Few
other performers have ascended as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo did—she
started off the way most of us do, with a first and last name, but the first soon
fell away, like a spent rocket booster, in the ballyhoo surrounding her. When
she appeared in her first sound picture, “Anna Christie,” the ads proclaimed,
“Garbo talks!”; for her first sound comedy, “Ninotchka,” it was “Garbo laughs!”
Quite why she became such a phenomenon is a puzzle to which film critics and
biographers keep returning. Garbo made only twenty-eight movies in her
lifetime. (By comparison, Bette Davis made close to ninety, and Meryl Streep
has made nearly seventy and still counting.) That slender output could be part
of the mystique, compounded by her disappearing act. But Garbo had acquired an
enigmatic mythos even before she ended her career—the Hollywood colony treated
her like royalty. Nor has it seemed to matter that only a handful of her movies
are much watched or admired today.
What
Garbo had to offer, above all, was her extraordinary face, at a time when the
closeup, with its supercharged intimacy, its unprecedented boon to the
emotional and erotic imagination, was still relatively new. Many of the shots
credited as the first closeups were unlikely to have set hearts aflame, since
they were often of objects—a shoe, a wrench. But filmmakers soon grasped the
centripetal seductions of the human face in tight focus. The screenwriter and
director Paul Schrader picks as a turning point the moment in a D. W. Griffith
film from 1912, “Friends,” in which the camera comes in tight on Mary
Pickford’s face, revealing her ambivalence about which of two suitors she
should choose. “A real close-up of an actor is about going in for an emotional
reason that you can’t get any other way,” Schrader writes. “When filmmakers
realized that they could use a close-up to achieve this kind of emotional
effect, cameras started coming in closer. And characters became more complex.”
A face
as beautiful as Garbo’s—the enormous eyes and deep-set lids, the way love or
tenderness or some private, unspoken amusement unknit her brows in an instant,
melting her austerity—was almost overwhelming when it filled the screen. She
belonged, as Roland Barthes wrote, “to that moment in cinema when the
apprehension of the human countenance plunged crowds into the greatest
perturbation, where people literally lost themselves in the human image.” This
is not to diminish her craft as an actress. But her acting was perhaps most
effective in her silent films or in nonverbal scenes in talking pictures in
which her face is the canvas for emotion. In the famous last shots of “Queen
Christina” (1933), Garbo’s androgynous Swedish ruler stands at the prow of a
ship bearing her away from her country; the body of her lover, killed in a duel
over her, is laid out on the deck. Garbo stares into the distance, her face a
kind of mask but no less eloquent for it. The film’s director, Rouben Mamoulian,
had told her that she must “make her mind and heart a complete blank,” empty
her face of expression, so that the audience could impose whatever emotions
they wanted on it. The scene would then be one of those “marvelous spots,” he
said, where “a film could turn every spectator into a creator.”
She was
skilled at inciting such projection. More than one contemporary in Hollywood
noted that her magic truly showed up only on celluloid, like a ghostly
luminescence undetectable until the film was developed. Clarence Brown, who
directed Garbo in seven films, recalled shooting a scene with her, thinking it
was fine, nothing special, then playing it back and seeing “something that it
just didn’t have on the set.” On her face, he said, “You could see thought. If
she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t
have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from
one to the other.” Garbo herself, with a kind of arch, adolescent indifference,
never wanted to look at the rushes. According to Brown, she’d watch only when
sound pictures were played in reverse: “That’s what Garbo enjoyed. She would
sit there shaking with laughter, watching the film running backward and the
sound going yakablom-yakablom. But as soon as we ran it forward, she wouldn’t
watch it.”
Much has
been written about Garbo over the years, but Gottlieb, a former editor of this
magazine, has produced a particularly charming, companionable, and clear-eyed
guide to her life and work—he has no axe to grind, no urgent need to make a
counterintuitive case for her lesser movies, and he’s generous with his
predecessors. By the end of the biography, I felt I understood Garbo better as
a person, without the aura of mystery around her having been entirely
dispelled—and, at this point, who would want it to be?
