Outlaw Marriages (17 page)

After the flood of positive reviews and the prestigious award, executives at Atheneum asked Flanner to choose more examples of her magazine work to create a second collection. She signed the book contract only after the publisher agreed to hire Solano to read her articles and choose which ones would be included. So Solano thereby played the same role she had with the first book, except this time she didn't volunteer her time but was paid for it.
51

When volume two of
Paris Journal
was released in 1971, that event spawned another flurry of admiring comments;
Saturday Review
said, “Janet Flanner's tapestry, her brilliantly colored and intricately patterned portrait of Paris enchants, educates and inspires.” Similar praise followed the publication of a third volume of pieces, titled
Paris Was Yesterday
, which Solano again helped Flanner put together; the
Washington Post
wrote, “Flanner's letters combine social, political, literary, art and theatrical history that is laced with style, wit, humor, erudition and insight.” And still more applause came in the wake of a fourth volume, titled
London Was Yesterday;
the
Chicago Tribune
lauded Flanner as “a master at picking out the details that indicate something broader about a subject.”
52

By the time that last collection of pieces had been published in early 1975, Solano's failing health reduced her role in the selection process because traveling by train had become too physically taxing for her. Flanner continued to write Solano, however, filling her letters with statements such as, “Rarely does a day go by that I don't think of you.” Solano died in late 1975, at the age of eighty-six. A four-paragraph obituary in the
New York Times
stated, “For 20 years Miss Solano lived with Janet Flanner.”
53

Flanner's final “Letter from Paris” was published in the summer of 1975. The author then moved back to the United States and lived with Natalia
Danesi Murray, who was now directing the New York office of an Italian publishing house.
54

American news organizations told their readers about Flanner's death in 1978, of a heart attack at the age of eighty-six, not only through a plethora of lengthy obituaries but also with any number of tributes.
Newsweek
called her “the most lively and perceptive chronicler of France that the U.S. news media has ever known,” and the
New York Times
wrote, “With a keen eye for the significant in politics, art, the theater and the changing conditions of life, Miss Flanner condensed her observations every two weeks into 2,500 words of chatty but polished prose.”
55

Despite having plenty of space to praise Janet Flanner's achievements, none of these titans of American journalism nor the others that reported her passing—including the
Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer
, and
Washington Post
—so much as mentioned the name of the woman who'd contributed immeasurably to the celebrated journalist's life and work: Solita Solano.
56

Making Hollywood the Celebrity Capital of the World

…

Greta Garbo was the epitome of the Hollywood movie star. The stunningly beautiful actress was so talented, so glamorous, and so captivating on screen that fans clamored to see her films and to devour every morsel of information about her personal life that the press could feed them. In short, Garbo is an apt representative of that charismatic group of men and women who transformed Hollywood into not only the movie capital of the world but also the home to the most talked-about celebrities on the planet.

Garbo was assisted in several key ways by her same-sex partner, Mercedes de Acosta. On a personal level, the highly cultured de Acosta taught the star how to speak, how to dress, and how to live in the style expected of cinematic royalty. On a professional level, de Acosta advised Garbo on which film roles to accept and which to reject, while also lending a creative hand in shaping how the characters she played ultimately came across on screen.

Mercedes Hernandez de Acosta was born into a wealthy and socially prominent New York City family in 1893. Her father, who was born in Cuba, earned a high salary as a top executive for a steamship company, and her mother, who was descended from Spanish nobility, devoted much of her time to the Catholic church.
1

Mercedes attended private schools on the East Coast and in France, showing a particular talent for writing. During her teenage years, she mixed with the sons and daughters of the wealthiest members of New York society by attending cotillions and formal dinners.
2

De Acosta recognized, by her early twenties, that she was attracted to members of her own sex and then had a series of affairs. Among the beautiful young woman's early lovers were world-renowned dancer Isadora Duncan and Broadway star Eva Le Gallienne.
3

In 1920, de Acosta surprised her closest friends by marrying a wealthy portrait painter named Abram Poole. She later wrote that she took that step to please her mother, who'd repeatedly told her daughter, “I would die in peace if I knew you were happily married.”
4

After the wedding, de Acosta continued to have affairs with various women. When Poole learned about his wife's repeated infidelity, he divorced her.
5

The 1920s also was the period in de Acosta's life when she launched her writing career. She initially dabbled with poetry, but she eventually settled on becoming a playwright. During the decade, she had three of her plays staged, two on Broadway and one in Paris.
6

Consistently negative reviews—the
New York Tribune
said de Acosta's dialogue was “so flowery that it resembles a seed catalogue”—led to all three productions closing after only a handful of performances.
7

By 1930, de Acosta was so frustrated by her experiences with the theater that she shifted to creating movie scripts. She then persuaded officials at RKO Studios to bring her to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter.
8

Greta Garbo was born Greta Gustafsson in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1905. Her father worked as a street cleaner, and her mother as a housekeeper. The family lived in a cold-water apartment in one of Stockholm's poorest neighborhoods.
9

