# Garbo - Hardcover

by **Robert Gottlieb** (Author)

**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 Biography

**Robert Gottlieb** has been the editor-in-chief of Simon and Schuster, the head of Alfred A. Knopf, and the editor of _The New Yorker_. He has 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 Letter

**Number of Pages:** 448

**Dimensions:** 1.4 x 9.2 x 6.1 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** December 07, 2021

## Details

- **Price:** 40.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 40.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- Garbo - Hardcover

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