Tag: Natalie Barney

Tabou

Life Lessons from Book 3

by Suzanne Stroh

 

Epigrams and aphorisms are making a comeback, going by the success of Fried and Hansson’s Rework, Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes and other smartass non-fiction best sellers.

 

So I’m pleased to see that my people can keep up.

 

Here’s a fresh look at the state of things from Sylvie, Book Three in the Tabou quintet, now available for all eReaders.

 

Annihilate the enemy with acts of kindness only you can afford.
Patience Herrick
Owner, The Philadelphia Flyers

 

 

The only risk they acknowledged was scandal.

John Dobbs

General Counsel, Russet Brewing Company

 

 

Who chooses to spend the rest of her life building a dream with a girl who belongs to another woman?
Patience Herrick
 

 

Weak people will hide ignorance. I am not shocked, of course.
Marie Christine Aurore Faucigny-Lueur
de Scey-Brouillard, Princesse de Fillery
at age 15 in 1959, writing to her long lost sister
 
 
“I will tell you everything.”     “Oh please. Not everything–not yet. I’m still high on the mystery.”
Patience and Aurore
getting to know one another on Antigua

 

Patience steals more than her share of Oscar-worthy scenes in this volume:
 
On setting boundaries:
“Since we are to be cordial neighbors after you get off my property at once.”
 
On whether to book one hotel room or two:
Forget about less is more. More is more.
 
Unmatched in seduction technique!
“I remember you as a drug addict.”   “I remember you as an uptight bitch.”
Patience and Sylvie du Montclair Russet
chatting over a candlelight dinner on Antigua

 

And history comes alive!

 

On courting:
She was always off to the wars, “Like you, little one,” leading troops into battle and so forth while Louis dieted. “Now there was a woman with a big dick.”
Sylvie on the Duchess of Montpensier
On cooking:
“People don’t know how to make a real banker’s sauce anymore except in France. It’s impossible in America. I don’t ask my people to do it.”    “Nutmeg?” Patience put out her hand: Sylvie handed it over.     “Thank you,” said Patience.     “The banker’s sauce?”    “Béchamel. Court banker.” There was a long pause, with Patience not following. “I mean to the court of Louis fourteen.”

 

On cognac:
“So Cognac is like the ATM at the Royal Bank of Bastardy.”   Sylvie nodded. “A very stable financial institution. But a very volatile social organization.”

 

On dynastic challenges:
In your case I am not sure how it is regarded in England. The legitimation aspect. Certainly let us hope with respect! He was not the one who got his head cut off.
Aurore at 15, in France
writing to Sylvie at 11 in the South Pacific
On going native:
I have attached a treatise on the South Pacific, with pictures I drew, it details outrigger canoes and the flora and fauna and some things you may not know about in France. I doubt your teachers know anything about our people, my father is making a study because he says the French are ignorant of this great culture. I am worried that perhaps you have never seen people naked? If it is shocking you can just fold over the page. Memorize it though in case they take it away from you in the convent. Everybody goes around like this here, it is breezier in effect, but my mother tells me that this is not the case in France. But I don’t believe it. It is not natural. And France is real civilization, no?… With my most distinguished sentiments, princess,
Sylvie Russet, age 11, on Hiva Oa
 
Eavesdrop on Greta Garbo’s lookalike hob-nobbing with Greek tycoons moored off the shore of Martinique.

 

“Ah, the scent of a woman. What can never be duplicated. The perfect fragrance.”

Sylvie Russet, lost twin of Greta Garbo

 

Have an affair with the world’s most talked-about woman? Was she crazy? No. It’s out of the question. Our children are falling in love, and besides, my husband will kill me. That made it even more exciting a thought, somehow, but she had to get Sylvie off the boat in case something else happened.

