Greta Garbo reached the summit of Hollywood fame and then spent half a century engineering a vanishing act, walking Manhattan in trench coats and sunglasses under the name Harriet Brown. This episode begins in a freezing Stockholm cold-water flat, where a shy girl staged elaborate pretend games to control a world she could not, nursed her father through the Spanish flu until his death when she was 14, and left school to lather faces in a barbershop. It follows her from department store catalog modeling to the Royal Dramatic Academy and the pivotal meeting with director Mauritz Stiller, who gave her the name Garbo and made MGM sign her as part of his own deal.

The discussion covers the months MGM ignored her in New York, the studio-ordered weight loss and dental work after Irving Thalberg's screen test, the explosive pairing with John Gilber ...