Greta Garbo: The Screen Icon's Great-Nephew Scott Reisfield Decodes Her Mysterious Image

In this episode, I speak with screen icon Greta Garbo’s great-nephew Scott Reisfield, author of the new book “Greta Garbo and the Rise of the Modern Woman.” Scott dispels long-held misconceptions about his great-aunt, whom he knew as just another member of the family. 

Garbo was no recluse, Scott says, but she was a trailblazer who took control of her career and championed women’s empowerment long before the feminist movement. 

Learn more about “Greta Garbo and the Rise of the Modern Woman” and connect with author Scott Reisfield at Scottreisfield.com.

You can reach me at chrisbournea@gmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

One of my favorite movies as a kid was Garbo Talks with um uh Ann Bancroft, where she's like a woman who's dying, and her dying wish is to meet Greta Garbo, and her son goes off in pursuit to bring Greta Garbo to his mom in the hospital. Did you ever see that movie and what was your perception of that movie?

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Not only did I see it, Carlta saw it, and she liked it, and I liked it.

SPEAKER_01 0:26

Hello, and welcome to the Culture Beats Podcast. My guest is Scott Ricefield, author of Greta Garbo and The Rise of the Modern Woman. Scott, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:36

I'm doing well. How are you down in Ohio?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

Great, great. And uh so I understand from reading your uh your bio, so you were related to Greta Garbo, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Yes, she was my great aunt.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Okay. Did you um did you ever get to meet was she still alive at at any point while uh you know while you while you after you were born, or did you ever hear stoke family stories about her?

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Or yeah, um, she was a part of my life. Um wow. She's in a very small family. So my my mom was her niece, okay, and really the only person in that generation. Uh she had a half-brother, my mom, who was never part of the family.

SPEAKER_02 1:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

But uh my grandparents only had my mom, and her other sister died in her 20s, uh, so she never had any children. Oh wow. So Garbo lived the last part of her life in New York City, and I grew up in in northern New Jersey, just outside New York. So she would come out to visit us. Uh, I would see her in the city. Um, she and my mom uh were very close. She and my grandmother were very close. Uh and she so I think about 1970, she and my mom started taking uh trip to the Caribbean for two weeks every winter. Oh wow. So they were that close. I'm a slightly different generation, well, a completely different generation. So for me, she's like an expert grandparent. You know, there's there are conversations I had with her, but there's certain things you don't you don't talk about grandparents with, and I I didn't talk with her about those things either.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Did uh you have any sense of what a legend she was, or was it sort of just like she was just another member of the family?

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Well, initially she was just another member of the family.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

She she uh she gave my mom you know name suggestions for me, you know, when I was about to be born. Um she but she um for me was just kata. And as a child, her movies were first off old. Uh they were shown a little bit at uh revival houses and sometimes on television. Um but there weren't, you know, there was no Star Wars kind of event. Yeah. So um it wasn't until I was like middle school uh that I realized like, oh, she'd been like this actress. And actually wasn't until college that I understood what Garbo meant to people. Um she uh had gone on vacation with my mom, and there was uh a paparazzi that took photos of them down on an island called Barbuda in the Caribbean, and they ended up in People magazine. Yeah and and my mom's name is there, you know, in the magazine. So I'm sitting in calculus, and some guy walks in and sits down next to me and says, I saw your mom in People Magazine, which certainly not was I I was expecting to start class. Um that really that really brought home the the fame and celebrity part of it in a way I had not understood up until that point.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Right. And Kata was uh her nickname, Greta Garbo's nickname, or yeah, nobody in her family ever called her uh Greta.

SPEAKER_00 4:19

Maybe she didn't like Greta, she was from childhood Kata.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

And she was from Sweden originally, correct? Yeah, she was born and raised in Stockholm. Okay. Did your family have a connection to Swedish culture or yeah, did you grow up with born in Stockholm?

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Oh, okay. So she didn't move to the United States until World War II had started. Okay, even while she was working in Hollywood, spent years in in Sweden. She would she would leave Hollywood for a year, uh, come you know, to go to Sweden, come back, make a couple of movies, and leave for another year. Um in the later stages of her career, she's making a movie a year on average.

SPEAKER_01 5:08

Yeah. Which was actually kind of not that prolific back then, right?

SPEAKER_00 5:13

No, not at all. Yeah, and um there were a couple of reasons for that. She had pernicious anemia, so she had significant health concerns, and she invested a lot in each film. And in the later part of her career, she's almost working like an associate producer, she has veto over everything. Um, and the scripts have censorship issues, so they have to carefully construct a script to get through the censorship, but still tell a feminist story of an interesting woman with romantic problems or a woman in a leadership position. Uh, but even um though she was working in Hollywood, but during the war, uh my parents, my grandparents came to the United States because of the war. Uh, there was a fear that Germany would invade Sweden. And because Garbo was not pro-German, that you know they would seize her assets in Sweden. My grandfather and Kata had a farm they owned together. Uh, so they sold that and moved to the United States. And during the war, I have a letter she wrote to my grandmother in which she says, Yeah, I want to go back to Sweden after the war. We'll buy another farm. I'll make movies. Um, so you know, Sweden was important to her. I I think when she returned after the war, she either she realized she had changed or Sweden had changed, and and um she chose to stay in the United States.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Right. You talked about how involved she was behind the scenes with her movies. Did you get a sense either from you know your interactions with her or from writing this book or from you talking to family members of how unusual that was for a woman to do that and what was it difficult for her? Or because she had star power, was she was it did that make it easier for her to take more control?

