If you think celesbian gossip these days is crazy, you should’ve been alive like 100 years ago because DAMN these ladies were BUSY. Well, I mean, we’re pretty sure they were busy — it’s hard to know for certain in most of these cases, ’cause even if one woman claimed it happened, it’s likely the other swore it didn’t. But that hasn’t stopped historians from writing books like The Sewing Circle: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women, The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood, Hollywood Lesbians, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars. Using those books and the internet, I made you this chart, and compiled the list beneath it. This chart is focused on actresses of the early 20th century — everybody on this chart is connected, somehow, to a member of “The Sewing Circle.”
Again, a lot of this information could be false, but it is also possibly true! As hard as it was to find information about the actresses on this list, however, information about the sexual relationships between Black stars was even harder to nail down. I’m working on that, though, for a follow-up post that’ll center on the big names of the Harlem Renaissance.
Without any further ado, here are the ten most prominent ladykillers of early Hollywood and Broadway!
10. Dorothy Arzner
Alleged relationships & lovers: Joan Crawford, Ona Munson, Alla Nazimova, Billie Burke, Marion Morgan
The only female director in Hollywood at the time, Arzner defied expectations on multiple levels. She directed over 20 films in 24 years, taught Francis Ford Coppola and was the first female member of the Director’s Guild Association. She also spent many years with her partner Marion Morgan, after rumored relations with many other actresses IN THE BIZ.
9. Barbara Stanwyck
Alleged relationships & lovers: Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Helen Ferguson, Tallulah Bankhead
Barbara Stanwyck pinged hard for her lesbian fans, even in movies where she had to pretend to be in love with a dude. A gay actor named Clifton Webb, who played her husband in Titanic, called Stanwyck “my favorite American lesbian.” “Stanwyck’s screen characters defined themselves on their own terms,” writes Axel Madsen in The Sewing Circle: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women. “Stanwyck was emotionally honest, and the way she related to men was different.” She was deeply closeted, burying her secret underneath her well-defined and daunting career ambitions and a really shitty but relatively brief marriage to a gay vaudeville star that inspired the film A Star is Born. She ultimately spent thirty years with her publicist Helen Ferguson.
8. Joan Crawford
Alleged romances/affairs: Alice Delamar, Barbara Stanwyck, Martha Raye, Dorothy Arzner, Claudette Colbert
Crawford, who’d started her career as a stage dancer, was stoked to be cast in a film with Greta Garbo, even though they didn’t have any scenes together. When they met, Garbo took Crawford’s face in her hands and said, “What a pity; our first picture together and we don’t work with each other. I’m sorry. You have a marvelous face.” Crawford said of this encounter, “if there was ever a time in my life when I might have been a lesbian, that was it.” BUT WAS IT REALLY, JOAN? Her lovers — and she had many, male and female — called her “Billie.” MGM paid $100 grand in 1935 to suppress the release of a pornographic lesbian film Crawford had appeared in at the age of 19. Unlike a lot of the other women on this list though there isn’t a lot of concrete solid evidence about her affairs.
7. Eva La Gallienne
Alleged relationships & lovers: Josephine Hutchinson, Tallulah Bankhead, Alla Nazimona, Laurette Taylor, Beatrice Lillie, Mercedes De Acosta, Alice Delamar
Although Eva didn’t actively attempt to hide her sexuality, she wasn’t exactly proud of it either. At the height of her fame, she began a relationship with Alla Nazimova. After their breakup she began dating Mercedes de Acosta, with whom she traveled to Europe, often showing up in the salon of famed openly lesbian socialite Natalie Barney. Her relationship with actress Josephine Hutchinson, who was married at the time, ended up being a huge scandal in the press, inspiring Eva to tell a friend, “If you have any thoughts about being a lesbian, don’t do it. Your life will be nothing but tragedy.” She then became involved with director Margaret Webster, with whom she co-founded the American Repertory Theater.
6. Greta Garbo
Alleged relationships & lovers: Marlene Dietrich, Mercedes de Acosta, Salka Viertel, Louise Brooks, Billie Holiday, Lilyan Tashman, Tallulah Bankhead
Garbo dated men but unlike other Sewing Circle members, never married one. Rather than lie to the press about her private life, she established a reputation as mysterious and aloof. Like Kristen Stewart! At the age of 19, while working on an obscure German film — before moving to America and becoming a star — she was seduced by 23-year-old Marlene Dietrich, described by Hollywood historian Diana McLellan as a “bohemian young mama with a notorious and compulsive appetite for the sexual seduction of other beautiful women, particularly backstage.” Garbo, on the other hand, was “simple” and “sensitive,” and ended up so hurt by Dietrich that she denied knowing her for the rest of her life. You know how it is. Then Garbo moved to Hollywood, where she continued an intimate relationship with actress-writer Salka Viertel and was introduced by Viertel to Mercedes de Acosta.
