Mercedes de Acosta

Born 1892 or 1893; died 1968 | Poet, playwright, novelist, and screenwriter

Mercedes de Acosta’s papers preserve work that was never produced alongside work that reached an audience. The Rosenbach catalogues plays, screenplays, poetry, and successive drafts of her autobiography, Here Lies the Heart. This record makes artistic ambition tangible without equating an unmade film with an accomplished production. De Acosta’s historical significance includes the writing itself and the attempts to find performers, finance, and institutions willing to bring it into public life.

She grew up in a Spanish-Cuban family in New York society. Accounts disagree on whether she was born in 1892 or 1893, including different descriptions within the Rosenbach’s own records. Her early publication history is clearer: Moods, identified as prose poems, appeared in 1919. The surviving bibliography includes further poetry and drama. The range of genres should be retained rather than allowing her later memoir, or her relationships with celebrities, to represent everything she wrote. [1,2]

Her play Jehanne d’Arc joined literary work to an intimate and professional partnership with Eva Le Gallienne. The Rosenbach’s exhibition account follows the difficulty of arranging financial backing and identifies Alice DeLamar’s support. It also points to production ephemera, a typescript, and a surviving expense book. Those materials offer a way to examine what the play cost and how it was made. The archive has not yet inspected them directly, so the production story remains attributed to the museum’s account. [1,3]

The museum also describes a proposed film project involving Greta Garbo that did not come to fruition. Such distinctions are essential to a biography of someone who wrote for performance: a script, a negotiation, a rehearsal, and a release are separate events. Her work passed through several hands and through commercial judgments that could prevent a project from being realized, regardless of the writer’s conviction or the fame of a hoped-for star.

The Rosenbach explicitly identifies de Acosta’s attachments to Marlene Dietrich, Isadora Duncan, and Eva Le Gallienne; its exhibition account also identifies Garbo as a lover. The museum’s description of Dietrich correspondence calls the letters romantic. Marie Laurencin appears in its discussion as a friend and possible lover, a qualification preserved here rather than silently promoted to fact. The American Film Institute separately reports an affair with Alla Nazimova. These sources supply distinct relationships to investigate, not one undifferentiated sewing-circle membership. [1,3–5]

Marriage formed another part of her life. The finding aid records her union with painter Abram Poole and a later divorce, but civil documents and chronology still require verification. Personal papers contain family and creative relationships as well as erotic ones. A photograph in her collaged Bible cannot by itself classify the woman pictured as a lover, and a correspondent’s decision to restrict letters does not establish their contents. [1,3]

De Acosta sold most of her papers to the Rosenbach in 1960 and separately gave the Garbo material, according to the finding aid. The survival of the archive was thus affected by financial circumstances and decisions about access. Her route to Natalie Clifford Barney runs through Nazimova and Dolly Wilde, and through Duncan’s artistic world; no direct de Acosta–Barney affair is established here. She helps illuminate women’s authorship where desire, collaboration, patronage, and the difficulty of earning money could become entangled without becoming the same thing. [1,3–5]