Mercedes de Acosta

Mercedes de Acosta grew up in a wealthy family of Cuban and Spanish origin in New York. As a child she insisted that she was a boy, she later wrote. She became a poet, playwright and screenwriter and was active in the movement for women’s suffrage.

In 1920 she married the painter Abram Poole; they divorced in 1935. At the same time she had many relationships with women, among them famous actresses of Broadway and Hollywood such as Eva Le Gallienne and Alla Nazimova. In 1931 she began an on-and-off relationship with Greta Garbo, and later an affair with Marlene Dietrich. Alice B. Toklas is said to have remarked that one could not dismiss Mercedes lightly, since she had had the two most important women in America.

Her memoir “Here Lies the Heart” (1960) hinted at these relationships and angered several of the women involved. She donated her letters, including those from Garbo and Dietrich, to the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia; some were only opened in 2000.

She died in poverty in New York in 1968, aged 76. Today she is regarded as an important figure of early 20th-century lesbian history.