Loving Garbo

Mercedes’s affair with Poppy Kirk began in the autumn of 1948 and lasted until 1953. Poppy was born Maria Annunziata Sartori in March 1899, the daughter – or possibly adopted daughter – of Victor Sartori, the American Vice-Consul in Livorno, a man of Italian descent originally from Philadelphia. Poppy was pushed into her first marriage in Paris, very young, by her family. Her husband was a ne’er-do-well lawyer from Turin named Mario Montrezza, fifteen years her senior. They had a son, Victor, born in 1923.

Poppy worked as a model in Paris. She was a friend of Jean Cocteau, who was always supportive despite being snobbish about her job. And later she worked for Schiaparelli and the Ballets Russes. She loved Chinese artefacts, screens, lacquer boxes, furniture and plates, read Chinese poetry and philosophy, and took a keen interest in oriental religions, most particularly in Buddhism.

Her first marriage having failed, Poppy retreated for a while to her little villa at Santa Margherita. In 1935 she married a rather dry, intelligent English writer and journalist, Geoffrey Kirk, at twenty-eight some eight years her junior. He had served in the Secret Service, and while he could have continued a bohemian existence, enjoying the company of literary figures, he joined the Foreign Office in 1939, and rose to be a minor ambassador. Poppy spent part of the war in London, where she cooked energetically in the canteen set up in the National Gallery, she and her staff serving a record 2,400 meals in one day. Sybille Bedford remembered that Poppy was ‘awfully good about charitable works and having cocktail parties. She was not at all intellectual. She was a terrific flirt and always succeeded in implanting herself in people’s hearts and minds.’2

Poppy was known as ‘Madame Poppi’ when she worked at the well-known couturier’s, Molyneux. She had several romantic relationships with women early in life, and when her first marriage failed she was rescued by the half Indian Paulina Terry, one of the daughters of Maharajah Duleep Singh.^fn1 Then there was a lady called Gilberte, who had wanted to share a dwelling with her in Italy. During this later phase Poppy lived with Princess Dilkusha de Rohan,^fn2 the daughter of a British Army officer, Major A. T. Wrench, stationed in India (hence her strange name) and an American mother. In 1922 Dilkusha married Prince Carlos de Rohan, a scion of that French princely family. The wedding photos show an uncomfortable bride with heavy dark eyes, draped in silver lamé and Brussels lace, clinging, almost furtively, to her spry, young husband, a dapper figure with slicked hair and carnation. They lived in Austria, where, in 1931, he was killed when his car hit a tree. Dilkusha moved to Paris, worked in haute couture and became part of the circle of Alice B. Toklas, who thought her ‘bawdy’ and drank her first and last Bloody Mary at a birthday party ‘Dil’ gave her.

Poppy claimed that Dilkusha resented her work and never wholly understood her. Their weekends were often tedious, relieved only by a concert. ‘I never let Dilkusha into my own self,’ wrote Poppy. ‘She never wanted to – nor did she miss what I could not give her . . . I never really belonged to her.’³ It was Dilkusha who brought Mercedes into Poppy’s life, taking her to dinner at Poppy’s house. Mercedes knew about the Dilkusha affair. Of the meeting she wrote:

When we arrived Poppy was in the kitchen and called out to us to take off our coats. As I am always very sensitive to voices, I like to hear a voice before I meet the person it belongs to. Poppy has a charming one, and her English is English, although she was born and brought up in Italy. The room we were in was lighted only by candles and when she appeared I thought for a second I wasn’t seeing clearly, or that I was dreaming again. She was wearing the same Chinese gown the woman in my Tibetan dream had worn and in fact she was the same woman.fn3 There were the same slit, half-closed eyes, and the same faint smile. I was actually so stunned by this encounter that it was difficult for me even to shake hands with her. She was so busy preparing dinner that she was unaware of my emotion, but when we sat down at the table and I remarked on her gown, she said: ‘I always wear Chinese gowns. I love everything oriental.’ She did not have to say this to make me believe it.⁴

Poppy was on her way to New York, where Mercedes soon followed. She wasted no time in effecting a seduction, and Poppy relished waking up, folded in Mercedes’s arms, gazing at white flowers and the sunlight breaking in through the window. A friend of Poppy’s used to tell her that ‘no saucer of cream could even get [her] off [her] tip of tree’, but as Poppy told Mercedes: ‘I did sit by your fireside and I loved it – the first time in my life.’⁵

Early in 1949 Poppy left Mercedes to join her husband, Geoffrey, who had recently taken up his post as First Secretary at the British Legation in Panama. This was to fulfil a promise made a year earlier that they would try to start new lives together. They met in Mexico, where there was a conference. The reality of her trip soon came to seem most unpleasant to Poppy: ‘You had covered me so closely – with such very soft wings – that I was not prepared for this.’⁶ In a hot, smart night-club in Mexico City, she asked Geoffrey to release her from her promise. He had no choice but to agree, though he was bitter and thereafter treated her with ‘icy politeness’.⁷

In the meantime, Mercedes had rented her New York apartment to Carol Channing, the star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and moved to Paris. Here she found Poppy’s former lover, Dilkusha de Rohan, behaving badly. Jealous of Mercedes, she began to show Poppy’s letters around and to talk indiscreetly. There was, of course, some justification in thinking that neither Mercedes nor Poppy had been a good friend to Dilkusha. In any case, knowing that Poppy would come soon, Mercedes took an apartment at 5 Quai Voltaire. She sent Poppy an unsigned cable to this effect, which Geoffrey opened in error. He brought it to Poppy but said nothing. Then, just before dinner, he suddenly turned to her and gently asked her if she intended to marry the cable’s sender. Poppy answered vaguely.

