Did Greta Garbo really want to be alone?

I need some help with a film star quote of great political importance.

Greta Garbo famously said "I want to be alone". These were not her own words, they were the words of her character Grusinskaya in the 1932 film Grand Hotel.

Or were they?

Later Garbo was to say this:

I never said I want to be alone. I only said I want to be left alone. There is all the difference.

And indeed there is.

In fact, the shift that David Willetts and others are trying to make for Conservatives is based precisely on an understanding of the difference between being alone and being left alone. Tory modernisers believe that people want to be left alone, but don't want to be alone.

Hence my assertion that the quote was of importance.

Yet Garbo's remark about the quote is puzzling. Study the script of Grand Hotel and it is quite clear that she did say "I want to be alone".

So is there any historian of films or expert on Garbo able to explain her disavowal of the quote? Does anyone know the context?

Comments

[bowleserised]

Maybe when she said "I didn't say I wanted to be alone" she was referring to real life, and not a film script.

[Elan Durham]

To clarify one quote by employing another, Emily Dickinson wrote:

"THE SOUL selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more."

I have feeling Garbo would have understood this idea, there being a great deal of difference between privacy and isolation, welcomed company and the police state.

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

Yes, I can help. Mauritz Stiller, Greta's sponsor and director, had been replaced by Monta Bell as director of The Torrent.He asked Guido Orlando, Press AGENT TO HELP HIM LAUNCH GARBO. HE WAS MADLY IN lOVE WITH HER. Orlando spoke Italian with Stiller and suggested she hide her face and refuse all interviews in order to attract the attention of the Photogs. It worked. Greta wasn't s h y She was an actress. The first one to r u n a w a y from publicity!!
Peter Kinsley, (www.peterkinsley.com)
London, England

[Brian Taylor]

Actually, if I remember correctly, in Grand Hotel, Garbo said, "I want to be alone NOW"

[peter kinsley www.peterkinsley.com]

I have been asked, via my website to expand on the above: Greta Garbo's sponsor in America and director of her first film, was Mauritz Stiller, but a production row removed him from The Torrent and he lost the credit for launching G.G. in the USA.
Guido Orlando as a boy, had bribed his village doctor's son to write an essay in his name on why he wanted to visit America. It was to find his father, who was working as a coal miner with two of his sons and told little Guido to go back to Italy. Adopted by an American family he later became pilot fish for publicity for Rudolph Valentino, and got Clark Gable his first dollar earnings as an actor, but that came later. Stiller spoke Italian with Guido (as Valentino did) and was lonely in his enormous house and told Guido he loved G.G. and wanted her to succeed, sayng "They'll turn her into another Clara Bow or Gloria Swanson unless I can wake them up to what a great actress she is." She had lost a part with Metro as they said she "didn't push hard enough".
Guido, aged 21, had a brainwave, and his campaign of interviews refused, "snatched" pictures of her cloche hat hiding the beautiful face began. The myth of Garbo's shyness was born, and was working still when I lunched with Guido on Ostia beach and the Via Veneto in Rome in the 60's and she lived near Cap Ferrat, ate in the Mont Agel golf club, Monte Carlo, and a French resto. in London, still hiding from the cameras.