Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  Dietrich sought emotional support from Maria, who was touring through Germany with the USO at this time, although she did not have the glamorous receptions her mother had been accustomed to. Now that peacetime had come, the theaters were only half-full and she did not have the feeling that she was accomplishing anything important. Maria sent affectionate telegrams, but she could not cancel her tour as her mother wanted her to do. Dietrich felt abandoned in her grief. It was only when she returned to Paris that the news really sank in. “Only then I realized that my mother had died. Even when I stood at the grave—even the second time before I left Berlin, I did not quite know.”7 She quickly made sure that her love affairs would not leave too much time on her hands for mourning. Gabin felt that it was high time for him to know where he stood. He kept his hopes up and sent her flowers while Gavin was visiting and distracting her. Dietrich tried to lean on her daughter to help her bring order to her head and heart, although Maria had plenty of problems of her own. She had lived with her husband, Dean Goodman, for only a few months after marrying him in 1943, and was now contemplating divorce, which pleased Dietrich, who hoped to have her daughter all to herself once again. Dietrich repeatedly appealed to Sieber to take charge of their daughter’s divorce. She did not hesitate to suggest unsavory methods to achieve this goal: “Papi . . . we must with detectives or other way prove Goodman to be homosexual. . . . The best thing is to get some proof and then put the irons on him. . . . Goodman lived always with men. But he has to be confronted with proof.”8 Dietrich had no qualms about blackmailing her son-in-law with accusations of homosexuality. She was happy at the prospect that no man would stand between herself and Maria anymore. In the emotional chaos she was experiencing, she clung to her family. Rudi not only had to send her pills, shoes, cosmetics, food, and clothing, but also put up with her letters. When he read about how much she missed him, he knew full well that she did not mean him, but rather a fictitious someone who loved her, someone she could pine for who did not contradict her. Sieber met her professions of love with silence.

  Once the war had ended and no longer dominated Dietrich’s state of mind, her life went awry. She missed the war and the way it had held sway over her. In comparison with the war, everything else had become trivial and inconsequential. Worries about her love for Gabin, and her career, had been put off until the war was over. The war had brought her sold-out concerts, banner headlines, and great admiration. But that phase now lay in the past. This was the second time Dietrich was coping with the end of a war. In 1918, she had been young and able to take advantage of the opportunity for a fresh start. In 1945, she was more than forty years old, and younger actresses were now determining what constituted a new beginning. Gabin pulled a few strings with his old contacts to get himself and Dietrich roles in a Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert movie. Carné and Prévert were the great actors of French cinema, internationally acclaimed artists, but the whole slant of the project was not to Dietrich’s liking. She found the script bland and the dialogues sophomoric. Unexpectedly, she had changed her mind about Hollywood: “Hollywood is decent compared to the business people here—the Jewish film producers are not back yet and the goys just don’t understand how to make good pictures and treat artists.”9 The project was called off. Gabin already had a new offer on hand: “It is a sort of Blue Angel role in a bourgeois environment. She is a bourgeois too, no singer, I just mean the traits in her character. He kills her out of jealousy. Wonderful role.”10 She decided to wait and see what came of it. If it fell apart, she saw no reason to stay on. Dietrich was let down by Paris. Occupation and war had altered the city, and some felt that it would never go back to being the way it had once been. “Only when I walk up the Champs-Élysées and see the Arc is it still the same place and just as beautiful.”11 She was not spared the adversities of everyday postwar life, which she seems to have taken as a personal affront on the part of the French. Bread was being rationed, and apartments were unheated. Dietrich froze as well, because she could not afford the coal from the black market. The electricity did not always work, and she often spent long hours in the dark, unable to make coffee or dry her hair. “It looks as if we fought the war for nothing. The people have changed (or didn’t they?) so terribly, they seem to think only of their little life and the great spirit that was there during the war has gone or maybe was never there in civilians.” Her life as a soldier had had meaning; now she had to adapt to peacetime.

