Metro’s meanness and lack of judgment was one reason he quit and opened his own salon. A New York wholesale house wanted him to design a total of thirty-five dresses a year and offered to pay $150,000 for the job, split between him and Metro. “What’s that to us?” his bosses said. “That’s peanuts. No, you can’t take it, and that’s final.”
Reason number two was the reaction Adrian got from director George Cukor to the twenty-four beautiful costumes designed for Garbo in Two-Faced Woman. I saw them hanging in the Wardrobe Department and drooled over them. But Cukor made up his mind that for this picture she was going to look as she does in reality. No glamour; two fake diamond clips in her frizzed-up hair. No clothes to make an audience’s eyes pop, but wool sweaters and sack frocks.
“After making her a fashion legend, you want to do this to her?” cried Adrian. “Won’t you at least come and see the clothes I’ve made?”
Cukor refused even that. Two-Faced Woman was the last picture Garbo made. She respected Adrian, to the point where she’d sometimes eat her vegetarian lunch in his office. The picture was one of her few failures. He handed in his notice. Metro was burned to a cinder when it had to hire six people to replace him. He’d been in the habit of designing clothes not only for the stars but for the whole company in movies he worked on.
When Garbo retired from the screen, she gave only one autograph as a souvenir. It went neither to Adrian nor Louis Mayer. To her colored maid, the only living soul allowed in her dressing room, whom the studio paid for, she presented a framed photograph of herself on which she had written: “To Ursula, from your friend, Greta Garbo.” I’ve heard of only one similar gesture of hers. Dr. Henry Bieler, of California, put her on a diet to which she’s clung over the years. When he wrote a book, he asked her for an endorsement, which she promptly sent him.
Nowadays she’s lost the passion for self-effacement that had her masquerading as “Harriet Brown,” hidden in a floppy hat and dark glasses. Neighbors in the New York apartment where she lives are devoted to her. Their children exchange greetings with her on the street. Among those neighbors are Mary Martin and Richard Halliday. Their daughter Heller lived with them until she eloped last year.
One day Mary’s front-door bell rang. Garbo was standing outside. “Forgive my intrusion,” she said shyly, “but I have often watched from my window and seen you and your family. Sometimes going shopping. Sometimes getting into your car. You look so happy, and I feel so alone.”
Over the tea that Mary insisted on serving for them both, Garbo found one more friend, to add to the precious few she’s made in her lifetime. Two others, who are devotion itself, are the designer Valentina and her husband, George Schlee.
There was a Christmas Eve before Adrian resigned when I was the stooge in a plot to turn him green around the edges. Omar Kiam, who designed for Sam Goldwyn, was the one to arrange it. Adrian had just announced his engagement to Janet Gaynor. He was giving a party, and Omar was to be my escort. On December 22, Omar informed me that I had to have a new gown. But I hadn’t time to get anything, I told him. “Then I’ll make one. You won’t even need fittings; I’ve got your dress form at the studio. You’ve got to be dressed to the teeth.”
At six o’clock on Christmas Eve, ninety minutes before he was due to collect me to go to Adrian’s, Omar arrived on my doorstep with the dress over his arm. I have never seen anything lovelier: American Beauty red velvet, tightly fitted, with a full, flounced skirt and train. “If this doesn’t knock their eyes out, nothing will,” he grinned.