The Good Fairy and the Goddess
Frederic Raphael
LOVING GARBO by Hugo Vickers Cape, £19.99, pp. 320 In heaven, they say, there is neither marriage nor giving in marriage, though the elect will have to wait and see whether they still have appetites for the foie gras to the sound of trumpets which was Sydney Smith's conception of bliss. What of hell? Its torments will almost certainly include doing will-she-won't-she time with Greta Garbo, whose sulky shade will — on the evidence of Hugo Vickers' account — give foie gras the allure of dog food. As for the trumpets, what a monotonous fanfare she will oblige them to sound! Luckless egotists will be condemned to the second-fiddling part of Cecil Beaton and the perpetual re- enactment of a romance so anguished and yet so puerile as to lend Barbara Cartland an aura of Stendhalian grittiness.
The puerility of Garbo and her long-time follower was literal: each, by turns, played the boyish role. Cecil regularly and rogu- ishly wrote 'Dear Sir' letters to a surly Madame who seldom replied. If their pro- tracted transatlantic affair had been nobody's business — or pleasure — but their own, how welcome they would have been to each other! However, Beaton found it as hard to conceal his feelings as Garbo did to have any. Since exhibitionism was his way of life, just as self-effacement was her perverse form of narcissism, he could not resist publishing his diary of their improbable chatouillements, though he should have guessed that it would lead to his being added to Greta's garbage.
Cecil Beaton's reputation, like flaky pastry, does not keep very well. His datedly posed and lit photographs of a royal family which still had iconic significance are the work of a Mr Toady who tried sedulously for the social advancement which began in the Twenties, when he was a small star, slowly shooting upwards, in the firmament of Brian Howard. He was, in a sense, the Good Fairy to Brian's bad, eternally disponible to the extent, so he reported, of it being 'quite usual . . . never to put on ordinary clothes for a week or ten days at a stretch': his early life consisted of a whirl of fancy-dress party-going. Where Brian's mordant malice kept him panderingly alert to the blinkered perversity of the beau monde, Cecil was — like Evelyn Waugh, who bullied him at school — an arriviste who was emulously eager to get there.
He was also hard-working and, like so many bogus talents, deeply sincere: he had a great many feelings. Although primarily homosexual, his desire for Garbo (or for a famous connection) was sufficiently ardent for him to prove a satisfactory lover, on the relatively few occasions when she consent- ed not to be alone. Garbo either hid her face, and person, like a blanketed police suspect or displayed a penchant for get- 'em-off nudity. Her off-screen perfor- mances gave the impression that she had better things to do than to act, but it is clear that acting was all she could do. Unwisely, she preferred her own repetitive scripts to other people's; her self-styled scenes were of stultifying monotony and, with no Lubitsch to cry 'cut', they went on for decades.
It is not difficult to withhold sympathy from Beaton, but he has been so gloatingly mauled by Waugh pere et fill, that it smacks of pleonastic plagiarism to join in the deri- sion. Why deny him a shaft of the flattering light which he threw with such ennobling skill on his egregious sitters? He may have fallen in love with an idea of Garbo, and with that God's-gift-to-photographers pro- file, but he did go through the long and finally lacerating simulacrum of a passion for someone who, like Proust's Odette (whom Garbo was born to play, and had probably never heard of), was not of his genre. Cecil was a naive and sentimental lover, who was at first amazed by the success of his suit; not yet an A-list celebri- ty, he was unlikely casting for Armand to Garbo's Marguerite Gautier, a part in which she had languished with such tuber- cular artistry that the camera caught even her beautiful cough.
It remains a mystery why she abandoned the unreal life of the movies for the even less real penthoused vacuousness of the early retirement to which she removed her- self. If she hated Hollywood, she does not seem to have relished New York, where she carried on a sequence of three-sided relationships, in which Mercedes de Acosta, a go-get-'em lesbian who, in her earlier years, rarely went fishing without a catch, and Georges Schlee, the allegedly sinister husband of the legendary dress designer Valentina, were repertorial play- ers. After various indiscretions (of course published by Cecil in his gabby diaries), Mercedes was finally labelled NOT WANTED ON VOYAGE by the peregrinating Garbo for whom Georges was cicisbeo, travel agent and Russian Orthodox Svengali, though he failed to re-start her career. Playing the triangle was Garbo's only lifelong art.
She may or may not have granted Schlee sexual favours (she was not hot for sex, but the Nordic tradition did not make heat a requirement); certainly she liked to play Georges off against Cecil. After Schlce's death, Garbo and Valentina — who only then dared to vent her hatred of her hus- band's love for the star — continued to live in the same apartment block; it was an economy to be able to cut each other dead without having to leave the building.
Throughout her life, Garbo found an avid market for her demanding cruelties; only the very occasional acquaintance had the nerve to tell her what a mean-spirited tightwad she was (she had managed her finances, at least, with enriching worldli- ness). The late Count Friedrich Ledebur was her companion on a 'camel trip' when Garbo refused to pay her share or to sign the photos their guides produced: 'I'm invited, I don't pay.' Ledebur was furious: 'You're invited? By someone with a tenth of your money.' He made it clear that if she didn't do both things, she would be left in the desert. She did both.
Pity, really.
Hugo Vickers seems thoroughly at home with the nobs and (more often) snobs of the entre deux guerres for whom the 1939 war was an irritatingly loud interruption of their self-indulgences. In the world he depicts, first-nighting is an act of dedica- tion and the Windsors pass for good com- pany. Since Cecil was shrewd enough to take copies of the billets doux Madame destroyed, his letters and diaries are at the heart of an affair as substantial as a macaroon. But then what is more spiritual- ly uplifting than to read about a bunch of spoiled, weepy, greedy, spiteful people who, between gushes of self-pity, give each other the hell which they so richly deserve? Sir Cecil was to discover that loving Garbo was like loving Eurydice: he needed only to look back and there was nothing there.
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