All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  Mercedes wanted to worship and be intimate, at once. She wanted it known that being a fan is itself a performance, individual and collective, intensely personal and outrageously public. What Garbo wanted was something else: “The German people are wonderful,” she said early in her career. “They do not touch you, yet they have their arms around you—always.” It was a sort of oxymoron, in conflict with herself as well as with the desire of others to get close to her. She provoked that desire in her friends as well as her fans, and Mercedes thrived on and was debilitated by it. It was a fantasy of control as potent as Mercedes’s own.

  Esther Murphy, who “always was fond of” Mercedes, reflected “that even when she was in her most absurd incarnations…she was fundamentally an intelligent and subtle woman. But her mind seemed to go in layers like Neapolitan ice, and some of the layers were pretty trashy.” In Here Lies the Heart and its drafts, Mercedes layers assertions about her “sexual reaction[s]” to flowers, her travels “out on the astral plane,” and her ability to predict the future with precise social and historical observation. Many signs and wonders suggested that she was predestined to meet Garbo. Flowers, she notes, “affected and excited me as certain beautiful women have affected and excited me.” (She also used them to deflower her lovers, but this she did not write.) She was able to halt the infestation by ants of her home in Los Angeles with meditation, “slow breathing exercises…call[ing] on all the Enlightened Ones” for help, and speaking “out loud to the ants…slowly, distinctly, and softly,” telling “them that they were in great danger and would surely be killed if they did not go away,” repeating, like a mantra, “Please leave the house.”

  But she also wrote about what it felt like to live in what was “a very different period for women. We had to battle every inch of the way for rights which are now taken for granted. Young women who vote today can never imagine the frustration and indignity of being considered inferior to men and not allowed to go to the polls. And today, when women can fill any job, it is impossible to realize what it meant to be completely dependent financially on a husband or family simply because jobs were closed to them because of their sex.” She described the tenor of life in New York City in the years before the United States entered the Great War, when all of the young men she knew were in military training and most of the young women did volunteer work of some kind. First the men “disappeared one by one…to board ships painted gray and black which sailed secretly, surrounded by convoys, from unnamed ports.” Then the city “was crowded with officers and soldiers of all the Allied Nations,” including “wounded men who had been sent from the trenches to the United States for surgical care, some totally blind or lacking one eye, a leg or an arm, others with their heads bound in bandages. The tension in the atmosphere heightened from day to day” as everyone wondered whether and when the United States would enter the war.

  These layers also characterize the portraits in the book. “While this is an autobiography,” wrote one reviewer, “it reads like a book of many, many biographies woven through the life of Miss de Acosta.” Some of her accounts of the other people in her life are simply lists, collections of famous names. In the winter of 1921–22, after her first two books of poems were accepted for publication, Mercedes began going to dinners given by Mrs. Simeon Ford, who fed writers, then asked them to recite their work. There she “met many of the most important poets in America: Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, Sara Teasdale, Elinor Wylie and Leonora Speyer were often there, and also Charles Hanson Towne, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Ezra Pound and Kahlil Gibran, all of whom I already knew.” Even grief is an occasion for name-dropping. After Rita’s death: “Friends were kind to me, especially my theatre friends including Noel Coward, Greta Cooper, John Wilson, Harold Ross, Alex Woollcott, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Margalo Gil[l]more, Clifton Webb, Kit Cornell and countless others.” The party she gave in the 1920s for a star-studded collection of actresses who were her friends was another such catalogue: Helen Hayes, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Laurette Taylor, Alla Nazimova, Jeanne Eagels, Katharine Cornell, among others, all came to dinner. But these women were unable or unwilling to converse with one another, and Mercedes said that she was forced to acknowledge that it was a mistake to bring together so many people used to having the spotlight on themselves alone.

