Beautiful enigma: Garbo’s mystery lives on

‘We didn’t need dialogue’, glares Gloria Swanson’s crazed silent picture star midway through Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. ‘We had faces!’ She had a point. Even those of us who believe the movies weren’t really the movies until they had snappy dialogue (and no dialogue ever snapped the way Wilder’s did) have to concede that Swanson had a face that could stop a train. Still, she was an also-ran compared with Greta Garbo, who had a face that could start a religion. As her first champion, the Swedish filmmaker Mauritz Stiller, once said that Garbo’s mush would ‘make the gods happy’.

Her embonpoint was rather less empyreal. John Gilbert, her most frequent Hollywood co-star, wasn’t known for his insight — even if he’d had the voice, he hadn’t the wit to make the transition to sound — but he was surely right when he said that Garbo’s ‘bones are too large’. Despite the best efforts of lighting crews and wardrobe assistants, Garbo’s movies reveal a woman with a flat chest, no waist, thick ankles, big feet and, at least in her earliest days in Hollywood, what Robert Gottlieb calls a ‘riotous frizz’ of electroshocked hair. But Gottlieb is at least keen to stress in his fine new biographical study that there was no truth to the suggestion that the young Greta’s gob was a mess. In fact he says she had ‘the only perfect teeth of all MGM’s stars’.

She also had what Gilbert called ‘amazing eyes’ — large, dark, deep-set and fathomless. Alas for Gilbert, he did what legions of cinema worshippers only dreamed of doing and dived right in. To be fair, Garbo did kind of fancy him too. Still, she would always turn down his offers of marriage.