by Lisa Cohen
The child stares at the actress’s home. She sees the smoke and yells to alert those inside. They all rush out, confused, then thank her and thank her again for her bravery and selflessness.
She saves the actress.
She receives the grateful thanks of the great.
She gets as close as she can, then backs away.
But there is no fire.
The truth—of the star, of herself, and of her fantasy—is in the heat and light of her mind, in the heat and the lights of the theater and crowd, and in the radiance of this actress who is forever elusive yet bigger than life—strong enough to stand up to it all, but still, perhaps, in need of rescue.
Swoons of adulation, feats of seduction, acts of conservation—these were the gestures, the texture, of Mercedes de Acosta’s life. From a young age she was both intimate with stars and ruled by starstruck fantasy. Imagine being rowed across a pristine mountain lake in the Sierra Nevada by Greta Garbo. Imagine watching Garbo strip off her clothes and dive happily into the freezing water, while you stand on the pier of the small private island to which she has just brought you. Imagine, when Garbo retreats from you and Hollywood to Sweden, having an admiring and aggressive Marlene Dietrich pounce on you, cook for you, inundate your house with flowers, and then, when you mention that you have no place for so many roses, send over a collection of Lalique vases.
Greta Garbo, Silver Lake, California, July 1931, snapshot by Mercedes de Acosta (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)
Mercedes de Acosta did not have to imagine these scenes. For her they were both fact and fantasy. Dietrich called her “mon grand amour.” Isadora Duncan said that she would follow her to the ends of the earth. The young actress Eva Le Gallienne, at the height of their affair in the early 1920s, sighed in a letter that she felt she would die if Mercedes did not marry her. Some of Mercedes’s lovers were later mortified by the association and their own emotion, and refused to have any contact. Janet Flanner wrote her an erotic tribute in verse in the late 1920s, then could not tolerate her. “I fear Janet will have to be affronted by the presence of Mercedes, who I understand will be there,” wrote Esther Murphy of a gathering in Paris in 1950. Le Gallienne is later said to have called Mercedes’s memoir “Here Lies the Heart—and Lies and Lies and Lies.” But “Mercedes never lies,” insisted another friend, the artist Eva Hermann. (Aldous and Maria Huxley agreed; to them she was a searching and sincere friend.)
There was nothing reasonable about Mercedes de Acosta. Generous, alluring, and witty, she was also self-consumed and suicidally depressive, her “undeniable gifts,” as Esther put it, veiled in an “exasperating cloak of romantic egotism.” A passionate fan, she was visually arresting and always aware of her own audience. Repudiating orthodox religion, she was caught up in a series of religious enthusiasms.
Nor has there ever been anything reasonable about others’ responses to her. During her life, these tended toward romantic swoon or repudiation. Since her death, she has inspired either uncritical homage or lashings of vitriol—especially for her career as a seductress, particularly for her pursuit of Greta Garbo. She has been seen as a role model for sexual liberation, her erotic successes and lack of shame about her desires a cause for celebration. She has been called a fraud, a hysteric, and, despite her own charisma, “the first celebrity stalker.” In death as in life, the question of Mercedes’s lies and truthfulness still dominates the discussion of her character, with attackers and apologists treating her as a problem to be resolved or a side to be taken, in scholarly journals and star biographies, books about Hollywood’s gay subculture, a full-length biography, and its reviews.
Obsessed with artistic “greatness”—“On Great Men Recognizing Greatness” is the title of one of her essays—Mercedes de Acosta wrote herself into history partly through her association with literary, theatrical, and religious greats. She saw these contacts as a way to make sense of her life and was both carried away by and savvy about her obsessions. She continued to pine masochistically for Garbo long after it became clear that the star enjoyed encouraging and deflating Mercedes’s hopes, just as she enjoyed controlling others’ access to her. But Mercedes could also be an astute analyst of celebrity and its appreciators, not only enduring and taking pleasure in, but also writing with irony and precision about, the continual, conflicting needs for intimacy and distance that direct the traffic between stars and fans.
