[Celebrity Murder Case 07] - The Marlene Dietrich Muder Case

by George Baxt

  Anna May’s heartbeat was unusually rapid. By nature she was a calm and unflappable woman. Now there was heat in her cheeks and moisture on her upper lip and she dabbed at it with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. What Mai Mai had told her disturbed her. Mai Mai was a genius; her father had told her this and she had great respect for his judgment. If there was an opportunity later, she would share what she had heard with Marlene. Marlene was a practical woman, a very intelligent and a very clever one. Look at how she manipulated her husband and von Sternberg and Adolph Zukor and Ben Schulberg, who was the West Coast head of Paramount Pictures, but, according to rumor, not for much longer. People seemed to like to be manipulated by her, she did it with such grace and subtlety. The way she loved her daughter, but didn’t dote on her or indulge her. The way she defied the studio when they insisted she keep Maria sequestered from the public eye, as the presence of a daughter might damage Dietrich’s glamorous image. So Dietrich was the bellwether, and other actresses revealed they were mothers. Gloria Swanson, Miriam Hopkins, Constance Bennett, even when the legitimacy of their children was in question. Lots of actresses went to the desert for their health and returned many months later with “adopted” babies. Some could even name the father.

  Yes, she would share this knowledge with Marlene, and the sooner the better, although she’d be hard put to explain what she thought Marlene could do about it.

  Marlene was in her daughter’s bedroom, where Maria’s nurse sat in an easy chair reading Tiffany Thayer’s racy version of The Three Musketeers. Maria was a beautiful child, and now, fast asleep, her mother thought she resembled an angel in repose.

  “Did she enjoy her dinner?”

  “Oh, yes. She’s like her mother. She loves her food.”

  “She mustn’t like her food too much. I have a fat problem and I don’t want her to have one too. Now listen, if the party gets too noisy and awakens Maria, come and tell me and I’ll send them all home.”

  “Nothing awakens Maria. She sleeps like a log.”

  “I wish I could say the same for me. Well dear, Happy New Year.”

  “And to you, Miss Dietrich.” God, but she’s gorgeous in that slinky, shimmery gown. And me, me in this damned uniform, alone on New Year’s Eve reading Tiffany Thayer. Oh, what the hell, D’Artagnan’s banging Milady deWinter. Some girls have all the luck.

  Marlene went swiftly down the hall to a room at the rear of the house. She knocked lightly on the door and entered. An actor dressed as Father Time and a midget dressed as the New Year’s baby sat playing cards and drinking gin.

  “Everything all right, boys?”

  “Everything’s fine, Miss Dietrich. Dinner was great.” Father Time was a once popular silent screen actor down on his luck. Von Sternberg had asked her to hire him.

  “How’s the diaper, Ambrose?”

  The midget chuckled and said, “A perfect fit. The gin’s great too.”

  “Go easy on it. I don’t want the old year reeling out and the New Year staggering in.”

  “Don’t you worry about us,” said Father Time. “We’re pros.”

  “Happy New Year.” Marlene shut the door behind her. Father Time. Once he’d been the king of the mountain, and now he was at the bottom of the heap. What a cruel profession, what a cruel town. Well, they’ll never do it to me. She moved to a balcony hidden by drapes that overlooked the ballroom. The guests were arriving. Soon she’d make her entrance. She would time it very carefully even if she had to wait for the very last star to arrive, and that would undoubtedly be Constance Bennett. Well, thought Dietrich, Connie darling, no bitch upstages Dietrich, especially in her own home. The orchestra was playing “Sonny Boy.” Al Jolson must have entered with his wife, Ruby Keeler. Marlene returned to her suite for another glass of champagne. She found Anna May Wong waiting for her.

  “Darling! Why didn’t you send Gloria to fetch me?” Gloria was pouring champagne for them.

  “I only just got here. I’m glad I got to you before you joined your guests.”

  “You’re frightened. What’s wrong?” Gloria distributed the glasses and then discreetly disappeared.

  “You’ll probably think I’m foolish. But you’ve got to hear what Mai Mai Chu told me in the car.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s downstairs studying the guests.”

  “What do you mean ‘studying’ them?”

