All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Esther’s stasis troubled Wilson, but it was Janet Flanner, Nancy Mitford, Sybille Bedford, and Dawn Powell who worried most ardently about her disappointed promise. Powell was a specialist in persistence—the will to keep writing despite financial and family trouble, insufficient recognition, and her own hard drinking—and literary failure was often her subject, as well her as quotidian fear. “After 21 years or more of writing novels steadily with inch-like progress,” she wrote in her diary in 1944, “I am about where most of my contemporaries are who wrote one play, one book, of moderate success, and basked in increasing glory, prestige and (in some cases) affluence, ever since. They took care to nurse what fame came on their one outburst—they cultivated the rich, the publicity spotlight.” In A Time to Be Born, set in wartime New York and populated by writers, editors, and publishers, one of Powell’s characters lies in bed comparing himself with an ex-lover, composing an anxious rhapsody on failure:

  Failure frightened him, looming up all the sharper by Amanda’s success. He seldom slept. He wondered if he was through. He was thirty-three. Sometimes people were through at thirty-three. Thirty even. They became old drunks. The world was full of old drunken failures. Has-beens. Warnings. Men who didn’t realize they were never any good anyway…What did other men do…when fears, batted out the door like flies, left only to return by window? What did other men do, suspecting that what was for them had been served—no further helping, no more love, no more triumph; for them labor without joy or profit, for them a passport to nowhere, free ticket to the grim consolations of Age? Was it true, then, that this world was filled with men and women merely marking time before their cemetery? When did courage’s lease expire, was there no renewal possible?

  Esther was so unsettling to Powell that her death spurred an extraordinary consideration of Powell’s own need to write and of the pressure she felt to conform to expectations about femininity. After noting that it would have been nice if Esther had “confounded her friends with Documents,” leaving some written work after all, she wrote to Gerald, “But we read ourselves into those we love, and occasionally I catch a glimmer that some people don’t want to be the action—they really want to be spectator. I daresay,” she went on, “someone will sympathize with me for being obliged to write instead of breeding a big Xmas family on the range and I won’t be able to use the grave’s intercom to shout ‘No No No! I had what I wanted!’”

  The grave’s intercom: Powell’s startling image of the need to defend her ambition and speak to posterity is also a way to describe the work of a biography, a genre that can let someone who no longer speaks be heard. Her cry makes the intercom real while describing it as impossible, and it suggests the continuing need for an angel at the grave—someone who listens, keeping vigil by a corpse—even as it imagines doing away with that intermediary. But Powell was not quite right about Esther, who did want to “be the action,” who loved and needed her own spectators, and wanted to instruct, amuse, distract, inform. Esther’s need for an audience was so great that she could not isolate herself to write, so it was a lifelong performance rather than a document that she produced. The performance both kept her from writing and was a form of obsessive creation; it guaranteed her failure and immunized her from it. The performance was a way to create an intimacy with her subject and with her audience while distancing herself from both. Those who did not know Esther well, a friend wrote, could not see “the kindness that lay under that river of talk, or the loneliness, accepted and understood.”

  Esther alarmed Powell, but they shared a worry about the kind of American success that Powell criticized in A Time to Be Born. “Amanda” in that book is based on Clare Booth Luce. Married to a media magnate, like Booth Luce, this character achieves a bestselling romantic novel, which, ludicrously, leads the press to treat her as an expert on world politics. In the spring of 1953, as Booth Luce arrived in Rome as President Eisenhower’s ambassador to Italy, Esther wrote to Sybille, “I don’t know Mrs. L. and I have always considered her a terrifying kind of go-getting American woman with everything as grist to her mill, art, politics, religion.—undertaking everything without understanding anything—and then of course her blatantly reactionary politics and the vulgar publicity given to her conversion to Catholicism…Eisenhower blundered when he made that appointment.”

