Mercedes de Acosta

Mercedes de Acosta (March 1, 1892 – May 9, 1968) was an American poet, playwright, and novelist. Although she failed to achieve artistic and professional distinction, de Acosta is known for her many lesbian affairs with celebrated Broadway and Hollywood personalities including Alla Nazimova, Isadora Duncan, Eva Le Gallienne, and Marlene Dietrich. Her best-known involvement was with Greta Garbo with whom, in 1931, she began a sporadic and volatile romance. Her 1960 memoir, Here Lies the Heart, is considered part of gay history insofar that it hints at the lesbian element in some of her relationships.

She was born in New York City on March 1, 1892. Her father, Ricardo de Acosta, was born in Cuba to Spanish parents, and later immigrated to the United States. Her mother, Micaela Hernández de Alba y de Alba, was Spanish and allegedly a descendant of the Spanish Dukes of Alba. De Acosta had five siblings: Aida, Ricardo Jr., Angela, Maria, and Rita. Maria married the socially prominent landscape architect A. Robeson Sargent, son of Harvard botanist Charles Sprague Sargent. Rita became a famous beauty known as Rita Lydig. De Acosta attended elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament on West 79th Street in Manhattan to learn "feminine ways," where Dorothy Parker was a classmate. While there, she met two lesbian nuns, and took on the task to deliver notes between them, and even stood guard in the corridors for them.

De Acosta married painter Abram Poole (January 12, 1882 – May 24, 1961) in 1920. They divorced in 1935.

She was described in 1955 by Garbo biographer, John Bainbridge, as "a woman of courtly manners, impeccable decorative taste and great personal elegance ... a woman with a passionate and intense devotion to the art of living ... and endowed with a high spirit, energy, eclectic curiosity and a varied interest in the arts."

De Acosta was involved in numerous lesbian relationships with Broadway's and Hollywood's elite, and she did not attempt to hide her sexuality; her uncloseted existence was rare and daring in her generation. De Acosta is often associated with The Sewing Circle, an informal network of lesbian and bisexual female writers and actresses, who socialized and supported each other; most participants were closeted, unlike de Acosta. In 1916, she began an affair with actress Alla Nazimova, and later with dancer Isadora Duncan. Shortly after marrying Abram Poole in 1920, de Acosta became involved in a five-year relationship with actress Eva Le Gallienne. De Acosta wrote two plays for Le Gallienne, Sandro Botticelli and Jehanne de Arc. After the financial failures of both plays they ended their relationship.

Over the next decade, she was involved with several famous actresses and dancers, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Ona Munson, and Russian ballerina Tamara Platonovna Karsavina. Additional unsubstantiated rumors include affairs with Tallulah Bankhead, Pola Negri, Eleonora Duse, Katherine Cornell, and Alice B. Toklas. An annoyed Bankhead regularly dubbed de Acosta as "Countess Dracula" following their alleged affair, due to her appearance and fashion as she was "notorious for walking the streets of New York in mannish pants, pointed shoes trimmed with buckles, tricorn hat, and cape" and a "chalk white face, deep-set eyes, thin red lips, and jet black hair." Rumors say de Acosta once stated, "I can get any woman away from any man," but there is no evidence to substantiate this claim.

An ardent liberal, de Acosta was committed to several political causes. Concerned about the Spanish Civil War, which began in 1936, for example, she supported the Republican government that opposed the Nationalist faction. A tireless advocate for women's rights, she wrote in her memoir, "I believed...in every form of independence for women and I was...an enrolled worker for women's suffrage."

She also became a vegetarian and, out of respect for animals, refused to wear furs.