"Queen Christina," Part 3 of 3: More Royal Than Human -- Garbo

I begin with the reminder that these posts about Greta Garbo's films are opinions. Today's post has a lot of references to gender and sexuality. I'm not an academic in Gender Studies and I'm not a listened-to voice in terms of today's politics. I'm simply a person who watches old movies, with thoughts and feelings I want to share with anyone who's interested.

 I know there was a gap in this virutal  Garbo film festival late in the summer when I posted a few non-Garbo-movie essays on the blog. Now the series is back. At the end of this post I've given you  links to the essays that came before today's offering. You are now reading  Part 3, about one of my favorite films.

As mentioned in as earlier post about the sources for Garbo's films, the actress did a number of biopics, of which "Queen Christina" was one, obviously. And so we're given the chance to think about Hollywood versus reality. Sweden really did have a Queen Christina, whose reign began about twenty years after William Shakespeare wrote his last play. For reasons explored within this post, historians, both dedicated and casual, have argued for decades about who Christina was and how she lived.

 

 It isn't hard to find one theorist with a set of conclusions and then another theorist with an opposing set. I looked through a number of sites which contained some  history about the Swedish ruler's life and reign. For this post I settled on THIS ONE as the right mix of fun and easy to read but also loaded with facts and dates. If you want to know more the real Christina of Sweden, start there. 

While my wish is to set the record -- well, not straight, haha, let's see,  better start over. My wish is to challenge people who want to bring a modern sensibility to a figure who lived in the 17th century. And I also want to acknowledge the reasons that the character of Queen Christina, as played by Greta Garbo, has remained appealing to so many viewers for so many years. 

 

Cynical folk love the quote (usually ascribed to Oscar Levant but actually originated by Ed Gardner, who played Archie on the old-time radio show "Duffy's Tavern") "Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll get to the real tinsel underneath." But I'm not that cynical. Personally, I love the magic and make-believe of golden-age Hollywood. If I want hard truth, I read the news. And there are reasons why the make-believe was so good back in the 1930s and 1940s, the era in which 'Queen Christina" was written and produced.  People needed a chance to get away from it all, and Hollywood did its best to give movie-goers a means of escape. 

The film came out in 1933, and I do mean came out.  This kiss is one of Hollywood's most remarkable pre-Code moments.

The woman Christina kisses is Ebba Sparre, the real-life lady-in-waiting to the queen. While it's not clear historically that Christina was a lesbian as we would define the term today, most researchers are certain that she had romantic attachments to other women and some of her contemporaries were aware that Ebba had a sexual relationship with Sweden's ruler. More on Ebba in a moment.

 

 

Margaret Leland Goldsmith, an international finance expert who became a prolific biographer, translator, and author of historical fiction (and one-time lover of Vita "Orlando" Sackville-West), wrote a number of "psychological biographies," including Christina of Sweden, published in 1935, two years after the release of the Garbo film. 

Here's the opening for Chapter Five of Goldsmith's book Christina of Sweden:  "Most of Christina's biographers have agreed that her refusal to marry was the decisive factor in her life. And they agree that had she married, she would not have abdicated; she would have become a great ruler instead of a great adventuress."

My comment on this passage in the book:  For most women of the 17th century, marriage could provide security or it could make a woman unsafe in her own home, depending on how her husband chose to treat her. At its worst, the marriage contract could be an asset grab or lifelong servitude. At best, it could be a partnership with benefits for both parties. But in the mid-1600s, it was unlikely to be a love match chosen by both husband and wife because of passion or compatibility. Christina could just have been smart enough or so enabled by birthright and money to expand her options.  Could Christina have simply reasoned that to be a wife, one had to be a woman, so if one has the power to rename oneself as "king," then one can't be a wife? Wasn't it Golda Meir who said that women shouldn't learn typing as a backup in case they couldn't find a good job, because if you can't type they can't make you work as a typist?