  Yet she also used Here Lies the Heart to portray people who had been prominent in cultural life but were no longer known by the time her book was published, and to document forgotten social networks. She writes about Cole Porter and Isadora Duncan, but also about the then-popular music hall performer Theodora (Teddie) Gerrard; about the collector Gabrielle Enthoven, who spent her life amassing approximately a hundred thousand playbills that document the history of the London theater from the early eighteenth century on; and about her friend and Esther’s, Robert Chanler, that anarchic force and important “part of the social, artistic and Bohemian fabric of New York in the twenties.” And she created in Here Lies the Heart a mildly coded history of a corner of twentieth-century gay and lesbian life. She writes that she was frequently at the apartment Enthoven and the writer and translator Cecile Sartoris shared on Washington Square in the interwar years. She notes that she and Le Gallienne shared a bed in the old farmhouse they stayed at during a vacation in Brittany. She describes Dietrich’s extravagant generosity. She analyzes Marbury and de Wolfe’s ménage, noting that many saw her mentor as ruthless, but “in her personal relationships the contrary was the case—other people were often ruthless to her,” and when she lived with Elsie de Wolfe, “it was always Elsie who relentlessly got her way.”

  In her vivid short profile of Marbury, she describes her mentor as formidable in physique and reputation. She was short and “so fat that her feet, which were abnormally small, could not carry her weight” and she had to “wear steel braces on her legs” and use “two canes.” But “seated, as she generally was, she gave the impression of being tall because of the heavy formation of her head and the bulkiness of her shoulders.” Mercedes calls Marbury “an extraordinary mixture of worldliness and childishness; of shrewdness and Victorian innocence,” and not only a powerful theatrical and literary agent but a canny Democratic Party operator. A convert to Catholicism and “a natural Jesuit,” she “was thoroughly enmeshed with the powers of the Church from the Cardinal down. She was a sly and astute politician,” Mercedes writes, “and, in the days when I knew her had a considerable influence in all the intrigues of Tammany Hall.”

  It was Marbury who first encouraged Mercedes to write Here Lies the Heart, telling her to keep notes when she was young so she could write an autobiography one day. Mercedes had not kept notes; she drew “from memory” to write the book. She did keep a collection—letters, clothes, clippings, and more—the tangible record of her engagement with the popular and high culture of the first half of the twentieth century. After the book was published, she sold and gave this material to the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, which she chose because of her friendship with its director, William McCarthy. Ailing, with her finances in disarray, she wrote to McCarthy in the summer of 1960, “Let me tell you again how happy I am that my little collection is at last with you. I have every confidence that you will treat it ‘kindly’ and do the right thing by it.” Over the next several years, she continued to give and sell material to the Rosenbach. “Am sending you two pair of very beautiful evening slippers which I wore in the twenties,” she wrote McCarthy in 1961, “and which I prefer to give to you rather than the Metropolitan Museum who have asked for them.” “Utterly broke,” she wondered: “Do you think there is any chance of the Foundation paying me a little extra money for the continual new material I have been sending you and will continue to do over the years?…I have not even been able to pay my rent or telephone bill this month…I feel very humiliated to ask you this—it is not easy. With the world in the sad state it is in I feel very disgusting to be harassed by personal financial worries.”

  As she n
egotiated the transfer of her collection, which today consists of about five thousand items, she stipulated that the letters from people she identified as still living ex-lovers—Le Gallienne, Dietrich, Poppy Kirk, and Claire de Forbin—be sealed until both she and her correspondent were dead. To the Garbo correspondence she attached an additional waiting period of ten years. In 1964, she wrote to McCarthy, who was terminally ill:

  I never get over the feeling that one should never give away or show letters which, at the time, have meant much to one and are so very personal. And yet I would not have had the heart or the courage to have burned these letters. I mean, of course, Eva, Gretas and Marlenes [sic]—who were lovers. So it seemed a God-sent moment when you took them. I only hope, as the years go on, as you are no longer there that they will be respected and protected from the eyes of vulgar people.

