All We Know: Three Lives (18 page)

She also found lovers in the theater. She had a brief affair with Alla Nazimova, to whom Marbury introduced her, and fell in love with another intense young performer, Eva Le Gallienne, then rising to stardom. The web of performance, ambition, fandom, and passion among these women was complex: Le Gallienne was a former protégée and lover of Nazimova, who was then being compared with Eleonora Duse. Mercedes’s first encounter with Le Gallienne was something like the meeting of a fan club. As she described it, it consisted entirely of a conversation in which the two of them “feverishly compared notes on everything we knew or had ever heard about Duse.” (Their date was arranged by Betty Parsons.) Over the next several years, which coincided with Le Gallienne’s tours of the Northeast and Midwest in Ferenc Molnár’s
Liliom
, Mercedes and Le Gallienne sent each other yearning letters, arranged brief trysts, and continued to play out their romance through a love for Duse. They followed the actress in Paris and saw her perform when she came out of retirement in London and New York. After Duse’s sudden death in 1924, on tour in the United States, they spent a night in vigil over her coffin in a New York church. Their affair coincided with, but seems never to have been impeded by, the beginning of Mercedes’s marriage to the society painter Abram Poole in 1920. “I was in a strange turmoil,” Mercedes wrote about her decision to marry Poole, “about world affairs, my own writing, suffrage, sex, and my inner spiritual development.” Feeling pressure to please her mother, but convinced that matrimony was an archaic institution, she agreed to Poole’s proposal only on the condition that she keep her own name. They divorced amicably in 1935.

Mercedes’s sartorial predilections also tended to the theatrical and were so singular and sustained that she came to resemble an image of herself. As a child she had been overjoyed when Rita gave her a complete Russian boy’s outfit, and in the early 1920s, she and Le Gallienne affected Russian folk tunics. By the end of the decade, she had made herself another sort of uniform. “She wears peculiarly characteristic clothes,” a reporter observed, “and contends that she has succeeded in reducing the dress problem to a fine art. During the day she nearly always wears a black Directoire
redingote
—huge lapels, a tiny, tight waist, and enormously full skirt. Her hats vary between a black tricorn and a little round black astrackhan Cossack cap.” She had this coat, which was designed by Paul Poiret, copied throughout her life. Her shoes were made by Yantorny, who designed Rita’s footwear. One day in 1960, Greta Garbo was standing in a health food store in New York City when she saw a “long-toed, silver-buckled shoe” and the edge of “a black highwayman’s cape.” She knew immediately that it was Mercedes.

Although Mercedes can be said to have costumed herself, rather than dressed fashionably, going out in costume was itself a fashion in the 1920s—at masquerade parties held in private homes and in public—and Mercedes got herself up as a Cossack, a Hussar, and a Franciscan monk. At such parties, at drag balls, and at nightclubs, men and women who violated gender norms were on display to insiders and outsiders. And their performances could be political acts: Laws against wearing the clothing of the opposite sex were among the restrictions used to police homosexuality. “These were the days when the speak-easies were in full bloom,” Mercedes wrote in a draft of
Here Lies the Heart
.

The lines struck through in this draft of
Here Lies the Heart
do not appear in the published book, her memory and rumination on it edited to replace sexual and gender transgression with the ordinary misdeeds that were part of life under Prohibition.

If Mercedes had stood still on the street as a child—staring, waiting, longing—when she was a teenager and grown woman adulation often meant being in motion. She “despised distance and belittled the world by moving about it quickly on large boats and small feet,” wrote Janet Flanner of Mercedes’s willingness to rush to a lover’s side from across the Atlantic. (The line is from a 1928 concrete poem in the shape of a tulip in which Flanner also described Mercedes’s lovemaking: “She ate flesh talking of flowers and flesh.”) Mercedes’s feelings for the actresses she loved were caught up in this disdain for distance, the attempt to erase the space between herself and the women she admired. Nowhere was she so persistent—and so bound to fail—as in her association with Greta Garbo.

With Bessie Marbury’s help, after Rita’s death in 1929, Mercedes moved to Los Angeles and found work as a screenwriter. In the kind of avowal of predestination that is typical of
Here Lies the Heart
, Mercedes writes there that at a party before she left New York, Tallulah Bankhead told her to pick a card out of a deck and make a secret wish. Bankhead examined the card and told her that she would get what she hoped for on the third day after her arrival in Hollywood. She had wished that she would meet Garbo. In Hollywood, she fell in with a group of displaced New Yorkers and European expatriates, including Igor Stravinsky, Aldous and Maria Huxley, and the screenwriter Salka Viertel, and on her third day in town she met Garbo at Viertel’s home. The star of
The Temptress
,
Flesh and the Devil
, and
Anna Christie
was then at the peak of her popularity. Her reserve and desire for privacy were already legendary, and her character was dissected endlessly—in
Vanity Fair
and
The New Yorker
as well as in fan magazines. Most of her fans, called “Garbomaniacs,” were women. Over the next several years, as Mercedes worked intermittently on screenplays for Paramount, RKO, and MGM, she became a minor celebrity herself: “The most talked-about woman in Hollywood is the woman no wife fears,” proclaimed one gossip column, not naming her.

