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

by Wieland, Karin

  She could not imagine any option but to carry on as she always had: living out of a suitcase, spending nights in hotel rooms, jotting down flight schedules, inspecting stages, taking bows, handing out checks, descending on fashion boutiques, and creating sensations. At the age of seventy, she had crossed a threshold that would make it harder for her to take hold of the future. Being young had become such a part of her that she could not let go of it. In addition to makeup, corsets, live cell therapy treatments, and vitamin pills, she now also availed herself of the services of cosmetic surgery. Her friend Kenneth Tynan, who got together with her for dinner in London in May 1972, noted, “Marlene has clearly undergone some facial renovation: cheeks and neck are smooth and unwrinkled.”70 But alcohol was most important. In the past, she had enjoyed drinking a glass of champagne before going onstage, but after all these years she had lost control of it. Champagne turned into scotch, and one glass turned into many. Because she could no longer overlook the fact that she was a lonely old woman, she needed the alcohol to revive the memory of her youth and erotic omnipotence. Was she still able to bring magic to the stage? Only if she herself believed in what she was singing, but she failed to realize that the alcohol only heightened her inertia. Alcohol made her indifferent even to her perfection. Every time she sang “Sentimental Journey,” she had to cry. And when she listened to her Berlin record, she teared up. She had grown old and sentimental. Her famous swan coat was showing signs of wear, and her once breathtaking dresses had seen better days. If she was too drunk when she sat down at the dressing table, she smeared her lipstick, applied her makeup sloppily, and put on her wig askew. Without a masquerade, she could no longer appear in public. She no longer dreamed of enticing a man, who would, after all, see her swollen feet, the thinned-out hair on her head, and her many wrinkles. Now that she had problems with balance, she had to be brought to the stage curtain in a wheelchair. As long as no photographs of that got out, she enjoyed this little luxury, which made it less apparent that she was no longer so steady on her feet after a good helping of scotch. Alone in her hotel room after the show, she was unable to sleep. “No wonder I don’t sleep other than drugged. (I take no more than one.) But I still wake up at 2 p.m. and then what?”71 How much could she read? She had already devoured every book by her favorite author, Rex Stout, and sometimes, out of pure desperation, she resorted to reading a cookbook at night. Dietrich, whom the stage had finally freed from the necessity of portraying other women, had become “a prisoner of her own legend,” as Coward cleverly put it. Only she could free herself from it.

  She still had to take care of Sieber. In the 1970s, his handwriting looked like an old man’s, and he began to repeat himself. The reader can almost feel him frantically grasping for something to say to Dietrich, but there was not much to report. On the final pages of his daily planner, he had entered the birth dates of his friends after their names. During the final years of his life, the dates of their deaths, marked with a cross, were added on. And there were more and more crosses. He held to his routine of noting every detail of his life. Gifts, expenses, telephone calls, Russian Easter, Dietrich’s flight schedules and performances, food, drink, reading, hair washing, bathing, and bedtimes. At one point he asked Dietrich to go out with him, reminding her that he had the good suit he had bought for Tamara’s funeral. She sent him packages with pear brandy; a type of vodka that could be found only in Paris; autobiographies of their friends; articles about his hometown, Aussig; records by Horowitz; medicines; and products to stimulate hair growth. He sometimes dreamed about his time in Berlin; he collected wine labels from back home, and looked forward to visits from his grandchildren, who were as big as giants. There is little information about Sieber’s feelings. He recorded every last detail of how his life was slowly coming to an end. Dietrich was caught up with her own illnesses and did not have as much time for him as she had had in the past. When she sent him ten stamped and self-addressed envelopes, he asked huffily whether she wanted some from him as well.

  Sieber’s whole life had revolved around Dietrich, and she had assumed full responsibility for him. Not even Tamara could induce him to venture out on his own. Now it was too late to do so. Dietrich had never freed Sieber from his obligations to her, and he had never asked her to do so. The farm had become a refuge for her. No one there was interested in the star. There is a photograph of Dietrich at Sieber’s farm, sitting in a wheelchair dressed in a denim outfit and smiling uncertainly at the camera.

