by Donald Spoto
This motley group assembled for much of July at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden Roc in Antibes, where in the evenings Dietrich held court with Coward as she crooned his songs and those of Hollander in her now smoky, swooping baritone. For European society and the social press, Marlene Dietrich was, at thirty-seven, a film actress on extended holiday and the star of a small but glittering cast of worshipful international luminaries. She led her friends a merry chase, wining and dining from Paris to Cannes and back again, to the gambling casino at Monte Carlo, to bistros in Juan-les-Pins. (“Nobody knows to what extent Marlene was seen with some of her men primarily for the publicity value,” as playwright Moss Hart said.)
Several days each week, however, she and Remarque slipped quietly away from the group, motoring for an evening tryst at an inn near Antibes, or for picnics in the hills of Vence and Grasse and a night in a petite auberge. They drank Calvados and drove (at least twice) to Paris for weekends, strolling over and under the city’s bridges and through the Tuileries and Jardin du Luxembourg: “the sturdy Kraut,” as Hemingway called her, could obviously play the Gallic amorist, and Remarque was now the leading man in her drama.
Passionate the romance may have been; it was also laced with mutual suspicion and the remnants of Remarque’s Bavarian Catholic guilt. Confident that their affair would sooner or later end, Remarque became the kind of gloomy, jealous lover who seemed fated to pursue his own unhappiness. He had perhaps tried to counteract his own rigid past with her unfettered present, but this was asking too much of himself, for he had come to resent her independence, her freedom to pursue another amour if that suited her.
For her part, Dietrich constantly told Remarque she could not live without him. In her way, she perhaps meant this, but her way was not so profound and imbued with philosophy as his. He wanted to discuss history, the arts, international affairs with her and with their friends; into such conversations she entered, but Dietrich preferred to haul out a portable phonograph, put on her recordings and describe for the group the difficult circumstances of each one’s production or the film from which it was excerpted. She appreciated (in the words Ophelia used to describe Hamlet) being the observed of all observers. Nevertheless, that summer of 1939, Dietrich much depended on a kind of fierce sexual bonding with a fellow countryman who also provided intellectual excitement.
But by August, as the threat of war loomed ever larger, there were also career developments impinging on the summer’s idleness. Although she had an offer to appear in a French film under the direction of Julien Duvivier (who had made Pépé le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal), there was also a most unusual bid from Hollywood. Joe Pasternak, an independent producer contracted to Universal Pictures, sent cables and portions of a script in progress called Destry Rides Again, planned as a raucous musical parody of cowboy movies, but with an underlying tenderness and a clear if subtle antiwar subtext.
Pasternak wanted Dietrich for the role of Frenchy, a hardboiled dance-hall girl who falls for the gentle strength of a new sheriff named Tom Destry; she begins to mend her evil ways, discovers the proverbial true love with Tom, and finally dies, stopping a bullet meant for him and fired by her former lover. But there was one serious drawback to the contract for her services. After the Brandt manifesto, Universal authorized Pasternak to offer Dietrich only 75,000 for the picture, just one sixth of her previous price. She hesitated, and not only because of the salary and the unglamorous role; additionally, at that time Universal did not have the prestige of, say, Paramount or MGM.
But Remarque (not von Sternberg, as she always insisted later) read the outline and sample script pages of Destry Rides Again and urged her to accept. Ignore the salary, he said; this movie might well revive her career and even create a new dimension to it. Her co-star was to be James Stewart, much praised for having rendered an appealing performance in Frank Capra’s patriotic comedy Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; he had been chosen for an important featured role in a forthcoming film of The Philadelphia Story (for which he eventually won a best supporting Oscar). Quickly rising star though he was, Stewart’s name would appear in the credits after Dietrich’s; it would be her picture if she could make it so, Pasternak promised. On August 16, she obtained the only remaining pair of connecting first-class staterooms on the Queen Mary and sailed for America, with Remarque as her companion; the others followed soon after (Rudi, Tamara and Maria settling temporarily in New York).
