WestView

Garbo and I

February 2010

By Andrew Vélez

What had we shared? Three encounters. The first was in the mid-1960s when a festival of her movies was being shown at a theatre on 60 St. and Third Avenue. It was there that I saw Queen Christina for what was maybe the second time, but the first time in a movie theater and not merely on a small television screen with a grainy print. The potent eroticism of her sexually ambivalent performance totally drew me in. To my surprise, I unexpectedly found myself starting to get hard, in a relaxed and pleasureful way.

Only days after that, on a chilly autumn afternoon while walking in the same neighborhood, which was where I lived at the time (and she as well only blocks away), I was lost in thought with my eyes looking downward at the sidewalk. Wide gray flannel trousers strode into my view. Did I KNOW before I even looked up? I can’t remember now, but there she was. Queen Christina live in dark glasses, looking like a striking if very forbidding European woman of a certain age.

Recognition, surprise and shock must have shown on my face. Her expression was hard and I felt as if I was being told silently in no uncertain terms, I dare you to dare to speak to me! Awed, I obeyed the silent admonition, somewhat stunned to be having one of those encounters with her for which she was famous in New York. Garbo, the walker about town; Garbo, the unapproachable.

The second time was on a late summer afternoon about two years later. I was riding a bus up Third Ave. and there she was again, striding through the crowd, wearing dark brown sunglasses, this time with her hair pulled back, tied with a bit of ribbon. In the bustle of the day no one seemed to be noticing her. And how almost girlish she looked with that ribbon in her hair. I wanted to beat on the bus window or turn to my fellow passengers and shout, “Look! There she is!”

The third and last time was another couple of years later on a quiet, bright, and crystal- clear wintry Sunday morning in early 1968. I remember that time well because I’d only recently bought a Super-8 camera, with thoughts of recording some of the turmoil of what life seemed full of at the time. Assassinations, anti-war marches, “happenings” in Central Park.

If you know New York, then you know that special quiet on Sunday mornings before the city wakes up. Park Ave. was especially still. Maybe it was 8 or 9 AM. I can’t recall exactly, but I had decided to walk over to Central Park to shoot some film. I was walking to the corner of 64 St. when there she was again, this time a ways up the block from me, walking alone, swathed, almost sunken into a classically long, dark brown, wide- collared mink with a matching hat set at a stylish angle. Here I was with a camera, this time loaded with color film. How amazing that would be: to film Garbo, and in color, no less. I stopped in my tracks and stood still near the corner.

She spotted me and no doubt saw the camera as well. She paused in her walking. It was a moment. If I had begun filming her she could of course have covered her face as she had famously done so many times before unwanted cameras. But she wouldn’t have been able to avoid being filmed. And I would have a movie of Garbo.

This was all in a matter of seconds. The moment for a decision was very brief. And I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was something that prevented me from turning the camera on, from intruding in that way. So I kept walking across Park Ave. and she continued on her way down the block. Now I wonder what she thought at the time. Did she appreciate that I had respected her privacy? When I think of her now, I realize she was by herself each time I had seen her.

Years later I told a friend about it and that last encounter. He smiled and said, “It makes a much better story that you didn’t film her.” But still and even until today, a part of me wishes I had dared to do it. And as with so many other moments, I yearn for a do-over.

Even as I also wonder now who even remembers Garbo anymore. Given the blank stares I get when I mention certain names to people below a certain age, would it even matter to anyone? In the years to come I was to become well acquainted with at least three people who knew her well, two of them legendary stars in their own right. I never told any of them about those experiences. Those moments belong to only to us two, to Garbo and me.

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