SPEAKER_00 7:27

Well, yeah, I mean she she came to the United States on a three-year contract.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:34

Um with MGM, but that was very unusual. And she she had actually signed a five-year letter of intent with MGM based on her first movie, literally one movie. Um, but she was underage. So when she came to New York, the the letter of intent was not enforceable. And what she wanted was actually, she wanted a one-year contract. And MGM was like, we can't do a one-year contract. They settled on a three-year contract, and MGM more or less immediately regretted signing her to a shorter deal. Um and after she'd been working for a year and a half, they basically froze her out. Unless she would sign a five-year deal, they would give her kind of second-rate roles. And when they cast her in her the first second-rate role, she walked out. And she was not working for about six months, well, five months. And then she signed a new five-year deal. And and the story of those negotiations could be a podcast in and of itself. I'm sure she um signed a five-year deal. So for five years, you know, she filmed whatever film they queued up for her. She had negotiated just doing three films a year because she didn't want to do four. Um, but they paid her as if she was doing four. Um, and I think while she didn't have as much control of her roles for those five years, Fahlberg used her cleverly. He understood who her audience was, which was uh middle class women, and he made films for them. And she liked making most of those films, I think. Uh, but when that five-year contract ended, she started uh doing deals for one or two pictures at a time. And that's when she had control um of things like the director, the co-star, which which project she was doing. Um the first of those films was Queen Christina, and she brought the project to Fahlberg. You know, the the treatment was done, and you know, she's telling them this is what I want to do. She actually wanted the right to make it in Europe, which she didn't actually do, but she considered it. So she she worked within the studio system because that's the way you made films then. There really wasn't much of an independent Hollywood. Um, but she was um, I wouldn't say she's the only person calling the shots. She wasn't she wasn't an Orson Wells kind of person, but she was definitely part of the team that ran her career.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

She definitely sounded like she was ahead of her time because even today you hear women talking about how few roles there are, few substantial roles there are for women, and how still there's still so few women behind the camera in in really prominent roles like being a director or a producer. So it's amazing that many years ago in that era that she was able to um to have so much control.

SPEAKER_00 10:58

I I do think that her life, you know, looking back, uh says something I think for women today. I I I view my book as a women's history book about an interesting woman who was breaking barriers. And on top of that, in her roles, because of the way she acted, people could relate to her character uh in ways they couldn't with the sort of older, more um vaudevillian kind of acting. Uh her acting, which she brought to Hollywood from Sweden, Sweden, you know, they're making uh plays uh you know, written by Strindberg and Ibsen. It's very naturalistic, very modern, very, you know, much psychological. And that's not what Hollywood was when she arrived. She came with that, and she was lucky because they had just changed, you know, film stock, so close-ups were better and things like that. But she brought that um film as a as a an imagining of a reality with real people, which is common today. But I I go back and I look at her in her first silent films, kissing her co-star, compared to other couples kissing in other films. It's just it's just more real. Uh, everything she did um appeared to be real, and her audience thought they could read her thoughts. You know, in silent films, they just had the inner title cards, you know. So the idea that you could understand what somebody was expressing based on their uh acting beyond just the title cards was pretty impressive.

SPEAKER_01 12:48

Yeah, and and she's I think maybe a lot of people don't realize she wasn't someone who was quote unquote just discovered by whoever MGM and just kind of plucked out of obscurity. She had actually trained at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, correct?

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Right. Uh the Royal Dramatic Theater, which everybody calls Dramatin, just make sure, um, had a school. It was a very rigorous training program. Sweden is a theater country, or it was then. You know, Stockholm was half the size of Copenhagen and had twice as many theaters.

SPEAKER_02 13:26

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

You know, I I found a book of of famous Swedes from like 1920, and there's 11 actresses. Oh wow. So so it was a respected profession. And most of the people at Tramonton came from middle class families, but she she was a working-class girl, and she got in. She she had been working at a department store and doing industrial films on the side, and she took her earnings and invested in acting lessons with probably the leading acting coach of that time, because he had just retired from running Dramatin, uh, the school part. And so she worked at it. She spent a year getting ready to audition for Dramatin and got in. Um, and they loved her from the beginning, right from the beginning. She was uh compared to Tora Teye, who was a generation earlier than Garbo, and had also come from her uh soda neighborhood. Um and uh, you know, she she thought she was gonna have a great stage career.

