The Sewing Circle
Hollywood’s Greatest Secret—Female Stars Who Loved Other Women
To Dana Henninger
Contents
Author to Reader
1. The Odd Couple: Mercedes and Thalberg
2. Tangled lives: Women Who Loved Women
3. In Love: Garbo and Mercedes
4. “In America, Men Don’t Like Fat Women”
5. Lover to the Stars
6. The Perfect Sapphic Liaison
7. Enter Joan Crawford and Katharine Cornell
8. Dietrich on the Rebound
9. Queen Christina
10. The Flaming Twenties
11. Stanwyck: The Best-Kept Secret
12. Hollywood and Broadway: Transcontinentals
13. Sodom-on-the-Pacific
14. Talking Pictures
15. Hepburn and the Lady Director
16. Odd Girls Abroad
17. Camille: The All-Gay Production
18. Screen Style
19. Judy Garland in the Land of Oz
20. Fresh Faces
21. The Sisterhood and the War
22. The Dark Age
23. Seeking to Belong
24. Fifty Years Later: Today’s Showbiz Lesbians
Notes on Sources
Bibliography
Index
Membership in the closed society
of the motion picture industry
is almost never revoked
for moral failings.
—John Gregory Dunne, Playland
Author to Reader
This is a book about appearances, about denied attachments and emotions, and the mocking of mystery and allure. It is the documented story and affectionate close-up of exalted lives and furtive appetites. When Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich had enough of men, artifice, and glamour, they sought solace, strength, and understanding in clandestine feminine friendships. On-screen, they were incarnations of turbid fantasies. Offscreen, they depended on women who loved women, like the poet-playwright Mercedes de Acosta, whose bed they shared in succession. Catholicism and Judaism—the predominant faiths of showbiz people—are explicitly antagonistic toward same-sex love. The mores of the golden era enforced a two-way secrecy. Not only did lesbians live hidden lives, but the public at large averted its eyes. Nobody wanted to know.
Garbo, Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, and Barbara Stanwyck cultivated the movies’ rich territory of sexual ambiguity as insolent, direct, kiss-me-deadly females. On occasion they convinced their studios to let them play men—Marlene’s dream was to play a man pretending to be a woman—and enjoyed the thrill of exposing themselves while hiding inside a character.
The gender codes of the day taught Tallulah Bankhead, Alla Nazimova, and Garbo to think of themselves as having “dual natures,” one male and one female. They were torn by these seemingly opposite sides and subcribed to the then-current theory that lesbians were men trapped in women’s bodies. Garbo believed the part of her which both wanted to succeed and to love women was her male side. The sewing circle was both euphemism, readily denied, and furtive sisterhood of women in love with women. Friendship, the mysterious dynamic that unites people, was, with loyalty and trust, a greater attraction than physical passion.
Sexuality is often just another role, as arbitrary as any part a screen star is asked to play. Fear of discovery—and vanity—meant knowing how to espouse bisexuality long enough to see oneself through an offscreen bed scene. The question of whether Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy—“Gillette blades” for cutting both ways—loved women and tolerated men is less a matter of evidence than of attitude and affinity. Lesbians lie to men, said Judith Anderson, because they don’t want to be rejected, even if there is no sexual attraction. A majority of Hollywood’s lesbians enjoyed men as long as they didn’t come too close.
Marriage was common. The most famous modern homosexual, Oscar Wilde, was married with children, and Hollywood lesbians sought protection and acceptance in “lavender” marriages to actors who were often homosexual, and with whom they could form secret alliances against hostile surroundings.
Paramount’s premier costume designer Edith Head married Fox art director Wiard “Bill” Ihnen. Both were always busy, stayed out of each other’s life, and lived past eighty. Crawford and Stanwyck’s cracked marriages to alcoholics gave these two former chorus girls a sense of stability, while the safe and sexless marriage of Linda and Cole Porter gave his career dazzle. Laurence Olivier’s marriage to Jill Esmond remained unconsummated for years as she struggled to accept her lesbianism. While living with faithful companions, Hepburn, who early on scored in near-andrógynous parts, maintained the perfect front with alcoholic Spencer Tracy, who, as a Catholic, never divorced his wife. The successive marriages of Janet Gaynor, Lili Damita, and Agnes Moorehead were daisy chains of deceit. Other “tandem couples” included Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester, Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland. When they had to, lavender couples produced children.
For many, liberation had come after marriage. Since leaving their husbands, these women lived a life of travel, cultural pursuits, and leisure for the development of friendship and same-sex attachments. Some never divorced. Dietrich’s unorthodox marriage to Rudolph Sieber, who lived thirty-seven years with another woman, had its roots in a 1920s Berlin accustomed to sexual ambivalence. Lili Damita, who found Marlene in a tuxedo irresistible, and Errol Flynn, Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, Berthold and Salka Viertel, were married couples with sexual independence. Unlike many working- and middle-class lesbians, none of these women sought long-term relationships with female lovers. Singles like Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and Dorothy Arzner, Hollywood’s only woman director of the 1930s and early 1940s, lived in a deeper twilight.