  At the beginning of 1975, she resolved to drink less. Alcohol was making her fat, and she no longer fit into her clothes. Before leaving on another tour in Australia in the fall, she had to get through almost two dozen performances in North America and Europe. Maria called her mother on August 11 with the news that Sieber had had a stroke and been brought to a clinic, where he was unresponsive. Mother and daughter were in constant contact by phone. In late August, Dietrich arrived in Los Angeles. She visited Sieber, then flew on to Sydney via Honolulu. The tour did not go well. Ticket sales were sluggish, and the producer was considering canceling the entire tour. He had not failed to notice that his star was rarely sober. At a concert in Sydney, she stumbled and fell over a cable that was lying around as she came onstage; she was quite likely drunk. The audience was sent home, and Dietrich was brought into her dressing room to be examined. The doctor diagnosed a fracture of the left femoral neck. Wrapped up like the finest porcelain, she was flown to Los Angeles. A photograph shows her on a stretcher at the airport covered up to her neck. Sieber suffered from paralysis after his stroke, and Dietrich was in a full body cast after her fall. Since she had no faith in Californian doctors either, she was brought to New York and then to Paris, where she lay in extension bandages until February 1976. Dietrich’s life had come to a standstill.

  IN THE

  MATTRESS

  CRYPT

  In April 1976, when Dietrich’s health had improved, she once again flew the familiar route from Paris to Los Angeles to be with her husband. She spent several days with Sieber and was relieved to find that all the money she had paid to the army of doctors, nurses, and therapists had been worth it. In early June she returned to Europe. Fourteen days later she got the news that Sieber had died.

  It somehow typified the life they shared that he passed away in Los Angeles while she was furnishing her apartment in Paris. She did not want to fly to America again, and she tried to avoid going to funerals anyway, especially when everyone was just waiting to take pictures of her as the grieving and ailing widow. Maria would take care of everything.

  On June 30, 1976, Rudolf Emilian Sieber was buried in Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery. His grave is near Tamara’s and a stone’s throw from Paramount Studios. The inscription on his gravestone reads: “Rudi 1897–1976.” His last name was left off; he had spent his life being “Herr Dietrich.”

  On November 15, Dietrich’s daily planner noted the death of Jean Gabin. Her last great love had died of heart failure. In the days to follow, sleep was out of the question. Billy Wilder called her up; perhaps he was thinking about the lonely old Dietrich mourning her ex-lover. Shortly before Christmas, she received a letter from Gabin’s attorney, who told her that Gabin had bequeathed her photographs and a cigarette case. One day before New Year’s Eve, these items were delivered to her, and a few months later, she put them on her auction list.1 Since she no longer smoked, she had no need for the cigarette case, and she preferred money to sentimental keepsakes. Now that Gabin had died, all the men who had been truly important to her were gone. Jo was the first, then Boni, and now Rudi and Jean in the same year. Jo, Boni, and Jean had become nothing but memories over the years, but Rudi was still part of her daily life. In September, Dietrich wrote to her daughter Maria that since his death, nothing mattered to her anymore. “His handwriting in my telephone books, his notes that pop up everywhere keep me running back in my mind and torture me. ‘Never more’ is a horrible saying. From the things he liked from here to the magazines I used to
send—I stop so many times and remind myself that all is over.”2 Since there were no longer performances or planes to catch or rendezvous, she had nothing to divert her from her pain about the past. The nights were the worst. She slept until two o’clock and then woke up. “Think Papi is sitting all alone in the livingroom and I get up to look. Stupid.”3

  On top of that, she now needed to write those silly memoirs, which meant dredging up old memories. Every completed chapter went straight to Maria. If Dietrich died before finishing the book, Maria would know how to carry on. She had to churn out pages in order to get the advance, but writing felt like torture. She did not really want to reflect about herself. Dietrich had no desire to divulge the details of her life and felt trapped. She told Kenneth Tynan, who had wanted to write a biography together with her some years back, that her accidents and Sieber’s death had deeply depressed her. What could she do without Rudi? He always carried a postcard with him on which she had written the text of “Falling in Love”: a true sign of abiding love.