5. Katharine Hepburn
Alleged relationships/lovers: Elissa Landi, Irene Mayer Selznick, Phyllis Wilbourn, Laura Harding (heiress to the American Express fortune), Jane Loring (film editor), Judy Hollywood, Billie Burke
As a kid, Katharine shaved her head and went by “Jimmy,” and as a grown-up super-famous actress, was known for her boyish attire and bohemian attitude. Her agent’s third wife referred to Hepburn as “that dykey bitch.” Her first relationship was allegedly with her college friend Laura Harding.
4. Alla Nazimova
Alleged relationships/lovers: Jean Acker, Natacha Rambova, Eva Le Gallienne, Mercedes De Acosta, Dolly Wilde, Bridget Bate Tichenor, Glesca Marshall, Grace Darmond, Dorothy Arzne
Stage actress Alla Nazimova cointed the term “The Sewing Circle,” referring to her group of lesbian, bisexual, or bi-curious Hollywood ladies. She held “outlandish parties” at her Sunset Boulevard estate, the legendary queer hangout known as The Garden of Allah, which was converted into a hotel in 1926. Alla was unusually open about her relationships with women and was instrumental in launching the careers of Sewing Circle members Jean Acker and Natacha Rambova. Alla lived with her partner Glesca Marshall from 1929 until her death in 1945.
3. Marlene Dietrich
Alleged lovers/relationships: Edith Piaf, Greta Garbo, Mercedes de Acosta, Claire Waldoff, Tallulah Bankead, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck
Marlene Dietrich was a glamorous Hollywood extrovert of whom film critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, “She has sex but no positive gender. Her masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men.” Dietrich was a big fan of gay Berlin in the 1920s, and after moving to the states and becoming one of Hollywood’s biggest female stars, had a lot of affairs with men and women. She even went above and beyond by having affairs with men who’d had affairs with women she’d also had affairs with.
2. Tallulah Bankhead
Alleged lovers/relationships:Â Greta Garbo, Hope Williams, Beatrice Lille, Patsy Kelly, Katherine Cornell, Billie Holiday, Libby Holman, Hattie McDaniel, Eva La Gallienne, Barbara Stanwyck, Mercedes De Acosta.
Tallulah Bankhead, best known as a stage actress but also prolific in radio, film and television, was crass, hilarious, and unapologetic about her sexuality, an outgoing alcoholic and drug addict who “sought sex of every variety constantly, hungrily, and without reservation.” Actress Hope Williams, at 19, initiated 16-year-old Tallulah into the world of lesbian sex and she took to it pretty damn quickly. It’s difficult to find any lesbian or bisexual woman of the era who is not rumored to have had a thing with Tallulah. She married actor John Emery for four years and then never married again again. She didn’t find The Kinsey Report remotely surprising, declaring, “I’ve had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself.” She was considered “unsuitable for the public” by the Hays Committee on account of her “Verbal Moral Turpitude.”
1. Mercedes de Acosta
Alleged lovers/relationships: Greta Garbo, Alla Nazimova, Katharine Cornell, Isadora Duncan, Eva Le Gallienne, Marlene Dietrich, Ona Munson, Eleonora Duse, Barbara Stanwyck, Tallulah Bankhead, Salka Viertel, Eva Hermann
Play and screenwriter Mercedes de Acosta was the Shane of her era, bedding pretty much every lady-loving-lady in the West Hollywood region. Prior to becoming a bisexual seducer of the stars, she was a little girl who thought she was a little boy. Her Mom used to call her “Rafael.” Alice B. Toklas said of de Acosta, “Say what you will about Mercedes, she’s had the most important women of the twentieth century.” She had lengthy love affairs with actress Eva Le Gallienne, Alla Nazimova and Isadora Duncan. Her most legendary relationship, though, was with Greta Garbo. She married a heterosexual man in 1920 but insisted the wedding remain private and was notably frowning when carried over the threshold that evening.
Here’s a glossary with information about some of the other women on The Chart:
