Loving Garbo

Darling Cecil,

It was wonderful having that grand long letter from you. What a divine vacation you must have had with Peter. It sounds too heavenly.fn1

There has been so much going on in our set here that every time I think of writing I am swamped with the very idea of trying to tell it all. The Garbo-Mercedes business has been too amazing. They had terrific battles, and Garbo left without saying goodbye. Then Mercedes flew to NY to see her and Garbo wouldn’t. Mercedes flew back despondent – lost her job with MGM and is in the most awful state. Also says she is broke – can’t get a break and it’s too terrible. The story is as long as the dictionary – but much more amazing – so will hope you get together with Mercedes one day and hear it from her lips.¹

Loos related further Hollywood news, of Tallulah Bankhead going to MGM; of Red-Headed Woman, a comedy scripted by Loos for Jean Harlow, failing to pass the English censors; and of the American playwright Zoë Akins and her husband fighting ‘like battleships’. Loos also had news of Edmund Goulding, another friend of Cecil’s and the director of Grand Hotel, which had opened that spring to rave reviews, most especially for Garbo, who played the exquisitely desolate femme fatale with whom John Barrymore fell in love.fn2

Eddie Goulding left here on 12 hours notice after giving a party for eight girls which wound up with two of them having to be sent to the hospital. Hearst stepped in and squashed the story being printed except for vague allusions in Winchell’s column. Hearst must have been furious about it. One of the newspapers told the studio people not to worry about the story being printed as it was so filthy it couldn’t be. Don’t know myself what it was that happened – but that’s the gossip about town. Please don’t spread it – as Eddie seems to be going over great in London.²

In Hollywood in the thirties, the inner circle knew all that was happening and the general public very little. The ‘Garbo-Mercedes business’ was another one of the Hollywood secrets that studio PR people kept under wraps, and Cecil would have been interested in the most recent instalment as a matter of course. But Loos’s account, coming when it did, must have piqued his interest more than she could have guessed. Cecil had been obsessed with Garbo for some time and had pursued her assiduously when he was in California, hoping to photograph her for Vogue or for a book he was preparing. She had avoided him until just before he returned to England. Then one afternoon at the Gouldings’ Spanish-style mansion, where Cecil was staying, they had had a surprisingly intense encounter that went on until dawn. Cecil apparently, and uncharacteristically, kept the news of this meeting to himself.

We talked of . . . things, profound and trivial. Then finally, as the moon sank and disappeared and a tiny streak of light fell across the sky in the east, we were silent. Slowly the dawn came. As the sun rose we walked down the mountain and picked rambler roses.3

In the summer of 1931 Garbo and Mercedes disappeared to a little house on Silver Lake in the Sierra Nevada Mountains owned by the actor Wallace Beery, where they shared a solitary idyll for some time, although not as long as Mercedes later claimed:

How to describe the next six enchanted weeks? Even recapturing them in memory makes me realize how lucky I am to have had them. Six perfect weeks out of a lifetime. This is indeed much. In all this time there was not a second of disharmony between Greta and me or in nature around us . . .⁴

Mercedes observed Garbo closely. In an extract she omitted from her autobiography, she described Garbo’s legs:

They were not tan or the sunburned colour which is commonly seen, but the skin had taken on a golden hue and a flock of tiny hairs growing on her legs were golden too. Her legs are classical. She has not the typical Follies girl legs or the American man’s dream of what a woman’s legs should be. They have the shape that can be seen in many Greek statues.⁵

For much of Desperate Garbo was to be dressed as a boy in order to escape from the police and others. Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, would have none of this. ‘Do you want to put all America and all the women’s clubs against her?’ he asked. ‘You must be out of your mind . . . We have been building Garbo up for years as a great glamorous actress, and now you come along and try to put her into pants and make a monkey out of her.’⁷ That was the end of the project.

Garbo then made Grand Hotel and As You Desire Me, which was released in June 1932. During negotiations over a new contract with MGM, she left Hollywood for New York, hiding out at the St Moritz Hotel on Central Park South before sailing for her native Sweden. Mercedes was left behind in the condition described by Anita Loos in her letter to Cecil Beaton. But since Mercedes was soon being swamped with flowers by Marlene Dietrich, who had embarked on a determined campaign to seduce her, she may not have been suffering as much as Loos thought.

New York in the days of Mercedes’s childhood had a charm that is hard to imagine now. Italian organ-grinders still roamed the streets with sad-looking monkeys tethered on chains. Coaches rattled along the avenues, with footmen as postilions. Through her sister Rita, Mercedes met many of the great figures of the day, from Rodin and Anatole France to Edith Wharton and Queen Marie of Roumania. She became a friend of Picasso, Stravinsky, Sarah Bernhardt and others. She used to claim that her brain was ‘international’, indeed ‘universal’, though her heart remained resolutely Spanish. Mercedes’s film career included being fired by Irving Thalberg for refusing to write a scene in the film Rasputin and the Empress (1932) about a meeting between Princess Irena Youssoupoff and the Mad Monk that had never taken place in life. Mercedes was that rare creature in Hollywood, a purist.