  She went back to Paris so as not to be a burden to Maria. “It bores me stiff. I guess I was always spoiled and had people who recharged my batteries. Now, there is nobody to talk to, to advise me.”4 She found the chapters about Hemingway and Remarque quite difficult, but the one about Coward was easy. “The Childhood Chapters are by far the best because I find it so much easier to write from a child’s viewpoint.” But she knew that this would not be enough. She did not want to compose a set of anecdotes, because she had hated anecdotes her whole life. Her readers would not be getting any bedtime stories from her.

  She was particularly hard on her old friend and assistant Max Kolpé. He was part of the memoirs project right from the start because he would be doing the German translation. They had put their heads together to figure out which publisher would be likely to pay the highest advance. If Hildegard Knef had made millions with an uninteresting story of her life, this project ought to be a breeze for Dietrich. She was dissatisfied with Kolpé’s translation and insinuated that he was translating into Bavarian rather than German. Finding his German sloppy, she pointed out that Sieber had always been a stickler for proper German grammar. She herself read, spoke, and wrote primarily in English, yet she found fault with friends who had forgotten standard German.

  Dietrich noted which chapter was complete and who had been asked to look it over. Criticism was of course unwelcome. She had no idea how she would complete the project. The secretaries were incompetent, Kolpé was bungling his work, and there was too much noise in the house. “Mme. Miron gave me the weekly bath. She is still the best. I am all scrubbed and clean. Otherwise there is nothing but a terrible vast emptiness that I know I have to fill and write about my—what? I ordered food from the restaurant because I could not face the cooking. God knows how I am going to pay for ALL of that.”5 She began to count up what she had written character by character. When would the advance be coming? And what in the world was a keystroke? If it were not for the money, she would not be writing a single line. Her recollections were nobody’s business. “What an easy time when I worked on stage.”

  The filming of Just a Gigolo offered a change of pace. This movie, set in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, was about Prussian officers, lost honor, cocottes, communists, and Nazis. The “Eden” bar that Boni liked so much was also in it. Dietrich, as the Baroness von Semering, her face hidden in the shadow of a large hat, sang the title song. She considered the story inane and did the movie just for the money. David Bowie, who played the leading role, reminded screenwriter Walter Reisch of the young Rudi Sieber. Perhaps Dietrich felt the same way, and she had one more reason to appear before the camera again. Just a Gigolo would be her final motion picture. The film was a box-office and critical flop. Under a film still showing her as the Baroness von Semering, she noted, “How ugly can you get?”6

  On March 14, 1979, Dietrich received a telegram from her publisher, Bertelsmann, informing her that her book had been published. After considerable thought, she had chosen the title of a poem by Goethe, Just Take My Life, as the book’s title. Kolpé asked not to be listed as the German translator, “so that people won’t keep saying that you refuse to speak German.”7 She enjoyed reading the review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which put her on par with Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll. Reviewers delighted at the way her words mirrored her world of artifice. After all, who would be expecting the truth? “The memoirs are as stylized as she herself is, and as true as the artful Dietrich when onstage in Las Vegas.”8 The book did not become the bestseller she had hoped for. Dietrich refused to boost sales with readings, television appearances, or book signings. She did not need the aggravation.

  She had decorated her parlor in Paris with photographs of her famous lovers and admirers. Ronald Reagan and Jacques Chirac had been added recently. She had the private telephone number of both politicians. Chirac sent her flowers, and she wrote him letters. She enjoyed telephone conversations with Nancy Reagan, who gave her a signed copy of her memoir. Dietrich had no intention of dreaming about the past once she retired; she took a lively interest in current events, yet her interest in movies, the theater, and fashion seemed to ebb once she had left the stage. She delighted in watching Frank Sinatra on television, but she was far more absorbed in the issues surrounding Watergate, the strikes in France, and the neo-Nazis in Germany. She kept up with an impressive number of newspapers and magazines, reading the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, France-Soir, Le Figaro, and Die Welt on a daily basis, and supplemented these with Die Zeit, Bunte, Quick, Stern, and The New Yorker. While she was still active in the world of performance, she had disparaged television, but in her later years she made her peace with it.