She herself did not use the word fan when she wrote about her admiration of her celebrated friends, although she did refer to her “fanaticism” on various subjects. She described herself as overwhelmed by and subservient to the performers who inspired her. She also described herself as an expert on them. Every fan imagines him- or herself an expert on the star to whom he or she feels a special closeness, but Mercedes did so in ways that complicated her own cherished ideas about greatness. She knew that stars were often themselves fans. She knew that being a fan meant existing on a shifting ground that is also an epistemological problem: We want to get close to and know everything about the performers we admire; we want to stay distant and remain in awe. She knew that her feelings of adulation meant that she sometimes put herself on display in embarrassing ways. Describing her early, overheated adoration of Maude Adams, she mocked herself: “I often stood outside Miss Adams’ house waiting to catch a glimpse of her,” she wrote in a draft of her memoir. “One day I saw smoke coming out of the basement window. I decided at once that the house was on fire and I hoped it was. This was my moment to be heroic and save Miss Adams. I rushed up the front steps and rang the bell furiously,” at which point “a rather annoyed maid opened the door” and said, “Don’t be a stupid child. The cook has merely singed the chicken.” And so, she wrote, she “went home, humiliated and far from heroic.”
She got as close as she could, then was sent away.
She was warmed by her adulation and by the transmutation of her shame.
As an adult, Mercedes de Acosta had a hard time holding on to people, but she was able to hold on to quantities of stuff associated with them. Over a lifetime of fantasies coming true and failing to, she built an archive that documented various artists’ careers, traced her rapport with these figures, and described her own career. Saving the blank card that Greta Garbo sent her with flowers; saving photographs, playbills, manuscripts, and newspaper and magazine clippings; saving correspondence from famous and obscure friends and lovers; saving books, articles of clothing, dried flowers; saving a small metal canister holding two lengths of film of Garbo, each of about fifteen frames—delicate, stuttering celluloid evidence of Garbo’s beauty and distance and of Mercedes’s obsession and instinct for preservation. With all of this collecting, Mercedes was saving a famous actress from the flames. She was also saving less well-known figures and saving herself. Documenting the ephemeral and concrete impulses of a fan who was as willing to get lost in her adulation as she was to criticize it, Mercedes de Acosta preserved the time she lived through. She also styled herself a connoisseur of the fleeting pleasures of performance, with all of the exhilaration and need that such expertise implies. And she demonstrated that the concrete and fantastic postures of a dedicated fan have everything to do with the attitudes of a passionate reader, with the challenges of representing the past, and with the heightened feeling that hums around a particular style.
She was born in New York City in 1893. Her mother, Micaela Hernandez de Alba de Acosta, had arrived in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and married at sixteen. A pious Catholic—she was one of the original pew owners at St. Patrick’s Cathedral—this woman spoke only Spanish with her children, raised her daughters in “the Spanish code of feminine behavior,” and required them to marry a European or European-born American, with the result that not one did. Growing up in this “Spanish cloister,” Mercedes and her seven older siblings nevertheless moved comfortably in upper-class New York. Her sisters were called “the most romantic girls in New York society,” and their lives were
chronicled regularly in the newspapers. All married into established American families: Aida to Oren Root (nephew of Elihu Root, the secretary of war and of state under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt); Maria to Andrew R. Sargent of Boston; the eldest, Rita, to the millionaire developer William Stokes, more than twenty years her senior, then to Captain Philip Lydig, both of whom she divorced.
Mercedes grew up in a world of privileges, which were also constraints. “Parents in the social world,” she wrote later, “considered it beneath their children to work professionally in almost any job.” When her widowed mother bemoaned her disappeared fortune, Mercedes, by then in her twenties, was unable to help. “It would have been wiser to have discussed finances with a squirrel in those days than with me,” she recalled. “I thought then that banks were a form of club to which one belonged and from which one could draw whatever sums of money one wanted to be refunded later when and if convenient.”
