Has anyone read the book? Any one have gossip on the lesbians of Old Hollywood?
The Sewing Circle was made up of Hollywood women who were either bisexual, committed to lesbianism, or just visiting. They met at one another's houses for lunch, conversation and possibilities. The Sewing Circle sometimes met at the house of Dolores Del Rio, then married to Cedric Gibbons, the MGM art director.
Article: Greta Garbo, the most private of all the great stars, called her lesbian love affairs 'exciting secrets.' Marlene Dietrich, Garbo's bête noire and a world-class extrovert, called a group of Hollywood women her Sewing Circle. (She sometimes referred to her male lovers as her 'alumni association.') The enmity between Garbo and Dietrich is one of the more interesting stories in Diana McLellan's entertaining ramble through the date books and diaries of movie-business women from the silent era until the 1950's. 'The Girls' is really two books: who slept with whom and how it was, and inventive speculation about an international intrigue that McLellan would have us believe began in a casual lesbian affair.
Among the many women who dance through these pages, Salka Viertel and Mercedes de Acosta are central to the Garbo-Dietrich feud -- so bitter a hostility that the two always insisted that they had never met. Viertel, a leader of the European émigré community in Hollywood, was a fierce guardian of Garbo's privacy and knew Dietrich well. Viertel had a family and was also a de facto career manager for Garbo; in McLellan's telling, she was something of a manipulator who tied her screenwriting hopes to Garbo. De Acosta loved many women, most especially Garbo. For de Acosta, who also wrote scripts, all Garbo had to do was be. She inscribed a book of her poems 'for the White Flame in you that reaching out lit me.' Garbo loved her in return until one day when she stopped.
According to McLellan, Garbo and Dietrich had not only met but also had appeared in a film together: 'The Joyless Street,' made in lubricious Berlin in 1925, with Garbo as the second lead and Dietrich in a small role. In the rarefied world of European silent film studies, asserting that Dietrich (who always denied it) was in 'Joyless Street' isn't new. McLellan's expansion on the subject is to envision (her word) an affair between Garbo, 19 and still a bit of 'a bumpkin beauty,' and Dietrich, 23 and already known as a sexual athlete, that Garbo found so hurtful that it 'quite clearly lay at the root of Garbo's lifelong obsession with privacy.' Garbo held grudges long after she could remember what they were about, but could this putative affair be the source of 'I want to be alone'? It seems a slender thread to bear so much weight. And why would Dietrich, who shrugged off lovers and gossip, play along with it for so many years?
McLellan's answer requires an event she has tried to document but cannot: an early marriage between Dietrich and Otto Katz, the author of 'The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror' and a Comintern operative. McLellan would have Garbo, through Salka Viertel, blackmailing Dietrich over the marriage: deny you knew Greta or we'll tell the world about Otto. As McLellan tells it, Dietrich, who was both helping finance his anti-Nazi activities and was worried that exposure of his Communism could hurt the effort and damage her own career, felt humoring Garbo was worthwhile.
Otto first came to Hollywood in 1935 for the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Fascist League. McLellan says he was the model for Victor Laszlo in 'Casablanca.' This heady bit of historical-cinematic speculation is new to me and might be more credible if she didn't also say that Albert Maltz (later one of the Hollywood Ten) was one of the writers of 'Casablanca.'
Continued inside thread…