Was greta garbo gay

Join us as we celebrate Garbo’s enduring legacy as bisexual lesbian-leaning icon and boundary-setting queen!

Films:
9/3: TBD
9/10: QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933, 109 min)
9/17: CAMILLE (1936, 109 min)
9/24: NINOTCHKA (1939, 110 min)

This class will be taught by Max Swanson, a filmmaker/performer, writer, educator, and organizer based in Portland, OR.

They currently also teach at NW Doc and PSU, and work as a freelance story consultant. They had become friends nearly two years earlier, when she confided to him, "My bed is very small and chaste. Viertel convinced Thalberg to cast Garbo, who loved the role of Christina because, like the writer Daphne de Maurier, she could “let her boy out of the box.” In the final scene, the androgynous Swedish ruler stands at the prow of a ship, the wind blowing her hair away to reveal those perfect features as she hurtles away from her country and her dead lover into the unknown.

In her private life, Garbo’s closet was full of mannish suits, shirts, and ties.

It provides an intimate view of Garbo that is both touching and surprising. The three of them loved and fought, came together and parted, for forty years. Her break came in 1923 when the gay, Jewish director Mauritz Stiller needed an actress for an epic based on the Swedish novel The Story of Gosta Berling. Like a character in a Dickens novel, she never forgot the humiliations she and her family experienced.

Loving Garbo is based on much previously unpublished material, including the letters of Beaton, Garbo, Mercedes, Dietrich, Anita Loos, Eva Le Gallienne, and many others. For one thing, his romantic attachments were almost exclusively with men and would continue to be. They sailed to the U.S. in 1925, arriving in New York, where Garbo loved riding the rollercoaster at Coney Island.

 Garbo’s relationships with women were subjects of much intrigue, while her carefully crafted image of mystery allowed her to maintain a certain level of privacy about her sexuality.

In this installment of Our Iconic Queer Ancestors, we’ll delve into Garbo’s persona, and her impact on film and her subtle subversion of the era’s expectations of femininity and sexuality.

MGM Studios and Hollywood gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper sold Garbo to eager readers who were primarily white, middle- to upper-class women who aspired to upward mobility as depicted in films and fashions.

Banner demonstrates that Garbo was a new kind of star who displaced the petite, simpering American film models that Mayer and Thalberg had created.

She made 28 movies in her career and acquired the status of Hollywood royalty. Her most popular silent and talking films included Flesh and the Devil, Anna Christie, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, Camille, and Ninotchka. One of her lovers in Hollywood in the thirties was the screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta, a friend of Beaton's who has the rare distinction of having had affairs with Garbo and Marlene Dietrich at the same time.

Next, they boarded the train to Hollywood.

Garbo’s first two pictures were hits; in Torrent and The Temptress (both 1926), she showcased the European “femme fatale” as elaborated by the great German director Fritz Lang in Metropolis and popularized by Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box (both 1929).

286 pages, $34.95

CELEBRITIES who retreat from the public eye become all the more intriguing because of their aura of inaccessibility. She often called herself a “fellow” and signed her letters “Harry Boy.” But Banner’s feminist analysis does little to shed fresh light on Garbo the person as distinct from Garbo the legend, perhaps because of the author’s own need to emphasize her subject’s bisexuality rather than her well-documented lesbianism.

Her father, an unskilled laborer, was handsome, musical, and fun. Garbo's sexuality, like everything about her, remains mysterious, but certainly included women, as Beaton well knew.

Beaton had reason to be surprised at this turn of events. She never felt truly at home in America. Next, while scouting for European talent, Louis Mayer invited Stiller and his untested starlet to Hollywood.