A few days after war broke out in September, Dietrich was safely at Universal Studios for wardrobe fittings on Destry Rides Again. To the press she expressed anxiety for her mother in Germany, but there was still no mention to anyone about her sister Elisabeth. Even a long-term friend like Stefan Lorant was unaware of Elisabeth’s existence. “Ah, that is easy to understand with Marlene,” he said when informed in 1991. “It is simply part of the myth she has created—the legend of the only child.”
The rest of the legend, however—the creature so rapturously conceived and presented by von Sternberg—was rousingly and immediately dashed to pieces by her performance as Frenchy, and as it happened audiences loved it. A vulgar, rowdy singer at the Last Chance Saloon in the town of Bottleneck, Dietrich had three songs, one of which—“See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have”—became as much a popular signature tune as “Falling in Love Again.” Only for these scenes was she attractively dressed and photographed; otherwise, Dietrich fully cooperated in her presentation as a tarty hellcat: she swilled whiskey, munched crudely on a chicken leg, stuffed cash in her bosom (muttering with a smile, “There’s gold in them thar hills”*) and engaged in a wild fistfight and wrestling match with Una Merkel, who played a jealous townswoman. Kicking, punching, rolling on the floor, shrieking like a savage, throwing chairs, doused with a bucket of water and still swinging her fists, Dietrich filmed the “catfight scene” over four days, after which she and Merkel were much bruised and scratched—but still friendly, especially after Joe Pasternak and director George Marshall promised that this sequence alone would make movie history. It did. In Destry Rides Again, Dietrich made Frenchy the most beautiful manly woman of her career, while her swagger made James Stewart appear even more gentle, more passive and feminine than Gary Cooper in Morocco.
Some of this is in the script, of course. First seen with a parasol and birdcage, Stewart is carefully introduced as the pacifist lawman who refuses to wear guns and speaks with an almost fearful gentleness. In the role of Thomas Jefferson Destry (the middle name capitalizing on his recent role as Jefferson Smith, who went so effectively to Washington for Frank Capra), Stewart—never really a sex symbol in American film—is not so much an adoring man but a kind of transforming, almost ministerial one, as sexless as a plaster saint. He recoils from Dietrich’s languid but aggressive manner and her coarse, exaggerated makeup, and she is so impressed by his sheer difference from other men that she wipes off her lipstick and gazes at herself in a mirror, wondering if he is right about her looks. The moment is reprised in the final scene, when she dashes in front of Stewart to shield him from a gunshot. Taking the bullet and dying in his arms, she again wipes off her lipstick with the back of her hand, begging to be worthy of his kiss at last. The moment works in spite of its rather arch melodramatics.
Dietrich is the macho gal throughout. Lawless, promiscuous, brash, a satiric study in tawdriness, she dispatched a performance that restored her to critical and popular favor and demonstrated her eagerness to find the right blend of comedy and romance in a new kind of role. By her thoroughly physical involvement, she accepted that her earlier glamorous image had become obsolete. She wanted, in other words, to be one of Hollywood’s popular breed of new leading ladies—to be ranked with the likes of Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, and even the imported Vivien Leigh—all of them strong, active heroines coping (sometimes toughly, sometimes comically) with serious social realities and, surprisingly often, outwitting male characters much in need of maturation and taming. These women played characters who were neither weaklings nor passive ciphers,
and often they had the intellectual and moral superiority in the stories.
In this regard, Frenchy is no heroine, but she is certainly the only interesting character in Destry Rides Again, the sole person who changes and finally makes a grand gesture, even a sacrifice. Stewart’s Destry is simply the nice voice of decency, a kind of Mr. Smith Goes to Bottleneck; Dietrich’s Frenchy, however, moves the story forward from inner transformation to outer action. Her long, slow gazes in this picture are no longer the morally indifferent affectations of a world-weary mannequin; accompanied by her oddly appropriate pauses, these looks signalled the character’s fresh perceptions. Photographed by Hal Mohr with a sharp realism and minus the sanctifying diffusion favored by von Sternberg, Dietrich appears amused when others in the story are anxious, serene when they are frenzied, and at every moment she is a surprising counterpoint to the typical barroom moll. In her rumbustious manner and gun-toting singing, she had the opportunity to demonstrate her flair for comedy even more than in Desire. Her Frenchy conveyed an innate understanding that a hussy is not necessarily a harlot.
