The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (157 page)

Did such an incident occur in life? If not, it should have. Could a living legend fail to behave in life as she would in art? The comparison of incidents is hardly useful biographically, for it only shows the way in which legend has overwhelmed history in Garbo’s case. But it does point to the technique of the goddess: she was supremely good at being observed, as if unawares. The Stiller incident comes from the words of a bystander, lulled into thinking that Garbo’s preoccupation was affording him a private insight. That is exactly the means by which Garbo wins us in her films, by seeming so enrapt in her own feelings that she encourages us into the breathless expectancy of voyeurs.

That technique should not be passed off as cynical or instinctive. We believe in stars only when a natural reticence is perfectly allied to the discipline of performance. Garbo graciously allowed herself to be photographed and gently made it clear that she was turning a blind eye to the intrusion. Any actress in intimate close-up does the same thing by looking discreetly away from the lens. Garbo did it more enchantingly than most. And there are valuable comments from some of her most experienced midwives (or altar boys) to illustrate this. MGM took care of her and persisted with men who understood her or in whose company she felt at ease.

Clarence Brown was an insipid depictor of glamour, but he directed Garbo six times, partly because he recognized the command she held over the camera: “Garbo had something behind the eyes that you couldn’t see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other.”

Nobody photographed Garbo so often in close-up as William Daniels, who worked on twelve of her fourteen sound pictures. He has mentioned a method, evident in any of her films: “She was always taken in close-ups or long shots, hardly ever intermediate or full figure. The latter do not come out well.” The fact was that in full-length shot—the glory of, say, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, or Carole Lombard—Garbo was gawky, louche, embarrassed, and clumsy. She needed to be seen from afar, in full shot or in glowingly soft close-up: how well that style responds to the voyeur impulse, and how clearly it derives from silent cinema. Garbo had her origins in that, of course, but she always spoke cautiously, because she never made English as subservient to her mouth and manner as did Dietrich.

The facts of her career show that her desire to escape was begun almost as soon as she entered films. Her childhood had not been happy, but stage training and short films led to her being chosen by Mauritz Stiller for
Gösta Berling’s Saga
(24). Stiller seems to have known what he had found and to have impressed upon her the response to being filmed that she always employed. They went to Istanbul to make a second film together, but funds ran out and Garbo was seconded to
Joyless Street
(25, G. W. Pabst).

She was then hired by MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, with Stiller taken along in tow. She made ten silent films at the studio and quickly established herself as the new woman, passionate but restless and insecure:
The Torrent
(26, Monta Bell);
The Temptress
(26, Fred Niblo);
Flesh and the Devil
(26, Brown);
Love
(27, Edmund Goulding);
The Divine Woman
(28, Victor Sjostrom);
The Mysterious Lady
(28, Niblo);
A Woman of Affairs
(29, Brown);
Wild Orchids
(29, Sidney Franklin);
The Single Standard
(29, John Robertson);
The Kiss
(29, Jacques Feyder).

She talked, eventually, in
Anna Christie
(30, Brown), and thereafter dominated MGM in the 1930s with a diminishing trickle of films:
Romance
(30, Brown);
Inspiration
(31, Brown);
Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise
(31, Robert Z. Leonard);
Mata Hari
(32, George Fitzmaurice);
Grand Hotel
(32, Goulding), the only time on record that she asked to be alone;
As You Desire Me
(32, Fitzmaurice);
Queen Christina
(33, Rouben Mamoulian);
The Painted Veil
(34, Richard Boleslavsky);
Anna Karenina
(35, Brown);
Camille
(36, George Cukor);
Conquest
(38, Brown);
Ninotchka
(39, Ernst Lubitsch)—by now, her best-known and most-loved performance; and
Two-Faced Woman
(41, Cukor).

The war had cut her off from vast European popularity, whereas in America her foreignness always offended in some quarters. In addition, the wartime mood was against the romantically lovelorn. She seized the moment herself and generously released MGM from a very demanding contract. In later years, there were repeated efforts to lure her back, many of which are captivating in prospect: as Bernhardt for Selznick; as George Sand for Cukor; as Dorian Gray for Albert Lewin; as the Duchesse de Langeais for Max Ophuls; in Proust for Visconti. But why should such authority risk appearance, especially if Garbo was as insecure as we liked to think?

