A New York Times Book Review Editors Choice | One of Literary Hubs most anticipated books of 2021
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 worshipped her
Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941, Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, Greta Garbo is in peoples minds, hearts, and dreams. Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, she managed, in sixteen short years, to infiltrate the worlds subconscious, and 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 worldand that indescribable, transcendent presence she possessedwas rivaled only by Marilyn Monroes. 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, naïve, and always on her guard. When she arrived in Hollywood at age 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 worlds 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 worldher desperate, futile striving to be left alone. He takes us through the films themselves, from M-G-Ms early presentation of her as a vampher overwhelming beauty drawing men to their doom, a formula she loathedto 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 Yorka hermit about townand 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 Schleewere they consummated? Was she bisexual? Was she sexual at all? The whole world wanted to knowand 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 Garbofrom other peoples memoirs and interviews (ranging from Ingmar Bergman and Tallulah Bankhead to Roland Barthes); from literature (she turns up everywherein Hemingways For Whom the Bell Tolls, in Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene); from the letters of Marianne Moore and Alice B. Toklas; from countless songs and cartoons and articles of merchandise. Most extraordinary of all are the picturesmore than 250 ravishing movie stills, formal portraits, and revealing snapshotsall reproduced here in superb duotone. Garbo had no personal vanity, no interest in clothes and makeup, yet her story is essentially the story of a faceand the camera.
