Garbo’s pipe

Athbhliain faoi mhaise duit!—Happy New Year! I hope you've had an evening or two for a quiet smoke during the holidays, time to reflect on blessings and the good in your life. Certainly this blog and the joy of Peterson has been one of mine, especially as I've made new friendships and continued old ones with all who comments and email back and forth. Whatever the new year brings, a quiet pipe and some good tobacco will only make it better. Since visiting the Peterson Museum in 2013, I have been compiling a list of famous Peterson pipe smokers, or at least people of renown who have been photographed smoking a K&P pipe.[1] While the museum was in a state best described as fascinating chaos ("fractal?"), there were photos of several people hanging on the walls or hidden away in drawers, many without identification of where they came from but some with letters of appreciation by the one photographed. For this first installment of “Famous Peterson Smokers,” I turn to silent and early sound film star Greta Garbo (1905-1990), the Swedish-American actress and star of Flesh and the Devil (1927), The Kiss (1929), Grand Hotel (1932), Camille (1936) and Ninotchka (1939)—which are just a few of my favorites. Her performances were as mysterious as she, and yet when she retired at age 35, she left a persona that has endured as one of the great female film stars of the classic age of Hollywood film. "On one of her many transatlantic crossings," the caption reads.* I first saw Garbo (mistaking her for a young Dietrich) with what I knew was a Peterson at the museum, in a photograph cut from a page in a book, mounted and framed. Two years before that, I had read an appreciation of her by Eric Squires, which begins with this great paragraph: “‘I have been smoking since I was a small boy,’ Greta Garbo was known to quip. It was a rather unusual statement coming from a Hollywood starlet, yet it was also a sentiment very true to her nature. She was indeed a prolific smoker; cigarettes, cigars, and, yes, even pipes too. And she was as well what could only be described as ‘enigmatically contrary.’ The silver screen beauty often dressed in clothes which, in her day, were considered ‘mannish,’ and making such pronouncements as, ‘I am a lonely man circling the earth,’ was one of the intensely private vixen's preferred ways of breaking silent moments in conversation.”[2] Long-time readers will know that I have been trying to place Garbo’s Peterson pipe for a while now. When I posted about this before, in a consideration of the 400 shape group, there were several difficulties in identifying the pipe: the angle of the photo, the relative size of the pipe to Garbo’s face, and the extreme length of the shank in proportion to the bowl height, which just didn’t seem to fit any K&P shape I could find. I'm not sure I've solved it…