When she arrived in Hollywood Greta Garbo spoke barely a word of English, yet in sixteen short years, she managed to infiltrate the world's subconscious. She appeared in only two dozen Hollywood movies, and ended her film career when she was thirty-six.Gottlieb retells her life, beginning in the slums of Stockholm and proceeding through her years of struggling to elude the attention of the world. He examines the films themselves, the life she led in Europe, and her relationships with co-stars, authors, and more. He also assembles glimpses of Garbo from other people's memoirs and interviews, from literature and countless songs and cartoons and articles of merchandise. Garbo was a woman with no vanity, yet her story is essentially the story of a face... and the camera. -- adapted from jacket