Cecil and Greta: A Love Story
by William Abrahams
MEMOIRS OF THE FORTIES by McGraw-Hill, $10.00
I am prepared to believe that the events in Cecil Beaton’s discreetly titled volume, the major portion of which is a memoir of himself in love with Garbo, happened exactly as he has described them. And yet, as though to remind us once again that art sets the pattern that life follows, the events compose themselves (or are composed) into a kind of novel, a belated recruit to a genre one had thought extinct: the quasiconfessional, ardently self-absorbed romance of a young man in love that came into solemn being with The Sorrows of Werther in 1774, flourished through the nineteenth century (Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe is a notable example), and received the coup de grace in our own time in a work of comic genius, Lolita-a fittingly perverse end of the line, and quite possibly the last great love story. Mr. Beaton, as we know from his nostalgic ballet and theatrical designs, is much taken with the past, and it is not surprising that the “Cecil" of his chronicle should be closer in spirit to Goethe’s Werther than Nabokov’s Humbert; he himself remarks on his, Cecil’s, affinity to Adolphe.
What unites these young men-indeed, inherent in the genre itself-is the highly developed sense of “roleplaying.” As heroes they cut recognizable figures: young men in love who know that they are “young men in love”—such is their role and they play it to the hilt, suffering the pains and luxuriating in the pleasures (or vice versa) of love requited-unrequited, all the while observing and recording with scrupulousness (even with self-approval) the least of their sensations. The ladies who inspire these transports tend to be enigmatic, elusive, sometimes saying Yes, sometimes saying No, difficult to pin down, usually impossible to bed down, and in the end lost to their distracted lovers: of such is the kingdom of romantic love.
Because Mr. Beaton is not a novelist (though one feels, given the multiplicity of his talents, that he could easily become one if he chose), and because the story he has to tell is literally true and without disguise, the traditional story as I have suggested it is even more recognizable than might otherwise be the case. Mr. Beaton’s version begins in the winter of 1946. Already a famous photographer, and friend and acquaintance of countless notable figures around the world, he had come to New York to discuss some projected theater designs with producers and to take photographs for Vogue, settling down at reduced rates in a suite he had decorated in the Plaza Hotel. On the evening of March 15, his friend Margaret Case arranged the fatal interview: his first “reunion” with Garbo.
“Reunion”—for ten years earlier, in Hollywood, they had spent a single evening together, but the memory of it lingered. “On that extraordinary evening,” Mr. Beaton writes, “having quaffed large quantities of Bellinis (peach juice laced with champagne), we had improvised wild dances, done impersonations, acted charades, and altogether behaved as if we had known each other forever. We had been like two elemental creatures, loving and laughing with none of the usual barriers of shyness or modesty that strangers must overcome. But when, eventually, dawn broke over Beverly Hills and Garbo drove away in her ramshackle old car, she gave me no indication that she would allow me to continue this so violent and intimate a friendship. In fact she refused my suggestion that I should eat a spinach lunch with her later that day at the studio and the following afternoon I left Hollywood. I did not write to her for I knew that was how she would have preferred it. I would certainly have received no reply.” But in the intervening ten years Garbo remained for him “the most mysterious and alluring phenomenon in the wide world,” and he concludes wistfully, “Would I ever be fortunate enough to meet for a second time, this most elusive of creatures?”
So much for the prologue. We come now to the story itself. The young man arrives at his good friend’s apartment on a wintry night in March. The alluring one is already there. What follows is a perfect replica of romanticism in its full-blown flower: “At the sight of Garbo I felt knocked back, as if suddenly someone had opened a furnace door onto me: I had almost to gasp for the next breath. The warmth of her regard, her radiance, her smile—robbed me of equilibrium: I held onto the back of the chair. Garbo made no sign of recognition but seemed to glean amusement from the mere sight of me. She took it for granted that once again I had immediately fallen in love with her.”
Given the youthful fervor of the prose, it seems advisable to remark that Mr. Beaton at this time was forty-two; Miss Garbo, some five years in retirement from the screen, was forty-one; but no matter—in spirit they were still young, young, young, and after a silence of several days she telephoned to him from her suite at the Ritz Tower and their friendship took fire. That same afternoon, in his suite at the Plaza, he asked her to marry him—“not as a pleasantry but to be taken very seriously.” With a self-absorption worthy of Werther, he remarks, “I had never before asked anyone to marry me, and yet to make this proposal now seemed the most natural and easy thing to do. I was not even surprised at myself.” But Garbo, well within the tradition of the elusive heroine, “looked completely astounded,” and made the traditional heroine’s reply: “Good heavens! But this is so sudden!”
It is not necessary to follow the story through to its last inevitable farewell. Throughout, the conventions of the genre are evident—both in their earlier and later manifestations, so that at times we leave the terrain of the novel for its reincarnation on film. There is the evening when Cecil and Greta are at the house on upper Fifth Avenue of their friend Mona Harrison Williams. “Most of the vast rooms [are] under dust sheets. It is in one of these dismantled rooms that—among packing cases and covers—by the light of a street lamp outside the window and to the beat of relayed music from Carousel—Greta and I dance for the first time. I am completely ecstatic.” But surely, one feels, one has watched this romantic scene or its prototype before, on the screen, perhaps even with Garbo playing the role of Garbo?
Role-playing remains at the heart of it, and Mr. Beaton, playing his, is almost flawless. (Garbo, it has to be said, is less persuasively rendered elusive to the end.) Yet the realities of the unromantic, contemporary world do break in. For Beaton is not only a young man in love; he is also a famous photographer, and the most revealing episode in the memoir-the only one that would be likely to interest a contemporary novelist has to do with his taking photographs of Garbo and selling them to Vogue, much to her distress. (One would be curious to see what Muriel Spark, for example, might make of such material.)
I have referred earlier to the genre as “extinct”; in that light this tale of Cecil and Greta must have its ghostly effect. No doubt sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, not to mention literary critics and historians, will have reasons to account for the disappearance of the romantic love story from our literature. Role-playing is as much a part of our lives as it has ever been: but the role of the romantic young man in love, even as the role of the woman as goddess, has lost its power to compel. It is difficult to imagine people now taking themselves seriously in such roles. We have arrived at a point in time where Werther, whose lover’s anguish wrung tears from generations of readers, is now written off by W. H. Auden as “a complete egoist, a spoiled brat, incapable of love because he cares for nobody and nothing but himself . . .and who would disagree?
Of Mr. Beaton’s sincerity in the role he played as a young man in love there need be no question. It is the authenticity of the role itself that is in doubt. Unbeknownst to himself, he is caught in the paradox that Lionel Trilling has recently and so splendidly described in Sincerity and Authenticity: “Society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic.”