  Anna May took Marlene’s hand and led her to a settee. “You’ve got to hear this. And when I’m finished you can tell me I’m either a damn fool or that you’re as disturbed as I am. But Marlene, Mai Mai is no damn fool and she’s very disturbed. And Mai Mai doesn’t disturb easily. You remember what she said on the phone this afternoon, there will be danger in this house tonight. Well, it came to her again on the drive here, but Marlene, this time Mai Mai was truly frightened…”

  “Tell me,” said Marlene, “tell me everything. And I mean everything.” She took a heavy swig of champagne.

  THREE

  HAZEL DICKSON’S ROADSTER was old but proud. For the past five years it had served her well, transporting her over many thousands of miles on the trail of a lead or nosing out the tidbits she would sell to the newspaper columnists who hoped to titillate their hungry and faithful readers. Although Hazel was carefully steering up the long driveway where stately rows of cedars of Lebanon formed an arboreal honor guard, the roadster seemed to know its own way to the stately front door. One of a dozen parking attendants replaced Hazel at the wheel, eyeing Hazel and Herb Villon with suspicion. Surely they were meant to use the servant’s entrance. Herb was not at home in a tuxedo and Hazel was wearing her Coco Chanel, the latest in evening pajamas. It was a daring new style that Dietrich had introduced to America when she returned from Paris the previous April.

  They could hear the orchestra treating Cole Porter’s “You Do Something to Me” with reverence and respect as they passed through the entrance. The butler on guard at the doors recognized Hazel and wished her a Happy New Year. She would have preferred hearing him tell her how ravishing she looked, but a girl can’t have everything. Herb was impressed by the huge foyer with its grand staircase leading up to the ballroom. Maids and butlers were flying up and down bearing trays of food and party favors. “There are four bars upstairs,” Hazel advised Herb, who had muttered something about being thirsty.

  “If Helen Twelvetrees is here, introduce me to her.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then I shall ravish her on the dance floor in full view of everyone.”

  “And what will her husband be doing?”

  “Keeping score, if he’s a good sport.”

  Entering the ballroom, Herb had the good manners not to yell “Wow!” Instead he said to Hazel, “If they drop a bomb on this place, the only thing left of Hollywood will be walk’ ons and extras.” He recognized Maurice Chevalier. He assumed the woman with the French heartthrob was his wife, Yvonne. There was Fredric March with his wife, Florence Eldredge, looking as though he wished he were with somebody else’s wife. March’s lechery was a Hollywood legend. John Gilbert, holding what was probably a tumbler of whisky, had arrived with his young bride, actress Virginia Bruce, but Hazel spotted her dancing with a French actor recently arrived in Hollywood, Charles Boyer. John Gilbert was trying to act gay and insouciant, as though his star was not descending, the talkies being unkind to him and his once huge horde of fans dwindling as rapidly as sand falling through a sieve. Gloria Swanson, albeit only five feet tall, looked majestic in a black gown studded with multicolored paillettes, and artfully wielded a black ostrich fan that managed to sidesweep anyone in her immediate vicinity. Hazel heard a woman commenting on Swanson, “She has a classic profile. Very old.” Jules Furthman, the highly respected writer who had scripted Shanghai Express, was talking to columnist Sidney Skolsky, a diminutive man whose forte was telling his readers what the stars wore in bed, if they wore anything. Furthman was expounding on another writer, who was accused of stealing his latest plot from
de Maupassant: “He’d plagiarize an obituary.” Skolsky reminded Furthman that he’d lifted Shanghai Express from de Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, to which Furthman responded swiftly, “Not all of it!”

  An ardent young man reciting a Browning love poem to lovely actress Dorothy Jordan was overheard by the impeccable but drunk John Barrymore, who cackled to his stunning wife, Dolores Costello, “My dear, methinks I am hearing verses.”

  Herb, holding his second gin and tonic, was having a wonderful time eavesdropping on the stars and delighting in their uninhibited bitchery. Hazel had left him and was off in search of salable items. Herb heard director George Cukor, a recent arrival from New York with the sharp tongue of an avenging serpent, say of an actress long on ambition and short on talent, “She’s ferociously fought and clawed her way to the bottom.”

