THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1935 WERE A period of pleasant indolence for Marlene Dietrich. Rudolf Sieber visited from Paris with Tamara Matul; he pored over his wife’s accounts, met with her agent and with tax advisers, and together they took Maria for a New York holiday. The friendship between them continued unbroken, if not uncomplicated.
So did Dietrich’s relationship with Mercedes de Acosta, who preferred a virtual oath of fidelity from the ladies with whom she enjoyed concurrent intimacies. Such a guarantee Dietrich was too aboveboard to provide, although she cannily learned not to divulge those details of her life that might estrange de Acosta. That year the two spent several days each week together, motoring to Santa Barbara for lunch, hiking in the canyons near Pacific Palisades or reading quietly at the home of one or the other. Dietrich’s domestic nature shone—she baked and cleaned and rearranged her friend’s closets and planned small dinners for friends.
Basil Rathbone (among others) was invited to these parties more than once with his wife Ouida Bergere, a slightly affected and amusing lady. Many claimed that when she wed the very English Rath-bone she quietly altered for the record her real name (Ida Berger), birthplace (Brooklyn) and accent (also Brooklyn). He recalled Dietrich serving champagne and caviar, then disappearing into the kitchen for an hour, whence she emerged “fragrant and cool and lovely as if she had just stepped out of a perfumed Roman bath” and summoned guests to an elegant dinner she had herself prepared. At such gatherings Dietrich made no effort to conceal the nature of her relationship with de Acosta, nor did she feel compelled to announce the banns.
But it was of course always easier for two women to have social variations on the so-called Boston marriage, which could be interpreted as simply a warm friendship; men, on the other hand, could never be so open, and their careers were jeopardized by even temporal cohabitation. Later, when Janet Gaynor and Mary Martin took a holiday together (leaving behind their homosexual husbands), the public felt it was charming for them to enjoy some time for “girl-talk.” It was widely known that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott—although, like Gaynor and Martin, married—enjoyed more than simply a platonic friendship; in fact, they shared a beach house every weekend for years. But finally they were given an ultimatum by RKO: Grant had to choose either Scott or contract renewal. As so often, professional considerations prevailed.
Quite apart from her open relationship to de Acosta, Dietrich blazed a fashion trail around town, making a tuxedo and fedora the ne plus ultra of chic women’s formalwear and enabling women to challenge another level of sexual stereotype. In this regard, rightly popularizing those freedoms long enjoyed exclusively by unconventional women, she brought a refreshing candor and dignity to life in Hollywood.
IN SEPTEMBER 1935, DIETRICH BEGAN FILMING THE comedy Desire, directed by Frank Borzage and produced by Ernst Lubitsch, whose Trouble in Paradise (made three years earlier) it much resembled. As a glamorous and sophisticated Parisian jewel thief who makes the American naïf Gary Cooper her unwitting accomplice in the heisting of a pearl necklace, Dietrich was at last allowed a chance to do more than pose statuesquely. “Permitted to walk, breathe, smile and shrug as a human being instead of a canvas for the Louvre,” ran a typical review, “[she] recaptures some of the freshness of The Blue Angel . . . Miss Dietrich is not dependent upon stylized photography and direction but has a proper talent of her own.” Her half-smiles hinted at a wily subterfuge, she sang Hollander’s “Awake in a Dream” with wry self-mockery and thus Dietrich effectively created a modern, credible character from an array of charmingly improbable situations.
No longer simply an excuse for von Sternberg’s fantasies, Dietrich demonstrated in Desire a flair for comic timing and supple expressiveness and, having learned every technical detail, she readily suggested to cinematographer Victor Milner the best camera angle and lighting configuration for herself (and sometimes for Cooper as well). “She was a perfectionist,” according to designer Edith Head, then working with chief costume designer Travis Banton. Early during the shooting of Desire, Dietrich kept Head working thirty-six uninterrupted hours at Paramount, pausing only for three hours sleep as she anguished over the choice of the right hat for one scene.