She did not have an easy life. She was the victim of depressions that in childhood led her to moan audibly in the corner of a room, and when she was an adult she had trouble sleeping and suffered from migraine headaches. Many times she endured what she called ‘the dark night of the soul’.⁹ She believed in ‘astral travelling’, when ‘the spirit or ego leaves the body while one sleeps and yet remains connected to the life force’. She explained the sudden awakening with a jerk that everyone has experienced as ‘a too sudden parting of the astral from the physical body’.¹⁰

Mercedes was a vegetarian who believed that ‘meat eating makes a tomb out of our living bodies for the corpses of dead animals’. She was an explorer of Eastern religions, a disciple of Krishnamurti. She began life as a devout Roman Catholic, often kneeling for hours with arms extended in the form of a cross. She put nails and stones in her shoes and walked till her feet bled. Later she rejected much of Catholicism, telling Elsa Maxwell: ‘I don’t believe in dogmas, I believe in taking the essence from all religions, in arriving at your own creed.’¹¹ She was an ardent feminist and loved Isadora Duncan because she helped to liberate women from the burden of layers of clothes, making corsets and stockings obsolete, and introducing sandals.

‘Have you got this?’ he demanded.

I was horrified. I had heard about grown people and children being deformed. These stories now leapt to my mind.

‘You’re deformed!’ I shouted.

‘If you are a boy and you haven’t got this, you are the one who is deformed’, he shouted back.

By this time the other boys had joined us, each boy speedily showing me the same strange phenomenon the first boy had exhibited. They were like menacing and terrible judges! They demanded that I produce the same ‘phenomenon’.

‘Prove that you’re not a girl’, they screamed.13

This was a shattering experience for young Rafael. ‘In that one brief second everything in my young soul turned monstrous and terrible and dark’.¹⁴ She ran home to her nurse, then challenged her mother and it was admitted that she was a girl. In due course, as she recorded in an unpublished draft of her memoirs, Mercedes was sent to a convent to teach her feminine ways, but she ran away. She continued to deny she was a girl, explaining to the bewildered nuns: ‘I am not a boy and I am not a girl, or maybe I am both – I don’t know. And because I don’t know, I will never fit in anywhere and I will be lonely all my life.’¹⁵

Some years later, Mercedes mused on how this had affected her life and her attitude to men and women:

It has made me see and understand the half tones of life, and like the half tone light of dawn and twilight, whose vibrations are ever the most mystical and romantic, so too I have come to regard these half-tones of life, and the people who walk their rhythm, as the most beautiful . . . To the outward form of sex which the body has assumed, I have remained indifferent, I do not understand the difference between a man and a woman, and believing only in the eternal value of love, I cannot understand these so-called ‘normal’ people who believe that a man should love only a woman, and a woman love only a man. If this were so, then it disregards completely the spirit, the personality, and the mind, and stresses all the importance of love to the physical body. I believe in many cases this is why the ‘normal’ people are usually much less inspired, seldom artists, and much less sensitive than the ‘half-tone’ people. They are held down and concerned so much with the physical body that they cannot see beyond the outward form of male and female. The Greeks understood so well that there is no pure masculine or pure feminine in one person, and in order to bring the body up to the level of this spiritual understanding, they did not hesitate to sculpt on the physical plane the hermaphroditic type in their works of art; and in the poetry of their lives they accepted homo-sexuality and bi-sexuality, whose impulse they regarded as just another stream which flowed toward the same great sea – the eternal source of love!16

The young Mercedes loved her eccentric, aristocratic mother, admitting she suffered from a mother complex. When her mother died, she guarded the body so zealously that when her brother came near, she seized a knife and tried to stab him. Her father was handsome, poetic, intellectual. As a young man in Cuba he had survived a battle in which twenty of his companions had been shot. In later life he brooded over this constantly, and when Mercedes was fourteen and he was an old man, he killed himself by jumping off a high rock. ‘I knew this gesture was, in his mind, an expiation at last to his comrades for having escaped with his life so many years before,’ wrote Mercedes.¹⁷

Mercedes herself was capable of dramatic and violent action. She owned a small colt revolver and took comfort from the idea that if life became too difficult, she could point it at the roof of her mouth ‘and pop myself off this baffling planet’.¹⁸ One day it disappeared, and Mercedes discovered that her sister Baba had removed it for safety, throwing it into the East River. She was enraged:

‘You took it’, I said, and leaped at her. The weight of my body knocked her over backwards and we fell down. I grabbed her throat and banged her head over and over again on the floor.¹⁹

Like many New Yorkers in the twenties, Mercedes loved the smoky night life of speakeasies and drag clubs.

