All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  She also continued to organize her life around the theater. Her mentor, to whom Rita introduced her, was the powerful theatrical agent Elisabeth (Bessie) Marbury, who represented J. M. Barrie, Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, and Somerset Maugham. Marbury lived for years with Elsie de Wolfe, for whom she devised an acting career, allowing Charles Frohman to produce her clients’ work in exchange for casting de Wolfe. When de Wolfe’s days onstage were over, she set her up in business as an interior designer, the career for which she is now known. Marbury encouraged and represented Mercedes’s writing, and in the 1920s Mercedes had plays produced in New York, London, and Paris.

  She also found lovers in the theater. She had a brief affair with Alla Nazimova, to whom Marbury introduced her, and fell in love with another intense young performer, Eva Le Gallienne, then rising to stardom. The web of performance, ambition, fandom, and passion among these women was complex: Le Gallienne was a former protégée and lover of Nazimova, who was then being compared with Eleonora Duse. Mercedes’s first encounter with Le Gallienne was something like the meeting of a fan club. As she described it, it consisted entirely of a conversation in which the two of them “feverishly compared notes on everything we knew or had ever heard about Duse.” (Their date was arranged by Betty Parsons.) Over the next several years, which coincided with Le Gallienne’s tours of the Northeast and Midwest in Ferenc Molnár’s Liliom, Mercedes and Le Gallienne sent each other yearning letters, arranged brief trysts, and continued to play out their romance through a love for Duse. They followed the actress in Paris and saw her perform when she came out of retirement in London and New York. After Duse’s sudden death in 1924, on tour in the United States, they spent a night in vigil over her coffin in a New York church. Their affair coincided with, but seems never to have been impeded by, the beginning of Mercedes’s marriage to the society painter Abram Poole in 1920. “I was in a strange turmoil,” Mercedes wrote about her decision to marry Poole, “about world affairs, my own writing, suffrage, sex, and my inner spiritual development.” Feeling pressure to please her mother, but convinced that matrimony was an archaic institution, she agreed to Poole’s proposal only on the condition that she keep her own name. They divorced amicably in 1935.

  Mercedes’s sartorial predilections also tended to the theatrical and were so singular and sustained that she came to resemble an image of herself. As a child she had been overjoyed when Rita gave her a complete Russian boy’s outfit, and in the early 1920s, she and Le Gallienne affected Russian folk tunics. By the end of the decade, she had made herself another sort of uniform. “She wears peculiarly characteristic clothes,” a reporter observed, “and contends that she has succeeded in reducing the dress problem to a fine art. During the day she nearly always wears a black Directoire redingote—huge lapels, a tiny, tight waist, and enormously full skirt. Her hats vary between a black tricorn and a little round black astrackhan Cossack cap.” She had this coat, which was designed by Paul Poiret, copied throughout her life. Her shoes were made by Yantorny, who designed Rita’s footwear. One day in 1960, Greta Garbo was standing in a health food store in New York City when she saw a “long-toed, silver-buckled shoe” and the edge of “a black highwayman’s cape.” She knew immediately that it was Mercedes.

  Although Mercedes can be said to have costumed herself, rather than dressed fashionably, going out in costume was itself a fashion in the 1920s—at masquerade parties held in private homes and in public—and Mercedes got herself up as a Cossack, a Hussar, and a Franciscan monk. At such parties, at drag balls, and at nightclubs, men and women who violated gender norms were on display to insiders and outsiders. And their performances could be political acts: Laws against wearing the clothing of the opposite sex were among the restrictions used to police homosexuality. “These were the days when the speak-easies were in full bloom,” Mercedes wrote in a draft of Here Lies the Heart.

