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THIRTY-SIX

While still living in Largo Argentina we lived a fairly ordered social life. Our usual fairly disordered life simply meant we’d have dinner with each other at a trattoria or with one or another of friends in the city or sometimes with passersby who’d ring up like Saul Bellow or F. W. Dupee, friends and acquaintances from our Hudson life now drawing to a close. Actually, an ordered social life was nearly impossible for me: it meant writing down in a book invitations accepted and then, in due course, honoring them. This obliged us to see the same people over and over again. One evening as I was dressing to go out to dinner at Mimi Pecci-Blunt’s palace opposite the Campidoglio I got the inevitable telephone call: “Gene is worse. Only the shots are keeping him alive. He’s also been hallucinating. Just now he said, ‘If I don’t get out of this motel soon I’ll become extinct.’ ” Hardly his usual language. My stepmother was herself somewhat formal in manner; she had been brought up by her mother in Beijing in the thirties and she recalled that period as the most magical of her life. An early boyfriend had been a son of the historian Arnold Toynbee; the young man’s romantic suicide seemed always to be, somehow, at the edge of her memory unlike her long-absent wealthy father, Owen Roberts, who had separated from her mother. Gene had brought father and daughter together. When the old man died, his daughter inherited an eighteenth-century house on a crater lake overlooking Hartford, Connecticut, a tall mountain almost entirely surrounded by the Alsop family, one of whom was Joe—the political columnist and devotee of empire as well as some sort of relative to “Uncle T” as Theodore Roosevelt was known to him: Uncle T had characteristically presented his infant relative with the tooth of a saber-tooth tiger, always on conspicuous display in Joe’s Georgetown house.

I quizzed my stepmother about the various doctors and their reports. How far had the cancer spread? Apparently, to the brain. She was waiting for me to say something and I was waiting, in my turn, for her to say the inevitable which turned out to be, “Shall we stop the Swiss injections.” A curtain was suddenly coming down on Gene. As I talked into the telephone all I could see was a man taking a step on the dusty moon. And so it was, without words, we agreed to stop the medicine. Ordinarily, I would have talked this over with Howard but he’d already gone to dinner with friends. Then I walked the short distance to the Pecci palace; went to the wrong door; waited and waited. Finally I was let in. Dinner had begun without me. Mimi was polite, even droll. I made a mumbled excuse, thinking of Proust, of Swann, of Madame Verdurin who was, somehow—the original one, that is—related to Mimi who was herself a niece to Pope Leo XIII. The next day while I was struggling with a letter of apology to Mimi a footman arrived with a letter from her which combined Proustian tact with the Thomist wisdom of her uncle Pecci. And that is how it was I entered man’s usual state, as an orphan. But I am ahead of my story since my mother did not die until 1978, but as I had not seen her in the twenty years previous to her death, at the end it was as if we had never known each other. She had attacked Howard who had genuinely liked her, which was more than I had ever done, and so I had told her that I never wanted to see her again and never did. I was startled at how many ladies of my acquaintance were horrified when they read this account in the first volume of these memoirs. Obviously, a new epoch of mother worship had been ushered in by…Freud? Fannie Farmer? I’ve yet to read any criticism of George Washington for his bad relations with his mother or even Ernest Hemingway. But a sea change occurred in the twentieth century and mothers are automatically exempted from all blame if my lady friends are to be believed.

Meanwhile, a happy voluntary mother-daughter relationship was being acted out each winter and sometimes summer, too, at Klosters in Switzerland. Salka Viertel was the widow of a well-known German film director and mother of the writer Peter Viertel. A sometime actress and screenwriter, Salka had been chosen by Greta Garbo to be her mother. Salka lived down the street from Howard and me and next to the small flat where Garbo stayed; she did her yoga exercises on the balcony to the amazement of the villagers who had no idea just who Frau Garbo was.

Thanks to my Aleutianized left knee I could never ski well but cross-country skiing was possible as well as long walks beside the Silvretta River. Or even the longer walk to Davos where the characters in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain died of tuberculosis while immersed in philosophical tautologies.

Garbo had become very fond of our Australian terrier, Rat. “But it is such a brutal name for him so I shall call him Ratski.” And so each morning at about eight she would come by our flat and Ratski would rush out into the street to greet her. Then I would join them for our morning walk beside the nearby Silvretta River. On the walk Rat took charge, as always. We went only where he wanted to go.

