by Donald Spoto
Worse anxiety awaited everyone as they moved north toward Rome. On May 23, the Allies began a drive on the Anzio beachhead and soon the German stranglehold on Italy was definitively broken. On roads secured by the Allies there were large, leggy drawings of Dietrich—illustrated directions by amateur military artists, pointing the way to her unit. She insisted that her show must go on despite the evident danger of being so perilously close to the site where fighting had not yet ceased.
Surrounded by a protective ring of tanks, the Camp Show began the night of May 25, and as she sang “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” hundreds of soldiers provided the lighting by pointing their flashlights on the performing area. The effect was almost cinematic, as the shimmering, shifting lights sought her out and her low voice broke through the darkness. At that moment she thought (as she told a reporter next day), If they don’t like my act, all they have to do is turn off their flashlights! But the lighting remained—as haunting as anything ever devised by von Sternberg. “I felt,” she said, “as if I had passed the toughest test of my career.”
Several days later, Dietrich came down with viral pneumonia, but she continued to perform; eventually, however, she collapsed, dangerously close to delirium with fever and dehydration. She was sent to a hospital tent, treated with injections of penicillin and five days later resumed two shows daily from Naples to Bari, entertaining groups of from fifty to twenty-two thousand. “Anyone who has played for soldiers overseas,” she said later, “is not going to be satisfied with another kind of audience for a long time. The boys are full of generosity and never gloomy.”
On June 4, the Allies broke through into Rome, and when Dietrich and her companions arrived a week later the street battle was still fierce. Fanning out through the city, soldiers fought a Nazi rear guard at the Forum, an armored convoy near Trajan’s column and snipers round almost every corner. Dietrich and her troupe then wheeled dozens of the injured to a large hall, where she sang and joked until darkness. “It gave me the opportunity of kissing more soldiers than any woman in the world,” she said later. “No woman can please one man; this way, you can please many men.”
Before the end of June, her ten-week assignment completed, she was in New York, fulfilling her obligation to appear at the premiere of Kismet. Urged during publicity and press conferences to comment on what seemed the imminent collapse of the German Reich, she spoke frankly: “The Germany I knew is not there anymore. I don’t think of it. I suppose if I did, I could never do these tours.”
Telephone calls to her agent confirmed what she suspected. Her absence had not made Hollywood’s heart grow fonder; on the contrary, she was out of sight and therefore not much in their business minds. Despite her two-picture contract with MGM, the studio could not find a suitable project for her after Kismet, and so she returned to the USO Camp Shows. Leaving New York at the end of August, she again performed twice daily at bases in Greenland and Iceland, with a new troupe of musicians and a new accompanist replacing Danny Thomas.
BUT THE SPIRIT OF JOAN OF ARC HAD NOT ENTIRELY taken possession of Marlene Dietrich, and during this second (and, as it happened, longer) tour, she seemed to eyewitnesses quite conscious of her legendary status and fully prepared to exploit it for her present and future.
This she did first in London. Dietrich arrived in September, briefly met another old flame, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and then attached herself securely as a regular visitor to the headquarters of the European Theater of Operations—which by an odd coincidence happened to be housed at 20 Grosvenor Square, the former apartment-hotel where she and Fairbanks had lived six years before. With the regal grace worthy at least of a princess, she toured the apartment she had once occupied, showing Commanding General Jacob Devers, his officers and the press what could be stored in which cupboards, and how the rooms might be best furnished. “Only the door to [the] fuchsia bathroom had to be closed when visitors arrived,” according to Colonel Barney Oldfield. He had been a journalist and publicist before the war, and was then entrusted with the complex job of managing military press and public relations throughout the European campaign.
Oldfield, a commissioned officer for thirty years, was known for being (as newsman Charles Kuralt later called him) “the king of the press agents.” But he was also a sharp strategist and tactician, and General Floyd L. Parks, the first American commander in Berlin in 1945, confirmed that he did nothing during the first days of occupation without Oldfield at his side. Oldfield became a dutiful guardian and occasional facilitator for Dietrich throughout the next year, tasks required on her behalf by top-ranking American officers. Among them were Generals Mark Clark, Omar Bradley and George S. Patton—and especially the handsome, enigmatic and controversial Major General James M. Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who took the offer of Marlene Dietrich to be his company’s mascot and friend, and eventually his lover.