We sat up for hours trying on dozens of different hats, changing them, tilting them, taking the feathers off this one and trying them on that one, snipping off a veil or a brim, switching ribbons and bows. Finally we got what she wanted. I was amazed at her stamina and determination.
Similarly, photographer John Engstead recalled that weeks later, after trying forty hats submitted by New York designers, Dietrich selected a dramatic black one Lubitsch and Borzage at once realized would excessively shade her face. She tried others, wearing each one at a deliberately wrong angle until the men yielded and allowed her to wear the black. When she saw the film’s rushes next day, however, she had to admit that they had been right. Persistent she may have been, but always thoroughly professional.
Her studio education filtered into her home life, as visiting photographers and journalists often learned. Arriving there, they were taken to the living room, whose major light source was a single pinpoint spot focussed above the fireplace. Eventually Dietrich glided in and moved silently into place, leaning against the mantel and raising her head until the illumination of her cheekbones was dramatically presented to her visitors. “Falling into exciting and sinuous poses is second nature to Marlene,” commented Engstead.
BUT HER CONCERNS THAT YEAR WENT BEYOND THE contours of her own glamorous image. Privately, the autumn and early winter were laced with the anxiety of a real-life drama and its tragic dénouement. Still encouraging her occasional sweetheart John Gilbert (then separated from Virginia Bruce), Dietrich insisted that Lubitsch and Borzage consider him for a supporting role—that of her suave ally in crime. Despite the ravages of Gilbert’s drinking and the fact that he looked much older than his thirty-six years, the test was successful and he was engaged for the film. But just before production began, while he and Dietrich were swimming in his pool at Tower Road, Gilbert suffered a mild heart attack and had to be replaced by John Halliday. Even as she worked daily at Paramount through the final months of the year, Dietrich hovered consolingly round Gilbert, and after another more serious attack in December she became virtually the night and weekend nurse. She also decorated his home for Christmas, ornamenting a tree, filling the rooms with candlelight and performing holiday chores, food and gift shopping for him and his young daughter. When she had to honor a radio commitment that month (reading scenes from Desire on the “Hollywood Hotel” promotional series), Dietrich paid for a trained medic to replace her for two hours.
Nor was her generosity at holiday time limited to intimates. Paramount employees who served her or were in special need because of erratic employment or personal hardship received gifts with notes of gratitude. To her makeup assistant, Dot Ponedel, she gave a pair of crystal lamps, and Jessmer Brown (her studio maid), Arthur Camp (the property master on Desire) and others all received presents she knew they needed or fancied. When an elderly couple who had retired from the studio fell ill with influenza that winter, Dietrich twice drove to North Hollywood to prepare hot meals and clean their home. Such gestures may have had an element of noblesse oblige (and somehow Paramount’s publicity department was always informed of them); but the recipients were touched by her sentiments.
But Dietrich’s kindly vigilance did not entirely obliterate less admirable traits that could have serious consequences. One evening she and Gilbert saw that the car pulling into his driveway belonged to Greta Garbo; it was the closest the two women had come to meeting thus far. Gilbert rushed out for a brief chat with Garbo while her enduring rival remained in the house, misinterpreting the meeting as a grand reconciliation scene that would revive the embers of an old romance. When Garbo departed and he returned inside, Dietrich flew into a rage and left at once. Her refuge was Gary Cooper, only too eager to comfort her for what she described as Gilbert’s “rejection.” Imprudently miscalculating the effect of her actions on poor John Gilbert, Dietrich ensured that he knew of her resumed affair with Cooper. Gilbert then fell into a black depression at Christmas, drank himself into a stupor and sustained an even graver heart attack early in the new year. On the morning of January 10, despite the efforts of the physician she dispatched to his bedside, Gilbert suffocated to death in an alcoholic convulsion.