But then I find valid pushback to this idea that Christina wasn't expressing herself, just outmanuevcering her opponents in this bit of dialogue from the film "Queen Christina" It's Hollywood dialogue but of interest because it's based on someone's hearing similar words in Christina's court:

 

 And this side of the argument is the one author Margaret Goldsmith takes. In Christina of Sweden,  Goldsmith continues on the topic of Christina's refusal to marry:

"None of them however, even serious modern writers, venture to discuss the delicate reasons prompting her to remain unmarried...Had Christina's elderly advisers suspected the intensity of her devotion to Ebba Sparre, they would have been shocked to the very depth of their Lutheran souls." The closeness of the queen and her lady-in-waiting does seem remarkable -- and obviously, it was remarked on by people at the time. The era of the "romantic friendship" between women was far into the future.

When deciding about the hitorical truth, I feel that it's important to keep in mind that biographer Margaret Goldsmith herself had experienced romantic love with another woman, after which she'd chosen to seek a divorce from her husband. Was she recognizing, in Christina's life, a familiar set of emotions, or was she seeing what she wished to see? How would any of us, including Goldsmith herself, know for sure?

The famous on-film woman-to-woman kiss was thrilling to many movie-goers in the early 1930s, I suspect the Hollywood writers knew it was sensational but they may not have seen it as the enormous shock it was to the rest of America. The scriptwriters for "Queen Christina" came from a group of European refugees, centered around actress and writer Sasha Viertal.  

I'm not sure why it is that Europe has historically been so much more tolerant of LGBT+ folk than the United States. As late as the 1980s and 1990s, we saw that across the Atlantic, society accepted gay men and lesbians in military service. Many individual nations passed marriage-equality laws without a lot of fuss. And even back in Greta Garbo's era, those who'd fled Berlin and Vienna to end up in Los Angeles had direct experience with seeing gay men forced to wear the pink triangle or sent to work camps or suffering worse fates than that. 

Of course, Hollywood doled out more tolerance to some than to others. Racism and depictions of any culture outside the WASP ideal were at horrifying and damaging levels. But compared to the rest of the U.S., Hollywood was tolerant and accepting. A surprising number of women (white women of course) and LGBT+ people worked as professionals within  the film industry. Some held positions of power when that happened nowhere else. And this, in my view, was because in entertainment as a business, it was talent that counted more than anything else, especially when we're thinking about people who worked behind the scenes.

"Queen Christina" was made just before Will Hayes created a code used to for censor movies and choose which films the public would be allowed to see. A lot of wild stuff was shown on the movie screen.  Hollywood was insular, and when you live and work in a tolerant place, you can forget how the rest of the world can be. I know this from moving from conservative Indianapolis to the liberal  college town Bloomington, an hour's drive south. When I lived in Bloomington, people used to say "If we didn't live in Bloomington, we'd have to live in Indiana." Later, when I lived in another college town -- Columbus, Ohio -- I remember the looks of astonishment some young people from very small towns in the Buckeye State wore on their faces when they arrived in the fall as college frosh. When they saw actual obvious gay and lesbian people who were, say, eating in a restaurant, they couldn't believe it.. Not just on TV! Real gay people eating a sandwich in public!! The small-town folk were goggled-eyed at first, then they got used to us. 

An even bigger divide than that between town and gown exists, of course, between the worlds of royalty and non-royalty. Any love story of Queen Christina and Ebba Sparre is complicated by the fact that  Christina was the ruler of a nation and Ebba  was her subject. Though many a romantic movie has made love between a royal and a commoner seem feasible, there's always the power difference. Though Ebba Sparre was a companion rather than a servant, someone from the nobility, who had her portrait done in oils and things like that, the convention with a lady-in-waiting was that she must always be of lower social standing than the woman she served. So while the relationship is not quite that of Arnold Schwarzenegger canoodling with the family nanny, it's not like Queen Christina's love life was with a social peer, as happens with most (if not all) humans. On the other hand, it should be noted, while the real Christine was not the lovely movie star we see when Garbo plays the queen, Ebba Sparre was apparently so gorgeous that she played the role of Venus in a mythology-based play put on at the court. So at least Ebba had some form of power that balanced things a bit. 