The
actress who came to embody a kind of unattainable elegance, who would someday
wear sumptuous period costumes with a grace so offhand that they might have
been rumpled p.j.’s, grew up in a cramped apartment with no indoor plumbing, in
one of Stockholm’s most impoverished neighborhoods. She was born Greta Lovisa
Gustafsson on September 18, 1905, to parents from rural stock. Her mother was,
in Gottlieb’s description, “practical, sensible, undemonstrative”; her father,
an unskilled laborer, was handsome, musical, and fun, and Greta adored him. But
he was stricken by kidney disease, and Greta, the youngest of three children,
made the rounds of the charity hospitals with him. “She never forgot the humiliations
they endured as poor people in search of live-or-die attention,” Gottlieb
writes. She was fourteen when he died, and she dropped out of school, leaving
her with a lasting embarrassment about her lack of formal education. She went
to work to help support the family, first at a barbershop, where she applied
shaving soap to men’s faces, then at a department store, where she sold and
modelled hats. She said later that she was “always sad as a child for as long
as I can think back. . . . I did some skating and played with snowballs, but
most of all I wanted to be alone with myself.”
Alongside
her shyness and her penchant for solitude, Greta harbored a passionate desire
to be an actress. As a kid, she’d roam the city by herself, looking for
theatres where she could stand at the stage door and watch the performers come
and go. The first time Garbo was in front of the camera was at age fifteen, in
an advertising film for the department store that employed her. Sweden had a
thriving film industry, and she soon quit her day job to appear in a couple of
movies. At Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which she was accepted at
seventeen, the young actors were instructed in a system that “scientifically”
analyzed the semiotics of movement and gesture. Remarkably, some of her lecture
notes from that time survive—she jotted down that “the head bent forward equals
a mild concession” or a “condescending attitude,” and that “the throwing back
of the head” conveys “a violent feeling such as love.” Barry Paris, an earlier
biographer whom Gottlieb cites approvingly, notes that “Garbo in silent films
would employ that system of gestural meaning to a high degree.” She did so in
her sound pictures as well. When she plays the Russian ballerina in “Grand
Hotel” (1932), her body language is jittery, neurotic. Depressed, she lets her
head droop as if it were simply too heavy to hold up; surprised by delight at
the prospect of a romance with John Barrymore’s gentleman jewel thief, she
tosses her head back at giddy angles. It might have been laughable, but instead
it’s riveting.
In the
spring of 1923, the gifted film director Mauritz Stiller approached the
Stockholm theatre looking for actresses to cast in his new movie, an epic based
on a Swedish novel, “The Story of Gösta Berling.” Stiller came from a Jewish
family in Finland; orphaned young, he had fled to Sweden to avoid being
conscripted into the tsar’s Army. Garbo and he were never lovers—Stiller
preferred men—but their relationship was perhaps the most important in both of their
lives. With his commanding height, his taste for luxury (full-length fur coats,
a canary-yellow sports car), and his domineering style with actors, he had more
than a touch of the Svengali. But Stiller believed in Garbo at a time when, as
one veteran actress put it, Greta was “this little nobody . . . an awkward,
mediocre novice,” and he loved her. (He also seems to have been the one who
suggested replacing “Gustafsson” with “Garbo.”)
When
Hollywood came calling—in the form of Louis B. Mayer scouting European talent
for M-G-M—it wasn’t clear whether Stiller was the lure or Garbo; the director
was certainly better known. In any case, Stiller made sure that they were a
package deal (and, Gottlieb adds, later upped Garbo’s pay to four hundred
dollars a week, an “unheard of” salary for an untested starlet). The two sailed
for the United States in 1925, arriving in the pungent heat of midsummer New
York. (Garbo’s favorite part of the visit seems to have been the roller coaster
at Coney Island.) Then it was on to Hollywood by train.
The
studio moguls gave an unknown such as Garbo a very short runway. M-G-M signed
up the Swedish girl for two pictures, “Torrent” and “The Temptress,” and, as
the film historian Robert Dance writes in his smart new book, “The Savvy
Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood” (Mississippi), “if those first two films
were unsuccessful financially M-G-M would not renew her contract for a second
year.” As it happened, both were hits. Motion Picture was among the industry
outlets declaring her début “a complete success.” (“She is not so much an
actress as she is endowed with individuality and magnetism,” it said.) Garbo
became a fan favorite, even though she was almost uniquely averse to the kind
of goofy stunts and mildly salacious photo shoots that other stars put up with.
When she got to be as famous as Lillian Gish, she told one interviewer early
on, “I will no longer . . . shake hands with prize-fighters and egg-and-milk
men so they will have pictures to put in the papers.” Instead, she worked with
consummate portrait photographers who lit her gloriously. Eventually, her films
were earning enough that she was able to negotiate an unusual contract, one
that gave her the right to veto scripts, co-stars, and directors. And she
shunned interviews so consistently that in the end her privacy became its own
form of publicity.
