All We Know: Three Lives (21 page)

The Rosenbach had bought Mercedes’s papers, remarked the museum’s director that April, “because she insinuated herself into the centers of modernist thought and art.” Garbo’s writing was of a piece with the rest of the library’s holdings, “round[ing] out a stunning collection that chronicles the great Modernists of the 20th century,” noted the publicity for the unsealing. Mercedes’s relationship to modernity, in this story, was that of an outsider who imposed on its legitimate centers. She was at once mocked and given no credit for her collection. As one critic has argued, she was “a pre-Enlightenment person in a post-Enlightenment age. She could never bring herself to give up on daydream or romance or superstition,” and her plays were “almost entirely—as if obliviously—in the obsolete vein of 19th-century melodrama.” While “Garbo was ruthlessly, corrosively modern, as thorough in her irony and disillusionment as Gibbon or Voltaire,” de Acosta “was a throwback, a figment out of the Dark Ages, wedded to unrealities.” It is true that her writing often eschewed the uses of distance, abstraction, and irony that were changing the literary landscape in the first part of the twentieth century and that have come down to us as the canonical version of modernism. Her plotting could be outlandish—“Probability is not a word that occurs in Miss de Acosta’s dictionary,” wrote one reviewer of her novel
Until the Day Break
. The book contains “purple passages that seem to belong to a past decade,” noted another. Rereading this novel as she wrote in
Here Lies the Heart
, she was herself “amazed that the reviewers didn’t throw it out of the window.” The worst of her poetry reads like self-parody. Enthusiastically punctuated, it includes lines such as “Suddenly I thought of death!” and “reaching / out we extend our hands and lean far into the Vast / Space of the Infinite!” Yet her subject matter also struck a number of contemporary readers as modern, and her poems were appreciated by some critics for their directness of expression and for the way they conveyed her sense of being stifled by social convention. Her collection,
Moods
, had a second printing, and Harriet Monroe, a powerful arbiter of the new in verse and supporter of women writers, published Mercedes’s work in
Poetry
magazine.

The Bible of Mercedes de Acosta (Courtesy Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia)

Separating Mercedes de Acosta from what we think of as modern not only flattens that category retrospectively. It also repeats a certain modernist formal orthodoxy by reproducing the attempts to purge nineteenth-century modes such as melodrama from its purview—attempts that have been so successful that it is still easy to think of overt and extravagant expressions of emotion as unserious. Elinor Wylie was the contemporary poet Mercedes said she most admired, but it is with the work of Sara Teasdale that she was most obviously in conversation.
Streets and Shadows
, the collection Mercedes published in 1922, echoes Teasdale’s 1920 
Flame and Shadow
. Her poems to Garbo clearly owe something to Teasdale’s first book, the 1907 
Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems
, which include “To Eleonora Duse,” “To Eleonora Duse in ‘The Dead City,’” and “To a Picture of Eleonora Duse as ‘Francesca da Rimini.’” Amy Lowell, whom Mercedes also admired and met—and who was then considered part of the modern movement in poetry and is now too often ignored or dismissed—also commemorated Duse in verse. If Mercedes held on to much of what modernism repudiated (emotion, fantasy) as it established itself, her writing documents the links between those earlier aesthetic modes and celebrity culture—a connection that had to wait for Frank O’Hara and other gay male poets for it to be taken seriously.

And if her writing makes it possible to see modernism as part of what preceded it, her collection—her archiving of personal mementos and of mass-produced items of popular culture—suggests how disparate archival practices overlap. Like the Rosenbach brothers and the institution founded to memorialize them and their work, Mercedes was concerned with respecting and protecting the material she cared about. Yet her collecting—of Stravinsky’s score, Dietrich’s stocking, Alice B. Toklas’s letters—proposes once more that there is a false distinction between a pop cultural and high-cultural way of understanding valued objects. Garbo’s letters to Mercedes enrich the Rosenbach’s holdings of modernist writing and artifacts not only because of the star’s modernity, but also because the de Acosta Papers as a whole testify to the history of feminist activism and to the primacy of the individual ego, to spiritual search and to sexual adventure, to the feeling of being a fan and to the history of celebrity in the twentieth century, and to the material and emotional texture of all of these ventures.

