Garbo: A Biography

The author of Louise Brooks presents a full-scale portrait of the legendary and enigmatic actress, drawing on previously unavailable source material to provide a revealing look at her life, career, and personal relationships. 20,000 first printing. Movie/Entertainment Alt.

Greta Garbo's melancholy self-obsession, her paradoxical need to perform and withdraw, manifested themselves in her teens, shows Paris (Louise Brooks) in a moving biography that unearths connections between the private woman and the public actress. Recurring traumas of abandonment-the deaths of her father, Karl, a Stockholm landscapist, when she was 14, and of her beautiful actress sister Alva, victim of cancer at age 23-molded Garbo (1905-1990) into a high-strung, hypersensitive recluse pathologically afraid of betrayal, of commitment, of pregnancy, according to Paris. The Swedish sphinx moved to Hollywood in 1925 and became "the sex fantasy of the century," an androgynous, exotic persona on whom millions projected their desires, yet, by this account, she was a largely celibate narcissist who longed for an idealized hearth and home. Garbo found a substitute family in the home of her closest friend, actress Salka Viertel, and this revealing biography, featuring 180 photographs woven into the narrative, draws on the 50-year Garbo-Viertel correspondence, on firsthand reminiscences and on Garbo's taped conversations with her confidante, New York City art dealer Sam Green, which fills in details of her last decades of self-imposed exile in Manhattan and trips abroad. Movie/Entertainment Book Club alternate; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For all that has been written about the movies' most elusive goddess, Paris provides the first serious cradle-to-grave biography. His advantage over previous miners of the inexhaustible Garbo lode is access to 50 years of correspondence with screenwriter Salka Viertel and 100 hours of taped phone conversations with confidant Sam Green, a New York art dealer. Paris was well equipped for this task; his superb portrait of another actress, Louise Brooks (LJ 9/15/89), also dealt with an aborted career and a long and mostly reclusive retirement. As revelation, Garbo doesn't measure up to Brooks, but, thankfully, its thoroughness precludes much speculation, especially in the inevitable area of Garbo's love life. This should stand for some time as the definitive biography.
Thomas Wiener, formerly with "American Film"
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Cruel words were spoken and printed about Greta Garbo after she died a few years ago. In contrast, this latest book clearly establishes itself as the definitive, responsible biography she deserves. Yes, Garbo was peculiar, but she wasn't incomprehensible. And Paris, New Yorker writer and author of a previous well-received Hollywood biography, Louise Brooks (1989), comprehends her commendably. Born Greta Gustafson in 1905 in Stockholm, Sweden, in modest circumstances, Garbo began in the fledgling film industry in her native country under the tutelage of famed Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. Paris clears up the misconceptions surrounding her arrival in Hollywood in 1925, then proceeds to document with rich and accurate detail her American movie career, observing with empathy the "aloof insecurity" that made her distant from people and her public, the conflicted sexuality that left her with unconventional friendships and a unique allure onscreen, and the set of circumstances by which she inadvertently retired from the movie business. Paris fully reconstructs Garbo's post-Hollywood years without resorting to tabloid-style clich{‚}es about that "weird recluse in the sunglasses." Instead, the author more than substantiates his assertion that Garbo was "an anomaly, not a mystery." A necessary purchase for all biography and film collections. Brad Hooper