Garbo [Hardcover] Gottlieb, Robert

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | One of Esquire's 125 best books
about HollywoodAward-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, naïve, 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

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux (December 7, 2021)


• Language ‏ : ‎ English


• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 448 pages


• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374298351


• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 57


• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.6 ounces


• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.59 x 1.35 x 9.3 inches


• Best Sellers Rank: #394,322 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #809 in Movie History & Criticism #3,676 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies #4,593 in Women's Biographies


• #809 in Movie History & Criticism


• #3,676 in Actor & Entertainer Biographies

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