by Donald Spoto
THE FIRST RENAISSANCE OF DIETRICH’S CAREER HAD been inspired by Josef von Sternberg in 1930, but Joe Pasternak was now responsible for the second revival of her career. Audiences loved Dietrich’s rough-and-tumble humor in a musical western, and critics admired her complete abandonment to a self-contained satire on her own demimondaine image. Destry Rides Again could have been marketed as Dietrich Rides Again.
She had, therefore, good reason for optimism at the start of 1940. The principal witness to this was Remarque, “one of the first refugees who benefited from my protection,” she said rather loftily. Remarque took a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel near Dietrich’s bungalow, where she lived with Maria, whom Rudi and Tamara had delivered to California before returning to settle for several years in New York (where he worked at Paramount’s East Coast office). In such proximity to the glumly adoring Remarque, Dietrich could easily be very protective indeed.
Contrary to her mother’s good fortunes, Maria was enduring a most unhappy period in her life. Although she had never lacked life’s material necessities and had been pampered with gifts and good times by her father and (when work and affairs permitted) by her mother, Maria felt she could neither please her nor ever compare favorably with her—could never, in other words, really be worthy of so famous and glamorous a parent. “The greatest compliment ever paid to me,” Dietrich said at the time, “was ‘You spoil your daughter.’ ” But as usual the spoiling was not entirely beneficial. Dressed in miniature versions of her mother’s elegant clothes, she was from the start groomed for beauty and fame; she had even been taught something about makeup and costumes the day she filmed her scene as young Sophia in The Scarlet Empress. Thenceforth, as she grew, Maria was (always with the excuse of economy) given her mother’s cast-off designer clothing.
As playwright Enid Bagnold wrote in The Chalk Garden, “An only child is never twelve.” For Maria Sieber, the years between twelve and seventeen were unnaturally desolate, with her father rarely present and her mother courting both her career and a small platoon of lovers. Imprudently, always offering the fear of kidnapping as reason enough, Dietrich kept her daughter home from traditional schools and engaged private tutors, thus effectively depriving the girl of normal socialization. “I had no friends my own age, and I was never permitted to leave the grounds,” Maria later said wistfully. “Bodyguards were the only friends I had.”
The outcome was perhaps predictable. By age fifteen, in spring 1940, Maria was bearing—to the point of almost seventy excess pounds—the burden of a lonely and troubled adolescence. Her sudden and alarming weight gain (to almost two hundred by the following year) may have derived from a subtle refusal to wear her mother’s clothes and thus be a mini-Marlene, as well as from her sense of social isolation.
“I was always self-conscious because of my mother’s beauty,” Maria acknowledged later. “She was so beautiful that it always gave me a feeling of ugliness and unworthiness. All my life I suffered because I was terribly overweight and I felt my mother [was] ashamed of me . . . I got fat because my childhood was miserable.” In this regard, Dietrich’s failure to seek medical treatment or counselling for Maria is (notwithstanding her evident good intentions) not hard to understand. Actresses who depend professionally on their beauty cannot, as their children mature, deny the truth of their own inevitable aging—whatever the extent of nature’s gifts or a surgeon’s cosmetic remedies. More to the point, an unattractive daughter is no threat to a mother’s primacy. The pattern has nothing to do with malevolence; such is often the garden variety of parent-child rivalry.
“Mother and I were never like mother and daughter,” Maria added. “As I matured, I was often taken for her sister—an older sister, because I was so heavy. I have always felt the older one in our relationship.” Dietrich, on the other hand, was quite oblivious to any difficulty. With no awareness of her condescending irony, she remarked that year, “Maria is as American as a colored girl.”
The problem became more poignant throughout 1940 and 1941, when Maria—obviously feeling unattractive, unwanted and unloved—for a time seemed to harbor an alarming death wish. At first her obsession was merely academic, as she immersed herself in books about cancer, tuberculosis, infantile paralysis and all sorts of life-threatening illnesses. But then she began to speak occasionally of taking her own life, in which mood she wrote a morose little lyric she handed to her mother:
A man who was committing suicide
Said, as his feet left the earth
Which had grown too small for him:
“How soon shall I regret this?”