  She had to attend to business on a near-constant basis. She continued to record her schedule on a calendar. Dietrich preferred British daily planners that came with a map of the London Underground and of England. As someone who had so often crossed the Atlantic, she made a point of noting the time difference between Paris and New York, and between Paris and Los Angeles, at the beginning of each new year. She wrote an average of four letters a day, which went out to destinations around the world. She had two typewriters and a copy machine in her apartment. “When I worked on the stage I had 6 different dresses, so, why not now when my only source of income is this bloody book, have 2 typewriters?”9 In most cases, she gave Maria copies of the letters she received or sent. When books about her were published, she requested a copy and carefully inspected what had been written about her and which photographs had been selected to accompany the text. She sent her famous chicken soup to sick friends by taxi. She spent whole days drawing up lists of things that could be sold. Requests for interviews interested her only if they came with the offer of a good fee. Most of the time, she pretended not to be at home, and said that she was in the United States or Switzerland.

  When Maximilian Schell announced his arrival, she claimed to be elsewhere as well. He had taken a room at the Hotel George V and was waiting for her to call. Dietrich sent a message that she had an appointment in London. The two of them knew each other from the filming of Judgment at Nuremberg. He had garnered the Oscar for best actor for that movie, an honor to which she had felt entitled for so long. But eventually she did do a project with him. In the fall of 1982, they got together to shoot a film about Dietrich’s life. She spent six days conversing with him for three-hour stints, one day in German and the next in English. Once again, she was doing this only for the money, and she was furious to learn that she was expected to speak the whole time. She stubbornly referred to her book, where all this could be read. She had figured that in the film he would show pictures or film clips and read from her book or from von Sternberg’s. Instead, he tried to force her to reflect about herself on camera. She considered Schell good-looking, but timid and unimaginative. When the two of them had a look at scenes from her old movies, an activity she considered silly, Dietrich astonished her viewers. She still knew ever
y image, recalled every shot. But overall, her performance in Marlene—as the film would be named—was proof positive of Remarque’s playful observation: “You can’t argue with Aunt Lena.”10 She constantly contradicted herself, but that did not bother her. At the age of eighty, she was witty and sharp, and a larger-than-life presence. Schell might as well have packed up and gone home. Only at the very end of the film did he try to prove to her that she was a sentimental person. When they recite Freiligrath’s famous love poem together: “Oh, love as long as you can love! / Oh, love as long as you wish to love,” there is a catch in Dietrich’s voice. Her mother had loved this poem. It had been framed and displayed on the living room wall in Berlin. It might seem kitschy, but she could not recite these words without weeping.

  Schell, in turn, could not get her to pose for the camera. Her reasoning was short and sweet—and smart: “I’ve been photographed to death my whole life. That’s enough.”11 She did not want any camera to capture what old age had done to her face. It was nobody’s business that she had lost the battle for youth. This was not vanity but an artistic stance. In this film, which is about her, she is never onscreen. She was declaring the official end of her lifelong romance with the camera. Von Sternberg would have liked that.

  It was not only the public that was no longer permitted to see her; she was also shutting out her old friends, such as Romy Schneider and Hildegard Knef, who received a generous supply of prescription pills from Dietrich by mail. Dietrich did not appreciate the way Knef kept putting herself on a pedestal. When Knef asked her for a French fashion designer, Dietrich felt it was time to give her a piece of her mind and declared that a world-famous man like Yves Saint Laurent would not travel to Germany for some lady named Hildegard. Her own situation was, of course, a different matter. The couturiers worshipped her and considered themselves lucky if Dietrich wore their creations.