When Greta was fourteen, her father died and she dropped out of school to help support her mother and siblings. Her first job was selling hats in a department store, and, within a few months, the pretty young girl was also appearing as an unpaid model in ads for the store.
10

In 1922, Greta had the good fortune to sell a hat to a Swedish film director. Taking note of her “good looks and bouncy figure,” he cast the seventeen-year-old
in a minor role in one of his movies. She then quit her sales job and won a scholarship to study at Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theater Academy.
11

Greta studied acting for less than a year before one of the country's top film directors came to the school in search of new talent and chose her to play a major role in one of his movies. The director found his young protégé's name too ordinary, however, and changed it to Greta Garbo.
12

The actress's next break came in 1925 when Louis B. Mayer of Hollywood film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer saw her on screen while he was traveling in Europe. The movie mogul was so dazzled by Garbo that he brought her to the United States and placed her under contract.
13

When Garbo arrived in Hollywood, the gaggle of reporters who interviewed her dutifully wrote down the first words of awkward English that came out of her mouth when asked about her plans: “I wait for what the studio decides for me to do.” The newsmen also made critical comments about her appearance, pointing out that one of her nylon stockings had a run in it and that her shoes needed new heels.
14

Mayer signed Garbo to a two-year contract at a weekly salary of $400. Various studio employees were then summoned to work their magic. A fitness expert helped her shed twenty pounds, a beautician straightened her frizzy hair, and a secretary took her to a dentist to have her teeth straightened. No one was assigned to help Garbo with her English, seeing as how the era's silent pictures didn't require her to speak.
15

Garbo's first role was in
The Torrent
, a melodrama about a Spanish peasant who sleeps her way to opera stardom. With a simple plot and a translator to help her understand the director, Garbo did well. When the film was released, the trade paper
Variety
crowned the new actress “the find of the year.”
16

The young star, however, was miserable. Shortly after arriving in Hollywood, she wrote a friend in Stockholm that she regretted having made the move. She complained, in particular, about being lonely. “Oh, my enchanting little Sweden,” she wrote longingly, “how happy I shall be to get home to you again!”
17

In 1927, Garbo starred in two more films and hired a financial adviser. She soon had a new contract for $3,000 a week and was investing her earnings in real estate.
18

Despite Garbo's continuing professional success, she still wasn't happy. One
of her new complaints, by 1930, was that every character she played was shallow and predictable. “Always the vamp I am—always the woman with no heart,” she told a friend.
19

Another annoyance was the studio's insistence that Garbo do more than act. When MGM proposed, for example, that she endorse Palmolive soap and allow her face to appear on the product's wrapper, she flatly refused, asking, “Are not the good movies be enough?”
20

Studio officials, for their part, thought Garbo's insistence on privacy was extreme, as she wouldn't talk to reporters, wouldn't sign autographs, and wouldn't attend any public events—not even the premieres of her own films.
21

Biographers who've studied Garbo's career have made the point that she became the first major movie star who vehemently avoided publicity. They've also observed that shunning the spotlight ultimately added both to her celebrity status and to the mystique that became part of her public persona. “The press coverage of Garbo became obsessive,” one scholar has written, “and so did public curiosity.”
22

In the summer of 1931, Garbo crossed paths with the woman who became the love of her life and also helped enormously in her evolution into a Hollywood icon.
23

The actress met Mercedes de Acosta at the home of a mutual friend. Garbo was instantly smitten, and she arranged to spend time alone with de Acosta two days later. On that occasion, they talked at length and danced together to the song “Daisy, You're Driving Me Crazy.”
24

For their third meeting, which came just a few days after the second, Garbo invited the screenwriter to her home. Years later, de Acosta quoted Garbo as saying at the time, “I never ask anyone to my home, but today, as a great exception, I am inviting you.”
25

After the women talked for several hours, they made their way to a nearby beach where they made love. “As the sun rose,” de Acosta later wrote, “we walked and picked rambler roses as we went along.” Garbo recalled that momentous evening, many years later, by identifying precisely what had attracted her to the woman who then became the central figure in her life. “Mercedes possessed vivacity, charm and a great knowledge of love,” the actress said. “She excited me in everything she did.”
26

While these initial meetings were unfolding, Garbo went to the studio each day to film her next movie,
Susan Lenox
. As soon as the shooting ended, she asked her new partner to spend six uninterrupted weeks with her on Silver Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where the two women had a small island entirely to themselves.
27

In her memoir, de Acosta described the vacation as perfect in every way. “In all this time, there was not a second of disharmony between Greta and me,” she wrote. “We had brilliant sunshine every day.” The women spent their nights sleeping in a small cottage and their days canoeing, swimming in the nude, and taking photos of each other—including Garbo posing with her breasts bared.
28

After that trip, Garbo moved into a house half a block from de Acosta's, and the couple began alternating which residence they spent the night sleeping in. They started each day with a ten-mile hike through the Hollywood Hills, and during other leisure hours they played tennis and went horseback riding. “Sometimes we also took picnic lunches,” de Acosta later wrote, “and spent the whole day on the beach far up toward Malibu.”
29