In 1936, Esther Murphy wrote to Chester Arthur:

While Esther grasped this complex, often annoying human amalgam, more recent observers, including her biographer, have tried to rescue Mercedes de Acosta, from herself and from others’ scorn. It is a gesture that echoes Mercedes’s relationship to her lovers and that ignores the fact that if we take her as she was, she needs no such help. She herself mocked her desire to rescue Maude Adams from a nonexistent fire. She also described herself, older, backstage with Adams, as “so absurdly and tragically intense that it’s a small wonder I didn’t blow up the whole dressing room.” Aware that she used her feelings for Garbo to scuttle other intimacies, she wrote to Marlene Dietrich, “I do know that I have built up in my emotions a person that does not exist. My mind sees the real person—a Swedish servant girl with a face touched by God—only interested in money, her health, sex, food, and sleep. And yet her face tricks my mind and my spirit builds her up into something that fights with my brain. I do love her, but I only love the person I have created and not the person who is real.” (Dietrich’s response, according to her daughter: “Really! De Acosta is too vain for words!”)

The correspondence from Garbo that Mercedes saved, which cannot be quoted without permission of the star’s estate, illuminates Mercedes’s romantic exaggerations. Her impromptu trip in the winter of 1935 to Sweden, for example, which in
Here Lies the Heart
she calls the result of Garbo’s spur-of-the-moment invitation, was not Garbo’s idea but hers. But these letters also make it clear that her connection with Garbo was not the delusion of a crazed fan. Garbo tells her to come closer and to go away; tells her how she has suffered from the film industry and describes her indecision about how to spend her life after Hollywood; describes her ailments, physical and emotional, and entreats Mercedes to take care of herself; sends her yoga mantras, sends her love, and sends her on household errands; bemoans her inability to settle, asks Mercedes to make her a hotel reservation, describes her plans in detail, refuses to be pinned down. She tells Mercedes not to bother her, tells her not to forget to write, writes that she dislikes writing, tells her to ignore newspaper reports about her, apologizes for her odd behavior, tells her they are wholly different kinds of people, thanks her for buying her a pair of shoes, laments the waste of her life, chastises her for being too persistent, refers coyly to the jealousy of Mercedes’s current girlfriend (Poppy Kirk), and hopes that Mercedes will take care of her, Garbo, should she decide to go to Paris. She is aloof, frustrated, demanding, loving, funny, and self-consciously evasive.

Garbo’s star image, like that of Maude Adams, was produced (by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) to make publicity out of the difficulty of producing publicity about this idiosyncratic, solitary, gender-bending star. Today the books, photographs, magazine articles, and television documentaries that are part of the ongoing work of knowing Garbo almost always conclude that we can never know her. “Garbo Letters Leave Mystery Intact,” explained
USA Today
in April 2000. Mercedes de Acosta, although unfamiliar to most, was assumed to be thoroughly known, in an epithet or two. Part of the lure of a collection of personal papers is that it offers the promise of answers about a life, simply by virtue of being grouped under one name. Yet the Mercedes de Acosta Papers have most often been used as a source for information about Mercedes’s famous friends. The proof that her collection was asked to provide in the spring of 2000—that Garbo did or did not have a female lover—at once had everything to do with Mercedes and reduced her to next to nothing, creating a tremendously important cipher. To the extent that she and her collection were important, it was only as a proving ground for knowledge about Garbo, as an index of the star’s desire. As such, she could have been anyone, or any woman.

Respecting and protecting Greta Garbo posthumously from Mercedes de Acosta meant denigrating the latter and her desires—even as Mercedes and her collection generated another wave of publicity for (and concomitant increase in value of everything to do with) the star. Respecting and protecting Garbo meant offering legalistic readings of the star’s utterances rather than acknowledging that knowledge and desire can be as elusive as Garbo was. What was on display that spring, in addition to Garbo’s letters, Mercedes’s Bible, and so on, was a form of guardianship that involved the familiar (and in this case familial), derogatory view of women’s relationships to stars (trivial, unrestrained, juvenile). On view, too, was another attempt to assert the correct distance from this star, and a reminder that there is no arguing with the excitement of power. While Garbo’s image and biography are monitored by constant family concern and litigation, de Acosta’s are not. Garbo was born with nothing, but ended with enormous wealth: Her power today comes not just from her star image but from canny investments in real estate and stocks, which her family inherited. Mercedes, who began life with every financial and social advantage, ended with almost nothing: “One by one down to the end,” she wrote to William McCarthy in 1964, “I seem to be selling everything.”

