by Donald Spoto
DIETRICH WAS FURTHER DISPIRITED BY THE NEWS OF several more deaths, among them that of Frederick Hollander, at age seventy-nine in Munich. He had written her songs for many films, from The Blue Angel to A Foreign Affair—melodies sassy and pungent that he fitted to her personality. From “Falling in Love Again” to “Illusions,” Hollander’s tunes became identified with Dietrich’s voice and presence, and composers for her other films invariably turned to those recordings for inspiration.
This death was followed, on June 24, by that of Rudi, who was also seventy-nine. He had suffered a fatal heart attack and was found by his housekeeper sitting upright in a rocking chair in his San Fernando cottage. For several years, he had lived alone, for Tamara—who had finally endured irreversible mental breakdown—had to spend the last years of her life in an institution, care which Dietrich underwrote. Hectored for years by the press, Rudolf Sieber had resolutely negated every request for interviews and had kept a dignified silence about his marriage to Marlene Dietrich. She had occasionally visited him, and there was no doubt of their loyalty, manifest in his financial advice and her ongoing support. According to their old friend Stefan Lorant, who had known them both for over half a century, the Sieber marriage—always more accurately defined as a friendship—was preserved by its very nonconformity to any standard. Marriage was a legal and social status they saw no reason to forgo. “Poor Rudi,” Marlene Dietrich Sieber said a few years after his death. “He was such a sensitive, sensitive man. I don’t know how he could have put up with it, living his whole life in the shadow of a famous woman.”
Her confinement throughout 1976 reinforced Dietrich’s tendency toward seclusion; thenceforth, she declined all requests for visits from friends (much less photographers or interviewers) either in hospitals or at her Paris apartment, to which she finally returned, with Maria’s help, late in 1976. She had devoted her entire life to the manufacture and presentation of a carefully calculated artifact, and when it was no longer presentable she seemed to feel there was nothing for anyone to see—that in a way Marlene Dietrich no longer existed.
Apparently at Maria’s suggestion, Dietrich decided to make her solitude creative by writing her memoirs. This turned out to be a more intriguing possibility than a satisfying reality, and the publishing history of Marlene Dietrich’s autobiographies was finally somewhat byzantine.
A book was indeed contracted in 1976, and it appeared in Germany three years later, published by Bertelsmann as Nehmt nur mein Leben—Reflexionen (Just Take My Life—Reflections; the words are taken from Goethe). Condensed, these random, shallow anecdotes formed the basis of Dietrich’s own English manuscript, submitted to and summarily rejected by her British publisher, Collins, to whom she was forced to return the advance. In this book, Dietrich offered nothing like a life story, gave not a single date, ignored the basic facts of her background and family and provided little more than a few vague comments on people she had known. Any journalist could have revealed more.
Undaunted, Dietrich’s agents then marketed the rejected English manuscript in France, where it was translated and published in 1984 by Grasset as Marlène D. Three years later, Ullstein published an abbreviated German rendering of this as Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin (Thank God I’m from Berlin). The first publication of any of this in English was a translation of Ich bin, issued by Grove Press in 1989 as Marlene.
In each version, Dietrich warned her editors and readers that “facts are unimportant,” a prudent caution since she provided so few. There was no mention of a sister; she conveniently combined father and stepfather; Rudi was hardly mentioned, and Maria was only a vague parenthesis across a page or two. More alarming were her frank errors: actors, writers and producers are assigned the wrong credits, and some of her most important colleagues (Paramount’s designer Travis Banton, for example) are misidentified. The dates of several of her films are given incorrectly (by as much as a decade), and she has a remarkably vague idea of the characters she played and the stories in which they figured. The pages are further diminished by an abrasive, defensive petulance; the book was not even, alas, an engaging novelette.
There were also unintentionally hilarious gaffes. Writing approvingly of the Jewish tradition of grieving at funerals, Dietrich added that “in the Christian world we are taught to hide our feelings”—an assertion doubtless shocking to Italian, Greek and Iberian cultures, among others. She also claims that acting is not, after all, the right profession for men, “but only for those with talent.” Regarding her private life there was not a single disclosure.
