Rita de Acosta Lydig
Giovanni Boldini, 1911
Private Collection
Source: ATHENAUEM
Rita De Alba De Acosta Lydig, a descendant of the Alba family, famous in the history of Spain as the Dukes of Alba, was born in New York City to Ricardo de Acosta and Micaela Hernandez y de Alba in the year 1880. Her father was a well known merchant of Havana and New York. Her first husband was W.E. Stokes, a multimillionaire whom she had a son by. She eventually divorced and in 1902 married retired U.S. Army Captain Phillip M. Lydig. Rita was an exceptional beauty and was painted several times by such artists as John Singer Sargent and Giovanni Boldini. She was also known for her lavish and extravagant lifestyle and as an author of some note as well, having written the 1927 book Tragic Mansions, a semi-fictional account of the often pathetic and personal lives of the golden age millionaire families of Newport, Rhode Island --- the same local that served to inspire author F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel, The Great Gatsby, a poignant tale of decadence first published in 1925.
Rita's younger sister, Mercedes De Acosta, was also an author, as well as a scriptwriter and social critic, but most notably infamous for her relationship with Greta Garbo and perhaps lesser so for her trip to India to meet with the venerated sage Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi.
In 1994 author Annette Tapert wrote in her book book, THE POWER OF STYLE: The Women Who Defined the Art of Living Well:
Rita was equally welcomed in Paris, where she spent parts of each year. She would arrive at the Ritz with a hairdresser, masseuse, chauffeur, secretary, maid,... and forty Vuitton trunks... In Paris, she joined ranks with musicians, artists, intellectuals, and philosophers, names like Rodin, Duse, Yvette Guillbert etc...
Impressed by Rita's innate creative spirit, Isabella Stewart Gardner, the great collector and creator of the Gardner museum in Boston, once asked their mutual friend, John Singer Sargent, why Rita had never expressed herself artistically, "Why should she?" Sargent answered, "She herself is art."
As an aspiring writer and a author of a book herself, while in the exciting postwar creative milieu of Paris, besides just joining the ranks of musicians, artists, intellectuals, and philosophers as cited above, Rita De Acosta also sought out authors of similar ilk --- especially so such luminaries as W. Somerset Maugham, who was also an accomplished playwright and basically lived in Paris on and off during the same years De Acosta visited. Years later, ironically, Maugham played a major, but somewhat peripheral role in Rita's sister Mercedes life, especially in relation to her book Here Lies the Heart.
Cafe Du' Dome, Paris, circa 1929. The man sitting just left of the waiter is thought to be Maugham.
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