Greta Garbo began her acting career in her native Sweden and moved to Hollywood in 1925, where she quickly became one of the industry’s most beloved stars. She was in a relationship with her frequent co-star John Gilbert, who also served as her acting coach. At the dawn of the 1930s their relationship was over, but Garbo’s star remained on the rise.

After the break with John Gilbert, Garbo had no acting coach. In April 1930, a year after she and Gilbert parted, she found a new coach at a party at the director Ernst Lubitsch’s home, a center for the Hollywood German community, where she met Salka Viertel, a Berlin stage actress. Garbo and Salka spent most of the evening talking on the terrace. Salka, who was sixteen years older than Garbo, found her “hypersensitive, although of a steely resistance,” while her opinions about people were “just, sharp, and objective.”

Salka had come to Hollywood in 1928 from Berlin, at the age of thirty-one, with her husband, Berthold, and their three sons, David, Peter, and Christopher. Fox studios had hired Berthold, a writer and director known in Germany. Salka had been a successful actress in Berlin, but she was rarely cast in roles in Hollywood films; she was, she said, “too old” and “not beautiful enough.”

Salka had a sensual glow. For several years she had an affair with her next-door neighbor, Oliver Garrett, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, who helped her navigate the ebbs and flows of Hollywood. She then had a long affair with Gottfried Reinhardt, the son of Max Reinhardt, the Berlin theatrical impresario. Gottfried was twenty years younger than she, but he was stocky, with a solemn manner, and they didn’t seem that different in age. The Viertels had an open marriage, and Berthold was so often in Europe and with other women that Gottfried often lived in her home and functioned as her husband. He worked as an assistant producer at MGM.

In 1929 the Viertels moved to a large house in Santa Monica Canyon, near the beach. Salka held Sunday afternoon get-togethers, with coffee and homemade cake, conversation, ping-pong, and walks on the beach. Garbo didn’t always attend Salka’s salons, partly because of attacks of shyness, but also because eventually she sometimes went to other Hollywood gatherings—at Vicki Baum’s home in Pacific Palisades, for example, a few miles up the coast from Santa Monica, or at director George Cukor’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Baum, from Berlin, wrote the novel on which Grand Hotel was based. Cukor, who was homosexual, held luncheons for gender-crossing friends. His home was a showpiece, with six acres of gardens terraced up a hill.

Salka often joined Garbo in hiking in the hills or swimming in the ocean early in the morning. Following Swedish practice, they swam in the nude. When together, they discussed films, the theater, literature, and their lives. Both Garbo and Salka wanted to return to Europe, but they felt they couldn’t. Garbo had her screen career and her drive to be financially independent, while Salka and the boys were dependent on Berthold, still employed by Hollywood studios. Jacques Feyder suggested that Salka play Marthy, the prostitute in Anna Christie, in MGM’s German version of the film, which he was to direct, and Garbo agreed. She and Salka grew close; Salka was the mother Garbo wanted; Garbo was the daughter in Salka’s family of males.

Fred Zinnemann, Berthold’s assistant, later an eminent Hollywood director, described Salka as “one of the world’s most generous and opinionated women,” and she dominated Garbo. At their meetings, Salka was the star and Garbo the audience. After reading a biography of Sweden’s Queen Christina, Salka suggested to Garbo that she play the queen in a biopic. Garbo agreed—and suggested that Salka write the screenplay. Salka wasn’t a writer, but Garbo knew that, at her request, Thalberg would partner Salka with MGM’s best writers. Garbo gave Salka a career—as a writer and an acting coach. Salka participated in writing the screenplays for Queen Christina and most of Garbo’s subsequent films. Deeply impressed by Salka, Garbo developed an abiding love for her. But Salka was never certain how she felt about Garbo.

In the summer of 1931, while Garbo was making Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise, Salka was persuaded to introduce Garbo to Mercedes de Acosta, who had come to Hollywood to write a screenplay for Pola Negri—and to seduce Garbo. Mercedes had heard through the lesbian grapevine that Garbo wasn’t a lesbian, but she could easily become one. De Acosta, openly lesbian, had a reputation for skill as a lover, and she was on a mission to turn prominent actresses into lesbians. It’s not surprising that she wanted to meet Garbo, but Salka was worried about what might happen if that meeting took place.

