Garbo

July 1, 2021

A composer, conductor, and pianist, MacArthur Fellow Aucoin helps us better understand opera--The Impossible Art--by chronicling the creation of his opera Eurydice from its beginnings to its premiere at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Son of celebrated bandleader Eddy Duchin and a famed bandleader himself, Duchin decided after enduring both a stroke and a case of COVID-19 to Face the Music and relate not just his glamorous life but the sorrow of never getting to know his busy father and the mother who died when he was six days old. Two-time Emmy Award winner Gless recounts her five decades in Hollywood in Apparently There Were Complaints (75,000-copy first printing). Former Knopf and New Yorker editor Gottlieb's Garbo offers not just a biography of the iconic movie star but a study of her far-reaching impact on film and culture (25,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from October 25, 2021
"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.

December 1, 2021
Garbo. Many artists are known by a single name, but none are more iconic than the ephemeral, inscrutable Swedish actress who dominated Hollywood in the late 1920s through the '30s. Much has been written but little is definitively known about the woman who prized her solitude above all else. Oh, there are facts, there are the films, but for every story there is an element of doubt. Was she promiscuous or chaste? Cruel or compassionate? Talented or just very lucky? In distinguished editor and writer Gottlieb's intriguing biography, there are as many questions as answers. What defies debate, however, is Garbo's stunning, perfect beauty, here illuminated by a trove of arresting portraits taken by the world's preeminent photographers. Equal to Gottlieb's trenchant analysis of Garbo's mercurial life and career is the supporting commentary from those who knew her best or thought they did, from an insightful essay by critic Kenneth Tynan to a snide barb from rival Tallulah Bankhead. Gottlieb exhausts the known record and contributes his own incisive observations to revive and revere the Garbo mystique.

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Starred review from October 15, 2021

Countless books have been written about Greta Garbo since her self-imposed exile in the 1940s, yet this comprehensive biography may be the final word. Gottlieb (Avid Reader: A Life) notes that despite Garbo's brief career and often mediocre films, her name is still synonymous with Hollywood glamour and mystery. Gottlieb covers her life, her work, her shifting sexuality, and the handful of people who truly knew this enigmatic woman, like Mauritz Stiller, the Swedish director who discovered an 18-year-old Garbo and brought her to the United States, and actress and screenwriter Salka Viertel, who had a nurturing influence on Garbo. Gottlieb's research is so complete and his style so engaging that this book almost reads like an oral biography told through a singular voice. Hundreds of photographs document everything from Garbo's early modeling jobs in Sweden to the living room of her recluse-era New York apartment. The final section, "A Garbo Reader," includes historical extracts on Garbo from fellow actors, critics, and writers, and even the occasions her name has been used in song lyrics. VERDICT This is a brilliantly written and constructed portrait of a true icon of the cinema.--Peter Thornell, Hingham P.L., MA

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 1, 2021
Skillful, admiring biography of the film star of yore. Writer and publisher Gottlieb delivers a nuanced portrait of Swedish-born actor Greta Garbo (1905-1990), who famously wanted to be left alone and who made good on it, disappearing from the scene in 1941 after nearly 30 films. She was less popular than peers such as Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. As the author writes, perhaps that's because "M-G-M presented her first as a vamp, luring men on with her vampish ways, but she hated that." The psychology runs deep here. Early in life, Garbo suffered the deaths of family members including her father, poverty, and a lack of education, a source of constant embarrassment to her in later life. Even while standing in line for food, however, she was putting on skits for those who waited with her. A natural beauty of considerable discipline, she won a Hollywood contract after making a few films in Europe, and she was put to work on films such as The Temptress(1926). "Garbo hated this movie, too," writes Gottlieb, "but its success secured her position as the most promising young actress in the world." By 1932, she was making at least $250,000 per movie, a fortune at the time. Gottlieb carefully explores Garbo's private life, which was marked by a hermeticism without equal in the film world. Although an icon in that milieu, she took exceptional pains to live out the rest of her long life away from the public eye, spending 50 years away from the film world while never being allowed to truly leave it. "What are we to make of this strange creature who, without trying, compelled the attention of the world in a way no other star had done?" Gottlieb asks toward the end of a smoothly flowing book that provides ample answers while never quite solving all of Garbo's mysteries. A searching life study that ought to rekindle interest in an unhappy yet brilliant artist.

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