11/20/2023 0 Comments Wasted book aucosta![]() ![]() De Acosta boasted that she could steal any woman from any man. Her hair was a ‘lignous’ coiled black, like a ‘combed bush’. ![]() She had ‘a small white body, like a small marble park’, an infatuated Janet Flanner wrote, ‘in which her eyes lived as brown nightingales’. ![]() Yet such was de Acosta’s sinister allure she managed to bed just about everybody who was anybody in the sapphic world of her time: from Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind), Poppy Kirk (a Schiaparelli model and prominent diplomat’s wife) and many others in Hollywood, Paris and New York in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. So lamia-like her sartorial mode – she favoured black silk cloaks and trousers, tricorn hats, blood-red lipstick and cadaverish white face-powder – Tallulah Bankhead was not the only acquaintance to nickname her ‘Countess Dracula’. By all accounts, de Acosta (1893-1968) was a serious lady ghoul. Reading about Mercedes de Acosta, poet, playwright, memoirist, Hollywood screenwriter and lesbian seductress extraordinaire, brings it all back. They were interested in you personally! So much so in fact that they would rise up out of their coffins, wamble over long distances (all the way from Transylvania) and sneak into your very own bedroom just to suck the blood out of you. The great thing about vampires, after all, was that they really cared about you. Now I wonder, though, if it wasn’t also a bit of perverse provocation, part of the prepubescent come-hither act. This neurotic and slightly awkward posture – still habitual, I’m embarrassed to say – was meant to be prophylactic: even while snoozing, I figured, I’d be ready to fend off any emissaries from the undead who tried to bite me. At the age of ten or eleven, having absorbed the requisite number of creaky old Bela Lugosi films, I evolved such a baleful Dracula-fear that I began sleeping every night with one arm slung backwards over my neck. You know you’re getting old when sleeping with a vampire no longer gives you a sickly thrill. ![]()
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