Confronting a collection and a life like Mercedes de Acosta’s means being forced to consider, over and over, the boundary between the important and the inconsequential, between intellect and emotion, between something and nothing. Which is to say, it means being forced to reflect on what we understand to be a biographical fact. Questions of evidence will always also be questions of access, yet there will always be something we cannot read, or see, or hear, even when it is right in front of us or spoken directly to us. And when it comes to a contest of wills and of power like this one, there will never be enough evidence. The trouble had to do with what Mercedes de Acosta did with her body, just how close she got to the star. Her body is gone. Fantasy and factuality, memory and material preservation, are all alive in her collection. This is how she is embodied now, in a place that is not simply a repository of paper and things but also a storehouse and producer of feeling. But how did she view her collection? It was, she wrote to McCarthy, “quite unique and certainly very human material.”

Madge Garland, Londonderry House, London, 1949, photographed by Cecil Beaton (Cecil Beaton/
Vogue
© The Condé Nast Publications Ltd.)

There is a visibility so tenuous, so different, or so discomfited that it is easy to miss. And there is a visibility so simple, so precise, or so extreme that it, too, is obscure.

In a schoolroom in London at the turn of the twentieth century a young girl lies strapped to a sloping wooden board, a treatment ordered for her worsening curvature of the spine. During writing lessons, she is allowed to sit upright with the rest of the class, but then her arms are secured so tightly to the back of her chair that she cannot move her wrists normally, which forces her to develop a cramped and backward-sloping handwriting. There is also trouble with her throat and “graver trouble” with her feet and ankles, for which she wears lace-up orthopedic boots. In the summer, “when the world [is] at its prettiest,” she suffers so acutely from allergies—to food, to flowers, to the air—that her temperature soars and she is forced to lie all day in a darkened room. To fatten her and restore her to health, she is fed strawberries and cream, but this therapy only exacerbates her ailments.

She is Madge Alma McHarg, a tall, thin, slightly bucktoothed girl with freckles and long, straight blond hair. Her eyes are a bit too close together, her clothes seldom flatter her, and her parents constantly remind her of her “deficiency both in looks and in manners.” Her shyness is so devastating that it “amount[s] almost to paranoia,” so acute that she experiences it as yet another physical distress. When she stands, she hunches her shoulders and drops her head, looking up from this bent and tentative posture.

Despite or because of these aberrations, she is full of energy, desperate for learning, mad in pursuit of autonomy.

In the early evenings, she is occasionally required to present herself to her parents for inspection: to her beautiful mother, in her late twenties at the beginning of the century and always perfectly turned out, with flowers in her hats and feather boas around her neck; and to her father, not handsome but also impeccably dressed, with his taste for fine suits and shoes and his professional knowledge of textiles. Like other privileged girls of this place and time, Madge is dressed as she grows up “as a pale and meagre version of [her] mother.” But at this young age, when her parents summon her to their drawing room, a nursemaid helps her slip a special pinafore over her ordinary day dress. It is made of white muslin, edged with Valenciennes lace, and threaded with blue ribbons that bubble up into voluptuous bows on her shoulders. For a moment, in this garment, she is transformed—suffused with pleasure and self-confidence.

This fragile, awkward, defective child, called “charmless” by her parents, grew into a woman who organized her life around such moments of transformation, around the experience and display of physical elegance. She became a woman of high polish and even, in Virginia Woolf’s estimation, “rather excessive charm.” In her twenties, she took her graceless figure and remade it, learning how to stand and move and dress, and she made a career in which flawless posture had meaning. She took her paucity of formal education and invented a life in style to compensate herself. And she renamed herself, at Gertrude Stein’s suggestion. Discarding her family name and taking the floral, pretty surname of an ex-husband whose name she had refused when she married him, she became Madge Garland: a hyperfeminine but tough embodiment of the world of haute couture. She became a woman who rejected all training in docility, but outfitted herself to look as if she were no threat. She became an “intellectual devotee of
couture
,” who was nevertheless often seen as the incarnation of trivial nothingness—a “meringue,” as one colleague put it. “A bunch of froth,” said another. She became a public figure whose organization of her life around self-display was bound up with a need to actively, continually conceal herself.