  Looking at the shipwrecked lives of her friends and associates, Esther herself focused on the women. She wrote about the wasted years and suicide of her friend Emily Vanderbilt Whitfield. She ruminated about the decline of Louise Bryant, another friend of the 1920s, whose bold journalism on the Russian Revolution had rivaled, but is now eclipsed by, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World. Bryant married the wealthy diplomat William Bullitt after Reed’s early death, developed a rare and painful illness, drank to alleviate it, and ended her days in poverty in Paris.

  If American women’s successes, in Esther’s view, were often either phony or fatal, talking was perhaps a way around this conundrum. But it was also, she believed, an ethical stance, crucial to democracy. In 1950 she sent Gerald a newspaper clipping headlined “Our Tongue-Tied Democracy,” a copy of a speech in which the author made a version of this argument. By talking, always talking, Esther also kept her material alive, made sure that it never lost its immediacy—or that she did not lose her access to it—as she could not have had she finished her book. Her performance was a way to keep the Sublime Governess herself alive. Not finishing her book, she was also not finishing herself, sustaining the quality of attention she had received as a precocious child: praise, wonder, and interest. It may be that she also felt an obligation to her audience, to compensate for what was not forthcoming—to live up to at least one image of herself. It may have been a way to allay the fear that people would forget her or lose interest if she disappeared for the time it took to write a book. If so, she was at least partly right (as Powell partly believed): It is unlikely that a book on Madame de Maintenon would have been remembered and discussed as much as its absence was.

  In the meantime, Esther succeeded as a thinker and a friend, as an original voice that was at once seemingly endless and bound to disappear, and as one that, if it sometimes seemed to shut out conversation, nevertheless included and channeled the many other voices she read and listened to. She thought of herself as inhabiting a world of living and dead people who were worth quoting. The habit was serious, sententious, ironic. “Winter is come and gone but grief returns with the revolving year[s],” she wrote to Sybille, quoting Shelley’s “Adonais,” on the reappearance of a slightly de-ranged friend whose advent always seemed to bring “the usual disasters, inconveniences and misfortunes.” She cited not only writers and other known actors in history, but also living friends and acquaintances. “As Muriel Draper’s Negro maid, Maude, used to say of many of Muriel’s friends when she first saw them after a long absence ‘She’s disimproved, Mrs. Draper.’” Predicting de Gaulle’s victory on the eve of the French elections in 1958, Esther wrote to Edmund Wilson, “As a workman who told me he had always voted socialist but said he was going to vote for de Gaulle, told me the other day, ‘On votera pour de Gaulle par ce que la France est lasse.’” (We will vote for de Gaulle because France is exhausted.) She told Gerald that she had the impression that the French were “relieved to have someone in power who is midway between a President and King” and said she was “reminded of de Tocqueville’s remark: ‘Nous avons l’habitude de la Monarchie, mais on en a perdu le goût.’” (We are used to a monarchy, but have lost our taste for it.) Referring to the fierceness with which Sybille’s half sister guarded a late-in-life love affair, she wrote, “As Jane Bowles once said to me, ‘Life has more imagination than we have’ so we must grab shamelessly what it throws us.”

  The expatriate, circa mid-1950s (Private collection)

  And then there were the whimsy and wild metaphor, the odd, epigrammatic utterance, itself quotable: “Joe Appiah wouldn’t hurt an apple!” she said of the Ghanaian politician. She told Dawn Powell
that she could drive a car but had no idea “what made it go or what made it stop beyond gas. What was under the hood that made trouble,” Powell noted, “she never even guessed. ‘For all I know,’ [Esther] said dreamily, ‘it might be a little cherub.’”

