Mercedes de Acosta

Mercedes de Acosta (* March 1, 1893 in New York City; † May 9, 1968 ibid) was an American writer and fashion designer. She was best known for her love affairs with Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, Eva Le Gallienne, Salka Viertel and Marlene Dietrich. How close she was to Greta Garbo cannot be proven.

The daughter of a Cuban father, Ricardo de Acosta, and a Spanish mother, Micaela Hernandez y Alba, descended from the Dukes of Alba, she grew up in an eccentric, wealthy milieu, but early on she resisted the ecclesiastical and moral constraints of society and as a very young girl publicly fought for women's rights.

A novel of hers was published in 1920. The theater agent Bessie Marbury discovered her and heralded the beginning of a remarkable career. Marbury, who had good contacts in Hollywood, arranged contracts for her with MGM and some other big studios where she met Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo.

Engaged to the painter Abram Poole (1882-1961), she met Eva Le Gallienne in 1920, recognized her lesbian orientation and entered into a relationship with her. Her marriage to Poole failed (her husband was also homosexual), and Acosta devoted her life entirely to women from then on. She made several trips to Europe and also to India, where she was taught by Guru Ramana Maharishi, and worked as a war correspondent in France during World War II. In 1960, her autobiography, Here lies the heart, was published, although it received little attention at the time. Her other literary works include poems and several plays.

She died impoverished and forgotten by her former friends in New York in 1968. She was buried next to her mother and sister, Rita de Alba de Acosta (who was known as beauty extraordinaire Rita Lydig), in Trinity Cemetery in Washington Heights (New York City).

Ten years after Greta Garbo's death, in accordance with a bequest from Acosta, her 55 love letters were published. This correspondence is in its original form in the Mercedes de Acosta Collection of the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. Acosta had sold her estate to the museum in 1960.

Her poetic work consists mainly of three books published while she was still alive: Moods (prose poems) (1919), Archways of Life (1921), and Streets and Shadows (1922). A comprehensive compilation of these three books appeared for the first time in Spanish translation under the title Imposeída (46 poemas) (Las Cruces, NM: Eds. La Mirada, 2016, ISBN 978-0-9911325-4-6), edited by Jesús J. Barquet and Carlota Caulfield. Barquet and Caulfield wrote the introduction to the book ("Mercedes de Acosta en traje de poeta"), and, with Joaquín Badajoz, the Spanish translations.