  And so the Rosenbach is the repository not only of typescripts of drafts of Here Lies the Heart and of Mercedes’s other writing, published and not, of family photographs, and of an exercise book in which her mother practiced her English, but also of the remains, stockpiled for years, of this life fantastically intersected by celebrity:

  Eva Le Gallienne’s breathless correspondence, out of which fall eighty-year-old, browned rose petals.

  Telegrams and telegraphic notes in green ink from Marlene Dietrich on rich green-and-silver monogrammed stationery.

  A love poem in Isadora Duncan’s hand that ends, “My kisses like a swarm / of Bees / Would find their way / between thy knees / and suck the honey / of thy lips / Embracing thy / too slender hips.”

  Longing scrawls from Ona Munson, which are also a window into lesbian flirtation and infighting in 1940s Holly wood. (Why has Dietrich been eyeing her? Munson asks. What are mutual friends saying about the director Dorothy Arzner?)

  Intimate snapshots of Le Gallienne, Dietrich, Garbo, and others—and studio portraits of these women, in plush black velvet frames.

  An incongruously homemade icon of Garbo: tiny, yellowed photographs of her face, cut from the newspaper and collaged on cardboard.

  Pages and pages of Alice B. Toklas’s spidery, minute writing, which seems, as Mercedes wrote, to have been penned “with the eyelash of a fly.”

  Letters from and an autographed score by Igor Stravinsky.

  Clothing: “A single stocking” and “One yellow sock and one pink and black scarf in an envelope with a note”—gifts from Dietrich: the first two, metonyms of her famous legs; the last, lipstick-stained, of her mouth.

  Shoes that belonged to Rita; shoes that belonged to Mercedes; shoes that Tamara Karsavina “wore during rehearsals when she took off her ballet slippers.”

  It is a body of work that makes it clear that the poetry for which Mercedes de Acosta should be remembered is made of the fugitive lines of a fan’s devotion, and that this affect and activity have more than a little in common with an archivist’s belief in the importance of preserving a material sense of history. It is also a collection that suggests how peculiar collecting, collections, and the idea of evidence are.

  Marlene Dietrich, Malibu, California, 1932, photographed by Mercedes de Acosta (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

  Imagine the power of a collection: to summon a world; to include and exclude; to define and protect the collector and her objects; to mark time as divisible and as infinite. Imagine the drive to save or acquire an object, in all of its permutations—a reiteration of ardor imbued with tedium, for the object and for repetition itself. Imagine the endless interest and endless aspiration that collecting expresses. Imagine it as a form of pinning things down and turning them into property that also reveals their mobility and vulnerability, their endless need for protection.

  And yet collecting and collections have been seen as antidotes to such feelings for the collector—as bulwarks against vulnerability, against loss, against the possibility of nothing. For Mercedes de Acosta, collecting was clearly a way to sustain a connection to her sister Rita. Having lost her father, a sibling, friends, and a lover to suicide, and being wracked by suicidal fantasies herself, she found collecting a way to hold on to life, a form of insurance, and a means to create a body of evidence. Whatever we may think of the blank card that came with flowers Garbo sent, Mercedes saw it as telling documentation. Employing clipping services, she documented the publication of her books and the production of her plays. Amassing material about her famous friends, she amassed proof that she had existed; proof that she had participated in worlds that she loved and admired; proof that she, too, had been loved and admred; proof that, although it was impossible to think of herself as great, it was possible to think of herself as someone who understood greatness and had inspired the great to be greater.

  The Rosenbach Museum & Library was founded in 1954 to maintain and develop the collections of Abraham S. W. Rosenbach, a celebrated book dealer, and of his brother Philip, who specialized in the fine and decorative arts. It is now a house museum and archive that occupies two adjoining nineteenth-century town houses, one of them the brothers’ former home, on an old residential street in downtown Philadelphia. The Rosenbach has holdings of about 350,000 items, including the manuscript of James Joyce’s Ulysses; Marianne Moore’s papers and a re-creation of her living room; collections of Judaica and early Americana; manuscripts and first editions by Conrad, Blake, Dickens, Wilde, and Lewis Carroll.

