by Donald Spoto
Marlene Dietrich, the film actress of German origin, has spent so many years with the cinema Jews of Hollywood that she has become an American citizen. The association with Jews has made her whole character quite un-German. In the picture we see her taking the oath in Los Angeles. The Jewish judge’s contempt for the legally prescribed oath is revealed by his demeanor: in his shirtsleeves he administers to Marlene Dietrich the oath by which she betrays her Fatherland.
Apart from the usual Nazi malevolence, Streicher had the facts wrong: Dietrich would not in fact win her citizenship for two years (this was an application to begin the process), and Ruperich was third-generation Bavarian Catholic.
AFTER PLAYING THE LAST SCENES OF ANGEL, DIEtrich lost no time preparing to depart for an extended European holiday. Paramount, she knew from her agent Harry Edington, had no idea how to remedy the disaster they expected from the film and so were disinclined to renew her contract. Except for some kind words for her subtle comic gifts in Desire, she had not received any really glowing critical notices since Morocco. Additionally, The Garden of Allah was a terrific disappointment and advance word on Knight Without Armour was discouraging. Now thirty-five, she knew the film-fan polls showed disenchantment—even uninterest—after seven years and ten films of basically insubstantial Dietrich exoticism. For the past two years, she had been the highest paid woman in the world, receiving almost half a million dollars a year for very little actual working time. But that was all about to end, and now she had no indication that her career would endure; accordingly, she decided to retreat rather than sustain the scorn Hollywood so likes to heap on those once adored.
The summer of 1937 began in Switzerland, where she collected Maria at school and planned a holiday with her, Rudi and Tamara. Dietrich then dispatched a telegram to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in London, inviting him to join her in Austria. Unaware that the plans included an extended family, Fairbanks arrived two days later, astonished and disappointed to find what he termed “really a rather curious ménage.”
The arrangement was indeed knotty even by the most tolerant criteria, and it suggested that Dietrich’s relationship with Sieber could occasionally be at least casually carnal. Even as she shared a room with Fairbanks, she extended herself liberally, leaving their bed and blithely toddling down the corridor to join Rudi and Tamara—and not only for hot chocolate. This may, in an odd way, have had more to do with the latter than the former, for Dietrich saw “Tami” as a necessary, helpful adjunct to her own life: Matul not only made Rudi happy, she also looked after Maria’s needs in Europe. And because Matul (also a product of the freewheeling Berlin life of the 1920s) was not immune to feminine blandishments, Dietrich may well have known that to please her would be, in effect, to please Rudi (and by extension Maria). “This design for living,” Fairbanks reflected years later (alluding to the Noël Coward play about a romantic trio), “was really not within my experience, much less my desire, and I made known my displeasure—to no avail, of course. Why did I sustain it? I was completely carried away with Marlene.” In this he was not unique.
Apart from this element, which seemed of concern only to Fairbanks, the summer was passed in pleasant indolence, and mother and daughter enjoyed an unusually protracted period together. “Her devotion to Maria was very touching,” Fairbanks added,
although she was so extremely maternal one wasn’t sure whether this, too, was a part she was playing. But I remember thinking that the child had not much sense of who or where she was. It seemed to me an odd way of bringing her up, but of course no one criticized. That summer Marlene was the doting mother—until she decided to go with her public image again, and then she was the distant, remote and cool Venus.
This odd quintet remained several months at a rustic, timbered chalet on a lake near Salzburg. They visited Max Reinhardt at his summer festival there, sat on benches in the sunshine and drank huge steins of beer, dined at a local inn (or at home, where Dietrich as usual prepared the meals) and listened to Tyrolean music in the summer twilight.
By mid-November, Maria had been returned to her Swiss academy, Rudi and Tamara were en route to Paris, Fairbanks to London and Dietrich to Hollywood. During a stopover in New York, she received the unsurprising news from Harry Edington that Paramount had definitely decided not to renew her contract. The woman who could so recently command the richest deal in the history of movies was now unemployed, had established an expensive and indulgent lifestyle, and—with two years of back taxes still owed—lacked any source of income.
