In November, she performed in Paris at the Théatre de L’Étoile near the Arc de Triomphe. Maria sent her a telegram to let her know she was thinking of her: GO GIRL AS THEY SAY IN THE OLD COUNTRY MACHS GUT.31 Dietrich wrapped the pampered Paris audience around her little finger. Her cosmopolitan spirit, charm, style, and beauty were a far cry from the popular perception Parisians had about dumpy German women. She celebrated her triumph at Maxim’s nightclub, with a smiling Burt Bacharach to her left and a doleful Yves Saint Laurent to her right. During this fall season, she was seen at the side of Jean Cocteau, Noël Coward, Maurice Chevalier, and Alberto Giacometti, and sitting at dinner tables with Yves Montand, Sophia Loren, Alain Delon, and Romy Schneider. Rumor had it that Gabin was planning to show up with his wife. The photographers and Dietrich waited every evening, but Gabin did not come.
In March 1960, Dietrich’s American promoter, Norman Granz, told the press that Dietrich’s tour of Europe would start in Germany. Her first concert was planned for April 30 at the Titania Palace Theater in Berlin. This announcement created quite a stir. Why was this artist, whose antipathy to Germany was well known, giving concerts in Germany? The short answer was: for the money. “Will Marlene Dietrich—as people have been saying—be getting 15,000 to 20,000 marks per performance during her tour? No—she will not be pulling in 15,000 or 20,000 marks every evening. As Norman Granz tells us: ‘Marlene is getting much more!’ The ticket prices will reflect this.”32 Dietrich’s high fee, which commanded respect from Americans, was scorned by some members of the German press. There was an explosion of envy about an artist who had proved that one could preserve one’s dignity as a German when confronted with Hitler as a Führer. A parochial mob ran riot in letters to the editor with the usual clichés about her being a traitor to her country, and there were demands that she stay away from Germany. But some journalists were mortified by these carryings-on, and understood that Dietrich’s visit fifteen years after the end of the war represented a test of character for the Germans. The chief reporter at Die Welt traveled to New York for an interview. In Dietrich’s Park Avenue apartment, he met “a lady full of reserve and culture.”33 She talked with him while smoking one cigarette after another, and made it clear that she was coming to Germany to sing, not to face the Nuremberg trials. She hated Hitler, but not her own people. She had no need for explanations; she had gone to Bergen-Belsen with the American troops when thousands of murder victims were still lying there. Asked how she felt about being a German, she replied, “If you’re a Jew, it’s easier to forgive, the way that you can more easily forgive something that is inflicted on you by others. But I feel the shared responsibility; I was part of the nation that caused all of it.” Even so, Dietrich wanted her visit to Germany to be viewed as a statement that it was time “to stop making accusations and to bury the shadows of the grim past.”34
There was no direct flight from Paris to Berlin. On April 30, after a stopover in Frankfurt, Dietrich flew on Air France and landed in Berlin’s Tegel airport at 10:30 p.m. Hildegard Knef picked her up. The two of them are laughing in almost every photograph, but Dietrich’s laughter looks forced. She had on a beige spring outfit under a three-quarter-length mink coat, and she wore a big hat. Her rooms were reserved at the Hilton, where her eagerly anticipated press conference would also take place the following day. The crowd was enormous. For over an hour, there was such a racket that people could not hear their own words. Dietrich was in black: a simple dress with a sophisticated cut. High-heeled shoes showed off her lovely legs, and her face was partly concealed behind the wide brim of her hat. The small French Legion of Honor ribbon was her only adornment. She endured the popping of flashbulbs in grim-faced silence. She wore white gloves and smoked one unfiltered cigarette after another, seemingly indifferent to her surroundings. Der Tagesspiegel published this lyrical description, “Eyes with a good deal of past, cool polished eroticism, a white pain in her composed face that does not allow for the expression of feelings and remains inscrutable. She has lovely, large, and patient movements. Something monkish about her; so severe. Lasciviousness, devil from head to toe? No.”35 Dietrich answered questions in a soft voice. No, she had not been to the Tiergarten section of town, and no, she had not visited her former apartment building on Bundesallee either. She had recognized the zoo, where she had played marbles as a child, from her hotel room. She did not have mixed feelings. You don’t go to a city to be sad just because you had been a child there. She did not lapse into Berlin dialect, nor did she wax nostalgic. Instead, she displayed wit and intelligence. When she discovered that reporters were secretly holding microphones, she threatened to call off the press conference. She had explicitly asked that no microphones be used, because she had an exclusive contract with NBC. She had come to Berlin in order to work and to earn more money; that was all there was to it. The room-service receipts indicate that she ate in her room—veal steaks, green salad, and tea with lemon. She did not eat at the bar. Why go out? Where would she go, and with whom? The Silhouette was closed down, and Schwannecke and Mutzbacher had not been there for quite some time either.
