by Donald Spoto
That spring, she asked Gabin to come with her for a brief holiday in New York, where they went to the theater and visited old acquaintances. To cheer herself, Dietrich spent three afternoons with the couturiers at Lily Daché, where she went into a paroxysm of buying—ninety-eight items, including a Persian lamb jacket, a two-hundred-dollar scarf, a one-hundred-fifty-dollar white turban, a silver possum muff, purses, and fur gloves and accessories more suited to the Russian tundra than Southern California. But she was not happy when she received the bill for almost 5,000, and by late summer the store had to sue for nonpayment; her account was not balanced for almost a year.
That summer, Dietrich accepted an invitation from Bette Davis, who had helped organize the Hollywood Canteen, a place where entertainment and meals were provided for servicemen during the war. Dancing with soldiers and sailors and preparing dinners and cakes, she “not only contributed glamour out front,” as Davis later wrote, “but backbreaking labor in the kitchen.” In the spirit of her friend Carole Lombard, Dietrich then joined colleagues like Linda Darnell and Dorothy Lamour on a nationwide bond tour, exploiting her fame (and in her case underlining her opposition to Germany) by raising funds for the War Department.
Just about this time—the late summer of 1942—Dietrich received visitors from New York, who had come to discuss her appearance in a Broadway musical. Composer Kurt Weill and producer Cheryl Crawford (who had collaborated on the 1936 musical Johnny Johnson) hoped to follow Weill’s Lady in the Dark with a show based on The Tinted Venus, by F. Anstey (pseudonym of the English writer Thomas Anstey Guthrie). One Touch of Venus, as it was eventually called, was a comic variation on the Pygmalion-Galatea myth. It tells the story of a barber who places an engagement ring on a statue of the goddess of love, who promptly comes to life and pursues him. But when she discovers what sort of life the typical housewife leads, she returns to Mount Olympus.
At the core of the musical comedy in progress was a character that seemed conceived for Dietrich, and so Weill and Crawford visited her to describe the story and ascertain her interest in a New York stage debut. According to the producer, Dietrich appeared attentive and interested, “but she also had an odd, rather remote quality—whether she wanted to seem as mysterious as her image, I couldn’t know, but Marlene was certainly elusive.” The visitors were not given more certitude when, after they had described their theatrical plans, Dietrich brought out her musical saw and accompanied herself in the Brecht-Weill song “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy End.
There were three or four such meetings. Weill and Crawford mapped out the plot, the musical numbers, the staging, the lush possibilities for a magnificent wardrobe. Dietrich listened, she nodded gravely, and then she inevitably entertained them on the musical saw. They were getting nowhere very fast indeed. In a final attempt to gauge some idea of Dietrich’s willingness to commit to the show, composer and producer invited her and Gabin to the Cock and Bull, a popular steak house on Sunset Boulevard. “There was very little talk about our project,” Crawford added, “but Marlene and Gabin were delightful to watch, two such beautiful people in love with each other.” At the end of dinner, coffee was ordered—to the horror of the two beautiful people: “We wouldn’t think of it!” they cried in unison. “It will keep us awake!” And that, said Cheryl Crawford and Kurt Weill later, shattered the romantic fantasies they were entertaining about Dietrich and Gabin. A last-ditch stab at the topic of One Touch of Venus was deflected when Dietrich told Crawford not to worry, she would soon be in New York for further discussions. Soon turned out to be late, but since there were difficulties with the musical’s book, Crawford was patient.
BECAUSE SHE NEEDED THE MONEY AND COULD DO little else, Dietrich undertook another disappointing picture at Universal in the autumn of 1942. For the third and final time she appeared with John Wayne, in a project of monumental tedium called Pittsburgh. He and (again) Randolph Scott played coal mine “hunkies” who climb to the top of the industry, brawl over Dietrich, fight over principles and finally knuckle down to a patriotic effort after her stout speech for the unity of labor and management during wartime. When the filming was over in late October, so was her romance with John Wayne; he did not like her incessant chatter about Gabin’s great acting talent, while Dietrich finally found Wayne simply too morbidly dull. What had begun as a torrid diversion concluded from a chill distance, as his telephone calls to her went unreturned and his flower deliveries unaccepted.
