Author: Diana McLellan
Publisher: Libertary Co.
Rating: WORTHY!
This book is a deeply-researched look at the sometimes very (and sometimes not so) private lives of actors, directors, producers, screen writers and others throughout the 20th century, but focused quite tightly on a limited few in any detail, with a host of other names drifting in and out as the years pass. I highly recommend it because it is full of information about events and activities which too many people may not realize were taking place - even as early as the first decade of last century.
The dramas unfold around a select few well-known names, such as Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo, all of whom were bisexual with a marked preference for female companionship, and around the people closely associated with them, some of whose names are not well known at all. This list includes Josephine Baker, Joan Crawford, Mercedes De Acosta, Dolores Del Rio, Eva Le Gallienne, Katharine Hepburn, Billie Holiday, Ona Munson, Alla Nazimova, Natacha Rambova, Barbara Stanwyck, and Lilyan Tashman. Men aren't absent either, with names like Douglas Fairbanks, Henry Fonda, Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone, Rudolph Valentino, and even John Wayne being dropped into the mix.
Don’t expect it to be a titillating detailed erotica-fest. It’s not. It tells, artfully, humorously, perspicaciously, and unashamedly of the lives of women and men who were free to live the life which felt perfectly natural to them in a time which was far more closed than is ours today. But note that those times were not always tightly-closed. Indeed, some periods were surprisingly (at least to me!) liberal, but overall, it was a roller-coaster during which the lives of these people were easier, then harder, then easier, but never as free of condemnation and as free to live as they are today. It all depended upon which way the wind was blowing and what religiously-motivated government legislation sought to hand-cuff (and not in a nice way!) people at any given time.
In the earliest part of the century, and through the twenties, things were quite liberal, but legislation came down, and it sent people into hiding or certainly into two lives: their public and their private. Thus arose what are known as "lavender marriages" where a lesbian and a gay guy would marry to present a 'normal' public persona, from behind the somewhat precarious safety of which, they could live their separate natural lives without so much worry.
But the novel is far more than just that. There are spy stories here, fear of communism, intrigue over jewelry (specifically that of which Marlene Dietrich came into possession. There are stories of physical and emotional cruelty, of nyphomaniacal behavior, of stage politics, and of manipulative "friends" such as Sasha Viertel, who controlled Greta Garbo almost like a glove puppet, and became her sole voice to the world for years. There are also images, which look a lot better on an iPad than they do on a smartphone!
The stories are funny and sad, scary and heart-warming, easy and brutal. There are stories of German-born Dietrich offering to shoot Hitler, and of winning the Medal of Honor, of Swedish-born Garbo leading-on men while seducing and then casting off women, of those two women refusing to acknowledge they'd ever met when in fact they'd been in a film together in which they'd shared scenes (and perhaps more?), of devotion to the stars from subordinates and underlings, of life-long romances and disastrous break-ups. There are hilarious observations both from personalities like Noel Coward and from the author herself, and scary stories of obsessive pursuits and seductions.
The amount of almost incestuous interaction and partner-swapping amongst these stars, activities which over time tie all of them together in one way or another is quite dizzying! It’s a warning in some ways, that power corrupts, but it’s also sobering to know that these people are no different from anyone else except in that they had the money and freedom to be able to live the life they chose (or in the case of Garbo, as she evidently decided at the end, to live the life she wasted!), but still managed to be unhappy and frustrated a lot of the time. In the end, money can’t buy you love! Who knew?!
The book is long and detailed, so you might want to keep it to hand and dip into it periodically, with a visit to some other book in between, but it is very readable and entertaining. One thing I found most peculiar in perusing this is how private these people managed to keep their real lives, in an era when revelations about them would have been truly sensational and ruinous. Contrast that with today, when leading that same kind of life causes few eyebrows to be raised, yet the media is more obsessed than ever with pursuing "scandal". How huge of a Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot is that?! And what more will we learn when Dietrich's secret papers are finally released in 2022? I recommend this history for anyone who's interested in having their mind opened as wide as their jaw might drop!