What we all saw in it is difficult to understand now. I suppose it was the newly found excitement of homosexuality, which after the war was expressed openly in nightclubs and cabarets by boys dressed as women, and was, like drinking, forbidden and subject to police raids, which made it all the more enticing. Youth was in revolt, and outwitting the government and getting the better of the police lent a zest to our lives.20

Mercedes wrote in a draft of her memoirs: ‘How am I to convey to the reader the diverse people I feel within me – a reader who probably also has as many diverse people as I have within him or within her – as the sex may be. And here too, is another problem. Who of us are only one sex? I, myself, am sometimes androgynous . . .’²¹

Mercedes was married between 1920 and 1935 to the artist and portrait painter Abram Poole, but she refused to be described as Mrs Abram Poole, remaining resolutely Mercedes de Acosta. Nor did her marriage prevent her from pursuing various ladies. She even claimed to have taken a girlfriend with her on her honeymoon. She had remarkable success in this regard. Alice B. Toklas wrote of her: ‘A friend said to me one day – you can’t dispose of Mercedes lightly – she has had the two most important women in US – Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich.’²² Shortly before her death at the age of 100, ‘Dickie’ Fellowes-Gordon,^fn4 Elsa Maxwell’s lifelong friend, recalled that Mercedes used to boast: ‘I can get any woman from any man’;²³ and there is considerable evidence to support this claim. Truman Capote was one of those fascinated by the sex life of Mercedes. ‘Truman thought up a game he called International Daisy Chain, the point of which was to link people sexually, using as few beds as possible,’ recalls John Richardson, the art historian. ‘He used to say that Mercedes was the best card to hold. You could get to anyone – as it were from Pope John XXIII to John Kennedy – in one move.’²⁴

She was variously fascinated by many famous and complicated women – the Italian diva with the tragic face, Eleonora Duse (whom she first saw passing in a gondola in Venice when she was eleven and whose body, after her death in Pittsburgh, she arranged to lie in the Dominican Catholic Church in Lexington Avenue); the Russian ballerina Tamara Karsavina, and Isadora Duncan, the ill-fated dancer who died when her scarf was caught in the wheel of her car.

Mercedes first met Isadora in 1916, and during the course of a long friendship, arranged for the payment of many of her bills and the editing and publishing of her memoirs, My Life. ‘Many days and nights we spent together,’ Mercedes recalled, ‘eating when we felt hungry, sleeping when we felt tired, regardless of time or the hour.’²⁷ Isadora often danced for her, and did so once while humming much of Parsifal. In the last year of her life, Isadora wrote a poem to Mercedes in her illegible hand, a fragment of which reads:

A slender body, hands soft and white

for the service of my delight . . .

Two sprouting breasts

Round and sweet

invite my hungry mouth to eat.

From whence two nipples firm and pink

persuade my thirsty soul to drink

And lower still a secret place

Where I’d fain hide my loving face

My kisses like a swarm of bees

Would find their way

Between thy knees

And suck the honey of thy lips

Embracing thy two slender hips.²⁸

Other women in Mercedes’s life included Marie Doro, a famous Charles Frohman fn5 star, a small, alert and intelligent creature with spectacularly dark eyes and thick brown hair. Marie wrote popular songs, one of which was entitled: ‘Do I make it Clear’, and was an authority on Shakespeare’s sonnets and Elizabethan poetry. She shared Mercedes’s fascination for religion and studied at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. ‘She had a way of weaving in and out of my life,’ wrote Mercedes, adding: ‘If you never knew Marie intimately – and this was almost a lifework – you could never have known all her tricks for hiding her beauty. I was immediately aware of her, even when she dressed herself up like a pixie to conceal it!’²⁹ Marie used to go into hiding ‘to contemplate’ and once changed her hotel four times in one week to escape her friends. When she died in 1956, she bequeathed $90,000 to the Actors’ Fund.

Mercedes’s great early friend Bessie Marbury, the companion of the interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe and agent to H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham and Oscar Wilde, provided entrée to another romantic attachment, Alla Nazimova, a famous Russian actress. Nazimova was dark and intense, slender and exotic looking, and when she appeared in the US she had a clearly defined moustache, fashionable in Russia but not in America. This she was eventually persuaded to remove. Mercedes met her after a large benefit at Madison Square Garden in which Nazimova had run around the arena dressed as a Cossack, carrying a Russian flag, leaping into the air every few steps. Mercedes called on her in her dressing-room and was at once transfixed by her large, purple-coloured eyes. Nazimova held out her hands: ‘We took to each other instantly. I felt completely at ease and as if we had always known each other.’³⁰

Nazimova had come to America in 1906. Henry Miller persuaded her to learn English and she starred in his Hedda Gabler. Nazimova then played in many Ibsen and Chekhov plays, and created the role of the murderous wife in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning becomes Electra. When she received applause, she did not bow, but gave ‘the Roman salute’, later given sinister implication by Mussolini and the Fascists.³¹

Toward the end of February they met, but Eva was restless later. According to the letters she wrote to Mercedes (she destroyed those she received from her) the things she meant to say were left unsaid, the things she managed to say were badly expressed. She worried further that she had tired Mercedes or caused her trouble at home.

Their meetings took place at Eva’s apartment, which she feared was second-rate. In tune with her image of Mercedes, she felt it should be banked with white camellias, and a few gardenias to represent herself. Their moments together had to be squeezed between meetings with agents and dinners from which she would escape as soon as possible. Having given herself totally to Mercedes, she was terrified of losing her. She wrote that the thought of Abram or anyone else lying in her arms was unbearable.