SPEAKER_01 14:39

Yeah, then films happened. What is your sense of um what did what did her parents think of being an actress as a career? Uh, because you know, in the United States, even still, if like a a child, a young person tells their parents, I want to be an actor, or it's looked at as kind of, well, that's not a very secure career path. But is it because Sweden has such a strong theater um community that it's looked at as more of a legitimate uh profession, especially coming from a working class background?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Yeah. Well, she had always done acting in in a childhood sense. She put on little performances with other kids, and and so it wasn't anybody's secret that she wanted to be an actor. Okay. Um and and her family supported her. Now her father had passed away when she was a teenager, and so it was just her mom and her brother and her sister who you know they were all working, and she was working, and she stepped away from that to do theater, and they supported her. They so Dramatin, when you're a student, they didn't pay you. Okay, there was no tuition, but they didn't pay you, which is why so much of the the class was middle class or above.

SPEAKER_02 16:01

Oh right.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

So she had made some money um working in industrial films. She had money from working at the department store. But in addition to that, her family supported her. So um, yeah, I mean, they they were a very tight family. It was kind of, I think, sort of a follow your dreams kind of uh family, and that's what she wanted to do.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

How much do you think um her looks played into her success? Because she's known as this, you know, glamour icon. I mean, it didn't hurt that she was a very beautiful woman, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

I I think that helped. She I think it was in some ways more her carriage, the way she uh walked and interacted with people. She had impact on people. Uh, and and some of that was her looks. But in a Hollywood sense, she was not considered beautiful, she wasn't pixie ish enough. Garbo actually transformed the idea of beauty in America. Uh, and there's there's a fascinating photo shoot in Vanity Fair from I think it's 1932, where they show seven actresses who have totally changed their hair and makeup to look more like Garbo.

SPEAKER_01 17:20

Wow. Wow. And this is the hundredth anniversary of her first MGM film, right? Torp Torrent.

SPEAKER_00 17:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 17:28

And that was a silent film, correct?

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:31

So how how was she able to make the transition from silent films to talkies, as they call them, not being a native English speaker when so many native English speakers didn't make the transition?

SPEAKER_00 17:44

Yeah. You know, I think there are two aspects of it. One is MGM and she, I would say it was sort of a combined decision, weighed it. She was one of the last people to transition. Uh, and that allowed them to work out a lot of the technical issues. Then they found a story of a Swedish immigrant woman, right? So she has to have an accent. It certainly doesn't hurt. And in fact, I read somewhere where MGM was saying we actually had to get her to to speak in more of an accent because we wanted. Um, but I think as a naturalistic actor, sound actually just freed her to do more. Her real, I mean, by the time she's into film three, she's one of the stars. With sound, she becomes the transcendent star. Um, so it's right after that. I I used how often an actor was mentioned in Photoplay magazine as sort of a proxy for what now would be like a Q-score or something like that. Because those magazines wrote about what their readers wanted to read about.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Yeah. And and not not to interrupt you, but just in case people aren't familiar with Q-Score, that's like a popularity score that like television and it just basically rates celebrities on how popular they are.

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:13

Um, so with sound, Corbo. So if you had more than 100 mentions a year in photoplay, you were a star and one of the people they wrote about. There's one year she had 700 mentions. Oh my god. You know, um she had over 300 mentions, like four or five times. Uh, and quite frankly, for anybody else to reach 200 was an incredible accomplishment. It I think it's hard to understand now how transcendent a star, how complete her dominance of women's self-perception of themselves around the world was. The only thing close I can think of today is Taylor Swift.

SPEAKER_02 20:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

She's like, you know, completely different way you communicate and different art and all that, but it's the same kind of incredibly dedicated fan base that's everywhere. That's what Garbo was. And she was that because she represented what a modern woman could be, you know, uh in in independence and sexuality. Um, and so people just followed her.

SPEAKER_01 20:32

I think it's kind of ironic that she was so uh famous before the internet, before so many things that we have now that promote celebrity, but she became famous for being aloof and um kind of mysterious. Was that intentional from you know from what you gather, or I mean intentional is like, oh, I'm going to create this air of mystery about myself, or was she just sort of a reclusive person and didn't like attention when she wasn't on screen?

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Yeah, I think there are two parts to that. One is you know, if you're already more mentioned and more followed than even your most successful alternate actor, yeah, what do you need more publicity for? Um, also when she traveled, you know, and again, she's going to Europe and coming back for films. She would always give interviews dockside, well, actually on the boat, right? So when she arrived in New York, she would give an interview, which was an interview, it just wasn't one with the Hollywood press. So it appeared in different media, right? It'd be in the New York Times or New York Post or you know, all the other papers in America, not in photo play. And so it's interesting how that got perceived of as well, you're not talking to the media. She is just doing it differently. But I think um yeah, she was a private person. She wanted, she didn't necessarily want celebrity, she wanted to be an actor. Slightly different thing, though let's face it, in the real world, it's hard to separate them if you're a good actor. Yeah, it just comes with the territory. I think she wished it hadn't. Uh and you know, so there's that, but then because she represented a very liberated woman, when American society came became more conservative during the Depression and World War II and the McCarthy era, those people who were now commenting on the culture, quite frankly, did not like everything she stood for.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:50

And the conservative, you know, columnists would would take shots at her because of who she was. Um and you know, the the part of calling a recluse to me is to um denigrate her importance to the culture, right? She's not she's not a real person, not an everyday person. And I would find newspapers where there'd be an article about her appearing at some club, you know, with somebody, and then two pages later, she's a recluse. Yeah, which is true.

