From Publishers Weekly
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.
From Library Journal
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.
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