The focus here is Hollywood’s pinnacle decades, the thirty years stretching from the dawn of the talkies in the late 1920s to the collapse of the studio system and the anticommunist witchhunt, which was so harrowing to nonconformists. In the company of Hollywood’s “odd girls and twilight lovers,” the book will bed-hop to Broadway’s Maude Adams, Eva Le Gallienne, and Katharine Cornell, to Natalie Barney’s sapphic oasis in Paris, and to London’s sewing circles, from Vita Sackville-West’s aristocratic set to Lynn Fontanne’s high-keyed West End monde.
Society condemned the love that dares not speak its name with such vehemence that Hollywood’s lesbians could count on no wink of complicity from the majority of their sex. Women made up the majority in vigilante organizations such as the nonsectarian National League of Decency and, as such, were largely responsible for the 1932 tightening of Hollywood’s self-censoring Production Code, which, among other strictures, forbade the depiction of homosexuality in any form.
Emma Goldman and Edith Ellis might have stormed the country for suffrage, women’s rights, and, under their breaths, sapphic love, but living openly as a lesbian was fraught with danger, guilt, and anxiety. Most American women barely knew what a lesbian was, and if it was explained to them, they were quick to label such women “twisted” or, in the new Freudian vocabulary, “inverts” or “degenerates” (Russian-born “Red Emma,” who was considered a monster in polite society and an advocate of “free love and bombs,” was deported in 1919 as an anarchist). In many communities, female lovers caught in flagrante were institutionalized in insane asylums.
Garbo, Dietrich, Crawford, Stanwyck, Bankhead, Garland—the roll call of golden-age stars who were lesbian or bisexual may seem especially lengthy compared to what we know of contemporary movie celebrities. Since modern sex researchers agree that homosexuality is probably a constant in human evolution, and that there is neither an increase nor a decrease, proportionally speaking, the answer to why so many stars then were closeted lesbians must be found in the social context. The cinema had barely learned to talk in 1930, and everybody in the movies was young—Garbo was twenty-five, MGM’s wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg thirty-one, and founding father D. W. Griffith was fifty-five. The arts and entertainment had always attracted gays, but the movies were a brand-new field. The screen catapulted a few women to unheard-of radiance and sway and gave them influence and opportunities that, with the exception of a few monarchs, no woman had ever had. Because they were the first superstars, Garbo, Dietrich, Crawford et al. seem all the more striking, and they remain, with the exception of Elizabeth Taylor, better known than the 1950s headliners. As for today’s stars, who knows what we will find out about them in fifty years?
“No one loves a fairie when she’s forty,” said British Vogue in reviewing Hugo Vickers’s Loving Garbo in 1994. Thirty-five years earlier, when such bluntness in print was not permissible, Edmund Goulding hinted that it was not Garbo’s vanity that shortened her career, but her fear of being discovered a lesbian. Goulding, who directed her in Love and Grand Hotel, said that if she and the press had made up, she’d still be making pictures. “The thing she balks at,” he told Ezra Goodman, Hollywood’s bitter historian in 1959, “is people going into her bedroom.”
In 1930s fiction and medical literature, lesbians are portrayed as neurotic, tragic, and absurd, inevitably driven toward debility or suicide. Ona Munson, the actress, and Irene Lentz, MGM’s 1940s chief fashion designer, were sewing circle members who took their own lives. In contrast to today’s politically charged, in-your-face sapphic literature, the writings of even a forthright lesbian such as Mercedes de Acosta are ambivalent and allusive. In Antoni Gronowicz’s controversial Garbo memoir, Garbo says de Acosta excited her physically more than spiritually. In her own memoirs, however, de Acosta’s most explicit image of their relationship is a thunderstorm swelling across a beach where they lay. Modern biographers and memorialists are less reticent. In Loving Garbo, de Acosta is an intelligent eccentric besotted by a dull, self-centered Garbo, while in Maria Riva’s Marlene Dietrich by Her Daughter, de Acosta appears as a tiresome figure of ridicule.
The need to feel in control at all times made it almost impossible to share fervent and touching emotions. Stars, moreover, lived in glass houses and were asked to move in the broadest circles, meaning few of them were ever seen in the few bars and stores catering to female “inverts.” Staying in the closet was altogether satisfying, sometimes even intensely romantic.
Chapter 1
The Odd Couple: Mercedes and Thalberg
Irving Thalberg, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s production chief, was in no mood for jokes. The world wasn’t exactly waiting for Greta Garbo to play a man, now was it?
The writer across from him, Mercedes de Acosta, smiled. To act is to assume identities. Since antiquity actors had slipped into women’s clothes and painted their faces. They were still doing it in Asian theater. Admittedly, the tradition of women in men’s roles was shorter, but it dated back to Cherubin in The Marriage of Figaro. On Broadway, a succession of actresses, from Maude Adams and Eva Le Gallienne to Marilyn Miller, had played Peter Pan. On film, Hamlet had been incarnated by Asta Nielsen.
Thalberg cut her short. Desperate was not supposed to be Garbo in drag, but Garbo getting out of harrowing scrapes. “We have been building Garbo up for years as a glamorous actress, and now you come along and try to put her into pants and make a monkey out of her,” he snapped. “Do you want to put all America and all the women’s clubs against her? You must be out of your mind.”
De Acosta reeled under his unaccustomed outburst, but recovered to say Garbo knew perfectly well that to escape police and assorted villains, the plot had her disguised as a man.
“She must be out of her mind, too,” Thalberg came back. “I simply won’t have that sequence in. I am in this business to make money on films, and I won’t have this one ruined.”
“Remember Sarah Bernhardt’s triumph as the duke of Reichstadt?” Mercedes asked.
Thalberg was flattered when people thought him an intellectual, and he liked to affect the airs of a Renaissance prince. She told him Paul Poiret, whose clothes were a permanent part of her own wardrobe, had designed Sarah Bernhardt’s close-fitting trousers and arrogant white coat for the title role in Edmond Rostand’s L’Aiglon. Pretending she was refreshing her own memory, Mercedes told how, on the downfall of Napoleon, three-year-old François-Charles-Joseph Bonaparte—l’Aiglon, or Eaglet, as passionate Bonapartists called him—had been recognized as emperor of France, how he had spent his short, feeble life in Schönbrunn Castle in Vienna, a pawn of his grandfather, Emperor Franz II of Austria, and his crafty chancellor Metternich. The author of Cyrano de Bergerac had made a strange and compelling hero of Napoleon’s luckless son, who was obsessed by pathetic dreams of rebuilding the Bonaparte empire, but was unable to escape Metternich’s political ruses. Eva Le Gallienne, Mercedes’s longtime lover in the 1920s, had played l’Aiglon on Broadway.
“Greta will look great in uniform,” Mercedes said, smiling.
The diminutive (five-foot-one) Thalberg insisted that the sequence come out. He rarely deviated from his glacial calm. He didn’t have to. Power was unstated. But he was tiring of Garbo’s lovers pitching asinine stories. If he had hired de Acosta, it was because her story outline promised Garbo as a “wild character,” someone like Iris March in The Green Hat. The much-banned Michael Arlen novel was something of a fixation with him. The Production Office—the industry’s self-censoring board—considered the book immoral, and Thalberg had produced a sanitized version called A Woman of Affairs, with Garbo as Iris March, twenty-year-old Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as the debauched brother whose death triggers the plot, and John Gilbert as the husband who, because he has syphilis, kills himself the night he marries Iris. Garbo had loved the novel, and although censorship had insisted that syphilis become embezzlement, the film was one of her most successful silents, famous for the ending in which she crashes her car into a tree rather than destroy her lover with the excesses of their passion. Thalberg wanted to remake it as a talkie with his wife, Norma Shearer, as Iris March.
De Acosta mentioned that Garbo also wanted to play the title role in The Picture of Dorian Gray. She quoted Dorian’s lines when he first sees his portrait: “I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. If it were only the other way. If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old. For that—for that—I would give everything.” She added that she was herself a friend of Oscar Wilde’s reckless niece.
No, Thalberg admitted, he didn’t know “Dolly” Wilde, who also lived in Santa Monica.
The legend of Thalberg as the boy genius and intuitive force behind Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s best films seems as permanently fixed in Tinseltown history as the image of Louis B. Mayer as Thalberg’s and MGM’s ruthless overlord. While Mayer’s administration and showmanship kept the studio flourishing, Irving the wunderkind possessed, along with a sometimes canny understanding of what the public wanted, a knack for developing stars and doctoring scripts. He brought the preview to a ruthless and ritualistic perfection. All films were dry-run, returned for reediting or even reshooting, and previewed again until audiences in outlying Los Angeles areas laughed or cried on cue. He lived and worked with uncommon intensity and hired people he thought were the best and the brightest because he believed you could buy talent and that top talent cost top money. Unlike other studio bosses, he listened to arguments, although that didn’t matter in the end because he always prevailed.
Shifting in his seat on this January 1932 afternoon, he knew he had to be careful. “Garbomania” was at its height. Garbo’s image of European otherness, her awareness of the pleasures and vices of love, her brooding eyes, her slim, languid body and broad shoulders, appealed to both male and female audiences. Her husky, accented voice whispered the pains of passion, and in spite of herself, she snared men. Thalberg believed she was a fascinating but limited actress. “She must never create situations,” he told the director George Cukor. “She must be thrust into them; the drama comes in how she rides them out.”
The Garbo woman the studio developed—and the world’s audiences swooned over—was a woman alone, an emotionally wounded woman with a past, who summons up the strength to march on. Garbo goes mad, drowns in frozen water, throws herself under a speeding train (in the original version of Love). In her movies, she said no; her leading men said yes, and in the fade-out the story had her change her mind.
In contrast to almost everybody else in Hollywood, Thalberg knew Garbo was a lesbian. He knew that women friends like Mercedes and Salka Viertel had enormous influence over his star. If Garbo didn’t think a script was right, she would say, “I think I will go home,” which meant that either she would ask her chauffeur to drive her to her big, rented house in the new Brentwood section of Los Angeles or, if her contract was up, that she would go to Sweden for an indefinite period.
He listened to Mercedes repeat what he already knew, that Garbo wanted stories that were different. Stars whined and begged for different roles while all their audiences wanted was for them to repeat themselves. People wanted Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald to sing, the Marx Brothers to be funny, Johnny Weissmuller to swing from trees, and Garbo to play an emotionally wounded woman whose past will not let her be at peace, a woman who, despite great hurts, marches on until fate makes her meet her man.
Movie celebrity was based on the ability to convincingly enact love games with the opposite sex. Tens of millions of moviegoers wanted to see Garbo play the disillusioned woman hopelessly and giddily in love or the tarnished lady giving up her man or dying in the last reel. Thalberg was still angry at the way she had disdained the press on the eve of the Mata Hari premiere. He had let her go to New York for Christmas, and all he had got back were reports of her “high-hattin’ act with New York reporters,” as the Motion Picture Herald put it. The Depression was deepening—the same trade paper told of how even Broadway houses were going nonstop “grind,” at fifteen cents a seat. And here he was planning to road-show Grand Hotel at $2 top. Unlike Fox, RKO, and Warner Brothers, MGM had made money in 1931. But the studio was paying Garbo $12,000 a week.1 Her movies demanded high gloss. As for source material, Thalberg had acquired popular and expensive literary properties by Blasco Ibañez, Herman Südermann, Tolstoy, Michael Arlen, Edward Sheldon, and, for the all-star vehicle that started shooting the next week, Vicki Baum’s current bestseller, Grand Hotel.
Of course, said Mercedes, there was always Joan of Arc or Teresa de Avila, who loved a female cousin and founded a religious order. And there was Queen Christina. Thalberg didn’t mention that he had asked Salka Viertel to look into adapting the life of Sweden’s Renaissance queen. He expected a good love story, not a documentary on a queen brought up like a boy.
In Thalberg’s judgment, Garbo had become Garbo in Love. The first time her hypnotic style of acting and her classic, almost narcissistic beauty overwhelmed the popular imagination was in Frances Marion’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Marion was currently adapting Dinner at Eight and was, with Anita Loos and Leonore Coffee, Thalberg’s favorite screenwriter. He hired more women writers than any other production chief. Two-thirds of the Garbo films were scripted by women, and two were based on original material by women, Adela Rogers St. Johns’s The Single Standard and now Baum’s Grand Hotel. He worked well with female writers, although he seemed not to like women.
Thalberg appreciated the company of men and, perhaps because he was born a “blue baby” with a congenital heart defect and was too frail for athletics, enjoyed male distractions. David Lewis, his personal assistant, and his script doctor, George Oppenheimer, were gay. Some thought Thalberg himself was a repressed homosexual and that his 1927 glamour wedding to Shearer was a clever front. Shearer quickly discovered her husband’s limited sexual drive. Joan Crawford believed the marriage was just as calculated on Shearer’s part. “She doesn’t love him,” Crawford told Rogers St. Johns, “she’s made a sacrifice for what she can get out of him, knowing he’s going to die on her.”
Thalberg’s moderne office on the second floor of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s executive building was long and bathed in shadow. His massive, shiny desk was on a platform so visitors had to look up at him. The right end of the desk was occupied by his newest contraption, the telephone-cum-intercom Dictograph, which looked like a small pipe organ and partially concealed a row of medicine bottles. As Mercedes launched into Teresa de Avila as Garbo material, the Dictograph interrupted her. A graveled voice that sounded like that of Louis B. himself called.
“Remember where we are,” Thalberg admonished and left.
Being dismissed by Thalberg was routine. His days were a succession of script conferences, editing sessions, and screenings, and his front office usually harbored writers who either chafed with impatience or disintegrated through boredom. It might be days or weeks before Thalberg’s office summoned a writer back. In the meantime, there was the pay envelope every Saturday night. Anita Loos claimed that while waiting for script conferences with Thalberg, she had knitted a scarf that, at her $3,500-a-week salary, must have cost the studio $85,000.
De Acosta was no mendicant scenarist hacking away nine to six in the story department. She had her own mind and money and was leading an independent existence. A few blocks from Garbo’s rented villa in Brentwood, she shared a house with Thalberg’s gay playwright friend John Colton. Like P. G. Wodehouse, she was allowed to do her work at home, perhaps because her black tricorn, buckled shoes, and cape were a tad too eccentric even for the writers’ corridor on the fourth floor.
An expanding circle of women were intrigued by de Acosta’s practice of oriental philosophy and alternative medicine, by her odd ideas about the arts, finding her cosmopolitan flair an antidote to Hollywood provincialism. She gave discreet parties attended by women in the know, even though her various rented homes never became the sisterhood’s equivalent of the West Hollywood residence of George Cukor, where the elite of gay men, boys on the make, and the occasional lesbian celebrity gathered. “George was their access to the crème of Hollywood,” said fellow director Joseph L. Mankiewicz. “George was really queen of the roost.” It was at Cukor’s that Edna Ferber and Noël Coward both showed up wearing double-breasted suits, and to Coward’s remark, “You almost look like a man,” Ferber parried, “So do you.”
Mercedes had deleted all colors until her wardrobe—and later her furnishings—came in black and white only. Dietrich’s daughter, Maria, would describe Mercedes as looking like a “Spanish Dracula with the body of a young boy, jet-black hair cut like a toreador’s close to the head, chalk-white face, deep-set black eyes permanently shadowed.” Tallulah Bankhead, who did not like Mercedes but admired her dinner jackets, said she looked like a “mouse in a topcoat.” Mercedes claimed she dressed whimsically to attract women—in one period she rouged her earlobes. She believed same-sex love was a life force no different from other forms of sexuality and liked to ask, “Who of us is only one sex?”
As a teenager, she had been fascinated by famous and complicated women. To please her mother, she had married, at twenty-seven. Although she refused to give up her maiden name, she made a point of dining with her painter husband, Abram Poole, whenever she passed through New York. Two of her plays, Sandro Botticelli and Jehanne d’Arc, starring Eva Le Gallienne, had been staged to indifferent reviews in New York and Paris, while Prejudice had been performed in London with a very young John Gielgud in the lead. During her long friendship with Isadora Duncan, she had edited and arranged for the publication of the dancer’s memoirs, My Life.
A year before Isadora was strangled with her famous scarf, she wrote a poem to Mercedes, which, in part, read:
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 thighs
And suck the honey of thy lips
Embracing thy two slender hips.
1. All figures are given in vintage dollars.
For comparison, Adrian, MGM’s premier costume designer, earned $1,000 a week, while the skilled tailors and seamstresses at the studio earned between $15.85 and $21 a week.
To translate these figures to today’s money, the reader should multiply the 1932 figures by twelve; $12,000 a week is the equivalent of about $144,000 in 1995 dollars. It should be kept in mind that as late as 1930, federal, state, and local expenditures constituted barely 10 percent of GNP, and combined taxes averaged a mere 4 percent on high incomes (source: American Fashion, Sarah Tomerlin Lee, ed., and Federal Reserve Library of Research, Philadelphia).
Chapter 2
Tangled Lives: Women Who Loved Women
The movies are graven images of mystery and allure. One of the pleasures of moviegoing is watching incandescent people, more interesting and riveting, more raffish, witty, and beautiful than the rest of us, defy the special gravity of the screen. Of all the stars who have fired the imagination of movie audiences, none quite equaled the elusive and unattainable Greta Garbo. She was, wrote the New York Times when she died in 1990, “the standard against whom others were judged.”
It is one of the movies’ greater ironies that Garbo’s need to conceal her lesbianism added to her allure and mysticism. Her fear of discovery made her snub the press. The more she became successful in protecting her private life, the more she drove journalists to a frenzy. The more she spurned reporters, the more they pursued her. And the more the press criticized her aloofness in print, the more her fans cheered her indifference. Photoplay, the premier fan magazine, had to apologize for calling her “remote, retiring, unsocial, and unfashionable in dress” and, in its January 1930 issue, to admit that she could do no wrong: “Where others scrabble and squall for notice, submitting to photographers and the pawing of the herd, Garbo crawls into a hole and pulls the hole in after her. Whether it is a trick or whether it is the nature of the lady, it is absolute perfection.”
Not that she—and MGM—hadn’t tried to accommodate the press. After the fan magazine Screen Book suggested her reclusiveness was a studio gimmick, Metro tried out different tactics. “There was nothing Garbo could do about the publicity we forced on her at first,” Joseph Cohn, Metro’s general manager, would remember. “We tried a lot of different poses, none of them too smart. She didn’t complain, but she wasn’t enthusiastic.” She rarely denied anything said about her, a habit that added to her allure, and to people’s impression that she had it all figured out in advance. Later in life, she came to believe she was the skillful manipulator, the clever seller of her own talent and legend.
Clarence Brown, who directed two of her silent films and five of her talkies, wasn’t sure she even knew she possessed an ability to project thinking in action. “If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t have to change her expression,” he would recall. “You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other. And nobody else has been able to do that on the screen. Garbo did it without the command of English.”
With five thousand people under contract, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the grandest of the Hollywood studios. Paramount might have Marlene Dietrich and Mae West, and the financially troubled Warner Bros. Ruth Chatterton, William Powell, and Kay Francis, but MGM possessed Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, and, fairest of all, Greta Garbo. It was Irving Thalberg, not Louis B. Mayer, who grasped what it was that moviegoers responded to, that what constituted star power was self-identification. Audiences were not primarily attracted to the opposite sex on the screen, but projected themselves on the light-and-shadow figures of their own sex.
Male spectators imagined themselves swashbuckling like Douglas Fairbanks or imitating Clark Gable slapping around upper-class dames. Women identified with Garbo, for whom love was so often the vehicle of ruin, Harlow’s vitality and humor, or Crawford’s Depression-wise dames challenging men and reaching for the brass ring. Garbo’s appeal to women was reflected in the Hollywood in-joke about the bridegroom getting into bed and vowing to his bride that, with one exception, he would always be faithful. If he ever had a chance to make love to Greta Garbo, he would no doubt succumb. To which the bride answered, “Me, too.”
Thalberg understood that to make it big, a film must have larger-than-life players acting out a story of conflict and suspense that audiences can identify with. He had built the career of the Canadian newcomer Norma Shearer, married her, and built her some more (British Vogue dubbed her “the reachable Garbo”). With the efficiency of a prime-rib stock breeder, he kept his hand in the teaching, grooming, and molding of new faces on the contract list.
The studios invented the so-called standard seven-year contract, which, with options, gave the bosses all the advantages. It allowed the studio both to terminate the relationship every six months and, if a newcomer was promising, to lock him or her in for seven years. MGM usually renewed every six months, usually with an increase in salary. “Talent”—actors, directors, and any other people considered valuable enough to be under contract—benefited from the security of continual employment. The advantage for the studios was that it allowed management to favor those who behaved. Stanwyck, Cary Grant, and Charles Boyer were among the few who only signed one- or two-picture deals. Such freelancing was much admired by contractees like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, but it was a gamble insofar as no studio had a vested, long-term interest in building up a Stanwyck, Grant, or Boyer.
The golden age was a time when actresses’ menstrual periods were tracked on a posted chart, when Clark Gable’s false teeth and Gary Cooper’s impaired hearing were closely guarded secrets, and the studios knew whose hair was truly straw-colored. To prove herself an authentic blonde, Carole Lombard—like Jean Harlow—reportedly bleached her pubic hair. The best-kept secret, the secret Garbo took with her to the grave, was her sexuality.
Friendships and romantic relationships overlapped, and because women can openly be friends, friendships often seemed freer than love relationships. Lesbians were, in the public image, loathsome creatures. They were seen as hard, sophisticated females who seduced innocent girls or women into mysterious “perversions,” or as sad caricatures of men, trying to dress and act as males, and generally aping some of men’s worst characteristics. Hollywood made “butchy” women into repellent monsters, vampires, or other subhuman creatures, and the theater portrayed practitioners of the love that dares not speak its name as neurotic, tragic, or absurd. No woman in her right mind would want to be seen so negatively. No actress admitting to loving women would be a success. Because the heroine in Edouard Bourdet’s The Captive is obsessed by another woman and refuses to be happy in her marriage, a New York City district attorney closed the play in 1926 and hauled producer, director, and cast of twelve to court on obscenity charges. The play, which was as tactful as it was audacious, met a similar fate in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit.1
Hollywood’s lesbian and bisexual stars lived too much in a fishbowl—and had egos too big—to be part of any for-women-only association that, to the noninitiated, was called a sewing club or sewing circle. There is some dispute as to the origin of the euphemism. Alla Nazimova, who was famous for the seances and orgies she organized, and for her Salome film, which, in an “homage” to Oscar Wilde, featured an all-gay cast, apparently used the term in the mid-1920s to describe a sapphic set that included Wilde’s niece Dorothy, several actresses, and writers. A decade later, the sewing circle alluded to Dietrich’s passel of “good-time Charlenes,” and the expression came to refer to a loose network of lesbians in the performing arts. Only those who mattered “knew.”
Members of the international sisterhood, who sometimes called themselves “two-spirited people,” were mostly rich, well-connected, and free. While rarely letting down their guard, they entertained each other in private, often with theme parties that allowed the too familiar to be “unknown.” References to lesbians were double entendres and clever witticisms supposedly above the ken of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Smith. Vanity Fair pictured Garbo and Dietrich in 1932 under the headline: “Both Members of the Same Club.” Others referred to Dietrich and Garbo as “gentlemen at heart.” Beatrice Lillie said she knew Gertrude Lawrence better than Gertrude’s husband, Richard Aldrich. Of the Lawrence-Aldrich marriage in 1940, sewing-circle member Constance Collier said, “Poor Richard. He thinks he has married Miss Gertrude Lawrence. He’ll soon find out it’s Myth Lawrence.”
Making a circle of lesbian friends was fraught with guilt and anxiety. Those who knew would deny it even decades later or, if pressed, resort to generalizations about the inscrutability and ambivalence of human emotions. Agnes Moorehead, who thought the word sapphic was an improvement over female homosexuality, believed women could have lesbian feelings without being homosexual, that love doesn’t have a sex.
The country might be in the depth of the Depression in 1932—and Paramount filing for bankruptcy—but going to the movies remained the cheapest and, for many, the only entertainment. All-night movie houses at ten cents a seat were crowded with homeless snorers. Breadlines were getting longer than box-office queues, however, as many couldn’t even afford dimes for entertainment or comfort, and cinema attendance slipped from the 1930 high of nearly 100 million a week. Traditional values resurfaced in the face of the grinding, brother-can-you-spare-a-dime poverty. The rich stopped flaunting their style, and the Cedric Gibbons movie sets scaled back on deluxe decors in favor of genteel, tasteful make-believe. The public no longer tolerated unconventional living and showy display. Eccentricities that adoring moviegoers had found endearing were increasingly seen as obnoxious—the press chided Crawford in 1934 for wondering what $100,000 per film was getting her.
Americans idolized the images of actors and never stopped asking: What are the stars really like? The studios exploited the public curiosity while making little effort to answer the question. Howard Strickling at MGM, Perry Lieber at Paramount, Harry Brand at Fox, Lynn Farnol at Goldwyn Studios, independent publicist Russell Birdwell, and the town’s other ballyhoo masters portrayed the lives of their players in such free translation that the stars’ private personalities were not only mostly unknown but beside the point. Concentrating on the stars—especially the women stars—to the detriment of the films themselves worked so well that instead of requesting new films by titles, theater owners asked for “two Gables” or “three Shearers.” Photoplay, Silver Screen, Modern Screen, Screenland, and the other fan magazines aided and abetted by enlarging stars to epic dimensions and often out of thin air, creating the Hollywood style and character.
The famous Garbo line, “I vant to be alone,” was not hers, but an invention of MGM publicist Pete Smith. After Fay Wray found Tyrone Power too fond of the boys, Brand covered Ty’s exuberant homosexuality with well-publicized dates with Fox contract players Loretta Young, Janet Gaynor, and Sonja Henie. When Power became world famous and under greater scrutiny, Brand publicized the star’s “secret” romance with newcomer Annabella, a French actress of androgynous manners who had starred in René Clair’s Le Million.
Strickling forbade male contractees from appearing in fashion layouts or from accepting “best dressed” awards for fear they would look effeminate. The appearance of a “blind item” intimating that William Haines, MGM’s popular matinee idol, was perhaps a pansy provoked Strickling’s office to flood newsrooms with the “news” that Haines had fallen in love with Pola Negri, and to follow up with photos of a king-size bed that Pola and Bill had selected for their life together as a married couple. Birdwell, who would whip the search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind to a national frenzy in 1937, deflected rumors of the bisexual Duke of Windsor’s sordid liaison with Woolworth heir James Donahue by turning it around and suggesting the Duchess was trying to convert the notorious Donahue to heterosexuality by having an affair with him. “I don’t want press agentry,” said David O. Selznick when he hired Birdwell. “I want imagination.”
The film factories, said Selznick’s father-in-law, Louis B. Mayer, were the only companies where the assets walked out the gate every night. “You put them under contract, pay them money they never in their wildest fantasies could dream of,” said Brand. “You nurture them, build them, only to see ’em put everything at risk, getting drunk, screwing around.” Anita Loos, who began knocking out scripts for D. W. Griffith in 1912 and became famous with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, would remember the impact of actors’ lives on America’s standards of morality, how “casual couplings were commonplace,” and how studio publicists hushed up things with “shotgun weddings, with guns wielded by studio bosses posing as papas.”
Strickling took over the MGM publicity department from Frank Whitback, a former barker for Barnum and Bailey who ran Metro like a circus and was the only man, in studio photographer Laszlo Willinger’s memory, who had four elephants as pets. The shirtsleeve, circus approach went out of style when the point of press agentry was not only to blow the horn, but also to conceal, to protect both moviegoers and the stars from each other and themselves. By the high 1930s, when Strickling had a staff of one hundred publicists, the studio publicity machines had neutralized the press.
Access to stars, “exclusives,” photos, handouts, lunches, all flowed with the smooth start-to-finish coverage of movies coming down the assembly lines. Less obviously, the stars came to rely on Strickling, Brand, and company, and in most cases to heed their advice. Hollywood was a company town and it was not in an actor’s interest to rebel. “We told stars what they could say, and they did what we said because they knew we knew best,” Strickling said in a candid moment. The Depression caused the publicity mills to modify their aim. As stage-managed by Strickling, Brand, Farnol et al., the stars downplayed their glamour a bit and told columnists and fan magazines how they wished they had the leisure and anonymity of secretaries to go shopping on their lunch hour.
Mayer made sure MGM films toes the Hays Office censorship line while in private he was an adulterer who maintained a brothel for visiting dignitaries where the whores were film-star look-alikes. He was implicated in stock swindles and later charged with conspiracy to violate usury laws, and, with the complicity of Strickling, he stepped in when a drunken Clark Gable killed a pedestrian, lining up a patsy from within the studio to testify that he was at the wheel at the time. Strickling not only orchestrated cover-up romances and publicized staged elopements, but also arranged abortions in Tijuana (an actress’s temporary indisposition was tactfully reported, if at all, to be the result of an appendectomy). To keep the teenage Judy Garland reasonably content, Strickling assigned Betty Asher, a slim, rather unattractive publicist who not only introduced Garland to the pleasures of same-sex love but to the drink and pills that would eventually ruin her life.
If arranging a marriage to cover up for a gay star was what it took, Mayer was accommodating. Noël Coward would describe Nelson Eddy’s January 1939 lavender marriage as made in heaven and credited to Louis B. Mayer. Since Rose Marie had made Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald a sensational singing duo in 1936, MacDonald had married (in 1937), and Louis B. ordered Eddy to do likewise. “Eddy agreed,” Coward would recall, “but he didn’t want a virgin bride or some insatiable creature, and Mayer understood. Sometimes the least sexual marriages last the longest. Mayer found him an older divorcée [Ann Denmitz Franklin] who’d been married to a movie director [Sidney Franklin]—she was wise to the ways of Tinseltown, she was not sexually demanding or needful, and she was well pleased to live the comfortable life of a movie star’s wife. She was satisfied. Eddy was satisfied, the studio was satisfied, the public was satisfied. At least I assume Eddy was satisfied. For his sake, I hope he had a very low sex drive. Or perhaps he was very, very discreet if he did step out.”
