All We Know: Three Lives

by Lisa Cohen

  If it was all a kind of nonevent, nothing, it inspired a huge amount of publicity for Garbo and a palpable contempt for Mercedes. The story that circulated was about an elegant, elusive, beleaguered star besieged by a pathological, opportunistic, unreliable fan—a view of Mercedes and her collection that did nothing other than reiterate what we already think we know about stars and fans: the greatness and need for privacy of the one, the irrationality and presumption of the other. No one was asking: What does it mean to be a collector? What sort of biographical text is a collection? How do fans and stars need and desire each other, and what does the dance between them actually consist of? What is the relation between facts and feelings in an archive? How do you prove or disprove the presence of nothing?

  She sets the fire. There is no fire.

  A.S.W. Rosenbach ran the preeminent rare book and manuscript business in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. He turned book collecting into a viable, valued form of investment and helped to build the collections of J. P. Morgan (now the basis of the Morgan Library), Henry Huntington (whose collection became the Huntington Library), Henry Folger (the Folger Shakespeare Library), and Harry Elkins Widener (in whose name Harvard’s Widener Library was founded). Rosenbach had a reputation as an omnivorous, outrageous collector who saved some of his best acquisitions for himself. He was known, too, as “a lover of whisky and women” and as a man who habitually embroidered on his exploits and accomplishments, telling inflated and factually incorrect stories about his life. And he collected everything, notes his biographer, not just rare printed matter:

  It was almost as though Dr. Rosenbach had wanted a biography of himself written, to which unspoken wish his brother Philip had assented, for the brothers hoarded paper as misers do gold. In dozens of filing cabinets, cartons, ledgers, scrapbooks, salesbooks, and piles merely bound with string they kept the important with the inconsequential—high school notebooks and college examination papers, sheets covered with doodles, personal and business letters sent and received, newspaper clippings, invoices of merchandise bought, and sales slips—a vast, unsorted accumulation of over fifty years.

  Keeping the important with the inconsequential is one version of what it means to be a dedicated collector—the other being a relentless connoisseurship. A.S.W. and Philip Rosenbach seem to have engaged in both. The museum’s educational material on collecting, directed at young visitors, puts it this way: “The brothers loved beautiful things, ugly things, old things, modern things, tiny things, gigantic things, weird things, rare things, expensive things, cheap things, fancy things, and plain things. They thought: ‘As long as we love it, anything can be a collection!’”

  Their vast, unsorted accumulation sounds distinctly like Mercedes’s hoard. But while theirs has been seen as evidence of foresight and even an (auto)biographical impulse, hers has been viewed as the sign of typically trivial feminine need, of sexual derangement, and of arrested development. The catalogue of Mercedes’s papers and the publicity for the exhibit Garbo Unsealed described her as “truly of the genus ‘social butterfly’” and asserted that “it is as a ‘confidante to the stars’ that her papers have interest.” Garbo’s great-niece called Mercedes’s Bible, in which she had pasted photographs of Garbo, reminiscent of her “11-year-old god-daughter’s scrapbook devoted to Leonardo DiCaprio.”

  This Bible, on display in Garbo Unsealed, inspired much commentary and came to stand for the unsealing and for the idea that Mercedes and her collection were unserious and unstable. Placed at the entrance of the gallery, it was open to an early page on which Mercedes had mounted six small photographs of Garbo. On the facing page (where at least a decade earlier she had written, “The Bible of Mercedes de Acosta 1922” and transcribed a passage from the Book of Matthew), she had mounted another small image of Garbo. The Rosenbach distributed a photograph of those two pages as part of its press packet and mounted an enlargement of it on the wall behind the podium on April 17, 2000. As a result, the image was reproduced widely. During the press conference, the speakers gestured toward it repeatedly. “Acosta’s fanatical devotion to Garbo is already well-known,” said Derek Dreher, director of the Rosenbach. “The image behind me is further proof of this.” “Case in point!” Horan, a lawyer, exclaimed, pointing to it.