Before Christmas, on Rudi’s advice, she sped to Los Angeles, moved her clothes out of her furnished house, dismissed her maid and chauffeur, sold the car and moved to a hotel. But despite the widespread knowledge that she was in effect out of work, she comported herself publicly with the serene dignity befitting Alexandra, the exiled countess she had played so prettily in Knight Without Armour. Independent as ever, she refused an offer to live with Mercedes de Acosta; instead, she exploited the sheer force of her charm and prevailed on the management of the Beverly Hills Hotel to open a long-term account in her name. That Christmas, she invited fourteen friends and cooked a lavish roast beef dinner in her private bungalow.
* Later the film was resuscitated as Hotel Imperial with Margaret Sullavan, but she fell and broke her arm on the set. Two years later, the film was completed and released, starring Ray Milland and Isa Miranda.
* Reviewing Knight Without Armour, Frank Nugent commented on Dietrich’s attitude of “unpardonable complacence, as though she had just turned from a mirror” (New York Times, July 9, 1937).
10: 1937–1940
FROM JUNE 1937 TO SEPTEMBER 1939, MARLENE Dietrich did not receive any offer to work; her career had suddenly stopped, although she had by this time achieved international fame and unprecedented compensation.
She was certainly not without a minor but effective talent, but this had mostly to do with her relationship to the camera; she was no Duse, and she knew it. Dietrich was, however, absolutely sui generis, and she never indulged in the petty hypocrisies of many stars. She stamped her own trademark, lived according to her own creeds, forged an image that was a direct reflection of her own social and sexual complexity. In important ways, therefore, she was perhaps the first triumphant example of self-promotion.
The suppressed passion, the mysterious allure and the almost diffident sensuality Dietrich conveyed were regarded by audiences during the Great Depression with the same adoration offered to Greta Garbo. But styles were changing, and in surveys conducted in fan magazines and theater lobbies, moviegoers listed their female favorites as Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Luise Rainer, Bette Davis, Jean Arthur and Claudette Colbert—all of them more accessible, more real, somehow, less elusive and illusory—and none of them radiating the fatal sensuality of Dietrich or the inviolable allure of Garbo, both of whom were more suited to the earlier conventions of deliberately artificial, more romantic films. Much of this change derived from the techniques of cinematography and lighting, which by the late 1930s were sharper, more clarified—just as audiences no longer required the ever more fantastic escapist fare popular at the height of economic disaster. None of this was part of anything like a programmed approach to the business of moviemaking. Studios continued, on the contrary, to operate as they always had, responding seasonally to the whims of audiences and occasionally risking, on order from an executive, the creation of a new star.
In 1938, Dietrich could assume that she was only in temporary stasis, awaiting a new director, a first-rate script, a fresh offer from Paramount, a return to favor—or even, as she expressly hoped, an offer to work in France for a director like Jean Renoir; or in England, where, it was rumored, Josef von Sternberg would be welcome despite the collapse of I, Claudius. She bided her time, and on American radio programs she read some pallid romances with actors like Don Ameche, or engaged in comic repartee with Edgar Bergen and his wisecracking dummy Charlie McCarthy (who, as some might have observed, also wore a top hat and formal
dress suit).
Tax authorities continued to hound her for monies past due, and that spring (acting on a suggestion from Harry Edington) she took a brilliant counteroffensive, claiming that she had not reneged but actually overpaid. Her husband could not work in America because he could not speak English, she said; therefore she wished to refile for each year since 1931, on the basis of community property and a shared loss. The case would continue to be argued for three years.
But her hopes for a new contract to revive her fading career were dealt a severe blow in May 1938. Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners of America, announced in the trade journals Variety and The Hollywood Reporter (and newspapers across the country soon promulgated it) that certain players no longer pleased moviegoers and were therefore undesirable at the box office. This was not merely a rude display of Brandt’s personal taste, for in the case of Dietrich, for example, The Garden of Allah, Knight Without Armour and Angel were indeed crashing financial failures in the theaters. Studios were accordingly urged not to make pictures with Mae West, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and a few men like Edward Arnold.