Produced the same year as Stagecoach, Drums Along the Mohawk, Jesse James and Union Pacific, Destry Rides Again was the second of four screen versions of the same story (inspiring some forgotten wag to call it Destry Rides Again and Again and Again). Inevitably overshadowed in 1939 by Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights, The Wizard of Oz and The Grapes of Wrath, the picture retains a lively sassiness, but it is the presence of Dietrich (at first undesired by Universal, who wanted Paulette Goddard) that enabled the story to find its deepest logic, uniting the tensions of the western-frontier tale with the exigencies of both the musical and the screwball comedy—and giving it, in the final analysis, a credible humanity. For the first time in years, audiences adored her.
DURING A DEMANDING SIX-WEEK SHOOTING SCHEDule that autumn and winter of 1939, Dietrich was also socially busier than ever. Always fascinated by astrology, she now began to consult professional stargazer Carroll Righter on a thrice-weekly basis. No, she would tell a friend, the stars were inauspicious for a weekend trip to Palm Springs; or yes, Carroll has approved her appointment for an interview and photo session two weeks from Thursday. To friends like Hemingway, Lorant, Fairbanks and others her belief in celestial influences seemed genuine; but invariably this philosophy enabled her to live according to her convenience, while offering the unassailable argument of faith as her sure defense. The intersection of Mars with Jupiter’s seventh moon somehow never dictated an inopportune duty or a troublesome engagement.
Righter, a cultured and influential homosexual with a large Hollywood clientele, was also an enthusiastic advocate of Dietrich’s industrious sex life, and this, too, may have won her appreciation and helped to justify her trust in his counsel. As if she were a historic lady predestined for majestic intrigues, Righter supported her dizzy round of alternate nights with Fairbanks and Remarque and with the French actor Jean Gabin, who began visiting Los Angeles in 1940. By grave references to heavenly charts and zodiacal concurrences, and with much furrowing of his brow, Righter advised Dietrich to see Fairbanks on this evening, Remarque on that, Gabin on the other, Mercedes de Acosta on such a weekend; this advice, which she frankly disclosed to each one, was received with amusement—at least, perhaps, when desires were not too often frustrated.
But besides acting like a kind of noble courtesan under the tutelage of a popular occultist, she often resembled a character in a bedroom farce by Beaumarchais. Once after a day at the studio, for example, she had planned—on Righter’s advice—an evening with Fairbanks, and in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel she was hurrying to prepare for his arrival when Mercedes de Acosta swept in unannounced and asked for a drink. This she sipped in the bathroom, chattering away while Dietrich bathed. When the telephone rang, de Acosta obligingly took the call and, recognizing the voice of Erich Maria Remarque, reported coolly that Dietrich had gone out for the evening. That was impossible, Remarque replied: he was to have visited her an hour earlier and was calling to announce he was nearby and en route. De Acosta lied that Dietrich had already departed—to which Remarque replied that he would come to see that for himself.
When Dietrich was told about the call, she suddenly remembered that indeed she had promised to listen to Erich read aloud some pages of a new novel he was writing. De Acosta, none too pleased with this ongoing male competition, then departed—but without telling Dietrich that Remarque was soon expected. Moments later, Fairbanks arrived and, typically, Dietrich brought him to her room while she dressed, intending to shuffle him out a back door with the protest of a sudden sick headache. But before she could play this scene, Remarque approached her door. Fairbanks sprang to answer the knock, and, although nonplussed, he acted with his usual grace and offered Remarque a drink. When Dietrich finally entered the room, she surveyed the awkward atmosphere and decided on a casual finesse. “I have so looked forward to introducing you two gentlemen,” she said. “Now, where shall we dine?” As they gazed at her blankly, the doorbell chimed again, and there stood Josef von Sternberg, who swept her up in a passionate embrace (ironic only to them both) as if she had no other love in the world.