Appolonia Mavros, aboard her yacht Serena

 

“You were so cold, so offhand!”    “I’m not offhand now.” Apple put her hands on. Oh dear Jesus. She could see her marriage going up in smoke. Her whole life going up in smoke. Ostracized. All for Garbo. “But this room…”

Appolonia and Sylvie admiring a Titian

 

Visit Curacao and Caracas and learn from tales of treachery, tax avoidance, social gaffes and wardrobe malfunctions:
 
Think two generations ahead, the way Kate did naturally and had done since Macbeth.
Eric Leyden, insurance executive
summarizing business lessons learned from
Kate McKenna Russet
Scottish-born Virginia matriarch

 

“The boys had their first date, I’m told, in a desert hot spring….Anyway, Talloway’s a Scot and there have been terrible rows over how many skirts to pack. Lesbian couples always dress alike.”

Jocelyn Russet

 

‘Bail money,’ he said without irony. ‘Every good general counsel always has enough on hand.’

Esteben Ovéquiz de Castañeda y Bohorques Inigues

General Counsel, Empresas Glacial

 

Cooper looked Esteban over. He was wearing a fancy Italian suit and handmade Spanish shoes and about $50,000 worth of jewelry. Cooper had seen the wives of dictators flee their homelands with fewer accessories.

Gary Cooper off duty in Caracas, Venezuela 

 
Leyden knew Kate well enough not to be shocked by her violent sex analogies. Plain-spoken, horse breeding woman.
Eric Leyden as a houseguest
of Kate Russet in the 1980s
 
The bitch never sleeps, thought Leyden, and if nobody but me worries about that at night…well, they should.
Eric Leyden, Independent Director
Russet Brewing Company
appointed by Kate Russet
 
Sylvie Russet. Leyden imagined money like water falling in the bright sunshine over the sculpted ice of her face, her body.
Eric Leyden on Curacao, May 1993
 
His pink neck was rolling over his shirt collar. His fake smile barely covered his social aggression.
Rowan Rask, Governor of Florida (R-Fl)
 
A violent society is proof of its own ignorance.
James Russet IV, Chairman

Russet Brewing Company

 
Herrick’s cold rage was an enforceable warrant.
Ambassador Herrick on jealousy
 
 
Due to the incompetence of those around him, he was only ever thirty seconds away from rolling away to a violent death.
James Russet IV

 

Ah, Valerie
In New York, the Anglo-Irish Countess of Tiffin and Ross, Valerie Drummond, is back and better than ever, taking center stage with an Oscar-winning back story of her own.

 

 
‘I see by your sheepish grin and your Freudian slip that all’s well that end’s well.’
Valerie keeping the mental gears well oiled

 

‘Learn to accept the power of your attraction for others.’
J.O.P. “Oliver” Russet
Iunching with Valerie at the Café Royal, 1934
 
If one could have any girl one wanted at the drop of a hat, would one want one?
Valerie in Socratic dialog with herself

 

MORE FROM THE VALERIE CHRONICLES

 
On Natalie Barney:
“I do recall asking for half, but all I got was teatime.”
 
The pioneer strain:
‘All this fuss about the G-spot,’ she’d said to Helen Gurley Brown the other day when they met to walk their dogs, ‘and I’ve known about that for centuries. I mean why doesn’t anybody ask me anything?’
 
Like mother like daughter:
She liked David, although she preferred Albert of Monaco. A principality whose name she pronounced roughly synonymous with the breath freshener Binaca.
Mercedes Russet, Valerie’s younger daughter
 
On the charm of Edwardian pleasures:
She hated the drama. She wanted them both to stop it, the girl and the young man. There was no need for all this drama. She would sit them down together and calmly explain what she was made for. She was fashioned for, built for, loving them both. She’d tell them she cared for them equally, tell them she’d treat them equally, draw up a schedule and make copies. It’s really only a question of management, like nearly everything else in life.

 

On guilt over the suicide of a lover:
For the first time in Valerie’s life, she found that everything was more than she could give.

 

On adventure travel:
If one wants to explore anything nowadays, Valerie felt she had no choice but to conclude, one should get down into a diving bell or up onto a rocket ship or deep into a viral molecule.
 
On the droit de seigneur:
Virgins deflowered by their true love are like that. Valerie knew from experience.

