by Donald Spoto
The occasional photographic disappointment notwithstanding, Dietrich’s time in Las Vegas was triumphantly happy, for almost everyone who knew her personally came to see her show during the holidays; she was, she wrote to friends in Europe, exceedingly pleased, making lots of money and in control of her own destiny at last.
Unfortunately, her return trip, just as the new year 1954 began, broke the spell. Dorothy, Countess di Frasso, an American millionairess who had married an Italian aristocrat, had come for Dietrich’s final performance and, with their mutual friend Clifton Webb, had booked sleeping compartments on the train journey back to New York. A somewhat madcap member of café society, an international party-giver and a pursuer of the Hollywood elite, di Frasso also had some doubtful (if only transiently romantic) relations with the underworld. En route from Las Vegas, Webb found her in her roomette, dead of a heart attack at sixty-six, lying fully clothed in her expensive mink coat and wearing a diamond necklace worth almost 200,000; her luggage contained as much in additional precious stones and jewelry. The event troubled Dietrich very much: Dorothy di Frasso was not an intimate, but she was nearly a contemporary, and they intersected the same social circles. Age Dietrich could try to ignore; death was unspeakable, and the death of a rich, buoyant, elegant, life-loving woman like Dorothy must have reminded her of her own mortality as nothing else had. (Mentioning a seamstress who worked for her in Las Vegas and died later of natural causes, Dietrich said flatly that her death was “unjust.”)
Still more unhappiness awaited in New York, where Rudi told Dietrich that Tamara, who had suffered from vaguely defined and intermittent emotional ailments for several years, had finally been diagnosed as severely manic-depressive with occasional frankly psychotic episodes. Doctors recommended that Matul enter an asylum for several months, but because Sieber was virtually without work by this time that was not feasible. Without hesitation, Dietrich suggested that they both return to California at her expense. Before the end of that year, Rudi and the frail Tamara had gone West, where Dietrich’s money set him up in the rustic life of a chicken farmer, an idea very much his own. This he preferred to the vagaries of working as a minor film company employee, and for a time Tamara, too, seemed to respond favorably to their new environment in the heart of the San Fernando Valley.
For Dietrich, the first months of 1954 were otherwise quiet. Stefan Lorant arrived early at her Park Avenue apartment one Sunday afternoon to take her to dinner, but Dietrich was in the midst of a major housecleaning, scrubbing the floors in each room. She then excused herself and returned from her bedroom and bath “transformed into a major star” (thus Lorant). After finding the doors of several East Side restaurants closed on Sunday evening, they finally located a quiet venue, but when the host said, “Of course, Miss Garbo, I have a lovely table for you,” Dietrich turned to Lorant and said, “This is not my evening.” They left at once and settled for pastrami sandwiches at Reuben’s Delicatessen.
She also turned up regularly at the Riva house, where Maria interpreted her mother’s frequent housecleaning as an implicit criticism. Dietrich fussed over her grandchildren, bought them clothes, and insisted on doing the same for Maria, for whom she bought what she considered to be the proper shoes and accessories.
There was also the usual round of theater-going with visiting friends like Noël Coward or Orson Welles, dining with literati like Hemingway when he passed through the city, and attending a United Nations reception at the special invitation of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, whom she did not know. Dietrich also repeated her benefit appearance at the circus that April, and over the course of several transatlantic telephone calls, finalized the details for the transfer to London of her Las Vegas act. Although England could afford to pay only about half her American fee, this was prestigious new territory to conquer.
And so on June 16, Noël Coward, a crimson carnation in his blue suit and carrying a bouquet of the same mixed with sweetpeas, met her at London Airport. Wearing a grey beret, a tightly fitted grey suit with its skirt two inches higher than the year’s fashion, Dietrich smiled demurely, stopped to sign a few autographs and, ignoring reporters’ questions, was summarily whisked off to the Dorchester Hotel. There she was installed in the very grand seventh-floor suite decorated by Oliver Messel (complete with a grand piano and a gold bed in a gold bedroom) and prepared, as secretly as if her task were atomic research, for her debut at the Café de Paris, Leicester Square. On Monday morning, June 21, crowds began to gather outside the dinner club on Coventry Street; the five hundred available tickets had been sold weeks earlier, but fans jockeyed for the best positions to see the elite arrive that night, and perhaps the star, too.