  From Prague in the autumn of 1956, she sent Sybille a postcard: “We leave this city of strange contrasts—the Old City is a baroque marvel, the new could be anywhere in the U.S.—tomorrow. As Lady Mary Wortley Montague said on her death bed, ‘It has all been interesting, very, very interesting.’” It may be an irony that Esther’s own most “authentic” speech was constituted in part by citation. But this voice inhabited by others has precedents and contemporaries that include Madame de Sévigné, Emerson, Melville, and Walter Benjamin, many of whose works challenge the opposition between citation and originality. “She has a natural dwelling place in books,” wrote Virginia Woolf about Madame de Sévigné, “so that Josephus or Pascal or the absurd long romances of the time were not read by her so much as embedded in her mind. Their verses, their stories rise to her lips along with her own thoughts.” In Representative Men, his biographical essays on Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and others, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” The poet Susan Howe, in her meditation on Emerson and scare quotes, cites his son Edward Waldo Emerson citing Oliver Wendell Holmes’s biography of Emerson: Emerson fils writes that his father’s essay “Quotation and Originality,” in Holmes’s view, “‘furnishes a key to Emerson’s workshop. He believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not in any stealthy or shamefaced way, but proudly, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription.’” Howe’s work with the labyrinthine processes of citation—these triply and quadruply embedded voices—is a comment on the literary practices called modernist and postmodernist that also animate earlier American writing. And this was how Esther worked: proudly, intentionally, productively, inclusively, haphazardly, distractedly, and obsessively; in the mode of Moby Dick and of the massive, unfinished accumulation of historical sources that was Benjamin’s Arcades Project; by seeing the task of understanding history and character as a re-presentation of voices from the past; mingling the living and the dead, textual and spoken material, high and low.

  Hers was the authority of failure. Writing to Sybille in 1953, she enclosed a line by the poet, priest, and missionary to the Huguenots, François Fénelon—a sentence that she spoke often and that Sybille was thinking of using as an epigraph. Like so much of what Esther read and retained, it was a kind of autobiographical utterance: “Here is the quotation—my memory is accurate,” she wrote (she could not locate the book). “‘C’était tout qui était possible, mais ce n’était pas assez.’ ‘It was all that was possible but it was not enough.’…I send this at once. All Love Esther.” The line is from a letter Fénelon wrote to Madame de Maintenon in 1694.

  Esther was the “poor, crouching, human being.” She knew that we all are. Like Auguste Comte, her life had “that something at once pathetic and impressive.” She was one of the people she might have included in the essay she wanted to write on those “critics and portrayers of the American scene.” It was all that was possible. It was and was not enough.

  Mercedes de Acosta, 1934, photographed by George Hoyningen-Huene (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

  A little girl stands on a New York sidewalk, transfixed in front of a brownstone on West Forty-seventh Street—her own street. It is 1906. She sees licks of smoke float out of the house. She cries out: “Fire!”

  The woman who lives in this building is a famous actress, great in the estimation of many and so significant to this child that she is filled with something unutterable, overpowering, and strange: love, the desire to be close to the extraordinary person, the desire to be of use to her—but also the need to be recognized herself, the rich feeling that would come from being seen to understand and honor greatness. She is the first to see the smoke as it billows from the basement and she wants to save the actress from the fire.

  The actress is Maude Adams, the most loved player and greatest box office draw of the American theater in the first two decades of the century. Credited with a new naturalism in performance style, she attracts thousands of spectators—many of whom go to the theater only when she performs—and her photograph hangs in homes, restaurants, and saloons across the country, as well as in President Taft’s study in the White House.

  The little girl is Mercedes de Acosta, the youngest child of upper-class Spanish parents. She will grow up to be a writer, a feminist, and a devotee of various “Eastern” religions. She will grow up to be the friend or lover, and ardent admirer, of the most celebrated performers of her time: Eleonora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Isadora Duncan, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Adams herself.

  Maude Adams was born in 1872, first appeared on stage at nine months old, became famous in 1892 as John Drew’s leading woman, and became a star in 1897 in J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister. From then on, she was the leading American interpreter of Barrie’s plays. Several of her most well-known parts were trousers roles: when she played Napoleon’s son in L’Aiglon, The New York Times wrote, “One never thinks of her as a woman from the beginning of the play to its sad last scene.” As the male lead in Chantecler, she received twenty-two curtain calls at the opening performance. Adams was also a brilliant theater technician. She spent seven years designing a three-ton, thirty-seven-foot piece of equipment that eliminated the need for footlights, “a structure unique in the history of stage lighting”; later, in the 1920s, she spent a year experimenting in General Electric’s laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

  But she was famous above all, to this electrified child and thousands of others, as Peter Pan.