SPEAKER_02 23:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:32

It's a Walter Winchell actually tried to shake her down for an interview and told her if she didn't come on his show, uh, he would he would speak ill of her, and she told him to stick it and ill of her for the rest of his career.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

I think um from how you've described Garbo, it's like she's like the quintessential star, like that indefinable star quality, because it seemed like no, whether she chose to do interviews or not, it seemed like the public was intrigued with her. I guess the only maybe a modern day um kind of comparison I can think of is Helen Miren. She's seen as a very uh credible actor, but you don't see her in the, at least not in America, from my perception, you don't see her in the tabloids a lot the way you do Taylor Swift. You don't hear about, well, she's also older, but I mean, even when she was younger, you didn't hear a lot of scandalous things about her, at least in America. Um, but uh she she doesn't have the same star power as say uh uh let's tailor Taylor Swift or um Madonna or something like that, someone who is a tabloid fixture. So so Garbo was both a celebrity and an actor's actor, it sounds like. But she didn't she didn't want the celebrity, she just wanted the the to be a uh to do the roles that she wanted and to do them the way she wanted.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because I I thought about, you know, who who would be similar today, and I came up with Jody Foster.

SPEAKER_02 25:09

Yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

Jodi Foster does her thing, lives her life. She comes out and does PR for her movies, yeah. And and then she goes away. Gorbo, in her own way, if you will, did PR for her movies, yeah, in a sense, and and and she wasn't clueless to the power of of PR. Uh-huh. I think part of it in terms of the the way Gorbo gets portrayed as a recluse is her last film was released in 1941. She was 36.

SPEAKER_02 25:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:43

Um, and a lot of that imagery of her as a recluse was built after the war. Yeah in paparazzi communications.

SPEAKER_02 25:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Um, and also recluse meant something different in early Hollywood. It just meant you weren't on the party circuit.

SPEAKER_02 26:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 26:01

Like 20 stars who were recluses, right? So it wasn't being used in the in the Howard Hughes kind of way. Right. So, and she was, she she didn't really do the party circuit. I read a Joan Crawford biography uh just recently, and and she showed up at this one place once a week to be seen. You know, definitely not Garbo. She'd show up randomly when nobody was expecting her, just because nobody did, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 26:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:33

But she she socialized with a a couple of circles of friends. Um, and they tended to be quite frankly, rather intellectual. Um, and they were they were um anti-fascist. Um and um yeah, so so in some ways uh she she was interesting socially just within a kind of limited context.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Right. And there's that famous line of hers, I want to be alone. Do you think that sort of became kind of um like people confuse that line with her like her per her real her real persona with the screen persona that that said that famous line?

SPEAKER_00 27:20

Well, she did deliver it in a movie, yeah, yeah. But I think that yeah, it it it fit with the the story that was being sold. Yeah. So uh and I think the other thing that people sort of miss in all this is you know, she had stalkers.

SPEAKER_02 27:40

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

So you don't think about that for stars back in the 30s. Um and they didn't live in kind of this parallel star universe. You can be a celebrity now and and like never meet real people. Sure. Uh and not only was that virtually impossible in the 30s, she had no interest in it. I mean, what she's known for, I think, sort of to counter that uh recluse thing is just wandering the streets of New York. There are plenty of stories of pictures and pictures of people encountering her on the streets of New York. She just walked.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

But did people approach her? I mean, it's because I the reason why I asked that is because uh I read in her Wikipedia that Liv Ullman was cast in the same, what is it, Queen Christina role, and happened upon um Garbo in on the streets of New York, and Garbo had started running toward her, you know, to excitedly tell her, oh, they're calling me the next Garbo, and Garbo actually ran from her. And Liv Ullman was like, I was young and she was older. I could have easily caught up with her, but I didn't want to I didn't want to traumatize her. Uh so it's like maybe she walked the streets of New York, but in New York, you know, there's so many people you can sort of be anonymous.

SPEAKER_00 29:02

Well, I I know that people recognized her, and and partly it's you're making these snap judgments as to somebody's intent. Yeah, yeah. There's several stories of people recognizing her and her going, uh, uh-huh, you know, we'll just keep this between us kind of yeah. Um so yeah, people recognize her. I think a lot of people recognized her, and it was just sort of like this is New York, we don't do anything about it.

SPEAKER_02 29:30

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:31

But yeah, I mean, it's uh it's kind of interesting. I mean, I I I don't know that she she probably could have handled it better sometimes, but it is what it is, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 29:46

Yeah. So how did you go about uh writing the book? What was your process? Did you interview family members, or what was your process of putting the book together?

