Greta Garbo was born in 1905 in one of the poorest sections of Stockholm. She lived in a cold-water flat with no indoor toilet. Salka Viertel was born in 1889 into a well-to-do Jewish family living on an estate of rolling meadows and orchards in Galicia, near what is now Lviv, Ukraine. Their stories, which began in radically different circumstances, came together in the same place: Hollywood. They became lifelong friends and the subject of considerable gossip.