  The Bible was presented as though it, too, had been unsealed: released from a kind of bondage of necessary privacy, secrecy, and shame, and evidence of a singular obsession with Garbo. Yet it had never been restricted material, and Mercedes’s decoration of it—the mingling of celebrity image and Christian devotional text—was not limited to Garbo. On subsequent pages she pasted photographs of Eva Le Gallienne and Eleonora Duse, two other actresses who inspired her—one her lover, one not. The association between Garbo and the spiritual, moreover, was not Mercedes’s alone. This star had been “divine” since her appearance in The Divine Woman, in 1928. (Nor was it Garbo’s alone: Sarah Bernhardt was “divine” before her.) As one reviewer wrote of Garbo’s silent performances: “It was not so much what she did, or how she did it, but what she conveyed through some spiritual distinction of her own.” Nor does Mercedes’s obsession account wholly for her ability to save so many images of Garbo. Her papers include “a great many magazines…in which articles and photographs [of Garbo] appeared,” as she wrote to William McCarthy, in part because there were so many to be had.

  The Rosenbach had bought Mercedes’s papers, remarked the museum’s director that April, “because she insinuated herself into the centers of modernist thought and art.” Garbo’s writing was of a piece with the rest of the library’s holdings, “round[ing] out a stunning collection that chronicles the great Modernists of the 20th century,” noted the publicity for the unsealing. Mercedes’s relationship to modernity, in this story, was that of an outsider who imposed on its legitimate centers. She was at once mocked and given no credit for her collection. As one critic has argued, she was “a pre-Enlightenment person in a post-Enlightenment age. She could never bring herself to give up on daydream or romance or superstition,” and her plays were “almost entirely—as if obliviously—in the obsolete vein of 19th-century melodrama.” While “Garbo was ruthlessly, corrosively modern, as thorough in her irony and disillusionment as Gibbon or Voltaire,” de Acosta “was a throwback, a figment out of the Dark Ages, wedded to unrealities.” It is true that her writing often eschewed the uses of distance, abstraction, and irony that were changing the literary landscape in the first part of the twentieth century and that have come down to us as the canonical version of modernism. Her plotting could be outlandish—“Probability is not a word that occurs in Miss de Acosta’s dictionary,” wrote one reviewer of her novel Until the Day Break. The book contains “purple passages that seem to belong to a past decade,” noted another. Rereading this novel as she wrote in Here Lies the Heart, she was herself “amazed that the reviewers didn’t throw it out of the window.” The worst of her poetry reads like self-parody. Enthusiastically punctuated, it includes lines such as “Suddenly I thought of death!” and “reaching / out we extend our hands and lean far into the Vast / Space of the Infinite!” Yet her subject matter also struck a number of contemporary readers as modern, and her poems were appreciated by some critics for their directness of expression and for the way they conveyed her sense of being stifled by social convention. Her collection, Moods, had a second printing, and Harriet Monroe, a powerful arbiter of the new in verse and supporter of women writers, published Mercedes’s work in Poetry magazine.

  The Bible of Mercedes de Acosta (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

  Separating Mercedes de Acosta from what we think of as modern not only flattens that category retrospectively. It also repeats a certain modernist formal orthodoxy by reproducing the attempts to purge nineteenth-century modes such as melodrama from its purview—attempts that have been so successful that it is still easy to think of overt and extravagant expressions of emotion as unserious. Elinor Wylie was the contemporary
poet Mercedes said she most admired, but it is with the work of Sara Teasdale that she was most obviously in conversation. Streets and Shadows, the collection Mercedes published in 1922, echoes Teasdale’s 1920 Flame and Shadow. Her poems to Garbo clearly owe something to Teasdale’s first book, the 1907 Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems, which include “To Eleonora Duse,” “To Eleonora Duse in ‘The Dead City,’” and “To a Picture of Eleonora Duse as ‘Francesca da Rimini.’” Amy Lowell, whom Mercedes also admired and met—and who was then considered part of the modern movement in poetry and is now too often ignored or dismissed—also commemorated Duse in verse. If Mercedes held on to much of what modernism repudiated (emotion, fantasy) as it established itself, her writing documents the links between those earlier aesthetic modes and celebrity culture—a connection that had to wait for Frank O’Hara and other gay male poets for it to be taken seriously.

