by Paula Byrne
Mirror, mirror, in my hand,
Who is the fairest in the land?
The HMS Disgusting
After my mother broke her hip, she put herself to bed. For ever. It was late when I arrived at the Avenue Montaigne. Mother was asleep, a book upended on her chest. Her clocks ticked away, and the record player needle hissed. I lifted the arm and turned it off. The rest could wait until the morning. There was a small sofa in the living room. I curled up like a cat. Sleep came quickly.
In the morning, I assessed the situation. It was much worse than I could have possibly imagined. My mother, so obsessed with germs, had come to this? She looked at me with a crafty smile: ‘I’ve just decided to take to my bed. It makes life easier. I have a hot plate here, and my phone. I got this claw thing, so I can reach for my books.’
I saw what she was up to. She could drink as much as she liked without fear of falling over. Much safer to stay in bed permanently. She never thought it might be better to give up the drink. She was happy in her mattress crypt. Mother always loved to set up camp, like the good German soldier that she was. But, my God, the mess.
I removed all the empty bottles and attempted to clean the place.
There were boxes upon boxes of Kleenex. Piles of newspapers and books. On one side was her office. Piles of stationery, notepaper, envelopes of all sizes, stamps, pens, rubber bands, string, magnifying lenses, files, and dictionaries. On the other, her pharmacy: pills, jars, tubes. On a shelf, her drink, decanted into mineral water bottles.
At the side of her bed, on a low stool, a row of Limoges pitchers. I grimaced, as I took them to the bathroom to empty and bleach. She must have been paying someone a lot of money to do that particular job.
She told me about her new friend, David Brett. He lived in a council flat in Yorkshire. They had begun a phone friendship. Again, the sly smile hovered above her lips. I inspected her white telephone. It was filthy with stains and splodges and numbers stuck on with tape.
Mother was obsessed by the fact that she now looked like a toad. I found some recent photographs across which she had scrawled a message: ‘How Ugly can you get?’
‘A photographer tried to get another picture. He hired a crane to get to me, so now I keep the curtains drawn.’
‘Are you sleeping, Mutti?’
‘I wake at 2 a.m., every night. No sleeping pills make me sleep, which doesn’t help the toad look.’
‘You look fine, Mutti.’
Then she looked at me, through her walled mirror, as if she were seeing me for the first time.
‘Kater, you look just like me.’
We played our little games. She made excuses not to wash, and then complained to her friends that I refused to bathe her. I watered down her Scotch, but she somehow found a devoted shop girl to smuggle in more. She sipped black tea, laced with booze, and, now that no one could see her, ate whatever she liked.
Her fans were legion and they telephoned day and night. They sent her frankfurters and marinated herrings. She told them, ‘I see nobody. I never see my daughter’ – even though I was there, cooking meals for her that she would never eat.
She would spend hours responding to fan mail by letter and telephone.
‘Who was the most difficult actor to work with? Shall I say Ray Milland? I make it all up, anyway.’
‘Good idea, Mutti.’
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good, then I can say him.’
Her favourite was still her council flat Yorkshireman. She spent hours and hours on the phone with him, racking up huge bills. He was devoted, and would help her with bills, accountants, doctors, lawyers. Despite my protestations, she gave him my number and told him to ring me any time, day or night.
He would ring me up in his flat Yorkshire drawl and reprimand me for neglecting my wonderful, beautiful mother, who lived only for me. Said that she tells him her innermost secrets. Tells him that she spends every Christmas alone.
When her Hollywood friends called and asked what she was doing, she would say, ‘I’m the same. In bed with a book and a bottle.’
At the age of eighty, she conducted telephone flirtations with Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Baryshnikov. When the president left the White House, the last telephone call he made was to my mother.
At 10 p.m., she was at her liveliest and wanted to chat. She would flick through a copy of Vogue, complaining about the latest fashions.
‘Look at this abortion. They don’t know what to do any more. UGLY. That mennuble, what’s her name? Madonna. She copies me all of the time. Do you remember the review dress?’
‘Yes, it was blue velvet and then you changed it to green.’
‘Good man, Travis. He listened, and that’s what made him so great. Do you remember the black ostrich feathers? I invented those shoes, do you remember, and then Chanel copied me. She was such a fake. She was a decorator, not a designer.’
She flicked through the pages.
‘Braids, big deal. I wore them in Dishonored. And remember when I wore braids when I played the statue, the one that comes alive?’
‘I remember, Mutti, but did you know that Lacy died?’
