by Donald Spoto
First (as she had with Wayne), Dietrich supervised the negotiations for his movie contract and then proceeded to manage his finances, although Gabin soon learned she was better at evaluating the first than administering the second. Although he lived mostly in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Dietrich selected a small house in West Los Angeles for him to rent as an official address, for propriety’s sake, and there—because he was completely incompetent in the ordinary tasks of household maintenance—she cooked, cleaned and purchased everything from drinking glasses to bath towels. “I helped him overcome all obstacles,” she claimed majestically.
In performing these chores, more was at stake than simple loving assistance. Dietrich’s lifelong inclination to assume the role of another’s housekeeper may have been an attempt to be Earth Mother as well as Glamour Queen, and her self-abasement for many men a subtle atonement for her years of neglect of Rudi. There is a hint of the heroic gesture that manipulates and controls even as it seems to serve, for few gestures could arouse such gratitude and amazement as the sight of Marlene Dietrich on her knees, a bandana round her hair, her face smudged with dirt as she scrubbed a floor. “I am just a simple Hausfrau,” her actions shouted—and so a part of her may have wished to be. But her role as eager domestic was always assumed for the particular benefit of one she wished to impress, or from whom she wished to exact some kind of tribute.
Helpmate and passionate companion she certainly was, but by Dietrich’s own admission the fires of the Gabin romance were banked by her activities as “mother, cook, counselor and interpreter, sister, friend—and more!” She found that his craggy posture was a façade, that he was a man of exquisite sensitivity who showed to others a mask of indifference but with her was gentle as a timid schoolboy: “my lonely child,” she called him. In pampering and soothing Gabin, she was in a way treating a mirror image of herself, the woman of serene control who preferred to think (as she insisted to Remarque) that she was completely dependent on the love and devotion of another, lost without the man she loved.
Enjoying her role as provider, Dietrich often surrounded Gabin with compatriots like the directors René Clair and Jean Renoir, preparing lavish French dinners and concluding the evening by leading guests in a rousing chorus of the “Marseillaise.” “He called her ‘my Prussian,’ ” Renoir recalled, “and she would reply to this by tapping his forehead and saying in a languishing voice, ‘That’s what I like about you—it’s quite empty. You haven’t a single idea in your head, not one, and that’s what I like.’ ” The insult, Renoir added, apparently left Gabin untouched.
Also among the occasional dinner guests was the French actress known simply as Annabella, once a leading lady for René Clair and a co-star of Gabin’s. In 1941 she, too, was making films in Hollywood, and since 1938 had been married to Tyrone Power. They arrived at Gabin’s house and were greeted by a slightly breathless but beautiful Dietrich: “Oh, hello! Excuse me, I am cooking a ragout for mon Jean and I must stay in the kitchen.” Gabin had not yet returned from his day at the studio, and the guests were left alone while their hostess scurried about preparing dinner. When he finally arrived, the Powers were astonished at Dietrich’s welcome. After several minutes of passionate embraces and kisses, she prostrated herself before Gabin, removed his shoes, massaged his feet and lovingly put slippers on him. “Gabin glanced in [Annabella’s] direction and winked,” according to Power’s biographer, “as if he was helpless, a victim of Marlene’s adoration.” After dinner, Dietrich played her musical saw for the guests.
In public, Dietrich was often seen with Gabin at the popular and lavish club Mocambo, which opened on Sunset Boulevard in January 1941. Privately, as she disclosed, her tender moments with Gabin were characterized by an overtly parental element: the seventh child of poor music-hall performers, he depended on Dietrich’s strong maternal instinct. “He took the place of my daughter,” she stated oddly, adding that “he was gentle, tender and had all the traits a woman looks for in a man.” Or at least the traits sought by a woman with Dietrich’s own tangled need to be needed: “He was a little baby who liked to curl up in his mother’s lap and be loved, cradled and pampered.”