Dietrich, seeing only her daughter’s inchoate lyric gifts, proudly showed the quatrain to Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker (whose own grim sensibilities were perfectly matched to the young poet’s); they only remarked on the child’s gravity.
But Maria never acted out her darkest fantasies; instead, she began to take an interest in the theater. Her life had little comfort or stability until she contracted her second marriage (at the age of twenty-two) and began her own career. “Mommy grows younger and more beautiful every year,” she said when still young, “[but] I never felt good enough for her.”
During the summer of 1940, Mommy (then thirty-eight) was certainly considered beautiful and popular enough by executives at Universal that, when Joe Pasternak asked for her to star in another comedy, she was readily signed at twice the salary of Destry Rides Again. Pasternak had commissioned writers John Meehan and Harry Tugend to capitalize on the success of Destry and Dietrich’s self-satire by constructing a spoof of the Sadie Thompson–South Seas epic subgenre. Accordingly they created the role of “Bijou Blanche,” a torch singer of benevolent ill repute who floats from island to island, following and wreaking havoc among the fleet. They all arrive at a gin joint called—thus the film’s title—Seven Sinners, on the fictitious island of Boni Komba, a name contributed by Dietrich and inspired by her nickname for Remarque. Among the latest naval arrivals is a tall, handsome lieutenant (John Wayne) who almost loses his career for her sake; they part, and Bijou returns to a boozy ship’s doctor and a wandering life.
Pasternak and director Tay Garnett suggested the rugged, six-feet-four-inch John Wayne to play Dietrich’s leading man. Although Wayne, a contract player at the B studio called Republic Pictures, had made more than eighty films since 1927, he had just appeared in Stagecoach and was on the brink of his mythic stardom. But his salary was still merely four hundred dollars a week, and he was supporting a wife and children. Wanting Dietrich’s approval, Garnett invited Wayne to the Universal commissary for lunch and arranged for Dietrich to walk casually nearby to assess him. “With that wonderful floating walk,” according to the director, “Dietrich passed Wayne as if he were invisible, then paused, made a half-turn and cased him from cowlick to cowboots, then turned to me and whispered, ‘Oh, Daddy, buy me that!’ ”
According to John Wayne’s third wife, Pilar (not married to him at that time), the subsequent developments were sheer Dietrich. Wayne was invited for a private conference in her Universal dressing room one day that June, after a session of wardrobe fittings for Seven Sinners. Dietrich dismissed the others, closed and locked the door and fixed a provocative look on Wayne while slowly asking the time. Answering her own question, she then lifted her skirt, and there, encircling her upper thigh, was a black garter with a watch. She noted the time, slowly lowered her skirt and glided toward Wayne, whispering, “It’s very early, darling. We have plenty of time.” That afternoon began one of the most intense affairs of their lives, “one that wouldn’t burn itself out for three years,” as Pilar Wayne knew: “Dietrich was more than an ideal bedmate. She was the first person in the film industry, excepting John Ford, to tell Duke that she believed in him . . . Dietrich made Duke feel like a man again, both in bed and on the sound stage.”
During the two months of shooting Seven Sinners that summer of 1940, Hollywood insiders soon knew that Marlene Dietrich had made an important conquest. While Erich Maria Re
marque sat in his hotel room nursing his romantic wounds and forcing the typescript of Arch of Triumph, his inamorata was photographed all over town with John Wayne, whose estranged (but not legally separated) wife, Josephine, began to make a noise that eventually terminated her marriage. The press not only documented Dietrich and Wayne at the Brown Derby, at the Mocambo, the Trocadero and at the beach; it was also announced that Dietrich had taken Wayne’s financial future in hand, introducing him to her own business manager, a Swedish immigrant named Bo Roos. She cooked for Wayne in her bungalow and brought his meals to the Universal set each day; they played parlor games during shooting breaks, attended football games and prizefights, sped out of town on weekends for fishing trips to Lake Arrowhead or for quiet times in Montecito and San Luis Obispo.
