Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen

Chapter 6. Queen Garbo

67 Chapter 6 Queen Garbo Mamoulian’s work with Marlene Dietrich in Song of Songs led to his next assignment, directing Greta Garbo in Queen Christina. Dietrich and Garbo were probably among the most whispered-about stars in Hollywood’s European expatriate colony. Both were thought to enjoy sophisticated vices unsuspected by the American public. Both tended toward trousers and masculine garb at a time when clothing was strictly segregated by gender. Suspected of enjoying the intimate company of both men and women, Dietrich and Garbo forced the studio publicists to work overtime to deflect rumors in an era when homosexuality was considered criminal and career ending. Dietrich’s daughter Maria Riva described Mamoulian’s appeal to her mother and perhaps to Garbo. “Rouben Mamoulian was not a Hollywood-type director,” she wrote. “No von Stroheim boots and riding crop, not even Cecil B. DeMille pomposity . . . he was quiet. Mamoulian wasn’t just calm, he seemed becalmed.”1 Garbo, one of Hollywood’s biggest box office stars in 1932, signed an unusual contract with MGM before leaving the United States for a six-month sojourn in her native Sweden. The studio granted her control over production dates and approval of directors and costars, and before departing, she agreed to star in a historical drama based on Christina, Sweden’s seventeenth-century monarch.2 Her friend Salka Viertel immediately launched into a screenplay. Viertel was pleased when producer Irving Thalberg referenced the lesbian-themed German film Mädchen im Uniform during an early script conference, telling her that “handled with taste it would give up very interesting themes.”3 MAMOULIAN 68 As was common in Hollywood, then and now, the original treatment passed through many hands on the way to production. Viertel complained that other screenwriters filled the script “with so-called ‘Lubitsch touches’ and the drama turned into a comedy.” One of the script doctors, British writer H. M. Harwood, decided that Christina should be depicted “as the prototype of a modern woman who resents any of the feminine functions that tend to remind her of her dependence .” Finally, playwright S. N. Behrman, who had written Broadway hits for Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, was brought in to complete the job. Aware of the lacuna in the historical record of Christina, his main concern was “Does the characterization emerge as a warm, living human being?”4 Like Elizabeth I, England’s “Virgin Queen,” Christina of Sweden reigned in a man’s world. She was deliberately raised as a boy by tutors who hoped she would grow into the father and defender of the nation. Intellectually curious, she corresponded with Europe’s leading philosophers and was something of a reformer who sided with the commoners against the nobility. As Viertel said, her “masculine education and complicated sexuality made her an almost contemporary character.”5 Christina’s refusal to marry and her fascination with a Roman Catholic world far removed spiritually and geographically from her own country’s frigid Lutheranism led her to abdicate and depart from Sweden for Rome. Christina’s life had been popularized by a pair of biographies in the 1920s, Faith Compton Mackenzie’s The Sibyl of the North and Margaret Goldsmith’s Christina of Sweden: A Psychological Biography. As early as 1927, MGM envisioned Garbo as the ideal Christina, but the vogue for historical biography pictures that began with Alexander Korda’s The Private Life of Henry VIII was the impetus for finally turning the concept into cinema. Along with her ethnicity and androgyny, Garbo shared Christina’s solitary spirit of independence, her aura of mystery, and her sense of being caged in a gilded prison. Like the character she would portray, Garbo eventually renounced her position for a private life. Her sullen lack of interest in stardom had long made her invulnerable to studio threats. By 1932 she already acted as if she would rather disappear from Hollywood than continue to work on projects beneath her contempt. Queen Garbo 69 Mamoulian was never bound to a long-term contract with Paramount, and Paramount executive Walter Wanger, with whom he had worked, was now a producer at MGM. Mamoulian was not MGM’s first choice. The studio cabled Garbo as she sailed back to America in March 1933 with suggested directors. She replied that Edmund Goulding and Ernst Lubitsch were acceptable, but neither proved available for Queen Christina. Afterward Mamoulian’s name, probably...