The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan

The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood by Diana McLellan

Author:Diana McLellan [McLellan, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Booktrope
Published: 2013-12-14T00:00:00+00:00


37

OTTO AMONG THE GIRLS

All Beautiful, Even Her Toes

THE PRESENCE OF OTTO'S Moscow-blessed spouse, Ilse, did nothing to dampen his ardor for other women. Indeed, as Otto enraptured the establishment and nailed down his Hollywood base, Marlene's life took an interesting new turn. The usual parade of male worshipers still filed into her bed—now including Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, and Brian Aherne, who was back in town. But she also drew about herself a collection of Hollywood's most ravishingly beautiful women—the type of actresses Marjorie Main called "glamour gal Sapphics." Others called them "Marlene's Sewing Circle."

All the Sewing Circle's members were sophisticated, intelligent, highly paid, and actively bisexual. Naturally, they were also, generally, politically simpatico, in line with the fashionable left-wing style set by the decade's chic feminist intellectuals in Paris. (Colette, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes, Nancy Cunard, and others all listed heavily to port, in revolt against that city's 1934 quasi-fascist uprising.) Marlene enjoyed delightful sexual interludes with these worldly creatures, and passed them on to Otto.

They were exactly his type. The group's members made a game of their own glamour. Competitive dressers, perfectly coiffed, painted, perfumed, and pedicured, they seduced or married the most interesting men around, and made love with one another as their amorous tides ebbed and flowed. Less starry-eyed than contemporary autobiographer Vida Scudder, who believed that only love between women "could approach near to that absolute union, always craved, never, on earth at least, to be attained," they nonetheless found in one another a sexually and emotionally pleasing haven of common ideas, common beauty, common worldliness—along with the shared need for public discretion, and, for spice, a soupçon of amusing, catty competitiveness.

Most continuously intimate with Marlene (and obviously Otto) now was the flawless black-haired star Dolores Del Rio. (Almost flawless. John Ford said she was in a class with Garbo, but "then she opens her mouth and becomes Minnie Mouse.") Orson Welles would later adore what he called "that sightless beautiful look" of her black eyes—"a great turn-on"—and her exquisite silk underwear, "all handmade... so erotic it was indescribable." Erich Maria Remarque would say that every part of her was beautiful, even her toes.



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