Where have all the sphinxes gone? There’s not a person on this planet today who could make my heart stop as it did when I saw Greta Garbo on Madison Avenue. It was the last day of 1985, on an afternoon steeped in merciless brightness, and, suddenly, there she was: a bulky fur coat, a knitted watch cap and an unpainted face, as closed as a fist, behind big sunglasses that had no aspiration to trendiness.
She didn’t look chic, not even rich, amid the well-buffed women with their big bags and little dogs. But Miss Garbo had on something none of those ladies could afford: she was wearing six decades’ worth of welldocumented silence. And that made her the most glamorous creature I had ever set eyes on.
These days, the world no longer has any tolerance for - let alone fascination with - people who aren’t willing to publicize themselves. Figures swathed in shadows are demode in a culture in which the watchword is transparency.
But from the moment she moved to Manhattan in the early 1950s, Greta Garbo was stalked by all sorts of people as a genuine rara avis, the choicest of all specimens of a soon-to-be extinct species.
Which she was. The Swedish- born actress, who retired from film in 1941, became an international star as an enigmatic love goddess in silent movies, and she carried with her ever after an awareness that saying nothing is what becomes a legend most. And because she rarely spoke we were free to hear her whispering to us in our dreams.
Garbo couldn’t exist in the 21st century. Today’s democracy of technology would, of course, conspire to put a fast and brutal end to the tantalizing demi-invisibility that Garbo sustained so well. Everyone who possesses a cellphone now is a potential member of the paparazzi.
The romance of people discussing their Garbo sightings would be replaced by the diminishing boasting of trophy hunters comparing shots. Disgruntled friends of Garbo’s would start anonymously posting unflattering tidbits about her on the Web.
“Oh, her again,” you’d say, when her face popped up on the latest celebrity gossip site. And were the divine Greta (oh, perish the thought) reduced to posting desperately, “I vant to be alone,” we would all snicker in knowing contempt.
Increasingly, the perception is that everyone is knowable, everyone is accessible and that everyone is potentially a star. Social media sites and the endlessly proliferating TV reality shows are now commonplace forums for the famous who want to seem like ordinary people and for ordinary people who want to seem famous. Us magazine’s rubric “Stars, they’re just like us!” has now been inverted to “Us, we’re just like stars.”
Craving mystery in an era of YouTube and reality TV.
I was seated not long ago next to a magazine editor, discussing a former glamour girl who had disappeared to a farm in South America. I said that I thought it was cool that she’d been able to quit being a celebrity. “Really?” the editor answered sadly. “I see it as giving up.’’
Fame has become an existential condition: If your image isn’t reflected back at you, then how do you know you’re alive? The problem is that 24-hour visibility will breed, if not contempt, then weary familiarity. That’s why tabloid newspapers need a new generation of cover girls and boys every year or so, a breeding process facilitated by reality television.
Transparency, of course, is itself an illusion. To keep up with Gwyneth Paltrow’s dietary habits isn’t really to know her. All that such informational minutiae does is make its dispensers more prosaic and monotonous. It’s not easy for the famous to hold out against the pressures of nonstop self-revelation. Jacqueline Onassis, a master of staying famous and unknowable, possessed a sort of self-feeding megacelebrity that shows up only rarely; Diana, Princess of Wales, had it, too.
My heart sank when I saw that Julia Roberts had become the face of some cosmetics company. Ms. Roberts had been one of the few contemporary stars to keep her public at a seductive remove, a posture that did wonders for her image. And, oh, the horror seeing Robert De Niro promoting a film on a talk show.
A hunger abides in us to see mere mortals approaching perfection, and artists are almost never as interesting as their art. When we first fall in love with people, they always seem remote, unattainable. Holding on to love after you’ve crossed the divide between you and the object of your desire is a chapter in achieving maturity. But there’s a part of us that needs to keep falling in love with the girl in the mists in the distance or the boy riding away on a horse. You know what happens when these dream girls and boys open their mouths or scratch themselves. The mystery dissolves .
So to honor a nearly forgotten time when there was romance in the unspoken, and human mystery wasn’t something that could be solved by the end of a TV episode, might we have a moment of silence?
No? I didn’t think so.