SPEAKER_00 29:56

Well, interestingly, perhaps, I I never intended to write this book. I I had done some research, I ran my own business and well, I I wrote a essay for a photo book that was associated with a museum exhibit of photos. So I had done some research for that, and I had done some research just because I was interested in certain facets of her life, and I traveled for work and I could take an extra day and spend it at a library, but I didn't see much of it. Um, but I had some knowledge that there were errors in how people wrote about her, and then COVID happened. I had to close my business, I had all the time in the world. Oh, right, yeah. So and I learned a lot doing the research. And I sort of during COVID, I could use resources here in Michigan, uh, the the University of Michigan Library, Eastern Michigan Library, and then just the state library system would all lend me books or give me electronic access to resources. So I did an incredible amount of research that way. And then at the end of COVID, I kind of went to I went to Sweden, I went to Germany, I went back to LA, up to Madison, which has some material that I needed, Salt Lake City, uh, Knoxville, Tennessee. So I I assembled everything. And now I started trying to turn it into a coherent story. And and I looked at what other people had written, and I I began to realize I was maybe telling a different story than I started with. I originally I was just going to kind of clarify, I guess, some errors, and probably would have been a more boring book, actually. But I realized there was this whole thread about women and impact on women and the craft of acting that was just fascinating. And then her battles with censorship. Um, and I'll give you an example of how I could fill stuff in. So um there's this gentleman who took these amazing photos of her in New York in 1925. And when he wrote his autobiography, he made up the story about well, he took the photos and then he saw her several weeks later, and she said, I'm going back to Sweden. MGM doesn't want me because she spent two months in New York, and no one ever could explain why she didn't just go straight to Hollywood. Right. So he he wrote, I sent these photos to MGM and they ended up in a board meeting. And people said, Who is this beautiful person? How do we hire her for MGM? Well, I knew the story wasn't right because I worked in business, that's not how boardrooms work. Nobody opens mail during a board meeting.

SPEAKER_02 33:01

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 33:02

You know, it's not the point of a board meeting. Yeah, so I knew it was wrong, but I didn't know the full story. So what I discovered is the reason she spent two months in New York is that they were negotiating this, you know, first three-year contract. She had the letter of intent, she was underage, it took them two months to come to an agreement. So during that time, not only did she have one photo session with Gentha, she had three. And the difference from the first one, which is just your standard photo shoot, to the second one, which is great art being created, is just amazing. Uh, and Gentha's part of it, and he's a great photographer, but a lousy writer about history. Uh, so that's just one example where you know Gentha writes it as I created her career, where really Garbo created her career. Right. And uh any woman can relate to this, right? Some guy says he did it for me, and I did it myself. Well, this happened several times in Garbo's career, and I was able to um create the story, maybe better to say, reveal the story of what she actually achieved, and she achieved it uh with intent. Um, and it's a fascinating story, it's a fascinating personal life, which is more interesting a life than I realized my great aunt had. Yeah, and just her impact uh has sort of been lost in this um sort of hibernation of feminism from 1929 to 1969, where quite frankly, it seems like nothing happened. But actually, women were still transforming the social relationships they had with men because they were working, you know, they were not getting paid what they should have gotten paid, but they at least had the jobs. Uh, they were getting that independence, they were dating and choosing the man they would marry with intent, even if in marriage they then, you know, almost universally assumed the traditional housewife role, you know, it took a while for it to go further, but she was part of that whole transition, even the invisible part. Uh, so it's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 35:34

Yeah. Do you think perhaps because uh she had um standards and she wouldn't she didn't want to just take any role just to be on screen? So she wasn't because she wasn't hungry for fame, that sort of made her in a in a strange way more attractive to the studio was like if you have to chase someone or pursue someone, it makes them a little bit more interesting than someone who's you know so hungry that they'll do anything. Do you think that kind of played into her um ability to be more in control of her career than the average actress was of her era?

SPEAKER_00 36:10

I I think that's one way to frame it. I would say it slightly differently. The the business people of MGM respected her as a force in the industry. She she knew them. I found this interesting uh story someone told about Garbo and uh John Gilbert and Louis B. Mayer and Irving Faulberg sitting around talking before going to a uh screening of somebody else's film. So it's not even her film, and she's talking with the people running the studio in a sort of social but business setting, right? You know, you work in an office, you you talk with the people in the office, sometimes you talk with the boss and he asks you how your family's doing or whatever, and it's personal, but it's work, right? She's having those kinds of discussions.

SPEAKER_01 37:11

Wow. And um what are what do you think is maybe one of the uh biggest misconceptions about Garbo?

SPEAKER_00 37:22

That she walked away from film. Uh her last film was in 1941. It was censored. Um it was condemned by the Legion of Decency, and they recut it and kind of I think changed the flow of the story. Uh I would love to see the original version before it was cut. Uh and they inserted a scene that sort of subverted the whole plot. Um she gets married, her husband, she's the country girl, her city boy husband returns to New York and she's afraid he's gonna, you know, take up with an old girlfriend or something. So she goes back to New York and pretends she's an imaginary twin sister who is you know very urbane. Um so they made uh Melvin Douglas figure out through a phone call he overheard that they were the same person right at the beginning of the film, which kind of eliminates the whole point of the film if he already knows, right? So uh and then there were some other edits. So she immediately signed to do another film with MGM that did not get filmed. Uh, she was going to make a film called The Girl from Leningrad. The man who was going to produce it died of a heart attack. Uh, Louis B. Mayer canceled the film. Uh, and you know, that was that. She there's a great set of stories because both Catherine Hepburn and George Cooker tell the story of those two and Garbo sitting with Louis B. Mayer, pitching him on Morning Becomes Electra. Could you imagine that cast?