Mercedes had written a play, Jehanne d’Arc, and hoped that Eva would perform in it. Eva was determined to do so, though afraid she would not do it justice. In May Mercedes fell ill, and Abram wired Eva with the news. Now the essential conflict came to the fore: Eva’s jealousy of Abram, who had a legal and moral right to care for her and hold her in his arms. The touchy situation was exacerbated by the arrival of an ex-girlfriend of Mercedes called Billie McKeever. She was an unconventional New Yorker, from a very conventional background. Mercedes described her as being ‘like quicksilver . . . wild, untamed’ with ‘a delicious fey quality’. She called her ‘Gypsy child’.³²

Mercedes recovered from her illness and sailed for Europe on the Olympic on Sunday 4 June, accompanied by a series of notes from Eva to be opened each successive day on board. These professed that she loved her insanely, while hoping that Mercedes had not made any romantic conquests on the moonlit deck.

On July 22, Mercedes left for Munich, pursued by adoring messages from Eva, who stayed behind in Paris. Eva’s mother came to stay with her, and was read aloud to from Jehanne d’Arc. When Eva was alone she entertained herself by visiting the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre, where she enjoyed dancing with a cocotte and talking to her.

Finally, a note from Mercedes arrived via the sculptress Malvina Hoffman. Mercedes summoned her, and Eva set off at once on the Orient Express to join her. Together they travelled to Genoa, Venice, Munich and Vienna. Molnar, the author of Liliom, met them in Budapest, where Eva was warmly greeted by banners saying: ‘Welcome Julie’ and given flowers by strangers. From then on they were fêted by Hungarians, who appeared to celebrate until well into the small hours of the morning.

But soon Eva had to leave Mercedes with Abram. While she made her way back to London via Paris, Mercedes and Abram went to Constantinople, where Mercedes’s passport records her presence from 8 to 18 August 1922. They stayed at the Pera, the celebrated hotel whose guests have included Atatürk and Agatha Christie. In her memoirs, Mercedes left a vivid account of a ‘poignant memory’.³⁴

One day in the lobby of the Pera Palace Hotel I saw one of the most hauntingly beautiful women I had ever beheld. Her features and her movements were so distinguished and aristocratic-looking that I decided she must be a refugee Russian princess. The porter said he did not know her name but he thought she was a Swedish actress who had come to Constantinople with the great Swedish film director, Maurice Stiller.

Several times after this I saw her in the street. I was terribly troubled by her eyes and I longed to speak to her, but I did not have the courage. Also I did not even know what language to use. She gave me the impression of great loneliness which only added to my own already melancholy state of mind. I hated to leave Constantinople without speaking to her, but sometimes destiny is kinder than we think, or maybe it is just that we cannot escape our destiny. Strangely enough, as the train pulled out of the station which carried me away from Constantinople I had a strong premonition that I might again see that beautiful and haunting face on some other shore.35

Mercedes insisted on this version of her first encounter with Garbo, but, sadly, it cannot have been Garbo that Mercedes saw, or thought she saw. Neither she nor Stiller arrived in Constantinople until December 1924, during which time Mercedes was certainly in New York.

Interestingly, the first draft of Mercedes’s memoirs tells the story rather differently, giving ample evidence of its subsequent embroidery:

In this strange and amazing city I moved about, stirred by a thousand emotions but quite unconscious that at that moment, moving too perhaps in this stream of human life and living even in the same hotel at which I was then staying, was a person who would one day mean more to me than anyone in the whole world.

And yet, looking back on those days and nights now, I seem to feel that I lived holding my breath, and as though straining to hear a voice or catch a glimpse of a face – both of which I had been waiting for all my life.

When I left Constantinople I wept bitterly. I could not say why but it was as though I were being torn away from my own heart. Did my sub-conscious already then know that in leaving this city I was turning my back on my true Beloved, Fate intended still to hold away from me, but whom I was destined to meet on a far distant shore many thousand miles away from this Eastern land!³⁶

While Mercedes was busy fantasising in Constantinople, Eva was at her mother’s home in England worrying about how to sort out this complicated relationship. Mercedes came to London, but almost immediately Eva returned to New York, aboard the Mauretania. Mercedes did not follow until October, while Eva returned restlessly to her Liliom tour. She was destined to be out of New York until December.

The long separation brought the usual agonies, reprimands and jealousies. Eva was wholly faithful to Mercedes, and was frequently wounded by her jibes that she might have found someone else. She was lonely and alone, which Mercedes was not. There was the occasional hope of an encounter between the distant lovers, but more often the fears and sickness of jealousy. Eva wrote that Billie McKeever, Mercedes’s former love, was causing her some pain, and any news of Alla Nazimova made her feel sick.

The photographer Arnold Genthe wrote that he thought the critics unfair: ‘To me Miss Le Gallienne’s portrayal of Simonetta seemed very convincing, poetical and intensely moving.’³⁸ Years later Mercedes wrote that the play had been panned, and rightly. At the time, Eva concluded that it was an example of what she should not do.

In the summer, Eva was in London with her mother, while Mercedes was at Trouville, until the two lovers escaped together to Brittany on a walking tour, dressed as gypsies. They settled in a fisherman’s home at Paimpol, were fed fresh fish by the fisherman’s widow, and became revitalised. In Paris they made a pilgrimage to the Hotel Regina, where their idol, Duse, lived. They both began to cry when they spotted her wrapped in a blanket on her balcony. At the end of the trip, Eva wrote that she loved Mercedes more than ever. In the autumn Eva was on tour once more with her much-acclaimed performance in Molnar’s The Swan. Eleonora Duse was on her final, ill-fated tour of the United States at the same time, and Mercedes and Eva met her at last.

