Was Greta Garbo trans?
The more you get into the Garbo lore, the more complicated her gender identity becomes. A queer icon, and possibly a trans icon as well
Mark
When Greta Garbo lost her battle with breast cancer at the age of 84, her last words were: “it’s been a wasted life, a wasted life, a wasted life.”
It’s a statement that puzzles the modern reader. After starring in some of the most influential (and queerest) films in the early days of the Hollywood system and retiring on dignified terms in the 1940s, what kind of waste is she talking about? Garbo wasn’t just one of the silent era’s first huge global stars: she was the kind of person movies were created around just to give viewers a glimpse of that enchanting, enigmatic face. “What men see in other women drunk,” the Swedish star famously quipped, “they see in Garbo sober.”
In many of her finest film performances—including the lusty Flesh and the Devil and the wonderful Lubitsch romantic comedy Ninotchka—we can easily see the truth of that statement. No one has ever had quite the same kind of onscreen presence as Garbo, and their legacy continues to this day.
How about we take this to the next level?
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She was also—as many can attest—a fairly open bisexual person during a time when queerness in Hollywood was at once privately tolerated and publicly criminalized. Garbo had well-recorded affairs with many glamorous women, including the playwright Mercedes de Acosta, the Hollywood screenwriter Salka Viertel, and the actress Lilyan Tashman. She famously romanced her frequent costar John Gilbert, whom she left at the altar. Joan Crawford reported falling in love with her on the set of Grand Hotel, and Louise Brooks described her as “a completely masculine d*ke.” Her sapphic bisexuality is a matter of record by this point. But the more you get into the Garbo lore, the more complicated her gender identity becomes.
In Diana McLellan’s deliciously dishy book “The Girls,” a portrait of the artist as an egg shines through. Granted, much of McLellan’s work treats gossip as fact, but honestly, when it comes to old Hollywood, the old adage of “print the legend” feels truer than ever. As a child, McLellan writes, Garbo played with her brother’s tin soldiers, along with her close friend Elizabeth. “Sometimes they made believe they were boys, wearing [her brother’s clothes,]” she explains. In an early interview, Garbo said, “Being feminine is a lovely quality which I may not have much of.” Join the club!
The egginess doesn’t stop there. Much of what Garbo seems to have wanted for her career was to have played roles that, at the time, were only given to men. She expressed a wish to play both Hamlet and Dorian Gray at different points in her career. She was of course shot down in this aim—MGM titan Louis B. Mayer was interested less in Garbo’s artistry and more in her box office draw, so her roles in the silent era were necessarily limited to “bad women” and tempresses. But by the early 1930s, after breaking ground in her first talkie as Eugene O’Neill’s reformed sex worker Anna Christie, she had slightly more control. In 1933, before the anti-gay Hays Code set in, she took on the title role in Queen Christina, which saw her dressing as a man for the first part of the film, and enticing her costar (John Gilbert) to fall in love with her in her male clothes. “Christina, like Garbo, preferred men’s clothes, referred to herself as a boy, and loved women,” writes McLellan.
Male clothes were, in fact, what Garbo seemed to enjoy most on and offscreen. For a costume party in the 1920s, the gay designer Adrian made Garbo a bespoke Hamlet costume she would wear to remain incognito. He knew about her desire to play the gloomy Dane, and sadly that costume was the closest she came to realizing that dream. She also, according to her lover Mercedes de Acosta, walked around her apartment in men’s slippers and pajamas, Long before Katharine Hepburn caused a sensation by wearing pants in public, Garbo was making headlines that screamed: GARBO IN PANTS!
It didn’t stop with clothing: at one point, Garbo got Acosta to write her a treatment for a screenplay in which a heroine “changes her life by disguising herself as a young man.” Sadly that film—titled Desperate—never came to fruition. After the project fell through, she pressed her case again with Irving Thalberg, pleading with him to let her play Oscar Wilde’s corrupt queer hero Dorian Gray. Needless to say, that never happened either. But Garbo found ways to exert their masculinity. As remembered by her Ninotchka costar Ina Claire, she and Garbo were talking on set when Garbo suddenly announced: “I have to go to the little boys’ room.” Later on, Claire went into the bathroom and found Garbo had “left the toilet seat up.”
There’s also a compelling case to be made for the infamous Cecil Beaton-Greta Garbo romance as a gay one. Though Beaton and Garbo were both primarily interested in same-sex relationships, the fact that they carried on a romance over the course of years means that for Garbo, this was possibly one of the few relationships in which she could see herself as a gay man.
The evidence is quite thick, and we could go on. But instead, we’ll leave you with this anecdote from the end of Garbo’s career. During drinks with Billy Wilder, Garbo was asked if there was any role that might lure her back to the screen. She did have one in mind. “A clown,” she said. “A male clown.” Later on, when presented with a film script (The Pink Bedroom) written for her by Tennessee Williams, she stated that while she loved the script, she would only make another movie “if the part was not male or female.”
Fans of Greta Garbo know that her life was far from wasted. But the more one learns about her, the more a clear picture of gender dysphoria comes into view. This was someone who had a tortured relationship to their own image as a siren and legendary beauty. What she wanted was to be something more, maybe something a little closer to how she saw herself. We’ll never know exactly what that self looked like, but we can see enough of it to confidently call her one of us.
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