A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice One of Esquire's 125
best books about Hollywood Award-winning master critic Robert
Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of
silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped
her. "Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,"
Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, "Greta Garbo is in people's minds,
hearts, and dreams." Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable,
she managed, in sixteen short years, to infiltrate the world's
subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was thirty-six,
only made her more irresistible. Garbo appeared in just twenty-four
Hollywood movies, yet her impact on the world--and that
indescribable, transcendent presence she possessed--was rivaled
only by Marilyn Monroe's. She was looked on as a unique phenomenon,
a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world, but in
reality she was a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naive, and
always on her guard. When she arrived in Hollywood, aged nineteen,
she spoke barely a word of English and was completely unprepared
for the ferocious publicity that quickly adhered to her as, almost
overnight, she became the world's most famous actress. In Garbo,
the acclaimed critic and editor Robert Gottlieb offers a vivid and
thorough retelling of her life, beginning in the slums of Stockholm
and proceeding through her years of struggling to elude the
attention of the world--her desperate, futile striving to be "left
alone." He takes us through the films themselves, from M-G-M's
early presentation of her as a "vamp"--her overwhelming beauty
drawing men to their doom, a formula she loathed--to the artistic
heights of Camille and Ninotchka ("Garbo Laughs!"), by way of Anna
Christie ("Garbo Talks!"), Mata Hari, and Grand Hotel. He examines
her passive withdrawal from the movies, and the endless attempts to
draw her back. And he sketches the life she led as a very wealthy
woman in New York--"a hermit about town"--and the life she led in
Europe among the Rothschilds and men like Onassis and Churchill.
Her relationships with her famous co-star John Gilbert, with Cecil
Beaton, with Leopold Stokowski, with Erich Maria Remarque, with
George Schlee--were they consummated? Was she bisexual? Was she
sexual at all? The whole world wanted to know--and still wants to
know. In addition to offering his rich account of her life,
Gottlieb, in what he calls "A Garbo Reader," brings together a
remarkable assembly of glimpses of Garbo from other people's
memoirs and interviews, ranging from Ingmar Bergman and Tallulah
Bankhead to Roland Barthes; from literature (she turns up
everywhere--in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, in Evelyn
Waugh, Graham Greene, and the letters of Marianne Moore and Alice
B. Toklas); from countless songs and cartoons and articles of
merchandise. Most extraordinary of all are the pictures--250 or so
ravishing movie stills, formal portraits, and revealing
snapshots--all reproduced here in superb duotone. She had no
personal vanity, no interest in clothes and make-up, yet the story
of Garbo is essentially the story of a face and the camera. Forty
years after her career ended, she was still being tormented by
unrelenting paparazzi wherever she went. Includes Black-and-White
Photographs
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