Women would have liked to be like her, to possess her gaze and her magnetism, bearing, even just the haircut. Men desired her and at the same time were intimidated by her almost supernatural charm, like a deity who happened to land on Earth by chance. The protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" dreamed of making love to her, at least once, and then loving her forever. Starting in the mid-twenties of the twentieth century, through just over fifteen years and twenty Hollywood films, Greta Garbo was all this and much more. As the journalist Robert Gottlieb writes in the volume simply entitled “Garbo” (Il Castoro, 2023, euro 28, pp. 456) “between 1925 and 1941 wherever you look, Garbo is in people's minds, hearts and dreams ”. In fact, he managed to penetrate the global subconscious, continuing to retain an irresistible, almost magical aura even after his sudden retirement from the cinematic limelight, at just over 35 years old.
Charming and shy at the same time, in love with acting and at the same time intolerant of the rules of the Hollywood star system, Greta Garbo has always been a mystery to her fans, cinema enthusiasts, critics and journalists. A mystery magnified by the detachment with which the great Swedish actress always seemed to relate to the world and people. Gottlieb's book then has the advantage of trying to shorten the distance with an actress who was already called the Divine after a handful of films. In fact, the author takes us inside the films, from its presentation by MGM as a "vamp" - a formula she detested - up to the artistic peaks of films such as "Margherita Gauthier" and "Ninotchka". She lets us touch how much truth there is in the words of a great literary critic like Roland Barthes when she writes: "La Garbo still belongs to that moment of cinema in which the mere capture of the human face caused the greatest disturbance in the crowds, in which he was literally lost in a human image as in a filter, in which the face constituted a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could neither be reached nor abandoned. [...] Garbo offered a kind of Platonic idea of the creature [...] Her appellation of Divine undoubtedly aimed at rendering, rather than a superlative state of beauty, the essence of her corporeal person, descended from a heaven where things are formed and finished in the utmost clarity”.
Above all, Gottlieb offers a vivid and accurate account of Garbo's private life, he tells it almost live, giving the impression of having the opportunity to know her in person. Garbo then emerges when she was still an unknown Swedish named Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, born into a poor family in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Stockholm. The story of a complicated childhood emerges, the lack of an adequate school education, cinema as the only way out of the ghetto of poverty to which she seemed condemned by birth. A road paved with determination, stubbornness, but also loneliness, mistrust, fear of suddenly losing everything she had managed to conquer. Only by understanding this distrust of everything around her and the constant fear that success would turn its back on her can we perhaps understand the long second part of Garbo's life, a second part to which Gottlieb's book devotes enormous attention recounting her retirement from the scene, as well as the repeated attempts to change her mind, up to narrating her life in New York after retirement - "a hermit in the city" -, and that in Europe, among the Rothschilds and men like Onassis and Churchill.
The result is the portrait of a screen goddess, a goddess who perhaps had Marilyn Monroe as her only follower. And at the same time the snapshot - necessarily blurred, given Garbo's reluctance to show her true face - of a lonely woman, who has perhaps never felt quite up to the role that fate had assigned her.