‘He was in love with me, but he used to write such boring letters. Anyway, you liked him. Do you remember when I wanted dark eyes and I put those drops in to make my eyes black? The things we did then, and now they write books and say it is art. We just made a film – then made another one. Such stupidity. It’s business, not art. They ask me why I wore tails, it’s because I didn’t want to show the legs for once, and I looked wonderful in them. No other reason. Why do they always want to see big meanings in films? Idiots. Did you see that last picture of Garbo?’
‘I hear she has kidney disease.’
‘That suits her. Smelly pee. She’ll die of it. She looked terrible in that photograph – ugly and so old. You know she used to count every piece of sugar to make sure that the maid didn’t steal it. And those feet! They could never do a long shot because of those gigantic feet.’
She picked up one of the photograph albums.
‘Look, here she is in the mink hat. Remember that terrible banquet and all those corpses, like concentration camp victims, long before we knew that they would exist for real.’
When she suddenly began talking about her mother, I saw she was getting tired. Was this the time I should ask about Aunt Birgitte?
‘In many respects she was a hard woman.’
Her hands stroked the bedspread nervously as she said this. Her sleeping suppositories were beginning to take effect. She murmured, ‘That strange feeling we had in the war. I’ve never found anything to equal its strength, it was a splendid carelessness that held us all together.’
I removed the heavy album from the bed and turned out the lights. I went into the parlour where her wall of death greeted me. Chevalier smiles, Coward mocks, Piaf broods, Papa Hem looks right through me.
I stood and looked straight into the huge mirror above the fireplace. At last I was not afraid, because I knew the one thing he did not know or understand.
It was time for me to speak to him: ‘Beauty is not skin deep.’
You are the fairest of them all.
The Blue Angel
Every morning she wakes sober and resumes her hellish daily journey, sipping Scotch until the angry monster emerges and rules her day. She is awaiting death and despising life for its fragility – for not coming into line as she demands. In the old days, everyone in the studio had jumped to her every command. How dare life disregard her demand for immortality?
It’s her ninetieth birthday, and she is all alone. Deserted by that family she loves so much.
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws.
Her beautiful legs, the symbol of her fame and beauty, are now withered and emaciated. She has chopped her hair with cuticle scissors, and it sits in
sparse, grey clumps, where it was once golden and lustrous. Her skin, so luminous, is now like parchment.
Her teeth have blackened and cracked. She awaits death, and faces her private hell alone; just the way she wants it.
She wears the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest commendation. She is too poor to pay her rent, but she can’t be turfed out of her beloved France, so the city of Paris kindly meets the bill. She would kill herself, if she could, but if she does, her life insurance will be invalid, and she must leave something for the Child. After her stroke, she speaks only three words; ‘Yes’, ‘No’, and ‘Kater’. She is a shell, but to me she was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.
She turns her face to look at me.
It’s the blind side of mirrors that make them work.
There are no great beauties any more. Actors may be good, but beautiful they are not. Cock and bull, my dear. I’m old-fashioned, I love the moonlight. You don’t hold any mystery for me, darling, do you mind? Consider the public. Never fear it nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all never, never, never bore the living hell out of it.
Remember what I told you: wit ought to be a glamorous treat like caviar; never spread it about like marmalade. How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door on the face of age. Much wiser to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance.
‘That’s quite enough from you, dear.’
She remembers the sound of the soldiers marching in step, and the clip clopping of the horses from her home in Schöneberg. Mother playing a Chopin waltz, her fingernails touching on the keys with a delicate little click. She used to call me Paul when she was happy with me. Skating with Birgitte on the Neuer See. The sparkling jewels on Unter den Linden. I came from a family of clockmakers, on my mother’s side. Father died of syphilis and it made him mad. My uncles, Otto and Williband, who were killed in the war. Spring driving along the Kurfürstendamm in an open-top car. Marguerite Bregaund was my first love, but I’ve never loved anyone. Not really loved. The rats’ paws were so cold.
Where have all the young girls gone? Long time passing. Grief does not diminish; it just becomes a habit. She would have liked a Spiegelkabinett of her very own, so she could admire her pretty face. Now it’s too late for all that. Mirrors distort, and they do NOT tell the truth.
Birgitte betrayed me.
She’d told everyone that her sister died in Belsen, but that was a lie. Birgitte and her husband ran a cinema for the Nazis. Her own sister. A cinema. Entertaining those Nazi beasts.
But when she cut out her sister’s face, it was to protect her, not to disown her. If they found out, they would punish her, so she told them she was dead.
Homosexuals worship their mothers, worship them. As for you, Kater: you were never pretty enough to be raped.
Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?