Crushed with remorse, Dietrich cancelled Desire’s postproduction still photography and confided her guilt to friends. More than that, she affected the role of Gilbert’s widow, collapsing at the funeral on the arm of Gary Cooper. A week later, Gilbert’s twelve-year-old daughter received a bouquet with a note attached: “I adored your father. Let me adore you.” This turned out to be a hyperbolic and impossible request, for the girl had her own mother, and in any case Dietrich scarcely found time even for Maria.
The Cooper affair survived until June 1, when she and Clark Gable read scenes from Morocco on a radio broadcast. Dietrich did not ask for Cooper to reprise his original role and he, annoyed at her courting of Gable even professionally, imitated her conduct vis-à-vis the hapless John Gilbert and stormed out of her house.
As IT HAPPENED, THE SAD EPISODE WITH GILBERT paralleled a time of professional unpleasantness owing to Dietrich’s demand for absolute authority. Her next Paramount picture was to be a tangled romance first called Invitation to Happiness and then renamed I Loved a Soldier, with recent French émigré Charles Boyer. But producer Benjamin Glazer left the project in January, complaining that Dietrich’s right of script approval and her insistence on instructing the cameraman were sabotaging his own creative contributions. Anxious when Ernst Lubitsch departed for an extended winter holiday, Dietrich was no more cooperative with the new studio production chief William Le Baron, nor was she satisfied when seasoned screenwriters tried to whip the scenario into shape. By February 11, 1936, more than a million dollars had been lost on a film two months delayed, for which only a few scenes had been shot. On March 4, she simply abandoned the production, and because by this time neither Le Baron, director Henry Hathaway nor writers Grover Jones and John van Druten had much enthusiasm for it, Paramount cut their losses.*
Because of this (and perhaps also because the Gilbert affair had caused some unwelcome local talk), the studio readily allowed Dietrich to work on a loan-out deal for independent producer David O. Selznick; he paid her 
200,000 for the privilege of starring her in one of the first Technicolor movies.
On March 26, Selznick announced Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer in his forthcoming production of The Garden of Allah, based on a turgid Robert Hichens novel about a sultry socialite who goes to the Moroccan desert seeking peace of soul. There she meets and marries a nervous, priggish Frenchman, a renegade Trappist monk who now tends to stagger uneasily backward at the sight of a crucifix. Predictably, neither finds heavenly solace, and on his honeymoon he virtually swoons with guilt until she delivers him back to the monastery gates. This ending was not so much spiritually edifying as it was dimwitted (and to some offensive), not least of all because it implied that God can throw a jealous snit and command a rivalry worthy of a Hollywood star.
Studio filming began in April, and at first there was some trouble with Dietrich, who was insisting more and more on controlling every detail of her appearance. But The Garden of Allah involved the more complicated business of color, and here she was not in her Sternbergian element. “I told her about the tales around town [concerning her interference],” Selznick informed the director of Allah, Richard Boleslawski, in one of his notoriously protracted memos,
and she told me this was all nonsense and that she never indulged in such carryings on and certainly would not on this picture . . . I told her that my one other worry was about her performance—that she had demonstrated to the world that she was a beautiful woman, but that she had failed to demonstrate, undoubtedly through lack of opportunity, that she was an emotional actress . . . She said she had been wanting to prove this for years . . . [Since our conversation] Marlene has been working extremely hard, never leaving the studio until twelve or one in the morning. I think she has done a magnificent job on the costumes—better than could have been done without her supervision.
But the harmony was shattered within two weeks. By April 28, Dietrich was convinced that the script was dreadful and the film would therefore be a downright clinker. As it happened, she was right on both counts. Peppered with pseudopiety (“In knowing you and your beauty, I have known God!”) and crowded with characters who speak only Latter-day Apocalyptic (“This is the land of fire—and you are a woman of fire!”), The Garden of Allah offered not even an occasional oasis of sense or feeling.
