Books: “Garbo,” by Robert Gottlieb

Before there was J-Lo, Madge, or any of today’s one-named superstars, there was a little girl born in 1905 in a cold-water flat in Stockholm, whose father was a street cleaner and who herself was too poor to go to high school.

However, Greta Lovisa Gustaffson (who came to be know as Garbo) was eager to go places in the world of theater. She began by working in PUB, a local department store, modeling hats and eventually making small advertising films for the store. Still dreaming of a career onstage,  Garbo was accepted into the Royal Dramatic Training Academy, where she eventually caught the eye of director Mauritz Stiller, who took a chance and cast her in “The Saga of Gosta Berling” (1924).

Louis B. Mayer, while in Europe trying to sign Stiller, later saw her in another film and said “get me that girl instead.” At a dinner in Berlin, he told Garbo, “you know, Miss Garbo, American men don’t like fat women.” She and Stiller followed him to America anyway, and the rest is history.

“Garbo,” the newest bio of the world’s greatest movie star, was written by eminence gris Robert Gottlieb, former editor of The

New Yorker. Be advised that if you love everything Garbo (like RG and this writer do), you will devour this faster than a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. Besides the standard facts which you could swipe from Wikipedia, the book is replete with extras—including the famous Garbo article by Sir Kenneth Tynan; gorgeous black-and-white plates of portraits taken by Hurrell and Clarence Bull; as well as fond remembrances by Billy Wilder, Talulah Bankhead, and countless others.

Garbo’s silent hits (“Flesh and the Devil”), her first talkie (“Anna Christie”), her 1932 hit and my personal favorite (“Grand Hotel” with Barrymore), her first on-screen laugh (“Ninotchka” with Melvyn Douglas) are dissected with lucidity, affection, and no shortage of star-studded gossip. Her male co-stars (Gable, Robert Taylor, Lew Ayres) mostly paled in her orbit. Garbo’s early affairs with John Gilbert, Erich Maria Remarque, and Leopold Stokowski drew frenzied public attention—the kind of attention which she abhorred to her dying day (April 15, 1990 at New York Presbyterian Hospital).

Sensing it was time to leave the party, Garbo retired from the movie business in 1941, having pretty much hated the Hollywood machine from the start. Throughout the next four decades, however, she continued to receive numerous offers to make films with all the greats, as well as with the not-so-greats, including Liberace (“Liberace? Is that a restaurant?” she asked with a straight face.) She was once asked if given the chance she would’ve met Hitler, who reportedly was interested in such a meeting. “Yes, and I would have taken a gun out of my purse and shot him.” Questioned by someone else about Dietrich who hated her, she replied, perhaps not so innocently, “Who is this Marlene Dietrich?” A friend later commented, “That may have been the wittiest thing she ever said.”

Was Garbo the “Swedish Sphinx?” Gottlieb claims her shyness and seeming impermeability were due to her self-consciousness about her lack of formal education. What about her supposed lack of warmth? Close friends said no. Once she was comfortable with you and knew you didn’t want her autograph or hound her on East 52 Street, where she lived, she laughed and loved with the best of them. Children were her soft spot (she had none herself and despite numerous proposals, never married.)

In a 21st-century world of TikTok, gotcha sites and Murdoch newspapers, there would be no room for someone as private and singular as Garbo. So consider taking a break from all that hoo-ha and read the definitive biography of the one-named superstar that dwarfs so-called celebrities like “Ye.”