  Her only friends were Max Kolpé, with whom she shared packets of soup in his hotel room, and Margo Lion, who had made a name for herself in France as a singer of Brecht’s songs. But both of them were busy during the day, whereas she had nothing to do but to think dismal thoughts. “No fittings, no Hütchen, Schühchen, nothing to do.” She even had wool sent to her from New York. Sitting in her room, she crocheted for her friends out of sheer boredom. “From my window I see the planes going off to the sea. I look after each of them and feel like the girl in a fairytale looking after the birds flying away for the winter.”12

  Gabin was looking forward to a quiet life after the war. He wanted to marry and start a family, and preferably move to the country. This new phase would spell the end of Dietrich’s unsettled life, divided between two continents and various lovers. Gabin was offering Dietrich the life of a French wife. At his side, she could try to find inner peace. But Dietrich was terrified at the thought of the intimacy of a marriage.

  She systematically destroyed her relationship with Gabin. She complained to her daughter, her husband, and her friends about Gabin, whom she labeled unsociable and pessimistic, and whipped herself into a frenzy of dislike. She had no intention of breaking up with Gavin, who called her every night. Readers of his letters to Dietrich get to know him as a reticent man, who, like most of her lovers, could not believe his good fortune. In his letters, which were written in blue ink on airmail stationery in a large, loopy handwriting, he kept telling her that she was a wonderful woman and a special person. Although he was divorced, he did not pester her with plans for the future. General Gavin was what was left of the war for Dietrich. Her affair with him was reminiscent of an exciting and upbeat time in her life. Moroever, Gavin offered her a welcome change of pace because he was “no actor, no writer or chi-chi.” At some point, Gabin had had enough of her infidelity and started an affair with a young actress. He went out with her every evening while Dietrich supposedly stayed at home and read old books by Erich Kästner or poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Shortly before Christmas in 1945, the situation escalated. During a dinner with friends, Gabin verbally attacked Dietrich, and she responded with physical force: “I gave him a smack in the face. He then hit me unmercifully and the women cried and it was all very embarrassing.”13 She was at her wit’s end. Their discussions about children, marriage, movies, Hollywood, and life in the country were going around in circles.

  Even as their love was fading, Dietrich and Gabin were still united in their feeling of having been let down now that there was peace. They had fought for freedom and democracy, but now had to accept the fact that the memory of their dedication had faded. The death of Dietrich’s mother shortly after the end of the war had been her absolute emotional low point, and she began to have her doubts about Europe: “This Europe I loved so much has dwindled down to some vague form of memory like in a strong way I have for my mother. I still long for it, forgetting that I am here and then realizing that it has probably gone forever too.”14

  When she and Gabin pursued acting roles, they were frequently told that they had been away from the screen for too long. Their greatest fear was that being labeled prewar stars in a world that longed for the new and unscathed was tantamount to a death sentence. Gabin had grown stouter, his blond hair was streaked with gray, and his facial wrinkles were becoming more pronounced. People in France still associated Dietrich’s name with The Blue Angel. In early 1946, Dietrich and Gabin had to decide whether to make The Room Upstairs (Martin Roumagnac). Their fame as a couple could work to the advanta
ge of the movie, but by the same token, their performance together might provide an unwanted reminder of the prewar era. Neither could risk a stigma of this kind. “Only artistic success interesting. . . . Cannot afford mediocre film.”15

  They did go ahead with it, and the shooting with director Georges Lacombe began in the summer of 1946. Gabin played Martin Roumagnac, a mason and building contractor from the country who falls in love with the beautiful widow Blanche Ferrand (Dietrich) and builds her a villa. Blanche, who comes from a good family and has lived in Paris for quite some time, now earns her keep by having affairs with rich men. Everybody in the village knows this aside from Roumagnac. He truly loves Blanche, but in a jealous rage, he strangles her. A sensational trial follows, and he is acquitted. Once he learns that his jealousy was unwarranted, he is a broken man. In the end, he is killed by Blanche’s fanatical admirer.

  The Room Upstairs turned out to be the flop they had feared. Even today, this movie is (unjustly) considered a failure. The black-and-white images of the French countryside still bore the traces of the years of occupation and war. Some scenes might well give viewers the impression that they are watching not Martin Roumagnac and Blanche Ferrand, but Gabin and Dietrich themselves. In one dialogue, which takes place in their hotel room in Paris, Blanche says to Martin that he doesn’t know what Paris is, and he replies by singing the praises of the country. Martin, the decent mason from the country, and Blanche, the duplicitous lady from the city, bear a striking resemblance to the down-home patriot Gabin and the former Hollywood star Dietrich. In another scene, Blanche is standing in front of Martin in her high-heeled shoes and casting him a signature Dietrich lascivious glance. This brief moment gives viewers a glimpse into a very private scene.