IN FEBRUARY 1943, IT WAS HER TURN TO ACCOMpany Gabin to New York, whence he was to return to France by way of Morocco. But first they would have a New York holiday. At the same time, Dietrich wanted very much to appear in a stage version of Vera Caspary’s popular novel Laura, but the author finally decided simply to sell the rights to a Hollywood studio, and the stage version was unproduced until 1947.
That spring, however, the matter of One Touch of Venus came to a head, and Dietrich was apparently eager to make a Broadway musical debut. After a preliminary meeting with Crawford and Weill, she made daily visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she studied various paintings, statues and engravings of Venus. She also ordered vast quantities of grey chiffon and invited the producer and composer to her suite at the St. Regis Hotel, where she stripped (at least once in their presence) and draped herself in the fashion of the Venus she had seen that day. “She modeled,” Crawford recalled, “she struck poses, and she asked our opinions. She looked divine, of course, but we couldn’t figure out what this had to do with her commitment to our show. I remember that she was very keen on one Venus in particular—one with gorgeous buttocks.”
After several such fashion shows, Dietrich was asked to come to the Forty-sixth Street Theater so that Crawford, Weill and company might hear her voice in an auditorium. When she arrived (with Gabin for moral support), it was immediately evident to everyone that Dietrich was very anxious indeed. When she sang Hollander’s “Johnny,” those in the fourth row could scarcely hear her. Unaccustomed to projecting her voice from the stage and unfamiliar with the demands of musical theater in her fifteen years’ absence from it, Dietrich feared she was out of her depth and range. And when she heard the richness and complexity of Weill’s songs, she was convinced this would be a mistake (as indeed it would have been for her to have undertaken, at her age, the role of the twenty-four-year-old Laura).
But pride kept her from a flat withdrawal, and the show’s creators were convinced that with rehearsals and the proper audio doctoring Dietrich was the right Venus—but still there was no contract for her participation. Arriving the following day at the St. Regis with legal papers in hand, Crawford was surprised to find Dietrich packing for an imminent return to California.
“You’re leaving?” she asked.
“Yes, my darling,” Dietrich said with a deep sigh, “and I have the most terrible headache.” But Crawford had not become a successful Broadway producer without some education in the ways of stars. She promptly produced a modest quantity of a stimulating drug, and moments later Dietrich was gloriously exuberant. “Obviously she wasn’t accustomed to taking stimulants,” according to Crawford, “having declined even coffee that evening in Hollywood. However, I wasn’t above taking advantage of my windfall.” And with that, the contract was put before Dietrich, who signed it with a flourish. One Touch of Venus was now headed for an autumn premiere in New York. That evening, Gabin departed for Morocco and Dietrich for Hollywood, where she awaited the revisions of the show’s book.
But in more sober moments, Dietrich knew she would have to renege on this commitment. She could not command a Broadway stage, nor (she knew better than anyone) had she the vocal or dramatic equipment to carry a strong musical. When, on March 16, 1943, the creators of One Touch of Venus telephoned Dietrich for her reactions to the new script by S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, she told Weill disingenuously, “I cannot play this—it is too sexy and profane.” For a moment, the New Yorkers must have thought they had a wrong number, but Dietrich continued as if everyo
ne would believe her: “You know, Kurt, I have a daughter who is eighteen years old, and for me to get up on the stage and exhibit my legs is now impossible.”
“Marlene, what are you saying?” cried Kurt Weill. “Why, this play is delightful—it’s intriguing, it’s witty, it’s sophisticated—”
“No, it is too sexy and profane,” Dietrich repeated, as if she had just completed the title role in The Song of Bernadette and dared not sully her image. Weill became angry, scolding Dietrich for her ignorance and hypocrisy, but Dietrich was adamant. “No, Kurt, it is sexy and profane, and I will not now exhibit myself in that way.” And rather than take their reluctant star to litigation, the creators of One Touch of Venus dissolved her contract. That autumn, the show opened with a leading lady named Mary Martin, who became a Broadway sensation.
