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, 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
"[A] sensitive portrait...A lengthy 'Garbo reader' full of excerpts and articles about her rounds out Gottlieb's perfectly paced account...a masterful look at an elusive Hollywood giant." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A] smoothly flowing book that provides ample answers while never quite solving all of Garbo's mysteries. A searching life study that ought to rekindle interest in an unhappy yet brilliant artist." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Gottlieb's research is so complete and his style so engaging that this book almost reads like an oral biography told through a singular voice...This is a brilliantly written and constructed portrait of a true icon of the cinema." - Library Journal (starred review)
This information about Garbo was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Robert Gottlieb was the editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, the head of Alfred A. Knopf, and the editor of the New Yorker. He contributed frequently to the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books and is the author of Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker, Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, and Avid Reader: A Life. In 2015, he was presented with the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died in 2023.
Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.