Word: garbo
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...several generations of moviegoers, Greta Garbo was only the world's most famous recluse. Wasn't she the star who, in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, had murmured, "I want to be alone" and then played out that role for the rest of her life? What else could excite the old awe when she died last week, at 84, ) from complications of kidney disease? After all, Garbo stopped making movies when she was 36, nearly a half-century ago. She never won an Oscar. She worked with few good directors, made fewer great films than any star of comparable magnitude...
...What, when drunk, one sees in other women," Kenneth Tynan wrote, "one sees in Garbo sober." But it wasn't the beauty alone that intoxicated. Garbo used her severe gorgeousness to suggest that the characters she played were creatures from a nobler, alien world, doomed to exile among the puny men and cramped conventions of earth. She was typecast as the siren who lures men to hell, only to get there first; but her pained dignity gave the lie to cliche. This Garbo lived by a standard too high for men to reach, so they grabbed what they could touch...
...Garbo charisma was a creation as mysterious in its genesis as in its impact. She was born Greta Gustafsson to a poor Stockholm family, and at first she gave little hint of her unique hold on the camera. In early publicity films she giggles and models dresses or gorges on a cream puff. There is no beauty here, no acting ability. What could Mauritz Stiller, the pioneer Swedish director, have seen in this plump teenager? Maybe the future of movies. He changed her name to Garbo, cast her as the young female lead in his The Story of Gosta Berling...
...played at this stage of his life by the appealing Marco Leonardi), he conducts his first and, as it turns out, only great love affair with the remote Elena (Agnese Nano) as if it were an old-fashioned movie romance, something like one of those doomy weepers Garbo used to do. Poor Toto. In this realm he has only screen conventions to guide...
Pynchon, 52, is usually described as reclusive, but this term does not quite capture the reality. Howard Hughes was reclusive; so are J.D. Salinger and Greta Garbo. These people achieved fabled recognitions and then decided to barricade themselves against a public that knew where they were and what they looked like. Pynchon, by contrast, somehow had the foresight to hide from the beginning; the only photographs of him in circulation date from his late adolescence. As a result, he resembles, in his freedom, an apparition he includes in Vineland, namely " 'Chuck,' the world's most invisible robot," an android that...