THERE WAS, THEN, NO IMMEDIATE WORK FOR MARlene Dietrich and so, by default, only her daughter claimed her care and attention. But Maria—who had faced the problem of her obesity and was slowly but consistently losing weight—had begun a social life and career of her own, and she neither understood nor appreciated her mother’s sudden, intense consecration of time and attention. That spring, in fact, Maria was taking serious steps to claim her independence; among them was the assumption of the professional name Maria Manton.
For almost a year (with her mother’s encouragement), she had also been taking drama classes at the Jack Geller Workshop, on the site of the former Max Reinhardt school at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. There Maria met a handsome and talented twenty-three-year-old actor named Dean Goodman, who had received a medical discharge after military service. He was an assistant to the legendary acting teacher Maria Ouspenskaya and had appeared to good notices in plays locally and throughout the West (most notably in a production of the thriller Love from a Stranger).
Years later, Goodman recalled that he (among others) felt shy with the daughter of so famous a woman, and although they met casually and occasionally dated, there was at first nothing romantic about the friendship. But like her mother, according to Goodman, it was a challenge for the daughter to make people like her. He found Maria pretty, bright and talented, and by June they were engaged.* “Maria was the aggressor in our relationship,” according to Goodman, “and only later did it become clear to me that she wanted most desperately to get away from home and mother. She was also very adamant that I not meet Marlene, and she admitted why: she said she was afraid every man she brought home would eventually be found in her mother’s bed.”
Goodman understood that there was a tense balance of love and enmity between the two women. On the one hand, Maria longed for her mother’s approval but resented her unstable childhood. Never secure in Dietrich’s affections, she had been isolated from her peers and put in the care of various tutors, and then sent away to school in Europe—always feeling that she was entirely subordinate to her mother’s career and lovers. For her part, Dietrich was never overtly cruel to Maria; but there had been a pattern of neglect. Now Dietrich realized that Maria was no longer a child but an attractive and talented young woman, and this apparently aroused all sorts of tangled rivalries and unacknowledged fears in Dietrich—for one, that Maria might find a good man and have a stable life of her own without the necessity of her mother’s protection. In addition, Maria’s maturing was a sure sign of Dietrich’s inevitable aging. That these were subtle if unacknowledged reactions was evident from her mother’s summary rejection—sight unseen, man unmet—of everyone Maria said she liked, Goodman included.
At the time, Goodman’s friends (among them the actress Lillian Fontaine, mother of Joan and Olivia de Havilland) urged him to reconsider what was becoming a rush to the altar with Maria. “But Maria was convinced she was in love with me,” according to Goodman, “and I thought I was in love with her. Right up to the wedding—because I didn’t want to seem like an opportunist or a star-struck fan—I didn’t insist on meeting Marlene, she had no desire to meet me, Rudi simply wasn’t around, and Maria wasn’t eager for me to meet either one! It was a very strange and swift courtship.” A wedding date was set for late August.
Dietrich, meanwhile, swung into action with every stratagem to prevent the marriage. First, she investigated Goodman’s credit and character but could turn up only favorable reports; furthermore, to supplement his acting income and support his future wife, he had taken a part-time job as a warehouse clerk. Then Dietrich made a more desperate attack, as Maria told Dean: she asked her daughter if she had considered what it would be like to have Jewish children? This surprising objection was repeated in a meeting called by Dietrich’s lawyer, to whom Goodman simply replied that if he were Jewish he would not be ashamed. But even the fact of his gentile family background did not affect his worthiness, for Dietrich then flatly asserted that Dean Goodman was a fortune hunter (something she herself told him in a brief telephone conversation).
Neither of the Sieber parents attended the wedding on August 23, 1943, at the Hollywood Congregational Church; only a few friends were present. The newlyweds moved into a small apartment, to which Dietrich one day shipped pieces of furniture from her own collection in storage. And one evening the Goodmans returned home to find it scrubbed and cleaned, new curtains hung, the windows washed and the place banked with fresh flowers. “Marlene had done it all herself,” Goodman recalled. “The building manager and our neighbors had thought the woman in bandana and work clothes was a hired domestic.”
