GLR July-August 2022

ner, drinks (though Joe herself was a teetotaler) and dancing took up some evenings, but card-playing was the leading indoor sport, with onze (a game similar to gin rummy) and poker the favorites. In attendance most of the time was a rotating parade of stunning female guests occasionally accompanied by a male—usually a famous one, such as the Duke of Windsor, who was at that time the governor of the Bahamas. The roster of vis iting female celebrities was larger and included at vari ous times the singer Mabel Mercer (regarded by Joe as “a very great lady ... [who] had a marvelous voice. She was very proper, you know, just the opposite to me”); the actress Gwen Farrar and her current lover Tallulah Bankhead; and the international celebrity Marlene Di etrich (see the photos of Marlene on Whale Cay). And there hang several tales. While biographers have shaded the story variously, the weight of evidence leads to the conclusion that Tallulah Bankhead and Joe did have a brief af fair. But the relationship between Joe and Marlene is more dif ficult to characterize. That Marlene did sleep with women (including the notorious Mercedes de Acosta), and that she and Joe became for a time close friends, is indisputable. Both women—tough, down-to-earth, and authentic—were something like natural soul-mates. At one point Dietrich even sought Joe’s opinion on which film roles to accept, and the two cruised the Mediterranean for two seasons in the late ’30s aboard Joe’s French fishing yacht, The Arkel . In Maria Riva’s impressive bi ography of her mother, Marlene Dietrich, she confirms that Joe “was the only one who ever called Dietrich ‘Babe’ and got away with it.” For her part, Joe was unquestionably enamored of the bewitching Dietrich and—possessing a powerful sense of enti tlement—she repetitively offered to build Dietrich a dream house in which she would live like a fairy-tale princess. Still, I go with David Bret, one of the more cogent of Dietrich’s biog raphers, who concludes that although Joe “hoped for more than a platonic relationship,” Marlene and Joe “never became sexual lovers. Marlene was only interested in ... [Joe’s] personality, which was said to have been electrifying [and] ... took it all in with accustomed humor.”* § J OE C ARSTAIRS sold Whale Cay in 1975 (it quickly fell to seed) and thereafter moved between her houses in Sag Harbor and Naples, Florida, where she died in 1993 at the age of 93. In old age she remained, as one friend, Ellen “Pucky” Violett, told me: “awfully sweet, but old school “—that is, not at all political. “Joe wouldn’t talk about her own history,” another of her friends added, “but she would talk about being gay.” According to Alexandra Stoll, who knew her well, Joe was never “an old lady”; even when she had to hobble around with the aid of two canes, she maintained a boat in Sag Harbor, “a sort of small yacht, and she did everything, unroped everything ... [she] re mained vigorous, mentally strong.” She also remained “very down-to-earth, and very, very honest, not pretentious or grandiose or sentimental, but sympathetic”—and, above all, “completely comfortable with herself.” _________________________ * From interviews with Ellen “Pucky” Violett, Alex Stoll, and John Jessup in 1997.

was accorded the privilege of spending the night with her in the same bed. She retained a photograph of every woman she bedded down and put them on display under the glass top of a coffee table; the total was well over a hundred. Joe’s sexual pattern was much more traditionally male than female—or rather, it represented what many men (so we’re told) would regard as ideal, except that Joe, unlike them, was exceedingly generous to her partners, heeding their wishes, showering them with gifts, without asking for exclu sivity. Joe “was just completely open,” Alex Stoll, who knew Joe later in life, told me in a 1997 interview. “I think she was a little pissed that everybody kept everything a secret, because she was the one who didn’t. She was just very honest, very down-to-earth, not sentimental or pretentious.” § A T AGE 34 and facing tax problems in both Britain and the U.S., Joe, with typical audacity, decided in 1934 to buy the barely habitable island of Whale Cay in the Bahamas, nine miles by four, for the sum of $40,000. In doing so, she became in essence the sole ruler and for a time nearly the sole inhabitant. (A sin gle shack existed for a man and his wife who occasionally tended to the lighthouse.) Covered with shrubs and weeds, the island was sold as entirely non-arable. Joe rolled up her leg endary sleeves and embarked on an eight-year project that at its close would boast an elegant pseudo-Spanish villa of hand-pol ished mahogany, a power plant, fifteen miles of paved road, a wireless station, a schoolhouse, and an agricultural enterprise that included homes and a chapel for the several hundred Ba hamians who flocked to Whale Cay’s generous salary scale— and produced the largest granary in the Bahamas. During the early 1930s, with construction crews largely in possession of Whale Cay, Joe traveled widely. Even later, she’d periodically shop and visit friends on the Florida mainland and elsewhere, but starting in the mid-’30s, Whale Cay became her chief residence, as it remained for the next forty years. And she made it a comfortable one: she had a private staff of four house boys, a nurse, a male cook, and several hundred Bahamian workers to maintain the flourishing plants and crops. When guests were in residence in the villa, dinner was served formally at nine o’clock, with the charismatic Joe in a formal naval uni form complete with trousers appearing to dazzling effect as she descended the curved staircase into the dining area. After din- Marlene Dietrich on Joe’s French fishing yacht, The Arkel, 1939 .

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