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

by Wieland, Karin

  Her second set of performances in Las Vegas began on October 15. The attraction was once again not her singing, but her dress. This time Dietrich showed her famous legs in a gown that fit tightly to the hip and was made of an almost transparent fabric. As an added effect, a wind machine set the wispy material in motion.

  In 1955, her show was divided into a female and a male portion. She was able to shed her dress and slip into a classic tailcoat in under a minute.10 To this day there is no other actress or female singer who can wear a tailcoat the way Dietrich could. Next to her, everyone else looks like an imitation.

  She was still agonizing over Yul Brynner. Waiting for the phone to ring, hoping for signs of love, exhilarating nights of passion, and raging jealousy continued to define her daily life. She lay awake night after night, agonizing and entertaining thoughts of suicide as she pictured him in the arms of another woman. She wrote to him: “If you want to change your mind about us and end the love you called ‘infinite’ you must know that I will end my life. It cannot be that you want to do this without reason, to me who loves you so much since so long.”11 Nothing made sense without him. But where could she actually carry out her suicide—in Billy Wilder’s summer house? She could not come up with a suitable spot, so she dropped the idea. No matter how angry or desperate she felt, she was defenseless when he turned up at her door. She described her jumble of emotions in a letter to Noël Coward:

  He came in smiling, bottle under his coat. He came into the bedroom and told me about Paris, the fog around the Eiffel Tower, the streets, the bridges and how he thought about me. I stood there thinking this is not a dream. He is really back and loves me. Then the hurricane broke over me for three hours and I fell asleep for the first time in two months to the day without torture and sleeping pills.12

  When she was with Brynner, she made solemn promises that she would change and stop asking questions of him, yet the very next moment she would pester him about when they could get together again. It would appear that over the course of their years of enervating conflicts, he lost his respect for her. When he came to see her at night, he was usually drunk, and would wake up the next morning without remembering anything he had said. He was confident that she would stay with him, and she humiliated herself in the process. Her friends had to listen to her unburden herself for hours on end. The affair with Brynner dragged on until the end of the 1950s. She found moments of solace in affairs with other men, but they did not free her from the gnawing fear of being alone.

  In 1956, Rudi Sieber suffered his first heart attack. He was still living on his chicken farm, Sunset Ranch. His diary entries had been frighteningly repetitious for years. On any given day, he was sure to provide updates on the number of eggs the hens had laid, his expenditures, the weather, his telephone calls, and any birthdays. He used a sharp pencil to record the minutest details of when he bathed or washed his hair, how often he took down the curtains, and on which day “Russian Easter” was celebrated. Sieber was leading a life that continually looked back to the past and kept old memories alive: “Kaiser Franz Josef’s birthday!” was a typical comment. Apparently his rundown ranch in this California valley had become the perfect nostalgic setting for the homeland he had lost forever. His visitors were friends from Vienna (Josef von Sternberg, Friedrich Torberg) and from the Berlin of the 1920s (Grete Mosheim, Fritzi Massary, Max Kolpé). He would bring back the old times with them over Moselle wine, Salzburg dumplings, or Wiener schnitzel. He was well liked, entertained frequently, and enjoyed hosting parties. Dietrich sent him packages of bockwurst, salami, Berliner Weisse beer, cognac, and shirts. He needed her checks and was positively obsequious in his gratitude, although he did not write to her as often as she would have liked.

  Tamara Matul stayed with him. Although this relationship made her ill and unhappy, she was unable to end it. She lived a rootless life in the shadow of Sieber, who in turn was dependent on Dietrich. Matul had hoped to start a family with Sieber and move on from her role as lover, but there was no escaping the family she had been drawn into. Dietrich called the shots, and she wanted Sieber to remain her husband. Dietrich made sure that each of Matul’s pregnancies was aborted. A child born to Matul and Sieber would have posed a threat to their complicated arrangement, and was therefore out of the question as far as she was concerned. Each time Matul underwent an abortion—and there were several—a part of her died. Sieber’s diaries contain lists of his consumption of alcohol and hers of pills. She could not get through the day without psychotropic drugs. She grew bloated from all those pills, and her eyes were red from all her crying. Rumors were swirling that she was mentally ill, but Dietrich and Sieber chose not to comment on them in public. After a visit to the ranch, Dietrich wrote to her daughter: “Tami is nuttier than ever and I was crying into my beard driving home from the ranch because it still affects me to see the crazy be stronger than the sane.” Since Matul was unable to cook, the three of them had gone to their usual diner, “a lousy little joint with a loud jukebox. The food was so greasy that I ate some old cottage cheese instead and did not touch it.” To her horror, Sieber ate up everything. On the way back, she offered to pre-cook a pot au feu in her apartment in Beverly Hills and bring it to the ranch. “When I arrived Tami yelled she could not keep it all, she would still have to wash the dishes even if she would only heat it, and I calmly packed everything together, washed the dishes after dinner and left too sad to say goodbye.”13

  Dietrich had to go out into the world and earn money. Finally she was offered a part in a new movie with Vittorio De Sica. The Monte Carlo Story was filmed in Rome and Monte Carlo. It was about a destitute count, naïve Americans, jewelry, pawnbrokers, and gambling. Dietrich played the Marquise de Crevecoeur, whose addiction to gambling turned her into a con artist. She looked ill. She was quite thin and had a glazed expression on her face. Her waist was down to twenty-one inches.14 Clothing and jewelry seemed to be holding together both the role and the actress. She did not go out a single time during the filming, neither in Rome nor in Monte Carlo. The worst part was her insomnia. Although she generally got by on very little sleep and was famous for staying out until daybreak, the sleep she was now getting was too little even for her. Sleeping pills had no effect.

  Since leaving Germany nearly thirty years earlier, she had been living out of a suitcase. She always carried lists of which items of clothing were in which location. In her case, location referred not only to a geographical place (Los Angeles, New York, or Paris), but also to which suitcase contained it. For her performances, she could not forget a single thing, and she had to have everything she needed to go onstage—shoes, dresses, wigs, makeup—with her, in duplicate if at all possible. Her daughter Maria, who was familiar with all the logistics, served as Dietrich’s support system and personal help as she had for the past thirty years, even though Maria now had a family and had become a sought-after actress in various television series. In May 1957 she gave birth to her third son, Paul, in New York. Dietrich—or Massy, as she was called in the family—was at her side.

  In the spring, Dietrich performed in Las Vegas and acted in a movie directed by, and starring, her friend Orson Welles. They knew each other since the 1940s, when they performed together for a group of draftees. She had been crazy for him back then, but he was married to Rita Hayworth and not interested in an affair. Both Welles and Dietrich were horrified by Hollywood, yet they had to keep on working there.15 Welles had asked her to be in his new movie in no uncertain terms: REFUSE ATTEMPT TO IMAGINE PICTURE WITHOUT YOU. . . . ALL MY LOVE ORSON.16 Her role was actually not in the original script; the idea was for her to show up during the filming and shoot her part within one day or night. There was no salary, and she would have to provide her own outfit. The blonde Dietrich had to be transformed into a dark-haired, fiery-eyed Gypsy woman, the type of woman that Welles preferred. When she arrived that evening, wearing a dark wig, at the appointed meeting place—a dilapidated bungalow in Venice—Welles embraced her and rejoiced. Dietri
ch played a cigar-smoking madam in a brothel with whom the drunken police captain, played by Welles, seeks refuge. The police captain is a “bad lieutenant”: he is corrupt, fabricates evidence, and becomes a murderer. Touch of Evil is set in a Mexican border town, yet a lack of funds made it necessary to shoot it in Venice at night. But that is not evident to the viewer, who feels transported to this small town right from the start. Dietrich was the only easygoing character in the movie. She played Tana as a woman of the world who is nobody’s fool. Besides, she is the only one who manages to like the fat, evil police captain. In this film, Dietrich proved what she was capable of when she worked with a good director. She proudly remarked: “I worked with him for only one long evening. But to hell with my modesty; I don’t think I’ve ever performed as well as on that day.”17

  It took years for the outstanding quality of Touch of Evil to be recognized, but a great deal of attention was showered on her next movie, Witness for the Prosecution. Dietrich had seen the stage version of the Agatha Christie play on Broadway and agreed to play the female lead in a movie version if Billy Wilder directed it. She chose Edith Head, whom she knew from the days when Head had been Travis Banton’s assistant, as the costume designer. Head knew whom she was dealing with: “Dietrich was not difficult; she was a perfectionist. She had incredible discipline and energy. She could work all day to the point of exhaustion, then catch a second breath and work all night just to get something right.”18 Head’s costumes brought out the icy beauty of Christine Vole. The witness for the prosecution wears simple, figure-hugging suits, white blouses, and small hats. Vole is a German woman, and her outfits are her uniforms. The cast also featured Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester. Dietrich got the impression that Wilder had not thought her capable of taking on this role. When he called to tell her that her acting had been superb, she remarked that this praise was meaningless to her because Yul had not said anything.