The love affair had another year to run, with all the normal crises of confidence in each other and in their work. There was a distinct deterioration of the relationship during the summer of 1924. Mercedes began to get suspicious and accused Eva of a variety of infidelities. She called her ‘a cold-hearted creature ruled by her head’.³⁹ Eva wrote from Chicago that she needed some freedom, and Mercedes responded with further accusations. But this drama also passed. Eva began to rehearse Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, and Mercedes made friends with Pavlova and Karsavina and went around with them in New York. And so it continued, Eva touring and Mercedes pursuing her various affairs, amusements and enterprises.

The play was finally performed in June at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin in June. Old Marshal Joffre attended the première. Jehanne d’Arc attracted much attention as the first American play to be performed in Paris in French. Eva’s portrayal of Joan was praised for her ‘fine perception and extraordinary talent’,⁴¹ and the sets were deemed ‘ingenious and of rare beauty’.⁴² Eva was frequently called back to the curtain for applause. Despite all this, the play never came to the United States.

The three-and-a-half-year affair between Mercedes and Eva ended soon after this. It did so partly because Mercedes befriended a young playwright, Noël Coward, who was about to make his name in America. His team were travelling to the States to stage The Vortex, a provocative play about drugs. They went by the Majestic, and both Mercedes and Eva were on board. Coward noted the failure of their expedition: ‘I think they were sad about it, at any rate they alternated between intellectual gloom and feverish gaiety and wore black, indiscriminately.’⁴³

In Coward’s group was his designer, Gladys Calthrop. She and Eva formed a liaison, which caused something of a stir. ‘Dickie’ Fellowes-Gordon went to see Coward and asked where Gladys was. ‘It’s all very embarrassing,’ came the reply. ‘She’s gone off with Eva Le Gallienne.’⁴⁴ Mercedes is less than informative in her memoirs. She writes: ‘About this time Eva and I for a variety of reasons were growing apart.’⁴⁵

Gladys Calthrop was a serious diversion, but there were other reasons for splitting. Eva was ambitious, and Mercedes had now involved her in two flops on the stage. The more lasting break came when Eva met Alice DeLamar,fn7 the heiress to a considerable mining fortune. Cryptically, almost bitterly, Mercedes noted in her memoirs that ‘a circumstance’ during the run of Jehanne d’Arc ‘opened the way for Eva to have her Civic Repertory Theatre^fn8 and made this project financially possible for her’.⁴⁶ This was the injection of funds from Alice, and also from the financier Otto Kahn. The DeLamar connection was strengthened later when Alice bought property in Weston, Connecticut, and Eva took a house there.^fn9

There was little communication between Eva and Mercedes after March 1926. They were due to meet in New York later that month, but Eva stayed on in Philadelphia, explaining that she preferred not to make Mercedes suffer. Thereafter Eva’s correspondence dwindled, and by October 1927, she did not even send her love when she wrote. Eva wiped Mercedes out of her life. While she normally kept letters and remained friends with old lovers, she destroyed those of Mercedes and eschewed her company. They did not meet again until the 1950s. In 1965 Eva published a tribute to Eleonora Duse^fn10 in which she charted the course of her friendship with the diva without so much as a mention of Mercedes.

Stiller and Garbo had been in Constantinople a few months earlier, hoping to make a film in Turkey, and Mercedes’s romantic version of events conflated that trip with her own, earlier one, with her husband. In any event, the Fates were drawing Mercedes toward the great obsessive love of her life.

Garbo had been taken under the wing of Mauritz Stiller in 1923, when she was an eighteen-year-old drama student, awkward and unsure of herself. Stiller’s role in Garbo’s career was that of Svengali to her Trilby. A giant Russian Jew in a yellow fur coat, he had ground his way to the top, making over forty films in Sweden. Long determined to find the raw material from which to create a world star, he set about moulding Garbo’s appearance, her acting, and her character. He even chose the name Greta Garbo. For £160 she took a leading part in Gösta Berling’s Saga (based on the remarkable novel by Selma Lagerlöf, later a Nobel Prize winner). It was released in 1924. But the film that got the most notice was Die Freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street), directed by G. W. Pabst.

Garbo and Stiller had stopped off in Germany on their way back to Stockholm from Constantinople for the filming with Pabst, and it was in his picture, a sombre study of postwar society, that Garbo’s sensuality first came over on celluloid. In the meantime, Louis B. Mayer had seen Gösta Berling’s Saga and invited Stiller and Garbo to Hollywood. Thus in 1925 the pair set sail, expecting stardom and fame to be instant. Disappointment followed. Garbo’s rehearsed lines for the American press were greeted by one solitary reporter. They were abandoned in New York by MGM until the photo session with Genthe landed Garbo in the pages of Vanity Fair and Mayer’s attention was drawn to his neglected acquisition. She was summoned to Hollywood and afforded star treatment. Stiller didn’t fare as well. He was one of the European imports, like Salka Viertel’s husband, who didn’t make it in Hollywood. Stiller completed two films there, both for Pola Negri at Paramount. The other films he worked on were partially directed by others. He soon returned to Sweden, where he died in 1928.

