by Donald Spoto
Dietrich and Gavin met when Hemingway invited the general for drinks at the Ritz and Dietrich was among the guests—to the chagrin of Mary Welsh, with whom (as Barney Oldfield recalled) Dietrich had an immediate standoff for Gavin’s attention. The Dietrich-Gavin affair, conducted with the utmost discretion, began that night in Gavin’s suite and continued when Dietrich followed him back to Germany. Although for obvious reasons he made no explicit reference to Dietrich in his later account of that time, Gavin did describe an allusive incident in his book On to Berlin. As the 82nd was taking German soldiers prisoner, his men found a concertina and sang the German tune “Lili Marlene,” which—although as familiar to Allies as to the enemy—had become, at Gavin’s insistence, the anthem of the 82nd Airborne Division.
There were several reasons for Dietrich’s attraction to Gavin. Because she was close to him, as she was to Patton and Hemingway and a number of journalists and correspondents, she shared the knowledge of Operation Eclipse, the Allied plan to storm Berlin—a strategy which was to feature Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division (and a tactic which was eventually abandoned). Since Gavin was to be the first commanding officer entering the German capital, he would be the man Dietrich could enlist in the search for her mother. Ever conscious of the power of her glamour and allure, Dietrich was certainly willing to exploit them in this matter.
There had always been a distant antagonism between the bombastic, egocentric Patton and the sedate, reserved Gavin. “Patton seemed to be getting all the publicity,” Gavin wrote years later, “[but] the record now shows that it was the First Army [not Patton’s Third] that took the brunt of [the German attack on Bastogne] . . . Yet when Stars and Stripes arrived daily, it was full of stories about Patton and his Third Army and how the defenders at Bastogne [not the counteroffensive First Army] were winning the Battle of the Bulge.”
The younger general could not have been displeased, therefore, to find himself the object of Marlene Dietrich’s ardor under any circumstances, and his resentment of Patton may have added to the satisfaction of his affair with her. And on Dietrich’s side there was even more complexity, for in associating with the generals she was in a sense rediscovering the aloof officers of her childhood—her own uniformed father and stepfather—whose emotional endorsement she had long ago been denied.
GERMANY SURRENDERED ON MAY 7, AND MOST USO shows were disbanded by the end of June. After a sojourn in New York that summer, Dietrich returned to Paris, where Gavin contacted her with the news she had so long awaited. He, Colonel Oldfield and Lieutenant Colonel Albert McCleery were in the first American column to enter Berlin on July 1. While Gavin and Oldfield saw, respectively, to military and communications matters, McCleery located Wilhelmina Dietrich von Losch at the address Marlene had left with Gavin. Frightened, living in desperate poverty with an older sister, Wilhelmina did not at first understand McCleery’s news; indeed, because Goebbels had put out the fiction that London was totally destroyed, she presumed that her daughter (whose propaganda broadcasts she had heard) had been killed.
Oldfield then arrived with a car, an interpreter and two photographers. Wilhelmina was gently persuaded to accompany them to the Tempelhof airfield where, on September 19, Dietrich arrived on the military shuttle flight from Paris. The airplane door opened and she stepped out carrying a briefcase and her musical saw, her uniform crisply pressed. After a tearful reunion, mother and daughter spent several days together, and through Gavin the most liberal rations were sent to Frau von Losch. Ten days later, Dietrich—obviously emboldened—directly approached the formidable Marshal Georgi Zhukov, commander-in-chief of the Russian occupying forces in Berlin, at his headquarters. Rudi Sieber’s parents, she had learned, were interned in a Czech camp. After a long private meeting, Zhukov arranged for the Siebers to be relocated to Berlin and given hospitality appropriate to the family of the international star; generous ration cards were supplied to them, too.
The reunion of Dietrich and her mother happened none too soon, for Wilhelmina’s health was frail and that autumn she declined rapidly. Finally, in Friedenau, the American sector of Berlin, she died in her sleep of heart failure on November 6 at the age of sixty-nine. From Paris, where she received the news, Dietrich at once telephoned Gavin, who was then attending an important press reception in London. Because of the strict regulations regarding non-fraternization between Americans and Germans, Gavin himself departed at once for Berlin with Barney Oldfield, to supervise the funeral details. But their plane encountered a blinding storm and they had to set down at Schweinfurt instead of Templehof.