Because no one would listen to her complaints or suggestions, Dietrich thought only of the impact on her own career. A telephone call from von Sternberg confirmed that yes, he would come to her rescue, and so she launched a campaign to replace Boleslawski (a Russian actor-director from the Moscow Art Theater). This she tried to engineer by attempting the seduction of twenty-seven-year-old Joshua Logan, the dialogue coach and rehearsal assistant on the film (later an important stage and screen director). In his memoirs he artfully reconstructed an awkward comic scene that reproduced the effect of Dietrich’s lifelong difficulty with the letter R:
“It’s twash, isn’t it?” said Dietrich of the script. “Garbo wouldn’t play this part. They offered it to Garbo and she didn’t believe the girl would send the boy back to the monastewy. She is a vewy clever woman, Garbo! She has the pwimitive instincts—peasants have, you know. Look me in the eye and tell me the twuth, now. It’s twash, isn’t it? You’re a tasteful New Yorker. Admit it. It’s twash.”
When Logan protested that the picture would finally look better than it read (it did not), Dietrich applied another kind of pressure when the company was shooting in Yuma, Arizona. She invited him to her hotel room, where Joseph Schildkraut awaited a prearranged evening assignation with her. Dismissing him, she spoke elaborately and frankly to Logan of her love for John Gilbert, pointing to the pictures of him that filled her room, and to the votive candles that burned before each of them. She then poured him a drink, sat on her bed and beckoned him.
“You don’t weally like Boleslawski, do you? . . . He’s a tewwible man. He’s Wussian. No sensitivity. He can’t diwect women. Wouldn’t you like to see him wesign?”
“Resign? Good God, no. I think it would be dangerous for the whole project if he left now.”
“Call up Selznick wight now,” Dietrich persisted. “There’s the phone. Tell him Boleslawski is not the wight man . . . If he left, we could get a good diwector—like Josef von Sternberg, who just happens to be available. He’s exactly wight for this, and for me.”
She poured more Scotch into Logan’s glass “and kept getting closer and seemingly more affectionate” until he bolted. Despite her wiles, Boleslawski remained on The Garden of Allah which (although it won the Oscar for cinematography) fully justified Dietrich’s anxiety.
As the horrors continued to forecast the picture’s critical and popular disaster, Dietrich pressured Boyer and other players to beg for a change of script if not of director. “I AM GETTING TO THE END OF THE ROPE OF PATIENCE,” ran a telegrammatic howl to Boleslawski from the now financially strapped Selznick on April 28. “WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR HAVING A FRANK HEART-TO-HEART WITH MARLENE AND WITH BOYER . . . I AM NOT GOING TO FACE SIX OR SEVEN WEEKS OF THIS NONSENSE . . . I WILL HAVE A LOT MORE RESPECT FOR YOU IF YOU TURN INTO A VON STERNBERG WHO TOLERATES NO INTERFERENCE.”
Dietrich was also tampering with basic realism, as she colored, lacquered and coiffed her hair and then summoned her hairdresser between takes to reposition each strand so that even when the desert wind blew she looked unruffled. This Selznick called “so nonsensical, when you can see the palms blowing. Surely a little reality can’t do a great beauty any harm.”
But in fact nature in all its torrid reality could do just that. On May 2, Dietrich collapsed in the 138 degree desert heat and work was suspended for two days. When she returned, she was no doubt cheered by the news that Paramount had not yet found a vehicle for her next picture and so, according to an unprecedented clause in her contract, the studio had to pay her 250,000 for nothing.
WITH GARDEN COMPLETE AT THE END OF JUNE, DIEtrich was therefore again free to accept another offer, which she quickly did when Alexander Korda (who had employed her a decade earlier in Germany) cabled from England, where he had settled and established a production company. And so in early July, with twenty trunks, thirty handbags, two maids and Maria, Dietrich boarded the Normandie in New York. “It isn’t that I don’t like America,” she had told the press, saying yet again (as she had in 1933) that she might remain abroad permanently. “It is just that America is not my country.” After leaving Maria with Sieber and Tamara in Paris, she proceeded to London to begin filming Knight Without Armour, for which she earned 450,000. In 1936, Marlene Dietrich was the highest paid woman in the world.