  With Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood (From Here Lies the Heart)

  On April 15, 2000, forty years after Mercedes’s initial transaction with McCarthy, more than thirty years after her death, and ten years to the day after Garbo’s death, the Rosenbach opened Mercedes’s Garbo material. Sitting in the reading room in the years and then the days leading up to this event, one heard museum docents come and go in the adjacent room, reciting a script about the Rosenbach brothers and their things. “This is the heart and soul of the museum,” they said, over and over. They were talking about Joyce’s death mask, Byron’s card case, Whitman’s manuscripts, and a model of the Globe Theatre, not about Mercedes or her collection. And yet: In the month before the end of the moratorium on the Garbo files, the Rosenbach—a place most accustomed to the eyes of scholars and school groups—sent out press releases announcing the imminent “unsealing” and it admitted reporters and cameramen. On April 15, its librarian tied two ribbons around the document boxes, representatives of the Rosenbach and the Garbo estate cut the ribbons, the material was quickly catalogued, and the curatorial staff mounted a small display.

  Two days later, in a makeshift pressroom, they announced the contents. Relieved and dismayed, or imputing relief or dismay to others, they testified about a lack of evidence. “Anyone determined to classify Garbo as one of de Acosta’s lesbian lovers will certainly be disappointed with the contents of these letters,” said Grey Horan, Garbo’s great-niece and executor. “There is no concrete evidence that any sexual relationship between these two women ever existed.” Garbo’s seminudity in some snapshots taken by Mercedes was a sign only of her Swedish lack of inhibition and love of the outdoors, not of her intimacy with the photographer. The museum director’s more measured comment: “Garbo’s letters do—the question on so many people’s minds—reveal an intense friendship with Acosta, but one that waxed and waned before ending altogether about 1960.” Journalists were then invited to view the exhibit, Garbo Unsealed. After seeing it, more than one returned to the pressroom muttering that there was “nothing there.” Headlines across the country and around the world the next day read “Garbo Letters: Reveal Friendship Not Lesbianism” and (the off-rhymed) “No Hint of Love in Acosta Trove.” Everyone had something to say about what they persistently identified as nothing.

  Nothing: The document box contained five folders that held more than one hundred items dating between 1931 and 1959. There were letters and telegrams—playful, loving, aloof, annoyed, demanding—from Garbo. There was a short manuscript of adulatory verse by Mercedes: “When we climbed your hands so held / the rocks in their gra
sp / I felt they had the whole great / mountain in their clasp.” And: “There is holiness in ploughed land. / Waves of black Earth being still—/ Like a dark sea of barren dreams.” There were the snapshots of Garbo from the vacation they took in the Sierra Madre. There was a tracing of her foot, and a small square of cardboard on which she had written Mercedes’s address, apparently cut from a box she had sent Mercedes. Much of the correspondence is in pencil and unsigned. There are several letters that close with the initial G, a card signed “Greta,” and a telegram signed “Harriet,” for Harriet Brown, Garbo’s favorite alias. One of the cards that accompanied the flowers Garbo sent Mercedes at Christmas and Easter over the years is marked with nothing but a large question mark, in blue ballpoint ink.

  Much of the intense speculation about this material in the days before this event depended on the assumption, both desired and feared, that Mercedes de Acosta, with her reputation for flamboyantly expressed emotion, had been lying when she named Garbo as her lover. Still, that question—Had they been lovers?—posed repeatedly, seemed to have as much to do with a desire to ask it as to find an answer. It was a question that was both attracted to and dismayed by the elusiveness of evidence, and it was, like a collector’s desire, incapable of being satisfied. It was also a question that depended on an understanding of identity as constituted largely by sexual behavior as well as on a belief that it was possible to gather positive evidence of desire. Only a few observers wondered publicly what such proof might consist of in the correspondence of a figure as demonstrably undemonstrative as Greta Garbo.