SAN FRANCISCO, May 8, 2019 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Greta Garbo may have wanted to be alone onscreen, but off she conspired with British Intelligence to save the world by stopping WWII before it could start. This amazing historical fact is the premise of a brand new novel by debut author Jon James Miller. The tale is based on real events surrounding movie star Greta Garbo's abrupt departure from the movies in 1941, and blends the best of noir with action, history and romance. It's also Millers way of honoring his late mother, Jean Dempsey, who was a huge Garbo fan, and passed her obsession with the queen of golden age Hollywood onto her youngest son.
"My Mom was a voracious reader and huge classic movie fan. She turned me on to all the stars of the 1930s and 40s, including Garbo. Years later after my Mom passed of colon cancer and I attended film school, I thought it would be fun to cast Garbo in a film noir thriller. That's when I read about the very real plan Garbo had cooked up with British Secret Intelligence and called "The Big One" to assassinate her biggest fan – Adolf Hitler. Hitler was obsessed with the movie star, and had his own print of Garbo's Camille that he would watch over and over again. He used to write Garbo fan letters, inviting her to come to Nazi Germany. And Garbo is quoted as saying, "if the war didn't start when it did, I would have gone, pulled out a gun and shot him because I would never have been searched." If my Mom were still alive today, I think she would have loved to read a story like that."
It would be years later when Miller, an award-winning screenwriter was working on a cable documentary and came across Seth Moseley, an old tabloid reporter. Miller and Moseley soon became friends, and the reporter told Miller about the time he discovered Garbo in the men's room aboard an ocean liner in the Port of New York, hiding from a gaggle of reporters who had learned she was onboard traveling under an alias. Moseley's encounter with the movie star inspired Miller to finally write the novel.
"I thought it would be fun casting Garbo, the heroine from Mata Hari and Queen Christina, on a real-life top secret mission to kill Hitler," he says. "I wanted to explore what it would actually be like if Garbo embarked on her secret mission, then simply ran out of time en route. What would have happened to her trapped on the open sea, surrounded by Nazis? I knew I had a great premise to build the novel on."
But while Miller admits writing his first novel was a steep learning curve, getting his work published took even greater effort, and time, than he could have imagined.
"My literary agent, Jill Marr is a fantastic agent and signed me right away. Jill was there for me when my first publisher went out of business, and the second turned out to be a bad fit. I actually ended up buying back the rights to my novel, and it wasn't until four years later that Amphorae Publishing Group bought it. It's been a long haul to publication but the folks at Amphorae are great and I have no regrets!"
Greta Garbo's career would come to an abrupt end in 1941 with the ill-conceived comedy Two-Faced Woman, her last film. But Miller contends that the war changed the world and cinema forever - ushering in the dark and menacing noir films of the 1940s, leaving Garbo's romantic heroines in the cold. But Miller, who spent many years researching WWII and the men and women who sacrificed their lives to defeat fascism, argues the movie star's legacy goes well beyond the silver screen.
"Garbo helped obtain the release of physicist Niels Bohr from occupied Denmark to Sweden and later to America. Bohr would later work on the Manhattan Project, dedicated to creating the world's first atomic bomb, and finally bring an end to World War II. Incidentally, my Mom's very first job was as a secretary, working on the Manhattan Project in New York City. Growing up, I had heard she was part of something top secret but didn't really put it all together until I started researching for the novel. Now, it's kind of cool to see the connection between Mom and Garbo, her favorite movie star."
Looking For Garbo is dedicated to Miller's Mom, and the fond memories of watching black and white movies together. The author stresses that the novel is a work of fiction but there's obviously semi-autobiographical moments throughout.
"There's a lot of my Mom in this story, for sure," Miller says. "She loved the glamorous movie stars and reading about their private lives. I think she would have loved to have seen Garbo sacrifice herself in order to save the world. It's definitely her kind of story."
SOURCE Amphorae Publishing Group
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