  And if her writing makes it possible to see modernism as part of what preceded it, her collection—her archiving of personal mementos and of mass-produced items of popular culture—suggests how disparate archival practices overlap. Like the Rosenbach brothers and the institution founded to memorialize them and their work, Mercedes was concerned with respecting and protecting the material she cared about. Yet her collecting—of Stravinsky’s score, Dietrich’s stocking, Alice B. Toklas’s letters—proposes once more that there is a false distinction between a pop cultural and high-cultural way of understanding valued objects. Garbo’s letters to Mercedes enrich the Rosenbach’s holdings of modernist writing and artifacts not only because of the star’s modernity, but also because the de Acosta Papers as a whole testify to the history of feminist activism and to the primacy of the individual ego, to spiritual search and to sexual adventure, to the feeling of being a fan and to the history of celebrity in the twentieth century, and to the material and emotional texture of all of these ventures.

  In 1936, Esther Murphy wrote to Chester Arthur:

  I have seen Mercedes be intelligent and discriminating in the past. But she…always flew off on a personal tangent, and I know of no one who could be more irritating than she could be when she was in one of her mood[s] of self pitying introspection. But either life, or the passage of time, or the influence of the Baba, or a combination of them all, seems to have worked a real transformation. She seems actually capable of getting outside of her own personal problems and seeing them in their relation to the larger problems that encompass all our lives…And this impersonality and sense of the true proportion of things, have given Mercedes a dignity and a conviction and a serenity she never had attained before…She seemed to me like a person released from a part of themselves that had always acted to diminish them.

  While Esther grasped this complex, often annoying human amalgam, more recent observers, including her biographer, have tried to rescue Mercedes de Acosta, from herself and from others’ scorn. It is a gesture that echoes Mercedes’s relationship to her lovers and that ignores the fact that if we take her as she was, she needs no such help. She herself mocked her desire to rescue Maude Adams from a nonexistent fire. She also described herself, older, backstage with Adams, as “so absurdly and tragically intense that it’s a small wonder I didn’t blow up the whole dressing room.” Aware that she used her feelings for Garbo to scuttle other intimacies, she wrote to Marlene Dietrich, “I do know that I have built up in my emotions a person that does not exist. My mind sees the real person—a Swedish servant girl with a face touched by God—only interested in money, her health, sex, food, and sleep. And yet her face tricks my mind and my spirit builds her up into something that fights with my brain. I do love her, but I only love the person I have created and not the person who is real.” (Dietrich’s response, according to her daughter: “Really! De Acosta is too vain for words!”)

  The correspondence from Garbo that Mercedes saved, which cannot be quoted without permission of the star’s estate, illuminates Mercedes’s romantic exaggerations. Her impromptu trip in the winter of 1935 to Sweden, for example, which in Here Lies the Heart she calls the result of Garbo’s spur-of-the-moment invitation, was not Garbo’s idea but hers. But these letters also make it clear that her connection with Garbo was not the delusion of a crazed fan. Garbo tells her to come closer and to go away; tells her how she has suffered from the film industry and describes her indecision about how to spend her life after Hollywood; describes her ailments, physical and emotional, and entreats Mercedes to take care of herself; sends her yoga mantras, sends her love, and sends her on household errands; bemoans her inability to settle, asks Mercedes to make her a hotel reservation, describes her plans in detail, refuses to be pinned down. She tells Mercedes not to bother her, tells her not to forget to write, writes that she dislikes writing, tells her to ignore newspaper reports about her, apologizes for her odd behavior, tells her they are wholly different kinds of people, thanks her for buying her a pair of shoes, laments the waste of her life, chastises her for being too persistent, refers coyly to the jealousy of Mercedes’s current girlfriend (Poppy Kirk), and hopes that Mercedes will take care of her, Garbo, should she decide to go to Paris. She is aloof, frustrated, demanding, loving, funny, and self-consciously evasive.