Garbo’s first American film was The Torrent (1926), a part she secured when another actress fell ill. Her reviews were far from the usual accorded to fledgling stars: ‘Miss Garbo is not beautiful, but she is a brilliant actress.’48 Her next film, The Temptress (1926) turned her into a valuable property. There then began the celebrated and romantic partnership between Garbo and John Gilbert, which extended from Flesh and the Devil (1927) until silent films became talkies. Gilbert’s squeaky, high-pitched voice belied his matinée idol good looks. He came to grief. Of the Gilbert-Garbo films all but The Divine Woman (1928) survive. They reveal Garbo expressing a seemingly effortless languor and making her co-actors appear wooden at her side. Their somewhat thin plots were not helped by the censor, who insisted that ‘syphilis’ should become ‘embezzlement’ in A Woman of Affairs (1929), the adaptation of Michael Arlen’s celebrated novel The Green Hat. Frequently, suggested screenplays left the temperamental star cold, causing her to dismiss one project with her famous line: ‘I t’ink I go home.’

Even in those days Garbo eschewed the more tinselly aspects of film life. She seldom attended parties, while adhering to a strict dietary regime, invariably eating chopped beef with fried potatoes and an egg, followed by a piece of cake, and drinking fresh fruit juice. Her love of solitude encouraged her growing reputation as a mysterious lady. Tallulah Bankhead said her mystery was ‘as thick as a London fog’.⁴⁹ At times throughout her life the fog lifted and she became unaccountably gay, the life and soul of the party before retreating once more.

In Anna Christie (1930), Garbo’s rich, deep Scandinavian voice hypnotised audiences. While in real life she was big-boned with a heavy nose and a boyish stride, the camera converted her into a creature of elegance and beauty. She was not set in a previously tried mould. She was unique. The poet Iris Tree spoke of Garbo’s eyelids. She said that when Garbo closed her eyes, her eyelashes were so long that they got tangled up and there was a great fluttering like the noise of butterflies opening their wings before she could open them again.⁵⁰ The voice completed the image. Some years later Kenneth Tynan wrote that ‘what, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober’.⁵¹ Tynan wrote too of her unchanging effect on screen: ‘She could still (and often did) fling her head flexibly back at right-angles to her spine, and she kissed as thirstily as ever, cupping her man’s head in both hands and seeming very nearly to drink from it.’⁵²

Came that superb moment common to all the Garbo films, when her reserve broke down, when all the arguments against love that her script-writers could dream up were flung aside, and with a sound that was half sob, half ecstasy, she ran to the arms of her lover. At such moments, every man in the audience felt that he alone was holding this exquisite woman, who, suddenly defenceless, revealed a depth of sexuality that would require a lifetime of delightful appeasement.53

Garbo was filming Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise in 1931 when she met Mercedes de Acosta at Salka Viertel’s house. Mercedes had just arrived in Hollywood, or ‘Follywood’, as many people called it, to work on a screenplay for Pola Negri. She soon found that the town’s main problem was ‘stupidity, vulgarity, and bad taste’⁵⁴ rather than the depravity that was its common reputation. Nevertheless, she was to stay there for many years. Although obliged to go to the studios from time to time, Mercedes eschewed ‘film people’ and naturally gravitated to the more sophisticated, European milieu of the Viertels’ circle. She was invited to their house on Maybery Road in Santa Monica for ‘tea’ one afternoon, and as they sat and talked the doorbell rang. Outside in the hall there was a low voice speaking German, which Mercedes recognised at once from Anna Christie. Garbo came into the room. ‘As we shook hands and she smiled at me I felt I had known her all my life; in fact, in many previous incarnations.’⁵⁵

As I had expected she was remarkably beautiful, far more so than she seemed in her films then. She was dressed in a white jumper and dark blue sailor pants. Her feet were bare and like her hands, slender and sensitive. Her beautifully straight hair hung to her shoulders and she wore a white tennis visor pulled well down over her face in an effort to hide her extraordinary eyes which held in them a look of eternity. When she spoke I was not only charmed by the tone and quality of her voice but also by her accent. At this time she spoke English quite incorrectly with a strong Swedish accent and her mispronunciations were enchanting. That afternoon I heard her say to Salka, ‘I trotteled down to see you’. Oddly enough, the words that she said were often more expressive than the correct ones.⁵⁶

Little conversation passed between Garbo and Mercedes, but at one point they were left briefly alone. ‘There was a silence, a silence which she could manage with great ease. Greta can always manage a silence.’⁵⁷ In due course Garbo noticed a heavy bracelet Mercedes was wearing. Mercedes handed it to her, with the line: ‘I bought it for you in Berlin.’ Presently, as ever, Garbo went home in order to spend the evening having dinner alone in bed. But the first meeting had been a success.

