Strikingly glamorous and famously inscrutable, Greta Garbo managed, in 16 short years, to infiltrate the world's subconscious; the end of her film career, when she was 36, only made her more irresistible. Robert Gottlieb explores her as a unique phenomenon, a sphinx, a myth, the most beautiful woman in the world and, at heart, a Swedish peasant girl—uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard.
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? ... Though she had a sense of humor, she emerges in Gottlieb’s portrait as prickly, stubborn, and stingy ... 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.'
The why and wherefore of this woman’s extraordinary life and career is masterfully told in Robert Gottlieb’s new book, Garbo, handsomely published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, with more than 250 splendid duotone photos, an extremely thorough filmography...all part of a terrific 100-page 'Garbo Reader' ... This generous addendum includes an amazing selection of Garbo material—comments by everyone from Ingmar to Ingrid Bergman, Tennessee Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Noël Coward ... This 'Reader' is preceded by 18 tight chapters that eloquently take us from a Swedish childhood of poverty and a woeful lack of education...but with many girlish dreams of becoming a great stage actress, all the way to international fame and wealth ... The book is written in a serious but witty, unpretentious, and often charming way, and does a fine job in trying to understand Garbo’s complicated personality.
Gottlieb seems for this project to have consumed everything written in English about Garbo and her circle ... Garbo’s Hollywood films are the heart of the book, and Gottlieb pithily describes all the star vehicles she was paid handsomely to push uphill ... Gottlieb’s critiques of the finished films hold them to today’s standards of watchability while appreciating their old-school charms ... Gottlieb evinces sympathy and fondness for Garbo.
