In 1981 my year 12 high school class had a camp excursion to a place called Sherbrooke Forest near Belgrave. We stayed in some camp barracks and did the usual team building activities. It was actually a nice place. Thing is, this was my second try at doing year 12. I had failed the exams and had done this same excursion already the year before – with a group of students I felt much closer to than I did this younger group, who I never managed to connect with. After the second day I asked the Organiser if I could leave early, and she said I could. So that night, just after a dinner of beef stroganoff, which most of the students hated, I snuck out down this dark windey forest path and made my way to the nearby railway station in Tecoma. This is all very typical for the solitary person I was back then (and to some extent still am): going my own way, doing my own thing – being alone. But it wasn’t just the lack of connection I felt for the other students, or the sense of sadness I felt that the camaraderie of the year before was gone that made me leave. I had an ulterior motive. You see, there was a film being played the next day on the telly that I just had to see, and I did not want to miss it, as I would’ve if I’d stayed at the camp. You have to understand, this was back in the days when your only viewing choices was the limited number of channels on the free-to-air: no cable, no streaming, no iview, not even video recording (except for the select few who could afford it), no nothing. If you missed a movie it could be years before you’d get another chance to see it. So it was important to me. The film was Camille, made in 1936, and it starred one Greta Garbo. I was in my Greta Garbo phase.
This all comes back to me now at this moment because I’ve just re-watched the film, having found a dvd copy at a local op shop. It’s the first time I’ve seen it since back then. And it’s magnificent. Garbo is stunning as Marguerite Gautier, ‘lady of the camellias’, a role she was nominated for an Oscar (which she didn’t win). It’s basically a Shakespearean tragedy about a prostitute (though the softened word here is ‘courtesan’). Watching it again I couldn’t help but reconnect with that younger, weirder version of myself who decided to forsake a school camp to see it. I can’t quite recall my impressions of it from that time, but I seem to remember being impressed by the final death scene. Garbo and her beau, played by Robert Taylor, played the scene for all it was worth.
Yeah, I was a weird kid. Imagine being seventeen in 1978 and obsessed with Greta Garbo! I wasn’t gay; I wasn’t even queer (or, I don’t think so…uh, maybe…): I was just weird. I can track the obsession back to a magazine I was collecting at the time, called The Movie. It came out in instalments, and when you had enough you’d buy a binder to store them in so that eventually you had a multi-volume encyclopedia. The first few issues focused on the end of the silent era and the beginning of the ‘talkies’, around 1930. The second issue had a feature article about Garbo, and that’s where I was introduced to her. She fascinated me. She was so mysterious, with an unusual beauty. The article talked about her Swedish background, her early success in the silent era, her ‘grand passion’ with actor John Gilbert, and her triumphant entrance to the talkie era with the film Anna Christie (Garbo Talks!). And then later her shift to comedy with Ninotchka (Garbo Laughs!). And then the mysterious early retirement when she ‘wanted to be alone’. I had to see all of her movies, if I could. Before I knew it I had found books about her (even acquired a poster of her that I put on my bedroom wall!) and I was on my way to a new obsession, a new phase. In fact, the Garbo phase was the first time I became aware that I was going through phases. There had been others before her, and I knew there would be others to come. But this was the point when I became acutely aware of the concept and that I was in the throes of another one.
I can’t really sum up my feelings about Greta. Maybe it was her air of solitude. Maybe she was just indicative of my tendency to put females in my life on a pedestal, and she was that tendency writ large (could explain my obsession with Twice at the moment!). I remember seeing her in Queen Christina at an indie cinema at a university. It was a double with Ninotchka, and besides me there 
was just a couple of old women enjoying the flick sitting behind me. It’s the only sound film she made with her ex-lover John Gilbert, and she had apparently asked him to be in it as a favour because his career was flagging. The final scene has her on the prow of a ship, bringing her dead lover back to Sweden. The Director, Rouben Mamoulian, instructed her to make her face a blank slate for the final close up, so the audience could read on that face any emotion they could wish. When I think of Garbo, I’m still feeling those emotions.
There’s a nice review of the film on Letterboxd that I must share here. It’s from comrade_yui, and it goes thus: ‘100 minutes of Greta Garbo being bisexual, crossdressing, and wearing cool hats. Basically what cinema was made for.’ Ray Davies of the Kinks wrote a wonderful song called Celluloid Heroes, and in it he gives this profile of Garbo that’s where I’ll end this:
Don’t tread on Greta Garbo as you walk down the boulevard.
She looks so weak and fragile, that’s why she tried to be so hard.
But they turned her into a princess and sat her on a throne.
But she turned her back on stardom because she ‘wanted to be alone’.