At a press conference at the Dorchester Hotel, she met with Korda, French director Jacques Feyder and her co-star Robert Donat. Filming was to begin before the end of July, but Donat’s chronic asthma turned suddenly severe. After a six-week delay, Korda—overburdened by high actors’ salaries and the costs of maintaining numerous exterior sets at Denham Studios—understandably considered dismissing Donat and radically reducing his role for another actor. But Dietrich was adamant. Although a dozen men could have easily assumed the role and she had no reason to concern herself with his career, she informed Korda that she would not remain with the project if he dismissed the ailing Donat—even if her own part were to improve in the bargain. Her gesture was duly noted and appreciated by Donat, his wife and family, and admired by her colleagues on Knight Without Armour. Throughout production, she was constantly alert for Donat’s well-being, covering him with her own fur coat while they waited in the autumn chill for a camera setup.
But the film could not have been saved by the healthiest men in England. As a widowed Russian countess who flees the 1917 revolution with the help of a British spy, she was required to do very little but pose prettily, swathed in chiffon or bathing provocatively as soap bubbles slowly burst in the tub. She was at first delighted to work with Feyder, a respected director who observed that
she only makes “Marlene Dietrich films,” and accordingly she is concerned with one thing only: that this will be a Marlene Dietrich picture. Her image, her face, her costumes—in her estimation, only these count. Her technical experience enables her to verify if the light on her face is positioned as she wishes. You can usually hear her ordering the electricians around: “Put two more lamps on the right . . . reposition the key light higher behind me.”
Feyder also resented her peculiar notions about costumes, which refused to consider the script, the setting or the character’s situation: “It all has to serve Dietrich—that’s the sole reality—and if she does or wears something anachronistic, well, then, you just have to change the script to conform to her wishes.” He resented her manipulations, her subtle seductions of whoever might serve her best at a particular moment during production. “The reputation she has for cooperation is remarkable,” Feyder considered, “for that’s really the height of her illusion. When you see the finished film you realize she’s had her own way in just about everything. Marlene Dietrich indeed has so much charm.”
Cinematographer Harry Stradling likewise recalled that, to ensure her best appearance, Dietrich once again demanded a full-length mirror beside the camera, so that if she felt too much light on her arms, or if her shoulders caught too much from a certain arc, she could instruct Stradling accordingly.*
Preparing for her bathtub scene, Dietrich had informed only her dresser that she would perform nude (without the customary flesh-covered bathing suit invisible to the camera). Production workers are not easily astonished men, but there was some commotion that autumn day when Dietrich arrived on the set, tossed aside her robe and (as a witness recalled) expertly “slipped and sprawled, spread-eagled naked before the camera crew.” She laughed, winked at her colleagues and went on with the scene. It was then learned that, as she had known in advance, a correspondent for Time was present. On November 30, 1936, Dietrich (clothed and with a distinctly Mona Lisa smile) graced the magazine’s cover. Onscreen, her bubble bath was the sole moment of interest in a picture that otherwise induced in viewers only a stupefying lethargy.
But there was also a mild disturbance when the German actress Mady Soyka, wife of Dietrich’s former Berlin agent, visited her dressing room; with her was journalist Willi Frischauer, who years later recalled the meeting. Soyka had been sent by Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s propaganda minister) with an offer of fifty thousand British pounds, payable tax-free and in any currency, if Dietrich would return to Germany for just a month to make one picture. “You can have anything you want,” Soyka said. “Anything!”
