The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood - Softcover

McLellan, Diana

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312283202 ISBN 13: 9780312283209

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001

Synopsis

Diana McLellan reveals the complex and intimate connections that roiled behind the public personae of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and the women who loved them. Private correspondence, long-secret FBI files, and troves of unpublished documents reveal a chain of lesbian affairs that moved from the theater world of New York, through the heights of chic society, to embed itself in the power structure of the movie business. The Girls serves up a rich stew of film, politics, sexuality, psychology, and stardom.

About this title

Review

The debut volume from the new L.A. Weekly imprint at St. Martin's Press, Diana McLellan's witty and penetrating study of the golden age of Hollywood sapphism will delight the armchair detective as well as the lavender movie buff. Thanks to McLellan's obsessive sleuthing, The Girls offers not only the most detailed biography of Mercedes de Acosta, seducer of the stars, but provides tantalizing evidence of an early affair in Germany between Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, women who in later life claimed never to have met. Much of the book is devoted to Garbo--another sign of the author's good taste--and revelations abound. Sadly, the golden age gave way to McCarthyism. Even the "gayest" of Hollywood lesbians retreated into the closet, or, like de Acosta, left for Europe. McLellan tracks their disappearance in the 1950s and 1960s against the first stirrings of the gay rights movement, providing a satisfying conclusion to a fascinating but not always happy tale. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Diana McLellan is the author of Ear on Washington, a survey of gossip in our nation's capital. Her column, "The Ear," appeared for then years in the Washington Star, Post, and then the Times, and was syndicated nationally. A prizewinning reporter, she is the former Washington editor of the Washingtonian, and a contributing editor to Ladies' Home Journal.

Edition details

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312283202
• ISBN 13: 9780312283209
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 464