Mercedes de Acosta, born to parents descended from the Spanish nobility, was raised in a wealthy section of New York’s West Side. She met celebrities through her sister Rita Lydig. Eighteen years older than Mercedes, Rita was a fabled beauty, a leader in New York high society, and a reformer who worked for women’s suffrage and birth control, as well as labor rights. The de Acosta family once had money, but Rita’s and Mercedes’s money came from their wealthy husbands.

Rita introduced Mercedes to her famous friends: the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Jack and Ethel Barrymore of the famed Barrymore acting family, and others. Raised a Catholic, Mercedes attended Catholic schools. In 1914 Vogue featured her as a New York debutante, and in 1920 she married Abram Poole, a New York society painter. She followed Rita into feminism, working for women’s suffrage and then for the Lucy Stone League, formed to persuade women to keep their maiden names after marriage, following the example of Lucy Stone, a leader in the nineteenth-century U.S. women’s movement.

Like Rita, Mercedes wore distinctive clothing, but she had her own style. She often wore capes, tricorne hats, and pointed shoes with silver buckles on them, looking like a pirate. She was also known for wearing a dark coat fitted at the waist, with wide lapels and a full skirt, designed by the Paris couturier Paul Poiret. Garbo liked the coat so much that she had a copy of it made for her. Mercedes dyed her hair black, painted her face white, and wore blood-red lipstick—prompting some people to call her “Madame Dracula.”

Mercedes wore only black and white clothes, so Garbo and Salka called her “Black and White.” Aldous Huxley described her as “a small but most exquisite woman, both in features and figure, and in the manner of her dress.” She was five feet four inches tall. Close to Cecil Beaton, she provided him with information about Garbo to use in his writing about her, until he and Garbo became close friends in the late 1940s.

Mercedes lived a dramatic life, engaging in what Cecil Beaton called “glorious enthusiasms.” She also had periods of deep depression. Until she was seven and saw the male sex organ, she thought she was a boy. Discovering her mistake devastated her, until she formed romantic friendships with girls and studied ancient Greek ideas of sex. She interpreted those ideas as suggesting that everyone has a masculine and a feminine side. She took up lesbianism as a cause. Cecil Beaton called her “a furious lesbian.”

Mercedes studied Hindu and Buddhist texts and followed Eastern mystics; her knowledge of Eastern religions was part of her attraction to Garbo, who continually looked for a spiritual path and never seemed to find one. And Mercedes always knew about the latest healers and remedies. She consulted Dr. Henry Bieler, who promoted vegetarianism. Not long after she met Mercedes, Garbo consulted Bieler and became a vegetarian.

Mercedes knew the two great dramatic actresses of the turn of the twentieth century: Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. She had had affairs with prominent female performers, including Isadora Duncan, a founder of modern dance, who promoted dress reform; the English actress Eva La Gallienne, with whom she exchanged wedding rings; and the Russian actress Alla Nazimova. When Nazimova came to Hollywood in 1916 to act in films, she formed a Sapphic circle, which some say was called “the sewing circle.” Isadora Duncan wrote passionate poems to Mercedes, extolling her sexual ability and writing paeans to her beautiful white hands.

Once Salka introduced Mercedes to Garbo in July 1931, Garbo initially fell for this aristocrat, with her tales of famous friends, knowledge of Eastern religions, and skill at sex. After finishing Susan Lenox that summer, Garbo took Mercedes to a cabin on an island in a lake in the High Sierras, where they swam, caught fish, talked, and began an affair. Mercedes was known for her sexual skill and Garbo for “the unbounded freedom of her life.”

After her trip to the High Sierras with Mercedes, Garbo displayed deep feelings for Salka, which suggests that the Sierra trip was a failure, that she was comparing Salka and Mercedes as friends and lovers, or that she was forming a triangle with the two of them. On September 18, which was Garbo’s birthday, she seduced Salka, who described what happened in a letter to Berthold—her confidante as well as her husband. Greta decorated her house with white gardenias, a symbol of femininity and of secret love. She served Champagne and played Sapphic songs on the gramophone. It was, according to Salka, “a gigantic temptation apparatus.” She concluded: “So we were together—it was harmonious and beautiful.”