  Dong See had downed several brandies, neat, to calm his shattered nerves. Raymond Souvir was anxiously looking for Dietrich, and a maid told him she had not yet made an appearance. The former silent screen star Pola Negri, who after a three-year absence was back in Hollywood to make her first talking film for Radio Pictures, A Woman Commands, had much of the room buzzing with surprise as she engaged in what seemed to be a very warm and friendly chat with her once arch rival at Paramount, Gloria Swanson. A lip-reader might have been delighted at what Negri was telling Swanson. “I roll the batter very very thin until you can almost see through it. Then I mash cooked prunes into the cottage cheese and spread a good layer on each individual square of batter. After I roll them and place them in a pan of lightly melted butter, I put them in the oven and bake them.”

  “Bake? Not fry?” Swanson looked so astonished, one might have thought she’d heard an option drop.

  “Bake, my darling, bake. Believe me, are those yummy blintzes!”

  Bela Lugosi of Dracula fame was apparently bemoaning his fate to Hazel Dickson. “So what is fame, what is success, what is money without someone to love?”

  Hazel was pragmatic. “Have you considered taking up a hobby?”

  “What kind of a hobby?” asked Lugosi in world-weary tones.

  “Of course, something that would interest you. Something you could sink your teeth into.”

  Countess Dorothy di Frasso swept into the room with Ivar Tensha and Monte Trevor in her wake. She accepted champagne from a waiter and an hors d’oeuvre from another and to her horror realized she was chewing on a disguised anchovy, and she despised anchovies.

  “Is there anything else I can get you?” asked a waiter.

  “A stomach pump.” She grabbed a napkin from the waiter’s tray and rid herself of the anchovy. A gulp of the bubbly had a needed cleansing effect, and then with an infectious joie de vivre she took to the task of introducing the munitions king and the British producer to all her friends and acquaintances, and they were legion. Within minutes Tensha and Trevor were swimming frantically in a sea of celebrity names and celebrity faces. From Edward G. Robinson to Evelyn Brent to Louise Brooks to Paul and Bella Muni. Soon they were hanging on for dear life to such familiar names and faces as Lilyan Tashman and Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen and then onward to Jackie Cooper and his mother and Mitzi Green and her mother and then to a sad young thing whose husband had run off to Mexico with her wealthy mother, di Frasso commenting sotto voce to her escorts, “The brute married her for her mummy.”

  Then di Frasso took egotistical delight in pointing out the many men who’d been to bed with her. Tensha asked with a rare twinkle in his eye, “Tell me, my dear, were you ever a virgin?”

  Di Frasso laughed. “Ivor, I was a virgin way back when virginity was an asset.” They were joined by Raymond Souvir and Dong See. Souvir commented on the presence of Gregory and Natalia Ivanov. Di Frasso explained, “Marlene specializes in eclectic guest lists. Actually, I suspect the Ivanovs are here because Marlene and Joseph von Sternberg have been haunting the Russian Embassy for research on the life of Catherine the Great. They want to do a film of her life with, of course, Marlene portraying the empress.”

  “I thought the Communists despised royalty,” commented Dong See.

  “Not when it could turn a profit,” said di Frasso. “They certainly treasure the treasures they confiscated from the deposed peerage. They’ve been selling them throughout the world to finance their five-year plan.” She addressed Tensha. “I’m told you’ve acquired some priceless religious articles.”

  “Oh, yes. I have a taste for icons studded with precious jewels.”

  Di Frasso said wearily, “While I have a taste for precious studs.”

  A buzz went up in the room. Constance Bennett was making her entrance, a dazzling creature in one of Gilbert Adrian’s more unique designs, the dress daringly slit from ankle to thigh, and wearing jewels that were assuredly worth a movie star’s ransom. Gloria Swanson, who loathed Constance Bennett, asked the star’s sister Joan, “What will she do with all the wealth she flaunts? She certainly can’t take it with her.”

  “If she can’t take it with her,” replied Joan Bennett, “she won’t go.”

  Hazel Dickson said to Herb Villon, “Oh, thank God.”

  “For what?”

  “Now that the Bennett bitch is here, Marlene will make her entrance.”

  In her suite, Marlene was pacing and digesting what Anna May Wong had told her. Mai Mai’s premonitions were certainly disturbing. The delicate Chinese woman was not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill astrologer predicting that you will meet a tall dark stranger who will rape you; she was a psychic, a genuine psychic, a woman possessed of powers Marlene found both awesome and frightening. Marlene thought these were terrible burdens for a woman she knew to be small and seemingly defenseless. When a young actress in Berlin appearing with Max Reinhardt’s celebrated and respected Theater Ensemble, she now remembered she had heard of the amazing Mai Mai Chu almost a decade before Anna May mentioned knowing her. Now she was here, under Dietrich’s roof, suffering a premonition or premonitions she couldn’t clearly decipher.

