All We Know: Three Lives (16 page)

The expatriate, circa mid-1950s (Private collection)

And then there were the whimsy and wild metaphor, the odd, epigrammatic utterance, itself quotable: “Joe Appiah wouldn’t hurt an
apple
!” she said of the Ghanaian politician. She told Dawn Powell that she could drive a car but had no idea “what made it go or what made it stop beyond gas. What was under the hood that made trouble,” Powell noted, “she never even guessed. ‘For all I know,’ [Esther] said dreamily, ‘it might be a little cherub.’”

From Prague in the autumn of 1956, she sent Sybille a postcard: “We leave this city of strange contrasts—the Old City is a baroque marvel, the new could be anywhere in the U.S.—tomorrow. As Lady Mary Wortley Montague said on her death bed, ‘It has all been interesting, very, very interesting.’” It may be an irony that Esther’s own most “authentic” speech was constituted in part by citation. But this voice inhabited by others has precedents and contemporaries that include Madame de Sévigné, Emerson, Melville, and Walter Benjamin, many of whose works challenge the opposition between citation and originality. “She has a natural dwelling place in books,” wrote Virginia Woolf about Madame de Sévigné, “so that Josephus or Pascal or the absurd long romances of the time were not read by her so much as embedded in her mind. Their verses, their stories rise to her lips along with her own thoughts.” In
Representative Men
, his biographical essays on Plato, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and others, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes, “Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone-quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.” The poet Susan Howe, in her meditation on Emerson and scare quotes, cites his son Edward Waldo Emerson citing Oliver Wendell Holmes’s biography of Emerson: Emerson
fils
writes that his father’s essay “Quotation and Originality,” in Holmes’s view, “‘furnishes a key to Emerson’s workshop. He believed in quotation, and borrowed from everybody and every book. Not in any stealthy or shamefaced way, but proudly, as a king borrows from one of his attendants the coin that bears his own image and superscription.’” Howe’s work with the labyrinthine processes of citation—these triply and quadruply embedded voices—is a comment on the literary practices called modernist and postmodernist that also animate earlier American writing. And this was how Esther worked: proudly, intentionally, productively, inclusively, haphazardly, distractedly, and obsessively; in the mode of
Moby Dick
and of the massive, unfinished accumulation of historical sources that was Benjamin’s
Arcades Project
; by seeing the task of understanding history and character as a re-presentation of voices from the past; mingling the living and the dead, textual and spoken material, high and low.

Hers was the authority of failure. Writing to Sybille in 1953, she enclosed a line by the poet, priest, and missionary to the Huguenots, François Fénelon—a sentence that she spoke often and that Sybille was thinking of using as an epigraph. Like so much of what Esther read and retained, it was a kind of autobiographical utterance: “Here is the quotation—my memory is accurate,” she wrote (she could not locate the book). “‘C’était tout qui était possible, mais ce n’était pas assez.’ ‘It was all that was possible but it was not enough.’…I send this at once. All Love Esther.” The line is from a letter Fénelon wrote to Madame de Maintenon in 1694.

Esther was the “poor, crouching, human being.” She knew that we all are. Like Auguste Comte, her life had “that something at once pathetic and impressive.” She was one of the people she might have included in the essay she wanted to write on those “critics and portrayers of the American scene.” It was all that was possible. It was and was not enough.

Mercedes de Acosta, 1934, photographed by George Hoyningen-Huene (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

A little girl stands on a New York sidewalk, transfixed in front of a brownstone on West Forty-seventh Street—her own street. It is 1906. She sees licks of smoke float out of the house. She cries out: “Fire!”

The woman who lives in this building is a famous actress, great in the estimation of many and so significant to this child that she is filled with something unutterable, overpowering, and strange: love, the desire to be close to the extraordinary person, the desire to be of use to her—but also the need to be recognized herself, the rich feeling that would come from being seen to understand and honor greatness. She is the first to see the smoke as it billows from the basement and she wants to save the actress from the fire.

The actress is Maude Adams, the most loved player and greatest box office draw of the American theater in the first two decades of the century. Credited with a new naturalism in performance style, she attracts thousands of spectators—many of whom go to the theater only when she performs—and her photograph hangs in homes, restaurants, and saloons across the country, as well as in President Taft’s study in the White House.

The little girl is Mercedes de Acosta, the youngest child of upper-class Spanish parents. She will grow up to be a writer, a feminist, and a devotee of various “Eastern” religions. She will grow up to be the friend or lover, and ardent admirer, of the most celebrated performers of her time: Eleonora Duse, Alla Nazimova, Isadora Duncan, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Adams herself.