SPEAKER_02 39:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:08

Cooker as the director would have been pretty interesting. Yeah, he turned them down. Um, and you know, it's that's an artier film, that's not where maybe the world was in 1943, 44. Uh, but there's a set of projects that she signed to do that didn't get made. Um, she signed the last one I found, she signed to make the miracle in 1955, uh, and it didn't get made. And it would have been of an interesting project. It was going to be a it got conceived of several ways, but the original way was as a television Easter special that would run every year. And um, you know, it was going to be a very wordy kind of play, uh play film. Uh, and they had trouble getting funding, they had trouble getting script approved, it got transformed into a cinema scope spectacular, and she just walked away from it.

SPEAKER_01 40:13

Do you have any sense of why you sort of just went into why that one project didn't get made, but why were these series of projects, why were they, why did they never come to fruition?

SPEAKER_00 40:23

Yeah. Well, I'll say one thing. I mean, you know, Garbo, I don't think, fully understood how the studio system was transformed towards the independent system after the war.

SPEAKER_02 40:38

Right.

SPEAKER_00 40:39

You know, she came from an era where Thalberg just made everything happen. You know, the censorship issues, the the production code administration, if Thalberg said it wasn't going to do X, they believed him and it didn't do X. When she got into this more independent era, there's no there's not the trust that that these institutions, I'll call them, have with each other, because there's no Thalberg. So when Walter Wanger proposes a script, the PCA just shreds it. Um, he doesn't really have an alternate script. He he's he's trying to find money to fund his project, but he can't quite put the funding together because he can't put the script together. And I don't know that Garbo fully understands at the point that this is happening what's happening around her project, because she's used to the studio uh just sort of taking care of everything. Right. Um so partly I think sometimes she didn't fully understand how precarious some of these projects always were.

SPEAKER_01 41:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

But inevitably for most of the projects, it's a censorship issue. I think I think with morning becomes Electra, Mayer probably said, I don't see how I'm gonna get this through censorship. She wanted to do um the importance of being earnest. Not not the important uh wrong Oscar Wilde story. Um the picture of Dorian Gray.

SPEAKER_02 42:24

Okay. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 42:25

As a woman playing that, and and you know, you could just see the possibilities for censorship problems.

SPEAKER_02 42:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:32

Um she wanted to do Duchess de Lange, which is the Walter Wanger Project censorship issue. And you know, the project she wanted to do before that. So the original idea that got exchanged for Duchess de Lange, she wanted she signed contract to do a film about George Sand, right? So the Lavender Scare is just starting in the United States, and she signs to do a film about a cross-dressing lesbian. She's making her political statements with what the role she's choosing.

SPEAKER_02 43:11

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:12

They're not getting filmed.

SPEAKER_02 43:14

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 43:14

You know, Duchess Delangay, the issue was adultery. Oh, and the PCA said, since there isn't adultery in the book, we don't see why we should accept it in the film. Uh, that's how they had gotten several Garbo films with adultery uh or sex work through censorship. They said either it's a true story in the case of Conquest, or it's in the book, as is the case with Anna Karanina and Camille. They're saying we're we're just taking facts or great art, and you can't you can't take out the essence. Well, when you get to Duchess de Lange, now you're making up the adultery to make the film more interesting, or or because you've changed the story. I've never seen A script for it. So, you know, it may be a fantastic script that really needs adultery or not. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 44:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:08

Um, when you get to the miracle, the script issues are about how, and the story of the miracle is a Catholic nun leaves her convent and goes and sows her wild oats around the world. And while she's gone, the statue of the Virgin Mary descends from a pedestal and takes her place in the convent. And when she returns after her adventures and you know recommits her life to God, uh, the statue returns to the pedestal. That's the basic story. Interesting. So the Catholic Church had several problems that the play, because this is all based on a play, they didn't change anything. The play was actually loved by the Catholic Church, you know, 25 years before. None of these were none of these points were issues.

SPEAKER_02 45:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

It had become a much more conservative culture, and so now they were. So something as simple as well, she can't leave the convent voluntarily, she has to be taken away, right? She can't choose this life. Uh, she can't be a nun, she has to be a novice. I mean, all these things, the the kind of chipping away at the reality or maybe let's call it intellectual honesty of a story, because it's not a real story, but they're trying to make a point. And they're saying, no, no, no, there can be no messy parts, right? It has to be like Sesame Street level clean. It's like it's not real life, and it's not interesting to people.

SPEAKER_01 45:45

Yeah. I mean, basically, it sounds like the sound of music, only a little more realistic. Well, except for the part about the Virgin Mary coming down from the pedestal, but yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_00 45:57

Um, but she wanted well, they were going to do it for TV, so it wasn't racing, it just was have adult themes. Um and it oh, I I had forgotten the writer. So their idea of who would write the script was Samuel Beckett, right? Oh, so this is not a lightweight kind of project, this is a serious project.

