Garbo - Robert Gottlieb Audiobook

Written by Robert Gottlieb
Read by Maria Tucci
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
Release date: December 7, 2021
Duration: 11:21:10

“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 America’s subconscious; her decision to suddenly end her film career at the age of thirty-six only made her more irresistible. Garbo appeared in only twenty-four movies, yet her impact on the world―and that indescribable, transcendent presence she possessed―was rivaled only by Marilyn Monroe. She was a phenomenon, a Sphinx, a myth, but also a Swedish peasant girl, uneducated, naïve, and always on her guard.

In Garbo, acclaimed critic and editor Robert Gottlieb attempts to capture the ever-elusive essence of Garbo through the eyes of others: in addition to a vivid and thorough retelling of her life, Gottlieb combs through glimpses of Garbo in literature, music, private letters, and, of course, films, in order to better understand her. Discovering her within Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and in the letters of Marianne Moore, and following her from her early movies with MGM to her career-defining, Academy Award-nominated role in Camille to her world-stopping decision to leave the limelight, Gottlieb crafts a biography of unprecedented intimacy and scope in the hopes of capturing the woman that only the camera knew.

Publishers Weekly….””More than any other star,” Greta Garbo “invaded the subconscious of the audience,” writes veteran editor Gottlieb (A Certain Style) in this searching and sensitive portrait of the actor. Though “only the camera knew” what went on behind her “amazing eyes,” Gottlieb follows Garbo from her impoverished Swedish childhood (during which she frequented soup kitchens) through to her beginnings in film and her remarkable career as an MGM star. He covers her life out of the spotlight, too, including her reclusive nature (”When she died, there was plentiful evidence of how ordinary and how dull the real woman had been,” wrote critic David Thomson), cross-dressing (which she’d “always enjoyed”), and art collecting (within a month of getting into it, she bought three Renoirs). Garbo’s life was full of contradictions, Gottlieb writes: she “insisted on being independent” yet lived mostly under the thumb of MGM, and called America home yet had “no connection to it.” A lengthy “Garbo reader” full of excerpts and articles about her rounds out Gottlieb’s perfectly paced account—it includes Harriet Parsons’s 1931 piece “24 Hours with Greta Garbo,” Kenneth Tynan’s 1954 Sight and Sound profile, and quotes from her colleagues including Billy Wilder, Edmund Goulding, and Clarence Brown—and the wealth of photos is a plus. The result is a masterful look at an elusive Hollywood giant.”