  Garbo’s star image, like that of Maude Adams, was produced (by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) to make publicity out of the difficulty of producing publicity about this idiosyncratic, solitary, gender-bending star. Today the books, photographs, magazine articles, and television documentaries that are part of the ongoing work of knowing Garbo almost always conclude that we can never know her. “Garbo Letters Leave Mystery Intact,” explained USA Today in April 2000. Mercedes de Acosta, although unfamiliar to most, was assumed to be thoroughly known, in an epithet or two. Part of the lure of a collection of personal papers is that it offers the promise of answers about a life, simply by virtue of being grouped under one name. Yet the Mercedes de Acosta Papers have most often been used as a source for information about Mercedes’s famous friends. The proof that her collection was asked to provide in the spring of 2000—that Garbo did or did not have a female lover—at once had everything to do with Mercedes and reduced her to next to nothing, creating a tremendously important cipher. To the extent that she and her collection were important, it was only as a proving ground for knowledge about Garbo, as an index of the star’s desire. As such, she could have been anyone, or any woman.

  Respecting and protecting Greta Garbo posthumously from Mercedes de Acosta meant denigrating the latter and her desires—even as Mercedes and her collection generated another wave of publicity for (and concomitant increase in value of everything to do with) the star. Respecting and protecting Garbo meant offering legalistic readings of the star’s utterances rather than acknowledging that knowledge and desire can be as elusive as Garbo was. What was on display that spring, in addition to Garbo’s letters, Mercedes’s Bible, and so on, was a form of guardianship that involved the familiar (and in this case familial), derogatory view of women’s relationships to stars (trivial, unrestrained, juvenile). On view, too, was another attempt to assert the correct distance from this star, and a reminder that there is no arguing with the excitement of power. While Garbo’s image and biography are monitored by constant family concern and litigation, de Acosta’s are not. Garbo was born with nothing, but ended with enormous wealth: Her power today comes not just from her star image but from canny investments in real estate and stocks, which her family inherited. Mercedes, who began life with every financial and social advantage, ended with almost nothing: “One by one down to the end,” she wrote to William McCarthy in 1964, “I seem to be selling everything.”

  Confronting a collection and a life like Mercedes de Acosta’s means being forced to consider, over and over, the boundary between the important and the inconsequential, between intellect and emotion, between something and nothing. Which is to say, it means being forced to reflect on what we understand to be a biographical fact. Questions of evidence will always also be questions of access, yet there will always be som
ething we cannot read, or see, or hear, even when it is right in front of us or spoken directly to us. And when it comes to a contest of wills and of power like this one, there will never be enough evidence. The trouble had to do with what Mercedes de Acosta did with her body, just how close she got to the star. Her body is gone. Fantasy and factuality, memory and material preservation, are all alive in her collection. This is how she is embodied now, in a place that is not simply a repository of paper and things but also a storehouse and producer of feeling. But how did she view her collection? It was, she wrote to McCarthy, “quite unique and certainly very human material.”

  Madge Garland, Londonderry House, London, 1949, photographed by Cecil Beaton (Cecil Beaton/Vogue © The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.)

  There is a visibility so tenuous, so different, or so discomfited that it is easy to miss. And there is a visibility so simple, so precise, or so extreme that it, too, is obscure.

  In a schoolroom in London at the turn of the twentieth century a young girl lies strapped to a sloping wooden board, a treatment ordered for her worsening curvature of the spine. During writing lessons, she is allowed to sit upright with the rest of the class, but then her arms are secured so tightly to the back of her chair that she cannot move her wrists normally, which forces her to develop a cramped and backward-sloping handwriting. There is also trouble with her throat and “graver trouble” with her feet and ankles, for which she wears lace-up orthopedic boots. In the summer, “when the world [is] at its prettiest,” she suffers so acutely from allergies—to food, to flowers, to the air—that her temperature soars and she is forced to lie all day in a darkened room. To fatten her and restore her to health, she is fed strawberries and cream, but this therapy only exacerbates her ailments.