My darling – you have hurt a little lately. Do you think I am afraid – if we love each other entirely – and completely – do I have to be afraid of gossip and criticism. If you are not sure or anxious – about us – or if you think I am doing wrong then I understand that I should be afraid. You must be the one to decide and if we should make a mistake I don’t think it could be one that would do us serious harm. More than that I do not believe we can do each other any harm at all.

My lovely one – I need you to complete me – your arms to hold me – your lips to kiss me – your heart beating against mine and our stillness – after – do you remember?8

Geoffrey gave Poppy the air fare to Paris, and she flew there on Saturday 16 April. She and Mercedes moved into the new apartment, and Poppy went back to work at Schiaparelli’s.

Sybille Bedford was one of Poppy’s many friends to be surprised by her involvement with Mercedes. She observed that Mercedes was a person of extremes, that people either loved her or loathed her. She had met her with the Huxleys and found her ‘unbelievably tiresome’. She added: ‘Yet she was someone you would not fail to notice in a room of two hundred people. Her appearance, though soignée and feminine, was very startling.’⁹ Tallulah Bankhead nicknamed Mercedes ‘Countess Dracula’.¹⁰ Janet Flanner, the famous ‘Genet’ of The New Yorker, loathed her. ‘You can’t trust Mercedes an inch,’ Poppy’s friend Allanah Harper^fn4 would say. ‘How can you be with this demon?’¹¹ Yet Mercedes appeared ‘tamed’ in Poppy’s company, and there were periods of happiness for both of them.

Poppy tried to be philosophical about Mercedes’s wish to spend time with old friends in New York. She also had to be philosophical about the continued hold of Garbo. Poppy was no admirer of Garbo, falling into that far from small band of people who felt that Garbo was tiresome. While Mercedes was away, she dined with Geoffrey in a Paris restaurant. He begged her to come back and gave her a gold cigarette lighter. January gave way to February and Mercedes showed no sign of returning. Poppy suggested a new scheme: ‘It seems to me if you pass from September to June in America, then perhaps come over in the summer months, you will then have everything you want, me here, Greta in N.Y., the climate you like, your flat and friends . . .’¹² But Poppy felt Mercedes was being selfish, and wondered how she would feel if she took off to her London home in Lloyd Square whenever it suited her.

In March a gloomy Geoffrey continued to press Poppy to return to him. Poppy could not explain her position, which was to say the least precarious. She berated Mercedes:

And how can I take too definite a stand when I myself am so unsure of you when in the height of our love, you have let me down every time. Why have you left me so often – and stayed with me so ungraciously?

I fear you have run out your love power. Tenderness for me you have – but it is not enough.¹³

When he returned to New York in the same month Poppy tried to persuade Geoffrey to meet Mercedes. He refused. Then she became involved in a prolonged drama, paying for an Easter cake that Mercedes had ordered for Garbo. Exasperated by the personalised cakes that Mercedes was inclined to dispatch, she suggested that Mercedes should send the same one to each ex-girlfriend, merely changing the ribbon round it.

Poppy remained on good terms with Geoffrey, who served as Counsellor in the British Embassy in the Hague from 1953 until 1960. It was Mercedes’s understanding that their relationship was restricted to the occasional holiday together, but in reality Poppy returned to him, though not without long breaks away.

Geoffrey Kirk became Ambassador to El Salvador in 1960, and Poppy went with him. Later they became bitter and turned against each other. Geoffrey retreated to a dwelling in Hertfordshire and died in 1975, having cut Poppy out of his will. She fell on hard times, and had to work as a ‘Universal Aunt’, and Sybille Bedford arranged that she should cook for the P.E.N. Club in London. Poppy died in a nursing home in Oxfordshire in 1986, aged 87.

^fn1 Duleep Singh (1838–1893) was the Maharajah of the Punjab. In 1849, when the Punjab was annexed to British India by the Governor-General, the Earl of Dalhousie, Duleep Singh, aged 12, abdicated, and handed over the famous Koh-i-noor diamond to Queen Victoria. The deposed Maharajah came under the Queen’s care but privately called her ‘Mrs Fagin’, adding: ‘She has no more right to that diamond than I have to Windsor Castle.’ He lived at Elveden, later the estate of the Earl of Iveagh. He married a German woman who died in September 1887. Paulina was born to his young mistress, Ada Wetherill, three months later. The Maharajah married Ada in May 1889. Paulina married a Lieutenant Terry.

^fn3A few days earlier, apparently, Mercedes had been suffering from a high temperature while staying at the Crillon, and in her delirium had dreamt of just such a woman as Poppy, who had smiled faintly as she passed her by.

^fn4Allanah Harper (1901–1992), a socialite friend of Edith Sitwell with literary interests, was the first person to encourage Cecil to make a career out of photography.

^fn5Hôtel Bisson, between Pont Neuf and Pont St Michel. The composer and diarist Ned Rorem was also staying there at that time.

^fn6Ona Munson’s career had floundered due to a row with one of the studio bosses. She put on weight, and attempted to diet by taking oestrogen. Depression followed. A few years later, in February 1955, she was found dead in her apartment, 255 West 86th Street. There was an almost empty box of sleeping pills by her bedside and a note that read: ‘This is the only way I know to be free again . . . Please don’t follow me.’

^fn7Jennifer Neill, daughter of Barbara Neill, who worked in the wartime canteen with Poppy. She married John Arnold-Wallinger in 1955. Her family liked Mercedes, who even stayed with her grandmother in the 1960s. The latter telephoned Jenny to say: ‘Well, I’m a pretty amazing Victorian old lady with a lesbian staying with me, who is entertaining a party of queers for tea.’