  In November, Witness for the Prosecution was celebrated with a big party in New York. The guest list included Truman Capote, Rex Harrison, Irene Selznick, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The box-office returns were quite impressive, and the movie was nominated for six Oscars, including Wilder for Best Director (for the sixth time), and Charles Laughton for Best Actor—his third nomination. Dietrich deserved a nomination, but just as in the case of A Foreign Affair, she was passed over.19

  Although she did many radio broadcasts, there was no real money to be made in this medium, because radio had lost a good deal of its attractiveness with the advent of television.20 Dietrich disdained television. She was proud of her daughter Maria, who often appeared on television, but she herself wanted nothing to do with it, apart from watching Peter Pan with her grandchildren in the afternoon. She decided to direct all her efforts at the stage. At long last, she would not have to hide behind imaginary characters but could decide on her own what she would bring to the audience—namely, her life. For her, the outside world—including her friends, foes, and benefactors—existed solely with respect to herself. Her countless love affairs intensified this singleminded concentration on herself. She had spent her whole life playing unhappy women who had suffered for love, and there was no reason not to remain true to this role. She was almost sixty years old when she decided to stand onstage in the spotlight and sing about love, desire, and sorrow. On the stage she was conceived of as ageless. Her show was a wistful reminiscence of a woman who seemed blessed with eternal youth. Dietrich remained tied to the cinema, but now she was directing the film of her life.

  Three miracle workers stood by her side in this undertaking. The first was the aforementioned Jean Louis, head costume designer at Columbia Pictures, who kept coming up with bold new creations for her, such as the now-legendary swan coat in 1955 and the “tassel dress” three years later. The second was Joe Davis, who, according to Dietrich, “had the gift of turning even the barest and filthiest stage into a fairy tale world.”21 She bowed to his expertise even though she considered herself an inspired lighting artist. Davis was a steadfast worker who was always out to achieve the optimal solution and would not brook compromises. Dietrich liked this division of labor. On the stage, she was unsparingly exposed to the eyes of the audience. She had to hide her age while putting herself on display. In Davis’s light, she felt protected and at the same time shown off to good advantage. The third miracle worker was Burt Bacharach, the man who put the soul in her songs. One fine day, Bacharach showed up at the door of her hotel room.22 She asked him to come in, looked him over, and was instantly smitten: “He was young, very young and very good-looking and I had never seen such blue eyes.”23 This young god intuited what she wanted. Bacharach became Josef von Sternberg’s successor. She described meeting him as the most profound change in her professional life. Dietrich had blind faith in him, and his praise and criticism became her standard from this point forth. But in contrast to her partnership with Jo, these two were not close to the same age; Bacharach was twenty-six years her junior. Although he was not a big name yet, everyone considered him a man with great promise. When he wrote how, shortly after they met, Dietrich went to his apartment without his knowledge and waited until he came back from playing tennis so she could serve him her famous consommé, it becomes evident that she thought of this as the prelude to an affair. While he washed off his sweat in the shower, she washed his tennis outfit. He does not reveal whether he responded to her advances. Her love for him was an open secret. “As a man, he embodies everything that a woman could want. He was considerate and tender, brave and valiant, strong and sincere, but above all he was admirable, enormously sensitive, and loving. And he was vulnerable.”24 He, in turn, valued her as an artist, respected her as a person, and at times perhaps loved her as a woman. “You are the sweetest of all possible angels. What a wonderful surprise.”25 His arrangements were adapted to the pitch of her voice; he took her preferences into consideration, concealing her weaknesses and bringing out her strengths. She now had an experienced and brilliant songwriter at her side. Bacharach drew his inspiration from many styles of music, including bebop, Maurice Ravel, avant-garde movements, and gospel. His elegant music gave Dietrich a connection to the buoyant modernity of the early 1960s. Bacharach dusted off her songs. Dietrich, who had never been able to take pleasure in the American promise of happiness, suddenly sounded much lighter. With this program, thoroughly tailored to her artistic style, she was poised to take the world by storm. In the preceding years she had usually performed in Las Vegas, and once in London, but she now expanded her radius. Bacharach traveled around the world with her. “When you went into a country with her, you went in as a conquering army.”26

  From July to August 1959, she went on tour through South America, giving rousing concerts in Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. SNOWED UNDER ORCHIDS GOOD SHOW GREAT REVIEWS STOP FOUND HEAVENLY ARISTOCRATIC CREATURE LIKE COLETTE PLAY.27 In São Paulo, she met a young man whose youth and naivete she found intriguing. The letter to Maria in which she describes this platonic affair, declaring that she will not try to seduce him despite being sorely tempted, is a letter of farewell to love.28

  By now, Dietrich had to admit to herself that her affair with Yul Brynner was hopeless.

  As far as love is concerned, I am still suffering from an old wound from the time before it even was one. It wouldn’t be so hard if he would let me go, but he isn’t doing that. From time to time, he shows up again and then I don’t have the nerve to end it. I haven’t seen anything new for years. All this is not good, I know. The children get all the love that remains, so all is not lost. I am lost, and that is a shame. Waste, waste, waste.29

  Her grandchildren were a source of comfort to her. Her home was where the Rivas were, she wrote in one of her dejected letters to Maria. “Kiss Michael’s knee, Peter’s black eyes, Pauly’s mouth and your heart and all that is in it.”30 The boys were aware that they had a very special grandmother, but she was quite easygoing with them. She took them to
the movies, baked delicious jelly doughnuts for Christmas, and made them scrambled eggs that turned their stomachs.