Their friendship was forged on revelations about early life and discussion of dreams, with long talks about matters both profound and trivial, often lasting through the night. Mercedes never minded: ‘Although I had not been to bed all night I felt refreshed.’⁵⁹

Not long after this Mercedes and Garbo took the holiday that Mercedes described as such a perfect idyll. It began in a typically disorganised Garbo fashion. She summoned Mercedes to inform her that she needed total solitude and would be retreating to an island in the Sierra Nevada. She entered her car and swept away. Mercedes retreated home disconsolate. A few days later Garbo telephoned. She had reached the island, felt that the beauty of it should be shared, and had decided to come back to collect her. Thus Garbo endured a three-hundred-mile drive back through the Mojave desert in gruelling heat. On this return trip she stopped every few hours to telephone: ‘I am getting nearer, I am getting nearer.’⁶⁰ The last call came from Pasadena. Garbo arrived and Mercedes put her to bed on the sleeping porch, though neither slept much. Next day Mercedes rang the studio to say she was departing. There was nothing for her to do there, so they were delighted. It took a further three days to reach the island once more, and the idyll then began.

James, the chauffeur, was dismissed and told not to return until the last moment of the holiday was over. Garbo then rowed Mercedes across Silver Lake to the small island and its tiny log cabin. She explained that the boat was their only way of reaching the island. ‘We must be baptised at once,’ said Garbo, throwing off her clothes and diving into the water. Mercedes followed. Garbo cooked simple dinners of poached mountain trout. And they talked. The photographs that Mercedes took show Garbo, bronzed and healthy, wearing a beret and shorts, gym shoes and white socks. In some of them she is topless, and in others she has a shirt thrown over her head, just covering her breasts. Mercedes was discovering a different side to Garbo.

It is generally accepted that Garbo is morose and serious. This is one of the things said of her in the legend that has been built up around her. All legends are built on rumours and hearsay. Of course she is serious if there is something to be serious about and she does not run around with a broad grin on her face like most American executives, but that does not mean that she is morose and lacks humour. As a matter of fact she has real humour and a remarkable sense of it. During those six weeks in Silver Lake, as well as many times since, she has shown her sense of fun to me.61

Mercedes wrote more about this holiday in the early drafts of her book. Garbo had her ‘literally rolling on the floor with her sense of comedy’. She told the story of her uncle in Sweden and how she continually asked him: ‘Does uncle care a lot about Jesus?’ Though he affirmed this several times, at length he became irritated, jumped up, throwing down his newspaper, and declared: ‘No! Uncle doesn’t give a damn about Jesus.’⁶² This became a catchphrase for Mercedes and Garbo whenever something bored them.

To friends, though, Mercedes expressed her occasional irritation. Garbo was always on a diet, and Mercedes said that Garbo would bore her with lengthy descriptions of the food she was not going to eat. During the months in Hollywood after that holiday, Garbo and Mercedes were much in each other’s company. And Mercedes began to notice other traits that bothered her. Mercedes was a devoted animal lover and vegetarian, and Garbo did not measure up to way she felt animals should be treated:

She had an appalling habit then of burning insects she found in the house or in the grass. She would burn ticks, spiders, daddy-long-legs and water bugs. The first time I saw her do this we were sitting on her lawn and she found a tick on her leg. It was trying to dig in and bury its head as they do. I saw her pick it off her leg, strike a match and burn it. My stomach turned over. ‘How can you take life so easily?’ I asked. ‘These insects have just as much right to live as you have. Why don’t you just carry them off to some other part of the grass? You don’t have to kill them, much less torture them by burning. They probably have a large family waiting for them somewhere. Have you ever thought of that?’ She bowed her head and said she never thought much about the insect world at all – but that now she would consider it and change her ways. Not long after this she telephoned me quite late one night to say that she had found a spider on her bed and had carefully picked it up and put it out the window. ‘Bravo’, I said, ‘now you are learning not to be a murderer’.63

Mercedes observed Garbo closely when she was working, and she saw that, like Duse, she was more of a medium than an actress. Though Garbo barely read the script of a film, she was able to draw the essence from it. Though she had never been to court in Sweden, or to a ball, she knew exactly how to act such a scene. She never went to see her rushes or to any previews.

Garbo was making Mata Hari at this time, and the film was released at the end of 1931. Mercedes thought the story poor. Mata Hari had been the mistress of Phil Lydig, Mercedes’s brother-in-law, so she knew a lot about her. She could not have looked less like Garbo, and Ramon Novarro, playing opposite, was so small that his shoes had to be built up, which was all too apparent. Mercedes only liked Garbo in the execution scene: ‘In the long black cape with her hair brushed straight back and her face unrelieved, she never looked more beautiful or more stirringly dramatic.’⁶⁴

When, soon after completing work on Grand Hotel in 1932, Garbo lost all her savings, she had to make stringent economies. It was then that she moved into Mercedes’s house. She made As You Desire Me (also 1932), possibly her finest film, and then left for New York and Sweden, the first of several well-publicised trips home. It was after she left that Mercedes became the friend of Marlene Dietrich, who bombarded her house with dozens of roses and carnations.

Mercedes may have enjoyed a perfect idyll with Garbo on the island in the Sierra Nevada but throughout her life, however well she came to know Garbo, she never succeeded in being sure of where she stood with her, although she acquired a good understanding of Garbo’s character and of her various dilemmas.

