THE outbreak of the war in Europe presented Greta Garbo with a new set of worries, both personal and professional. Fearing a German invasion of the Scandinavian countries, she had arranged in advance to bring her aged mother as well as her brother Sven and his family to the United States. Arriving in California at the end of December 1939, they took up residence in a modest house in a secluded section of Inglewood. Garbo's relatives were, if anything, shyer than she. They kept strictly to themselves, and Garbo seldom spoke of them. Her mother died in California, but because of Garbo's almost morbid dislike of talking about personal matters, few people knew of the occurrence. When Garbo made her first trip to Sweden after the war, she visited a friend who remarked sympathetically about Mrs. Gustafsson's death. Garbo, who was standing at a window in her friend's apartment, replied, "What a lovely view from this window."

Garbo's career was more seriously affected by the spreading war than that of probably any other Hollywood actress because her pictures had always earned more money abroad than in the United States. In fact, few, if any, Garbo films ever returned their investment from exhibition in the United States alone. The knowledge that her lushly romantic, tragic roles had made her the idol of European audiences had always been an important factor in the selection of her vehicles. Now, in the middle of 1940, with the Continent embroiled in war, France in defeat and the rampaging German armies still on the march, the lucrative foreign market was all but gone. In these circumstances M-G-M was faced with the necessity of producing a Garbo film, which, to make a profit, would have to appeal almost exclusively to American audiences.

After many high-level conferences, Metro executives came to the conclusion that the actress who had won her fame primarily by portraying lovely, world-weary women caught in the silken toils of ill-fated love, had to be transformed into a vital, blooming American glamour girl. To this ill-advised enterprise Garbo gave her half-hearted consent. The vehicle selected for her debut as a sporting, fun-loving American type was called Two-Faced Woman. It was destined to be Greta Garbo's last moving picture.

Though the studio denied it at the time, Two-Faced Woman was a remake of a picture called Her Sister From Paris, originally filmed in 1925 and starring Constance Talmadge and Ronald Colman. Based on a dusty Hungarian play, Two-Faced Woman told the story of a plain wife who wins back her indifferent husband by impersonating her own glamorous twin sister. The theme was the familiar one of The Guardsman with the roles of husband and wife reversed. However wispy the plot, Metro was not miserly in investing the picture with talent. The scenario was prepared by S. N. Behrman, Salka Viertel and George Oppenheimer; the cast included Melvyn Douglas, who had proved a perfect foil for Garbo in Ninotchka, Constance Bennett and Ruth Gordon; and the direction was entrusted to George Gukor, who had had such estimable success with Garbo in Camille.

As soon as Two-Faced Woman went into production, the Metro publicity department began an extensive campaign to prepare the American public for the emergence of "the new Garbo." In her next picture, it accordingly became known, Garbo would appear, for the first time on the American screen, in a bathing suit—a brief one she had designed herself. Furthermore, she had cut her hair in a new short bob that the Metro publicity experts predicted would:

"set a style craze comparable to the long Garbo bob in 1932."