“Dietrich was a very strong-minded lady,” Oldfield recalled many years later. “She could be glamorous and she could be earthy. I saw her gnaw on a German sausage like a hungry terrier, but of course she could make a grand entrance that would upstage a reigning queen. She could be as authoritarian as Caesar, and she could pout as prettily as a six-year-old whose lollipop was stolen after only one lick.”
During her time in London early that autumn of 1944, Dietrich made several propaganda appearances on ABSIE (the American Broadcasting Station in England), on a program aptly called “Marlene Sings to Her Homeland.” In these transmissions, beamed to all of Germany, she sang songs from her films as well as familiar beer-hall melodies and German airs, always dedicating them to the Allied soldiers who were “about to meet up with you boys and destroy the Reich.” These broadcasts, and her outspoken rage against Nazi Germany made her extremely unpopular—indeed, very much reviled—in her homeland, both during and after the war.
Dietrich’s greatest concern, as the Allies proceeded to sweep across Europe toward Germany, was the fate of her mother, Wilhelmina Felsing Dietrich von Losch. As Oldfield remembered, this was the topic to which she turned in every conversation with officers, journalists, pilots and paratroopers. She intended to enlist every kind of aid in learning if Wilhelmina, whom she had not seen since 1931 (and from whom there had been no letters since 1938), was alive or dead.
In October, Dietrich arrived in Paris (liberated since the end of August) and decided that henceforth she would make this the headquarters for her own European Theater of Operations. She would still present her one-woman show as close to the front as possible, still contact the most important officers for needs and favors, and still risk safety to secure the hearts of all-male audiences in the last brutal campaigns of World War II. But whenever possible she retreated to the relative comfort of the Ritz where, among other notables, she enjoyed the company of Ernest Hemingway.
As a journalist, Hemingway had made his way to London and managed to fly several missions with the Royal Air Force before crossing the Channel with American troops on D-Day. Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the Fourth Infantry Division, he fought in Normandy, participated in the liberation of Paris and, although officially a newsman, was highly respected as a skilled strategist for intelligence activities and guerrilla warfare. Dietrich sat on the edge of his bathtub at the Ritz, exchanging war news while he shaved, and telling him of the ardent hours she had just spent with General Patton, who had given her a pair of his pearl-handled pistols. Indeed, she said quite calmly, she and Patton had already shared the same bed more than once in London and in Paris.
The intervals at the Ritz in 1944 and 1945 remain examples of Dietrich’s canny abilities with the officers during these difficult times, for whenever she was present there were somehow ample supplies of liquor, champagne, cocktail food and caviar. Much of this turned up anonymously (the black market thrived), much of it was sent with the compliments of this officer or that general—especially her great admirer General Patton, called “Old Blood and Guts” by his men.
There were the usual rivalries around Dietrich, this time with Collier’s war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (the third and soon to be ex–Mrs. Hemingway) and with Mary Welsh (his current mistress and soon to be fourth wife). “Both were strong women,” Barney Oldfield said of Dietrich and Gellhorn,
tenaciously determined, probably in the land of the Amazons, and [acted like] opposing warlords. There was always the impression that each resented the other and denigrated her. To Gellhorn, Marlene was “that actress,” while Marlene thought of her as “that writer.” These two women jousted for the attention of General Jim Gavin . . .
. . . as they did, for different reasons, for the attention of Hemingway himself.
As for Mary Welsh, Hemingway was obviously in love with her, although time had not diluted his fascination with Dietrich. He proudly squired both women to official meetings and receptions in Paris at the end of the year, showing them off and boasting of their social help in his suite—which, he said, was “the Paris command post for all veterans of the 22nd Infantry Regiment.” Although the relationship of these two women to Hemingway differed, neither suffered gladly the other’s presence. No one more than Dietrich coveted the attention of men—by the thousands in an audience or individually in friendship or affair.