At that point, Gavin received bad news of his own: the IOIST Division had been selected over his now legendary 82nd as the regular army’s postwar airborne unit (a decision later rescinded). This immediately involved Gavin in a flurry of calls, interviews and memoranda. He had not, however, forgotten the reason for his trip to Berlin: “Do everything you can for her,” he said quietly to Barney Oldfield before hurrying to attend to his own complicated business. That night, Wilhelmina’s coffin was carried from her apartment to a small cemetery, where Oldfield hurriedly arranged for a grave. Finally, Dietrich arrived from Paris, accompanied by William Walton. The final formalities were brief. “Miss Dietrich was heartbroken and wept constantly,” Barney Oldfield remembered.
13: 1945–1949
AFTER SHE RETURNED FROM GERMANY TO HOLlywood at the war’s end, Marlene Dietrich was the guest of Orson Welles and his wife Rita Hayworth, at their home on Carmelina Drive in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Several film projects failed to reach even serious negotiations with Dietrich, and for several weeks she turned to managing the household chores and social calendar. After a few hints and then a blunt request, she prevailed on Welles to arrange an introduction to Greta Garbo, whom she had seen only from afar and longed to meet. According to him, Dietrich simply adored Garbo; others had the impression that she wanted to see how Garbo looked after several years’ absence from the screen, and that she also wanted to meet the woman whom Mercedes de Acosta had once loved, perhaps because Dietrich’s affair with de Acosta was also history by this time.
And so a party was arranged, at the home of Clifton Webb in Beverly Hills. Welles introduced the two women, and Dietrich gushed that she was thrilled, calling Garbo divine, a goddess, an immortal muse and inspiration. Garbo, who hated flattery as much as crowds, managed only a tight smile and a curt acknowledgment designed to end the conversation, but Dietrich persisted, her praise rising like religious veneration. Garbo, too, persisted, replying nothing but muttering distracted thanks until the exhausted worshiper finally withdrew. En route back to Carmelina Drive later that evening, Dietrich said to Welles, “Her feet aren’t as big as they say.” But the topic was not closed. Over drinks at the house, she insisted that, contrary to popular lore, Garbo certainly did wear makeup: “She has beaded eyelashes! Do you know how long it takes to have your eyelashes beaded?” Welles had no idea, but the matter was not further explored. In any case, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo had met at last; there is no evidence they ever did again.
BY CHRISTMAS 1945, LA DIETRICH WAS IN PARIS with Jean Gabin. The war had aged him: his hair had gone to grey, he had gained too much weight despite military service, the facial lines were deep, and his normally dour expression seemed graver. She, however, kept her hair a lustrous, lacquered blond and her waistline slim, and the few lines round her mouth and eyes were artfully concealed with the best cosmetics. Gabin looked at least a decade older than forty-one, while Dietrich seemed five years younger than forty-four.
Their disparate appearances would perhaps have been meanly discussed in Hollywood, but in postwar Paris Dietrich and Gabin made an attractive Continental couple. “She is the only married actress whose romance is discussed openly by columnists, magazine writers and herself,” noted an American reporter. “There is nothing hush-hush about her and Gabin. She is married to Rudolf Sieber, but they have an understanding. So much so that he has accompanied her on dates with Gabin.” It
was still to Rudi’s advantage to make himself agreeable, of course, since the bulk of his income came from Dietrich’s career (however inactive).
Thus happily reunited but each without work, Gabin and Dietrich decided to look for a movie they could make together to subsidize her protracted sojourn in Paris. To the rescue came the great Marcel Carné, who had directed Gabin in two prewar pictures and during the war had made Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), which was, then and forever after, generally regarded as one of the finest films of all time. With his screenwriter Jacques Prévert, Carné was preparing a kind of fatalist, allegorical romance about occupied Paris called Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of Night), whose leading roles he immediately offered to Dietrich and Gabin.