Maude Adams was born in 1872, first appeared on stage at nine months old, became famous in 1892 as John Drew’s leading woman, and became a star in 1897 in J. M. Barrie’s
The Little Minister
. From then on, she was the leading American interpreter of Barrie’s plays. Several of her most well-known parts were trousers roles: when she played Napoleon’s son in
L’Aiglon, The New York Times
wrote, “One never thinks of her as a woman from the beginning of the play to its sad last scene.” As the male lead in
Chantecler
, she received twenty-two curtain calls at the opening performance. Adams was also a brilliant theater technician. She spent seven years designing a three-ton, thirty-seven-foot piece of equipment that eliminated the need for footlights, “a structure unique in the history of stage lighting”; later, in the 1920s, she spent a year experimenting in General Electric’s laboratory in Schenectady, New York.

But she was famous above all, to this electrified child and thousands of others, as Peter Pan.

The girl stands on the street, poised to save the day. She sees the first wisps of smoke emerge, then the flames leap around, and she raises the alarm.

Maude Adams’s talents and James Barrie’s sense of fantasy merged perfectly in
Peter Pan
, in which she performed more than 1,500  times in record-breaking runs in 1905–07, 1913, and 1918. Critics thought that the part “seemed almost like second nature” to her. Although she “had been technically a star for eight years,” one noted, her performance as Peter marked the moment “that she actually came into her own.” She had designed her own costume, which started a fashion for the rounded “Peter Pan” collar and peaked hat, and she encouraged the identification. After each performance, children would crowd the stage door waiting for her to emerge. But when she noticed the disappointment of one at seeing her out of costume, she stopped leaving the theater after matinees. She did not want to break the illusion, did not want them to see that she was a woman and not a magical flying boy.

The girl stands dreaming. She has sat in the dark of a Broadway theater watching the woman who lives in this house play a boy who will not grow up. She has waited with other girls and boys by the stage door after the show. She is herself a girl and a boy at once: Although her name is Mercedes, her mother calls her Rafael and dresses her in boys’ clothes. When she grows up, she will become a woman whose striking personal style is distilled into costume. Greta Garbo nicknamed her Black and White. Others called her Countess Dracula, a name Tallulah Bankhead is supposed to have coined to fit Mercedes’s pallor, her fondness for capes, her jet-black and slicked-back hair, and her reputation as a seductress.

Maude Adams as Peter Pan (From Charles Frohman: Manager and Man)

“Peter Pan” made Maude Adams “a real personal friend of the American theater-going people,” wrote one observer. And the moment in the play when Peter addressed the audience directly—asking, “Do you believe in fairies?”—is said to have “registered a whole new and intimate relation between actress and audience.” Yet Adams was also famous for her desire for solitude and her efforts to keep her private life from public view. When she sailed back to New York in November 1902 after a retreat from the stage and a stay in a French convent,
The New York Times
reported that her name was kept off the passenger list, that she did not appear on board during the entire trip, and that she took all her meals in her stateroom. In the years that followed, she found solace in long stays at a convent in New York. The Pullman company designed a windowless private “theater car” to satisfy “Miss Adams’s wish for absolutely private rehearsals while on tour”; it was “the only vehicle of its kind in existence.” Her career is an early instance of whetting fans’ appetites and feeding a star image by withholding publicity, since her need to be alone was based partly on advice she received from the powerful Charles Frohman, theater producer, actor’s manager, early star maker, and her friend. “You are not to be interviewed,” he is said to have instructed her. “You are not to be quoted. People will wonder at you, yearn for the details of your private life…Let them. It will only spur their interest and desire for you.”

The girl stands on the street. She will become an immoderate personality who is most herself when flamboyantly appreciating someone else, a connoisseur of performance and performers. Her memoir,
Here Lies the Heart
, will achieve cult status for what she tells and withholds about her love affairs with famous friends.

After Charles Frohman’s death on the
Lusitania
in 1915, Maude Adams effectively retired from the stage. She gave her three-hundred-acre Long Island estate to a convent and at the end of her life “lived quietly with a companion, Margaret McKenna” in her home in the Catskills, where she died in 1953. She never married. “As long as she lived she was the particular idol of women and of young girls aspiring to the stage,”
The New York Times
wrote on her death. “She did everything she could for them and for her own ideals of the theatre.”
The Herald Tribune
was less decorous, describing “the almost hysterical acclaim that she was somehow able to inspire” and noting that “adolescent girls and single women were particularly susceptible to her charms.” She was buried beside Louise Boynton, her secretary and friend for forty-five years.

The child stares at the actress’s home. She sees the smoke and yells to alert those inside. They all rush out, confused, then thank her and thank her again for her bravery and selflessness.

She saves the actress.

She receives the grateful thanks of the great.

She gets as close as she can, then backs away.

But there is no fire.

The truth—of the star, of herself, and of her fantasy—is in the heat and light of her mind, in the heat and the lights of the theater and crowd, and in the radiance of this actress who is forever elusive yet bigger than life—strong enough to stand up to it all, but still, perhaps, in need of rescue.