Despite
such badassery, she never really adjusted to her new country or her new
destiny, at least beyond the movie set. What looked like carefully cultivated
hauteur was partly the product of awkwardness, disorientation, and grief. She
hardly spoke English when she first arrived, and, within a year, she learned
that her beloved sister, an aspiring actress herself, had died back home.
Stiller did not make a smooth adjustment to Hollywood and, in a blow to them
both, he was not chosen to direct Garbo’s first American picture. Garbo wrote
to a friend in Sweden about how miserable she was: “This ugly, ugly America,
all machine, it is excruciating.” The only thing that made her happy, she
claimed, was sending money to her family. At a young age, Gottlieb writes, she
found herself “trapped in a spotlight extreme even by Hollywood standards,” and
with no psychological preparation for grappling with the kind of fame—movie
stardom—that was new not just to her but to the world.
Athletic
and physically restless, she soon took up the long nighttime walks that became
a refuge; with her hat pulled low over her head, as it customarily was, she
would have been hard to recognize. Stiller, who probably felt that his young
protégée no longer needed him, returned to Sweden, where he died in 1928, at
the age of forty-five, reportedly clutching a photograph of her. “He never
seems to have resented her dazzling ascent to fame,” Gottlieb writes, “only
wanting her to be happy and fulfilled.” Back in Sweden to mourn him, Garbo went
with his lawyer to the storehouse containing his possessions, where she walked
around touching his belongings and murmuring about her memories. Gottlieb says
that this episode must surely have been an inspiration for the scene in “Queen
Christina” in which Garbo’s character moves around a room at an inn, touching
all the inanimate reminders of the lover she will never spend another night
with. On sets, she would sometimes talk softly to herself about what her mentor
might have told her to do—one director she worked with referred to Stiller as
“the green shadow.”
Garbo
appears to have been emotionally stunted in certain ways, damaged by the loss
of her father, her sister, and Stiller, abashed by the limitations of her
English and her education. Though she had a sense of humor, she emerges in
Gottlieb’s portrait as prickly, stubborn, and stingy. The sudden onslaught of
celebrity made her more so. She never married, had children, or apparently
wanted to do either; she had brief romantic relationships, mostly with men (the
actor John Gilbert, probably the conductor Leopold Stokowski), and likely with
women, too (the leading candidate seems to have been the writer Mercedes De Acosta,
the “ubiquitous lesbian rake,” in Gottlieb’s words, who had affairs with
Marlene Dietrich and many others). Her longest-lasting relationships were with
friends, especially, as Gottlieb makes clear, those who helped her
logistically, advised her devotedly, and steadfastly refused to spill the tea
about her. In these, she had pretty good, if not unerring, taste. Probably the
closest and most enduring friendship was with Salka Viertel, the intellectually
vibrant woman at the center of L.A.’s remarkable community of refugee writers,
composers, and filmmakers from Germany.
From the
start of her Hollywood career in silent pictures, Garbo was often cast as a
vamp—the kind of man-eater who shimmied and inveigled and home-wrecked her way
through so many nineteen-twenties movies. (See the entire career of Theda
Bara.) As Robert Dance notes, “Adultery and divorce were catnip to post World
War I audiences.” The parts quickly bored her: “I cannot see any sense in
dressing up and doing nothing but tempting men.” Off the job, she eschewed
makeup and liked to dress in slacks, men’s oxford shoes, and grubby sweaters.
Her closet was full of men’s tailored shirts and ties. She often referred to
herself as a “fellow” and sometimes signed her letters “Harry” or “Harry Boy.”
The movie role she seems to have liked best was the learned cross-dressing
seventeenth-century monarch Christina; it allowed her to stride around in
tunics, tight-fitting trousers, and tall boots, to kiss one of her
ladies-in-waiting full on the lips, to declare that she intended to “die a
bachelor!” (As plenty of gender-studies scholars will tell you, this is one
queer movie.) She expressed a longing to play St. Francis of Assisi, complete
with a beard, and Oscar Wilde’s vain hero Dorian Gray. In today’s terms, Garbo
might have occupied a spot along the nonbinary spectrum. Gottlieb doesn’t press
the point, but remarks, “How ironic if ‘the Most Beautiful Woman in the World’
really would rather have been a man.”
