January 7, 2001

Closet Hollywood

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A gossip columnist discloses some secrets about movie idols.

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First Chapter: 'The Girls'

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By DAVID FREEMAN

THE GIRLS Sappho Goes to Hollywood. By Diana McLellan. Illustrated. 440 pp. New York: LA Weekly Books/St. Martin's Press. $26.95.

reta Garbo, the most private of all the great stars, called her lesbian love affairs ''exciting secrets.'' Marlene Dietrich, Garbo's bête noire and a world-class extrovert, called a group of Hollywood women her Sewing Circle. (She sometimes referred to her male lovers as her ''alumni association.'') The enmity between Garbo and Dietrich is one of the more interesting stories in Diana McLellan's entertaining ramble through the date books and diaries of movie-business women from the silent era until the 1950's. ''The Girls'' is really two books: who slept with whom and how it was, and inventive speculation about an international intrigue that McLellan would have us believe began in a casual lesbian affair.

Among the many women who dance through these pages, Salka Viertel and Mercedes de Acosta are central to the Garbo-Dietrich feud -- so bitter a hostility that the two always insisted that they had never met. Viertel, a leader of the European émigré community in Hollywood, was a fierce guardian of Garbo's privacy and knew Dietrich well. Viertel had a family and was also a de facto career manager for Garbo; in McLellan's telling, she was something of a manipulator who tied her screenwriting hopes to Garbo. De Acosta loved many women, most especially Garbo. For de Acosta, who also wrote scripts, all Garbo had to do was be. She inscribed a book of her poems ''for the White Flame in you that reaching out lit me.'' Garbo loved her in return until one day when she stopped.

According to McLellan, Garbo and Dietrich had not only met but also had appeared in a film together: ''The Joyless Street,'' made in lubricious Berlin in 1925, with Garbo as the second lead and Dietrich in a small role. In the rarefied world of European silent film studies, asserting that Dietrich (who always denied it) was in ''Joyless Street'' isn't new. McLellan's expansion on the subject is to envision (her word) an affair between Garbo, 19 and still a bit of ''a bumpkin beauty,'' and Dietrich, 23 and already known as a sexual athlete, that Garbo found so hurtful that it ''quite clearly lay at the root of Garbo's lifelong obsession with privacy.'' Garbo held grudges long after she could remember what they were about, but could this putative affair be the source of ''I want to be alone''? It seems a slender thread to bear so much weight. And why would Dietrich, who shrugged off lovers and gossip, play along with it for so many years?

McLellan's answer requires an event she has tried to document but cannot: an early marriage between Dietrich and Otto Katz, the author of ''The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror'' and a Comintern operative. McLellan would have Garbo, through Salka Viertel, blackmailing Dietrich over the marriage: deny you knew Greta or we'll tell the world about Otto. As McLellan tells it, Dietrich, who was both helping finance his anti-Nazi activities and was worried that exposure of his Communism could hurt the effort and damage her own career, felt humoring Garbo was worthwhile.

Otto first came to Hollywood in 1935 for the founding of the Hollywood Anti-Fascist League. McLellan says he was the model for Victor Laszlo in ''Casablanca.'' This heady bit of historical-cinematic speculation is new to me and might be more credible if she didn't also say that Albert Maltz (later one of the Hollywood Ten) was one of the writers of ''Casablanca.''

Of all McLellan's ''Girls,'' none is better company than that early one-name star, Tallulah. When Tallulah was on top, comedians could always get a laugh by intoning ''Dah-ling'' in her patented growl. A convent girl, born to a distinguished Alabama political family, she ''sought sex of every variety constantly, hungrily and without reservation.'' She was mad for Garbo and pursued her relentlessly. She must have had a weird tropism toward actresses who played servants: among her lovers were Hattie McDaniel, who specialized in the lady's maid roles that were pretty much the only thing open to black women, and Patsy Kelly, who also played maids, usually the wisecracking sort.

If Tallulah wasn't a member of the Sewing Circle it was one of the few lesbian adventures she missed. The Sewing Circle was made up of Hollywood women who were either bisexual, committed to lesbianism, or just visiting. They met at one another's houses for lunch, conversation and possibilities. The Sewing Circle sometimes met at the house of Dolores Del Rio, then married to Cedric Gibbons, the MGM art director. Del Rio is forgotten now, but her great beauty sent Orson Welles and Erich Maria Remarque, both her lovers, into near paroxysms of praise.

One of the contributions of this book is the way it shows how a secret emotional life affected the personalities and temperaments of so many women. Did it shape their work? McLellan says yes, but she's unconvincing. For example, in trying to get her script of ''Queen Christina'' into production at MGM, Viertel traded on her friendship with Garbo, knowing that Irving Thalberg, the head of production, would do what Garbo wanted. Thalberg accommodated Garbo and then, later, had the script rewritten. Reader, it was ever thus. Lesbianism was the least of it.

Love is the most complicated emotion and its depiction on the screen is the cinema's greatest gift. We often suspect the lovers are real lovers. Dietrich's director, Josef von Sternberg, believed lesbian affairs contributed to an ''androgynous magnetism.''

A question often discussed in Hollywood is: Can a person who is homosexual, known or not, play an effective love scene with a person of the opposite sex? For Garbo, who had male lovers, the answer is certainly yes. If she was thinking of Mercedes de Acosta during her scenes with John Gilbert in ''Flesh and the Devil'' (1927) you wouldn't know it from the heat that comes off the screen. Dietrich also had indelible screen presence: she enjoyed her contradictions and made of male and female amusing, temporary distinctions. Garbo was a darker mystery, indifferent to wit and the world, in the camera's gaze she was haunting. Dietrich presented her nature like a charade, Garbo like a secret among secrets.

''The Girls'' is written in a breezy tone that is mercifully free of theorizing. McLellan is best when she's wallowing in dishy gossip and revealing a fascinating subterranean world.

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David Freeman is the author of ''A Hollywood Education,'' a story collection, ''The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock'' and the novel ''One of Us.''

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