We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
20
SCREENLAND
GRETA GARBO
An Amazing Psycho-Analytic Portrait of the Screens Mystery Woman
Greta Garbo as she looked when she first arrived in Hollywood — a lonely, moody, shy Swedish girl. Hollywood direction, lighting, and clever costumes helped her to burst her bondage and become a world celebrity.
The poised and perfect Garbo of today! She found in America just that help whicft has allowed her to bring her real self — shut in, a being of inarticulate moods — out into the glare of the Kleig lights.
How about the lovely Miss Garbo, who has but 22 years to her credit (or debit), a Swedish woman who already has become what the psy chologists call the soul-image to the American people, and to many millions besides? Everything about her, so we are told, is mystery. To begin with, her his' tory since she came to these shores reverses the theory that foreign actors are ruined by Hollywood and Americanization; their peculiar novelty wears off; their fire dies; from being passionate they become good sports, and from being unique they become commonplace. But Greta Garbo, while she was always Greta Garbo, has undergone an amazing development, as if she had added to herself only what was best in America and rejected the shoddy.
No amount of success has rooted out her initial qualities, and, were it not for the new psychology with its knowledge of types, we could have no key to her mystery. Her mystery is this: She is genuinely shy, yet she broadcasts herself to the world; she loves solitude and is not a mixer, yet she stands in the glare of terrific publicity; it is not easy for her to express herself to others, yet she is today one of the truly remarkable actresses of the
screen. America has, every year, a Prize Beauty contest, and every district of the land sends its favorite goodlooker, and from these one is chosen as Miss America. Yet none of these Prize Beauties even faintly resembles Greta Garbo. She is not in any way the typical American beauty, whose symbol is the American beauty rose, shapely, open and frank of face, familiar, a good fellow, a mixer, with nothing in the least mysterious about her. She might live down the next block. Greta Garbo lives in Never-Never Land, and she is more popular, more loved of Americans than any of these.
Her appeal is not direct, like that of an Anita Page or a Mary Pickford; it is subtle, evasive, often unexpected. She is not changeless, like a Norma Shearer or a Marion Davies. Most actresses have what we might call one face. Greta Garbo is a woman of a thousand faces. She always looks different. Spread out a set of her photographs and each is quite different. Here is the face of a very worldly woman, here is the face of an innocent, here is sheer loveliness, even magic; here is something approaching plainness. If we can say that almost every woman moves with a certain rhythm by which we place her — the