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Greta Garbo...it's so tempting to romanticize someone so seemingly aloof and alone, but after reading a recent article in the Boston Globe that referred to her "apartness," I had to read more about her because I hardly know anything about her at all.

I've seen many of her films, but way before that I knew she wanted to be left alone (or to be more specific: "I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference.")

I have always been drawn to reserved people and not just because of the mysterious air they exude. There is always more to people than meets the eye, perhaps because, as Garbo herself once said, you need to keep some things to yourself>>>

There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them.

Both this article:

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/the-garbo-next-door-200004
 

and this (from Wikipedia) add to the mystique and sadness of her solitude. But as old school Hollywood (when less was more) and mysterious as it might seem, she was still a real woman who did deserve a right to privacy and probably suffered far more than she ever let on...

In retirement, Garbo generally led a private life of simplicity and leisure. She made no public appearances and assiduously tried to avoid the publicity she loathed.^[113] As she had been during her Hollywood years, Garbo, with her innate need for solitude, was often reclusive. But contrary to myth, she had, from the beginning, many friends and acquaintances with whom she socialized, and later, traveled.^[114][115] Occasionally, she jet-setted with well-known and wealthy personalities, striving to guard her privacy as she had during her career.

Still, she often floundered about what to do and how to spend her time ("drifting" was the word she frequently used),^[116] always struggling with her many eccentricities,^[115][117] and her lifelong melancholy, or depression, and moodiness.^[118][119] 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."^[120] To another friend she said in 1971, "I suppose I suffer from very deep depression."^[121] 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.^[121]