  The girl stands on the street, poised to save the day. She sees the first wisps of smoke emerge, then the flames leap around, and she raises the alarm.

  Maude Adams’s talents and James Barrie’s sense of fantasy merged perfectly in Peter Pan, in which she performed more than 1,500 times in record-breaking runs in 1905–07, 1913, and 1918. Critics thought that the part “seemed almost like second nature” to her. Although she “had been technically a star for eight years,” one noted, her performance as Peter marked the moment “that she actually came into her own.” She had designed her own costume, which started a fashion for the rounded “Peter Pan” collar and peaked hat, and she encouraged the identification. After each performance, children would crowd the stage door waiting for her to emerge. But when she noticed the disappointment of one at seeing her out of costume, she stopped leaving the theater after matinees. She did not want to break the illusion, did not want them to see that she was a woman and not a magical flying boy.

  The girl stands dreaming. She has sat in the dark of a Broadway theater watching the woman who lives in this house play a boy who will not grow up. She has waited with other girls and boys by the stage door after the show. She is herself a girl and a boy at once: Although her name is Mercedes, her mother calls her Rafael and dresses her in boys’ clothes. When she grows up, she will become a woman whose striking personal style is distilled into costume. Greta Garbo nicknamed her Black and White. Others called her Countess Dracula, a name Tallulah Bankhead is supposed to have coined to fit Mercedes’s pallor, her fondness for capes, her jet-black and slicked-back hair, and her reputation as a seductress.

  Maude Adams as Peter Pan (From Charles Frohman: Manager and Man)

  “Peter Pan” made Maude Adams “a real personal friend of the American theater-going people,” wrote one observer. And the moment in the play when Peter addressed the audience directly—asking, “Do you believe in fairies?”—is said to have “registered a whole new and intimate relation between actress and audience.” Yet Adams was also famous for her desire for solitude and her efforts to keep her private life
from public view. When she sailed back to New York in November 1902 after a retreat from the stage and a stay in a French convent, The New York Times reported that her name was kept off the passenger list, that she did not appear on board during the entire trip, and that she took all her meals in her stateroom. In the years that followed, she found solace in long stays at a convent in New York. The Pullman company designed a windowless private “theater car” to satisfy “Miss Adams’s wish for absolutely private rehearsals while on tour”; it was “the only vehicle of its kind in existence.” Her career is an early instance of whetting fans’ appetites and feeding a star image by withholding publicity, since her need to be alone was based partly on advice she received from the powerful Charles Frohman, theater producer, actor’s manager, early star maker, and her friend. “You are not to be interviewed,” he is said to have instructed her. “You are not to be quoted. People will wonder at you, yearn for the details of your private life…Let them. It will only spur their interest and desire for you.”

  The girl stands on the street. She will become an immoderate personality who is most herself when flamboyantly appreciating someone else, a connoisseur of performance and performers. Her memoir, Here Lies the Heart, will achieve cult status for what she tells and withholds about her love affairs with famous friends.

  After Charles Frohman’s death on the Lusitania in 1915, Maude Adams effectively retired from the stage. She gave her three-hundred-acre Long Island estate to a convent and at the end of her life “lived quietly with a companion, Margaret McKenna” in her home in the Catskills, where she died in 1953. She never married. “As long as she lived she was the particular idol of women and of young girls aspiring to the stage,” The New York Times wrote on her death. “She did everything she could for them and for her own ideals of the theatre.” The Herald Tribune was less decorous, describing “the almost hysterical acclaim that she was somehow able to inspire” and noting that “adolescent girls and single women were particularly susceptible to her charms.” She was buried beside Louise Boynton, her secretary and friend for forty-five years.