In her statements to the press in 1945 and 1946, she insisted her USO tours had taught her much about “real life,” about courage and commitment, life and death and basic values. Dietrich said she could never return to Hollywood and her former custom of glamorous moviemaking. This was an appetizing morsel of self-promotion designed to suggest the New Dietrich, changed and chastened by the horror of war, and America swallowed it whole. But as Carné recalled, it certainly did not alter her approach to her first postwar film project in January 1946:
Marlene had stipulated in her contract that she would not have to do the picture until she had approved the script, and she began to review it with us, scene by scene. She was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic and began to make a thousand suggestions—each one of which seemed, to Jacques and me, utterly absurd. One example: she wanted to play a night scene completely out of character, descending from a cab and paying the driver by taking the money from the top of her stocking!
Director and writer stood firm, and not even Gabin could convince Dietrich that her role as a benighted wife in war-torn Paris simply must not be prettified. She was equally adamant, and so—“deeply hurt at seeing her talent misunderstood” (thus Carné, with light sarcasm)—she refused to do the picture.
Within days (before the end of February), producer Marc Pelletier contacted her with an alternative project, to be directed by Georges Lacombe. Martin Roumagnac was based on a novel about a high-class prostitute whose passionate affair with her building contractor ends when he learns about her profession, kills her, stands trial, and is then murdered by one of her former lovers. Neither the actors nor the director could enliven the dreary script, and when the film was released (in America as The Room Upstairs) it was dismissed as a languid, unconvincing bundle of clichés, notable only for the many shots of Dietrich’s legs and the Sternbergian lighting—all of this unofficially supervised by herself. But she was consoled for its failure by her fee, which was then the equivalent of 100,000.
Despite an arduous production schedule and much evening reshooting, Dietrich insisted that she and Gabin make themselves available to Parisian social and cultural life whenever possible. She sang at a gala revue honoring the Royal Air Force, and on March 15 the couple dined with Noël Coward, whose plays and films she had admired for over a decade, and whose friendship she vigorously cultivated; Coward, on the other hand, had the unenviable task of trying to mediate a Dietrich-Gabin argument that raged throughout the meal. According to Coward, Dietrich “looked lovely but talked about herself a good deal”—her favorite topic of conversation, as he and others learned.
The dispute apparently concerned Gabin’s resentment over Dietrich’s resumption of her affair with General Gavin. For one thing, the names of Gavin and Gabin confused Parisian gossips and journalists, who reported that Dietrich was seen somewhere with Gavin when she had actually been at another place with Gabin, and vice versa; at one point, it was rumored that Gavin would be her co-star in a forthcoming film. Public confusion or no, Dietrich demanded (as always) her independence. But when Gabin countered that he would, therefore, pursue another actress he had met, Dietrich was furious. As usual, she could not approve her lover’s dalliance. Referring to Sarah Bernhardt, she insisted, on the contrary, that it was the prerogative of a woman artist like herself to have a lover (even, presumably, simultaneous lovers).
Coward was not the only witness to the troubles. The writer Max Colpet (formerly Kolpe), whom she had known earlier in Berlin and recently met again, was also in Paris, and in the middle of one night his telephone rang:
“Are you alone?” she blurted, without introduction.
“Yes, why?” Colpet replied, recognizing her voice.
“Can I stay overnight at your place?”
“Of course. What’s happened?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there.”
The matter was simple. Dietrich had had a terrific fight with Gabin when she was preparing for an evening with General Gavin. She took refuge with Colpet, prevailing on him to escort her for her rendezvous with the general at Monseigneur, a faded old romantic nightclub overladen with Russian artifacts. In such movie-set surroundings, filled with the sound of a strolling gypsy orchestra, Gavin looked very much the young, heroic leader, recalled Colpet, who added that he “had the impression that she had protracted her affair with Gavin in order to demonstrate her independence from Gabin, who was very possessive.” She also needed good contacts, superb references, and access to quick transport to London or New York, where she had possible film work pending. For all these reasons—and because Gavin was the perfect, glamorous escort and an adoring admirer—the affair continued through 1945 and much of 1946.
