© THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 8, 1990 by PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN:
TV to Invade Greta Garbo's Last Refuge: Garbo – The Name – The Face – The Auction – The Video
In anticipation of next week's auction of the Greta Garbo estate at Sotheby's, the cable channel AMC, in cooperation with the auction house and the Garbo estate, has produced "The Greta Garbo Collection," a 15 1/2-minute-long mini-documentary. It will be broadcast on AMC tonight at at 9 o'clock and 1 A.M. and on Bravo Monday night at 10.
The program picks up where Robin Leach leaves off. Understatedly introduced by a natty Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who starred with Garbo in "A Woman of Affairs" in 1929, it offers a glimpse of her "sumptuous refuge" on East 52d Street in Manhattan, with tinkly piano background and panning camera. The front door opens magically, in authentic Leach tradition.
Scenes of Garbo's apartment, bathed in Hallmark card sunset-orange light, are woven with movie stills and interviews with experts from Sotheby's and Newsweek's film critic, Jack Kroll. The recluse-about-town is shown as an enigmatic woman of taste -- taste that will doubtlessly be inherited by whoever parts with his or her money next Thursday at Sotheby's.
Garbo's frequent trips to the auction house, where she once sold "a little early Picasso that wasn't terribly attractive," says David Nash, Sotheby's expert for Impressionists, are viewed as part of the Garbo mystique.
Haunting the French furniture and decorative-arts sales, the star "would never bid on anything herself," Mr. Nash says; "she managed to conduct negotiations practically without speaking."
She was not an academic, comprehensive collector, but one with great style and, as is said about so many famous women, with a fabulous color sense. "She bought things that tickled her," says Letitia Roberts, the head of Sotheby's porcelain department.
In the film, the pearl-swathed Miss Roberts appears in the documentary in the rose-, green- and salmon-colored living room with some of Garbo's favorite porcelain objects, including the figure of a wizard and pieces decorated with birds and flowers.
"I find profound people often go for very natural objects," Miss Roberts tells the camera. Such lack of artifice, she assures us, "says a lot about Miss Garbo." The only lapse in Garbo's impeccable taste, which included three Renoirs and a Bonnard and carved Louis XV furniture, seems to have been a treasured dime-store blow-up snowman she kept in the living room near the French doors with the river view that were so often kept open. With this program, a whole new new genre – one part Architectural Digest, one part Infiniti commercial – may be born.
Additional Press Articles about Greta Garbo:
- Interviews/Videos with Scott Reisfield and Robert Dance February 6, 2006
- Greta Garbo's Great Nephew Derek Reisfields Talkes about Garbo December 2005
- Gray Horan Talks about Greta Garbo 2005
- Letters Push Garbo Slightly Into View April 18, 2000
- Garbo's Pedestrian Side: Everything Not on Film March 14, 1995
- Garbo's Glamour Enlivens Auction November 16, 1990
- »The Greta Garbo Collection« November 9, 1990
- The Name. The Face. The Auction. The Video November 8, 1990
- Greta Garbo's Collection and a van Gogh Are to Be Sold July 19, 1990
- Garbo: Illusion Was All April 22, 1990
- Greta Garbo, 84, Screen Icon Who Fled Her Stardom, Dies April 16, 1990
- The Elusive Garbo Turns 80 September 19, 1985
- Garbo Book Is Called A Hoax April 21, 1978
- Saga of Greta Lovisa Gustafsson September 1965
- Back from Europe: Greta Garbo Refuses to Discuss Own Life October 8, 1938
- Garbo And Stokowski Deny They Will Wed March 18, 1938
- Stokowski in Capri with Greta Garbo March 2, 1938
- Greta Garbo Back: Consents to 10-Minute Interview May 4, 1936
- True Story of Garbos Life by her Interpreter Sven-Hugo Borg 1933
- Detectives Shield Actress in Royal Suite of the Gripsholm July 31, 1932
- First and Only Bona Fide Life Story of Greta Garbo April 1928
- Greta Garbo's Intelligent Acting December 4, 1927
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