But despite her widely quoted comment that “America is not my country,” Dietrich had not implied that Germany was. Compatriots by the score in the United States, France and England had been telling her what the press had now begun to confirm, and so—brilliantly exploiting her trademark brand of aloof disdain—she cast a long, appraising, head-to-toe stare at Mady Soyka and then replied flatly, “This comes as a great surprise,” referring no doubt to the condemnations of her that had become commonplace in the German press since the time of Song of Songs. Soyka increased the pressure: “There will be an immediate reversal of the press campaign against you. The German public will be suitably prepared for your return.”
The political implications of this apparently casual meeting were enormous, but Dietrich—who knew she was being used like the 1936 summer Olympic games in Germany, for propaganda and prestige—would have none of it. “Darling,” she said sweetly, spinning a fantastic fiction for Mady Soyka, “how nice of you to bring me this marvelous offer. What a pity I cannot accept it at the moment. You see, I am under contract for the next two years, which takes us to the end of 1938. Then I am committed to do a play on Broadway in 1939. Shall we not return to the idea perhaps in 1940 or 1941?”
Dietrich’s visitor departed swiftly. When the Nazis later occupied Paris during the war, Soyka, a great beauty celebrated for her naturally golden hair, managed a café on the Champs-Elysées. But some members of the French Resistance were offended when she ostentatiously wore gems and bracelets that had once belonged to Parisian Jews who subsequently vanished. One day in 1942, so did she: it was later determined that the Resistance had whisked her off, coiffed and bejewelled, to a swift, quiet execution as retribution for her spying on French Jews.
DELAYS DURING KNIGHT WITHOUT ARMOUR DID not leave Dietrich idle. In her suite at Claridge’s she welcomed interviewers and in midsummer returned briefly to Paris for fittings with couturiers. But most of her private time in London for the remainder of 1936 and into early 1937 was spent in the company of the American actor Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Son of the spirited silent-screen star, he was pursuing a movie career of his own, mostly in England, where his social connections enabled him to enjoy the company of aristocrats, statesmen and even the confidence of some members of the royal family—among them George, Duke of Kent (brother of the still uncrowned King Edward VIII) and his wife, Princess Marina of Greece. A tall, articulate, witty and strikingly handsome man, Fairbanks was then divorced from Joan Crawford and had (as he described in his memoirs) a vivid and busy romantic life—until he met Marlene Dietrich that July, at a dinner party given by Alexander Korda. Only years after their last meeting did he learn she was eight years older than he.
Soon after the evening at Korda’s, Fairbanks invited Dietrich to the premiere of his new film, Accused; she accepted, bringing along Rudi and Tamara, who were then visiting in London. At first baffled by the openly unconventional arrangement, Fairbanks quickly learned that the Siebers were, as he said years later, “really like brother and sister. It had, Marlene said, been a marriage only long enough for Maria to have been conceived, but they remained good friends and he managed her finances.” Within a week of that evening, Fairbanks and Dietrich were spending most nights together, alternately in her suite and his new penthouse flat, very near Claridge’s, at 20 Grosvenor Square, Mayfair.
At first, Fairbanks assumed their affair was “only her passing fancy”—doubtless a reaction not only to her obvious independence but also to the shrine on her bedside table, with a votive candle ever burning before a photo of John Gilbert. These items remained in plain view for over two months, as Dietrich persisted (so said Fairbanks) in “maintaining the fictitious drama that John Gilbert died because of her,” an assertion stoutly rejected by Gilbert’s family. The memorabilia were temporarily packed away only when she abandoned her hotel suite and took a small flat on the floor below Fairbanks in Grosvenor Square. There the relationship thrived without the awkward hindrances of Claridge’s, where, on mornings after a formal event he had attended with Dietrich, Fairbanks had to descend a rear fire escape in full-dress tailcoat.
Although, as Fairbanks later admitted, he and Dietrich were not really in love with each other, it was “a relationship of more sophisticated intensity” than he had hitherto known. She was not only an ardent mistress; she also responded empathetically to the strained relationship between Fairbanks and his famous, powerful and somewhat intimidating father who “rarely seemed to be more than vaguely aware of my presence . . . I failed to win any real affection from him.”