Her
third American film, “Flesh and the Devil” (1926)—the ultimate
nineteen-twenties title—transformed her into an international star. It’s about
a love triangle involving two best friends, played by the magnetic John Gilbert
and the handsome Swedish actor Lars Hanson, with Garbo at its apex. It, too, is
a pretty queer movie, though it seems less in control of its signifiers than,
say, “Queen Christina.” As Gottlieb points out, the two male leads are forever
clasping each other fervently, bringing their faces close together, as if about
to kiss. (It heightens the vibe that, in silent-movie fashion, Hanson appears
to be wearing lipstick some of the time, and Gilbert eyeliner.) “Flesh and the
Devil” also features some of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever encountered on
film. There’s one, in a nighttime garden, in which Garbo rolls a cigarette
between her lips, then puts it between Gilbert’s, her eyes never leaving his,
as he strikes a match and illuminates their gorgeous, besotted faces. There’s
one where she lies back in sensual abandon on a couch, Gilbert’s head lolling
against her lap, and he lifts her hand and drags her fingers across his mouth.
And then there’s my favorite: she and Gilbert are at a Communion rail in
church. By now, Gilbert’s character has killed her first husband in a duel, and
she has married the other friend, but they’re still crazy about each other,
natch. Gilbert sips from the chalice just before she does, and, when the priest
hands it to her, she turns it around to drink greedily from the side her
lover’s lips have just touched. Her expression is one of slow-burn ecstasy.
Gilbert
and Garbo fell in love while they were making the movie, but their story is a
sad one, mainly because Gilbert is a sad figure. He is often offered up as an
example of an actor who couldn’t make the transition to sound—his voice was
said to have been too reedy or something. That turns out to have been an urban
legend: his voice was fine. The trouble was that he was best at playing boyish
men undone by love at a time when, as Gottlieb observes, Depression-era
Hollywood was more into “gangsters, snappy dialogue, musicals.” Garbo and
Gilbert lived out a “Star Is Born” trajectory. When they made “Flesh and the
Devil,” he was a big-name actor at the height of his powers, and he helped
Garbo by making sure the camera angles were right for her and each take of her
was the best it could be. One story is that he planted a stand of trees on his
property in the Hollywood Hills to remind her of the woods in Sweden, and he
apparently proposed to her repeatedly. (She professed herself puzzled that she
kept refusing a more permanent bond, but she did.) By the time she made “Queen
Christina,” in 1933, she had top billing, and she insisted that Gilbert, who
was then married to someone else, and professionally on the skids, play her
romantic interest—rejecting the studio’s choice, a young Laurence Olivier.
Gilbert later remembered that she was tactful and considerate with him on the
set, though he was drinking heavily, throwing up blood, and nervous about his
performance. “It is a rare moment in Garbo’s history,” Gottlieb writes, “when
we can fully admire, even love her, as a human being, not only as an artist.”
Gilbert died three years later, at the age of thirty-eight. Garbo was
characteristically unsentimental. “Gott, I wonder what I ever saw in him,” she
remarked while he was still alive. “Oh well, I guess he was pretty.”
Why did
Garbo stop acting? It wasn’t as though her star was truly on the wane. It had
been years since she’d made her successful transition to talkies, with a
dialogue-heavy adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.” (From the moment
she uttered her first lines, “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side—and don’t
be stingy, baby,” her accent proved to be a sexy asset.) She’d been nominated
for four Best Actress Oscars. In 1939, she’d made “Ninotchka,” the romantic
comedy in which she played a Soviet apparatchik on a mission to Paris who falls
in love with a playboy count and discovers, as the pitch for it went,
“capitalism not so bad after all.” It was a huge hit—more than four hundred
thousand people went to see it at Radio City Music Hall during a three-week
run, Gottlieb says. Garbo is very funny, deadpanning her way through the first
half of it in boxy jackets, rationally assessing Melvyn Douglas’s charms.
(“Your general appearance is not distasteful.”) As one biographer, Robert
Payne, wrote, the performance worked so brilliantly because it satirized “Garbo
herself, or rather her legend: the cold Northerner immune to marriage, solemn
and self-absorbed.”
The next
and last movie she made, “Two-Faced Woman,” a clumsy attempt to re-create
comedy magic with Douglas, was a turkey, but she could surely have survived it.
