Word: stokowskied
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...past 14 years locked in a vault. Next month Simon & Schuster will publish Garbo, by the author Antoni Gronowicz, a longtime friend, who died five years ago. Withheld while Garbo was alive, it contains reminiscences about her childhood in Sweden and her relationships with mentor Mauritz Stiller, conductor Leopold Stokowski and others. In it, Garbo reflects on the tales that "women chased her more often and more persistently" than men. Another associate, film scholar Raymond Daum, has a book due out late this year...
From then on, and despite headline-grabbing flirtations with John Gilbert and Leopold Stokowski, Garbo became in effect the indentured mistress of her movie studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. This most galvanizing of actresses was the most passive of stars. At MGM's urging, the young Garbo slimmed down, had her teeth capped, adjusted her hairline. Her most enduring studio ally was her doting cinematographer, William Daniels. Garbo must have felt comfortable, surrounded by MGM's middlebrow high gloss. She may not have cared that its gentility suffocated her films, so long as she could breathe her artistry into them...
...recalled to mind a most illuminating conversation that I'd had with a nude Leopold Stokowski, just last week, at a little gala thrown by an equally pre-lapsarian Hank Kissinger in honor of my latest opus, The Oracle Speaks (Knopf, $27.95, although if you have to ask the price you will in all likelihood neither understand nor be able to afford the book...
...republished four years ago and became a best seller after a PBS documentary last year on her life, she left out her volcanic love affairs, which seem to have numbered in the dozens and included alliances with such notable gents as Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Conductor Leopold Stokowski...
What if George Gershwin had lived longer? He saw his first hit song, Swanee, sell more than a million copies, wrote for Broadway and symphony orchestras and performed Rhapsody in Blue to the applause of Rachmaninoff and Stokowski, all before his 30th birthday. He was planning further classical compositions when he died of a brain tumor at the age of 38 in 1937. Would Gershwin's later music have made its way into the standard American repertory along with the works of Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber? Or would he have been considered an overreacher whose notes never quite shook...