But Dietrich’s cavalier independence and the role of lover primus inter pares was finally too much for Jean Gabin; within the year he married the French actress Maria Mauban. This was a devastating blow to Dietrich, who could never understand why a man she still loved (or ever had loved) would commit to another woman. When Robert Kennedy asked her, at a Washington luncheon in 1963, why she said she left Jean Gabin, she replied, “Because he wanted to marry me. I hate marriage. It is an immoral institution. I told him that if I stayed with him it was because I was in love with him, and that is all that mattered. He won’t see me anymore. But he still loves me.”
Josef von Sternberg’s postwar marriage was an equivalent shock to her. (An aphorism frequently on her lips was: “When I devote myself to someone, no one can undo it.”) So far as she was concerned for herself, the Sieber marriage was a sensible model anyone could follow: one married once, for the protection it provided from other, overeager lovers; one married once for the social status and for the children’s legitimacy—and then damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
This attitude was for a time inherited by her daughter. Not until 1946, when Maria wanted to become engaged to a New York scenic and toy designer named William Riva, did she yield to Dean Goodman’s request to terminate their marriage, which had been in name only since the end of 1943. As Maria might have expected, Dietrich again disapproved of the man she chose and strongly discouraged another precipitous marriage. But this second engagement lasted a year, by which time the couple decided to marry (on July 4, 1947) with or without Mama’s blessing.
On January 11, 1946, the night before the Victory March in New York, Walter Winchell announced that Marlene Dietrich and “a certain very young general,” who were both in town for the parade, would soon marry. Informed of this embarrassing (and untrue) development by a phone call from Barney Oldfield, Gavin coolly said the story was of no concern to him. His wife, who had known of the affair for some time, reacted differently, and within two years she was granted a divorce. “I could compete with ordinary women,” she said privately, “but when the competition is Marlene Dietrich, what’s the use?”
AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS IN PARIS THAT SPRING AND summer, the Gavin affair ended. Dietrich now had no prospects of European film work and therefore accepted an offer from Hollywood to appear in a film called Golden Earrings. “I must call the general in Paris” were her first words as she stepped off the airplane and was met by the director Mitchell Leisen.
“But you’ve just come from Paris!” he said.
“He made me
promise I would call him,” Dietrich replied, “because he was worried about me. He wants me to marry him, but I can’t be an army wife.” Leisen was an expert filmmaker but a poor keeper of confidences, and within hours Hollywood buzzed with the news of Dietrich’s romance with a military hero. Nonsense, insisted the most alert gossips: it was Gabin she would eventually marry; there was no one in her life named Gavin.
Because she had been absent from Hollywood three full years (and had not starred in a successful film since 1939), Leisen had to convince Paramount that Dietrich was the right choice to play Lydia, a vulgar but seductive Middle European gypsy who helps a British intelligence officer smuggle a poison-gas formula out of Nazi Germany just before the war by disguising him as her peasant husband. When she was first offered the role, Dietrich was still in Europe and visited gypsy camps to see how the women looked, dressed and behaved. Now at the studio for wardrobe and makeup tests, she assured Leisen she would play Lydia with complete fidelity to realism—to European neorealism, in fact, which flinched at nothing.
This she did astonishingly well, for although Dietrich could not of course completely abandon her pretension to youthful beauty (nor would the studio have desired it), she dispatched the role of a greasy, sloppy gypsy with the kind of fresh comic panache not seen since her Frenchy in Destry Rides Again. As a sex-starved wench, she swoops down on the stuffy hero played by Ray Milland, supervising his transformation into a Hungarian peasant. Munching bread, gnawing on a fish-head supper, spitting for good luck, diving for Milland’s lips and chest, she is the complete, man-hungry virago—at once crude, funny and sensuous throughout the aridly incredible narrative. “You look like a wild bull!” she whispers to Milland after she has finished with his disguising makeup, pierced his ears and clipped on the golden earrings; then she nearly growls, “The girls—will—go—mad—for you!” Often resembling the seductive young Gloria Swanson, Dietrich does not simply breathe in this picture; she seems to exhale fire.