  Everyone rushed up to Harlem at night to sit around places thick with smoke and the smell of bad gin, where Negroes ‘in drag’ danced about with each other until the small hours of the morning. This fad lasted all through the twenties and into the early thirties. What we all saw in it is difficult to understand now. I suppose it was the newly found excitement of homosexuality, which after the war was expressed openly in nightclubs and cabarets by boys dressed as women, and was, like drinking, forbidden and subject to police raids, which made it all the more enticing. Youth was in revolt, and outwitting the government and getting the better of the police lent a zest to our lives.

  The lines struck through in this draft of Here Lies the Heart do not appear in the published book, her memory and rumination on it edited to replace sexual and gender transgression with the ordinary misdeeds that were part of life under Prohibition.

  If Mercedes had stood still on the street as a child—staring, waiting, longing—when she was a teenager and grown woman adulation often meant being in motion. She “despised distance and belittled the world by moving about it quickly on large boats and small feet,” wrote Janet Flanner of Mercedes’s willingness to rush to a lover’s side from across the Atlantic. (The line is from a 1928 concrete poem in the shape of a tulip in which Flanner also described Mercedes’s lovemaking: “She ate flesh talking of flowers and flesh.”) Mercedes’s feelings for the actresses she loved were caught up in this disdain for distance, the attempt to erase the space between herself and the women she admired. Nowhere was she so persistent—and so bound to fail—as in her association with Greta Garbo.

  With Bessie Marbury’s help, after Rita’s death in 1929, Mercedes moved to Los Angeles and found work as a screenwriter. In the kind of avowal of predestination that is typical of Here Lies the Heart, Mercedes writes there that at a party before she left New York, Tallulah Bankhead told her to pick a card out of a deck and make a secret wish. Bankhead examined the card and told her that she would get what she hoped for on the third day after her arrival in Hollywood. She had wished that she would meet Garbo. In Hollywood, she fell in with a group of displaced New Yorkers and European expatriates, including Igor Stravinsky, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and the screenwriter Salka Viertel, and on her third day in town she met Garbo at Viertel’s home. The star of The Temptress, Flesh and the Devil, and Anna Christie was then at the peak of her popularity. Her reserve and desire for privacy were already legendary, and her character was dissected endlessly—in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker as well as in fan magazines. Most of her fans, called “Garbomaniacs,” were women. Over the next several years, as Mercedes worked intermittently on screenplays for Paramount, RKO, and MGM, she became a minor celebrity herself: “The most talked-about woman in Hollywood is the woman no wife fears,” proclaimed one gossip column, not naming her.

  Mercedes’s rapport with Garbo has been debated since it began, sometimes exaggerated by Mercedes, often diminished by those with a stake in keeping the star as free from intimacy as she kept herself. The two women were linked in fact: It seems clear that they were lovers briefly, that Garbo then withdrew, and that their friendship, though vexed, continued on Garbo’s alternately restrictive and affectionate terms until she severed ties just before Mercedes published Here Lies the Heart in 1960. They were linked in feeling: Both had been starstruck as children; both had lost their fathers when they were in their teens, and then siblings. “Both idolized their elder sisters,” writes Karen Swenson, one of Garbo’s more astute biographers. “Both were afflicted with an inner restlessness that was compounded by a chronic inability to sleep.” Both felt foreign and alienated from others and “liv[ed] in a near-constant state of melancholia.” They were linked in the media: from a much-reproduced paparazzo photograph of them wearing slacks and walking down Hollywood Boulevard in 1934 (“a cameraman who had waited for three hours on the running board of a car parked on Hollywood’s main boulevard…just managed to snap the Garbo as she came out of her tailor’s with her friend, Miss de Costa [sic]”), to the small tumult around the unsealing of Garbo’s letters to Mercedes in April 2000.