To know Greta – one must know the North. She may live the rest of her life in a Southern climate, but she will always be Nordic with all its sober and introvert characteristics. To know her one must know – really know – wind, rain, and dark brooding skies. She is of the elements – actually and symbolically. Forever, in this present incarnation, she will be a Viking’s child – troubled by a dream of snow.⁶⁵

He dressed in a new white kid coat, snakeskin shorts, white socks and shoes. Then he looked out of the window and there to his surprise was Garbo, sitting cross-legged on a garden seat with the Gouldings, smoking a cigarette. She too was wearing white.

Cecil went down to try to telephone once more. Then he ambled into the drawing-room, where he found Garbo and his hosts. He gasped ‘Oh, sorry,’ and turned on his heels, but Marjorie called him back. He recalled later: ‘This time I walked across the drawing-room on air.’⁶⁷

Cecil described their meeting fully in his published diary, The Wandering Years. He concocted the details from some rough pencil notes that he made at the time, and which survive among his papers. Of all their meetings, this is the most curious to unravel. He related how Garbo had turned the full barrage of her magnetic charm on him; how she complimented him on his youth and beauty, and his white Indian shoes; how the Gouldings ‘hardly existed in the presence of their guests’; how he and Garbo ‘crab-walked with arms around each other’s waists, and much friendly hand-squeezing’. It was on this occasion that Garbo picked a yellow rose from a vase, held it high, and declared: ‘A rose that lives and dies and never again returns.’ There followed a scene worthy of Proust, Swann pressing Odette’s rose to his lips and then locking it in a secret drawer of his desk. (Cecil took the rose, pressed it in his diary, took it home and framed it, and hung it over his bed. At the house sale after his death a photographer from New Zealand bought the rose for what then seemed the exorbitant sum of £750.)

Cecil concluded: ‘The Gouldings were rather too baffled by the evening to talk about it. I could hardly believe what had happened. The only concrete proof was the yellow rose that she had kissed.’⁷¹

Whatever Cecil thought about this meeting, it is worth remembering Anita Loos’s letter, and her stories about rows between Garbo and Mercedes; how, very soon after this, Garbo left for New York without saying goodbye to Mercedes, and went to Sweden. But by the winter of 1933 Garbo and Mercedes were reunited, and Mercedes was writing to Cecil, whom she had met in New York in the late 1920s and become friends with: ‘Greta told me yesterday that she had met you when you were out here last. You didn’t tell me about it.’⁷²

^fn1Cecil had travelled with Peter Watson, a rich young Englishman with whom he was unhappily obsessed, to Le Touquet, Paris, Nimes, Arles, Aix-en-Provence, Marseilles, Cassis, Toulon and Cannes. They had continued via Monte Carlo to Parma and Venice. The trip had been far from idyllic. Cecil was forever jealous of Peter and unable to concentrate or work.

^fn2Edmund Goulding (1891–1959), London-born director of such films as Love (1927, with Garbo), The Broadway Melody (1929), several Bette Davis vehicles, including That Certain Woman (1937) and Dark Victory (1939), had just directed Blondie of the Follies, starring Marion Davies, the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. Loos supplied dialogue for the film. Hearst was the producer.

^fn3Salka Viertel (1889–1978) was trained as an actress and played the Marie Dressler role opposite Garbo in the German-language version of Anna Christie. She and her husband, the Austrian writer and director Berthold Viertel (1885–1953), had come to Hollywood in 1929. She began her screen-writing career with Garbo’s Queen Christina. Her house in Santa Monica was something of a salon for Europeans living in Hollywood.

^fn4Dorothy Fellowes-Gordon (1891–1991), scion of a Scottish family, shared Elsa Maxwell’s life and sometimes wrote her column for her.

^fn5Charles Frohman (1860–1915), American theatrical manager, who sponsored the first London production of Peter Pan. The first manager to realise the possibilities of interchange between London and New York shows. Drowned in the Lusitania.

^fn6The information in this section is largely derived from Eva’s letters to Mercedes. The estate refused permission to quote these, but the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia permitted me to examine them thoroughly.

^fn7Alice DeLamar (d. 1982) lived in an apartment on the Ile St Louis and had a home in Palm Beach. Her father, Joseph Raphael DeLamar (1843–1918) was known as ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’. He made a fortune when gold was discovered in Colorado. Later he was director of numerous companies in New York and vice-president of the International Nickel Company. Taciturn and aloof in business, he was a lavish host. He left Alice half his fortune of $20 million.

^fn8Civic Repertory Theatre. Founded by Eva Le Gallienne 1926 for actors to play many roles each season, and to produce non-commercial meritorious plays. Its low admission prices and the Depression contributed to its ultimate downfall in 1933.

^fn9George Balanchine and others also lived on this property. Eva remained there happily all the rest of her life, surrounded by raccoons, skunks and possums, which she fed at night. She was still appearing on stage as late as 1983. She was given the National Artist Award by President Gerald Ford in 1977 and the National Medal of Arts (the highest award for an artist) by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. She had been active all her life in attempting to form a national theatre in America. Eva died in Weston on 3 June 1991, at the age of 92.