In her twenties, she ran away from home to become an apprentice journalist at British
Vogue
, then a magazine in which couture took a distant second place to flattery of the upper classes. She helped transform it into a forum for high fashion and high art, a mingling that seems self-evident now, but was a revelation to readers then and was resisted by Condé Nast and his managers as dangerously uncommercial. With her mentor and lover, Dorothy Todd, then the editor of British
Vogue
, Madge Garland helped make the magazine a place for writers and visual artists including Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell, as well as Stein, Picasso, Proust, Cocteau, and Matisse. Coming into her own as a fashion journalist around the Bloomsbury group and with avant-garde writers and artists in Paris, Madge Garland made herself new in ways that had everything to do with the modernist valorization of novelty and mingling of art and the decorative arts. Knowledgeable about the history of costume, she often said that she had been “ideally cast” as a fashion editor because she invariably “thought that this year’s clothes [were] prettier than last.” To the end of her life, she was riveted by whatever was most contemporary: “I have always been a sucker for something new,” she told an interviewer in the 1970s. She also made herself a trained observer whose professionalism, like her experience of fashion and of modernity, was inseparable from her feminism—her need to break away from her family, to repudiate a world of strictures about how she should live and of low expectations about what she could accomplish.

This was a woman who played a defining but still obscured role in almost every aspect of the English fashion industry in the interwar and postwar years. In the 1930s, as the fashion editor of other women’s magazines in London, and then again at British
Vogue
, she promoted and dissected high fashion with intelligent wit. A symbol of effortless elegance, she also wrote about fashionable dress as a world of work, rather than as the natural exhalations of some enduring femininity. After the Second World War, she created the country’s first school of fashion design, was a consultant to the textile industry, advised the government on schemes to coordinate art and industry, and wrote book after book on fashion and beauty.

Near the end of her life, however, she told a reporter, “I was never really that interested in fashion, but I wanted to be financially independent.” Asserting that her work had been nothing more than a means to make a living was a way to express her anger that fashion had been one of the few fields in which a woman of her social class could find “respectable” work. It was a way to reiterate her sense of injury that her father had denied her the higher education she wanted and kept her unqualified for any other profession. It was an opportunity, too, to criticize her father’s work as an importer of textiles and women’s clothing. Yet Madge Garland was not shy about her expertise, nor about the idea that such a sphere of knowledge existed. “She believes in knowing things,” wrote a journalist in the 1950s, “and the caprice and whimsies of some women of fashion have no place in her life or personality.” Yet if she herself believed that she knew more than most about her field, she also held that what most women felt about clothes was important.

By dismissing her interest in fashion, she was both bowing to the idea of fashion as a trivial field of endeavor and preempting it. In fact, she was acknowledging that an argument about “importance” was at the heart of that industry and one of the engines of her own life. In her meticulous, unsentimental journalism, she grappled with this issue, grasped the world of haute couture as popular entertainment, and presented herself as a character in that story—a participant-observer, expert but amused, often self-mocking. Her denial, her investment, her constant refining of surfaces both sartorial and rhetorical—all have to do with how she looked: what she saw, what she looked like, what it meant to look like her, like someone to look at. Looking at her now means remembering modernism not just as the thrill of new ways of writing and painting but as a whole set of experiments in fields that are still understood as secondary: interior decoration, textiles, bookmaking and bookselling, magazine publishing, as well as fashion—so-called minor arts that provided a range of expression for and were significantly shaped by women who were breaking away from their families and attempting to create something new in their lives and in the culture. Madge Garland lived these experiments her whole life, well beyond the modernist moment, however it is defined.