 
Greta Garbo and Mercedes, Hollywood, 1934. “It’s no snap to snap Garbo” (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

  But Mercedes did not focus on what they shared when she wrote about Garbo. Instead, she compared her friend to Rita. Greta and Rita, she felt, shared “a sort of despotic attitude” combined with “a certain tenderness and consideration,” humor, and “tristesse.” She also translated their celebrity into spiritual terms. Admonishing Cecil Beaton, who was writing about Rita in his book The Glass of Fashion (and who had his own vexed affair with Garbo), Mercedes advised him that “in depicting people who have stood for something in one walk of life or another, you should try and find the essence of their spirit—their soul, so to speak, and not concern yourself so much with the ‘gossip column’ aspect of their lives.” But the gossip column aspect and the soul were always intertwined for Mercedes—and both were part of the language she found to articulate desire that could not be written about otherwise. The stars she admired condensed divinity and celebrity. Maude Adams had “a self-effacement rare in anyone but a saint,” she wrote. The ballerina Tamara Karsavina projected “spiritual as well as physical beauty…across the footlights.” Garbo had “a deeply spiritual hold” on her and “on the public.” And Mercedes’s spiritual awakenings, of which there were many, were invariably star-studded. In the 1920s, John Barrymore introduced her to Kahlil Gibran, who gave her a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and counseled her. In the 1930s, she studied “astrology, cosmic-astrology, mythology and yoga” with the dancer, set designer, and wife of Rudolf Valentino, Natacha Rambova, and was inspired by Rambova’s interest in “ancient Eastern religions” and “psychic phenomena.” The journalist and biographer Vincent Sheean wrote of Here Lies the Heart that Mercedes was “a worshipper—of artists and saints chiefly—and the quality of worship comes through.”

  Mercedes had often tried to integrate her religious and social consciousness with her love of the theater. One unproduced play, in which Duse expressed interest, was about the Virgin Mary. Another, staged in New York and London, concerned anti-Semitism. In 1925, Mercedes and Eva Le Gallienne collaborated on a spectacle about Joan of Arc, and in the 1930s, Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, hired Mercedes to write a screenplay about St. Joan for Garbo. Working on this script, Mercedes felt that it wasn’t just the distance between herself and Garbo that expanded and contracted, but the distance between the saint and the actress, and the space between Mercedes’s fantasy and the concrete facts around her. Although the two women would meet at the end of their workdays,

  Greta complained during these months that I was “not there.” In a certain way I wasn’t and yet…I was never for a second separated from her, as she and Jehanne D’Arc became inseparable in my consciousness. When I conjured up Jehanne in my imagination it was always Greta I saw. It was Greta who was the peasant girl. It was Greta who wore armour. It was Greta who saved France. So complete was this transference in my mind that when I actually walked with her in the hills or on the beach I often saw her in medieval costume or in armour. I arrived at a point when I could not tell which was Greta and which was Jehanne. Yet, curiously enough, I could not discuss the script with Greta. She was too much Jehanne to be able to talk it over with her…I suffered a strange shyness about the whole matter with her and if she ever mentioned it I changed the subject.

  In later years, further mingling this fantasy with an idea about authenticity, Mercedes would insist that Garbo should have made a movie in which she played a series of saints, “done as a sort of pilgrimage with the actual shooting done right on the scenes in Europe. First, Jeanne d’Arc, then, St. Teresa, and maybe St. Francis.”

  When Garbo withdrew from daily contact with her, in the mid-1930s, Mercedes wrote to Marlene Dietrich, “Until I was seventeen I was a real religious fanatic. Then I met Duse and…gave her the same fanaticism until I transferred it to Greta…You will see I shall get over this ‘insanity’ and then perhaps you will love me a little again. But if I do get over it, what then shall I pray to? And what will then turn this gray life into starlight?” Mercedes’s questing after spiritual support intensified at this time—but what is most striking about her religious searching is the way that her guides were excited by her affiliation with Garbo. Both the Franciscan nun at whose remote convent in Umbria she stayed and the Indian guru she consulted were eager to advise her on whether to maintain or break ties with Garbo, wanted her to help them contact Garbo themselves, and complained that they felt they were competing with Garbo for her attention. The vow of silence taken by the Hindu mystic Meher Baba did not keep him from sending Mercedes telegrams and letters in which he counseled her to calm down about Garbo and pay attention, instead, to spreading his fame and working on a movie about him: “Greta will come to you. Go to Sweden to see her, without fail. But at the present moment, my work is most important…the work of writing [the] story for Baba’s picture. Get to work, immediately, with all the zeal, enthusiasm and love that you could put in it.” He needed her to be his fan, not Garbo’s.