FROM 1976 TO HER DEATH IN MAY 1992—EXCEPT for her two half-days of work on Just a Gigolo and one month when she allowed a colleague to record an interview—Dietrich resided in a twilight of isolation, a woman vaguely connected to the world by newspapers, books and telephone but insistently reclusive, inaccessible to all but an employee or two, receiving no visitors except (on infrequent occasions) her daughter Maria. In a way she became a character in a von Sternberg picture—veiled and remote, victimized by the legacy of the fame for which she always expressed undiluted contempt, but on which she counted for her very existence.
Only once since Just a Gigolo did she mitigate that severe disengagement, and then only partially. Dietrich and actor-director Maximilian Schell (who had also appeared in Judgment at Nuremberg) came to an agreement about a documentary on her life and career. There was, however, a difficult proviso, for just before filming was to begin in her apartment she refused to be photographed; only her voice would be heard. From this appalling requirement, Schell somehow fashioned a work of considerable virtues, intercutting documentary footage, film clips, still photographs and a series of hallucinatory images reminiscent of a Fellini dreamscape. The result, called simply Marlene, was rightly praised. Connecting the visuals of this film are the voices of director and star (speaking now in German, now in English), as he coaxed, cajoled, grew impatient with her scolding—and finally evoked more of the real Marlene Dietrich than any cameraman had ever dared attempt.
There are, of course, the usual snappy Dietrich retorts and outrageous contradictions peppering the occasional honest assessment:
—Of her old films, she says: “I’m not at all interested. Do you think I’d go and sit in some stuffy cinema and watch movies?”
—Of Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel: “What a ham!”
—Of Josef von Sternberg: “He was always forcing me to think, to use my brain and learn something when I was working—not merely to do what I was told.”
—Of women: “In universities they’ve weighed women’s brains—they weigh half as much as men’s, you know.”
—Of feeling in poetry, sentiment in films, nostalgia in real life: “Quatsch!”—“Nonsense! Rubbish!”
—Of herself: “I’m no romantic dreamer. I have no time for that. I’m a logical, practical person who has worked all her life.”
—Of God and the afterlife: “I don’t believe in a superior power. Once you’re dead, that’s it—it’s all over!”
She did, however, agree to watch with Schell some excerpts from a few of her films on videocassette, and to discuss certain interesting moments. Despite her stated insistence that she found herself and her career monumentally boring, it was clear from her sudden animation that she found only these moments really interesting. But seeing her younger self was evidently painful, for as she continued to comment there was a rueful but futile attempt to disconnect herself from her own memories. Her agent had handed Schell a slip of paper with a citation from Dante, a clue to Dietrich’s vulnerability during the tapings:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria.
There is no greater pain
Than the recollection of past happiness
In times of misery.
According to the conventional wisdom, people do not change very much, especially in senior years; like figures in stories, it is believed, men and women usually become fi
xed in their own characters.
But something indeed shifted in Marlene Dietrich during the last years of her life—something that was perhaps due to the simple transforming effect of time and solitude. A woman who never showed the slightest inclination to share her feelings, who gloried in her Teutonic training to conceal emotions, was at last led to a kind of epiphany.
Surrounded by a tangle of wires and a crew of technicians, she listened while Schell began to read the old lines from Ferdinand Freiligrath. Then her memory recaptured a few words, and, on the soundtrack of the film Marlene, the voices of Maximilian Schell and Marlene Dietrich meet, part, blend again:
O love, as long as you can love,
O love, as long as you may love.
The hour comes when you will stand at gravesides weeping.
Whoever opens you their heart, do all you can to please them.
Fill all their lives with joy and never cause them sadness—
And guard your tongue! Harsh words are easily said—
O God, I meant no harm!
The other leaves and complains.
You kneel down at the graveside and say,
“O look down upon me, crying here on your grave,
Forgive me for hurting you—oh God, I meant no harm.”