Dietrich often signed her letters to Ernest Hemingway “from Mama.” But no one ever had more maternal sustenance from her (nor, perhaps, was any man ever more dependent on it) than Jean Gabin. “The mothering is more important than the sex,” Dietrich said (to her daughter) about her relations with men. (“She is mother as sex,” said her next movie co-star, Edward G. Robinson.) In the 1950s, Dietrich, Sieber and Lorant were discussing her many liaisons. “Who do you think I loved more than anyone else?” she asked them without a trace of irony. “Jean Gabin?” suggested Rudi. “Gabin, yes,” she replied. “Certainly, Gabin.” And in 1963, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy met Dietrich at a Washington luncheon and asked who was the most attractive man she had ever met, she replied, “Jean Gabin.”
Ursula Petrie, who knew Dietrich well in the early 1940s, was one of many who noted that with Gabin on the scene, “almost overnight, Dietrich’s interest in Remarque waned.” This may have been at least partly owing to the fact that even for a woman with Dietrich’s prodigious energies it must have been difficult to make three films in one year while simultaneously maintaining ardent affairs with one woman and at least three men. But there was another issue, as Dietrich later wrote: Gabin was “stubborn, possessive and jealous.” He soon learned, however, the common lesson of everyone close to Dietrich: it was futile to demand exclusivity.
This became clear to Gabin when she began her assignment at Warner in late March—a tedious business called Manpower, in which she played a tough floozy opposite Edward G. Robinson (who had top billing) and George Raft as electrical linemen whose dangerous job is nothing compared to their rivalry for her favors. Robinson and director Raoul Walsh later recalled that Dietrich was as usual obsessed with her hair and makeup, placing a mirror near the camera and supervising her own lighting and photography—“so subtly and sexily,” according to Robinson, “that no one was offended and she got precisely what she wanted . . . [She had] arrogant self-assurance and was sexy, temperamental, demanding . . . and rough and tough.”
Such must also have been the reaction of Gabin, who could do nothing to prevent Dietrich’s indulgence with George Raft during the six weeks of filming that spring. Tough and cynical like him (although presented onscreen with a sleek menace), Raft fascinated Dietrich with details of his underworld connections to racketeers and gangsters. Their brief affair, according to a few friends like Ursula Petrie, had a rather bizarre beginning when Raft took Dietrich (apparently in the mistaken notion that she would be shocked) to a notorious downtown venue where live sex shows were performed. But Raft had not taken into account her years in Berlin, for Dietrich was not only unfazed but downright amused.
The trysts with Raft, which occurred with little discretion in various Warner studio dressing rooms, aroused sufficient ire in Gabin that he, too, resolved to dally, and by the time Manpower was completed at the end of May, Dietrich feared that her nonchalance had jeopardized the primary relationship of her life at the time. Lunching with Raft at the studio, she telephoned Gabin from their table and conducted a long and obviously amorous conversation in French (later translated for Raft’s benefit). Had Gabin enjoyed the previous evening with his girlfriend? Would they be dining together that evening? Did he still love her? The conversation over, Marlene reached for Raft’s hand: “I was advising Jean about his career,” she said without blinking. “Oh, Georgie, it is too bad you are taken by Betty Grable [another leggy transient in Raft’s busy schedule]. I am so lonely.” She was not, of course, bemoaning the lack of anything more permanent with Raft; Dietrich simply did not sustain rivalries as calmly as she caused them. Once their film was completed, her co-star waved farewell, after presenting her with a gold bracelet—engraved with “George” on one side and a tiny raft on the reverse.
The dismal picture called Manpower was an i
mmediate failure and marks the lowest point in Dietrich’s career. Everything in it seems unreal: relationships, dialogue, sets, costumes—even Los Angeles, where the story occurs, is beset year-round by fierce winter tempests, hail and ice storms.
That the resuscitation of Dietrich’s professional fortunes had indeed been only temporary was clear to her and to just about everyone in Hollywood when she had a third critical and box-office loser in a single year. At Columbia Pictures, under the direction of Mitchell Leisen, she played (for a salary of 100,000) an unmarried Broadway star who encounters legal obstacles after she sweeps up a neglected Manhattan baby and tenderly brings him home for adoption. The Lady Is Willing was planned as a warmly touching comedy about a woman whose heart is broken open by maternal love, but the only fracture that summer was to Dietrich’s ankle. Tripping over prop toys on August 25, she whirled round awkwardly and, to prevent injury to the infant in her arms, took a terrible fall.