Swoons of adulation, feats of seduction, acts of conservation—these were the gestures, the texture, of Mercedes de Acosta’s life. From a young age she was both intimate with stars and ruled by starstruck fantasy. Imagine being rowed across a pristine mountain lake in the Sierra Nevada by Greta Garbo. Imagine watching Garbo strip off her clothes and dive happily into the freezing water, while you stand on the pier of the small private island to which she has just brought you. Imagine, when Garbo retreats from you and Hollywood to Sweden, having an admiring and aggressive Marlene Dietrich pounce on you, cook for you, inundate your house with flowers, and then, when you mention that you have no place for so many roses, send over a collection of Lalique vases.

Greta Garbo, Silver Lake, California, July 1931, snapshot by Mercedes de Acosta (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

Mercedes de Acosta did not have to imagine these scenes. For her they were both fact and fantasy. Dietrich called her “mon grand amour.” Isadora Duncan said that she would follow her to the ends of the earth. The young actress Eva Le Gallienne, at the height of their affair in the early 1920s, sighed in a letter that she felt she would die if Mercedes did not marry her. Some of Mercedes’s lovers were later mortified by the association and their own emotion, and refused to have any contact. Janet Flanner wrote her an erotic tribute in verse in the late 1920s, then could not tolerate her. “I fear Janet will have to be affronted by the presence of Mercedes, who I understand will be there,” wrote Esther Murphy of a gathering in Paris in 1950. Le Gallienne is later said to have called Mercedes’s memoir “Here Lies the Heart—and Lies and Lies and Lies.” But “Mercedes
never
lies,” insisted another friend, the artist Eva Hermann. (Aldous and Maria Huxley agreed; to them she was a searching and sincere friend.)

There was nothing reasonable about Mercedes de Acosta. Generous, alluring, and witty, she was also self-consumed and suicidally depressive, her “undeniable gifts,” as Esther put it, veiled in an “exasperating cloak of romantic egotism.” A passionate fan, she was visually arresting and always aware of her own audience. Repudiating orthodox religion, she was caught up in a series of religious enthusiasms.

Nor has there ever been anything reasonable about others’ responses to her. During her life, these tended toward romantic swoon or repudiation. Since her death, she has inspired either uncritical homage or lashings of vitriol—especially for her career as a seductress, particularly for her pursuit of Greta Garbo. She has been seen as a role model for sexual liberation, her erotic successes and lack of shame about her desires a cause for celebration. She has been called a fraud, a hysteric, and, despite her own charisma, “the first celebrity stalker.” In death as in life, the question of Mercedes’s lies and truthfulness still dominates the discussion of her character, with attackers and apologists treating her as a problem to be resolved or a side to be taken, in scholarly journals and star biographies, books about Hollywood’s gay subculture, a full-length biography, and its reviews.

Obsessed with artistic “greatness”—“On Great Men Recognizing Greatness” is the title of one of her essays—Mercedes de Acosta wrote herself into history partly through her association with literary, theatrical, and religious greats. She saw these contacts as a way to make sense of her life and was both carried away by and savvy about her obsessions. She continued to pine masochistically for Garbo long after it became clear that the star enjoyed encouraging and deflating Mercedes’s hopes, just as she enjoyed controlling others’ access to her. But Mercedes could also be an astute analyst of celebrity and its appreciators, not only enduring and taking pleasure in, but also writing with irony and precision about, the continual, conflicting needs for intimacy and distance that direct the traffic between stars and fans.

She herself did not use the word
fan
when she wrote about her admiration of her celebrated friends, although she did refer to her “fanaticism” on various subjects. She described herself as overwhelmed by and subservient to the performers who inspired her. She also described herself as an expert on them. Every fan imagines him- or herself an expert on the star to whom he or she feels a special closeness, but Mercedes did so in ways that complicated her own cherished ideas about greatness. She knew that stars were often themselves fans. She knew that being a fan meant existing on a shifting ground that is also an epistemological problem: We want to get close to and know everything about the performers we admire; we want to stay distant and remain in awe. She knew that her feelings of adulation meant that she sometimes put herself on display in embarrassing ways. Describing her early, overheated adoration of Maude Adams, she mocked herself: “I often stood outside Miss Adams’ house waiting to catch a glimpse of her,” she wrote in a draft of her memoir. “One day I saw smoke coming out of the basement window. I decided at once that the house was on fire and I hoped it was. This was my moment to be heroic and save Miss Adams. I rushed up the front steps and rang the bell furiously,” at which point “a rather annoyed maid opened the door” and said, “Don’t be a stupid child. The cook has merely singed the chicken.” And so, she wrote, she “went home, humiliated and far from heroic.”