  Danger.

  “I see danger!”

  Gloria, the maid, hurried into the room. “Miss Dietrich, Constance Bennett has arrived and Gloria Swanson is saying terrible things about her!”

  “As well she should. Connie is a terrible woman. Come, Anna May, let’s go downstairs.”

  Anna May was wise in the ways of Dietrich. “I’ll go first. Give me a few minutes and then make your entrance.”

  She was out of the room before Marlene could politely demur and hurried down the stairs into the overpopulated ballroom. Dorothy di Frasso spotted her, “There’s Anna May Wong coming down the stairs. She’ll probably know the identity of the strange little Oriental woman wandering the room and staring at everyone. God knows what she’s looking for.”

  “Perhaps an honest man,” suggested Monte Trevor, not knowing any himself.

  “There, look at her,” cautioned di Frasso, “now she’s staring at our group. Do any of you know her?”

  No one replied.

  The orchestra was spiritedly rendering “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” and the ballroom erupted into thunderous applause. Slowly, sensually, sinuously, a wicked and very worldly-wise smile on her face, Marlene Dietrich triumphantly descended the staircase into the ballroom.

  Joseph von Sternberg sipped his drink. You are my creation. I made you. 1 discovered you and taught you to be Marlene Dietrich, the magnificent star, not the fat little frump I auditioned in Berlin. I recognized that under those twenty pounds of fat there was screaming for release the stunning creature descending the staircase. I too am that creature. Marlene, you are my doppelganger. The doppelganger, the occult creature Germans believed was a person’s other self. Von Sternberg signaled a waiter for a fresh drink.

  Hazel Dickson said to Herb Villon, “She makes every woman in this room look like Baron Frankenstein’s creation.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” replied Herb, adding with disappointment, “I guess there’s going to be no Helen Twelvetre
es.”

  “There’s a Helen Twelvetrees,” Hazel assured him, “but not here tonight.”

  Hands on hips, Jean Harlow said to Joan Crawford, who clung to the arm of a new boy in town, Franchot Tone: “Can you beat that broad?”

  To which Crawford responded, “The point is, Baby”— everyone at MGM called Harlow ‘Baby’—“you can’t beat that broad. My hat’s off to her.”

  Natalia Ivanov was crying softly into a handkerchief. There was no consoling her, and her husband refrained from trying. Unlike Dietrich, Natalia could never ask the mirror on her wall, “Who’s the fairest one of all?” They would have been surprised to learn that Dietrich never questioned her mirror. She didn’t have to. She knew the answer.

  Kay Francis embraced Dietrich. “It’s a tewwific pahty, dahling. And yaw so democwatic. Evewy stah from evewy studio is hewe. But how did you dawe ask Connie Bennett and Lilyan Tashman to the same pahty?”

  “Why not? They’re both friends of mine.” She almost said ‘fwiends’ but she had greater control over her impediment. Kay Francis didn’t give a damn, not when they were paying her seven thousand dollars a week.

  “Didn’t you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Lilyan caught Connie in bed with her husband, Eddie Lowe. She beat the stuffing out of Connie!”

  “That’s all right. Connie has stuffing to spare. Forgive me, darling, I have so many guests to greet.”

  “Go wight ahead, sweetie. I want to meet Anna May’s astwologuh fwiend. I think she’s so fascinating.” She wafted away on a cloud of Russian Leather.

  Hazel waved at Marlene. Marlene wondered if the formidable-looking gentleman stifling a yawn was Hazel’s policeman boyfriend. If there was truly danger tonight, she would find the presence of an officer of the law very comforting. Marlene and Hazel embraced. Hazel introduced Herb Villon, and Marlene recognized his name and said warmly and sincerely, “I’m so glad Hazel brought you.” Villon felt good all over and was deeply in love with Dietrich. Hazel would be relieved to learn Helen Twelvetrees had been overthrown. Marlene swiftly and lucidly told them about Mai Mai Chu’s dire prediction, and Villon, who had in the past resorted to psychics when at an impasse in a particularly puzzling murder case, was openly sympathetic to Dietrich.