  Dietrich was unable to give her performance a new twist. She appeared to be oddly out of step with the times. Her clothing, hats, facial expressions, and gestures seemed passé.

  Their names were not enough to act as a box-office magnet; the planned breakthrough turned out to be a fiasco. Dietrich was devastated. She could not forgive either Gabin or France for the failure of this film, and she concluded that her future did not lie with either of them: “This is a terrible country—twenty years behind. No work on Saturdays (except studio), no work on Mondays, holidays all the time and no tempo—just eat eat eat. . . . I thought of staying in France but changed my mind and coming back. . . . ”16 She wanted to go back to America and earn money.

  She urged her agent, Charles Feldman, to get her a role in a movie that Mitchell Leisen would be making for Paramount Studios. At first, the studio turned her down. DEAREST CHARLIE . . . PLEASE ARRANGE FOR EARRINGS WANT SO MUCH TO DO IT . . . WANT TO COME HOME TO MITCH AND YOU . . . PLEASE DO ALL YOU CAN FOR EARRINGS.17 Feldman’s negotiations were ultimately successful, and by June Dietrich knew that she would indeed be joining the cast of Golden Earrings.

  A letter she wrote to her daughter while en route to the United States tells of her poor state of health. Bothered by the way her fellow passengers were looking at her, she stayed alone in her cabin until the afternoon. She launched into lengthy descriptions of the various powders and pills she took for her many aches and pains. Her freezing hands turned red, which unnerved her. She was suffering from insomnia. Not even sleeping pills could bring her the sleep she longed for. Dietrich was apprehensive about coming back to Hollywood. She had closed the studio door rather haughtily behind her just two years ago, and announced that she would find something better almost anywhere else. In Hollywood, everyone knew that the best years of her life lay behind her and she was coming only for the money. In order to be able to pay the hotel bill in Paris, she had had to sell furs. Dietrich prepared to conquer America a second time in lamentable shape: she was an actress in her mid-forties with red hands, insomnia, and hemorrhoids, one who wore out her old dresses and felt forced to play an absurd role in a preposterous movie. But she did not let on to the outside world how this bothered her.

  Her “repatriation,” as she called it, was eased by dividing up the world into civilians and military personnel. She felt like a soldier and longed for the lost world of camaraderie. Standing alone at the side of the road in Paris, she had watched the victory parade go by. “Angel Child came back from Champs-Élysées where I watched all alone victory parade. Only a few MP represented us. My heart was heavy with memoirs and loneliness in rain.”18 Nobody wanted to hear what they had endured. But in contrast to her, the former soldiers knew where they belonged, even if they felt out of place in their marriages and families.

  Dietrich’s most pressing question remained: “Where should I live, and with whom?” In Paris and with Gabin she had not found an answer, and she would not find one right down to her final retreat from the world. She scraped along through the somber postwar period. Her name still cropped up in the gossip columns, such as in reports that she had been seen with Burt Lancaster and had had an affair with a high-ranking officer. Her daughter was now also her secretary. Her name no longer had enough appeal for big headlines. At times she claimed to love Hollywood, and at others she said she preferred filming in France. She did not hold out for long in either the United States or Europe. Her life in the postwar period was one long state of transit.

  Feeling forlorn, she got in touch with Remarque again. He knew her; she did not have to pretend with him, and unlike Rudi, he answered letters. “I’m writing you because I suddenly have an acute longing—not the kind I usually have. Maybe I need liverwurst sandwiches, the solace of the afflicted—and emotional liverwurst sandwiches. . . . I am at loose ends and empty and aimless. . . . I have no one left. . . . I’ve rebelled and lashed out (not always with the fairest means) and have cut myself free, and now I sit in freedom, alone and abandoned.”19

  But Remarque had gotten over her. His life had moved forward happily—or so he claimed. Remarque was exasperated when he thought about what had become of his great love, Marlene Dietrich. The idiocy of Hollywood, with its trivial images and wretched transformations, had rendered her unrecognizable. He desperately sought any remaining element of the time they had shared, but even the memory of their love was “failed, forgotten, futile, finished.”20

