All We Know: Three Lives (19 page)

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:

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 she 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.”

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 negotiated 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:

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: