"That Furious Lesbian" The Story of Mercedes de Acosta

by Robert A Schanke

pub.  Southern Illinois University 2003

This biography was a long time a-cooking: tasty but tiny pop-ups of Mercedes de Acosta (pictured below) have too long salted the taste-buds of the LGBT reader, hungry for solid OurKnowledge fare! Dig into Garbo, Nazimova, le Gallienne, Dietrich, Duncan - and de Acosta is there, girding the palate, watering the tongue. Alice B Toklas is pungent, Maria Riva is downright vinegary, Cecil Beaton is sweetly sympathetic! At last, the definitive menu of the life of this seriously sapphic daughter of a very nicely placed Spanish-Cuban marriage in 1880s New York would quench our appetite! Fill up all those juicy gaps with a solid paste of good research, nutty with a few well placed crystalline cherries of entertaining imagination!

Alas! It was not to be. Mercedes de Acosta - in her elder days of financial embarrassment when Hollywood was long past - wrote an Autobiography "Here Lies the Heart" * (in fact she wrote three versions, each one of which sadly becomes progressively more secretive and less scandalous) and Robert A Schanke when serving up "That Furious Lesbian" seems to have made little effort give us nouvelle cuisine when rehashed fodder will do! For example - a tasty crumb that is missing - Mercedes went to school with Dorothy Parker! Not even mentioned! Happily anticipating fresh nuggets about Bessie Marbury the massive Yankee Theatrical Agent and her lover Elsie de Wolfe; the Two Anns - (Vanderbilt and Morgan !!;) Malvina Hoffman the sculptor; Amy Lowell the poet, Eleonora von Mendlesshon, the Marquise de Forbin - the expectant stomach is grievously disappointed when the author dishes up not one scrap more than can be learned about these fascinating women elsewhere! And that is precious little. Only Mercedes' sister, the beautiful and scandalous Rita Lydig leaps into life: as does the seemingly malevolent Salka Viertal in palmy Hollywood days as she puts the boot into Mercedes' affaire with Greta Garbo.

The only apparently fresh research comes from the author's friendship with the Indian dancer Ram Gopal - who until his death lived in South London. Ram Gopal knew Mercedes well - she was interested throughout her lifetime in eastern Mysticism - and Schanke comes to rely heartily upon Gopal's memories to arrive at his climactic speculative diagnosis that for 30 odd years Mercedes suffered from an "obsessive clinical disorder" with Greta Garbo! Rather too heartily perhaps?

However to do Robert A Schanke justice he has had a difficult task. It is only 40 odd years since Mercedes de Acosta died; relatives and descendants of the women she knew, and even loved, must live still in Yankristocrat circles and might well regard a new biography as something not unlike bubonic plague.

Hopefully somewhere, in the kitchen of life another chef is in training for a qualification in the Biographical Art. "That Furious Lesbian" will do well enough as an appetising hors d'oevre - as the Plat du Jour, well, somewhat less than filling!

Val