Early Hollywood described Sapphic stars ranging from the great Nazimova to Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, and Garbo herself as The Girls, lesbian affairs, it was widely felt at the time, expanded your emotional range, nurtured your amour propre, kept your skin clear and eyes bright, burnished your acting skills, and even - as director Josef von Sternberg believed - exerted a powerful and androgynous magnetism through the camera's lens, attracting the unwitting desires of both men and women in the audience as they watched through the dim, smoky air of the movie house. This book lifts the veil from the lives of Hollywood's most powerful and uninhibited goddesses.