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.