 

On lesbian appeal:
Valerie considered all the women who’d ever run from loving other women, going back 3,000 years. Well, none of them had ever laid eyes on her granddaughter.
 
On slipping standards:
“Spent marriages lying about all over the place. How are you going to tidy that up?”
 
On gratitude:
“Thank God for that girl at Bletchley Park, even though she sent me straight down the wayward path with her…her…” (Valerie blushed) “…comprehensive tuition.”
 
On dowager duties:
She had raised them to lead and be role models, befitting their position in society. Lead what? Model what? Society where? The gay world seemed so fragmented now. There was no more real underground. No elite, no social pecking order. Fewer and fewer exciting secrets. And deep confusion actually, when it came to society. You never knew if you were in it or not, to steal the words of Henry Adams…. So she had gotten what she wanted for her granddaughters, a safer world to live and love in, but Christ, how utterly mind-numbingly boring!

 

Suggestions for improving psychotherapy:
“Let’s have your muddle first. Then we can have mine.”
 
On the principal of No Surprises:
“Jocelyn, dear, brace yourself.” Yet Valerie made no pause. “I need to tell you that you’re to be cruelly disinherited by me.”
 
On prospects for the entrepreneurial generation:
Mastery of the physical world “merely” seemed central to their spiritual quest. They always wanted to be worthy of enjoying their luxuries. They were Epicures.
 
On looking at art:
It wasn’t androgynous in the sense of stripping away one’s identification with sex, but rather ultra-masculine and ultra-feminine at once, in the sense of adding to it.
Valerie watching her granddaughter
Jocelyn enter a room at 960 Fifth Avenue

 

 

Not to put down the every-day, tossed-off aperçus of family life:

 

On family planning:
These days it’s the mere announcement that two people are preparing to breed that’s the real excitement. The actual pregnancy’s such a letdown.
Tristan Canoncourt, Fourth Lord Crome
 
On chores:
“I never get bored of it. Watching their ass lifting a load.”
Jocelyn Russet, amateur alpinist

 

What becomes a legend most
Her exploits had invented the term starfucker.
Jocelyn giving credit where credit is due–
to her grandmother
 
On masculine appeal
He hasn’t a microfiber of investment banking in his body. Couldn’t manipulate a number if it was attached to his scrotum.
Astrid Kay
President, Art Students League of New York
 
On troublemakers:
One impossibly attractive and too-capable lesbian in my life was trouble enough. Two of them together is a menace.
Constance Canoncourt, Lady Crome
 
Economizing
Nobody has half a million to spare.
Phoebe, Comtesse du Montclair
 
Scrabble
An owner is the person with the most responsibility.
Phoebe du Montclair
 
Comme il faut
Never take a man’s car to St. Cloud.
Phoebe du Montclair
 
Every beneficiary is a minor for life.
Jocelyn Russet
 
“Not so fast, Narcissa dear. What about her own legacy? The one you share?”    “The one we what?”    “The one you share. Share, share, as in commingled assets.”
Jocelyn and Valerie
fighting over a pot au crème

 

All mixed in, of course, with pearls like these:

 

I hope you lead yourself to find yourself, Madame.
Natalie Barney’s male ghost
encountered on the rue Vignon
 
This river go to Mombassa. No! Shit! That was La Brea.
Darius Jones, UCLA film student
 
“He can’t go back to Italy. I’ve already ravaged the entire country as you know.”
Valerie mulling over
her estate planning problems
 
One man’s son, and no man’s progeny.
Ambassador Herrick as a young man
in 1939 with money problems of his own
 
Never cross a Herrick. You could feel the murderous impulse throbbing across the table.
Sylvie Russet having drinks at the Ritz
 
A late entry I’m afraid. A very late entry. Oh I’d love you to read it, but in Denmark, you see, we don’t actually write the paper until it has been presented to society.
Alexander “Zander” Duffield
Hollywood screenwriter, Zen master,
rock climber and secret agent
 
We must deconstruct denial itself! How much of it is implicitly acceptance?
Zander gaining entry to an academic conference
under false credentials
 