To obtain and keep that attention, almost nothing was beyond her caprice. William Walton, the highly respected journalist then working for Time magazine (and later for the New Republic), was subjected to the full Hollywood-party treatment. He, too, was billeted at the Ritz that year, and met Dietrich through Hemingway.
Walton had bought a chic Paris hat for a sweetheart in New York, which Dietrich insisted on modelling for all who came to her room. One evening, she passed Walton’s open door while he was working and awaiting friends. She stopped, walked back to her own room and returned—completely nude—wearing the hat at a rakish angle. “Don’t I look cute?” she asked innocently. Walton replied calmly, as if she were also wearing the latest Paris frock, and Dietrich had to attempt a dignified retreat. On another occasion, as Hemingway’s biographer documented, Dietrich wore the same hat and calmly used Walton’s toilet (taking a page from Tallulah Bankhead’s stylebook), not interrupting her conversation with him while he shaved. In some ways it seems remarkable that generals and war correspondents within her emotional-ballistic range managed to conclude the war.
The discipline of conduct in war never affected the part of Dietrich’s character that was calmly exhibitionist. She dangled naked legs from truck platforms before sighing soldiers, and more than once she burst in on a soldiers’ camp shower to bathe as if no one else were present—actions which could not have been as beneficial to morale as she may have intended, and which led more than one angry officer to label her a cruel tease. Jean Renoir recalled that his wife Dido was so often asked by Dietrich to accompany her to the ladies’ room of a restaurant that Dido feared an imminent proposition. “But Marlene simply wanted to show off her legs,” according to Renoir, “and [she] took Dido with her on the pretext that she needed to be protected against the women who assailed her. It was simply the enactment of a ritual.”
THAT AUTUMN AND DURING A VICIOUSLY COLD WINter, Dietrich divided her USO entertainment duties between divisions of the Third and Ninth armies in eastern France, Belgium, Holland and at last in Germany. To banish shaking chills in the town of Nancy, in Lorraine, she drank Calvados (to which she had been introduced by Erich Maria Remarque). Imbibing on an empty stomach, she vomited constantly, “but I would rather vomit than be hospitalized,” she wrote later of that time. “Otherwise, what am I afraid of? Of failing . . . of being unable to endure this way of living any longer. And everybody will say, smiling, ‘Of course, of course, that was an absurd idea [for her to go to war] in the first place.’ ”
With the ruthless, proud and independent Patton, Dietrich and her performance troupe moved north in December from Nancy into Belgium—precisely at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, from mid-December 1944 to mid-January 1945. She frequently traveled and dined with this tough tactician, and on at least one occasion she fell asleep in his office. He carried her to his car, drove her to her barracks, and when she awoke next morning he was still by her side.
Whether she bestirred herself at some time before dawn is not clear, but members of Patton’s staff—like his aide, Frank McCarthy, who produced the film Patton—later confirmed that there was an intense affair between Dietrich and the general all during the time of her attachment to his army.
“She charmed her way onto more airplanes than Bob Hope—and with an entire troop,” according to Barney Oldfield. “She could commandeer a jeep and driver and all sorts of privileges, and these were accorded to her as if she were a queen in the eyes of those she dealt with.” Dietrich was, as she later said, frequently summoned to Patton’s quarters on the pretext of his needing a report on her shows or to inquire about her willingness to accompany him on a hospital tour. (When director Billy Wilder later asked her if her affair had not indeed been with Eisenhower instead of Patton, she replied, “But, darling, how could it have been Eisenhower? He wasn’t even at the front!”) During this critical time of the conflict, Dietrich managed to brace Patton as she did his men. Needing an official password for her, he decreed “Legs,” in her honor.
Accompanying Patton all through the hostilities in the Ardennes, Dietrich suffered severe frostbite that plagued her for the rest of her life and exacerbated her later arthritis. Her twice daily song-and-joke shows continued during this last great German offensive on the western front in southern Belgium. While Allied aircraft were impeded by wretched weather, Nazi Panzers advanced toward Antwerp and the German Fifth Army completely surrounded Bastogne. Nazi Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt then demanded that Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe surrender the city; his response was the legendary “Nuts!” Only when Patton barrelled into Bastogne on December 26, with Dietrich at his side, did the situation begin to alter; the First Army joined them a week later, and with that the Germans began to retreat.
