Greta Garbo - in Retirement

In Retirement

In general, Garbo in retirement led a private life of simplicity and leisure. She made no public appearances and assiduously tried to avoid the publicity she loathed. As she had been during her Hollywood years, Garbo, with her innate need for solitude, was often reclusive. But contrary to myth, she always had many friends and acquaintances with whom she socialized, and later, traveled. Occasionally, she jet-setted with well-known and wealthy personalities, striving to guard her privacy as she had during her career. She has been forever linked to her famous line in Grand Hotel: "I want to be alone." But she later remarked, "I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be let alone.' There is a world of difference".

Still, she often floundered about what to do and how to spend her time ("drifting" was the word she often used), always struggling with her many eccentricities, and her lifelong melancholy, or depression, and moodiness. As she approached her sixtieth birthday, she told a frequent walking companion, "In a few days, it will be the anniversary of the sorrow that never leaves me, that will never leave me for the rest of my life". To another friend she said in 1971, "I suppose I suffer from very deep depression". It is also arguable, says one biographer, that she was bipolar. "I am very happy one moment, the next there is nothing left for me", she said in 1933.

Beginning in the 1940s, She became something of an art collector. Many of the paintings she purchased were of negligible value, but she did buy paintings by Renoir, Rouault, Kandinski, Bonnard, and Jawlensky. Her art collection was worth millions when she died in 1990.

On 9 February 1951, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1953, she bought a seven-room apartment at 450 East 52nd Street in Manhattan, New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life.

In 1969, Italian motion picture director Luchino Visconti allegedly attempted to bring Garbo back to the screen with a small part, Maria Sophia, Queen of Naples, in his adaptation of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. He exclaimed: "I am very pleased at the idea that this woman, with her severe and authoritarian presence, should figure in the decadent and rarefied climate of the world described by Proust". Claims that Garbo was interested in the part cannot be substantiated.

Although she became increasingly withdrawn in her final years, she had become close over time to her house-keeper and cook of thirty-one years, Claire Koger. “We were very close—like sisters", Koger said.

Throughout her life, Garbo was known for taking long, daily walks with companions or by herself. In retirement, she walked the streets of New York City dressed casually and wearing large sunglasses. "Garbo-watching" became a sport for photographers, the media, admirers, and curious New Yorkers, but she maintained her elusive mystique to the end.