She reaches for the champagne that she has secreted under the bed. Drinkers often conceal the truth even to themselves. I know all her secrets. I’ll take them to her grave. I won’t betray her. She pours herself a glass and picks up the gold Cartier clock from her bedside table. Tick tock. Tick tock.
She smiles and hurls it, right at me, and screams: ‘There’s an end of all thy beauty.’
Epilogue
The past is never where you left it.
My mother was lying on her bed like a limp rag doll. I was shocked by how much she still frightened me, even in death. When I was a child, she used to make me repeat, ‘When I’m with my mother nothing bad can happen to me.’ But it did happen, Mutti. And you did nothing to protect me. And now I don’t know if I can ever forgive you.
Her mirror is smashed into fragments. All that bad luck. I pick up a piece, and look at myself.
‘Did you feel robbed of your childhood when it happened?’
‘No, Mother did that all by herself.’
Her maid handed me a final letter, a poem:
If a Surgeon
Would Open my Heart
He would see
A gigantic sea
Of Love
For my only child
He would be stunned
At the force of it
The violence
The fury of it
All Entangled in
One human heart
She got her Paris funeral, and thousands came and lined the streets to pay their respects. Then we took her to Berlin, and that day it was flower market day, and when the German people saw her casket, they threw flowers, just like they did at the end of her shows. Hundreds of flowers. My mother would have loved it.
I buried her in Schöneberg, next to her mother. The greatest performer in the world is laid to rest in a sun-dappled garden, and on her grave I lay lilies of the valley.
Author’s Note
This novel is a through-the-looking-glass telling of the life of Marlene Dietrich. It is a work of historical fiction, not a biography, but I have learned from many biographies of Dietrich and of other female stars from the golden age of Hollywood. I owe a particular debt to Maria Riva’s superbly written and extremely candid memoir of her mother, Marlene Dietrich by her Daughter (Knopf, 1993), and to Donald Spoto, Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich (Cooper Square, 2000). The book by ‘Boni’, from which a few brief passages are quoted, is Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph (translated by Walter Sorell and Denver Lindley, Appleton-Century, 1945), a semi-autobiographical novel about his affair with Dietrich, whom he christened Joan Madou. To capture the unique voice of Dietrich, some of her own words are quoted from Marlene Dietrich’s ABC (Doubleday, 1962). The voice of the Mirror reflects the style and often the words of Dietrich’s friend Noël Coward.
The titles of the chapters narrated by the Daughter are Dietrich films (and a couple of her songs). Chapters narrated by the Mirror have the titles of Noël Coward songs (with the exception of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ and ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone?’).
Although all characters are fictionalised, readers familiar with the Dietrich story will recognise her husband Rudolf Sieber in Papi, the great Austrian directors Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder in Mo Goldberg and Billy, the irrepressible Travis Banton in the Head of Wardrobe, the actor Brian Aherne in Lacy, Ernest Hemingway in Papa Hem, Burt Bacharach in Burt Freeman, and so on.
I learned much from Randall Thropp, costume and prop archivist at Paramount Pictures.
Thanks to Arabella Pike and Susan Watt. Susan has been a scrupulous editor, whose ideas and insights have been of immeasurable value. I especially enjoyed our evening together at Wilton’s Music Hall witnessing Dietrich come back to life in the dazzling one-wo(man) show, Natural Duty. Thanks to Charlotte Webb for her careful copy edit and to Heike Schuessler for the glorious jacket design.
My children, Tom and Ellie Bate, read an early draft and made helpful suggestions. Thanks to young Harry for asking ‘How’s Marlene going?’ Sally Bayley helped me to find the device of the mirror voice, and Stephen Pickles has spent many a long hour discussing all things Dietrich, and passing on several marvellous anecdotes.
Heartfelt thanks to my husband, Jonathan Bate. He is my first reader and my last. My father’s favourite song is ‘Falling in Love Again’: I hope he enjoys this novel. My sisters and I grew up watching black and white Hollywood movies; they were the backdrop to our lives. This book is dedicated to my sister, Christine, the Joan Crawford to my Bette Davies.
Also by Paula Byrne
FICTION
Look To Your Wife
NON-FICTION
Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson
Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead
The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things
Belle: The True Story of Dido Belle
Stressed, Unstressed: Classic
Poems to Ease the Mind (co-editor)
Kick: The True Story of Kick Kennedy, JFK’s Forgotten Sister, and the Heir to Chatsworth
The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in Hollywood
About the Author
Paula Byrne is the author of one previous novel, Look to Your Wife. She is well known for her bestselling biographies. She is married with children and lives in Oxford and the USA.
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, ON, M5H 4E3, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 301, India
http://www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com