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EPISODE 4: DIETRICH, GARBO & OLD LIES

LISTEN: SOUNDCLOUD / iTUNES / GOOGLE PLAY

NOTES: We got a microphone for phone recordings and I learned editing. What a world.

SOURCES: listed at end of transcript

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I'm Jack and this is “Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories”. This week we're going to be talking about Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, and the so called “sewing circle” that constituted them and other queer women in early Hollywood. Before I get to that, though, I wanted to apologize for the very, very late episode. Life happened all at once with a million little fires to put out, so I had to reprioritize for a minute. I'm back now, though, and hopefully from here on in, it'll be smooth sailing and weekly episodes again. Thanks for sticking with me!

So, I wanted to start this week's episode out by talking about Katharine Hepburn, even though she isn't going to be the main focus. In our episode on Dorothy Arzner, I mentioned that my second favorite Katharine Hepburn story was the one where Arzner saw her up a tree and decided to cast her in Christopher Strong. I think it's time for my all-time favorite Kate story. I read this little tidbit in Gene Tierney's autobiography Self Portrait – definitely a recommended read, by the way. So, when Gene first came to Hollywood, she was introduced to Howard Hughes. Unlike most of the women that were introduced to him, she didn't start a sexual relationship with him, and instead he acted as a sort of patron to her – he very famously helped her get the best care for her daughter when she was born with some pretty severe congenital defects, but he also got her brother a summer job at his aircraft company. Butch Tierney flew out from the east coast and worked there for a summer, and he only met Hughes once. Hughes comes walking in one night when Butch is busy burning the midnight oil, and he's got this scraggly little street urchin with him. Butch honest to God thinks that Hughes has a little boy with him, and can't figure out why. They have a conversation, something quick to the effect of, “Well, Butch, how do you like the job?” “Fine, sir, just fine.” “Wonderful!” And Hughes leaves, the grubby ragamuffin in tow.

And then, later, Butch found out that the little boy was actually Katharine Hepburn.

Now, I tell this story because I want to examine Hepburn's androgyny as compared to the overt sexuality of Dietrich and the glamor of Garbo. I feel like all of these women had a certain androgynous quality to them, or at least something a little masculine mixed in with their femininity, but I think personally that Hepburn was the one that exuded that quality the most. Now, Hepburn is the only American of these three – she's actually from Connecticut, which is where I was raised. She was born on May 12, 1907 and she was a very affluent, educated young woman. She only married once, but she was romantically linked to people like Spencer Tracy and our boy Howard Hughes. I think it's kind of interesting that people whispered about her being primarily attracted to women, and she's linked up to these men who were thought to be bisexual.

The thing about Hepburn and Hughes being together that I want to point out, though, is that Hughes was attracted to her because she wasn't like most of the other starlets that he attached himself to. She was active, she was vibrant. She very deliberately dressed comfortably in trousers and never really went in for the glitz that was in vogue at the time. She was a golfer and she loved the outdoors – when Spencer Tracy first met her, he wasn't all that thrilled with the dirt under her fingernails and thought she was a lesbian. Shocker. And, you know, whatever kind of same-sex relationships Hepburn had in the past, it was really clear that she loved Tracy and wanted to take care of him and be there for him.

In any case, regardless of the nearly thirty-year relationship with Tracy, Hepburn is still the woman quoted as saying, “All men are poops.” I feel you, girlfriend. It's been posited that Hepburn fell more on the asexual scale, too; when it came to getting physical with her romantic partners, she notoriously disliked sex. I've found a source that says that when she said she didn't have a fling with John Ford, she wasn't lying, at least on a technicality. She was also a very private person, and as someone who grew up around a lot of well-bred Connecticut families, I don't think it's too far a stretch to say that this is something she definitely picked up from being around a bunch of tight-lipped, image-obsessed type of people. You know, here's a woman who's pretty consistently called the greatest actress of the 20th century, and she's rumored to have asked someone to get her some pretty brunnette escorts and liked to call herself “Jimmy”. In the end, she left most of her love-life and relationships a mystery – which is a fitting sort of thing for her to leave us with.

This brings us around to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. Garbo was born in Sweden on September 18, 1905. She's born into this pretty poor family, and she's really close to her father. She's this shy, sort of frumpy looking kid who just daydreams about getting out of the gray place that she remembers of her childhood. Her father died when she was 14, and it devastated her. She wanted to become an actress because she thought it would be posh, but she's kind of the misfit of her drama friends at the Royal Dramatic Theater's Acting School because she came from a poor family and she's a little strange. Our buddy Louis B Mayer brings her to America in 1925 because he gets fixated on her charm and her eyes, and if you've seen photos of Garbo, she really does have these beautiful, deep-set, striking eyes. She goes on to make a name for herself in silent films, and of course – she makes an even bigger name for herself in talkies.