West, munching breakfast in bed at one in the afternoon, took a reporter’s inquiring telephone call: “Well,” she drawled, referring indirectly to one of her classic comedies, “Brandt and his little men have done us wrong. All I know is that whenever the guys in the front office want to pay their mortgage, they call me up with an idea for a picture.”*
Dietrich’s response to the Brandt manifesto was an icy, wounded silence. But privately her life continued more or less cheerfully. By autumn 1938, the unstable European situation leading to war had brought Maria back to California (Rudi and Tamara were still in Paris). Dietrich enrolled her daughter in a private school and engaged tutors for extra language lessons and trainers for horseback riding. (One of Maria’s best friends and sporting companions at the time was a wistful, nervous fourteen-year-old whose name had recently been changed from Frances Gumm to Judy Garland.)
That same season, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was making a picture in Hollywood, and he and Dietrich virtually lived together, spending nights at his home or in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They went out but rarely, and when photographed together at a restaurant or nightclub, Dietrich (as he recalled) “took this in her famous ‘world-weary’ manner, and I took it with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.” Despite her professional crisis, he noted no especial sadness or anxiety in her manner that year, and they went through what he called “the motions of secrecy” about their affair—though he was sometimes “in a fury because Marlene occasionally swam in the buff” at the pool parties she gave on Sunday afternoon at her rented Santa Monica beach house (some luxuries evidently still being necessities).
“She enjoyed having her beauty appreciated,” said Fairbanks with bemused diplomacy; such had been the opinion, too, of the film crew of Knight Without Armour, and of John Engstead, who recalled that she often welcomed photographers and reporters to her Paramount dressing room wearing only a sheer foundation garment or the skimpiest covering. Every performer has to be a kind of exhibitionist; a few can sometimes be defined by the term quite literally. For Marlene Dietrich—always comfortable exhibiting herself—“more” often meant “less.”
On June 9, 1939, however, she dressed like the movie stereotype of a grade-school librarian, wearing a grey serge suit to take her oath of American citizenship—stating on her affidavit that she was born in 1905—not, as she had previously stated on the application, 1904 (much less the truthful 1901). Everyone politely ignored her new birthdate, and that evening, she and Maria left Los Angeles for New York, where Rudi awaited; they were to proceed thence for a European holiday. “I am glad to be a niece of Uncle Sam,” she told reporters as she drew a gold-tipped cigarette from a platinum case after the ceremony.
As it happened, her Uncle Sam immediately decided to extract more than the tribute of gratitude from his new niece. On June 14, the Siebers boarded the Normandie for a summer on the Riviera, to be financed by savings Rudi had kept jointly on behalf of himself and his wife. But in addition to the passengers and well-wishers, the ship was bustling with agents of the Internal Revenue Service, who were much more punctilious about details than the Naturalization Office. For six hours, embarkation was delayed as federal officers Bernard Campbell, J. B. McNamara and Steve Ryan presented writs, liens and attachments, arguing with Dietrich and Rudi about a tax debt of 248,000, due on her 1936 British salary for Knight Without Armour. Her thirty-four pieces of luggage were at first removed from the Normandie, returned to her an hour later, then taken away again and finally restored while Dietrich, her New York lawyer William B. Jaffe and United States attorney John T. Cahill debated whether she should be forbidden to leave the country (and perhaps even be subject to arrest) with such an array of possessions while so large a tax debt was pending. (Wisely, Sieber—who had no legal responsibility for his wife’s case, since he was not a citizen and had earned no American income—kept a quiet distance.)
At last they reached an agreement, much to the relief of impatient passengers, of weary baggage handlers and of the Normandie’s officers, who were more concerned with tides than taxes. Dietrich, perched atop her largest trunk, dipped into a large handbag and withdrew 108,000 worth of diamonds, emeralds and gold. These she offered for an escrow account held by the IRS and by her attorney Jaffe against the final disposition of the government’s claims; the shipboard brouhaha was the lead story in every New York newspaper the next day. (Remarkably, the government decided in Dietrich’s favor, and all the gems were returned to her in May 1941—along with more than 23,000 she duly claimed to have overpaid for 1936.)
