In 1936, the magazine Stage published an article by Leonard Hall called ‘The Glamor Factories of Hollywood’ (‘In goes a Cinderella. Out comes a princess of plastic pulchritude’). The primary example Hall gives of how the studios manufactured glamour ‘just as certainly as the quack of Donald Duck’ is Greta Garbo. Hall claims, in fact, that ‘the Somnolent Scandinavian was the first baby doll to be glamorised in the modern Hollywood sense, and she remains to this day the outstanding product of the art’. He recounts in detail the early efforts of the ‘glamor mechanics’ to improve the woman with ‘lank blonde hair and heavy-lidded eyes’, which, besides dieting and exercise, included the affixing of ‘spurious eyelashes so long that they dipped in her consommé in the commissary’. The only unusual element Hall can point to in his chronicle is that, in contrast to other Hollywood ‘Cinderellas’, Garbo adopts glamour as ‘strictly a studio proposition’, and that off the screen she and her star image look like ‘badly matched twins. There is a faint family resemblance, and no more.’

Given my essay's title, naturally I want to contrast Hall's assessment with that at the centre of Roland Barthes's famous 1957 piece ‘The Face of Garbo’, in which he focuses on Garbo's ‘admirable face-object’, her ‘at once perfect and ephemeral’ visage, in the final long close-up at the end of Queen Christina (1933). It is not exactly a ‘mask’, nor a ‘painted face’, he writes, but ‘a kind of voluntary and therefore human relation between the curve of the nostrils and the arch of the eyebrows’ which together produce a ‘thematic harmony’ of ‘extreme beauty’ to which the appellation ‘divine’ could reasonably be applied. Despite his references to the ‘human’, then, Barthes envisions the ‘classical star face’, in Noa Steimatsky's words, as ‘removed from any pretense of natural expressivity, the pretense of sharing in the reality of ordinary mortals – the spectators’.