The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood Book

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 Read More

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  • Product Description

    THE GIRLS lifts the veil on the private lives of early Hollywood's most powerful and uninhibited goddesses...

    The most unforgettable and immortal women of Hollywood's golden era thrilled to a hidden world of exciting secrets. In THE GIRLS, Diana McLellan reveals the complex and intimate connections that roiled behind the public personae of Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and the women who loved them. Previously unseen FBI files, private correspondence and a trove of unpublished documents reveal a chain of lesbian affairs that moved from the theater world of New York through the heights of chic society to embed itself in the power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.

    Why did Garbo and Dietrich deny knowing each other to the bitter end? THE GIRLS documents how they not only knew one another, but the swoon that started their ill-starred amour. How did Garbo-worshipper Tallulah Bankhead save Dietrich's career? FBI files make it clear how an intervention with J. Edgar Hoover helped. When was Marlene Dietrich first married? Not when her official biography claimed she was-an early marriage to a sexy, smoky communist was hushed up; THE GIRLS shows how and why.

    From the uninhibited appeal of lover-to-the-stars Mercedes de Acosta to the role of Garbo's lover Salka Viertel in torpedoing her career, from the sapphic world of silent star Alla Nazimova's Garden of Alla to Rudolph Valentino's lesbian brides, THE GIRLS explores a rich stew of film, politics, sexuality, psychology and stardom.

  • 0312246471
  • 9780312246471
  • Diana McLellan
  • 1 October 2000
  • Saint Martin's Press Inc.
  • Hardcover (Book)
  • 440
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