You’ll meet numbers guys
Laughing like money going downtown.
Julien Russet, terror attack survivor

 

“Basically I do math, sir, not clandestine operations that severely deplete my mental resources.”
Kit Hemion, math genius, arborist, surfer

 

 

Patience is never happy with two-fifty, thought Joss, unless it’s followed by six zeros.
 Jocelyn on Patience

 

 

And literary posers
“I’m exploring the human heart. Taking all the borders off the maps.”
Jocelyn Russet
On insufferable dead poets:
Don’t take the fragment thing so seriously!
Jocelyn Russet, Hollywood screenwriter

 

Indulge your inner Peeping Tom!
“Oh please! Don’t believe everything I say in our pillow talk, for heaven’s sake.”
Jocelyn Russet

 

She can’t find the place on the map where she used to be comfortably wasted.
Jocelyn on Patience

 

And your hopelessly romantic side
Trying to forget her…that would be like trying to get the ocean out of her inner ear.
Sylvie on Jocelyn

 

“All people really want, Louise, is a bit of a dream.”
Witherspoon to his secretary
in HIRE WITHERSPOON!
screenplay by Jocelyn Russet and Alexander Duffield

 

“Please, be at leisure! At leisure! I can’t think in this atmosphere!”
Witherspoon to his staff
on taking over the family business
so his identical twin can elope with a courtesan

 

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. So that’s Sylvie in a nutshell. It’s a bit like a multinational DOWNTON ABBEY. Only sexier. How deep the wisdom? I’ll leave that up to you.

 

Suzanne Stroh
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.
Books

Translating Sex

by Suzanne Stroh

 

Translating sex? What’s not to get excited about?

I can’t think of a better way to spend a Friday night than here in London on March 8 at the London Review of Books Shop where these four incredibly interesting women will be talking about how to translate French erotica.

image.php

Is it jealousy I feel whenever I think I might not be able to attend the master class that follows on Saturday March 9?

Yes, I think it is. If those women are what you get, I’ll never stop my adventures in translating.

Well anyway, she says politely, handing me the ticket, if I can’t be there, I hope you will go in my place. Then she pauses. Odd, don’t you think, how much that girl looks like Renée Vivien. Not really, I say. She merely raises an eyebrow. And it’s moments like these I should so like to undress her, that I may find something about her not to love so much….

Monsieur cover 1

 

 

Monsieur is Emma Becker’s first novel. Her next book sounds right up my alley.

Apparently she’s fleeing the teeming hordes. How Berlin will prove more restful for her than Paris, not so sure.

 

 

Cumberland

 

As for me, after six weeks of six thousand words nonstop, none of them erotic, I need a break from writing.

 

Monsieur is coming along.

alligator

 

I need to get a better girlfriend, she sighs, reaching for a second piece of chocolate cake.

Suzanne Stroh
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.
Books, This Family Business

Adventures in Translating

by Suzanne Stroh

 

I’ve begun a new literary adventure, and I look forward to sharing it with you in the year to come. I’ll be translating the raucous biography of an incredible woman, Élisabeth de Gramont, from French into English. If you read French, you can buy the book here.

Here’s a sketch by André Rouveyre of them visiting their friend Rémy de Gourmont, the literary tastemaker responsible for lionizing Barney and giving her the name she spent a lifetime living up to: L’Amazone

2018 will mark the 100th anniversary of the first modern marriage contract between two women, made by Élisabeth, Duchess of Clermont-Tonnèrre, a central figure in the artistic and political history of modern France, and her “eternal mate,” Natalie Barney, that consummate American in Paris.

The amazing untold story of a secret lesbian marriage

Their beautiful, radical, non-monogamous and staunchly faithful union lasted a lifetime until Élisabeth’s death in 1954, which shattered Natalie to the core. Astonishingly, all this was kept secret until Francesco Rapazzini published his biography in 2004, with the full support and generous cooperation of Élisabeth’s very private family.

