- Title
- Greta Garbo's foot, or, sex, socks and letters
- Creator
- Dever, Maryanne
- Relation
- Australian Feminist Studies Vol. 25, Issue 64, p. 163-173
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164641003762461
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2010
- Description
- In November 2006 I found myself staring at item no. 80 from Box 23 of the Greta Garbo material held at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. Item 80 is an envelope from the Pont-Royal Hotel on the front of which is written ‘Greta’s foot Sept. 1958’. Inside is a pencil tracing of Garbo’s foot extending across two small sheets of unlined notepaper. I held the two pieces of paper in mid-air and stared at them with what I hoped was a look of sufficient scholarly intensity to satisfy the two archivists looking on. ‘Looks about a size 8’, I have written in my notes, but in my excitement I failed to note down whether it was her left or her right foot. Elsewhere in the collection - that of Mercedes de Acosta - I encountered a yellow cotton ankle sock with a lipstick kiss still visible upon it. Further afield in the same papers, there is a single silk stocking that once belonged to Marlene Dietrich. Nowhere present is the pair of slightly used socks that Greta generously offered to Mercedes in a note from 1938. But this is not what took me to Philadelphia; no, this visit was the culmination of a six-year desire to see what ‘nothing’ looked like. What took me on this hiding to ‘nothing’? In April 2000, the world’s press reported on the opening of a long-embargoed cache of letters from Greta Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, the Spanish-born aristocrat turned screenwriter widely thought to have been Garbo’s lover. At issue was whether the letters would somehow ‘prove’ the nature of the relationship between the two women.
- Subject
- Greta Garbo; letters; archives
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1054961
- Identifier
- uon:15816
- Identifier
- ISSN:0816-4649
- Language
- eng
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