SPEAKER_01 46:20

Yeah. So you touched on this a little bit. You talked about the lavender scare of society being so conservative about LGBTQ issues. Um, do you so Garble has come to be seen as sort of a LGBTQ icon? Do you think that's a fair representation of her? Or what are your thoughts about that?

SPEAKER_00 46:43

Yeah, I think it is because I I don't think she personally cared that much. Um, and I think she, you know, she she was not a public spokesperson for very much anything. But you know, in Queen Christina, which she had a fair amount of control over, uh Thalberg uh came to Sulker Vertel because they had he had just seen this German film that had a lesbian kiss. So he's like, Do you think do you think Garbo would accept this? And like, well, let's ask her. So they get a hold of her and she's all for it because it's gonna shake things up. Um she had I, you know, the George Sand project, which we talked about, yeah. And I think just in general, her characters are always independent, yeah and and and following their hearts. And so I I I think you know, even in the 30s, I could see how that would appeal to um people who weren't straight in whatever particular variety of something else they were. Um and you know, many of her friends uh were gay men. Um you know, lifelong friends like Cecil Beaton and Gaylord Houser. Um she just didn't really care. And when it was inconvenient for your career in Hollywood, uh she didn't care. She hung out with these people anyway.

SPEAKER_02 48:20

Right.

SPEAKER_00 48:22

So I think in that sense, uh yeah, I get it. I mean, I I see why you know people sort of like the honesty integrity of her consistence in this.

SPEAKER_01 48:35

Yeah, and that seems like that was yet another area where she was a a trailblazer and a ahead of her time. Did did you watch her movies growing up? Or did do you have a favorite, favorite Garbo movie, or has it changed over time?

SPEAKER_00 48:50

Well, yeah, it it has changed a little bit over time. I did see some growing up, uh and I maybe had a different appreciation of movies as a child. Silent movies didn't do it for me as much. So now it I I actually view silent movies as different from sound film, as opera is different from theater, right? It's it's just it's just uh um a convention that was used, and now it's just less common. I don't know that opera was ever that completely dominant, but you know, the old operas relied upon cheap workforces that made everything happen backstage, and they're not that cheap anymore, so it's much harder to do opera. Um so I for me, um Flesh and the Devil is a pretty amazing film. Um, and I like Love too. I've always liked Nanochka because for me, that always seemed to be closest to her as the person I knew. And and I think it's it's a story that stands up well today. Um, I mean, you wouldn't make quite that movie today, but the jokes are still good jokes. Um I think that Camille is a fantastic film. It's a little dated because of the you know, perception of women and sex workers and stuff. It's it's it's of its time, yeah. Uh and exactly what she was working to change. So I guess she succeeded. Um and and I'd say the movie that has struck me more, especially as I put it in the context of her career, as the first film she really uh sailed as her own vessel is Queen Christina. You know, she's playing the queen, and the conservatives hated it. She was a woman in charge, and and that actually offended them that uh you know kings are supposed to have a certain carriage that she didn't deliver. Uh they thought it was bad for authority as a concept, right?

SPEAKER_01 51:10

So how did your uh perception of Garbo change uh after writing this book? Was did she seem like a more uh full, I don't know what the word is, uh more of a three-dimensional person rather than the the the woman you had grown up with?

SPEAKER_00 51:29

Yeah, but I think I think what changed and and what I really try to make the main focus of my book that I did not understand until until I was into writing it, and I was pulling these threads together and thinking, hey, wait a second, this is really important. If if you look at the most important women for women, the women who changed being a woman uh the most in the first half of the 20th century, uh if you have a list of five or ten, she's she's definitely on your list of ten. She's maybe on your list of five. She had that much impact, and she did it through her art and she did it with intent. And on top of that, it's just a fascinating life, especially her early life. It's just stunning what she achieved by the time she was 19.

SPEAKER_01 52:33

Yeah, and it's really awesome that you have the objectivity to see that because most of us, we just kind of take our family members for granted. I mean, most of us don't grow up with world-famous legendary family members, but even if you know I did have some relative who made the impact on the world that Garbo did, I don't know that I could see them in such an objective light and understand their impact. So it's it's pretty how how are you able to do that to kind of be objective about someone who you were relatively close with growing up?

SPEAKER_00 53:07

Well, I think two things. One is my mom could never have written this book because of her closeness to her as a person. I think as as two generations down, it's a little easier. You can separate. And I think it's the research that did it for me, the process of research. I like researching things. And so for me, it was digging into it and making the connection and and sort of the the researching joy in finding something cool. And that cool thing um sort of became the framework of my story. Once I realized what's cool about Garbo is what she did for women and how she did it, everything else I thought about her had to kind of fall around that. So take Queen Christina, the film. Until I understood what it was she was doing, to me, it was a slightly creaky old film. And it still is a slightly creaky old film, but it is so feminist and so about female leadership and also about following your heart. Antonio dies and she just sails off to some future. There's no guy, I mean, the guy's dead, but there's no, you know, standard romantic end.