But he neither hears nor sees you,
he shuns the welcome of your arms—
the mouth which often kissed you says no more
“I’ve long since forgiven you.”
In truth, he has forgiven you,
though many a tear was shed for you and your harsh words.
But still, he rests—he’s reached his end.
There is a moment of silence, and then Marlene Dietrich begins to weep, softly, uncontrollably. “I’m afraid I can’t say that—I just can’t,” she whispers, unable to hold back after so many years.
The film’s final image holds just a few seconds—it is her last screen appearance, as the frail baroness in Just a Gigolo—and then this picture, too, slowly fades.
“It makes me cry,” Marlene Dietrich says as we see the blurred image gradually vanish. And then there is only her voice, veiled with memory:
“Maybe it’s just a kitschy poem. But I don’t know. My mother—my mother really loved it. It’s something so many people say—‘I meant no harm.’ Maybe nowadays it’s too sentimental. Maybe.”
OTHERWISE, VERY LITTLE HAPPENED OUTWARDLY IN Marlene Dietrich’s life in the final years. She had in a way become like one of her favorite poets, Heinrich Heine, living in voluntary Parisian self-exile, an inactive recluse claiming the pedestal to which she believed her fame entitled her. Her career had for years kept her away from her daughter and grandchildren and all during her life she had never made the kind of time necessary for establishing authentic friendships. Her distance from others, her pursuit of affirmation, her longing to be a buddy to as many men and women as possible—all these exacted a fearful cost. A lifetime of emotional isolation, long before her final physical seclusion, had in fact necessitated and sustained precisely the illusions she lived by, the fantastic chimeras she constantly denied. “All her life she was wearing a mask,” said Maximilian Schell. “The real Marlene has never been visible. Her mind is filled with the creation of a legend as she conceives it.”
Agreeing with Coward’s assessment that she was confined within her own legend, Bernard Hall (eventually her live-in majordomo as well as secretary) said that she “made herself a prisoner in her own home, striding around like a caged tigress, because she had a fear that someone would photograph her in her twilight years—like they did her old rival Greta Garbo in the streets of Manhattan. So she rarely went out.”
In her retreat from society, one day became very like the next, and few were happy. Awake before six in the morning, she cried out to Hall for some food and by eight o’clock she began drinking scotch. According to Hall, “I didn’t know what to do. I gave [the whiskey] to her—it was impossible saying no. Anyway, she had two bottles under the bed. She was brilliant until ten A.M., then zonk, she’d collapse. It was sad to watch, heartbreaking.” In fact Dietrich was in her last years a restless, pathetic alcoholic. “It’s difficult to say when she became so,” Hall added. “But even when we were on tour together, I’d think, ‘How much can a person drink?’ ”
At last—about the spring of 1979—weak, weary and angry, Marlene Dietrich simply announced, “I’m going to bed.” Hall had attended her for over thirty years, but finally her condition so saddened him that, as he later admitted, he “simply couldn’t cope with caring for her full-time any more. She was totally impossible to live with.” In 1987, he moved to London, and Dietrich was cared for by a series of secretaries, daytime companions and, occasionally, visiting nurses.
Her cluttered, modest apartment was filled with mementos, glorious photographs of Dietrich in the films she loved the most—primarily The Devil Is a Woman (“because I was never more beautiful”)—and pictures of her with her great and adoring mentor von Sternberg, with her comrade Ernest Hemingway, with the handsome young Gary Cooper, the confidently charming Maurice Chevalier, the jealous peasant Jean Gabin. “I’m never lonely,” she insisted to Maximilian Schell at the start of their interviews in 1983. Bernard Hall, as well as friends like Stefan Lorant and Billy Wilder, disagreed.
Her reclusiveness, said Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., “was very strange and unfortunate. For years she rang up to chat with me and my wife, and then this stopped. Once I visited Paris and telephoned. I recognized her voice and greeted her, but she denied it was she and pretended to be the maid.” Jean-Pierre Aumont, among many others, had a similar telephone experience of Dietrich’s denial of self.