She grew up in a Manhattan that was at once industrial and rural. Trains belched steam and smoke—Park Avenue was not yet covered, so the tracks running to and from Grand Central were open to the air—horse-drawn carriages paraded along Fifth Avenue, and “the country,” a tree-filled estate belonging to friends of her parents, on acres of farmland abutting the East River, was just thirty blocks north of her home. She was sent to various Catholic schools in New York and Europe, including the Sacred Heart, where she first met Esther Murphy. Unlike Esther, Mercedes grew up with an intense Roman Catholic faith, to which she appended a habit of self-mortification. She put nails and stones inside her shoes and walked on them until her feet bled; she prostrated herself for hours with her arms outstretched in the form of a cross; she wrote “long religious essays and poems and very extraordinary love letters” to Jesus, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Saint Francis, and Joan of Arc. As this epistolary practice suggests, her ideas about love and her religious life were interdependent—just as, later, her religious life and her feelings about performance and performers would be intertwined.
She grew up troubled by dramatic, painful depressions and “a suicidal mania” that no psychiatrist could explain or help. When she was young, she often retreated to a corner of a room, “put [her] face to the wall and moaned.” After her brother Enrique killed himself, when she was in her teens, a “craving for death” possessed her. She struggled so violently not to commit suicide, she wrote, “that blood often poured from my nose and weakened me so that I collapsed on to my bed in a semi-unconscious state.” Keeping a loaded gun was the one thing that reassured her, and when she lived in Los Angeles in the 1930s and ’40s, she would find release by going up into the hills and shooting at trees.
The injustices of her sex also weighed on her. She suffered constantly from “the frustration and indignity of being considered inferior to men”; she resented her mediocre education and wished she had been sent to a university, as her brothers had; and she came to believe, “without a shred of humor, in every form of independence for women.” Yet for a long time she had not even known that she was a girl. As a child, “my hair was cut short,” she wrote in a draft of her memoir, “I was dressed as a boy and no one ever referred to me as a girl.” When a group of boys she was playing with told her otherwise, dropping their pants for extra emphasis, it precipitated a major crisis. She “raged in bed and ran a high temperature” for three days and suffered “a nervous collapse.” She prayed to be made a boy and developed a theory to explain what made her different: “I am not a boy and I am not a girl, or maybe I am both,” she recalled telling a nun. “And because I don’t know, I will never fit in anywhere and I will be lonely all my life.” By the time Here Lies the Heart was published in 1960, this material and her reference to these experiences as a “childhood tragedy” had been cut. Instead, she referred to herself at this age as the pet of the theater producer Augustin Daly, who wished to adopt a little girl. But boyishness endured as part of her sense of herself and her allure: Dietrich addressed letters to Rafael de Acosta; Garbo, who was fond of referring to herself with masculine appellations, called Mercedes her darling boy.
As this drama about gender identity disappeared from Mercedes’s account of herself, what remained, in her memoir, were her love of the theater and her religiosity, both sanctioned arenas for women to display passionate emotion toward other women. Writing about her earliest obsession with a performer, Mercedes said of Maude Adams, “Every child was hysterical about her as the little boy who never grew up, and I was no exception. To me she was Peter Pan and when I saw her in the part I was thrown into a state of ecstasy.” In her teens, she would meet a friend after school and together they would stalk Fifth Avenue, down to Washington Square and back up to West Forty-seventh Street, “like hunters out for game—we hunted our favorite actors and actresses.” Her friend “very nearly swooned if she saw John Barrymore and I felt the same about Ethel.” Confronted with Ethel Barrymore in person, a meeting her well-connected sister Rita arranged, Mercedes remembered herself as speechless. The actress took her to lunch, but she just sat there “too shy and excited to be anything but stupid, and praying all the while that I wouldn’t suddenly turn peagreen and be overcome with a migraine.” When, no longer a child, she finally met Maude Adams, she thought she “would actually die from shyness” and almost ran from her dressing room.
