CELEBRITIES who retreat from the public eye become all the more intriguing because of their aura of inaccessibility. Greta Garbo retired from the screen at 35 and led a secluded life until she died in 1990. She made 28 movies in her career and acquired the status of Hollywood royalty. I’m guessing whether most of Generations X, Y, and Z have ever heard of this goddess or seen one of her films unless they’re hardcore TCM fans or aspiring actors or film critics. A few more may be familiar with the phrase that defined her in the media and was often misquoted: “I want to be alone.” (The actual quote was: “I want to be let alone.”) But that was impossible, because MGM, run by Louis B. Mayer and “boy genius” Irving Thalberg, had brought European actresses like Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to America and chosen films for them expressly to make money. A new biography, Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo, by feminist historian Lois Banner—who’s the cofounder of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians—presents Greta Louisa Gustafson (1905–1990) as Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde. So much has been written about the actress that the Hollywood dream factory exploited as a marketable commodity during the 1920s and ’30s, when Garbo was billed as “the most beautiful woman in the world,” that it’s a challenge to say something new. Banner’s book offers a feminist rehash of Garbo’s childhood and reprises the well-known struggles on her quest for cinematic fame and financial freedom. From the beginning, Garbo used the acting skills that she had mastered in Sweden and Germany to establish a performative persona that the camera loved. Her facial assets included a pale complexion, large and intense eyes, deep-set lids, high cheekbones, long eyelashes, and expressive lips. Her acting was most effective in her silent films and, later, in talking pictures like Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie, which opens with Garbo’s first spoken lines: “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby.” The publicity department advertised the film with the tagline: “Garbo Talks.” A consummate performer, she was an expert at milking silent pauses for all they were worth. She played a variety of aristocrats, femme fatales, whores, and working-class girls throughout her career. Many of her heroines were women with regular jobs who faced challenges with wit, perseverance, and strength. Her most popular silent and talking films included Flesh and the Devil, Anna Christie, Grand Hotel, Queen Christina, Camille, and Ninotchka. MGM Studios and Hollywood gossip columnists Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper sold Garbo to eager readers who were primarily white, middleto upper-class women who aspired to upward mobility as depicted in films and fashions. Banner demonstrates that Garbo was a new kind of star who displaced the petite, simpering American film models that Mayer and Thalberg had created. Tall (at five-foot-six), thin, and androgynous, she exemplified a new kind of woman with her distinctive appearance, a sort of old-money, timeless, minimalist style consisting of handmade oxfords crafted especially for her in London, man-tailored jackets, long, elegant camel coats, pleated The Suits in Garbo’s Closet Georges Bataille. With fascism and anti-Semitism growing in France and the rest of Europe, Cahun and Moore took refuge in 1937 on Jersey, an island in the English Channel. In 1940, the second year of World War II, the Germans occupied Jersey. The Nazis required all Jews and German speakers to register with the occupiers, but Cahun and Moore refused. From 1940 through the end of the war, they wrote anti-German pamphlets and fliers, which they distributed despite the Nazi occupation. In fact, they often signed their work “Der Soldat Ohne Namen” (“The Soldier with No Name”) and, dressed as Nazis themselves, surreptitiously placed the fliers in soldiers’ pockets or on their chairs, or threw them into soldiers’ cars and home windows. At other times, they dressed in nondescript “masculine” clothing and roamed the city, writing the phrase “Sieg? Nein: Krieg! Ohne Ende!” (“Victory? No: War! Without End!”) on buildings, newspapers, packages, and even on papers pulled out of discarded cigarette packs. Stated Cahun: “I continued this on subsequent walks, scribbling the phrase on anything I could write on and leave behind.” Despite their great caution, Cahun and Moore were arrested by the Gestapo on July 25, 1944, and sent to prison. “I took all responsibility, trying to save Suzanne’s life. Then I confessed my Jewish ancestry,” Cahun tells us. The pair were sentenced to death for their role in creating anti-Nazi propaganda. With Germans recognizing that the end of the war was nigh, they pardoned Cahun and Moore on February 20, 1945. With the rest of Europe, Cahun and Moore celebrated V-E Day and their release from prison on May 8, 1945. But not even the end of the war brought the end to anti-Semitism in Jersey, so the pair returned to Paris, where they remained until Cahun died on December 8, 1954. Moore followed many years later, on February 19, 1972. At fewer than ninety pages, Rowe’s Liberated merely scratches the surface of Cahun’s life and art. But perhaps that’s appropriate as Cahun’s art often dealt with surfaces: poses, masks, assumed or discarded identities. The book pays tribute to Cahun’s Surrealistic photography and æsthetics, her aggressive anti-fascism, and her enduring, indestructible love for Marcel Moore. It is an inspiring (albeit sometimes bleak) story of two gender-bending queer artists who fought to remake their world in a way that was more pleasing to themselves and less harsh for everyone. For that reason alone, Liberated is a book that should be celebrated. CASSANDRALANGER IDEAL BEAUTY The Life and Times of Greta Garbo by Lois W. Banner Rutgers Univ. Press. 286 pages, $34.95 Cassandra Langer is the author of the 2023 memoir Erase Her: A Survivor’s Story. 34 TheG&LR
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