Carolina Watchman

Couldn't Stand For "Mr. Garbo"

Greta Garbo, writing in Liberty, says she will not marry because she could not bear to have her husband known as "Mr. Garbo."

Referring to the tendency of the film colony to call the non-acting husbands of movie stars "so-and-so's husband," Miss Garbo says, "I should hate to have my husband lose his identity to that extent."

"Rather than that," she adds, "I should want to retire from the screen altogether. I should want to forget that I had ever been Greta Garbo."

In an explanation of her retirement from Hollywood social life. Miss Garbo writes that when her director, Mauritz Stiller, died, she was "like a ship without a rudder."

"I was bewildered--lost--and very lonely," she adds. "I refused absolutely to talk to reporters, because I didn't know what to say. By degrees I dropped out of the social whirl of Hollywood. I retired into my shell. I built a wall of repression around my real self and I lived--and still live--behind it.

"If I needed recreation, I liked to be out of doors; to trudge about in a boy's coat and boy's shoes . . . . Most hostesses disapprove of this trousered attitude to life, so I do not inflict it upon them.

"Besides, I am still a little nervous, a little self-conscious about my English. I feel awkward, shy, afraid.

In her discussion of marriage, Miss Garbo says that the only good reason she can see for two persons marrying is that they can be together most of the time.

"That is impossible for me so long as I remain on the screen," she says "The marriage contract which has to make the best of whatever is left over after the film contract has been fulfilled seems rather a makeshift. . .'. . I am in deadly earnest when I say that a film star's career is a whole-time job."