Seductress Extraordinaire

Terry Castle

  • ‘That Furious Lesbian’: The Story of Mercedes de Acosta by Robert Schanke
    Southern Illinois, 210 pp, £16.95, June 2004, ISBN 0 8093 2579 9
  • Women in Turmoil: Six Plays by Mercedes de Acosta, edited by Robert Schanke
    Southern Illinois, 252 pp, £26.95, June 2003, ISBN 0 8093 2509 8

You know you’re getting old when sleeping with a vampire no longer gives you a sickly thrill. At the age of ten or eleven, having absorbed the requisite number of creaky old Bela Lugosi films, I evolved such a baleful Dracula-fear that I began sleeping every night with one arm slung backwards over my neck. This neurotic and slightly awkward posture – still habitual, I’m embarrassed to say – was meant to be prophylactic: even while snoozing, I figured, I’d be ready to fend off any emissaries from the undead who tried to bite me.

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