Wild Blue

As a daughter of Michigan and a lesbian with a family business background of my own, I knew all about the railway carriage heiress of the Belle Époque when I was growing up. It may have been the heyday of NCR, but my father still taught me to pinpoint Dayton, Ohio on the map as the home producer of Barney cars. Barney was a great family business that he rued the end of. For as Walter Matthau’s butler quips famously in A New Leaf, my father (like Natalie herself, whose beautiful French was more 1793 than 1923) was a modern man who liked to keep alive traditions that were dead before he was born.

barney_smith_railroad_car_company_1906_poster-rdd1b3cd1fde44d19ab016cf829128196_vf080_400

As I grew older and understood the gayness that he had taken for granted all my life, Dad made it quietly known that the wild child from Cincinnati was no role model. She was a model for bad behavior on par with the wayward Peggy Guggenheim. Certainly not a fit spiritual great-granny for a girl like me. Wild Blue, I always thought of Natalie with her untamed blonde mane and her steel-blue gaze. I’d find myself shaking my head in grudging admiration of her outrageous exploits in Bar Harbor and Washington, not to mention her audacious seduction of Liane de Pougy, the world’s most desirable woman, as a nineteen year-old American in Paris.

It goes without saying that my dance card was never as full, nor were my date nights. In fact we couldn’t have been more different.

Natalie was a much better rider, for one thing. She fenced and spoke French bilingually. My eyes and hair were dark, like Élisabeth’s, and like Lily de Gramont, I had a commanding voice that drew attention, a quick long laugh and a love of the countryside, the water and the wild places. And if my gaze was sometimes just as imposing, it was never predatory. Natalie’s was.

It was better in a Barney car
It was better in a Barney car

Like every other girl of my ilk, though, I found it hard to ignore Natalie Barney, even though she, too, was dead before my gay history was born. We were worlds apart in many of our tastes if not in our drives. She never set foot in a café, for instance, whereas I could live in them. I prized domestic anchorage; I valued love and loves placed in a lifelong context, while Natalie appeared to have no use for such things as marriage or children or even for making her life with animals. But my God, what a lover….

They got it wrong–for 40 years!

Natalie died in Paris in 1972 when I was seven. I watched and read, during my lifetime, as an entire cottage industry was built up around Barney as a legendary (some would say fatal) seducer, largely for her leading role as a patron of the arts to the Lost Generation. And now I realize that, in key respects, all the scholars and memoirists got it wrong. Like majorly wrong. It’s like that great Cary Brothers song… 

Blue eyes, you’re the secret I keep
Cary Brothers, “Blue Eyes” from “Who You Are”

 

By translating EDG, I’ll start putting it right by getting to know the wonderful secret Natalie kept so close to her heart, hiding her in plain sight. You will not believe the passion, the fireworks, the honesty and the agony in their love letters.

“Je vous présente Élisabeth, la duchesse rouge”

More importantly, I’ll introduce English readers for the first time to the incredibly full and rich (and, yes, complex) life of an extraordinary character in 20th century history. Élisabeth was a Marxist descended from Henri IV who shrugged off the slur “red duchess.” She was a popular author and sculptor and librettist, a music patron and the major clef to Proust’s great roman. Lily was another wild child who would never be tamed. She was the only woman Natalie Barney could never control. Élisabeth was also the clef to Natalie’s own living work of art, the one she dedicated her life to and hoped and dreamed it would become. Above all, Lily loved to laugh.

So if you are a reader of belles-lettres, a student of French cultural history from the Belle Époque through World War II, or a reader of the biographies and scholarly studies of the great lesbians of the 20th century, I hope you will enjoy my field reports in 2013.

If I complete four pages a day, I should have a draft ready by next Christmas. For now, glad to have you on my rope. We’re off into the wild blue yonder.