The subtitle of today's blog post is "More Royal Than Human," which is a reference to Part 1 of this series, subtitled "More Regal Than Royal."While I don't think royals can be called inhuman, they really do live in a way that rarely overlaps the experiences of ordinary human beings. This goes double -- or perhaps triple or quadruple -- if we are going back historically to a time when kings and queens were not figureheads and ceremonial ribbon-cutters in modern democracies, but the actual rule-makers and rule-enforcers in their lands. 

If you think about family or friends who have attended different kinds of school, it's obvious how these experiences have shaped their world views. Someone who was homeschooled had a very different childhood from someone who was sent to a math and science program and then was expected to do three hours of homework every evening. And someone sent to boarding school had yet another experience. And fifth grade was one thing to someone who went to a substandard school in a crime-filled neighborhood and something else to a child in a school filled with the latest technology, picked up after school in a van and driven to a playdate at a safe playground in a quiet neighborhood. All these individuals are children who got something called "education,"  but none of these people could really relate to the experiences of the others. That's the closest analogy I can come up with for the difference between myself, a product of an unremarkable public school in an unremarkable city, and someone of royal birth. 

Add to that going back in time to an era where European rulers had either total power or shared power with a government, and we get even more things about hereditary rulers which are not like the rest of us. For example, the "royal we." In its 1970s "Flying Circus" televsion show, Monty Python had an animated bit with Queen Victoria "talking" and she'd say "We are not amused" at the end of a comedy bit. 

 

Referring to oneself in the third-person does sound weird. But Queen Victoria did it as an ackowledgement that she was not  single individuals but representatives of the State.  Saying "we" was not to make herself more important, but to express that she had more responsibility than a commoner had. 

When I chose the subtitle "More Royal Than Human" for today's post, I didn't mean that a king or queen is inhuman like a robot or a criminal but in the "royal we" sense of Queen Victoria. Christina of Sweden, like other European rulers was considered to be less like a single human being and more like a functional unit of a larger machine. An individual person has more room for self-expression and may be allowed to develop naturally from their own wishes and hopes, but a representative of the State may need to become what the State needs. 

This idea is not unfamiliar to me personally. I grew up among the working poor, for whom household responsibilities were like the duties a ruler-by-inheritance owe an entire nation. In the families I grew up around, the fathers often did work which was dangerous and injurious to their health. In high school I knew a lot of boys who were promoted to manhood when the father died or if the workload was too heavy for the adults. in my own mother's Appalachian culture, there was a tradition of the "Big Girl," who was a daughter promoted to the mother's assistant.

When kings and queens rules nations, a member of a royal family was less a person and more a walking representation of the state. As a representative, a daughter may be called on to become a son. It's a bit like the roles of male actors in ancient Greece who were called upon to play female roles. Women were not allowed to appear on the stage, so for the good of theatre, men needed to step up and play the female roles. 

 

Much more bizarre roles were played out in royal courts of medieval times. In order to create bonds between nations, a male infant in one country was betrothed or married to a female infant in another nation, and then advisors to each baby did the actual rulership. And we certainly can look at British history, from ancient to modern, to find examples of gay kings who were theoretically married to women chosen by their families. It wasn't just gay men who had fake marriages. Male consorts sometimes sat next to their wives (and sovereigns) at public events, acting the role of husband, but then hours later they didn't have access to the current queen's private chambers. And royals often didn't choose who they married; Prince Charles never wanted to marry Diana -- he wanted Camilla, but his mother wouldn't allow him to remain single and happy with his married girlfriend.

Which brings us to the idealized view of Queen Christina, as played by Garbo in the movies, as a free spirit, doing as her heart told her to. Of course Christina is supposed to be exceptional, but members of the royalty have many more obligations and fewer freedoms than the people they rule.

