Will the “divine” Garbo return to the screen?

Will the “divine” Garbo return to the screen?

The legendary Greta Garbo, who retired from the silver screen 40 years ago because she thought she was too “old,” is now 76, preserves her eternal youth, and rumors speak of her return to the screen in the film “Sister Teresa.”

In the meantime, she chose to spend an athletic holiday in Switzerland, in the company of her friend Baroness Cécile de Rothschild, her age and as confirmed a spinster as she is. The two walked five kilometers every day, and photographers who caught them in their lenses admit that Greta, thanks to sport, but also to the strict diet she imposed on herself, is still quite “divine.”

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Catch-as-catch-can...

Northern France and the Flemish part of Belgium are apparently the last places in the Western world where women’s professional wrestling bouts are held. But, contrary to all expectations, these are not “monsters.”

Take, for example, “the arena tigress Stiffy Schultz,” whose real name is Annick Drimla, aged 37. She is 167 cm tall and weighs just 52 kg. Her colleagues are of even “smaller” proportions.

That does not mean, of course, that one needn’t be afraid of them. One man, misled by the “tiny” appearance of the 20-year-old wrestler Margaret, found himself hurled with great force toward a wall after he tried to attack her in a dark street. Annick, for her part, works in her spare time as a “bouncer” in bars prone to trouble. Naturally...

Fifteen years ago she was an office secretary-typist. Then one day a wrestler who was supposed to face Annick’s husband, himself a wrestler, in a “mixed bout,” fell ill. She took the sick woman’s place, and she liked the profession so much that she went on to perform independently as well.

At first her parents were horrified, but later they had to get used to it. In the “classic” division of roles in “catch-as-catch-can” shows, Annick was initially on the side of the “good girls,” known as “the Scotswomen,” but later she switched to the “tigresses”—the “bad girls” who stir up the audience’s hostility.

Surprisingly, these dangerous women like a profession that brings them up to a thousand francs a night on tour. In their private lives, of course, they are good friends and quite feminine. This was also the reason for the disappointment of the Italian director Mario Monicelli, who hired them to appear in a film about the lives of women wrestlers. “Go and get yourselves inflated in a tire factory,” he told them half-jokingly. And only because of his standing as a director did he not, as might have been expected, find himself crashing into the nearest wall...

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Brigitte and the seals

Brigitte Bardot’s dedication to the campaign to save the seals led her to agree to something she had not done for a long time. The matter in question was an exhibition of one hundred nude photographs of her, taken by the photographer Ghislain Dussart, which was due to open in her presence, amid all the “who’s who,” at the famous Byblos club in the resort town of Saint-Tropez.

All the photographs were intended for sale, and the proceeds were to go toward protecting the seals. But at the last minute it turned out that the organization to which the proceeds were destined, “Greenpeace,” was a foreign organization and was not recognized in France as being “of public importance.” Therefore, income tax had to be paid on the sale, which would have cast doubt on its usefulness. The sale was therefore postponed to a later date and arranged through another organization.

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A school for women bodyguards

And another woman in a profession that is not at all “feminine.” Kan Sotel is perhaps the world’s first female bodyguard.

This young Parisian, whose services cost 250 francs an hour, is a daring security guard for people who need one, an expert in the use of weapons, but prefers to overcome danger with hand-to-hand combat techniques that she knows inside out.

She has already been bodyguard to quite a few clients, mainly on their way to and from the bank, but her great dream is to devote herself exclusively to protecting women and children, “who need protection most,” as she puts it.

Since her profession is also a way of life for her, she is opening a special school for women bodyguards in Paris in the autumn.