Amazon.com
Think of Greta Garbo: imagine aloofness, eyelashes, huskiness, naturalness, "the smell of freshly mown hay." Think of Cecil Beaton: imagine camp foppery, narcissism, extravagance, artifice, "a snotty peacock." The two met once in 1932, then not again for 14 years, at which point they became embroiled in a thrillingly uneven relationship marked by projection, mismatched desire, and masochism. So what was the "terrible homosexualist" society photographer doing with "the divine" actress? Amateur psychologists, sharpen your pencils. Diana Souhami wisely does not allow herself to extemporize too wildly, despite the understandable allure of such an alliance. Along with the Scandinavian shoulders and paddle feet, Garbo also possessed a Nordic cold melancholy, rendering her screen portrayals attractively distant and her own self frustratingly absent. The truth was that she did not seem to possess a character to match her undoubted grace and beauty. Beaton, on the other hand, was instinctively bright and bursting with desire to be adored. He matched her indolence with bustling industry. At times, particularly in the recounting of his early days, his obnoxiousness borders on the unbearable, and Souhami barely conceals her disgusted glee. But she is superb at reining in such characters, as she showed in Gertrude and Alice, and she thrives on the challenge of eliciting respect for the sheer indomitable life force of such individuals. Beaton pursued the artificial throughout his life, and nothing could be more superficial than the hollow idealized self he saw in Garbo.
Absence--physical, emotional, and sexual--pervades every aspect of this book. Souhami's sympathetic and shrewd attentions coax a tragic and complicatedly familiar story from two masters of illusion who are united, then estranged, by their lonely natures--uncomfortable in their own skins but ultimately unable to live within each other's. --David Vincent, Amazon.co.uk --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Book Description
Greta Garbo was a legend of beauty and elusiveness and Cecil Beaton a leading society photographer and authority on fashion and style. At the time of their first meeting in Hollywood in March 1932 both were involved in turbulent same-sex affairs: Greta with Mercedes de Acosta and Beaton with Peter Watson, a wealthy dilettante. She flirted and danced with Cecil, told him he was pretty, took a rose from a vase, kissed it, said ‘a rose that lives and dies and never again returns’ and at dawn drove away brushing aside his pleas to stay. He took the rose home to England, framed it in silver and hung it above his bed. They met again fifteen years later in New York and started a relationship whose boundaries were to merge between image and reality, fact and fantasy, male and female and art and life. For her it was an idle flirtation, for him it fuelled his ambition to photograph her, to be like her and to marry her. Diana Souhami draws on diaries, letters, photographs and films to show how Greta and Cecil coded androgyny into their work and concealed it in their private lives and she paints beautifully a picture of these two remarkable individuals and their era.
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