For the morale of troops in the thick of the fighting, the USO pitched camp two miles from the German-Dutch-Belgian border and performed in Maastricht, Holland—the first town in that country to be liberated from the Germans. “Like the rest of us that winter, she had to wear long, woolly, drop-seat underwear, heavy trousers and gloves,” according to Oldfield, who was there with a press corps, “but she ignored the weather and changed into nylon stockings and a sequined evening gown—and in this glamorous outfit she stuck the musical saw between her legs and played for her cheering audience.”
Seeing her discomfort in the severe cold, war correspondent Gordon Gammack (then with the Des Moines Register and Tribune) recalled that in Maastricht he gave Dietrich a small coal stove for warmth, which she willingly accepted. Several years later, he approached Dietrich as she strolled with her grandchildren on a New York street. He introduced himself politely as the man with the stove from Maastricht, and said how much he had enjoyed her brave performance during the war. “Thank you for the stove,” she said unsmiling, with a chill that recalled that winter of 1945. “Thank you and goodbye.”
Aachen, twenty miles from Maastricht, had been the first large German city to fall (on October 20, 1944); it was on the route to Berlin when the Allies and Dietrich’s USO camp arrived at the end of January 1945. Acting now as interpreter for the American army, she was asked to tell the frightened inhabitants to evacuate the streets so that tanks could move through; to her surprise, she received a warm welcome from these Germans: “they couldn’t have been friendlier, even though they knew I was on the other side.” But Aachen bestowed another, less clement memory, for there the entire company contracted an infestation of body lice. With no showers, soap or medicine, the situation was grim until Dietrich selected a soldier from her audience and, to the accompanying hoots of his comrades, asked that he report later to her tent behind the truck. The young man’s subsequent report to his waiting friends has not been documented, but he was onl
y invited to offer Marlene Dietrich delousing powder and instructions for its use.
The next stop was Stolberg, a few miles from Aachen, where she met a correspondent with the International News Service. “I am through with Hollywood,” she told reporter Frank Conniff, perhaps more from her doubts about her career possibilities than from a settled moral conviction about Hollywood. Gazing at the wreckage of the city, she added, “I hate to see all these ruined buildings, but I guess Germany deserves everything that’s coming to her.”
FROM FEBRUARY THROUGH JUNE 1945, DIETRICH shuttled from Germany to Paris, alternating shows for both Allied and enemy wounded soldiers with long intervals at the Ritz, usually with Patton. And that spring, through Hemingway, she scored an important strategic victory for herself and ultimately for her mother. Because Patton then proceeded eastward through the Saar toward Berlin and the USO was deployed on a slower, more circuitous route, his contact with Dietrich was subsequently diminished. In fact he was replaced, for her attention was then lavished almost exclusively on General Gavin, and their affair affected both lives in important ways.
In 1945, James M. Gavin was a slim, six-foot-two-inch, dark-haired, boyish gentleman who looked almost a decade younger than his thirty-seven years. The youngest general in the history of the army, Gavin had lied about his birthdate to enter military service without a high school diploma, and from his first years with the army he impressed superiors with his thorough dedication and serene, methodical approach to supervising men and solving problems. Zealous in his duty as a paratrooper, he commanded the parachute combat team that first invaded Sicily in 1943, and by the time he landed at Normandy on D-Day had risen to the rank of brigadier general and soon commanded the entire 82nd Airborne Division. Because he was known to be a man of extraordinary valor (he fought for a month with a broken back, earning himself the Silver Cross and the Purple Heart), and because his military prowess was combined with a gentle, courtly manner, women—and some men as well—found him fascinating, even seductive. As Barney Oldfield recalled, “Gavin was a very glamorous figure, not only respected but much talked about by everyone. Many strong-minded women, including Mary Welsh and Marlene, were attracted to him.”