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

He was GARBO to the Allies and ALARIC to the Germans – the most successful double agent of the Second World War. Indeed, his spy network across Britain was so highly regarded that he was decorated for his achievements ... by both sides. Throughout the war, GARBO kept the Germans supplied with reports from his ring of twenty-four agents. Hitler's spymasters never discovered or even suspected a double-cross, but all the agents in GARBO's network existed solely in his imagination. In one of the most daring espionage coups of all time, GARBO persuaded the enemy to hold back troops that might otherwise have defeated the Normandy landings on D-Day; without him, the Second World War could have taken a completely different course. For decades, GARBO's true identity was a closely guarded secret. After the war, he vanished. Years later, after faking his own death, Juan Pujol García was persuaded by the author to emerge from the shadowy world of espionage, and in this new edition of his classic account, now updated to include his agents' original MI5 files, GARBO reveals his unique story.

Describes the life of Juan Pujol, a poultry farmer who opposed the Nazis and concocted a series of staggering lies that lead to his becoming one of Germany's most valued spies, while actually acting as a double-agent for the Allies.

Greta Garbo (1905-1990) is as famous for her reclusiveness as for starring in such enduring classics as Flesh and the Devil, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, and Ninotchka. In this richly illustrated volume, renowned biographer Barry Paris offers the definitive biography of this fascinating and complex woman -- from her hardscrabble childhood in Sweden to her arrival in Hollywood at the age of nineteen, from her meteoric rise to stardom to her unintentional retirement from filmmaking at the height of her fame, from the new life she crafted for herself to her surprising, and failed, plans for a comeback. Drawing on hitherto unavailable material, including one hundred hours of tape-recorded conversations, fifty years of correspondence, and interviews with Garbo's surviving friends and family, Paris reveals the real woman behind the enigma.

This is a novel about movie love. Set in Ottawa in the 1990s, it is the quixotic tale of tall, thin Harriet Browning, inflamed by the movies she was deprived of as a child. Harriet is a woman so saturated with the movies, seen repeatedly and swallowed whole, that she no longer fits into this world. Bent on seeing everything she has missed, she forms a Friday night movie club with three companions-of-the-screen: a boy who loves Frank Sinatra, a girl with Bette Davis eyes, and an earthy sidekick named Dinah for Dinah Shore. Breaking in upon this quiet backwater, in time with the devastating ice storm of 1998, come two refugees from Hollywood, the faded widow of a famous screenwriter and her movie-expert stepson. They are Harsh Reality. With them come blackouts, arguments, accidents, illness and sudden death. But what chance does real life stand when we can watch movies instead? What hope does real love have when movie love, in all its brief intensity, is an easy option? In this comedy of secondhand desire, movies and movie lovers come first.

In the male-oriented studio system, Greta Garbo wielded a power no other actress has ever possessed, before or since. Be it producer, director, lover or journalist, Garbo called the shots, and when she decided that she was done with the whirlwind of life as Hollywood's darling she withdrew completely, leaving her public begging for an encore that never came. Though there have been numerous biographies of Garbo, this is the first to investigate fully the two so-called missing periods in the life of this most enigmatic of Hollywood stars: the first during the late 1920s, forcing MGM to employ a lookalike to conceal what was almost certainly a pregnancy; the second during World War II when Garbo was employed by British Intelligence to track down Nazi sympathisers. It also analyses in detail the original, uncensored copies of Garbo's films - with the exception of The Divine Woman, of which no complete print survives - and offers substantial evidence that John Gilbert was not, in fact, the great love of her life. Rather her true affections lay with the gay, Sapphic and Scandinavian members of her very intimate inner circle. Using previously unsourced material, along with anecdotes from friends and colleagues that have never before been published, David Bret paints a rounded portrait of Garbo's childhood in Sweden, her rise to stardom and her all-too-brief reign as queen of MGM. Hers is a truly remarkable story, recounted here with warmth, intensity and unique insight.

Annotation 2005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Juan Pujol, a young Spanish anti-fascist, ultimately became Agent GARBO - the greatest double-agent of World War II. Initially recruited by German intelligence, GARBO came to London after a series of adventures to work for the British. Using a ring of invented sub-agents, he and his MI5 controllers eventually succeeded in pulling off one of the greatest deceptions in history. As a part of Operation FORTITUDE, they convinced the Germans that the D-DAY landings were only a diversionary attack, so protecting the Allied landings and hastening the end of the war in Europe. The release of MI5 case files (kept secret for over fifty years), means that these facts can now be told in full. The report which forms the bulk of this publication reads like a classic spy adventure - enciphered messages, secret inks, items concealed in cakes, exotic foreigners and fanatic nationalists. It was written by GARBO's MI5 case officer, Tomas Harris, one of a group of Cambridge graduates that included the Soviet spies Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby. Mark Seaman's introduction and notes explain and illustrate the crucial historical importance of this MI5 file.