On Tuesday, May 3, at 8 p.m., she gave her first concert. Sixty police officers were on hand in order to contain possible rioters, but this precaution proved unnecessary. Even though it has become customary to describe her reception in Berlin as hostile, there were no organized protests. The people who had declared their antipathy in anonymous letters or in letters to the editor were nowhere in evidence. There were only “two timid individuals waving cardboard signs saying ‘Marlene go home’ and ‘Marlene get lost,’ who were first quite proud of their efforts, but later felt rather stupid.”36 The attendees included the governing mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt, with his wife, Rut; film producer Atze Brauner; Hildegard Knef in a skintight black sheath dress with her companion, David Cameron; and director Harry Meyen with his colleague Wilhelm Dieterle. Everyone who was anyone in Berlin showed up. There were many elderly married couples who were dressed festively but modestly. Dietrich made her audience wait while a French jazz group played a set. Finally she came onstage. Dietrich was visibly moved by the big applause. The concert began with “Allein in einer grossen Stadt” and ended with “Wer wird denn weinen.” Her notes show that the banter she had jotted down to fill the time in between songs was in English. Dietrich’s well-crafted lecture to the people of Berlin, which was insistent but never condescending, emphasized what they had lost by having Hitler as their Führer. Friedrich Luft compared her art of showmanship to Piaf and Montand. “She didn’t have the tear in her eye that people were hoping to see. She did not bow to an inflamed public opinion, but instead remained consistently and courageously the person she was, and held firm to her stance.”37 After the concert, former emigrant Brandt rose from his seat and prompted the audience to give her a standing ovation.
In Bad Kissingen, the concert hall was only half filled. Afterward Dietrich had to leave through the back entrance; out front, a waiting throng of teenagers was cursing and booing her. This jeering crowd was not a group of former Nazis; these were young people who had come of age in the 1960s. A similar situation had occurred in Düsseldorf when a seventeen-year-old girl spit in her face and yelled “traitor” at her as she was leaving her hotel. Bacharach, who was standing next to her, was still horrified by this incident decades after the fact. He thought it was acid. Dietrich bore up, and her proud and lovely face was unscathed. She wrote in her memoirs that when she was spat upon and then had to go onstage, Bacharach’s support and her own German obstinacy are what got her through. But the succeeding events make it plain that she was quite thrown. In Wiesbaden she fell off the stage. It was the first fall of her singing career—and another fall of this kind would bring her career to an end fifteen years later. But more bad news was to follow. Josef von Sternberg, her discoverer, was witness to her fall. He was sitting in the audience with his son, and they had planned to have dinner with her afterward. She had no intention of calling off the dinner, and she spent th
e evening with Jo. It was only when she returned to her room that she realized that something was terribly wrong. Maria urged her to have X-rays done at the American hospital, and it turned out that her collarbone was broken. Dietrich did not cancel any of her concerts. For the press conference in Munich, she lashed her broken shoulder to her raw silk dress with a Dior chiffon scarf. The roses on the scarf were the same shade of red as the tiny ribbon from the French Legion of Honor she had fastened to her dress. Her tour in Germany was a financial disaster, and she looked forward to leaving the country once again.