Rushed to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, she was soon encased from toe to thigh in a plaster cast, requiring her to be photographed only in close-up for the remainder of the film, further restricting a weak script. On October 29, the company moved to New York for location shooting, Dietrich’s ankle now almost healed and simply taped. “Watch Mama make the front pages of every paper in New York,” she whispered to a press representative as they stepped from the train at Grand Central Station. She then appropriated Leisen’s decorative walking stick and, cannily aware of every excuse for publicity, stood for photographers and described in excruciating detail her baby-saving accident.
But back in Hollywood for the final scenes, she could not so easily win the attention she craved from two people. “She couldn’t understand why [her co-star] Fred MacMurray wouldn’t fall madly in love with her,” said Leisen some time later, referring to Dietrich’s traditional ploy of seducing her leading men, the better to assert her authority over them for the course of their collaboration. “I said, ‘Listen, Marlene, Fred’s so happily in love with his wife, he couldn’t care less about any other woman, so you lay off. Just make the picture.’ ” She had no more luck, soon afterwards, trying to woo young Ann Miller, then a rising musical performer who was as cool to Dietrich’s blandishments as Carole Lombard and Frances Dee had been. Dietrich did not take this rejection easily, and for days she pouted at home and at work; Gabin had not the remotest idea of the reasons for her disagreeable mood.
CHRISTMAS 1941 WAS A CHEERLESS TIME FOR DIEtrich, and in fact by New Year’s Eve she was in an acute state of depression. The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7 and America’s forced entry into world conflict frightened her and evoked memories of her earlier hardships in Germany during the first World War. Additionally, despite her naturalization she shared the wary discomfiture common to immigrants from countries now at war with the United States. For several years it had been too awkward for her to play a German character in films, and so her accent and background were ignored or she was presented otherwise.*
But there were deeper personal reasons for her anxiety. On December 27, Marlene Dietrich turned forty—a crucial moment for a woman whose career very much depended on her ability to be perpetually alluring and agelessly beautiful. She calmly told the press, friends and even lovers that she was in her midthirties; the record, after all, variously stated that she was thirty-four, thirty-five or thirty-six, and this fiction was politely accepted.
The subterfuge was more comforting to the public than to herself. Privately (as Maria told her first husband), Dietrich was, at the end of 1941 and for much of the next two years, very often near panic for several reasons. First, she was aware of the indifferent and sometimes hostile reviews she was receiving in a series of wretched pictures. Second, there were (as usual) very few leading roles for those who were called “mature women.” In a business that has always depended on fantasy and the promulgation of eternal appeal, she now feared for her own ability to maintain an impossible ideal.
For decades, the self that Marlene Dietrich presented to the world had been wrapped in a tissue of illusions and deceptions. Some of this had its roots in the early demands of Prussian-Victorian etiquette, the polite repression of emotions, the social and cosmetic artifices enjoined on her from infancy by society, her mother and her grandmother—a culture, in other words, that canonized appearance and propriety but courted luxury and grandeur. As a music and drama student she then created the persona of an aristocratic girl with an impressive Weimar pedigree, blithely falsifying basic truths about her family—the identities of her father and stepfather, for example, and the very existence of her sister Elisabeth. For the benefit of a carefully contrived public status, she revealed as much of her private life as was helpful to her controversial image, and so she actively altered her history and her identity, taking any means to offer a more acceptable and even a more desirable person than she may have considered herself.
In her marriage and social life, too, there were many roles and fictions that made her life a series of playlets. Dietrich cherished a persona of simple domesticity while cultivating a score of serial, often simultaneous, paramours, and although she had many lovers, there seems to have been little depth or security with them. Her affairs were little melodramas—sometimes satisfying, often tempestuous, always containing the preparation scenes of their own finales, perhaps because of her fierce independence and the nonexclusivity she demanded.
