#marlene deitrich
Isabel Duncan to her lover, Mercedes De Acosta, 1927…
Beneath a forehead
Broad & Bright
Shine Eyes
Clear wells
of light–
A Slender Body
Soft-Hard-White
To be the Source
Of my delight–
Two sprouting breasts
round & Sweet
Invite my hungry
mouth to Eat
from whence two
nipples–firm &
pink persuade my
thirsty soul to drink
& lower still
a Secret place
where I’d fain
hide my burning face
Arch Angel
from Another Sphere
God Sent to
light my pathway
here
I kneel in Adoration
dear
My kisses like a swarm of Bees
Would find Their way
between thy knees
& suck the honey
of thy lips
Embracing thy
Two slender hips
De Acosta was an average writer whose poems were seldom read and whose plays were seldom performed–but she did one thing better than any of the successful artists she called friends: “I can get any woman from any man.”
Alice B. Toklas observed, “Say what you want you will about Mercedes, she’s had the most important women of the twentieth century.”
These were not love ‘em and leave ‘em relationships; her affairs blazed with passion. Isadora Duncan came after stage actress Eva La Gallienne who, while touring, wrote three to four love letters to De Acosta everyday. Marlene Dietrich sent bouquets of roses and carnations at nearly the same rate when she fell for DeAcosta early in the 1930s. The accompanying cards always concluded: “I kiss your beautiful hands and your heart.”
In Greta Garbo, however, she met her match, and De Acosta never regained her reputation as the outrageous lesbian vamp. The pair did well at first, vacationing together, sunbathing in the nude, but Garbo would not play the supporting part in a relationship. She sometimes treated De Acosta as a servant, sending her to buy groceries, having her scout real estate properties. After a dozen years of occasional romance, Garbo declared her famous “I vant to be alone” and permanently ended the relationship. This was something De Acosta would not accept: “You belong to me,” she wrote. “Some things just belong to other things.”
Garbo belonged to no one. De Acosta pined for the rest of her life and died in poverty after her 75th birthday.
She had sent word, on her deathbed, asking Garbo to come say goodbye. The request was ignored.
(Additional sources: Robert Schanke and The Rosenbach Museum, Philadelphia.)
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