Greta Garbo: the Hollywood enigma who perfected self-isolation years ago

This hermit-like image stuck. It provided British comedians Dudley Moore and Peter Cook with lots of material. They once performed a television sketch about Cook being bothered at night by “bloody Greta Garbo” dressed in her nightie, tapping on his window. In another satirical sketch, Cook dressed up as Garbo and drove through London in an open-top car, melodramatically yelling “I want to be alone” into a megaphone.

But how accurate is this clichéd image? She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson in Stockholm on September 18, 1905. For most of the last four decades of her life, she lived in a seven-room apartment in Manhattan (she occupied the entire fifth floor), overlooking the East River. Her New York home was full of prized possessions, including a Renoir painting and numerous pieces of 18th-century French furniture.

Money was never a problem for Garbo. She invested the fortune she had made from films wisely – including on a portfolio of stocks and on property on Rodeo Drive, Los Angeles, long before it became one of the most sought-after streets in America. The woman who had been ashamed of her poor latrine-cleaner father ended up with a $50million fortune.

The doormen guarded her privacy; fellow tenants followed an unwritten rule to avert their eyes whenever they encountered the star known in their residence as “The Face”. The only time they remembered being surprised by Garbo’s behaviour was when she spent a day operating the elevators when the building staff were on strike.

Garbo was not domesticated – she rarely cooked and used her casserole dish to make coffee – and normally ordered food from the local Swedish gourmet delicatessen Nyborg & Nelson. She was certainly quirky. She allowed a telephone in her home but insisted it had to be black. “That’ll keep me awake at night, trying to decide the colour scheme,” she told a friend. “I do so little telephoning it really doesn’t matter. Sometimes I don’t call anyone for weeks. I don’t answer the phone.”

She was not housebound, though. Garbo went out every day, usually wearing long trousers, a plain coat and flat loafers, her face hidden by a large fedora, scarf and sunglasses. In 1963, she became good friends with Raymond Daum, a former combat photographer who later became Gloria Swanson’s personal archivist. The pair would sometimes walk up to 11 miles a day, window-shopping in New York stores and visiting Madison Avenue art galleries. They would come back laden with bags.

Garbo’s friend Gore Vidal later said that he didn’t believe she had been lonely, but rather that she’d spent half a century looking for the perfect pullover. “She was terribly lazy and terribly rich,” Vidal remarked with his characteristic acidic wit.

Daum later wrote a book called Walking with Garbo, in which he said that Garbo “could out-walk me”. He also revealed that she was “damn good” at tennis, and would sometimes be driven 30 miles out to Greenwich, Connecticut to play “strenuous” matches at the home of a friend. He recalls her remarking dismissively about “pale and putty-looking” New Yorkers. She mainly ate vegetarian food, and was athletic enough to do cartwheels in her fifties. She regularly exercised at home, dressed in a floral all-in-one yoga costume.

The late veteran Hollywood actor Van Johnson once revealed that Garbo had a secret way of communicating with friends. “She leaves me messages on our special tree in the park. The messages usually say something like. ‘V meet G for lunch.’ It's lovely,” he recalled in the biography Van Johnson: MGM’s Golden Boy.

Occasionally on their walks, a stranger would ask whether she was Garbo. She would raise her index finger to her mouth and say: “Shhh.” She could be even more slippery. For many years she also spent part of each winter in California (where she loved growing roses) and one time when she was staying at actor Anthony Palermo’s house, she took his young daughter Michelle to a coffee shop. A customer asked: “Aren’t you Greta Garbo?” She looked straight at him and replied: “What would Greta Garbo be doing in a place like this?”

There was a part of Garbo that enjoyed the intrigue. William Stevenson’s 1976 book A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War confirmed that, during the Second World War, the former actress helped the British military by identifying high-level Nazi sympathisers in Stockholm. She also provided introductions and carried messages for British agents. In the late 1950s, she travelled to her holiday home in Klosters, Switzerland, under the alias Harriet Brown, a name chosen in homage to her favourite American director Clarence Brown, who had worked with her on Anna Karenina in 1935.