In Good Company

By the way, my first impression of this job is that literary translation hasn’t changed much since antiquity. It’s laborious, and taxing, and when you admire the author and have great affection for the subject, like I do, it’s incredibly satisfying. The loneliness sometimes brought about by the solitary nature of the work is more than compensated by the excellent company I keep at the end of my shift. My veteran editor, Jean-Loup Combemale, grew up in Paris on the rue Jacob and visited his grandparents a few doors down from Élisabeth on the rue de la Faisanderie. My able researcher, Vanessa Coulomb, brings an M.B.A.’s focus to the job of helping today’s English readers relate to la vieille France, along with a storied Norman childhood of her own. Thanks in advance to you both.

Acts of love and literature

Given today’s economy—less than 5% of all books sold annually in the US are translations of works published in a foreign language, according to The Nation—a major literary translation is usually an act of love, an undertaking in the great amateur tradition, which Élisabeth herself joined the ranks of when she translated the poems of John Keats as a young woman.

There are those who play for money, babe
There are those who play for fame
There are still those who only play
For the love of the game
T Bone Burnett, “Kill Switch”
from “The  Criminal Under My Own Hat”

 

It’s a band of brothers and sisters I’m proud to be a part of. As I learn more about them and their august tradition dating from the advent of written language, I’ll pass it on. And if you have any questions or interests or stories of your own to tell, please share.

 

 

Suzanne Stroh
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.
Books

Who Forgot to Pack the Protégée?

by Suzanne Stroh

 

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 429 pages, $30).

Time to make room for a new biography in the bookcase. But where do I shelve it?

After Here Lies the Heart by Mercedes de Acosta, between Diana McLellan’s The Girls and Loving Garbo by Hugo Vickers? In what proximity to Diana Souhami’s sparer Greta and Cecil or Maria Riva’s spare-no-details book about her mother, Marlene Dietrich? Or should it go on the Paris-in-the-Twenties shelf beside A Moveable Feast, Henry and June and Living Well is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins—staying close to Stein’s Picasso and Genêt by Brenda Wineapple, about Janet Flanner?

Maybe it belongs nearer to my deviant Vidals, Sexually Speaking in particular. That would house it comfortably close to A.L. Rowse’s dated classic, Homosexuals in History. It would share a shelf with The Portrait of Dorian Grey. But how close should it really get to David Leavitt’s biography of suicide Alan Turing, The Man Who Knew Too Much?

Oh bugger it. My cataloging system is a mess. I have no idea where to put this fresh take on three Minor Moderns, All We Know, by Wesleyan professor Lisa Cohen. More than a decade in the making, benefiting from countless interviews of Greatest Generation raconteurs like the late Sybille Bedford, it’s study of Esther Murphy the intellectual, Mercedes de Acosta the celebrity seducer and Madge Garland the fashion director, three eccentrics born in the 1890s.

All three came of age between the wars and took their seats with the chattering classes in New York, London, Paris and Hollywood to survey Modern culture from the Algonquin, from Bloomsbury and the Deux Magots, from Marlene Dietrich’s kitchen and other high-status perches. Till now, these tastemakers have been regularly cast as minor historical characters in support roles. Or else, as Joan Schenkar wrote about Dolly Wilde in Truly Wilde, their lives “were merely ‘noticed’, not ‘recorded.'”

Minor League to Major League

The argument Cohen makes in All We Know is that each woman led a life of major significance in the development of Modernism. If history never nominated Murphy or Acosta or Garland for Best Actress to run against Beauvoir or Barney or Stein, it’s history’s mistake. Blame the Academy, not the performance.

Cohen locates the error easily. History forgets that Modernism never went anywhere without a bent girl on her arm. Women’s liberation was at the core of what the Modern era was about, Cohen reminds us. And what women were freer than those like Acosta, Murphy and Garland who risked their status and their livelihoods to love and make lives with other women? Cohen pulls these women off the bench and puts them back on the field as major players.

At the same time, the biographer reckons with evidence of underachievement and attention deficit. All three of her subjects were married lesbians who lived complex double (sometimes triple) lives. Did they squander their considerable talents out of wasted energy? All three made marks on their eras and stamped their professions but never achieved their dreams or created enduring artworks. Were they failures? Sure, they all had women lovers and paired off with other dykes, but none of their relationships endured, and it’s sometimes hard to know from these short-form biographies whether sex and love were major driving forces in any of their lives. Were they even gay enough to be truly inspiring? I wonder. What’s a lesbian anyway?

