to be alone.

You're going to be very much alone, my dear madam. This is the end.

Garbo never said, "I want to be alone".

Her character in the movie Grand Hotel said that.

What she said was, "I want to be left alone,"

and there's a huge difference,

and it was exactly what the world wouldn't do.

In 1941, Garbo received her first bad reviews

for the movie Two Faced Woman.

It was also a box-office failure.

As America was drawn into the Second World War,

Garbo's career stalled.

In all the years that we lived through the war and everything,

I never heard her talk about Hitler.

Churchill - maybe.

But she was not a woman who was interested

in how the world was going to hell, you know.

She was more interested...

..in the hell that was pursuing her.

With no more movies to promote,

Garbo saw no reason to be photographed at all.

But she was still being chased by the camera.

She hated the fact that she had no control over endless shots,

snatched wherever she went.

Even when her friend, celebrity photographer Cecil Beaton,

pleaded with her to pose for him, Garbo refused every time.

Then in 1946, Garbo needed a new passport photograph.

To Beaton's surprise, she asked him to take it.

She started to pose, it was one of those days

when everything was going well.

She got intrigued and adopted more and more extraordinary postures

and positions for him, and then he had secreted away some costumes,

and some she rejected, some she accepted.

She was dressing up as a harlequin and all sorts of things,

and producing a great number of fascinating photographs,

very few of which, quite frankly, were appropriate for a passport.

This was the most intimate photo shoot Garbo had ever done.

In front of Beaton's lens, all her inhibitions seemed to disappear.

But Garbo had no idea that Beaton intended to publish the photographs.

When they appeared in Vogue later that year, she was horrified.

I think that Cecil was obsessed with his career

and with being the best in his career,

and having those trophy photographs of Garbo was worth the sacrifice

of perhaps giving her up and promoting his career.

Garbo was furious.

She said she would never to speak to him again.

By 1949, Garbo hadn't worked for nearly a decade.

She always said that she was just waiting for the right project.

That year, she was offered the chance of a comeback

in a film called The Duchess of Langeais.

But the studio insisted on a screen test.

She goes ahead and does it, which is an indication of how serious she was

about wanting to make this film, and it turns out beautifully.

It proves in spades that she is still as photographic,

if not more photographic than ever.

Garbo even agreed to work for a reduced fee

but the financial backers pulled out.

The film was never made.

She said, "I will never make a moving picture again.

"This is the end."

In the 1950s and '60s,

Garbo retreated into the world of the super-rich,

with holidays on Aristotle Onasiss' yacht

or at the Rothschilds' villa in France.

With them, she felt safe from the camera.

But a shot from the past was about to come back to haunt her.

In 1960, Mercedes de Acosta published the topless photograph

from their holiday in 1932.

Betrayed yet again by a friend,

she cut Mercedes out of her life forever.

Garbo hadn't appeared on screen for over 20 years

but her refusal to be photographed

was only increasing the public's hunger for more pictures.

There is kind of a morbid curiosity in how she changed,

and in her ageing process.

She was kind of like Helen of Troy.

This was the fairest woman in the world,

and that was a large responsibility in any age,

but it got worse and harder for her.

She felt mocked, I think. She felt as if the world almost delighted

in the gradual crumbling of its greatest beauty.

In April 1976, celebrity photographer Harry Benson

was on assignment in Antigua

when he got the chance to photograph the world's most elusive star.

A friend of mine had a boat, and he rented it out.

So we'd go away in the boat, and we scouted where the house was.

We basically got the boat right opposite her house on the beach

so when she arrived, she thought it was quite normal.

It was a 300mm lens.

She was right in my striking range of the lens,

so, basically, all I had to hide was, you know, the lens shining.

And I think she might have seen it.

I think she always suspects somebody is watching.

This has been her life, this paranoia.

It's like...sighting the Loch Ness Monster,

you know. It's a phenomenon.

In the final years of her life,

Garbo retreated to her New York apartment.

A prisoner of her own image and legend,

she was still at the mercy of the camera.

Because she always fled down the street,

it became a great sport to photograph her,

and people used to stalk her and follow her around.

The whole thing was something that, in a way, she created.

She created this kind of strange thing,

so you have this dilemma with her - what was she really up to?

I'm sure she really hated being photographed

but, equally, she was rather defiant.

New York was the best of worlds and the worst of worlds for Garbo.

It was a place where on the one hand she could disappear

into a crowd and mingle,

and not necessarily be recognised all the time.

On the other hand, it was a place where she was constantly recognised

on the street by people.

It had both things, and it both complicated and facilitated

this strange game that increased over the years,

this strange adaptation to life and game, at the same time,

of hating the publicity and the photography,

and of rather enjoying the effort to outwit the photographers.

It became her daily ritual to walk for hours

through the streets of New York.

Her friend, Sam Green, would often join her

and protect her from inquisitive fans.

She had almost no friends.

Some acquaintances, but no-one was very close,

and the woman needed a lot of protection.

For instance, she could never write a cheque

to pay her bills, because no-one would cash them.

The signature was always worth more

than the amount of money on the cheque.

We would walk on the city blocks and the code was I would stop the person

who was going to approach her,

and she would take a left or a right, but never get off the kerb,

so I was sure to find her as I circled the block,

I knew she would be on it at some place. That was our code.

Even in the scorching summer sun,

Garbo would dress in a hat, overcoat and dark glasses.

Her aim was to prevent photographers from getting a clear shot.

But if that failed, there was one last trick she would use.

She was able to ward off anyone taking a good photograph

by carrying a rather nasty piece of paper Kleenex in her pocket

which she would pull out and put in front of her face

in order to shield anyone from getting a good photograph

or a publishable photograph.

In the early 1980s, one photographer became obsessed with Garbo.

Ted Leyson would stalk her for the next ten years.

Garbo's lifelong struggle with the camera was turning into a nightmare.

I think it was his life's ambition to stalk her every day.

And, yes, we would see him with his long-distance lens,

almost every day. That's why on sunny days

she would carry an umbrella,

because it was a very good shield from Mr Leyson.

And the crumpled Kleenex was always ready to spoil his shots.

He would position himself outside Garbo's apartment

across the street, usually,

for hours and hours at a time, if not every day, every other day,

something like that, for years.

But there was one shot that had always eluded Leyson.

An unspoiled close-up of Garbo's face.

On the 9th of April 1990, Garbo was on her way to hospital.

There was a flash.

Sick and weak,

she was unable to look away or raise a hand to her face.

She looked straight into the lens.

Ted Leyson finally had his shot.

Half a century after her last screen appearance,

Greta Garbo had lost her battle with the camera.

Six days later, at the age of 84, she died.