GIRLS

If you were "one of the girls", as early Hollywood described Sapphic stars, lesbian affairs lent an edge to both your life and your work. This book lifts the veil from the lives of such powerful and uninhibited Hollywood goddesses as Nazimova, Dietrich, Bankhead and Garbo. It was widely felt at the time that being a lesbian expanded your emotional range, nurtured your amour propre, kept your skin clear and your eyes bright, burnished your acting skills, and even - as director Josef von Sternberg believed - exerted a powerful androgynous magnetism through the lens of the camera, attracting the unwitting desires of both men and women in the cinema audience.