Two weeks later, she flew from Paris to Israel. When she arrived in Tel Aviv, one of the reporters advised her that she would not be allowed to sing in German. It was forbidden to speak German on the stage and in movies. Dietrich replied quite calmly: “No, I won’t sing one song in German; I’ll sing nine.” Bacharach, who related this story, claimed that the man was shocked by her response. Her concert in Tel Aviv began with two English-language songs: “My Blue Heaven” and “Cream in My Coffee.” Then she sang her first German song: “Mein blondes Baby” (“My Blonde Baby”), a mother’s lullaby. According to Bacharach, this moment in the concert hall in Tel Aviv was one of the most emotional experiences of his life, “because it was sort of like the dam had broken, and people were crying. Nobody was upset in a negative way. It was like a catharsis that freed them.”38 Next came the Richard Tauber song “Frag nicht warum” (“Don’t Ask Why”). She sang all nine German songs in a row, including “Lili Marleen,” in response to a request from her audience. The Israeli author Ephraim Kishon thought the audience had lost its mind: “A stanza of Mahler, who was a Jew—they’d rather die. A Nazi song by a German singer—by popular request.”39 Dietrich donated the proceeds of her first concert to a rehabilition center for the Israeli army. She had agreed to this tour in Israel on the condition that she be able to meet Moshe Dayan and perform for the armed forces. Dietrich’s estate contains handwritten letters she received from German Jews whose lives had been saved by heading to what was now Israel. They thanked her for having come and for her commitment to fighting Hitler, wrote about the suffering they had endured, and celebrated her as a great artist of the twentieth century. Dietrich had been invited to Yad Vashem, but she did not visit the Holocaust research center until her second tour through Israel in February 1966, when she was honored as one of the “righteous.”
Dietrich had become a businesswoman. She spent her days writing letters, making telephone calls, sending telegrams to all parts of the globe, giving instructions, and rehearsing. Photographs had to be taken and sent out, lists drawn up and gone through, recordings arranged, and studios found. There was a constant hustle and bustle on matters concerning notes, dollars, and percentages. Even though she had her agency, a great many matters still fell to her in ensuring successful performances. She had to make arrangements for the musicians, hotel rooms, clothing, new songs, and finances. Although she was always working, she did not end up with much income. Her chaotic life, her thriving business, her financial worries, and, increasingly, her physical ailments also meant that she had no time left to focus on men.
Her sister Elisabeth was the only remaining member of her close family. There have been many speculations as to why she rarely mentioned Elisabeth. Was it because Elisabeth’s husband had been a member of the Nazi party, or was it a simple question of vanity, a means of disguising her age? The letters that the sisters exchanged until Elisabeth’s death in 1973 show that Dietrich wanted only to protect her. It was clear to her that Elisabeth would not be able to endure being hounded by the press. These two very different sisters had retained their childhood intimacy. Elisabeth called Marlene “pussycat,” and Marlene called her “my sweetie.” Elisabeth ungrudgingly acknowledged that her younger sister was the cleverer and more beautiful of the two. She described her physical appearance in self-deprecating terms: “I am fat, not dainty, and know that I look hideous.”40 When she made awkward attempts to show interest in her sister’s life by talking about Paris or New York, she seemed to have no idea what she was saying. For her, Marlene lived only in the memories of the childhood and teenage years they had spent together in Berlin and as a film star on the screen, in photographs, and in magazines. She commented on the films and enjoyed the many pictures Dietrich gave her. She felt close to Boni, Étoile, and all the other famous lovers without ever having met them. Elisabeth was Marlene’s tie to her childhood and adolescence. When she wrote her memoirs, she asked her sister what color the army postal service envelopes were or what area their father’s side of the family was from. Elisabeth received a monthly check from her as well as the royalties from Deutsche Grammophon. Without this help, she would not have known how to get by. In addition, she got regular packages with dresses, stockings, instant mashed potatoes, records, and English-language newspapers. A whiff of the big wide world spread through Elisabeth’s little apartment in Celle whenever a package arrived from Fauchon in Paris. Elisabeth felt that her sister Marlene brought “sparkle and shine” into her otherwise bleak life. She found it somewhat disconcerting to put on Marlene’s luxurious coats, but she enjoyed being the sister of a woman who frequented Parisian fashion boutiques. To return the favor, she copied out page after page of poems by George, Hölderlin, Platen, Goethe, Heine, and Shakespeare for her sister; tracked down song lyrics for her; got her books by Joseph Roth; and at the pharmacy, large quantities of a drug called Geriatrea, which Rudi needed to take as well. Dietrich’s shy, humbled sister may have been ingenuous and poor, but she had attained a reasonable level of education and decorum. Journalists kept ambushing her, hoping to take pictures of her in her apartment or get an exclusive story about how the sister of the antifascist Dietrich had been the wife of an SS man. Elisabeth assured her sister in 1965: “My dear pussycat, all I can say is that neither my husband nor my son worked in a concentration camp. . . . We spent five years showing movies to the Jews.”41