With Fairbanks, Dietrich had a polished, sophisticated and compassionate gentleman for a lover; Remarque was the dour, grave intellectual she could both comfort and learn from; but with John Wayne, it seems, the matter was simpler. According to all accounts, they never spoke of marriage; they were simply buddies who bedded. And when it was over (after they had made a trio of films together), Dietrich clearly felt neither residual affection nor loyalty. “Unpleasant people, actors,” she wrote curtly years later. “First of all, John Wayne. He needed money, and he begged me to help him . . . John Wayne wasn’t exactly brilliant: he spoke his lines and that was all. Wayne was not a bright or exciting type. He confessed to me that he never read books, which proves you don’t have to be terribly brilliant to become a great film star.”
Their first picture remains their best, for Seven Sinners offers one of Dietrich’s splendid comic portraits as well as a performance of gentle, self-knowing sadness. The action begins at the Blue Devil Café (clearly homage-by-inversion to The Blue Angel), where she causes a riot by simply being. Deported with her cronies to another South Seas isle, she sings “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” en route and later “The Man’s in the Navy” at her new venue (the latter crooned in sparkling white navy drag). Learning that the fleet has arrived, she turns, takes in a sea of white-coated sailors and whispers, “Oh—the navy!” Slowly approaching them, she smiles, then stops everything in the room by asking, “Will someone please give me an American . . . [pause] . . . cigarette?”
Of all Dietrich’s films between the last with von Sternberg (1935) and her work for Hitchcock (1949), her Bijou is—with Frenchy—one of her two best performances, for in it she perfects the art of the double-take, the wordlessly smoldering reaction, the cool ingestion of a man’s intention. “How about coming to my cabin for a snack?” asks Albert Dekker as the ship’s doctor. She stares at him, and he has to elaborate: “A snack is food.” Her comic turns were carefully timed, her glances alternately inciting and reflective; there was, in other words, a recognizable woman, and some of each character she played was part of herself. Cunning, versed in masculine wants and feminine wiles, Dietrich was clearly in her element as Bijou. She was in this picture, as a typical review noted, “giving one of the finest performances of her career with verve and brilliance.”
Pasternak and his colleagues at Universal knew they had another Dietrich success in Seven Sinners, and after filming was completed on September 14 they rushed through editing and scoring; the picture was released within weeks. Throughout the autumn, meanwhile, it became clear to more and more people across the country that the Dietrich-Wayne friendship was more than professional, for they were still seen as a nightclubbing couple—and not just as a duet. In a ploy to confuse everyone, she insisted that photographers snap them with Erich Maria Remarque, or her old friend Stefan Lorant, or with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., or Jean Gabin (soon to play an even larger role in her life), or even with Mercedes de Acosta and a visiting Rudi Sieber. Indeed, that entire curious octet attended the Hollywood premiere of The Thief of Baghdad together in December.
Arranging a squad of escorts for the benefit of local cameramen was inspired. First of all, she knew it would be difficult for people to believe what was in fact the truth—that she would flaunt multiple, simultaneous love affairs. Second, the photograph, with a smiling Sieber in attendance, would neatly suppress any rumors that her marriage was threatened. Finally, the image of Marlene Dietrich surrounded by so adoring a team effectively presented her as one of the most daringly irresistible women around town. No publicist could ever have promoted her more shrewdly.
* In this regard, it is perhaps important to remember how much a woman’s medium film is; there is considerable truth in the generalization that women provide beauty and emotion onscreen, while men supply mere action. In film, men (no matter how attractive) are very much of this world, while women are always more susceptible to the transforming effects of lighting and makeup and can be rendered almost supernaturally beautiful creatures.
* In 1958, he married the American actress Paulette Goddard. They lived mostly in Locarno, Switzerland, where he died in 1970 at the age of seventy-two.
* The line was somehow approved by censors, heard by preview audiences and noted in critics’ reviews. But when it was widely reported as an example of the movie’s humor, it was ordered cut by Motion Picture Production Code chief Joseph I. Breen during major national release.
11: 1941–1944
“ONE AMERICAN CRITIC WROTE THAT I had contrived to parody her,” the French director René Clair said of Marlene Dietrich’s role in The Flame of New Orleans, his first American film. “But she understood this. I didn’t do it against her will. When Norman Krasna and I wrote the script, we intended that it be ironic—a romance with a sense of humor. Perhaps that’s what surprised the public: they didn’t know quite how to take it.”