There are lots of theories about why she took the surname Garbo (which means grace in Spanish) and she was certainly fond of wordplay. As well as the alias Brown, she also went under the names Gussie Berger, Mary Holmquist, Jean Clark, Karin Lund, Jane Emerson, Alice Smith and even the male name Karl Lund. Garbo used the fake Brown name when she visited the Dalva Brothers gallery on New York’s Upper East Side –a favourite location for socialites such as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“Greta Garbo would come in nearly every afternoon around 5.30pm and sit down opposite my mother’s desk,” said Leon Dalva Jr, the son of the original founder, in an interview in February with Christies. “You weren’t allowed to introduce her as Greta Garbo, though; she was Ms Brown. The members of staff who worked downstairs would always bid good evening to Ms Brown. And she would say it back with a little formal bow. It used to get a good laugh out of her.”

Garbo never married, and there were endless stories printed about her bisexuality and alleged affairs. “Women liked her. Men hated her,” said Vidal, who thought she had an “androgynous charm, the lesbian side of her nature” that was picked up only by certain people. Garbo certainly didn’t bond with her fellow Hollywood actresses. The one time she met fellow Ingrid Bergman, they had a strange, brief conversation in which Garbo warned her fellow Swede about Barbados, claiming that people there “steal your clothes”. Garbo also said that when she dined with Mae West, she didn’t say a word all evening because all the comedienne talked about was “monkeys and musclemen”.

Details about Garbo’s tumultuous relationship with British photographer Cecil Beaton came to light earlier this year in an authorised biography written by Hugo Vickers. Garbo told Beaton she hated wearing underclothes. Her seduction technique was blunt. After drawing the velvet curtains, she asked him: “Do you want to go to bed?” Although the relationship went well for a time – they used to bathe together – jealousy and rancour crept in. When Beaton told Garbo he was seeing an English widow, she reacted with fury, shouting, “I'll come over to cut her head off.”

Life started to go downhill for Garbo in her sixties. She complained to Daum about the sounds of a fellow tenant humming, or about the traffic noise from the busy nearby FDR Drive. Her letters to Viertel at the time are full of melancholy. “I suppose I suffer very deep depression,” she admitted in 1971.

The following year she wrote sorrowfully that “I am living in my usual rut again, seeing nobody… I feel rather tired all the time but it could be from living such monotonous life, never wanting anything… I want to do things in my mind, but I always postpone things till tomorrow and tomorrow is the same story." Donna Rifkind, the author of a book about Viertel, believes that Garbo “had social anxiety and a fear of crowds”.

It was not all down and gloom, though. A more playful Garbo is described by her friend Edward Lozzi, a Beverly Hills PR executive who later became a White House press aide for George Bush. Lozzi interviewed Garbo twice in the 1980s for CNN, and would entertain the actress when she went to California. Among the surprising things he revealed about Garbo was that she loved MTV music videos – and would happily sit smoking and eating chocolate chip cookies while she watched cable television.”

Garbo also drank a fair amount – especially neat Stolichnaya vodka and what she called Guttysark (Cutty Sark) scotch – and her health gradually declined. In her final years, she had to walk with a cane and suffered from heart and kidney problems. Only her closest friends knew that towards the end she was receiving dialysis treatments for six hours, three times a week, at New York Hospital’s Rogosin Institute. She died at that Manhattan hospital. She left her estate to her niece Gray Gustafson Reisfield. Garbo’s ashes were reportedly buried back in Sweden at a private ceremony.

Daum said that he once urged Garbo to socialise more, but she told him: “I want to do more with people, but I can’t. I can’t help it. I was born that way.” She was haunted for most of her life by the single memorable “alone” line her ageing ballerina character uttered in 1932’s Grand Hotel.

In fact, the line was always misquoted. In 1955, Garbo gave a rare interview to Life magazine, attempting to set the record straight. “I only said, ‘I want to be let alone!’ There is all the difference,” she added, to no avail.