Greta and Cecil - Softcover

Greta Garbo first met society photographer Cecil Beaton in Hollywood in March 1932. At the time both were caught in turbulent same-sex affairs: Greta with Mercedes de Acosta, among whose lovers were Eva Le Gallienne and Marlene Dietrich, and Cecil with Peter Watson, a wealthy dilettante. Yet Garbo flirted and danced with Beaton, told him he was pretty, presented him with 'a rose that lives and dies and never again returns' and at dawn drove away in her black Packard. Cecil took the rose home to England, framed it in silver and hung it above his bed.

Fifteen years later Greta and Cecil met again. He wrote in his diary that she closed the curtains in his rooms at the Plaza hotel, New York, and asked him if he wanted to go to bed. For her it was an idle flirtation. For him it fuelled his ambition to photograph her, to be like her and to marry her – an obsession that became a betrayal.

"Greta Garbo's mysterious, inebriating allure has always defeated attempts to reduce it to words. It is no small achievement, then, that Diana Souhami has conveyed an almost palpable impression in this book of the enchantment of Garbo's beauty."
BRIAN MASTERS, 'Mail on Sunday'

"We are presented with a world of wavering gender and identity, filled with reflection and reiteration, photographic images, mirrors and screens, where false façades conceal equally artificial foundations and reality is just what you break your foot on as you stumble on it in the dark."
JENNY KISKI, 'London Review of Books'

"Diana Souhami sculpts the narrative to reflect her elegant ideas on the worship of images, the blurring of boundaries in love and art and the muddle that is androgyny."
MAUREEN FREELY, 'Observer'

"Souhami's portraiture is full of glorious details ... and her tongue-in-cheek irreverence makes the characters both more interesting and less sympathetic."
Andrea Stuart, 'New Statesman and Society'

"Compelling reading."
LITERARY REVIEW