Gal on the go.

Hamer, Diane Ellen

That Furious Lesbian: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by Robert A. Shanke Southern Illinois Univ. Press. 210 pages (illustrated), $45.

MERCEDES de Acosta was a star fucker. She was lovers with Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Isadora Duncan, Eva Le Gallienne, and an assortment of lesser-known actresses, but she has remained a footnote in history because she didn't have any lasting talent of her own. Early in her life she showed some promise as a playwright, but she had only a few plays produced and none was well received. De Acosta was born in 1893 to a wealthy Spanish-Cuban family, in New York City, and had all the privileges of money and status. She found the theatre community when she was quite young and remained enthralled and ensnared by it all her life. She desperately wanted to find fame as a playwright or poet, and eventually tried her hand in Hollywood as a screenwriter, but again had little success. She was thwarted at every turn by a rival, Salka Viertel, an emigre writer who made a side career out of stealing jobs and lovers from Mercedes.

As time went by, Mercedes apparently went through her fortune, but she managed to continue to travel the world, seeking spiritual guidance in India and stalking Greta Garbo in the U.S. She managed to know or befriend hundreds of celebrities and was lovers with many of them. Truman Capote said she was his trump card in his friends' version of "six degrees of separation." Via Mercedes, he remarked, "you could get to anyone from Cardinal Spellman to the Duchess of Windsor." One of her major contributions to posterity is a group of photographs she took of Garbo, topless, while they were on vacation. At least they provide proof of their relationship--and of Garbo's bisexuality. To her credit, Mercedes never shrank from being a public lesbian, long before it was accepted or fashionable--even though, like many women of her day, she had a sham marriage (which eventually ended when her husband wanted a wife who would actually love and live with him).

Robert Shanke has written a thin biography of Mercedes de Acosta in That Furious Lesbian. Books like The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood (2000) have already covered Mercedes' life and loves in considerable detail. Shanke does, however, give a heartbreaking picture of her last pathetic days, when she was broke and dying in New York City. Even former lovers who were still alive and residing nearby wouldn't come to her aid. She had alienated them all by writing an autobiography entitled Here Lies the Heart (1960), which Eva Le Gallienne is rumored to have dubbed as "Here are the Lies, Lies, Lies."

That Furious Lesbian should have been a better book, especially since Shanke had access to people who knew Mercedes as well as to her manuscript collection. Although Shanke tries to make a case for Mercedes' good qualities, which included an unbelievable resiliency, he ends up portraying a clingy, dependent, stubborn woman. At any rate, the essence of Mercedes refuses to come through in this book. Shanke quotes from her poetry--far too much, in fact; and because of restrictions on using quotations from letters she received from friends and lovers, he has to paraphrase these documents. He spends too much time speculating about conversations and encounters between Mercedes and her lovers, another factor that contributes to the disappointing result. If it was her sex life that put Mercedes de Acosta on the map, it will take a more intimate "tell all" book to bring Mercedes to life.