“Fashion can be a mask to cover imaginative poverty, and is often the antithesis of individual taste,” she wrote in the 1960s, “but it can also become a weapon to establish a distinctive personality.” It is an assertion that says everything about her own battle to establish herself. “She really was a rebel,” a friend observed, “but in many ways such an unlikely looking rebel.” Like many of the women who shaped and were changed by the iconoclasm of the first decades of the twentieth century, Madge Garland also sought safety. She needed financial security, since she had no independent income and was never supported by a husband. The world she moved in demanded respectability, particularly for those who did not quite belong, but her social standing was always precarious. Conspicuously, wittily well dressed, she wanted to be admired by all, but desired by women, and she lived alone or with another woman for most of her life. Although she lived in London for nine decades, she was born in Australia and therefore seen as an outsider in England. Even after her death, the rumor or hint of someplace else about her persisted, and a sense that she had tried to hide her origins, along with an English scorn for un-English origins. She made sure that the facts were clear to almost no one: One old friend was sure that her family had moved to London from the Hebrides, or perhaps South Africa. Rumors of sexual scandal also persisted her whole life. In response to this pressure, she produced a style that was at once correct and distinctive, that played on correctness and was something more than correct: a bold performance. And she practiced an intense social discipline. Madge was a “kitten,” said Mercedes de Acosta, who had “a dynamic drive hidden under all those blue bows and ruffles.” Rebecca West, a friend for more than fifty years, called her “an exquisite piece of porcelain,” but knew how strong she was.

An autodidact of the fiercest sort, Madge Garland was also perceived as someone of little substance or enduring interest: “She was undoubtedly a fascinating person—I mean really fascinating,” said one of her closest friends, “but she has left no monument.” He was trying to imagine both how she could be worthy of a biography and what materials one would use to tell her story. She herself did not believe that she had a legacy, but in old age, at the urging of friends, one of them an accomplished biographer, she tried to write a memoir. She wanted to tell a story of adversity surmounted, of professional success. She produced a number of antiseptic, jaunty, repetitive pages. She left out names, some of the most important parts of her life, huge stretches of time and feeling. She veiled or rewrote even the most apparently straightforward details about her birth and schooling. She could hardly get past the moment when she defied her father and left home to get a job—a huge wrench for a young woman of her background in 1920.

Clothes fade away and they are not easy to archive. “Fashion is both ephemeral and personal,” she wrote in 1951, “it cannot be preserved. At most, the husk of a garment is left, a sloughed-off empty skin. Each dress may be said to die with its wearer, and the smart dress of to-day is only a crumpled curiosity to-morrow—soiled and worn.” But Madge Garland knew how clothes—the experience of wearing them well or poorly, of looking at oneself and being looked at with rapture or scorn—could lodge in the memory and in the body, and in advanced old age she could recall the look and texture of clothes she had worn as a young child and the energy associated with them. Describing the outfit in which her nanny had dressed her when she was required to present herself to her parents, she wrote, “Never in all my life—and I have been privileged to be dressed by Chanel, Dior, Patou, Schiaparelli, Lanvin, Jacques Fath, etc—has any garment given me the feeling of absolute self confidence that…muslin, beribboned and lace frilled pinafore gave me as I put it on over my everyday dress.”

Repudiating so much, she still inclined to optimism and desire. Strict with herself and others, she was stalwart in friendship and open to romance until the end. In a draft of her memoir, she wrote that she fell in love for the first time at age five, “a state in which I have remained all my life, only the objects have varied from time to time.” Like the leaning, leaping people in the photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, those figures who seem to be launching themselves into modernity, Madge Garland was always wanting more, wanting now, wanting what happens next.

So look at her. Look at her in a beige satin, drop-waist Chanel dress, around her neck a long rope of pearls and a multicolor, hand-block-printed silk scarf by Sonia Delaunay that she “cherished.” It is the South of France in the late 1920s.

Look at her posing for the fledgling Cecil Beaton, her own modernity placed against his self-consciously modern backdrops (cellophane, props, faux-“futuristic” painting): her blond hair shingled, her eyebrows the thinnest pencil line, two strands of pearls around her neck, an enormous flower pinned to the metallic sheen of her outfit.

Look at her “beautifully dressed in logical suits and illogical blouses,” circa August 1945. On her head, “an insane Hat.” With her piercing blue eyes and “sophisticated pink and white make-up” she looks like a painting by her friend Marie Laurencin.

Look at her in her late seventies “wearing a Marimekko dress and yards of huge pearls,” or wrapped in a knitted mohair coat of dusty but vivid aquamarine, still making people look up and the restaurant hum with interest as she pauses at its entrance.

And look at her well into her eighties out in the Kensington High Street, “looking absolutely marvelous” even on a bitter cold day. Or at lunch at the Reform Club in “the most beautiful mauve wool outfit.” Or out at Harvey Nichols, where she is looking intently through the racks of clothes, studying them, said an acquaintance who watched her from afar, “as if she were a scholar in an archive.”