Tea with Greta Garbo’s decorator

Many people write, or at least used to write, fan letters to their film favourites. Usually all they received in acknowledgement was a 10 x 8 glossy with a mimeographed signature. A little persistence sometimes resulted in another, with a brief ‘personal’ message written by the ladies toiling in the fan-club HQs. Not so for the two authors of this riveting book.

The Mutti-Mewse twins, early on, became obsessed with all things Hollywood, firing off missives not just to the major stars but to every man Jill they saw or heard was connected to that once fabulous industry. They must have had a magic formula in their letters.

Replies flowed back hand over fist. Not just a signed portrait, elaborately photographed by Hurrell, Kesserle or Max Munn Autry in all the sender’s splendour, but effusive messages of the ‘come up and see me some  time’ variety, and the authors — just them initially, but later with their wives and partners — scurried to these siren calls. And what makes their book so interesting is the fact that the twins were — are — clearly and touchingly fascinated by not so much the obvious huge movie icons, the Garbos and Grants and Dietrichs, but by the ones that had once been boffo until, to adapt Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, the pictures got bigger as they got smaller. And many of those are silent stars unable — usually due to unintelligible foreign accents or a too-shrill tenor — to make the transition to talkies.

The Mutti-Mewses disinterred quite a few of these true old-timers, many, surprisingly, not holed up in some dingy aged actors home, but living in Deco’d splendour in the Hollywood hills, or sprawling bungalows in the Palm Springs desert, and some even retaining the farms in New England, the year-round apartments at the Waldorf Towers, of their gilded heyday — evidently many of those ‘three-pictures and phfft’ players were nevertheless dab hands at real-estate.