 

What people think of you, whether or not you were born to rule, makes a difference in what you have to have to be free. You need position, allies, and money if you hav e to defend yourself from those who would limit your personal freedoms.  Pilot and speedboat champion Jo Carstairs had her own island. 

So far we've spent time in a consideration of who the actual Queen Christina was and what we believe or accept about her. Now to that, we add some modern recent cultural history to actress Greta Garbo, who seemed very androgynous or masculine to some people at the time, and who still has that vibe now for modern viewers. 

The same physique which makes Garbo look so glamorous  in evening gowns also made her a natural for the boyish fashions from the age of the flapper. Garbo was a star in Europe and then America during the film industry's silent era and costume designers made the most of the star's long slim torso. 

 

When we think about the flapper, what we get to pretty quickly is physical freedom. Of course there was psychological freedom and release from social expectations. Instead of completing a limited educational program and waiting at home with her hope chest and trousseau for someone to come purchase her, the wild girl of the jazz age had enthusiasm for life. She needed a body freed up for dancing and climbing in and out of roadsters and bedroom windows. What a change from the Victorian and Edwardian eras! And that sense of self-freedom was Greta Garbo all the way. She was not only naturally athletic but Scandinavian and outdoor sports like skiing had always been part of her life. 

It's easy to think, that because Garbo looked so good in masculine or boyish attire that this said something about her personally. There's much more speculation about Garbo's love life for a century, and how the hell really knows the heart of any specific human being, famous or not? We tend to associate butch women with lesbianism, but what that really used to mean is that women with short hair, tailored clothes, etc. were in a position to express themselves openly. They were either daring rebels or they were well-to-do or socially prominent. Take for example, Vita Sackville-West, mentioned earlier in this post as author Margaret Goldsmith's one-time lover.

Sackville-West was married to a husband with a title, and the couple had a separate-lives arrangement. Novelist Virginia Woolf, who was also married, was widely believed to be one of Sackville-West's lovers, and she used Vita as a model for her character Orlando. 

Add to this the Hollywood publicity machine. Garbo's contemporary Marlene Dietrich was marketed by her manager to exude sex appeal to female movie-goers. Much secret swooning occurred.

The same thing happened with Garbo. There are many publicity stills of Garbo in films, especially "Queen Christina," which feature masculine dress and hairstyle. Note the slicked-back hair in this shot. 

 

 

Another memorable visual is the tavern scene in which Garbo is with two companion.  They're dressed like The Three Musketeers. Garbo's got a cool hat.

And in this publicity still, Garbo's got another  cool hat. 

 

I've seen a number of online essays speculating that Queen Christina was transgender. I recognize the fact that many young trans kids will correct pronouns used for them ("I am a boy, not a girl" or the other way around) and that they will seek out clothing and possessions which match the person they recognize inside themselves. So Christina, in history and on film, using the terms "king" and "bachelor" sort of match that, as do the choices of outfits which were traditionally worn by active men. And then we see Greta Garbo in several masculine costumes and the trans label seems to fit. 

But if we watch all of "Queen Christina," we  note that the queen wears a wide variety of outfits in the film. I don't want to confuse the film with real life, but since we don't have lots of portraits of Christina, we may have to go with the Hollywood version as a rough guide. True, in the filn Christina wears trousers at a time when most female persons didn't do so, but the outfit in the publicity shot above is a disguise. It's similar to the costumes worn by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in "Some Like It Hot," or the suit and fedora worn by Katharine Hepburn in "Sylvia Scarlett," for the same reasons. 

 

 

The characters are traveling and avoiding detection by pretending to be a very, very different person. And of course while the escaping musicians in "Hot" are safer from mobsters when dressed in female attire, it's only because they are sharing a train car with an "all-girl" orchestra. If it was just the two of them, they'd be as unsafe as Sylvia Scarlett would have been traveling with her usual hairstyle and clothing. 