Garbo is viewed as this other-worldly, beautiful, and tortured foreigner. People went nuts for her. There's a joke in the book The Sewing Circle about a husband and wife on their wedding night, and the groom says that he'll always be faithful, with one exception: Greta Garbo. And the wife turns to look at him and says, “Me, too.” She's also over at MGM Studios, and I don't know if I've really expressed yet that MGM was considered the 'prestige' studio. They did big budget pictures with big stars. They were the ones with people like Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, and Jean Harlow. MGM is the studio that gave us Gone With The Wind. I don't want to get too much into Garbo's filmography or I'd risk this episode turning into an IMDB entry, but I'll mention that she becomes known for playing women who make bad choices. She's lustful, she's dramatic, and she's one of the very few actors I've ever seen that could use their eyes to convey emotion without ever changing the expression on her face. She really is a sight to be seen.

So, if we hop on over to Paramount Studios, they're seeing Garbo's success and they start chomping at the bit. They want their own sexy European woman – which is really how the studios thought about their stars back then, they were just so much product – and their answer was Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich is, in a lot of ways, the opposite of Garbo. She was born four years earlier, on December 27, 1901 in Berlin. She's born into an affluent family – I think an article I read about her called it “Weirmacht nobility”, if I can recall – and she was going to become a concert violinist. She ends up as a chorus girl and works her way up to bit parts in German films, meeting her husband Rudolf Sieber along the way. They married in 1923, and she stayed in Germany until Josef Von Sternberg brings her to Hollywood in 1930, five years after Garbo, based on the success of The Blue Angel.

Dietrich is a little different than Garbo from the start. MGM made Garbo lose something like thirty pounds. They fixed her teeth and her hairline and plucked her eyebrows and gave her a full star treatment. Again, stars were really a product back then, and this is MGM fully marketing their product. You can see in photos of Garbo – she's a very stone-faced, cool-looking person, and she's got that voice! That husky, come-here-boy, voice. And then you have Dietrich. The woman oozes glamor. She's expressive. I like to think of her as expansive. She's totally in control of herself and everyone around her. I mean, this is the woman who wanted to take down the Third Reich by sneaking back into Germany and seducing Hitler. I'm not making that up. I think a lot of people point to her wild schemes like this – her answer to a problem was always 'sleep with it' – and they think she was some kind of unhinged sex maniac, but I think it's important to remember the times these two women were around in. Marlene was acutely aware of what she was capable of, and she knew what people would do for sex. She was using what she had to get what she wanted. I digress, but I also don't stand for people slut shaming dead actresses.

So, where does this leave us in our tale of the intersection of Garbo and Dietrich? The two claimed to never have met one another until 1945, at a party at Orson Welles' home. Welles was just beside himself – he wanted to be the one to introduce them. At this point, Garbo's success had started to plateau. She was pretty close to retirement, when she tucked in the edges of her already extremely closed-off private life and became a bit of a recluse. Dietrich's career was also at a plateau, but it was looking brighter, and she still had quite a few good films in her at that point. They're introduced to one another at the party, and Dietrich is radiant. She's excited. Dietrich says that Garbo is a goddess. Garbo mumbles, “Thank you” and walks away. Dietrich is pretty miffed about it. She passes a comment about Garbo's feet not being as big as everyone says, and everyone thinks that's the end of it.

The truth is: they didn't meet for the first time in 1945. They had actually met twenty years earlier when they both starred in a GW Pabst film called Die freudlosse Gasse, or “The Joyless Street”. The author Diana McClellan only noticed Dietrich after watching the film over and over – she couldn't identify Dietrich at first, because back when Dietrich was making movies in Berlin, she dyed her hair black. She's not credited in the movie, either, though Garbo has a title role. So, McClellan is watching this movie – and Dietrich and Garbo get pretty cozy in it. At one point, Garbo collapses into Dietrich's arms. Garbo would deny ever having met Dietrich before 1945 for the rest of her life, and it would take almost until Dietrich's death before she admitted that she had been in the movie, though she didn't for sure confirm anything about her relationship with Garbo.

So, why lie? McClellan posits a very convoluted answer involving Rudi Seiber's political affiliations, but she also points to Garbo's legendary secrecy. She was a very private person, so much so that if any of her friends spoke to the press about her, they were subsequently cut off from her life. Dietrich was a lot less careful about what she said, but I think it's worth noting that in a small world like mid-twenties German film, she might have felt more comfortable staying mum if Garbo did as well. In The Sewing Circle, Axel Madsen maintains that Dietrich and Garbo didn't meet until 1945, but he mentions that they shared a lover once they reached America: a writer named Mercedes de Acosta.