Yet Mercedes also grew up accustomed to celebrity, a result of Rita’s influence. Nearly twenty years Mercedes’s senior, Rita was a celebrated beauty, patroness of the arts, and voracious, talented collector who filled her homes in New York and Paris with the musicians, actors, and artists of the day—Sarah Bernhardt, the Barry mores, Rodin, Caruso, Eleonora Duse, Mary Garden, Toscanini, Paderewski, and others—and with rare books, paintings, and textiles. “Meeting these artists so often,” Mercedes wrote, “I began to regard them as everyday people in my life.” Rita also introduced her to “many celebrities other than artists—King Alfonso, Queen Marie of Roumanie, Count Boni de Castellane.” All of her sisters were “persistently paragraphed and…photographed,” but Rita was a star of the late Gilded Age and early twentieth century, a “magnetic personality” who was painted by Boldini and John Singer Sargent, photographed by Baron de Meyer, Edward Steichen, and Arnold Genthe, and sculpted by Rodin, whose marriages, divorces, romances, travels, purchases, bankruptcy, and illnesses were news even after her death in 1929.
Rita de Acosta Lydig, “in her Persian trousers and one of her eighty-seven coats,” 1925, photographed by Arnold Genthe (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Arnold Genthe Collection)
Rita was the woman who made the first and most lasting impression on Mercedes and for years she set a standard that others could not reach. “I have known a number of extraordinary and beautiful women the world over,” Mercedes wrote in Here Lies the Heart, “but Rita, considered objectively and without any prejudice in her favor, seemed to me more striking, more unfailing in perfect grace and beauty than any other woman.” Rita was everywhere in Society—she showed her Thoroughbreds at the National Horse Show, where Patrick Murphy was often a featured speaker—but “her presence raised the vibration of the most commonplace event.” Anatomizing her sister’s celebrity, Mercedes wrote, “Without the advance publicity of a movie star, without the recognition which comes from films and photographs, she attracted people whenever she appeared in public. She rarely went into stores and never into a department store because crowds followed and surrounded her.”
If Rita’s glamorous femininity was a lifelong inspiration, so was her collecting. For a time, she lived in an Italianate house on East Fifty-second Street that Stanford White had designed for her. Her friend Frank Crowninshield, the longtime editor of Vanity Fair, described it as “a veritable museum,” full of majolicas, Renaissance paintings, ecclesiastical vestments, and Queen Anne silver. In 1913 she auctioned the contents of this house. In 1927 she filed for bankruptcy and again sold her collection. “The curators of the great museums of Europe recognized her knowledge and her taste,” w
rote The New Yorker at the time of this second sale. She also collected clothes in abundance and designed most of her dresses herself, commissioning the couturières Callot Soeurs to make them. And she never had one of anything: Her wardrobe was filled with dozens of versions of every model, and when she died, she owned 150 pairs of shoes, all “really works of art.” Handmade by Pietro Yantorny, who called himself the “most expensive shoemaker in the world,” they had a Louis XV–style profile and were made of antique velvet, lace, damask, and embroidery. Rita also died owning quantities of precious lace, her most profound obsession, some of it dating from the Middle Ages. In 1940, Mercedes donated some of these clothes, shoes, and laces to the Museum of Costume Art, the precursor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, and she helped organize a display of this material. In the early 1950s, she made an even larger gift to the Brooklyn Museum.
Mercedes saw Rita as a divided soul: serious and reckless; profoundly spiritual, but driven by a “mad extravagance”; idiosyncratic and “indifferen[t] to public opinion,” yet forced to live as a society hostess. She was committed to woman suffrage, spent money on other people as quickly as on herself, and was careless about protecting what she had accumulated. Again inspired by her, Mercedes threw herself into “rebellion against the mediocre, the prudish” in the wake of the First World War. Now in her twenties, she worked for suffrage and other feminist causes “as if it were the only thing that mattered in my life,” canvassing door-to-door, always leaving “a shower of leaflets and pamphlets strewn behind.” She found like-minded friends in the Lucy Stone League, which fought for women’s right to retain their own names after marriage, spoke on behalf of the League, and was quoted in the newspapers in response to the tirades of a businessman who wanted to burn all women’s colleges to the ground. Like Esther Murphy, she began to move between the high society in which she was raised and the sexual subcultures that had such an extensive presence in New York City at the time, in nightclubs in Greenwich Village and Harlem and in friends’ homes. She started to write, mostly poems and plays—aware that hers was a “minor” talent, but increasingly willing to show her work to others—and by the 1920s she had published three collections of poems and a novel.