“We were in Paris in 1987,” recalled Billy Wilder, “and after pretending to be her own masseuse or a cook, she admitted it was herself. At first Marlene had agreed to see my wife and me. We offered to take her out to dinner, or to bring food to her apartment—anything that would please her. But then she changed her mind, saying that she had to go to an eye doctor. It was obvious she just didn’t want to see anyone. Or anyone to see her.”
When Dietrich did wish to communicate, however, her telephone bills must have been among the highest in Europe, for a two-hour conversation with an old acquaintance in London, New York or Los Angeles was quite typical. Among the regular recipient of such calls was Stefan Lorant, a friend for seventy years.
But the name Marlene Dietrich was still worthy of page one of the New York Times: on the occasion of Germany’s celebration of reunification in 1990, a headline proclaimed, “United Germany’s Joy, and Marlene Dietrich Too.” The accompanying story announced:
The day also brought a legendary voice from the past. Marlene Dietrich, the screen star, welcomed the unification of the homeland she has not visited in thirty years in a rare public statement: “Of course I’m happy. Anything that brings people together and encourages peace always makes me happy. Happiness is so rare in this troubled world.”
And despite her disclaimer of sentiment, she told German television on January 14, 1991, that the old UFA film studios in Babelsberg, south of Berlin, ought not to be demolished for merely economic reasons. “I’m still nostalgic for Babelsberg,” she said, “and I only hope you find the success you rightly expect. Goodbye—I’ll cross my fingers for you!”
Occasionally, she wrote to the author of a book that delighted her: “Thanks a million for writing Hit Me With a Rainbow,” she typed in a note to the American novelist James Kirkwood, whom she had never met. “If you could send me [the book’s character] Stash, it would make me happy. I really cried laughing—a rare event in this lousy world. Love and kisses, Marlene Dietrich.”
Kirkwood replied, sending his other works and threatening to “set the witches to work on you” if an autographed picture were not forthcoming from her. The photo arrived, on which Dietrich had written, “Don’t set the witches to work—it is bad enough as it is. Please send books and write again. Am lonely. Love, Marlene.”
SHE H
AD IN FACT BEEN LONELY FOR YEARS—EVEN when she was on tour, as Bernard Hall confirmed. Thus her final return to work on a film, Just a Gigolo in February 1978, had been singularly important for her.
Dietrich had prepared meticulously for this appearance. Not long before, Vogue Paris had featured a photoessay in which models were made up to resemble the great stars of earlier decades. She was impressed with the facsimile of herself—especially with the makeup devised by a wizard of the craft named Anthony Clavet. At Dietrich’s request, he met her at the studio and opened his makeup kit, attempting the transformation of an exhausted old lady into an elegant, timeless beauty. When he put the final touches to her lips, Dietrich suddenly reached out and clasped Clavet’s wrist.
“You have done it,” she whispered fiercely. “You must understand—I cannot see well enough any longer—I cannot see to do Marlene.” He was then astonished when she added, with utter gravity, “If—if I ever go on tour again—to do my show—will you please do the makeup for me?”
Marlene Dietrich drew closer to the reflection in the mirror, straining to see, as if by sheer effort she could find again the lost lineaments, the classic features adored by von Sternberg, improved by light, rouge, line and shadow—the enigmatic stare, the ambiguous smile idolized by millions but never duplicated ever, by anyone. Clavet saw only a painted old woman he had painstakingly made over for a color film. But then he saw that Dietrich continued to sit quietly at her dressing table, as if she beheld someone else returning her gaze: the serious young violin student she had been years before, perhaps. Or the prancing Thielscher Girl. Or the saucy Lola Lola . . . Amy Jolly or Shanghai Lily . . . Frenchy the barmaid . . . or Major Marlene Dietrich, mistress of generals in wartime and comforter of soldiers languishing in army hospitals . . . lover to dozens, perhaps scores of those she met and liked. Perhaps she saw her most artful creation, the dauntless performer of her worldwide show, proclaiming that she was not only Eternal Woman but a kind of theatrical phoenix, ever rising from the cinders of one life to triumph in another.