If Dolores Del Rio and Cedric Gibbons, MGM’s pioneering art director, were a perfectly calculated “twilight tandem,” there was much innocence in Elsa Lanchester’s “double-gaited” marriage to Charles Laughton. Late in life, Lanchester would write of her husband’s homosexuality but not of her own and, in her autobiography, leave a touching picture of their early relationship. “There was no elements of frankness or honesty at all in our conversations,” she would recall in Herself. “Nor was there any element of calculation or thoughts of the future for two people who were twenty-five and twenty-eight years old, who had both had previous associations. Our lack of curiosity about each other was, I would think, a sort of subconscious cleaning process, a making of space between the past and the present. Later, the past boomeranged back.”2
To act is to become someone else, someone more intense, more riveting, and more eloquent than the reflection in the bathroom mirror. Sewing circle member Janet Gaynor believed every woman puts on “acts,” and that just as most men are born with an aversion to acting, women are born with an instinct for it. In coded language, she told an interviewer that, for women like her, “it has become more or less a habit with us to disguise our real feelings about things.” Harry Hay, the founder of the modern gay movement in Los Angeles, said, “We’re always in costume, turning on attitudes.” Actors will proudly assert that they invest their understanding of both masculine and feminine emotions in their roles. Mercedes de Acosta spoke eloquently of her friend John Barrymore’s androgyny as the source of both “his great gifts and his equally great destructiveness.”
Classical Hollywood was a company town, and the actors’ fear of rejection was easily manipulated by the bosses, whose approval the actors not only craved but without whom there was no acting. For Cedric Gibbons and Dolores Del Rio, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Taylor, marriage not only provided deep cover, but gave them poise and rank in the community. If the celebrity was a gay woman, there were enough men, as comedienne Patsy Kelly would say, ready to tie the knot in order to get on the gravy train.
Stars were always talked about, even though fame erected barriers that kept lesser mortals at bay. The studios had the power to silence cops and newsmen, but they had no way to still the rumors that leaked through the service trade. Lurid details had a way of spreading through the hired help and the netherworld of prostitutes and racketeers to people who paid for this kind of information—private detectives, showbiz attorneys, Hedda Hopper, and her fellow columnist Louella Parsons. Stars cringed before the peephole columnists while wooing them with corruptive flattery and often self-defeating cooperation. The ears of Hopper, Parsons, Cal Young, and a host of lesser gossips were always perked, and to be sure they were always au courant, they employed networks of informants while affecting a stewardship of public morality. Nothing was more provocative of course than the misdemeanors of the privileged. Then as now, to see them spanked in public was both edifying and entertaining.
Garbo’s husky voice and accented English only added to her stature. Style and reticence make for larger-than-life fantasy, and her aura of unattainability bewitched her public and made her life a source of intense curiosity. She had a fanatical following in the United States, and her international renown was unequaled. The public imagined that her haunting beauty was a reflection of inner perfection. Her presumed love affairs were the subject of endless speculation, not all orchestrated by Strickling or breathlessly rewritten by fan magazines and columnists. There were reports of an abortive elopement with her costar John Gilbert, and reports of a wedding ceremony at which she failed to appear.
Sapphics had little trouble figuring her out. The word lesbian was abhorred, and women in love with women preferred a more fluid terminology or no labels at all. They thought of relationships in the singular and couched an attraction as a nonsexist friendship.
“They hate lesbians even more,” Louise Brooks would say of Hollywood’s loathing of gay men in remembering how Mayer fired Haines after he refused to put distance between himself and his boyfriend by marrying Negri or some other actress. Although Garbo was the least bisexual of the actress stars in love with women, that is, the one who in private referred to herself as a man (“When I was a young man”: “Oh, what a funny man I am”), and never sought refuge in a lavender marriage, she was the one who was never found out.
1. La Prisonnière by Edouard Bourdet (1887–1935) popularized the giving of violets as the sign of knowing in sapphic circles. Between women lovers, the gift of violets was the rage for a decade, appearing in feminist literature and as an international symbol of affection. The edible flower, prized by gourmets, has a long Gallic association with sexual pleasure.
2. During the filming of The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Laughton told Thalberg he was a homosexual. Perhaps because Thalberg’s wife, Norma Shearer, was Laughton’s costar, nothing came of it, although the standard “moral turpitude” clause in the actor’s contract could have been evoked and his Hollywood career ended.
Chapter 3
In Love: Garbo and Mercedes
Garbo was twenty-four and living at 1717 San Vicente Boulevard in Santa Monica when she met de Acosta in 1929. Mercedes, who was thirty-six, had only been in Los Angeles three days when Salka Viertel invited her to tea and, on the telephone, said Garbo just might stop by. Within walking distance of Garbo, Salka lived on a tiny dead-end street overlooking the Pacific—a gypsy had once told her she would escape heartbreak and misfortune as long as she lived close to water. Mercedes dressed with care for the afternoon. She slipped a heavy bracelet onto her wrist. She had heard Garbo liked modern, chunky bracelets.
Salka was forty and the central attraction of Mittel Europa intellect and vitality. The house she shared with her often absent husband, Berthold, and their three growing sons was the end station for onrushing exiles from the German-speaking arts. As an actress, she had known everybody in Berlin and Vienna, and as darkness descended over Germany, she would see them all—from Max Reinhardt, Arnold Schoenberg, and Thomas Mann to Bertolt Brecht—trek to 165 Mabery Road in search of contacts, reassurance, and Kaffeekuchen. The Viertels had come to Hollywood in 1928, Berthold to write movies for German émigré director F. W. Murnau. Since Salka had helped her husband with scripts in Germany, he suggested she become