The Girls: Sappho goes to Hollywood
Diana McLellan
Robson Books £17.95, pp440
A year ago, on 15 April, a minor earthquake occurred in the world of Hollywood scholarship. The Rosenbach Collection in Philadelphia announced that it could now open some long-sealed letters that were certain to shed light on the life of one of cinema's most silent legends.
Mercedes de Acosta was a socialite and writer; she was marginal to the public view of Hollywood's firmament, but central to the private lives of some of its stars. She was reputed to have slept with so many people that when Truman Capote invented a game called International Daisy Chain, the aim of which was to link people sexually in as few moves as possible, he said Mercedes de Acosta was the best card you could have.
De Acosta deposited her private papers at the Rosenbach Collection in 1960 on one condition: that her letters from Garbo (some 87 missives in total) not be made public until 10 years after the last of the two women died. De Acosta died in 1968. Garbo died on 15 April 1990. One might reasonably assume that The Girls, an account of lesbian relationships in Hollywood from the 1910s to the 1950s, was the first response to these new revelations.
However, it seems that non-scholars will have to wait a little longer to find out the contents of those letters; though the Garbo-de Acosta affair is central to McLellan's book, she has looked at all of de Acosta's papers but these, and it's hard to understand why she couldn't wait for them to be made public.
It has long been known that Garbo and her counterpart, Marlene Dietrich, slept with women, that they had what Garbo called 'hidden lives' and 'exciting secrets'. It lent an added sexual charge to their on-screen appeal; both Dietrich's unangelic nightclub singer in The Blue Angel, the film that made her famous, and Garbo's cross-dressing Queen Christina had an ambiguous, androgynous air. Off-screen, rumours of their homosexuality, though damaging under the Hays Code of the 1920s, contributed to the mystery of these aloof, heavily accented, trouser-clad stars. And, more prosaically, it made them signs of their times.
In the decadent world of early twentieth-century glamour, lesbian affairs were very much in fashion. Whether it was among the writers and artists of Paris's Left Bank (Colette, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Marie Laurencin), amid the theatrical heroines of Broadway (Eleonora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Katherine Cornell) or the stars of the silver screen (Tallulah Bankhead, Louise Brooks, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck), affairs were ongoing, whichever way you looked.
McLellan cites a survey of 2,200 mostly middle-class women taken in the 1920s: more than half of them said they had experienced 'intense emotional relationships with women' and half again specified that sex was involved. It was just a trend, so common it yielded a great apocryphal joke. When a dazzled young man approached one of these actresses and said: 'I must have you for my wife!', her reported reply was: 'Oh really? When can I meet her?'
As McLellan puts it: 'Most of NY's smart young things did not expect to stay Sapphic for life.' They got married eventually, and, if they were not just tourists after all, they made sure they found themselves a 'lavender husband' who would put up with a platonic marriage. But since everyone slept with everyone (or at least Bankhead and de Acosta did), the accounts McLellan gives feel rather dull and dizzying after a while. The map is drawn clearly enough, but that's all it is - a map of the underground.
There are two main things McLellan claims are new here. One is that Garbo and Dietrich once had a passionate affair that left Garbo so bruised they both pretended all their lives they'd never met. The other is that Dietrich had been secretly married in her youth, to a communist who later set up the Anti-Nazi League in Los Angeles, leading directly to the Hollywood 10 trials.
It would be wonderful if these stories were true, but McLellan is not convincing. The Garbo-Dietrich affair is concluded from the fact that the two actresses appeared in a movie together before they arrived in Hollywood - GW Pabst's Joyless Street. This is true, and it's true that Dietrich's name is not on the credits; she only admitted later on that she was in the film. McLellan is not wrong to wonder at the secrecy of all this, but from there to assuming a full-scale affair is quite a leap.
She supports her argument with the fact that, for a few nanoseconds in the movie, Garbo is required to faint into Dietrich's arms. This, says McLellan, is an indication of deep trust. Others might recognise it as a form of behaviour called acting. (You start to worry about McLellan's sanity when she pictures Dietrich 'nurturing [Garbo] with her delicious homemade goulash'.)
McLellan's investigations into the life of Otto Katz, Dietrich's supposed first husband, are substantial, and he is a fascinating character. She has read Dietrich's FBI file (it is unsurprising that they had one on her), but no one ever doubted that these two people existed. It's the link between them that's the problem and no amount of archival evidence from each side can blur the fact that the link is weak.
Katz bragged to two, possibly three, people that he had once had a liaison with Dietrich before she was famous. He once challenged someone to go and look up the marriage records in Teplitz, Czechoslovakia, for proof that they actually wed, but these, McLellan finds, were destroyed by the Nazis. Regardless of whether Dietrich and Katz knew each other in Hollywood, it remains impossible to say whether they were ever married early in life.
As she tells us in her introduction, McLellan spent 10 years working as a gossip columnist in Washington and that is the tone she adopts here. The book is divided into short, digestible sections headed with a quote, like the paragraphs of a tabloid newspaper. In the manner of the worst biographers, a conditional tense is used to guess at events that the writer couldn't possibly know about. Salka Viertel, a mutual friend of Garbo and Dietrich and a key character in McLellan's tale, is imagined plotting to keep Garbo to herself; words are even put into her mouth: 'Don't worry, darling, Salka would have cooed.'
McLellan appears to have fallen victim to some sort of biographer's tic; whenever there is no evidence for something, she uses the word 'evidently' in her account of it. 'Salka was evidently au fait with the Garbo-Dietrich liaison'; 'Salka had evidently taken Marlene to her bosom and elsewhere'; 'Marlene evidently confided her worries [about her secret husband] to Mercedes', and so on. If you look these passages up in the notes, they are totally uncorroborated.
It seems strange that someone who has taken the trouble to look at manuscripts and dig out old FBI files should resort to a narrative that is purely speculative at every critical turn.
