John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars

Chapter Seven

117 Chapter Seven She is capable of doing a lot of damage. . . . Upsetting thrones, breaking up friendships, wrecking homes—that sort of thing. —John Gilbert, 1927 In late June 1926 it was announced that Clarence Brown would delay filming The Trail of ’98 so he could do Flesh and the Devil first. One little line at the very end of the article mentioned in passing that “Greta Garbo will play the leading role opposite the star.” The Greta Garbo whom Jack met in the summer of 1926 was lonely, scared, and pretty sure she had made a terrible mistake leaving Europe. The twenty-year-old had been a rising starlet thanks to her mentor, director Mauritz Stiller. Louis B. Mayer had snapped up both of them on a 1925 talent-shopping trip (it was never confirmed who he really wanted—the actress or the director). With barely a schoolgirl’s mastery of English, Garbo was forced to pose for cheesecake photos, conduct interviews, and portray silly, one-dimensional vamps onscreen. In her first American project, The Torrent, she was directed not by Stiller but by Monta Bell; she had no chemistry (onscreen or off) with leading man Ricardo Cortez. Stiller was assigned to, then fired from, her next film, The Temptress: Fred Niblo directed, and Antonio Moreno costarred. Both films were competent but unexciting melodramas that gave her little chance to really act. Not only was she separated from Stiller (he returned to Sweden in late 1927 and would die the following year), but Garbo now suffered 118 The Peak a personal loss. Her younger sister Alva—herself a great beauty and promising young actress—died of lymphatic cancer on April 21, 1926, while Greta was filming The Temptress. What little socializing she did was with Hollywood’s Swedish community: Stiller, Lars Hanson, Nils Asther, Einar Hanson, Karl Dane. She skulked sullenly around, too shy to speak to people and plotting her escape back to Sweden. Garbo and Gilbert had already met, and the portents were not promising for friendship, let alone romance: Jack walked past the newcomer Greta Garbo in a portrait by Ruth Harriet Louise, late 1920s (author’s collection ). Chapter Seven 119 one day on the MGM lot and shouted out cheerily, “Hello, Greta!” She froze up and replied, “It’s Miss Garbo.” Jack laughed, “Imagine upstaging me!” Even naïve starlet Anita Page, signed by MGM in the late 1920s, knew that “you just didn’t go up to Garbo and say hello!” Groucho Marx once reportedly spotted Garbo at MGM, peeked under her slouch hat, and told her, “Pardon me, madam, I thought you were a guy I knew in Pittsburgh.” Flesh and the Devil was based on a 1906 novel by Hermann Sudermann : the story of two boyhood friends caught in a romantic triangle and torn apart by an amoral vamp. Joining Jack and Garbo was handsome blond actor Lars Hanson—a fellow Swede who had already appeared with Garbo in the 1924 Swedish release Gösta Berlings Saga, directed by Mauritz Stiller. Cinematographer William H. Daniels assured that everyone looked fabulous—in fact, he became Garbo’s favored cameraman , shooting nearly all of her films, through Ninotchka. The costars’ official introduction came on the set around the beginning of August 1926, when they shot the scene where Jack’s character (earnest young military cadet Leo von Harden) meets Garbo’s (the mysterious Felicitas von Rhaden). In retrospect, everyone saw “love at first sight,” as Garbo’s interpreter, actor Sven Hugo Borg, put it. “Some instant spark, some flash seemed to pass between them the instant they looked into each other’s eyes,” said Borg years later. Of course, Garbo and Gilbert were acting the parts of two people who fall in love—you can see this spark and flash today in the film, and it is tempting to put it down to more than just professional ability. Director Clarence Brown told historian Kevin Brownlow, “At first Gilbert didn’t know if he wanted to work with her.” Shortly after that first train-station introduction, they filmed an outdoor love scene: Brown, in hindsight, felt that “it was the damndest thing you ever saw. It was the sort of thing Elinor Glyn used to write about. When they got into that first love scene, well, nobody else was even there. Those two were alone in a world of their own.” Which was...