BUT SOON DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, JR., GREW WEARY of being a rival for her time and attention—“not only from the more assured and intellectual Erich Maria Remarque,” as he admitted, “but [also when I discovered] some intense love letters from someone I’d never heard of.” The writer of these passionate documents was none other than Mercedes de Acosta, with whom Dietrich was of course still involved (most often at de Acosta’s home in Brentwood once or twice a week, and sometimes for weekends at a Santa Barbara hotel). Fairbanks confronted Dietrich with the letters, and she was as resentful of his prying as he was of her bisexual philandering. Harsh words were exchanged, the relationship swiftly began to cool, and by spring 1940 Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., ended an affair that had blazed brightly for almost four years. After the war, a less complicated, platonic friendship resumed.
On the other hand, Dietrich’s relationship with Remarque was unaffected by the de Acosta affair, perhaps because his earlier years in Germany had familiarized him with a more freewheeling lifestyle. As a student of human nature, he found Dietrich an endlessly fascinating conundrum as well as an admiring and attentive mistress. Sometimes he viewed her, as he told their friend Stefan Lorant, rather like a “sailor’s daughter,” an unsubtle woman of roaring ardor; when she wished, however, she was “[the goddess] Diana of the woods, with a silver bow—invulnerable, cool and fatal.”
But whatever his sexual enthrallment, Remarque accepted the paradox of Dietrich’s attachment even while he knew of her inconstancy. Perhaps the most perceptive and reflective among her men, he also recognized the difference between sexual passion and commitment, and Marlene Dietrich (he soon realized) was proficient at the former but apparently incapable of the latter; she was entirely a creature of whim and of the moment. Nevertheless, he became (like Fairbanks before him) a complaisant lover, and as permanent witness to this he left an encoded account of their romance in the novel he was writing at this time—Arch of Triumph. (Much altered, Arch of Triumph became a rather dewy 1947 romantic film starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.) The published book bore no dedication, but Dietrich knew it was hers.
Set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1938 and 1939, the narrative concerns a German refugee surgeon named Ravic (surrogate for Remarque) and his tortured affair with an enigmatic cabaret actress and occasional film star named Joan Madou (Dietrich), who is described as pale and detached, “an exciting and forlorn beauty [with] high brows . . . [and] a face whose openness was its secret. It neither hid nor revealed anything. It promised nothing and thereby everything.” Joan is “sometimes superstitious . . . and she was everything that enticement and temptation could give without love.” One scene neatly synthesized the author’s ambivalent feelings about Dietrich:
“Joan,” he said slowly, and wanted to say something entirely different, �
��it is good that you are here.”
She looked at him.
He took her hands. “You understand what that means? More than a thousand other words . . .”
She nodded. Suddenly her eyes were filled with tears. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I know.”
“That’s not true,” Ravic replied, and knew that she was right.
“No, nothing at all,” she said. “You must love me, beloved. That’s all.”
He did not answer.
“You must love me,” she repeated. “Otherwise I’m lost.”
Lost, he thought. What a word! How easily she uses it. Who is really lost does not talk . . . He knew their love would not endure, that it would become the stale vinegar of dead passion. It would not last.
Arch of Triumph did not reach its final form until 1945, long after the Remarque-Dietrich affair had ended; it has both the luxuriant guilt and the tainted wistfulness often found in novels that are simultaneously defensive and sealed with the author’s regret for a failed romance. Even while Ravic and Joan Madou manage to visit every colorful locale frequented by their real-life models, the wine of their love indeed turns sour. The protagonist resents both his mistress’s free love life and his own fierce passion for her. At the conclusion of Arch of Triumph, Remarque the benighted lover clearly inspired Remarque the professional fantasist: just as his affair with Dietrich ended when she invited actor Jean Gabin to live with her, so the actress Joan cavalierly moves to a jealous new lover—who finally shoots her. Ravic is summoned, but even his medical skill cannot save her, and she dies in his arms, begging forgiveness. The book remains valuable as a testimony of Remarque’s tortured, ambivalent feelings for Dietrich. But judged even according to the most lenient literary standard, Arch of Triumph is bloodless, ersatz Hemingway; to call it unremarkable would be high praise.