All We Know: Three Lives (20 page)

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 grasp / 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.

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:

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.