In this regard, her prodigal sex life is not hard to understand, for it was perhaps most of all her attempt to supply the missing intimacy in a life otherwise spent maintaining the image—remaining unpredictable, mysterious, even desirable by being always somewhat remote. Her lovers she tended to treat the way she did that image: by control, by meticulous management of a carefully created scenario. But in time the result would be a solitude which every public and private gesture had perhaps inevitably foreordained.
Josef von Sternberg had enabled Maria Magdalene Dietrich to become (as the press so often called her) La Dietrich—the beautiful, exotic, languorous creature, artificial and representing mostly his own fantasies. In some ways, of course, the Dietrich of the von Sternberg films was indeed a mannequin both sensual and detached, seductive and remote, desirable yet obviously unreal. From that time forward, with her own active cooperation, she was dedicated to maintaining the mythicizing process he had begun.
But life cannot sustain the burden of perpetual fantasy, and in a curious way the changes in public taste and the gradual depopularization of her image confirmed that. The spectral and illusory Dietrich, imagined and meticulously created by von Sternberg, coincided perfectly with the dreamlike, escapist rapture desired by Depression-era audiences. In the late 1930s, both film and the world situation altered dramatically. Lighting and lenses represented people more sharply and distinctly, and backgrounds now appeared clarified; actors were, in other words, recognizably situated. Screenplays, too, kept pace with the public’s demand for fresh humor, visual realism and real if subtle eroticism. (In this regard, it is easy to understand the popularity of films like Gone With the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Letter, The Little Foxes and The Maltese Falcon.)
THE APPROACH OF WAR SUDDENLY MADE AT LEAST temporarily obsolete (or unfashionable) many of the conventions and genres of earlier films—screwball comedies, heroic westerns, tales of mere urban gangsters. But even at the end of 1941 Marlene Dietrich was still unprepared and unwilling to accept the fact that she had come from a particular era, that she was of a certain age, that she stood for a vanishing ideal: the lessons of Destry Rides Again had apparently been forgotten. And so, just as she had dedicated herself completely to the manufacture of illusion, so she became one of the first unwitting victims of the price it extracts—a loss of emotional balance and of purpose, a spiritual vacuum at the core of herself and her life. She spent New Year’s Eve alone, pacing in her bungalow, and (as Maria recalled) during the following months she suddenly and without apparent reason broke down weepi
ng. Von Sternberg, Fairbanks and Remarque were no longer available to her, Mercedes de Acosta had gone to Europe, Jean Gabin spoke daily of returning to France. There seemed nothing for her to cling to, nothing substantial, secure or solid to reassure Marlene Dietrich that her life had any meaning at all.
SHE HAD LITTLE CHOICE OR REFUGE OTHER THAN her craft, and in the first two months of 1942 at least she could work, again with John Wayne; he both adored and bored her, but at least she could count on the raw comfort of their affair. Attempting to capitalize on the Dietrich-Wayne chemistry in Seven Sinners and her Frenchy in Destry Rides Again, Universal cast them in the fourth screen version of Rex Beach’s novel The Spoilers, about crooked gold mining claims during the Alaskan boom of 1900. Dressed, photographed and given dialogue sprinkled with double meanings that recalled Mae West, Dietrich played a saloon proprietor, strutting uneasily between Wayne and the smoothly villainous Randolph Scott. Destry was supposed to ride again; no one, alas, even trotted.*
In the finished picture, Dietrich looked as she really felt off-screen—almost stiff with ennui. When production was complete, she was so depressed she fell ill, and after staying home for a week was driven to a desert inn at La Quinta, southeast of Palm Springs. Compounding her dejection that season was the news, on January 11, of Carole Lombard’s death in a plane crash; the actress had been returning from a tour, using her fame and appeal to help sell war bonds. From her retreat, a distracted and disaffected Dietrich announced that she would soon abandon Hollywood and return to the theater for a New York revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband; when the producer reneged on the offer, she simply said to the press, “I’m not thinking of the stage now. Time enough for that later, when you get older and harder to photograph.”