Alas, there was little to take. “I’m going back to New Orleans,” said Dietrich as Frenchy toward the end of Destry Rides Again; that was the inspiring cue for Clair, Krasna and producer Joe Pasternak. As an elegant adventuress who courts a rich man, pretends to be her own slatternly cousin and eventually falls in love with a poor sailor, she was The Flame of New Orleans, and the picture was designed to be suffused with those delicate Gallic ironies for which Clair was previously admired (as, for example, in his French films Sous les Toits de Paris and Le Million). But the antic glee and appealing nonsense of Destry or Seven Sinners are absent from this mild confection, which —only on paper—had all the ingredients of a riotous Feydeau farce.
Disliking the script (“a flop”), her director (“he wasn’t exactly one of the friendliest men”) and her co-star Bruce Cabot (“an awfully stupid actor”), Dietrich was bored from the first day of production in February 1941. As usual, she had a song, but it required a soubrette’s range and delicacy; consequently—much to her dismay—her voice was electronically altered, the speed of the post-dubbing accelerated so her voice would sound higher. Attempting to salvage a doomed project, Dietrich assured that she was properly lighted and then simply purred her lines seductively, with a kind of dry-ice eroticism. (“There’s more to being a gentleman than wearing tight pants,” she murmurs to Cabot, surveying him head to foot with astonishing indelicacy.)
Pasternak and Clair had tried valiantly to satirize the world-weary romanticism of von Sternberg’s Dietrich; oddly, the result was anemic—simply Dietrich exagérée, nearly suffocated in a profusion of rococo white ruffles and feathers. Neither critics nor audiences were much amused by its windy languor, and The Flame of New Orleans fizzled quickly when it was released in May 1941, just weeks after production had been completed. Because Universal had also lost money on Seven Sinners, executives were glad to loan Dietrich out to Warner for her next film, which turned out to be the second of three failures for her that year. The Dietrich renaissance seemed suddenly imperilled.
Not so her romantic life. In the spring of 1941, John Wayne was still meeting Dietrich regularly at the Beverly Hills Hotel, behind the locked door of her studio dressing-room, and for occasional weekends at a Santa Barbara inn. She dictated what ought to be the terms of his contract renewal, and Wayne explained to her the
fine points of football and boxing. Their affair was monitored gloomily by Erich Maria Remarque, who hoped it would not long endure and so expressed himself to Dietrich, who calmly insisted on her independence. As it happened, Remarque’s hope for an end to the fiery romance was fulfilled, although the embers were not completely extinguished for another year. But in 1941, Remarque had a more serious rival than John Wayne.
Dietrich had first met the French actor Jean Gabin in Paris, in 1939. Almost three years her junior, he had been an adolescent runaway and street brawler who eventually danced with the Folies-Bergère at the age of nineteen and appeared in plays and films from 1930. Then, in a series of French films (among them Pépé le Moko, La Grande Illusion, Quai des Brumes and La Bête Humaine), Gabin became firmly established as the prototype of the tough, sardonic marginal hero or the curiously sympathetic antihero. In private life he seemed to most people very like his movie-role image—sullen, moody, antisocial and blunt as a peasant. A naturally gifted actor, Gabin was nevertheless unresponsive to culture and literature and indifferent to social proprieties—especially those defining Hollywood life, which he endured as a mere necessity; he was there only to earn enough money to rejoin his second wife and fight with the Free French. Von Sternberg was an idiosyncratic and obsessive visionary, Fairbanks an amiable and attentive squire, Remarque a formidable and romantic intellectual, and Wayne an attractive diversion. Jean Gabin, with his rough, rustic exterior, was entirely different.
But this was not Beauty and the Beast. As their affair began that year (while he was working in a film called Moontide), it quickly became evident to Remarque and to friends like Stefan Lorant that Dietrich’s ardor was even more fierce than for John Wayne—and this seems to have been based, more than in any other affair, very much on her role as care-giver and emotional provider. She later wrote that Gabin clung to her “like an orphan to his foster mother, and I loved to mother him day and night.”