A last summer at Klosters. Garbo is sixty-five. I could never get her to come back to Ravello where she had spent her “honeymoon” with the conductor Leopold Stokowski only to be driven away by a newsreel cameraman in the bushes who boasted ever after of his great coup. One did not grieve when he was later shot by the Mafia.

Irwin Shaw and his wife were longtime friends of Garbo and warned us never to discuss her film career. As it turned out, that was what she most wanted to talk about. She recalled every detail of every movie, including the names of the grips. “I learn my bad English from them,” she said, reminding us that she had been a star of silent movies and the whole world had wondered whether or not the glamorous voiceless Swede could make the transition to talking pictures, something her co-star John Gilbert had failed to do. Not only did she like to talk about the old days but she wanted to know what MGM was like so many years later. She also had a number of ribald stories that she enjoyed telling and retelling. Although she had been queen of MGM she was not above keeping an eye on the minor stars at court. For some reason the thought of the singer Jeanette MacDonald caused all the stars at Metro to start laughing while Judy Garland would burst into a flat-filled version of Jeanette’s signature song “San Francisco.” Doubtless, it had something to do with the old-fashioned operettas that Jeanette appeared in, along with her co-star Nelson Eddy fondly known as “the singing capon.” One story that Garbo liked to tell: Jeanette was married to an actor called Gene Raymond, an amiable sort who appeared in my film The Best Man. One morning Raymond was playing tennis with a coach while Jeanette arrives, in a picture hat (one starts decorating the scene when these magical figures appear in a narrative), a basket of freshly cut roses on one arm while trilling an aria from Naughty Marietta. As she enters the house, she reminds her husband that lunch will soon be ready. Raymond invites the pro to lunch but he says, “I’m all sweaty and I didn’t bring any other clothes.” Gene Raymond says, “Go up to my bathroom. There’s a shower and plenty of clothes your size.” So the tennis pro goes into the house. Meanwhile, Jeanette, weary from her decorative labors, is putting roses into vases. Then, as she passes her husband’s bathroom, she hears the shower running. She slips into the bathroom, pokes her hand into the shower stall, firmly grips the pro’s genitals and sings, fortissimo, “Ding, dong, Daddy, Don’t be late for lunch!” then she resumes her journey along the corridor only to come face-to-face with her husband. By this time Garbo would be roaring with laughter, her right hand twitching convulsively.

Much has been written about her androgynous appeal. While she was worshipped as a goddess by L. B. Mayer the longtime master of the studio, they both were alert to the basis of her popularity. Women loved her movies—she suffered; she was beautiful in a way few people are. Yet she was not popular with American men who preferred the Betty Grable type. The important money earned from a Garbo picture came largely from Europe. When World War Two put an end to the European market, Garbo nicely let MGM off the contractual hook. She would take a vacation until the war was over. It is said L.B. wept with gratitude. Contrary to legend she did not intend to retire. When the war was over Walter Wanger prepared a script for her based on Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais, to be released by RKO. Garbo got as far as the wardrobe test, a subtle way for the studio to see if she still looked like Garbo. She did. I’ve seen the test. But then she was only in her thirties. Unfortunately, the studio was bought by an aviation colleague of my father who promptly canceled the Garbo movie. It is a pity that Scorsese in his film about Howard Hughes left out the only thing that Hughes would ever be famous for. So shocked was Garbo by this abrupt rejection that she never came close to making another film. She was also very rich and somewhat lazy.

In Klosters she had a simple routine. She would collect the morning paper then get back into bed for a fat-free breakfast while reading the newspaper and the various Silver Screen movie magazines she had collected during the week. She kept up with all the new stars though I can’t imagine she saw many of their pictures, but when it came to Fabian’s romantic life she was au courant.

When someone sent me a large tin of Beluga caviar Howard decided to give a small party just for us, the Irwin Shaws, and Garbo. At the last moment Irwin rang to ask if he could bring the journalist Martha Gellhorn. I’d always liked her writing and felt sympathetic to anyone who’d been married to Hemingway. The small party went off well. Garbo arrived early and promptly put on Howard’s blazer. She liked dressing up in men’s clothes. She also liked to refer to herself in masculine terms. “Where is the little boys’ room” was a favorite expression. It was Ina Claire, the urbane comedienne from Broadway, who went to the little boys’ room right after Garbo had vacated it and, yes, the toilet seat had been left up.