Although she did not want to stir up her own family secrets, Dietrich was willing to play the cinematic role of a German who was convinced of the innocence of her people, a conviction she had never held in real life. In late January 1961, the shooting for Stanley Kramer’s film Judgment at Nuremberg began in Los Angeles. This would be the last movie with a leading role envisaged for Dietrich. Her fellow cast members were Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and Maximilian Schell. Never did she play a more Prussian character than in Judgment at Nuremberg. In this movie, she is the standoffish widow of a Wehrmacht general who has been executed by the Americans because of his war crimes. Her antagonist, whom she hopes to convince of the innocence of the Germans, is Dan Haywood, an American judge played by Spencer Tracy. He comes to Nuremberg to mete out justice to judges who cooperated with the Nazis. Dan is fascinated by and drawn to the poise and beauty of the widow Bertholt. She introduces him to German Moselle wine and the German way of life. She proudly rebuffs his compassion for her plight. While making him real coffee that she had managed to save in the war, she explains to him:
I’m not fragile, Judge Haywood. I’m a daughter of the military. You know what that means, don’t you? . . . It means I was taught discipline. A very special kind of discipline. For instance, when I was a child . . . we used to go for long rides into the country in summertime. But I was never allowed to run to the lemonade stand with the others. I was told, ‘Control your thirst. Control hunger. Control emotion.’ It has served me well.
This widow of a general and daughter of an officer claimed to embody the better Germany: She emphasized her anti-Nazi stance and the necessity of forgetting. Still, the American stood firm. He sentenced all the defendants to life in prison, and Frau Bertholt condoned neither his action nor this American tendency to paint all Germans with the same brush. Maria reported how hard it was for her mother to play this role.42 Even so, she was able to embody the role of the widow convincingly with her detached charm, self-discipline, and moral haughtiness. Judgment at Nuremberg was no
minated for nine Oscars, and it received two.43 Dietrich was not even nominated for her role as Frau Bertholt. However, Black Fox, a film in which she had no acting role but served as narrator, won an Oscar that same year as the best feature-length documentary. Black Fox was a film about Hitler inspired by Goethe’s retelling of the folk tale “Reynard the Fox.” The film posters read, “Marlene Dietrich tells the story of Adolf Hitler.” For Black Fox, Dietrich contacted Remarque and asked him to translate the text. Remarque, who had married Paulette Goddard in 1958, was delighted to receive this letter. He had also collaborated on the German version of Judgment at Nuremberg and thought Dietrich was “beautiful and magnificent” in it.44 But he could not help her now because he had to continue working on his new book, and he assumed that the translation would not pay well. Remarque was quite business-minded and not as generous as Dietrich.45
Gary Cooper died in May 1961. Dietrich attended the funeral service alone, looking stony-faced. In the summer of 1961, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide; the soldier and hunter had shot himself. Dietrich grieved for a great love of her life. She would most likely never be called “the Kraut” again.
In the same year that Hemingway took his own life, the young, charismatic John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Dietrich had known him from the last carefree summer before the outbreak of World War II. This president initiated an American age of “poetry and power,” as Robert Frost had prophesied. Kennedy was the youngest man ever to be elected president—a war veteran who appealed to Americans to work together for a better country. He was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. “The days go by, and there are always hundreds of things to do, although I get up early; once again I’ve been unable to sleep since the Kennedy thing. Maybe it’s the loneliness,” Dietrich wrote to Rudi on November 29. She enjoyed telling her friend Kenneth Tynan about her affairs—including the one with Kennedy. In 1962, she had performed in a nightclub in Washington. The president’s brothers, Bobby and Ted, came to the performance, but a president cannot go to a nightclub—so he invited her to the White House for a drink. A bottle of German white wine had been chilled for her. The president started to talk about Lincoln, then asked her how much time she had. She replied that she had an appointment in half an hour. “ ‘That—doesn’t give us much time, does it?’ said J.F.K., looking straight into her eyes. Marlene confessed that she liked powerful men and enjoyed hanging their scalps on her belt. So she looked right back at him and said: ‘No, Jack, I guess it doesn’t.’ ”46 With that, he took her glass and led her into his bedroom.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 47