Garbo

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, 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

Author: Robert Gottlieb
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 12/07/2021
Pages: 448
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.40lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.10w x 1.40d
ISBN: 9780374298357


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 07/01/2021 pg. 12
Publishers Weekly 10/25/2021
Library Journal 10/15/2021 pg. 1
Kirkus Reviews 11/01/2021
Booklist 12/01/2021 pg. 10

About the Author
Robert Gottlieb has been the editor in chief of Simon and Schuster; the president, publisher, and editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf; and the editor of The New Yorker. As a writer, he contributes frequently to The New York Times Book Review 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; Avid Reader: A Life; and Near Death Experiences . . . and Others. In 2015, he was presented the Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.