![]() Greta Garbo as Anna Karenina and John Gilbert as Alexei Vronsky in a scene from the silent movie Love (1927). Mercedes was known for her sexual skill and Garbo for “the unbounded freedom of her life.” After finishing Susan Lenox that summer, Garbo took Mercedes to a cabin on an island in a lake in the High Sierras, where they swam, caught fish, talked, and began an affair. Once Salka introduced Mercedes to Garbo in July 1931, Garbo initially fell for this aristocrat, with her tales of famous friends, knowledge of Eastern religions, and skill at sex. When Nazimova came to Hollywood in 1916 to act in films, she formed a Sapphic circle, which some say was called “the sewing circle.” Isadora Duncan wrote passionate poems to Mercedes, extolling her sexual ability and writing paeans to her beautiful white hands. She had had affairs with prominent female performers, including Isadora Duncan, a founder of modern dance, who promoted dress reform the English actress Eva La Gallienne, with whom she exchanged wedding rings and the Russian actress Alla Nazimova. Mercedes knew the two great dramatic actresses of the turn of the twentieth century: Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Not long after she met Mercedes, Garbo consulted Bieler and became a vegetarian. Henry Bieler, who promoted vegetarianism. And Mercedes always knew about the latest healers and remedies. Mercedes studied Hindu and Buddhist texts and followed Eastern mystics her knowledge of Eastern religions was part of her attraction to Garbo, who continually looked for a spiritual path and never seemed to find one. Cecil Beaton called her “a furious lesbian.” She interpreted those ideas as suggesting that everyone has a masculine and a feminine side. Discovering her mistake devastated her, until she formed romantic friendships with girls and studied ancient Greek ideas of sex. Until she was seven and saw the male sex organ, she thought she was a boy. Mercedes lived a dramatic life, engaging in what Cecil Beaton called “glorious enthusiasms.” She also had periods of deep depression. Close to Cecil Beaton, she provided him with information about Garbo to use in his writing about her, until he and Garbo became close friends in the late 1940s. Mercedes wore only black and white clothes, so Garbo and Salka called her “Black and White.” Aldous Huxley described her as “a small but most exquisite woman, both in features and figure, and in the manner of her dress.” She was five feet four inches tall. Mercedes dyed her hair black, painted her face white, and wore blood-red lipstick-prompting some people to call her “Madame Dracula.” Garbo liked the coat so much that she had a copy of it made for her. She was also known for wearing a dark coat fitted at the waist, with wide lapels and a full skirt, designed by the Paris couturier Paul Poiret. ![]() She often wore capes, tricorne hats, and pointed shoes with silver buckles on them, looking like a pirate. Like Rita, Mercedes wore distinctive clothing, but she had her own style. She followed Rita into feminism, working for women’s suffrage and then for the Lucy Stone League, formed to persuade women to keep their maiden names after marriage, following the example of Lucy Stone, a leader in the nineteenth-century U.S. In 1914 Vogue featured her as a New York debutante, and in 1920 she married Abram Poole, a New York society painter. Raised a Catholic, Mercedes attended Catholic schools. Rita introduced Mercedes to her famous friends: the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Jack and Ethel Barrymore of the famed Barrymore acting family, and others. Salka had been a successful actress in Berlin, but she was rarely cast in roles in Hollywood films she was, she said, “too old” and “not beautiful enough.” ![]() Fox studios had hired Berthold, a writer and director known in Germany. ![]() Salka had come to Hollywood in 1928 from Berlin, at the age of thirty-one, with her husband, Berthold, and their three sons, David, Peter, and Christopher. Salka, who was sixteen years older than Garbo, found her “hypersensitive, although of a steely resistance,” while her opinions about people were “just, sharp, and objective.” Garbo and Salka spent most of the evening talking on the terrace. In April 1930, a year after she and Gilbert parted, she found a new coach at a party at the director Ernst Lubitsch’s home, a center for the Hollywood German community, where she met Salka Viertel, a Berlin stage actress. At the dawn of the 1930s their relationship was over, but Garbo’s star remained on the rise.Īfter the break with John Gilbert, Garbo had no acting coach. She was in a relationship with her frequent co-star John Gilbert, who also served as her acting coach. ![]() Greta Garbo began her acting career in her native Sweden and moved to Hollywood in 1925, where she quickly became one of the industry’s most beloved stars. ![]()
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