Ada, Cordula, & Greta Garbo
In Part I, chapter 27 of ADA, Van meets Cordula de
Prey, Ada's 15 year-old schoolmate whom jealous Van suspects of being Ada's
sexual partner. The account, first of Van's meeting Cordula at a party
and again that evening in a bookshop; then of his subsequent
date with Ada (with Cordula as unwelcome chaperone) near the girls'
boarding school, is rife with lesbian motifs. Among them is an allusion to Greta
Garbo whose image is partly projected on both girls.
Cordula at the party is described as wearing
a "'garbotosh' (belted mackintosh) over her terribly unsmart turtle and held
both hands deep in her pockets as she challenged his stare. Her bobbed hair was
of a neutral shade between dry straw and damp. Her light blue eyes....".
Some months later, Van and Ada (with
chaperone Cordula) have a most unsatisfactory date on a rainy afternoon.
Ada "sported a shiny black raincoat and a
down-brimmed oilcloth hat as if someone was to be salvaged from the perils of
life or the sea."
The Garbo image refers to her role in her first
talking film, the 1930 "Anna Christie" based (fairly closely) on Eugene O'Neil's
play. Garbo's character, a reformed prostitute and man-hater, has
come home to her drunken Swedish father, the captain of a grungy coal barge
in New York harbor. Father and daughter have not seen each other
since she was five. In a fierce storm at sea, they
rescue a brash, handsome sailor. In the rescue scene, Anna appears in her
oilskin slicker and hat. The slicker (sans hat but avec turtleneck) appears in
the movie poster below. Note well VN's phrase "as if someone was to be salvaged
from the perils ... of the sea."
Cordula not only wears the "garbotosh" but Anna's
turtle neck sweater and has "bobbed hair .. of a neutral shade between dry straw
and damp" as well as light blue eyes. This accords with Anna's bobbed
hair and Garbo's real-life blonde hair and
blue eyes (not evident in the black and white film. (But see the movie poster
below.)
Rather than identifying the Garbo-Anna
image with only one of his characters, VN assigns elements of it to
both girls, drawing on both Garbo's dramatic role and Garbo herself. In fact,
neither Ada nor Cordula bear much physical resemblance to Garbo or Anna.
Narrator Van (and author VN) draw in these elements as part of Van's
preoccupation with Cordula and Ada's lesbian relationship. The Garbo film has no
suggestion that Anna has lesbian inclinations. But Garbo herself was
widely rumored to have lesbian lovers. The issue has been vigorous promoted by
some feminist scholars and, most recently, by the publication of the
correspondence between Garbo and one of her alleged lovers, who is
the subject of a new biography entitled "'That Furious Lesian': The Story of
Mercedes de Acosta" by Robert Schanke (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003
)($45).
VN was not, apparently, an admirer of the
heavily Freudian playwright O'Neil, a Nobel Prize winner in 1936. Although
VN left no record of his opinion of "Anna Christie," he witheringly
deconstructed "Mourning Becomes Electra" (and O'Neil himself) in his essay "The
Tragedy of Tragedy."
D.
Barton Johnson
Anna Christie (1930) was advertised,
in a two-word ad campaign, as the first talking picture (and 14th film) for
cinema's greatest silent star - an asexual, supercool Nordic beauty named
Greta Garbo: "Garbo Talks!" MGM Studios was quite concerned about their
alluring, 24 year-old talented actress. She was one of their biggest stars,
but she had a potential liability - her untested, heavy Swedish accent. Many
other silent stars had already failed or struggled to make the transition to
the sound era - Nita Naldi, Vilma Banky, and John Gilbert (satirized in MGM's
Singin' in the Rain (1952)). Even after talkies
were inaugurated in 1927, Garbo starred in more silents, e.g., The Single
Standard (1929) and The Kiss (1929).
Finally, the star's first talkie (an "ALL TALKING PICTURE")
was carefully chosen for her, mostly because it perfectly suited her Swedish
accent. And a familiar director Clarence Brown was also assigned to the film,
having already directed Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1927), and A
Woman of Affairs (1928) (and later Anna Karenina (1935) and
Conquest (1937)). The role Garbo would play, a sickly prostitute, would
be in sharp contrast to the glamorous characters she had already played in
silent films.
The 74 minute, black and white Anna Christie was
adapted (by influential screenwriter Frances Marion) from Eugene O'Neill's
play of the same name. It had earlier been a stage play, and had been filmed
by producer Thomas H. Ince and director John Griffith Wray as a silent picture
in 1923, with Blanche Sweet as the heroine, and George F. Marion in the same
role that he played onstage (and in this version). In 1984, a film directed by
Sidney Lumet, titled Garbo Talks (1984), used this film's slogan in a
story about a woman whose dying wish was to meet her screen idol
Garbo.
In the famed, immortalized scene that is about sixteen minutes
into this over-rated and stagy drama, weary and ailing, man-hating
Swedish-American streetwalker Anna Gustafson Christie (Greta Garbo), searching
for her estranged barge captain father Chris Gustafson (George F. Marion) to
seek redemption, makes her grand entrance into a NY Battery waterfront saloon
from a foggy street. The bar's waiter holds open the door to the Ladies
Entrance as she struggles in, lugging an old, weighty suitcase. She shuffles
over to a wooden table across from where her father's boozing companion Marthy
(Marie Dressler) sits, and drops her suitcase onto the floor. Anna takes a
seat in a chair, crouches down, and finally delivers her famous opening lines.
In a deep and husky, heavily-accented voice, she orders:
Anna: Gimme a whiskey, ginger ale on the side...and don't
be stingy, baby!
Waiter: (sarcastically) Well,
shall I serve it in a pail?
Anna: (bluntly) Ah, that suits me down to the
ground. (After the whiskey is served and downed) Gee, I needed that bad all
right, all right.