While the patrons dined on salmon, sole, broiled chicken and strawberry ice cream, Dietrich slipped quietly into her dressing room at ten o’clock that evening. Precisely on schedule, at a quarter past midnight, Noël Coward stepped to the microphone:
Though we all might enjoy
Seeing Helen of Troy
As a gay cabaret entertainer,
I doubt that she could
Be one quarter as good
As our legendary, lovely Marlene.
A single spotlight found her, at the top of a staircase, wearing the notorious Las Vegas gown and a floor-length white fox coat. The hush throughout the Café was followed by a collective inhalation of breath, then a rapturous sigh, then clamorous applause as she glided down to the stage. With another face-lift, she looked perhaps too perfect, her features almost unnaturally smooth, her expression daringly impersonal. With eyes almost closed and lips tentatively parted, she barely acknowledged the presence of her audience, and by this calculated aura of something perilously close to apathy, she announced—substituting authority for warmth and domination for intimacy—“a few songs I have sung in pictures, on records and during the war.” There was absolute silence, not the lightest clink of dinnerware, not a cough in the room; had she called “Attention!” the crowd would have leaped to their feet.
Dietrich pointed an index finger at the orchestra leader and then stood almost motionless for a half-hour, hands on hips, occasionally raising an arm defiantly, crooning with amiable disdain in a voice that no one criticized for its narrow range or its vacillation somewhere between harmony and hoarseness. As usual, she asked what the boys in the back room would have; she fell in love again, never wanting to; she was the laziest gal in town and not the marrying kind. Her inflections were alternately subtle, racy, forlorn; she did not ask to be loved or admired. She defied anyone to reject her, and that night no one did. She was simply there, a memorial to discipline, a statue of Eternity.
In the final analysis, that is what people came to see—a monument made famous by transcending time; a woman representing sex, yet implying that she was beyond it; an insolent, iconoclastic grandmother; a beautiful, overpowering and utterly unapproachable being whose manner on- and offstage said at once “Come hither” and “Keep your distance.” Everything about her expressed what she had recently told the press:
It is a woman’s job to sense the hungers in men and to satisfy them without, at the same time, giving so much of herself that men become bored with her. It is the same with acting. Each man or woman should be able to find in the actress the thing he or she most desires and still be left with the promise that they will find something new and exciting every time they see her again.
And so it was for six weeks, in the most successful cabaret show in postwar London. By being in complete control, never granting an encore no matter how insistent the applause, she impressed every patron of the Café de Paris and had London at her command. It did not matter that she had become an institution, almost a spectacle, a Snow Queen trapped, as Noël Coward said privately, in her own legend.
TYPICALLY, SHE ENTERTAINED AFTER HER SHOW UNtil four or five in the morning, then slept until late afternoon. To the Dorchester came old friends and new acquaintances, who cheerfully listened to recordings of her opening night. Among others was Jea
n Howard (the wife of Charles Feldman, producer of two Dietrich pictures at Universal), who years later recalled a meeting one afternoon. “Van Johnson and I arrived at her suite, and she put on a record. It was nothing but excerpts of the applause to her numbers! For her it was wonderful, but it hardly seemed the thing to do for guests.”
There were also charity excursions—beneficial publicity, she was assured—an occasional garden party benefit for blind babies or old age pensioners. When she heard that composer Harold Arlen was hospitalized with ulcers, she kept several days’ vigil at his bedside, occasionally soothing him by humming his tunes “Stormy Weather” and “That Old Black Magic.” As Billy Wilder recalled, “Arlen was on his deathbed when she took care of him—just as she had cared for Kirk Douglas, and for [actor-director] Gregory Ratoff when he was sick.” Her compensation was the act of mothering itself.
Dietrich then dashed to the Café, where each night a different celebrity introduced her (Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness and David Niven, for example); the patrons at the final performance included Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent.