When she died, there was plentiful evidence of how ordinary and how dull the real woman had been. And she had never managed to escape that legendary figure—or see the joke. Books appeared and her Sutton Place apartment was photographed—like a liberated shrine. For a few years arguments may persist on whether she was wise or dumb, androgynous or uninterested. But sooner or later such trivia will evaporate and a mysterious truth will be left—she was photographed. She was all in the silver.

Andy Garcia
(Andrés Arturo García-Menéndez), b. Havana, Cuba, 1956
Just as Al Pacino played Cuban refugee Tony Montana in
Scarface
(83, Brian De Palma), so Andy Garcia brought fresh Cuban blood to the flagging Corleones for
The Godfather, Part III
(90, Francis Ford Coppola). Garcia’s Vincent was a ready whip looking for a masterful hand, and the most urgent force of ambition in that autumnal and resigned picture. And Garcia is surely the actor best poised to inherit the force and position of “the Italian generation.”

He came to Miami as a kid and was trained in theatre. For the screen, he has done
Blue Skies Again
(83, Richard Michaels);
The Mean Season
(85, Phillip Borsos); a snakelike villain in
Eight Million Ways to Die
(86, Hal Ashby);
The Untouchables
(87, De Palma);
American Roulette
(88, Maurice Hatton);
Stand and Deliver
(87, Ramon Menendez);
Black Rain
(89, Ridley Scott);
Internal Affairs
(90, Mike Figgis);
A Show of Force
(90, Bruno Barretto);
Dead Again
(91, Kenneth Branagh);
Hero
(92, Stephen Frears);
Jennifer 8
(92, Bruce Robinson); and
When a Man Loves a Woman
(94, Luis Mandoki).

In 1993, Garcia directed a feature-length documentary,
Cachao
, a tribute to the Cuban musician Israel López. In addition, he has been working with fellow Cuban Guillermo Cabrera Infante on a feature script.

That collaboration has not borne fruit yet, but in the meantime Garcia has moved away from the mainstream and towards increasingly Hispanic material:
Steal Big, Steal Little
(95, Andrew Davis);
Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead
(95, Gary Fleder);
Somos un Solo Pueblo
(95, Marcos Zurinaga);
Night Falls on Manhattan
(97, Sidney Lumet);
The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca
(97, Zurinaga); as Lucky Luciano in
Hoodlum
(97, Bill Duke);
Desperate Measures
(98, Barbet Schroeder);
Just the Ticket
(99, David Anspaugh); executive producer and playing Arturo Sandoval in
For Love or Country
(00, Joseph Sargent);
Lakeboat
(00, Joe Mantegna);
The Unsaid
(01, Tom McLoughlin);
The Man from Elysian Fields
(01, George Hickenlooper);
Ocean’s Eleven
(01, Steven Soderbergh);
Confidence
(03, James Foley);
Just Like Mona
(03, Joe Pantoliano);
Twisted
(04, Philip Kaufman). He played the lead in
Modigliani
(04, Mick Davis), and he directed
The Lost City
, a Havana story, scripted by Guillermo Cabrera Infante;
Smoking Aces
(07, Joe Carnahan);
The Air I Breathe
(07, Jieho Lee);
Ocean’s Thirteen
(07, Soderbergh);
La Linea
(08, James Cotten);
The Pink Panther 2
(09, Harald Zwart);
City Island
(09, Raymond De Felitta).

Ava Gardner
(Lucy Johnson) (1922–90), b. Grabton, North Carolina
Gardner’s exceptional Spanish beauty was carried proudly for many years, with head thrown back, half dutifully for so many artistic still photographers and half to compensate for short sight. No doubt about her vivid looks, but rather more concerning the character and intelligence behind them. Apart from being glamorous, she was good as a man’s woman, a sort of gypsy Jean Harlow—indeed, she took the Harlow role in
Mogambo
(53), John Ford’s remake of
Red Dust
.