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was, therefore, not only an appealing and socially desirable companion she could respect but also one, like von Sternberg, to whom she could extend the kind of nurturing solace that was at once manipulative, parental and even somewhat detached. While neither as isolated as von Sternberg nor as wounded as Gilbert, Fairbanks was, at twenty-six, emotionally vulnerable after the failure of his marriage to the formidable Joan Crawford. He was nevertheless serious about his career and young enough to be responsive to an internationally famous woman who had raised tender domination to the level of a fine art. In his memoirs, Fairbanks described his mother, the redoubtable Anna Beth Sully, as a woman who “longed for—but seldom got—the kind of smothering devotion that she lavished on her own loved ones.” His subsequent attraction to two equally strong women (Crawford and Dietrich) is not hard to understand.
Perhaps because Knight Without Armour had introduced her to a few Russian words (or because it was the name of the Duke of Kent’s German shepherd), Dietrich gave Fairbanks the nickname “Dushka,” a term of endearment. This was not only an effective code-name for messages and notes; she also had it engraved on expensive gifts for him, among them a gold wristwatch. On weekends during film production, the lovers regularly entertained for cocktails and dinner—unless they had accepted an invitation out of town, to Lady Morvyth’s country house in Hampshire, for example, or to Coppins, the Kents’ residence in Buckinghamshire. Despite widespread economic hardship, 1936 was for the upper classes perhaps the zenith of England’s age of lustrous (if somewhat fanciful) social elegance. Dietrich, always magnificent to escort, was also enough of a Prussian traditionalist to be a zealous supporter of the English monarchy, a posture which could only have further endeared this glamorous star to her fashionable new friends. (Some, to her dismay, were as ardent in their support of Germany as she was of England.)
So much was Dietrich a royalist, in fact, that she was roused to dramatic action by the rumors of Edward VIII’s imminent abdication for the sake of Wallis Simpson in early December 1936. Distressed that the king might indeed defy the advice of his ministers and the hopes of his people, she was suddenly convinced that she—and only she—could prevent history from taking a tragic course. The first week of December, Dietrich summoned her liveried chauffeur and, determined to dissuade the king (by seducing him, if necessary) from abandoning the throne for Mrs. Simpson, she motored down to Fort Belvedere in her enormous limousine. But her arrival in such grand style was a signal to the ever present press as well as the police, and despite her altercation with the guards, Dietrich could not gain admission. Within days, Edward broadcast his news to the world—an event which, she was persuaded, would never have occurred had she been permitted a meeting with His Majesty.
As Fairbanks recalled, Dietrich basked in her new aristocratic connections and began to exaggerate her own pedigree. During that season, she even seriously weighed the potential advantages of adopting British citizenship. She was, however, embarrassed by the fact that her uncle had commanded the first Zeppelin raid over London during the war, and she feared this being known. Not so her romance with Fairbanks. With the shrewdness of a Hollywood publicist, she refused ever to confirm the affair, then or later; on the contrary, she always allowed her relationships (even those that remained platonic) to be the more excitingly surmised.
DIETRICH’S AFFECTATION OF BEING LINKED TO A NOble lineage was, according to Fairbanks, another of her brilliantly assumed illusions. Well trained from childhood in the requirements of a beguiling persona, she played the role of glamour queen to perfection, invariably saying and wearing the right thing. Related to this, she spoke of von Sternberg as a godlike artist precisely because this reinforced her status as his ultimate masterpiece on the pedestal to which he had raised her. But there was, Fairbanks realized, another woman in Dietrich—a Hausfrau who put a towel around her head, scrubbed her lover’s kitchen floor and then cheerfully prepared their dinner: “In these tasks, she divested herself completely of mysterious allure and became a fun-loving European woman who wanted to enjoy life.” What she gave the public, on the other hand, was the part of herself elaborated by von Sternberg, and this role she grew to covet; indeed, she contributed quite willingly to the myth.
