Mercedes de Acosta Revisted.....
WHO WAS Mercedes de Acosta ? A letter written by Alice B.Toklas to Anita Loos in 1960 comments with a clear sniff of artistic and moral superiority: ".....you can't dispose of Mercedes lightly - she has had the two most important women in the US - Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich."
A FRIEND AND acquaintance of many well known women and men in the literary and artistic planes of both New York and Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century Mercedes pops in and out of the biographies of her contemporaries. She could have stayed a minor player had she not, in ill health and strapped for cash, written her autobiography "Here Lies The Heart" in 1960. Picture below left: Mercedes de Acosta by her husband the painter Abram Poole
ALL OF HER FRIENDSHIPS feature; the book was gossipy, light hearted, factually unreliable - but did not remake her fortune; Garbo for one did not speak to her again. She died in poverty and alone in 1968, a sad figure, deserted by most of her friends
WHY IS THE BOOK not better known ? It is rambling, pedantic in style; gushing, and flattering to her self and her friends to a point where the reader recoils in disbelief. Dates are vague and mostly absent. And it is written in Code: you have to be able to read between the lines in order to Spot The Dyke!
A GOOD EXAMPLE is when Mercedes meets Greta Garbo for the first time. This eventful happening is at the house of the Polish Writer, Salka Viertal. If you know that it was Salka Viertal who persuaded Irving Thalberg to include in Queen Christina the scene where in male costume the Queen embraces the Countess Ebba...... and who cherished the desire to make a film, with Garbo, about the french writer and cross dresser Georges Sand) and that Mercedes has met Salka Viertal through Hope Williams, the actress, and met Hope through Bessie Marbury in New York........and if you know about Bessie Marbury - then it all clicks into place.
SALKA VIERTAL got around a bit; she and Mercedes have another friend in common - Eleonora von Mendelssohn who "has violent 'fixations" on both men and women......" The "introduction" is often the key to the names in the string and the Spot the Lesbian Game !
STRANGELY even in 2001 there is no biography of Mercedes de Acosta,
Female Lover of the Stars ! She features in other Hollywood books; biographies of Garbo and Dietrich they abound. Hugh Vickers in his "Loving Garbo" referred in 1994 to ".....a full biography which is being prepared " - yet it has not materialised ! No trace of any new study of de Acosta's life appears anywhere on the Web. Why is this ? One can but opine that the descendants of those famous, fabulous and rich women whom Mercedes loved still decline to cooperate with any modern biographer, wanting no hint of immorality around themselves or their families. The rich are like that . Photograph right: from The Library of Congress
THE ESTATE of Greta Garbo sourly retains the star's desire for privacy; the Estate of Eva le Gallienne will not allow quotes from some of her letters to Mercedes to be published - although the letters themselves can be openly viewed in the Rosenbach Museum !
POSSIBLY MERCEDES guessed that her memoires would be either misunderstood or blanked out; she left 4 drafts of "Here Lies the Heart" which hide less and proclaim more ! They are available at the Rosenbach Museum and available to genuine researchers - but amazingly have not yet been published. Photo left: Mercedes in 1925
MERCEDES cultivated her appearance, always wearing black and white, a swirling cloak, and pointed shoes with a gold buckle. Her black hair was cut short and slicked back, topped by an old fashioned tricorne hat. When she lost the sight of an eye she affected a black eye patch. She really wanted to be a writer, especially a poet and playwright.
BUT HER poetry has not survived a first tentative slim volume and her plays - when she could persuade Eva le Gallienne to produce them - were universally blasted by the critics. Her 10 years as a scriptwriter in
Hollywood seem to have resulted in no screen credits.
FAMOUS NAMES in "Here Lies the Heart" fall like confetti. Duse, Caruso, Picasso, Matisse, Toscannini, Bernhardt, Rodin, Novello, Pavlova , Diaghilev - to name but a few acquaintances. Coward, Novello, Beaton on another level; Marie Laurencin the painter and Malvina Hoffman the sculptor, countless film stars! And as well as Garbo and Dietrich, there is Isadora Duncan, Nazimova, Eva le Gallienne, Katharine Cornell, Constance Collier. Knowing who is who helps considerably ! Photograph of the older Mercedes right; taken by Marlene Dietrich
..........Next page for some excerpts from "Here Lies The Heart."
From Old Dyke 12 May 2001
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