GREER GARSON: MRS. MINIVER GOES WEST

She was appearing in a not very successful play called “Old Music” in London in 1937, Greer Garson likes to remember, and one night after the curtain the Cockney stage doorman said a gentleman was waiting and would like to meet her.

Ah, yes, she said; that would be the Realsilk hosiery salesman. Tell him to stop by after the matinee the next afternoon.

The doorman left, but reappeared. “It’s a Mr. Myer, of Metro-Goldwyn-Myer,” he said. “Don’t you think you oughta meet ‘im, mum?” Well, yes, guardedly.

Louis B. Mayer himself was on a star-seeking tour of Europe and MGM executives in London had recommended that he check out Greer Garson. With her mother’s permission, and a warning not to be late because tomorrow was a matinee day, Garson dined with L.B. and his aides. “They made an offer that could not be refused,” she said the other day in Dallas, which has been her principal home for nearly 37 years. And so she began her Hollywood career, recruited personally by the mightiest of all the moguls.

The early days were not auspicious. Although she seemed an elegant successor to Norma Shearer and perhaps even to Garbo, the studio had nothing for her for months. She injured her back in a swimming pool fall and was miserable physically as well as emotionally.

She did the unremembered comedy “Remember” opposite Robert Taylor in 1939. Then the small but potent role as Robert Donat’s wife in “Goodbye Mr. Chips” won her an Oscar nomination and she was away.

When Shearer turned down the title role in “Mrs. Miniver,” it went to Garson, became the performance with which she is still most closely identified and won her the Academy Award.

There were other nominations: “Blossoms in the Dust,” “Madame Curie,” “Mrs. Parkington,” “The Valley of Decision” and “Sunrise at Campobello,” as Eleanor Roosevelt. And there were many other films, including most memorably “Pride and Prejudice,” “Random Harvest” and--her last film outing--”The Happiest Millionaire” opposite Fred MacMurray at Disney in 1967.

Last month, the Meadows School of the Arts of Southern Methodist University organized a two-day tribute, “Greer Garson: The MGM Years,” with its events taped by producer-director Bob Banner for an hour-long TV special to air this winter, probably on PBS.

Several of her old friends and MGM colleagues flew in to take part, including Fred MacMurray and wife June Haver, Art Linkletter, Cesar Romero, makeup man William Tuttle, hair stylist Sydney Guilaroff, John Green (longtime MGM musical director), Frances Bergen, director George Schaefer (with whom she did “Captain Brassbound’s Conversion” and other TV dramas), producer Arthur Cantor (for whom she did “Auntie Mame” on Broadway in succession to Rosalind Russell), and TV producers Ralph Levy and Bill Frye.

In the days of its glory, MGM had the starriest roster of contract players in the business, every type a casting director might dream of, from juvenile leads to legendary antiquarians, sex kittens to resident villains. There was no question what Mayer had seen in her: a radiant intelligence; a rare and patrician red-haired, green-eyed beauty; an elegance, lightly worn, that was distinct from the high-voltage sexual allure of some other reigning screen queens. Even in the luminous MGM company, Garson was someone special, a well-educated cosmopolitan woman who was a skilled actress of warmth and depth and, not least, a dazzling and indefatigable talker.

(Her acceptance speech for “Mrs. Miniver” was said to have been the longest until then or since, but she has insisted that its length was exaggerated, and was clocked at only 5 1/2 minutes, according to Oscar historian Robert Osborne.)

Her first job when she graduated from University College at the U. of London was with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. During the Dallas festivities, she recalled something that English comic actor Reginald Owen once said of her. “Let’s not be too impressed by Greer’s apparent loquacity and erudition,” she says Owen said. “Everything she knows begins with ‘M.’ ”

Her success as Mrs. Chips and then as Mrs. Miniver thrust her into a mold in which she played strong women, often self-sacrificing, always intelligent, customarily dignified, reflecting the active best of the gender, at a time when the women on screen were still likelier to be decorative and reactive than achieving and commanding. Critics occasionally complained of the sequence of do-gooder roles, feeling they did not fully exploit her range or indeed her wit and flair for comedy.