It wouldn't have been safe for either Queen Christina or Greta Garbo to openly acknowledge, but much live openly, as a lesbian. If Christina would have even known what that was. (I didn't until I was late in my teens, and I was born more than three hundred years after the Swedish monarch.) There was a time when a butch-femme model was better understood by the world than two people expressing gender in the same manner. So if Christina of Sweden found herself in love with Ebba Sparre, might she not have thought "Well, one of us has to be the boy, and I'm closer to that"? I'm not saying that Christina was not trans, as how would I know? I'm just saying you can't tell from a disguise an actress wears in a Hollywood movie or from fragmented 17th century historical records. 

Of course these disguises made for excellent material for movie publicity, where we are back to the kind of selling to the public that Dietrich's manager did. Gender-bending always catches the viewer's eye.

Let's consider looking again at a very different Garbo, this time in one of her early films, a silent picture in which she plays a former peasant girl who has become a celebrated opera diva:

Is Garbo more or less herself in this role? She was a movie star by this time, so wasn't she more like this glamorous figure than she was like the girl king of Sweden? Also was from a humble background, a former shopgirl turned department store model who became a celebrity dressed in fabulous costumes. 

I would argue that Garbo herself wasn't any more Queen Christina in a falconer's outfit or broad-brimmed hat than male Greek actors were when playing female roles, as depicted in those Greek actor figurines we saw earlier. She wasn't an opera diva, either, or a ballerina, or Napoleon's mistress, or the pair of twins she played in her last film role. She was an actress, and she became what the director needed her to be. 

 In making these points about "Queen Christina," I wouldn't dream of trying to take the fun and excitement out of the film. We all need folk heroes and heroines. I love seeing Robin Hood and his crew partying hearty after robbing a greedy baron and sharing the wealth with the poor, even though the historical record is, um, a bit different. The same with Garbo's version of Queen Christina, who reminds me, in her psychological, emotional, and physical freedom of speedboat racer Jo Carstairs, who was rich enough to own her own island in the Bahamas and do just as she liked.

The wonderful thing about the movies is that each of us can look at a film character and see ourselves or a self we wish to be. And that's okay, as long as we don't try to tell other viewers what they see. And the movies kindly stay the same (except perhaps for colorization) while we evolve so we can find new connections between ourselves and an on-screen persona.  When I was young I found Garbo's Swedish queen-king an inspiration in her daring. And I find the film character's honesty and clarity inspiring these days when adventure is mostly behind me but I find the need for greater and greater freedom of mind and spirit. 

 As a treat, let's finish today's post with the trailer for the film version of "Orlando," with Tilda Swinton playing the lead role. 

 

 

Next week:  Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in "Queen Christina" and other movies

 

FINDING THE REST OF THIS BLOG SEIRES ON "QUEEN CHRISTINA":

 I began this series last summer with two posts:

                         the very first one   and   the essay which came next. 

After a two-part overview on the sources for each script, we went back to the beginning and looked at the films in detail, sometimes in groups and sometimes singly. We did this first with the silent films and then moved on to consider sound films in a bit more depth. 

"Queen Christina" is such a culturally complex film that I've needed three posts (well twelve posts probably but we'll settle for three) to give the movie the attention it deserves. And actually there've been more than three posts, as there's a significant section on "Queen Christina" in the second half of the two-part series I mentioned above, the one about where Greta Garbo's movies came from.

The post on the sources of Garbo's sound films including "Queen Christina" is from June 15, 2021 and is found HERE. 

Part 1 of the "Queen Christina" three-parter was posted on Aug. 31, 2020. It's called   "Queen Christina: More Regal Than Royal".  

Part 2 of my consideration "Queen Christina" concentrates on the visuals in the film and has lots of stills and publicity shots. That part appeared on the blog on Sept. 7, 2020 and is found HERE. 

And what you're reading now is Part 3 of 3 on "Queen Christina."

Garbo