  Remarque had worked on the book about Ravic for years. In 1941, as he was coming up with the title, he realized that this book was evolving into an emotion-packed autobiography of the past years. In August 1944, he completed the first draft, and in mid-September the advance publication began to run in Collier’s. Dietrich must have been bitter to realize that he had reworked their love story into a literary success, yet her own role was restricted to that of a reader.21

  Arch of Triumph was adapted for the screen by Lewis Milestone. The role of Joan Madoux, which Dietrich had awaited for years, went to Ingrid Bergman. Even so, Dietrich and Remarque remained quite close. He sent her the German version of “our book,” as he called it, and asked to meet up with her. Neither of the two wanted to relinquish the intimacy and closeness they had experienced. They were often seen together in New York nightclubs, and for her birthday he gave her a gold cigarette lighter encrusted with small rubies representing the Arch of Triumph, in memory of the city of their love.

  Dietrich kept Sieber up to date about her unhappiness with Gabin, but she rarely got answers to her letters and was deeply disappointed in his lack of interest in her life. She enumerated everything she had done for him and complained about his lack of gratitude. “As I have lost everything to the Germans and you have saved everything you could at least get me the things that belong to me.”22 Her letters to him in 1945 and 1946 were filled with requests for makeup and laments about her loneliness.

  Dietrich’s life was more unsettled than ever. She had no permanent residence, had clothing sent to her, and lived in a hotel. Meanwhile, her daughter was starting a family. One year after divorcing Dean Goodman in June 1946, Maria married the set designer William Riva. Riva was a good-looking man who was not fazed by his mother-in-law’s fame. It looked as though Dietrich was finally resigned to th
e idea of her daughter’s finding happiness. The press reported how delighted she was about the marriage of her daughter. By marrying for love, Maria had chosen a different path from that of her mother. Neither her mother nor her father attended Maria’s wedding. For once, the two of them were on the same continent in 1947: Dietrich was in Paris, and Sieber in Locarno. Maria’s wedding day was not upstaged by either parent.

  Suddenly, Dietrich got an offer for a Billy Wilder movie in Hollywood. In 1926 Wilder had come to Berlin, where he eked out a living as a reporter, paid dance partner, and screenplay writer. He had worked on the early Dietrich movie Madame Doesn’t Want Children, and he was a good friend of Max Kolpé and Walter Reisch’s, who were also close friends of Dietrich’s. Wilder managed to produce one high-quality box-office hit after another. In every one of his movies, he tested the threshold of what American audiences would accept, and A Foreign Affair was no exception. He set this love story in the ruins of Berlin. Wilder had been sent to Germany just after the end of the war by the Psychological Warfare Department, which sought to set up new film industry rules for the Germans to comply with on their path to democracy. After twelve years away, he was coming back to Berlin in the fall of 1945 bearing the rank of an American colonel. “I will never forget how the city looked back then. I came with a camera man, we flew over Berlin, and I saw the devastation. It looked like the end of the world. I later used the documentary material for my film A Foreign Affair.”23 Wilder, whose grandmother, mother, and stepfather had been murdered in Auschwitz, recommended converting the Germans to democracy not only with educational documentary films, but also by means of entertainment sprinkled with a dash of ideology. Washington was not thrilled with this recommendation, but when he was planning A Foreign Affair a year and a half later, he used it as his guiding principle. During his stay in Berlin, Wilder observed the devastated city with a professional eye. He decided that this “crazy, squalid, and starving city” was the ideal setting for a film. Wilder knew Berlin; he picked out the right corners and took photographs. He studied the Germans, “from the university professor who lost his home during the bombing of Berlin to the three-cigarette whores in the Femina Bar,” to gather material for his movie.24 In late May 1947, his screenplay was complete. He could not imagine anyone other than Dietrich in the role of Erika von Schluetow, the former mistress of a Nazi, for two reasons. First, Dietrich, who was herself from Berlin, would lend the movie a note of authenticity better than any other actress could; and second, she was the only German actress who could get away with playing this role. She had misgivings, and at first turned down Wilder’s offer on the telephone, whereupon he paid her a visit in Berlin to try to win her over. The $110,000 fee and the opportunity to work with a renowned director appear to have been motive enough for her to rethink her initial response.