RH: What led you to write about Alla Nazimova?
GL: Victoria A. Nelson, my editor at Knopf asked if I'd be
interested in writing a life of Nazimova, and I said, "I'm sure she's
fascinating, but does anybody really know anything about her?" I'd
heard rumors about her, but not enough to base a full-scale life on.
Victoria told me there was an archive of her papers in, of all places,
Columbus, Georgia. I went to look and was totally fascinated. Without
that material, particularly Nazimova's memoirs I simply could not
have written this book.
RH: The archive's existence immediately brings up what for me is
one of the most fascinating aspects of her story, in that it was
maintained by Glesca Marshall, her longtime companion. And
because Glesca was closeted, it's simultaneously a celebration of
Nazimova's life and a major case of spin doctoring.
GL: Absolutely. That was one of the biggest problems I had in
writing the book, finding out what was true and what was cover-up.
That involved quite a bit of work, as you can imagine, digging around
and talking to people. I was amazed at how many people were still
alive who had knew her or had worked with her, considering that
she had died in 1945 at the age of sixty-six. There were about
twenty or twenty-five people who'd worked with her on stage or in
films, or who had seen her act in some of the famous things, like
Ghosts. And then there was this fascinating 100 year-old lady
who'd seen everybody from Eleonora Duse to Nazimova to Eva Le
Gallienne and could compare them all as actresses.
RH: Nazimova's stage career is amazing, not only in terms of her
individual performances, but the lasting influence it had on
American theatre.
GL: This is the woman who inspired Tennessee Williams and
Eugene O'Neill to write plays. And she was offered plays by other
writers, too, including Noel Coward and Clifford Odets. And she was
in the background of the Russian theatre before that. I found out that
she had exaggerated her importance to the Moscow Arts Theatre; she
was an apprentice who had a few walk-ons. But she was there at the
start. She watched Stanislavsky rehearsh and learned a lot from it.
She really led an epic life -- from Moscow to New York, the
Broadway of the '20s, to Hollywood.
RH: Her transition from Broadway to Hollywood is interesting in
that for all her success, there were also several missed
opportunities.
GL: She realized later in life that her whole silent film career
had been a great mistake. She was typecast as a foreign vamp, and
the problem was that she was so good at it, so popular, that she came
to believe in it. She fell for her own image, aided and abetted by her
dreadful pseudo-husband, Charles Bryant.
RH: She also accumulated a lot of power behind the scenes.
GL: That's amazing, and one of the reasons why the
establishment started to hate her and insist that she had to be taken
out. No other woman had produced, directed, written and starred in
her own movies and been successful. She was too much ahead of her
time for the people here then. But she also cut herself off from many
talented people, directors like von Stroheim and Vidor, who in any
event might have been deterred by the stories about her: that she
was impossible to work with, that she demanded total control and so
on. Had she not missed opportunities like that, she might have been
as extraordinary in silent film as she had been in theatre, even
revolutionary. Instead she settled for the image of success.
The amazing thing is that, after she was washed up in Hollywood, she
went back to Broadway and had a series of successes as great as her
first run in theatre. When she did The Cherry Orchard,
Mourning Becomes Electra, A Month in the Country, and
Ghosts, all within five years... When she went back to the stage,
though, she made an effort to be more cooperative. The only trouble
she had during that period, from 1928 to about the late '30s, was
that for an actress of her age (because she was in her fifties by then)
with a slight foreign accent, the parts were limited. Her roles either
had to be classics, or something special like Mourning Becomes
Electra, in which O'Neill wrote around her accent. Her accent was
actually quite charming, really, and no heavier than, say, Garbo's, but
then Garbo had problems in movies as well.
And then, at the height of her success in Ghosts, she had the
breast cancer and the mastectomy. That was a very serious blow to
her in every way. Traumatic to begin with, and doubly so when it
happens just as you're back on the crest of the wave and the doctor
says you can't work for at least a year. It's amazing that she did as
much as she did given the mistakes that she made and the bad
luck that she had, but even after all that she managed to get back to
Hollywood for some last roles onscreen.
RH: And for a while, although she was discreet, she was also fairly
matter-of-fact about her sexuality.
GL: Only until she realized that she'd taken it too far. She'd put
out all these teasers when she was a silent movie star, saying things
like, "Some of my friends call me Peter and some call me Mimi," but
it was used against her when the films started not to make money.
She became not only a failed artist but a dyke who had to be kicked
out before she created a scandal that made the industry look bad.
RH: Let's talk about one of Nazimova's most famous lovers,
Mercedes de Acosta.
GL: Mercedes de Acosta was the greatest starfucker ever, very
stylish and unmistakably lesbian. She had affairs with Isadora
Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, and Greta Garbo. But before that, when she
was twenty-two, she saw Nazimova on stage and was determined to
meet her, so she went to Nazimova's dressing room after a
performance at Madison Square Garden and there was an obvious
instant click between the two. De Acosta eventually wrote an
autobiography in the '60s called Here Lies the Heart ("and lies
and lies," one of her friends quipped), in which she names names,
although she talks about what they did in coded terms. Earlier drafts
among her unpublished papers go into more detail about the weeks
that she and Nazimova spent together after that initial meeting.
RH: In the second half of the book, when you're recounting some
of the legendary rumors about Nazimova's Hollywood sex life, I was
intrigued that many of those stories come from the director George
Cukor.
GL: Well, he was the great source. He was extraordinary. He
knew everybody, really, and had known Nazimova since the late
1920s. George was always incredibly discreet about people who were
living, but in his later years, if he knew you well, he would talk to
you about anybody who was not still around. I believed him because
I knew that George was a first-rate gossip and his stuff was really
good. He didn't tell the sort of rumors that Kenneth Anger would give
you; he had the real thing.
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