Loving Garbo: The Story of Greta Garbo, Cecil Beaton, and Mercedes de Acosta

by Hugo Vickers

Drawing on previously unpublished letters and manuscripts, an intimate portrait of the chic bisexual world of Hollywood, Europe, and New York captures the complex relationship that existed among Greta Garbo, playwright Mercedes de Acosta, and photographer Cecil Beaton. 15,000 first printing.

Genres: Biography, Film, Nonfiction

333 pages, Hardcover

First published April 27, 1994

About the author

Hugo Vickers is a writer and broadcaster, who has written biographies of many twentieth century figures, including the Queen Mother, Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough, Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh, a study of Greta Garbo, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece, and his book, The Private World of The Duke and Duchess of Windsor was illustrated with pictures from their own collection. Mr Vickers’s book, The Kiss: The Story of an Obsession won the 1996 Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction.

Reviews

[Marlon Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the title, you might be led to believe it's about Garbo but this is really about Cecil Beaton and Mercedes De Acosta, two artists who loved Garbo. Their letters are intriguing. We see how they view the great moviestar. Even though they've had romantic relationships with Garbo, their letters show they're still fans. They are almost always in awe when talking about her beauty and when they become angry at the woman's reclusive nature, their anger is more about Garbo shunning her stardom and less about the star fading away from their lives. We see how their relationships with Garbo transform their lives for better or worse but the woman remains untouchable.

[Christopher Roth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have not read Hugo Vickers' gigantic biography of Cecil Beaton, but it seems clear from the front matter and other clues here that this book constitutes a loose end of material that was left over from writing the biography because it didn't quite fit in. Namely, that the triangle between Beaton and Garbo and Mercedes de Acosta worked as a story in itself but required digression into Mercedes' and Garbo's lives that would have been out of place in an already unwieldy story--and the triangle here can also be extended to include Marlene Dietrich, Georges Schlee, and Valentina Schlee in the bisexual polygon, though Garbo-Beaton is the narrative center of the book. Vickers was probably able to toss this one off fairly quickly, since Beaton's diary-keeping and letter-writing (and -copies-of-keeping) mean that it largely writes itself; sometimes pages and pages of Beaton's diary excerpts go by to the point that I forget I'm not reading a book by Beaton. This makes the book lopsided, because Garbo's estate, if I recall correctly (I now can't find the passage where he mentions this), forbids direct quotation of her letters. So the other half of the Garbo-Beaton affair is documented, but can only be paraphrased here. This does nothing to pierce her legend as an elusive hermit, but it's also clear that she wrote much less to him than he wrote to her, and for months at a time he would write streams of text to her daily and she would respond only with one-sentence notes or telegrams, if anything. Is this because she simply wasn't a literary person, or because she never loved Beaton as much as he loved her (that much is clear anyway), or, as I rather suspect, because, as a person generally, she didn't have much to say for herself? Some people don't you know (this is not true of all iconic film sex symbols, by the way: Marilyn Monroe, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, and Josephine Baker had plenty to say for themselves), and some such people use elusiveness and silence as camouflage. Put another way: Garbo was perhaps not all that bright or interesting; her reclusiveness makes that hard to evaluate, which is perhaps as she planned it. That's no discredit to her, but it makes her cult followers look a bit sillier, to the extent that it's true. Indeed, why then did Beaton, a very public and very social and very literary and wordy person, fall in love with her and devote years to her physically and decades to her mentally and emotionally? That's the unanswered question in this book, which I think Vickers is too close to his subject to imagine the reader asking, and it is related to the other elephant in the room, to wit: wait a minute, wasn't Cecil Beaton gay?? Well, yes and no, and that makes us ask questions about him and his love for Garbo that we wouldn't ask of someone in today's more enlightened and tolerant era. In early and mid 20th-century Britain and Hollywood, being a professional aesthete (he was a photographer and costume designer, among other things) and being a gay man were, by cultural expectation and in reality, heavily overlapping categories: aesthetically inclined men of a certain type were drawn professionally into a gay male social world and adopted gay mannerisms, and it was also a kind of profession that gay men gravitated to (these things also being true, but less predictably or consistently, today). This makes it hard to determine what Beaton's "true," "underlying" sexual orientation was, if there even can be such a thing independent of cultural context. Was he a bisexual who slept with men mostly and was "professionally" culturally gay but the love of whose life happened to be a woman (some would argue Peter Watson, only glancingly mentioned here, shared that distinction in his life)? Or was he a heterosexual who just found it easier to sleep with men because of what his professional and social worlds were? Or was he a gay man whose "love" for Garbo was really merely a childishly poeticized elaboration of his reverence for her physical beauty and his fanboy obsession with her iconic-ness? The answer is probably a mix of these, and keep in mind that we wouldn't ask--and wouldn't have to ask--this if Beaton were a young man today, because fluid, category-defying identities (that perhaps in a better world would come more easily to most of us) are less stigmatized and easier to maintain than in his day, when sexual nonconformity was permitted in certain contexts but was channeled into a small number of preconceived categories. But I do lean toward the third option--a gay man who was just a fanboy besotted by Garbo's eyelashes and cheekbones and wanted the prize of her physical surrender as though it were an objet d'art for his mantelpiece. This conclusion is supported, I think, by the fact that Beaton and Garbo (and most of the people in this book--except Marlene; I like her best) come off as unbearably selfish and shallow people. Beaton sometimes resembles unkind stereotypes of gay men when he, for example, interweaves his bitchiness about Garbo not returning his phone calls with bitchiness about her new hairstyle or the tacky décor in her lover Georges Schlee's apartment; this of course is not because he was gay, it's because he was shallow and superficial. Beaton and Garbo made each other miserable for a large chunk of their lives; reading this, it's hard not to feel that they kind of deserved each other.

[Jennifer Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good book worth a read If intrested in Garbo, not the best work I've read from Hugo Vicker's.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was okay. Another title could be: Stringing People Along - The Greta Garbo Story. Or Toying with People's Emotions- The Greta Garbo Story.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you are completely mesmerized by the legend of Greta Garbo this may not be the book for. It sheds light on her years after leaving acting- - her relations with Cecil Beaton and the seemingly strong attachment she had with the married man who appeared to control her life until his death. Much "dish" about Dietrich, Stiller, and others. According to this she could never actually make decisions for herself, frequently cancelled or just showed up without warning, cut her friends even if she even suspected they had "betrayed" her. She spent most of her time worrying about her various ailments - real or imagin. She was selfish and total self-involved. It was kind of a sad ending sor such a totally beautiful presence on the screen. And she never said "I vant to be alone" - it was "I vant to be left alone".

[Loren]

Gossipy and predictably Beaton-biased since Hugo Vickers is Beaton's literary executor and draws extensively from his letters and diaries. DNF.