SPEAKER_02 54:41

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 54:42

She's just going to be uh herself going forward now that she's freed herself from the responsibilities of running Sweden. And it's a pretty interesting um uh story. In Queen Christina, everybody sort of focuses on the last scene, which is stunning, where she's just staring out from the prow of the ship. But the lead up to that, you know, when Antonio dies and she's you know, uh kneeling over his body, she looks up and you can see, and this is great acting, you can see her uh settle in on kind of a vision of her future. Like her face just transforms itself into a seriousness. And it's sort of like, wow. So these are the sort of things that I think um, you know, I I see that I didn't under I didn't understand how transformative her acting was, right? I knew she was a famous celebrity actor, but I didn't understand how she had transformed acting, right? So all these pieces coming together, I think, gave me this picture I didn't start with of uh of a really stunningly amazing and impactful person, and it kind of overwhelms my personal relationship with her. I actually bring my personal relationship in with her because I know people want it. Yeah, it's actually not that important to her life or mine, but I realize that's not what people care about celebrity and they want to know what my personal interactions with her were, and I can do that, but you know, at the end of the day, she was like an extra grandparent. And while I can talk about all my grandparents, I can talk in more depth about my parents, right? So, you know, it's always that generational space that I don't seek to overcome. I know it's there. Um, but it I think that makes it easier for me to step back and just write it as a biography, right? Or maybe more a women's history story.

SPEAKER_01 57:06

Scott, you've been so generous with your time. I just have one additional question. One of my favorite movies as a kid was Garbo Talks with um uh Ann Bancroft, where she's like a woman who's dying, and her dying wish is to meet Greta Garbo, and her son goes off in pursuit to bring Greta Garbo to his mom in the hospital. Did you ever see that movie? And what was your perception of that movie?

SPEAKER_00 57:28

Not only did I see it, Cata saw it, and she liked it, and I liked it. It's a good movie.

SPEAKER_01 57:35

Did do you know, did did the the filmmakers ever approach her about maybe doing a cameo at the end? Like actually, because they show you know an actress coming into Ann Pancroft's hospital room. I think the answer to that question.

SPEAKER_00 57:49

You know, people asked her to do a lot of things.

SPEAKER_01 57:52

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 57:52

Um my favorite of all of them, which she thought was a hoot, but she never did it. American Express used to run this thing where you couldn't tell who somebody was, and it's like, hi, do you know me? That's why I carry the American Express card. Have you ever seen any of those ads?

SPEAKER_01 58:11

I remember the American Express uh ads. I don't remember that series of those ads particularly.

SPEAKER_00 58:17

Somebody asked her if she wanted to, you know, be on an American Express card ad. While she thought it was a hilarious concept, she was not going to do it.

SPEAKER_01 58:26

Yeah, yeah. That would be I I couldn't imagine Garbo doing any kind of commercial, let alone an American Express ad.

SPEAKER_03 58:33

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:34

Well, Scott, it's just been fascinating speaking with you. So if people want to get the book, it's called Greta Garbo and the Rise of the Modern Woman. How can they do that?

SPEAKER_00 58:42

It's on all the normal places you would find a book. You can order it through any bookstore, and it's on all the online platforms.

SPEAKER_01 58:51

Do you have any uh speaking engagements or signings uh planned anytime soon?

SPEAKER_00 58:58

Um, I don't have any on the books. I will try to line some up. Um, I I was just at the Columbus uh Motion Picture Festival and the Toronto Silent Film Festival, but uh I would like to maybe speak at some libraries and other events. Uh I just got a Kirkus review, and so for the library world, they all look to see if you got interviewed or or reviewed on Kirkus and have a very nice Kirkus review. So now I'm ready to go talk to all the the library people.

SPEAKER_01 59:34

Yeah, and and film aficionados. I can just I can just imagine people just packing auditoriums because Garbo is still such a fascinating subject, mainly because of the mystery that still kind of surrounds her.

SPEAKER_00 59:45

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, in and and for me, uh it's a different kind of speaking, but in business, I I was used to addressing you know groups of people. So I'm comfortable with it, and um it's kind of fun. It's uh I no longer have a nine to five. Um and and so and I I want to write another book. I had so much fun writing this book that I've decided to to write another of some kind. I haven't figured out exactly what yet, but uh something.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:17

Right, right. If people want to get in contact with you, how can they do that? Do you have social media that they can reach you through or yeah?

SPEAKER_00 1:00:24

Um, I do have a website, www.scotricefield.com, and I I am on uh Facebook and Instagram, but I I will confess I'm not I'm not a great uh Facebook and Instagram people thing. I I appreciate them for what they are. I have trouble um with the constant engagement. I like to dip in every once in a while, yeah, which is fun. I I actually I enjoy Reddit uh on Facebook. I've been on there's four Garbo sort of fan sites on Facebook. I I participate in those. And um yeah, so that's how you find me.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:07

Cool. Well, Scott, again, it's just been fascinating talking with you uh about your your book and about Garbo. And uh I look forward to reading your next book.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:17

Well, thanks, Chris. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:27

Thank you for listening to the Culture Beats Podcast. If you like this content and would like to lend your support, please leave us a review, a rating, andor a comment. That helps other people discover the podcast. Culture Beats is an independent endeavor. Views expressed by guests are their own. Thanks again, and talk to you soon.