  Yet it was partly as a kind of guru—but also as a performer and even a director of sorts—that Mercedes was able to understand her relation to Garbo. Writing to George Cukor in the late 1930s—she now in Paris, he in Hollywood—she lingered on their elusive mutual friend, from whose presence she was then excluded, and she appealed to Cukor to help her find work again in the film industry:

  These past years I have given so much of my strength, and brain, and vitality in teaching, inspiring, and taking care of Greta, that I have had very little left for myself of any of these things. It was perhaps stupid of me but I do not regret it. I did a good job with Greta although she would never give me any credit. In all the pictures she has done since I have known her, I have seen parts of myself and things that I have taught her. And I am glad that I have been able to influence her in her work and personal life—in spite of much handicap to myself, I would do it over again.

  Portraying herself in noble but unsung service to Garbo, she described feeling erased by the star. But calling herself an inspiration to the younger woman shifted the balance of power. She had sacrificed, but Garbo emulated her. The star, in her proximity, had not rubbed off on the fan; instead, Mercedes had lent her language, gestures, and look to the star. She was not only a consumer and connoisseur of greatness, but a guide who had helped to mold it through careful tutelage, stylish example, and heightened appreciation. Of course, asserting her importance to the star is classic obsessive fan behavior, but Mercedes was also saying that it was possible to see herself when the actress performed. (And there is evidence that she in fact helped Garbo, with her English as well as with daily life.)

  Part of Mercedes’s plea to Cukor was that she had done a good deal of unpaid work on behalf of MGM. It was a labor of love, but labor nevertheless. Writing about the transitory and the transitive—what was lost, what she gave, what could be transferred—she was writing about her style. Asserting that there was something about her presence that Garbo had collected and incorporated, she was trying to avoid having her own reverence turn to resentment. If she was thereby rescuing herself from passivity, she nevertheless understood the relationship, as she did in most of her love affairs, as one in which she rescued the other. About Garbo she wrote, “Though there may be nothing particular to defend her against, I want to defend her, to protect her, to take her part.” The accomplished women she fell in love with—later they included the actress Ona Munson; Maria Annunziata “Poppy” Sartori Kirk, who

  worked for Schiaparelli; and Claire Charles-Roux, the Marquise de Forbin, who had participated in the French Resistance—needed and welcomed her support initially, then chafed against it. When they asserted their independence, Mercedes could not tolerate it, became intolerable, and the objects of her affection backed away.

  Mercedes spent the latter part of World War II in New York working for the magazine Tomorrow, which focused on mysticism and parapsychology. After the war, she returned to France, where s
he lived with Poppy Kirk. She more or less stopped writing, other than occasional bits of freelance journalism and her memoir. She spent time with her sister Maria, who had been a lover of the painter Margarett Sargent and was now married to Teddy Chanler, Esther Murphy’s old friend. In the late 1950s, she kept company with Andy Warhol, no less a devotee of celebrity than she; when Here Lies the Heart was published, he drew the invitation to her book party. By the end of her life, she was sending letters dated only “4 a.m.,” and entreating friends for professional or financial help with a tubercular aspiring actress she had befriended, a pale shadow of the women she had once attracted. She was devoted to her pets and used them as an excuse for her stasis. “Don’t let a cat rule yr life,” exhorted an affectionate but frustrated Cecil Beaton. When she died in 1968, Beaton paid tribute to her “gallantry” and was “relieved that her long drawn out unhappiness has at last come to an end,” but noted that she’d “managed to make it [contact] difficult for friends, impossible for her lovers.”