Instead, she considered projects that fell through, turned down others (offered
the female lead in Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case,” Gottlieb writes, she is
supposed to have sent her agent a telegram saying “No mamas. No murderers”),
and slowly drifted away from the business of moviemaking. She had never liked
the limelight and, Gottlieb says, lacked the relentless drive that animated
contemporaries such as Marlene Dietrich or Joan Crawford. She doesn’t seem to
have been particularly vain about her beauty, but she was practical enough to
know its precise value, and to anticipate the cost of its fading. And, though
she seems to have enjoyed acting, she was never satisfied with the results.
“Oh, if once, if only once I could see a preview and come home feeling
satisfied,” she remarked after one film screening. Garbo was no Norma Desmond,
viewing her old films over and over to admire her own image. Screening some of
them years later, at MOMA, Barry Paris reported, she got a kick out of
imitating herself: “R-r-rodney, when will this painful love of ours ever die?”
She once told the actor David Niven that she’d quit because she had “made
enough faces.” The analysis was typical of her—unreflective, cryptic,
deprecatory.
She was,
Tennessee Williams thought, “the saddest of creatures—an artist who abandons
her art.” Yet Garbo doesn’t seem to have seen herself that way. Perhaps attuned
to the perils of growing old in Hollywood, she moved to New York, to an
apartment on the East Side, spent long stretches of time in Europe with friends
who were wealthy or witty or both, went to the theatre, collected a bit of art.
She did not reinvent herself as a memoirist or a philanthropist (though her
estate was valued at roughly fifty million dollars when she died, in 1990) or
an ambassador of any sort of good will. People loved the mystery of it all;
photographers were always chasing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding; she got
out. One wag called her a “hermit about town.”
Did
Garbo have a rich inner life to sustain her for all those years? There isn’t
much evidence of it. She was not a remarkable or notably confiding letter
writer, journal keeper, or conversationalist; she does not seem to have had a
surfeit of intellectual curiosity. In the movies, she had always been able to
convey a sense of hidden depths, of memories and emotions lighting room after
interior room, never quite surfacing to be articulated. Were those feelings
complex, interesting? We were persuaded they must be. The relationship to fame
that she enacted in the last decades of her life was something similar: it
looked profound, perhaps even spiritual—a renunciation of celebrity’s blessings
as well as its scourges. But who knows? Maybe she was just tired of making
faces.
What Was
So Special About Greta Garbo? By Margaret Talbot. The New Yorker, December 6,
2021.
Whether
by disposition or by strategy, Greta Garbo was the most elusive of movie stars.
In the 80 years since she gave her final performance, “I want to be alone” (a
line she spoke in “Grand Hotel”) has
become the thing for which she is best remembered — more than her talent,
probably more than her beauty and certainly more than her movies, of which even
a lot of cinephiles would have trouble naming five. Her professional legacy is
lean: Even the two famous slogans associated with her — “Garbo Talks!” for her
first sound picture, “Anna Christie,” and “Garbo Laughs” for her most enduring
(let’s just say best), Ernst Lubitsch’s “Ninotchka” — herald deviations from the norm. This is
not the Garbo you know, they say: the silent Garbo, the unsmiling Garbo, the
enigmatic Garbo. Impenetrability is an odd quality for a performer to make her
signature.
So it’s
fitting that “Garbo,” Robert Gottlieb’s ardent and wise investigative portrait,
sometimes reads less as a methodical account of a life than as a
biography-mystery, a hunt for a quarry that the author, a veteran
editor/writer/obsesser/pursuer who ran (at different times) Knopf and The New
Yorker, understands is likely to remain just out of reach.
As he
makes clear in his generous citations of the writers who preceded him into this
cavern, hers is not an unexamined life. “I am inclined to think that there is
altogether too much discussion of Garbo these days,” a critic for The New
Yorker wrote. That was in 1932.
What, if
anything, is left to discover? In the early going, not much. Gottlieb is
painstaking in reconstructing her youth (as Greta Gustafsson) in Stockholm and
her cultivation by a director who “had been looking for a beautiful girl whom
he could completely mold.” Upon her
arrival in Hollywood in 1925, she did not work her way up; as soon as M-G-M
found her, the studio decided she would be their next leading lady. “Greta
Garbo — Perfection!” blared their publicity campaign. “She was,” Gottlieb
writes, “bewildered, unsophisticated,” a young woman “suddenly transported to
Oz.” And, as he reminds us right at the start, many of the movies she made were
“clichéd or worse,” and their star was not a goddess, merely “a Swedish peasant
girl, uneducated, naïve and always on her guard.”