On August 17, Dietrich attended the Bal de la Mer in Monte Carlo, where Jean Cocteau and his mate, the actor Jean Marais, introduced her to a crowd as “a bird of paradise, a magnificent ship with sails unfurled, a woman whose plumes and furs seem to grow naturally from her skin. Her name begins tenderly and ends with the sound of a cracking whip—Marlene Dietrich.”
She returned to Paris with Marais to visit Piaf, Chevalier and the Seidmanns, but Marais had a clear impression that she was lonely and sad after the great London triumph. Dietrich claimed to harbor an enduring love for Gabin, and over several weeks Marais had to escort her to a small bistro near Gabin’s home on the Rue François. From there she gazed longingly, watching for him to emerge, waiting hours for a mere glimpse. She also asked Marais to escort her to various retrospective cinemas screening Gabin films, at which she laughed, cried, commented on his acting and reminisced about her love affair.
IN OCTOBER 1954, SHE WAS BACK IN LAS VEGAS, IN a new peek-a-boo Jean Louis creation that had fewer bugle-beads but, with the same artful foundation and construction, gave the identical illusion of nudity beneath diaphanous chiffon. For her final song, a wind machine strategically positioned offstage blew the billowing fabric round her, effecting for a moment the image of a heavenly Aphrodite, or of Venus rising none too demurely from the waves.
A week into the run of her show, she was offered contracts to return during the next two years, at 100,000 annually for four weeks work. One evening not long after that she noticed John Wayne in the audience, blew him a kiss and, when she took her bow, beckoned him to follow her backstage. This he did cheerfully, taking along his fiancée. Dietrich greeted him with a passionate kiss, but turned her back suddenly and began to speak with another guest when Wayne introduced his future wife. Her attitude about the fealty of former lovers had obviously not changed.
Nor had her mothering instincts. That winter, Harold Arlen’s musical show House of Flowers was scheduled to open on Broadway, and during its Philadelphia tryout Dietrich, worried about Arlen’s ulcers, sped to his side with cartons of milk. She also made herself the production’s servant, preparing coffee for the cast, stitching wardrobe and sending for her own brilliantly deceptive costume jewelry when Pearl Bailey’s real gems failed to sparkle under stage lights. But by the time House of Flowers came to Broadway, Arlen—simply an acquaintance flattered by her attention and her desire to sing some of his most famous songs—had clearly allowed Dietrich too much latitude as a kind of unofficial mascot. She freely offered actors and technicians so much advice and direction that there was considerable dissension onstage and off, and she had to be politely asked to keep still.
Dietrich left the company before the Christmas premiere in New York, and during the holidays she complained bitterly (to visiting friends like Coward and Hemingway) that apart from her nightclub act there was really nothing to engage her energy or talent. In a letter to her Hollywood agent, Charles Feldman, she complained that she longed to try new kinds of film, and that no one had yet “taken advantage of the worldwide publicity resulting from my initial appearance in Vegas and London. I don’t think there is another film actress idol for so many years who had such a success in a new field.” She received a polite but indifferent reply; it was, after all, the era of Marilyn Monroe.
At the same time, there was little emotional constancy in her life at the age of fifty-three. She lavished on her daughter and grandsons the attention she had not given Maria in childhood, but her generosity was often excessive, embarrassing and frankly smothering to the Rivas. Coward put the matter succinctly when, addressing the complaints of fortunate actresses with brittle bitterness, he described Dietrich as
fairly tiresome. She was grumbling about some bad press notices and being lonely. Poor darling glamorous stars everywhere, their lives are so lonely and wretched and frustrated. Nothing but applause, flowers, Rolls-Royces, expensive hotel suites, constant adulation. It’s too pathetic and wrings the heart.
Each item from applause to adulation was hers again in London that June of 1955, where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., introduced her second summer engagement at the Café de Paris, and where the opening night audience included patrons as diverse as Danny Kaye, Tyrone Power and Dame Edith Evans. Even the government pursued her this time. After Dietrich was introduced to the audience on July 5 by Bessie Braddock, the formidable Member of Parliament whom opponents compared to a Sherman tank, the two met backstage. “We chatted like one working girl to another,” Dietrich said and promptly accepted Braddock’s invitation to visit the Houses of Parliament the following week. When she did (on July 13), members of both Lords and Commons flocked to meet her, and the ordinary business of the day was interrupted by her simple presence in the galleries.