Mercedes’s rapport with Garbo has been debated since it began, sometimes exaggerated by Mercedes, often diminished by those with a stake in keeping the star as free from intimacy as she kept herself. The two women were linked in fact: It seems clear that they were lovers briefly, that Garbo then withdrew, and that their friendship, though vexed, continued on Garbo’s alternately restrictive and affectionate terms until she severed ties just before Mercedes published
Here Lies the Heart
in 1960. They were linked in feeling: Both had been starstruck as children; both had lost their fathers when they were in their teens, and then siblings. “Both idolized their elder sisters,” writes Karen Swenson, one of Garbo’s more astute biographers. “Both were afflicted with an inner restlessness that was compounded by a chronic inability to sleep.” Both felt foreign and alienated from others and “liv[ed] in a near-constant state of melancholia.” They were linked in the media: from a much-reproduced paparazzo photograph of them wearing slacks and walking down Hollywood Boulevard in 1934 (“a cameraman who had waited for three hours on the running board of a car parked on Hollywood’s main boulevard…just managed to snap the Garbo as she came out of her tailor’s with her friend, Miss de Costa [
sic
]”), to the small tumult around the unsealing of Garbo’s letters to Mercedes in April 2000.

Greta Garbo and Mercedes, Hollywood, 1934. “It’s no snap to snap Garbo” (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

But Mercedes did not focus on what they shared when she wrote about Garbo. Instead, she compared her friend to Rita. Greta and Rita, she felt, shared “a sort of despotic attitude” combined with “a certain tenderness and consideration,” humor, and “tristesse.” She also translated their celebrity into spiritual terms. Admonishing Cecil Beaton, who was writing about Rita in his book
The Glass of Fashion
(and who had his own vexed affair with Garbo), Mercedes advised him that “in depicting people who have stood for something in one walk of life or another, you should try and find the essence of their spirit—
their soul
, so to speak, and not concern yourself so much with the ‘gossip column’ aspect of their lives.” But the gossip column aspect and the soul were always intertwined for Mercedes—and both were part of the language she found to articulate desire that could not be written about otherwise. The stars she admired condensed divinity and celebrity. Maude Adams had “a self-effacement rare in anyone but a saint,” she wrote. The ballerina Tamara Karsavina projected “spiritual as well as physical beauty…across the footlights.” Garbo had “a deeply spiritual hold” on her and “on the public.” And Mercedes’s spiritual awakenings, of which there were many, were invariably star-studded. In the 1920s, John Barrymore introduced her to Kahlil Gibran, who gave her a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and counseled her. In the 1930s, she studied “astrology, cosmic-astrology, mythology and yoga” with the dancer, set designer, and wife of Rudolf Valentino, Natacha Rambova, and was inspired by Rambova’s interest in “ancient Eastern religions” and “psychic phenomena.” The journalist and biographer Vincent Sheean wrote of
Here Lies the Heart
that Mercedes was “a worshipper—of artists and saints chiefly—and the quality of worship comes through.”

Mercedes had often tried to integrate her religious and social consciousness with her love of the theater. One unproduced play, in which Duse expressed interest, was about the Virgin Mary. Another, staged in New York and London, concerned anti-Semitism. In 1925, Mercedes and Eva Le Gallienne collaborated on a spectacle about Joan of Arc, and in the 1930s, Irving Thalberg, head of production at MGM, hired Mercedes to write a screenplay about St. Joan for Garbo. Working on this script, Mercedes felt that it wasn’t just the distance between herself and Garbo that expanded and contracted, but the distance between the saint and the actress, and the space between Mercedes’s fantasy and the concrete facts around her. Although the two women would meet at the end of their workdays,

In later years, further mingling this fantasy with an idea about authenticity, Mercedes would insist that Garbo should have made a movie in which she played a series of saints, “done as a sort of pilgrimage with the actual shooting done right on the scenes in Europe. First, Jeanne d’Arc, then, St. Teresa, and maybe St. Francis.”

When Garbo withdrew from daily contact with her, in the mid-1930s, Mercedes wrote to Marlene Dietrich, “Until I was seventeen I was a real religious fanatic. Then I met Duse and…gave her the same fanaticism until I transferred it to Greta…You will see I shall get over this ‘insanity’ and then perhaps you will love me a little again. But if I do get over it, what then shall I pray to? And what will then turn this gray life into starlight?” Mercedes’s questing after spiritual support intensified at this time—but what is most striking about her religious searching is the way that her guides were excited by her affiliation with Garbo. Both the Franciscan nun at whose remote convent in Umbria she stayed and the Indian guru she consulted were eager to advise her on whether to maintain or break ties with Garbo, wanted her to help them contact Garbo themselves, and complained that they felt they were competing with Garbo for her attention. The vow of silence taken by the Hindu mystic Meher Baba did not keep him from sending Mercedes telegrams and letters in which he counseled her to calm down about Garbo and pay attention, instead, to spreading his fame and working on a movie about him: “Greta will come to you. Go to Sweden to see her, without fail. But at the present moment, my work is most important…the work of writing [the] story for Baba’s picture. Get to work, immediately, with all the zeal, enthusiasm and love that you could put in it.” He needed her to be his fan, not Garbo’s.