This book has gotten high praise from exceptional biographers like Michael Holroyd. Before lauding the meticulous research by Cohen, a serious academic with impeccable credentials, the mainstream reviews try hard to bring readers up to speed on who Cohen’s subjects were. Soon enough they’ve reached the word limit, without enough reflection on what Cohen is really writing about. She’s writing about the utility and limits of protecting your private life from public scrutiny, known by that clubby word “discretion.” She’s writing about the benefits and costs of disguising yourself. She’s writing about core competencies like sex and conversation and getting dressed that rise to the level of high art at the hands of master practitioners, but are really hard for biographers to archive and, therefore, to write about. She’s writing about really interesting people who are really hard to write about.

More Wild Girls

So before you get in the Bugatti screaming for the Hotel du Cap, here’s the scoop on whom you’ll be riding with. (“It’s not who you know,” the Mark Cross heiress Esther Murphy scolds you as you slide in, “it’s whom you know.”) Her living art is her intellectual conversation, just as Natalie Barney’s living art is her serial seduction. Both are ephemeral; both are hard to pin down on paper; but I see you’re in this car, not in that one with Barney and Brooks. So by all means, introduce yourself to Hemingway’s pal, FItzgerald’s sidekick, Gerald Murphy’s sister. She speaks any language you can throw at her, including the dead ones. She will tell you her name is Madame de Maintenon. She’ll give her address as Versailles, Louis quatorze. Just go with it. As for her nonstop monologuing, just remind yourself that this is the Modern era, where motoring is like the Slow Food movement. Why not let her seduce you with oratory? Ask her anything, and you know she’s into you when she pauses optimally before launching in with, “Well, all we know is…”

Madge Garland, very easy on the eyes, has been the editor of British Vogue since forever. You can tell by the dominatrix subtext and the pearl bracelets. Yes, it’s okay to call it “Brogue,” darling, but don’t even think of getting in the car half-dressed. You may don trousers only on arrival. But deep down, Madge fancies the man in you, and at least she’s not drunk, which is becoming a problem with Esther. Mind your pees and queues with Madge, the only woman in her postwar posse who earned every penny she ever spent. Let her give you the 300 level course on sexy runway models (A Thousand Years of Beautiful Women). Engage her in highbrow discussions about architecture and design, dazzle her with the university degrees she never attained, flash your ankles, and I predict you’ll have a memorable ride. Just don’t eat. Don’t try to get her to dish about any of her girlfriends. “The person I wish would come live with me doesn’t want to do it,” she said during World War II. That’s about as far as you’ll get on her status.

Not so with Mercedes de Acosta. She’s got a stamen up your skirt if you’re anywhere near starfuckable. My advice is, let her give it to you. Her body is her medium, and sex is her performance art. They say it’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience. She’ll tell you she’s a fan. Just go with it. Worse things have happened on the way to the Riviera. Just don’t forget to tweet your publicist with a heads-up on damage control. You’ll get down there only to find that every female celebrity known to man is also known to Acosta, and that spells cat fights  on the red carpet. No wonder she can’t get steady work as a screenwriter, even though she’s a Buddhist with a hip yoga teacher. She’s collecting Playbills and making notes for a tell-all memoir. Be forewarned.

Lisa Cohen’s interesting book lies unopened in the footwell on a ride like this. But keep it by the bedside and take it one chapter at a time. You’ll try once again to make sense of a tangled web of social networks linked by three friends who knew one another well. You’ll wonder what it’s like to spend fifteen years failing to write a book you’re the world expert on, like Esther Murphy. You’ll watch Madge Garland rise to prominence in fashion at Vogue, only to get sacked for living with somebody with an Eton crop who’s raising her secret daughter as a niece. This will remind you to rent THE KILLING OF SISTER GEORGE again on Netflix.