I had never heard of Mercedes de Acosta when I started digging into the research for this episode. She's a fascinating personality, and she ran with the likes of Dorothy Arzner and Salka Viertel – an Austrian actress and screenwriter who seemed to moonlight as a queer women's matchmaker and caretaker in early Hollywood. De Acosta was born in New York on March 1, 1893 to parents of Cuban and Spanish descent. De Acosta was the youngest of eight kids, and her mother dressed her up in masculine clothing and called her Rafael until one of the neighborhood boys asked to see what was between her legs. When Mercedes realized that she didn't have what the neighbor boy had, she demanded her mother to tell her the truth – was she a girl? She was devastated when her mother confirmed that she was, in fact, named Mercedes and not Rafael. And here we go back to this sort of androgyny, this kind of blurring of gender that occurs in these early queer women. Katharine Hepburn didn't like the word “lesbian” because she thought it was a word with very butch connotations – but still was a very masculine character herself. I keep thinking about this disconnect in the early 20th century, how people could engage in homosexual or homoromantic affairs but not ever consider themselves to actually be homosexuals. My roommate mentioned to me in a conversation a while back that so many people way back when didn't really have a word for what they were doing – it was just a thing they did. They didn't consider themselves “gay” the way that some people today identify with certain monikers. And to be sure, people like Josef von Sterberg went around telling actresses to definitely sleep with other women because it would make their art more believable, and maybe at least in Katharine Hepburn's case, she was so close to being asexual that she didn't want to pick a label because it would feel disingenuous – but this is all conjecture on my part.

So, Mercedes de Acosta. She's a writer, like I mentioned, mostly plays and a few novels. She eventually writes a memoir, which I'll get to in a little bit. She's introduced to Garbo through Salka Viertel in 1931, and she falls in love immediately. De Acosta is a bit of an anomaly, because, like Dorothy Arzner, she's out and she's proud. She has a husband, but they both know it's just to keep up appearances and they eventually divorce in 1935. Mercedes is so confident in her ability to snag any woman she wants that she brags about being able to get women away from their men. Besides Garbo and Dietrich, she has affairs with Pola Negri – who you might remember from our Valentino episode as the woman who threw herself onto his coffin when he passed away – Alla Nazimova, and the dancer Isadora Duncan. The Garbo thing, though – this is interesting – it's been said that the Garbo affair was “erratic” and volatile. This seems to be a pattern with Garbo, as I've heard the same thing said about her affair with John Gilbert – the only person who came close to marrying her, though she refused him over and over again. They would go through on-again, off-again phases, but they would remain more or less friends for thirty years.

Around 1940, de Acosta met Dietrich. Or, I should say, Dietrich found de Acosta sobbing under a table after hitting the skids with Garbo and they got together on the rebound. At this point, the two of them were lonely and dealing with their own issues, and that always makes for a pretty interesting combination. Dietrich, interestingly, preferred to have sex with women, but very tellingly said often, “You just can't live with a woman.” So she and Mercedes were also something of an on-again, off-again kind of thing. I think, in the grand scheme of the story, Mercedes and Garbo were the real item – and with Marlene being who she was, with her appetite for sex and her ability to find new lovers when the old one bored her, she ended up being the one that Mercedes would go to when things with Garbo weren't going so hot.

As these things go, Mercedes kept quiet about her relationships with Garbo and Dietrich until 1960. She was very ill, and she decided to publish her memoir under the title Here Lies the Heart. It comes out, and it doesn't hold back. A lot of people love the book, but Garbo officially breaks off their friendship. Now, remember, Garbo is the kind of person who would cut people off just for speaking to the press, so this isn't a huge surprise. One of Mercedes' former lovers, Eva Le Gallienne – sorry if I butcher that pronunciation, again, I don't speak French – goes ballistic and accuses her of making up stories. But not our good gal pal Marlene. Marlene double downs on their friendship and continues speaking to her regularly.

So, did Garbo and Dietrich deny knowing each other between 1925 and 1945 because of a tempestuous affair on the set of The Joyless Street? Did they decide to skirt one another because they were both involved with Mercedes de Acosta? Was it an insane Stalinist plot? I don't know. I like to think that it was some combination of the first two. Garbo seems to be a whirlwind, and Dietrich is cool as a cucumber. It probably wasn't a great mix. Combine that with the always convoluted queer dating pool, and it's a recipe for a personal disaster – but a wonderful hidden gem of queer Hollywood history.

Thank you for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This episode was written, recorded and researched by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a transcript of this episode and all of our episodes, along with some fun facts and photos, on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. We accept messages on both of those platforms, so feel free to shoot us any suggestions for show topics or comments you might have. We put out new episodes every Wednesday, and you can listen to us on SoundCloud, iTunes and Google Play, so don't forget to rate and subscribe to us! Thanks again to everyone for being patient with me while I work on my own life and bullshit. You're the real heroes. We'll be back on Wednesday with an episode about Cary Grant and his husband. You heard that right. See you next time!

SOURCES:

The Sewing Circle, Madsen, Axel, 1995

The Girls, Diana McClellan

Self Portrait, Tierney, Gene, 1979

Wikipedia. Yes, I am a lazy sack of crap.

#( TRANSCRIPTS & SHOW NOTES. )#( EPISODE 4. )#queer history #hollywood history #queer history podcast #hollywood history podcast #new podcast #greta garbo #marlene dietrich #katharine hepburn #[ that's all i got my dudes i am exhausted #but check out my new creator bio that's a thing now ]

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