But she says she had few complaints, and took special pride in her biographical roles, like Edna Gladney, whose story was dramatized in “Blossoms in the Dust,” Madame Curie and, ultimately, Mrs. Roosevelt.

At 77, she is, she notes proudly, into her second pacemaker, having had a brush with death from a heart attack in 1980. (“I went in for a check a few months ago and the cardiologist said, ‘My dear, you’re harboring an antique, a Model T of a pacemaker.’ So they’ve installed a new one. Quite up to date.”)

She and her oilman husband Buddy Fogelson divide their time between a penthouse in Dallas, a desert home near Palm Springs, an apartment in Los Angeles and their Forked Lightning Ranch in the mountains near Pecos, N.M. They raise Santa Gertrudis cattle, having pioneered in bringing them to the high country of the Sangre de Christo range. Coronado passed by in 1541 in quest of the Seven Cities of Gold, and later the Sante Fe Trail crossed its acres. Garson’s horse, she says, is called Ho-Hum Silver.

She married Fogelson in 1949. “In Dallas they said, ‘Those two? Six months,’ ” she said at lunch in a break from the tribute schedule. “In Beverly Hills they said, ‘Those two? Six months.’ Now it’s coming on to 37 years.” He has been in poor health but was able to attend the two gala dinners in her honor.

As a gift for her on their 30th wedding anniversary, Fogelson established four acting scholarships in her name at SMU, and she introduced this year’s winners during a master class that was part of the tribute.

“I don’t believe in total scholarships,” she says. “You need some incentive to keep working hard. But it was so difficult for me to get started. I wasted so much time. And time is all an actor has, time and health. You have only a certain number of years to be productive. I envy young people who can go right to their goals.”

She was born in County Down, Ireland, but her father died when she was only a year old and she and her mother moved to London to live with relatives. “I never lacked for love,” she says, but it was a scrimp-and-save life.

She never doubted what she wanted to do. “I’d come home and act the parts of people I’d seen in the park.” She would do a Christmas play in the house from age 4, taking advantage of a curtain that divided the living room from the dining room and playing St. George or the dragon, as the mood took her. She was reading from the age of 2. “Early precocity, early decay,” she says, cheerful that that dire possibility did not take place.

Acting was her destiny--”part obsession, part happenstance”--she told the acting students at SMU. She won a grant to attend University College, commuting two hours each way. She trained to be a teacher, but took the job with the Britannica so she could pursue acting classes.

She wangled an audition at Birmingham Rep, and Sir Barry Jackson accepted her in the company. “There was already a redhead in residence, so I wore wigs all through the first year,” she remembers. The pay was 4 guineas, roughly $20, a week.

Illness knocked her out of a second year at Birmingham and, feeling her career had foundered, she was having dinner alone at a women’s club in London in 1935 when novelist Sylvia Thompson recognized her and asked to read for a play of hers that was going into production.

Garson made a brave show of being terribly busy, a facade that collapsed when she learned Laurence Olivier was directing and starring. The play, “Golden Arrow,” was not successful, but she was. (“They were love-letter notices.”) It led to 13 plays in three years in the West End and at last to L. B. Mayer’s irresistible offer.

In addition to their involvement with SMU, the Fogelsons have been active at the College of Sante Fe, where there is a Greer Garson Theater and the Fogelson Library Center.

At Forked Lightning Ranch, they have given 300 acres to the government and established the Fogelson Visitor Center and Museum, displaying artifacts of the Pecos Indians on a site that dates from at least AD 1200 and that may have been built atop a settlement from AD 800.

It is all, one way and another, a very long distance from County Down, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica and from Culver City. But what the story suggests is that MGM’s happy endings were not always confined to the screen.