Back to the book, Garland’s section is the longest, informed by the author’s experience as a fashion writer. Sacked again and again, Garland rises from the ashes in Schiaparelli, proving that fashion, far from frivolous, was serious business for women between the wars. And has been ever since.

Did They or Didn’t They

Keep reading. You’ll attend the unsealing of Greta Garbo’s letters to Mercedes de Acosta at the stuffy Rosenbach library, only to find that “nothing’s there,” and you’ll wonder why it matters so much to know whether the two were really lovers. Is it because Garbo’s heirs seem to fear being tainted by knowing where the star’s heart had really lain (or lied, or got laid), if sex and Eros with Acosta can be proven? Or is it because we know, deep down, that no lesbian ruins her life over anything less?

Of Cohen’s three subjects, Acosta remains the hardest character to pin down. Cohen defines her as a “fan” and reads her life as one where celebrity obsession fueled compulsive collecting and stalking behaviors that filled her with shame afterwards. Acosta’s mysticism and her Romantic virility (both rare qualities in New York society where Mercedes grew up–as rare today as they were then) are explored less, but those who knew her well, like Alice Toklas, never underestimated the appeal.

There may be an argument to be made that Acosta, even more than Garland, knew where history was heading in “the American century” and had a reasonable plan for leading it there. Foresight in business, as in Hollywood, never lacks sex appeal. With this in mind it may be worth rethinking how shrewd Acosta really was in following her instincts. I can almost hear her mentor, Bessie Marbury, advising Acosta to leverage her esoteric assets to pursue power and influence that would trump the strong suit she’d been born with—but would never be able to play out as a New York lesbian. With better life skills, would Acosta have been the lesbian Wallis Simpson? (Like Garland and Murphy, she could not manage herself: fatal for a courtesan, as she should have known from reading Liane de Pougy.)

One thing’s for damn sure, as Gertrude Stein would have said. Acosta wasn’t the only Hollywood player with a lesbian seduction plan. Cohen quotes Dietrich, exasperated by Acosta’s vanity. But Dietrich pursued Acosta shamelessly in 1932, cruising her at a performance then turning up unannounced on Acosta’s doorstep, as soon as she learned it was over between Acosta and Garbo.

(Garbo, incidentally, had just been weakened by a bank failure that changed her financial prospects overnight. Instead of looking at the retirement she’d saved for, she was suddenly looking at another decade of brutal assignments to recover stability. Garbo was a hard worker to begin with, plus she was insomniac, hardly a natural at glamour, and it took everything she had to produce the studio image required of her on a daily basis. Anyone under those circumstances needs unswerving emotional support, plus dinner on the table after a rough day at work: idolatry on the order of Pougy in her Blue Notebooks phase. Even with the title Princess Ghika or similar, I can’t imagine Acosta measuring up to that challenge. Has anyone ever wondered if Garbo left Acosta for cause? Could that possibly be what all the fuss was all about?)

Well, in any case, mystery still shrouds Acosta. She would appreciate the irony.

Failure and Other Modern Mysteries

And so, along with Murphy the drunk and Garland the anorexic during the incubation period of what’s now our global “celebrity culture,” Acosta with her status addiction rounds out Lisa Cohen’s portrait of its early victims.

From beginning to end in All We Know, you’ll read about failure—failure to produce, failure to achieve, failure to exhibit, failure to earn, failure to thrive, failure to sustain love and sexual attraction and lasting domestic narratives. And you’ll wonder why there still isn’t more discussion about failure, on the part of all three of these women, to bequeath their considerable legacies. Legacies that we all now have to dig in the dirt for like archaeologists. Or novelists.

Why didn’t our genius great-grannies raise protégées? Perhaps Prohibition, the Crash and two world wars really did get in the way. Or perhaps the Modern Woman just never had the time.

Suzanne Stroh
With a feature film produced in 2012, award-winning screenwriter Suzanne Stroh’s period drama Scotch Verdict is in development at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Suzanne hails from Michigan, where her family brewed Stroh’s beer for five generations. She lives with her family in the Virginia countryside.