ON OCTOBER 4, 1955, DIETRICH RETURNED FOR another engagement in Las Vegas (with a new, equally deceptive outfit), and at Christmastime she was in New York, attending the premiere of the film Oklahoma! with its producer, Mike Todd. They were, at the time, discussing his idea of casting dozens of major stars in cameos for his forthcoming epic Around the World in 80 Days, and Dietrich was readily persuaded to join the ranks: other actors passing momentarily through the picture included Noël Coward, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, Frank Sinatra, and Ronald Colman. Dietrich agreed to appear for a half-minute as a San Francisco saloon queen (protected by bouncer George Raft), one of hundreds of colorful characters encountered by David Niven in his worldwide balloon excursion. (“I am looking for my man,” Niven says to Dietrich when he needs his valet in the noisy, brief sequence. “So am I,” she murmurs.)
That winter, Dietrich and Todd became quite openly known in New York as “a twosome.” A good friend of Todd’s and still on amiable (although platonic) terms with Dietrich, Eddie Fisher soon learned the truth of this report when he attended a Todd party and found her clothes in Todd’s bedroom closet. “Mike knew of my romance with Marlene and was obviously a little embarrassed.”* But neither man need have been too chagrined, for it was only a matter of weeks before the dresses and cosmetics were removed when Todd went around the world with his production company. Then, not long after her cameo was filmed, Rudi suffered a slight heart attack at his home in California. Dietrich was at his bedside daily throughout most of that April 1956, conferring with physicians and seeing that Tamara was properly attended. Not until he was fully recovered did she proceed to New York and thence for her stint in London at the Café de Paris, which she followed with four performances at a Dublin theater.
For these shows Dietrich added a second outfit, making a quick change from her diaphanous gown to top hat, white tie and tails, straight from her cabaret scene in Morocco. Puffing a cigarette, she straddled a chair and sang “One for My Baby and One for the Road.”
To the amazement of her audience, she accomplished this wardrobe change in less than a minute and without intermission. Dashing offstage, she doffed her shoes and st
ripped off the gown and its foundation garments while her assistant removed the jewelry and wiped off the lipstick. Another assistant handed Dietrich two hairbrushes already thick with brilliantine, and her plastered hair was stuffed under the top hat. Over her body stocking went black socks, the trousers and shirt were put on in a single piece, and she slipped into the coat and shoes. Before the orchestra had completed the introduction to the upcoming song she was back onstage, unsmiling and ignoring the applause with the affectation of stoic detachment long familiar to moviegoers.
IN AUGUST, SHE TOOK A HOLIDAY WITH NOËL COWard in Paris, at the home of Ginette Spanier and Paul-Emile Seidmann, with whom she was still on intimate terms. But Rudi’s brush with death and Tamara’s instability made Marlene Dietrich (then in her fifty-fifth year) both more anxious and more unrealistic about the inevitabilities of age and illness. She spoke endlessly about her past, about John Gilbert, Erich Remarque, Jean Gabin and Michael Wilding, and “with her intense preoccupation with herself and her love affairs,” wrote Coward in his diary, “[she] is showing signs of wear and tear. How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door in the face of age. Much wiser to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance.”
The forms of her courtesy to those nearby—essentially endless physical activity on their behalf—were often curious. At the Seidmann home, Coward continued, Dietrich was “in a tremendously hausfrau mood and washed everything in sight, including my hairbrush (which was quite clean).” It may not have occurred to her that such duties were sometimes ill advised.
The rationale for this sustained motif of menial housewifery, as if Dietrich were exchanging the role of Queen Mother for that of Visiting Charwoman, is not difficult to understand. In her favor, it must be said that she certainly wanted to help, to please her friends (as housecleaning had pleased her parents and even, on occasion, lovers) and to demonstrate that she was—when she wished to seem so—an ordinary, practical woman, capable of lowly toil as well as high fashion.