She made her debut, in 1942, in Robert Z. Leonard’s
We Were Dancing
and had a mixed career for the next few years, playing in the first American films by Fred Zinnemann and Douglas Sirk
—Kid Glove Killer
(42) and
Hitler’s Madman
(43)—in
Young Ideas
(43, Jules Dassin), and adorning Dr. Kildare movies. It was after the war that she broke through to stardom, first as a gangster’s moll in
Whistle Stop
(46, Leonide Moguy) and then in Siodmak’s
The Killers
(46). MGM pushed her hard, in Jack Conway’s
The Hucksters
(47), John Brahm’s
Singapore
(47), and
One Touch of Venus
(48, William A. Seiter), but she was more suited to exotic romance: thus, she never looked better than as the gambling beauty in Siodmak’s
The Great Sinner
(49), in
The Bribe
(49, Leonard), modestly touching in George Sidney’s
Show Boat
(51), and dottily mythic in Albert Lewin’s
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
(51).

She made more conventional films—such as Mervyn Le Roy’s
East Side, West Side
(50)—but was generally put out of doors and/or in costume. Her own busy romantic life (including marriage to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra), her looks, and her taste for sporting activities led to her being cast as a Hemingway woman, first in
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
(52) and then, incredibly, as Brett Ashley in
The Sun Also Rises
(57), both films by Henry King. Otherwise, she made
Lone Star
(52, Vincent Sherman),
Ride, Vaquero!
(53, John Farrow), and
Knights of the Round Table
(54, Richard Thorpe) before playing the title part in Mankiewicz’s
The Barefoot Contessa
(54), perfect casting and clever use of her narrow range. Cukor’s
Bhowani Junction
(56) was much more demanding and the Anglo-Indian in that film is her most touching performance. She then played in Robson’s
The Little Hut
(57) and was an overdressed
Naked Maja
(59, Henry Koster).

She worked sparingly in later years, without distinction in
On the Beach
(59, Stanley Kramer) and Nunnally Johnson’s
The Angel Wore Red
(60), but gloriously good-looking and worldly wise in Ray’s
55 Days at Peking
(63), Frankenheimer’s
Seven Days in May
(64), and Huston’s
Night of the Iguana
(64)—in the last of which she almost manages to be an earth mother. She gave herself up to lavish gesture—as Sarah in
The Bible
(66, Huston) and as an overblown Hapsburg in
Mayerling
(68, Terence Young)—but played a Queen of the Fairies in the fascinating
The Devil’s Widow
(71, Roddy McDowall); was still very beautiful as Lily Langtry in
The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean
(72, Huston);
Earthquake
(74, Robson);
Permission to Kill
(75, Cyril Frankel);
The Sentinel
(76, Michael Winner);
The Cassandra Crossing
(76, George Pan Cosmatos); and
Blue Bird
(76, Cukor).

She was in
City on Fire
(79, Alvin Rakoff);
The Kidnapping of the President
(80, George Mendeluk); Mabel Dodge Luhan in
Priest of Love
(80, Christopher Miles); on TV in
The Long Hot Summer
(85, Stuart Cooper); in the miniseries
A.D
. (85, Cooper); and in
Harem
(86, Billy Hale).

John Garfield
(Jacob Julius Garfinkle) (1913–52), b. New York
With the Group Theater in the late 1930s, he played in Clifford Odets’s
Golden Boy
. Warners signed him and launched him as male interest in a Michael Curtiz sentimental series:
Four Daughters
(38),
Daughters Courageous
(39),
Four Wives
(39) (in flashback), and in
Juarez
(39, William Dieterle). But by Hollywood standards, Garfield was rugged, half-ugly, and belligerent; indeed, as a kid, he had been in and out of Bronx street gangs. He soon became typed as a social outsider, so intransigent that he often went wrong:
They Made Me a Criminal
(39, Busby Berkeley) and
Dust Be My Destiny
(39, Lewis Seiler). He was a prisoner in Litvak’s
Castle on the Hudson
(40) and an ex-prisoner in
East of the River
(40, Alfred E. Green). There followed Curtiz’s
The Sea Wolf
(41), Litvak’s
Out of the Fog
(41), Robert Florey’s
Dangerously They Live
(42), and Victor Fleming’s
Tortilla Flat
(42), on loan to MGM. War brought him parts as one of the crew with a chip on his shoulder: in Hawks’s
Air Force
(43) and Daves’s
Destination Tokyo
(43) and
Pride of the Marines
(45), where he is terrific and raw as the blinded hero.