A self-defined ‘seductress of beautiful women’ and the by-product of an immense fortune, lesbian activist Mercedes de Acosta (born in 1892) was descended from Spain’s Dukes of Alba and a beneficiary of the best education and best social skills that her parents’ Gilded Age fortune could buy. From her perch within the aristocracy of the Belle Époque, and continuing as an arts-industry ‘swinger’ until her death in 1968, she became notorious for seducing-and describing to socialites on both sides of the Atlantic-at least a dozen women who fast-evolved into the most widely publicized and romantically ‘unattainable’ celebrities in the world.
During her heyday-the sexually permissive ‘Pre-Code’ free-for-all of the Silent Screen and Hollywood’s early talkies-her lovers included the self-enchanted silent screen mogul, Nazimova; the ‘live fast and die young’ tragedienne Jeanne Eagels; the blue-blooded aristocrat of the Jazz Age Broadway stage, Katharine Cornell; the most famous film goddess of the 30s and early 40s (Greta Garbo); and at least a dozen others. Within the deeply entrenched, phobically closeted lesbian circles of America’s mid-century, Mercedes become quirkily famous as ‘Hollywood’s Greatest Lover.’
One of her paramours, the German-born bisexual Marlene Dietrich, put Mercedes’ promiscuous indiscretions into context: ‘During Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919-1933), in Paris, London, Berlin, and in the dives and cabarets of Hollywood and New York, promiscuity was rampant and without any particular preference for any specific gender.’
In 1960, Mercedes published a ‘watered down’ memoir (Here Lies the Heart) that instantly became notorious. In it, she ‘outed’ many of her same-sex partners. A few years later-aging, crippled, blind in one eye, and desperately in need of money, she sold, for publication, some of the love letters addressed to her decades ago from, among others, Greta Garbo. And near the end of her life, within his home (historic Magnolia House on Staten Island), she was frank, unvarnished, and unapologetic during extensive interviews with film historian Darwin Porter, the co-author of this book.
Suspecting that one day he might pass on some of the secrets she revealed, she cautioned him, ‘Don’t be vulgar, dear, and promise me that you won’t publish anything while my friends are still alive.’
Porter honored her request by waiting until 2020 to release this astonishing insight into the underground lesbian contexts of the stage, screen, and publishing scenes of the first half of ‘The American Century.’ No other book has ever interconnected so many dots. No one, until now, has ever had the courage.
Tabela de Conteúdo
Chapter 1
Mercedes de Acosta– Muse, Mentor, Enabler, & Seductress of Her Era’s Most Famous Women. Here Lies the Heart
Chapter 2
A Tale of Two Sisters- How Mercedes De Acosta and her Richer, More Beautiful Sister, Rita Hernández de Alba de Acosta Stokes Lydig, Moved Within the Upper Echelons of Gilded-Age ‘Fin de Siècle’
Chapter 3
Eleanora Duse– Italy’s Belle-Époque Answer to Sarah Bernhardt
Chapter 4
Isadora Duncan, The Goddess of Modern Dance
Chapter 5
Eva Le Gallienne– One of Broadway’s Most Admired Grande Dames
Chapter 6
Nazimova: Empress of the Silent Screen: Self-Enchanted, Imperial, & Unforgettable
Chapter 7
Jean Acker & Natacha Rambova– Mercedes’ Seductions of Rudolph Valentino’s Wives.
Chapter 8
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas– Mercedes’ Affair with the World’s Most Celebrated Lesbian Couple
Chapter 9
Tallulah Bankhead and Hope Williams: The Venus’s Flytrap from Alabama & ‘The Darling She-Devil’
Chapter 10
Jeanne Eagels– Uninhibited, Beautiful, & Doomed.
Chapter 11
RAIN-America’s Obsession with Girls You’d Never Bring Home to Mother.
.
Chapter 12
Katharine Cornell & Guthrie Mc Clintic-‘The Happiest Married Homosexual Couple of the Theater World.’
.
Chapter 13
Mercedes’ Mania For Celebrities of the Belle Epoque and mid-20th Century.
Chapter 14
Greta Garbo– ‘The Face of the 20th Century.’
Chapter 15
Marlene Dietrich-The 20th Century’s Femme Fatale
Chapter 16
Ona Munson-Mercedes’ Torrid Affair with Belle Watling, Gone With the Wind’s Kind-Hearted Hooker
Authors & Scribes
Darwin Porter & Danforth Prince
Sobre o autor
Danforth Prince sustained a long and widely traveled career as a researcher and co-author of many editions of the FROMMER GUIDES, once one of the planet’s premier travel guidebook series. . Today, he presides over Blood Moon Productions, a feisty independent press devoted to celebrities who used to consume the imagination of the American public. Master of many trades and talents, always with a fascination for personalities who influenced the course of history, he’s also the Innkeeper for Magnolia House Saint George.com, a historic, arts-oriented and ‘celebrity-centric’ Air Bnb on Staten Island in New York City.
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