BUT THIS ANNOYING DELAY DID NOT FORESTALL THE gaiety of the six-day crossing. With the Siebers for the summer holiday was von Sternberg, whom they invited at the last minute. Recovering from his breakdown, he was carefully attended by Dietrich throughout the journey—but not as the recipient of her amorous adoration. That was reserved for another addition to their party, a famous German writer in exile whom the Siebers had just met that week in New York.
Born in Westphalia in 1898, Erich Maria Remarque had served in the German army during the first World War and was seriously wounded five times. Discharged after the armistice was signed, he worked as a teacher, cemetery stonemason, race-car driver and advertising copywriter, and then he began to compose articles on automobiles and sports. Throughout the 1920s, he worked diligently on his first novel, Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), a powerful denunciation of war which, published in 1929, brought him permanent fame and considerable wealth, inaugurating as well a serious if uneven literary career. The film version of that book, made in 1930, earned him a small fortune and ensured the future movie sale of several less impressive novels. In 1938, Germany officially deprived him of citizenship on the basis that All Quiet offended his country’s soldiers.
A quiet, soft-spoken man who wore a monocle and drank too much, Remarque had arrived in America in early 1939 with his wife, Ilsa Jeanne Zamboui, whom he had divorced in 1932 but remarried in 1938 (somewhat diffidently and, it seems, only to provide her with egress from Germany and entry to America). By June 1939, Zamboui was in Mexico seeking a second divorce.* Shunning literary fame and the adulation of strangers, Remarque’s taste for fine food and wine nonetheless made him a regular patron of those restaurants frequented by celebrities. Certainly no womanizer, he was also, at forty, not immune to the importunate charm of someone like Dietrich.
At New York’s “21” Club that June, he was therefore not unresponsive when introduced to Dietrich. She shared Remarque’s interest in nineteenth-century art (although she was far less knowledgeable), and he told her of his growing collection of works by van Gogh, Cézanne, Renoir and Degas. At once she was taken with this handsome, articulate man; and he with her, as he later told their mutual friend Stefan Lorant. That first evening, Dietrich invented an affectionate pet-name fo
r Remarque: “Boni,” an old Berlin schoolgirl’s version of the Latin substantive meaning “good man” or “good guy.”
But Remarque was attractive to Dietrich for reasons other than cultural: he had a somewhat dispirited, rueful demeanor when discussing the rise of Nazism and the world’s apparently headlong rush toward another hideous conflagration. This combination of good looks, talent, sensitivity and a kind of general sadness was again irresistible to Dietrich (as they had been part of her attraction to Kreuder, von Sternberg and Gilbert, among others). “His melancholy and sensitivity bordered on the pathological,” Dietrich wrote after his death. “I was deeply moved by this trait of his personality. Our special relationship all too often, unfortunately, gave me an opportunity to witness his despair.”
That first evening, she offered her usual brand of consolation—herself. After spending the night with Dietrich in his suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel (where, concidentally, she and Rudi were also booked), he immediately accepted the offer to join her little retinue for a summer in France. Romantic and visionary he may have been, but Remarque was after all a European, and he did not find Dietrich’s domestic arrangement indecorous; for the next two years he was her most constant and frequent lover.
During the summer, the group’s social circle widened in Paris and on the Riviera, and at various times the Siebers, Tamara, von Sternberg and Remarque dined and toured the countryside with the French actor Jean Gabin, whom they met in Paris. They also gave a cocktail party for the American ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, vacationing with his son John; and they attached themselves to a circle round the multitalented Noël Coward, whose stylish wit enchanted Dietrich. Without ever being introduced, she had telephoned him in May 1935 from Hollywood to congratulate him on his film appearance in The Scoundrel. Now, pursuing his friendship as she did that of Hemingway and Remarque, she began to learn Coward’s songs.