What is
absent from the early part of “Garbo” is her personality, and I don’t mean that
as a criticism of Gottlieb, because “personality” seems to have been absent
from Garbo herself. She was shy, a bit dour, could laugh with friends but then
turn cold — in short, a cipher.
Gottlieb
suggests that, given its first glimpse of her, “the world simply grasped that
she was unique and to be treasured.” Stardom, even in Hollywood’s formative
years, was rarely that free of machinery, but in Garbo’s case, one has to
credit a certain kind of alchemy; what could seem withholding, blank, even dull
in life felt deep, adult and mesmerizing when projected onto a screen. And once
Garbo steps in front of the camera, Gottlieb’s book comes gloriously into its
own, a tour through a career offered by a shrewd, deeply perceptive docent,
brimming with knowledge and insight.
This
seems an apt moment to mention that the author turned 90 this spring, not only
because, come on, bravo, but also because the fact that he was born in 1931
proves an invaluable asset to his understanding of his subject. To Gottlieb,
the 1930s studio movies in which Garbo made her mark aren’t relics of history
to be discovered in film class or on TCM. They’re just the stuff he grew up on,
made efficiently to be consumed quickly, and he brings to his assessments a
fan’s appreciation, a connoisseur’s acuity and an amused impatience with the
aspects of them that are and always were ridiculous.
Maybe it
takes a nonagenarian to be this tartly un-gushy about Garbo’s “Grand Hotel”
co-star Lionel Barrymore, “whose overacting is unbearable even by Lionel
standards. (Lonely, dying old men don’t have to be hams.)” Or to contextualize
a long-forgotten movie like “The Single Standard” thus: “Here she’s natural, happy
(when not being noble), fun to watch — likable! You see once more what she
might have been in talkies if she and M-G-M hadn’t conspired to keep her in
lugubrious romances and high-flown ‘classics’ and historicals.” His writing
about “Camille” — remembered, and often dismissed, for its over-the-top
melodrama and death scene — is the first I’ve read that helped me understand
the esteem in which generations of worshipers have held her performance. This
is what we want film books to do — to send us to the work with sharper eyes and
more open minds.
Any
attempt at a life of Garbo faces inevitable second-act trouble. She abruptly
departed from the screen in 1941 (“I had made enough faces,” she told David
Niven), and … then what? Gottlieb details the mostly uneventful remaining
half-century (!) of her life fitfully, which may be the only way to detail an
existence seemingly shaped to avoid excitement. She moved into a nice Manhattan
apartment on 52nd Street. She bought some Renoirs. She had few close friends, and her
relationships with them were fraught with various suspicions and
betrayals. She went to dinner parties
and Gristedes and the florist and took long walks. She appears not to have said a single
interesting thing. And then she died, leaving an estate worth between $32
million and $55 million, and stiffing
everyone but her niece. The rest is
(even more) silence.
But not,
thankfully, in this book. In the last 100 pages of “Garbo,” Gottlieb turns from
writer to curator, offering old articles, excerpts from memoirs, biographies
and novels, and the murmurs and memories of dozens of other voices, from
scholars and critics to colleagues and co-stars. It’s as if he has turned over
his clipping files to us and said, “See what you make of this” — fair enough,
since we’re all trying to solve the same puzzle. We hear from fans like
Katharine Hepburn, who said Garbo had “a real, real gift for movie acting. …
Photographically she had something that nobody else had. That’s what made her.
You don’t become that famous for no reason.” And from non-fans like Marlene
Dietrich: “She is the kind of person who counts every cube of sugar to make
sure the maid isn’t stealing, or eating too well.”
I
searched these pages for an observation that might serve as the rug that ties
the room together. John Gielgud’s verdict came closest: “Lovely childlike
expression and great sweetness — she never stopped talking but absolutely to no
purpose — said her life was empty, aimless, but the time passed so quickly
there was never time to do anything one wanted to do! … I couldn’t make out
whether her whole attitude was perhaps a terrific pose.” Gottlieb is the first to admit that resolving
that may be impossible, although his thoughtful contemplation of her should
spur many to watch her movies and try. But don’t say he didn’t warn you: “She
offered the world intense emotion and great aesthetic pleasure,” he writes,
“but she didn’t offer herself.”
GARBO
By
Robert Gottlieb
Illustrated.
448 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.
Greta
Garbo: The Most Enigmatic Movie Star. By Mark Harris. The New York Times,
December 3, 2021
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