By the late fall, Salka’s infatuation with Garbo had dissipated for a time, as Garbo became demanding. She was filming Mata Hari and spending time with Mercedes, in the first flush of their romance. Then, looking at Garbo one day, Salka realized that not only did she slouch but she also had a hump on her back. Salka wrote to Berthold, who was in New York, about the hump, but he replied that she should forget it because Garbo had influence in Hollywood and could damage his career. Salka stayed with Garbo as a close friend and mentor but kept her at a distance by having affairs with men, first with Oliver Garrett and then with Gottfried Reinhardt. After the episode of sex in 1931 between Garbo and Salka, there is no further evidence of sexual relations between them.

Even before Mercedes appeared in Garbo’s life in the summer of 1931, there were references to Garbo’s presumed lesbianism in the Hollywood trade journals and in movie magazines. In 1929, Variety’s review of Garbo’s movie The Single Standard slyly referred to Garbo’s free love views. In January 1931, in a review of Garbo’s movie Inspiration, a Variety writer called her “one of the strangest personalities of all the freaks or odd ones that have littered Hollywood for years.” And Mercedes persuaded Garbo to become more open about her masculinity. The Hollywood Reporter, Hollywood’s first tabloid, was launched in 1930. On August 21, 1931, a month after Mercedes and Garbo met, the tabloid noted that “Greta Garbo has a new love.” On September 23, 1931, the tabloid referred to “an ambidextrous foreign star.” (“Ambidextrous” means being able to use either hand for tasks; it was then a common circumlocution for lesbians, homosexuals, and bisexuals.) The tabloid also referred to “the two Garbos.”

But Garbo was ambivalent about Mercedes. After Salka, in her subtle, poetic way, informed Garbo that they could be close friends, but not lovers, Garbo turned to Mercedes for sex. That action unleashed Mercedes’s obsessive nature, expressed in constant demands for deep expressions of love. After several months, Garbo fled to New York to get away from her. When she returned to Hollywood after a month away, she found Mercedes living in a house near hers. Ever after, when Garbo moved, Mercedes moved to a nearby house. Garbo wrote to Hörke Wachtmeister, a close friend in Sweden, that Mercedes made her nervous. She also disliked Mercedes’s love of gossip, and she was incensed when she learned that Mercedes told Cecil Beaton about her doings, which he then used in writing about her.

Mercedes and Salka didn’t like each other, which isn’t surprising. Mercedes didn’t attend Salka’s salons; she formed one of her own, which may have been a continuation of Alla Nazimova’s “sewing circle.” She also had an affair with Marlene Dietrich, Garbo’s major Hollywood rival. Garbo eventually forgave her this breach of faith; free-love principles permitted it and forbade jealousy. And Mercedes was lavish in spending on Garbo; she once had an elaborate gate built overnight around her mansion when Garbo mentioned a need for it.

Mercedes’s husband divorced her in 1935 and married his mistress, but he didn’t cut off his large stipend to Mercedes for years. It was her major source of income, financing the mansions she rented and her largesse to Garbo. But she was indomitable. When the stipend ended, she managed to find jobs editing and writing for small magazines, moving between New York and Paris. She became friends with John Lennon and Yoko Ono and was often a guest at their Christmas celebrations. But when she died in 1968, she was destitute.

Garbo didn’t permanently break with Mercedes until her autobiography was published in 1960. Even though Mercedes hid their affair in a cloud of circumlocutions in the memoir, she included a photo she had taken of a topless Garbo on the island in the High Sierras. And her description of her research methods for the autobiography must have alarmed the perfectionist and secretive Garbo. Mercedes’s major source, she stated, was her memory. She had kept neither a diary nor a datebook, and when she wrote her appointments down on scraps of paper, she promptly lost them. She did keep letters written to her and other memorabilia; they are in her collection in the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. The biographer can figure out a lot about their relationship from that collection, but far from all of it.

From IDEAL BEAUTY: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo by Dr. Lois W. Banner. Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Lois W. Banner. Excerpted by permission of Rutgers University Press.