NO ONE MADE THAT MISTAKE IN HER ONLY TWO FILM appearances late in 1943. Wilhelm Dieterle, who had directed her in Berlin two decades earlier in the silent picture Der Mensch am Wege, had also emigrated and was directing in Hollywood as William Dieterle. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had given him that old chestnut of an Arabian Nights fantasy Kismet to enliven, with Ronald Colman, Technicolor, the full resources of the studio’s costume and set departments and a budget of over 3,000,000—surprising for those years of wartime restrictions. Again, Marlene Dietrich’s name appeared after the leading man’s and after the title, a small difference for audiences but, in the carefully negotiated scheme of things in ego-conscious Hollywood, a matter of considerable significance. She was seen briefly as Jamilla, the harem queen in the castle of the Grand Vizier in old Baghdad, romancing a beggar disguised as a prince (Colman).
Slinking none too voluptuously with layers of chiffon and veils, hairpieces carefully looped, braided and wired a yard above her head, Dietrich had the opportunity to do her first dance onscreen. In the only one of her four scenes lasting more than a minute, Dietrich attempted a five-minute wriggle, her legs sprayed with four layers of gold paint as she ambled, glided, swooned, waved her arms and tried (mostly with the help of judicious editing and the use of a double in long shots whenever there is dancing) to suggest something like a dance. Surely nothing like this—or much in the picture, for that matter—was ever seen in the Levant, for this is after all MGM’s Arabia, a salad of Balinese dancers in Chinese costumes left over from science fiction serials, a studio fantasy combining what seems to be Brazilian high fashion with the latest accessories from Bullock’s on Wilshire Boulevard.
From her arrival that autumn, she was in bad humor.
“Do you have a side of your face?” she asked Ronald Colman breathlessly. “A left side or a right side that’s better on camera?”
“Well—yes,” he replied.
“Darling, you are so lucky. I have none! I have to face the camera!”
This was really a warning, as Colman soon learned and later recalled: “She played every single scene looking straight ahead,” effectively ignoring her co-star and stealing the audience’s attention. This did not, however, effect a particularly flattering image, for (quite apart from the ridiculous wardrobe, hairstyles and sets) Technicolor was not kind to Marlene Dietrich. In The Garden of Allah, Kismet (and later in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious), she looks glossy and garish, her face flat, masklike, without affect, nuance or subtlety. Like a number of actors, she needed cinematic chiaroscuro
, the infinite black and white shadings of a master like von Sternberg to evoke and highlight her expression.
That same season, Dietrich was outfitted just as hilariously for her cameo appearance in an all-star Hollywood revue produced by Universal and starring mostly its own studio talent. The picture, at first called Three Cheers for the Boys, was an orgy of self-praise with songs, dances and skits featuring actors and dancers who had spent time entertaining troops at home-training camps and near the action abroad—among them George Raft, Sophie Tucker, Jeanette MacDonald, Dinah Shore and W. C. Fields. (The film’s considerable profits went not to servicemen or for wartime aid, but to Universal Pictures.) One of the scenes was to feature a portion of Orson Welles’s famous Mercury Wonder Show, a magic act he was staging that year in a tent on Cahuenga Boulevard. When Rita Hayworth, the actress soon to be Mrs. Welles, was enjoined by Columbia Studios’ Harry Cohn from appearing in Welles’s show, Dietrich stepped in and then agreed to do the brief film scene, in which (with the sloppiest special photographic effects in history) she was to be sawed in half.
At the same time, Dean Goodman returned home from acting in John Carradine’s Shakespeare tour, only to be told by Maria that she considered their life together a mistake and that she was leaving after four months of marriage. “But my parents never divorced,” she said airily, explaining her refusal to grant Goodman’s obvious request, “and like them we can have our freedom and the respectability of the contract.” (Three years later, when she wished to remarry, Maria changed her mind on the matter of divorce.) Of this brief and clearly miscalculated union, Dean Goodman said, “I liked and admired Maria—her talent, her energy, her perseverance, her cheerful personality despite the unhappiness and the difficulties she’d overcome.” Maria, on the same subject, was forever after more guarded: “I don’t want to talk about that. It never existed.”