By coincidence, the myth-maker was also in London, and several evenings in late 1936 Dietrich and Fairbanks dined with von Sternberg, Korda and his own contracted star (and soon his wife), Merle Oberon. Ever loyal to her mentor—and well aware that Korda was in deep financial trouble because of the delays over Knight Without Armour and the failure of his films Things to Come and The Man Who Could Work Miracles—Dietrich told Korda that if he found something for von Sternberg to direct, she would forfeit payment of the 100,000 still owed on her salary for Knight. This generous offer he accepted, and shortly into the new year 1937, Korda replaced William Cameron Menzies with Josef von Sternberg as director of the forthcoming epic I, Claudius, starring Charles Laughton and scheduled to begin in February. But Laughton clashed constantly with von Sternberg, causing major delays and increased costs. Thus, when Oberon was injured in an auto crash, Korda had the excuse he needed to shut down the hapless picture. Von Sternberg, feeling more anxious and rejected than ever, was paid off, but the collapse of this promising vehicle and the subsequent invasion of Austria pitched him into a nervous breakdown. To Dietrich’s dismay, he was virtually an immobilized catatonic for over a year.
ON JANUARY 18, 1937, DIETRICH WAVED FAREwell to Fairbanks, Sieber, Matul and Maria (who was on holiday from the Ecole Brilliamont in Switzerland) from the deck of the Berengaria and departed from Southampton. Back in Hollywood by mid-February after a sojourn in New York, she began a week’s rehearsals for her last Paramount film—Angel, directed by Ernst Lubitsch. This was perhaps one of the two or three most disappointing pictures of her entire career, and in it she gave nothing like a gala farewell performance.
In this arid, talky and unconvincing romance (based on a creaky Hungarian play), she was Lady Maria Barker, the neglected and bored wife of an English diplomat (Herbert Marshall). On a Paris holiday she meets a handsome American (Melvyn Douglas) who falls in love with her, and after ninety minutes of brave sentiments, whispered protests of love and ever so polite threats of disentanglement, the Barkers rediscover their lost love and the American parvenu nobly withdraws from the family circle.
Angel promoted the career of no one associated with it, and because the director and cast soon realized they had committed to a loser, tempers were as short as the dialogue’s wit. Lubitsch and Dietrich, hitherto friendly colleagues, were barely speaking by the film’s completion on June 14. One typical critique said straight out that Dietrich, although beautifully gowned, was “at the root of [the picture’s] evils . . . The film comes to a full stop every time she raises or lowers the artificially elongated Dietrich eyelids,” which she did so often that she seemed a sphinx without a riddle.
Away from the studio, her life was happier. Mercedes de Acosta hosted several welcoming soirées; Dietrich bought a snappy new white convertible roadster (for the impressive sum of 2,245); and in March she rented a house in Beverly Hills. Having moved so often as a child and never having had a permanent home even in her adult Berlin life, she was comfortable with frequent changes of residence; this was her sixth California address.
On March 5, Maria Magdalene Dietrich Sieber applied formally for American citizenship, taking an oath of allegiance in Federal Court before naturalization clerk George Ruperich. On her papers, she provided correctly all the details (the date and place of her marriage, and of her husband’s and daughter’s birth)—except one. She gave her date of birth as December 27, 1904, and thus three years were neatly subtracted from her official age.
Her application was not ignored in Germany, where a photo of Dietrich with Ruperich was accompanied by a comment in Berlin’s Der Stürmer, Julius Streicher’s notoriously anti-Semitic newspaper:
Marlene Dietrich, the film actress of German origin, has spent so many years with the cinema Jews of Hollywood that she has become an American citizen. The association with Jews has made her whole character quite un-German. In the picture we see her taking the oath in Los Angeles. The Jewish judge’s contempt for the legally prescribed oath is revealed by his demeanor: in his shirtsleeves he administers to Marlene Dietrich the oath by which she betrays her Fatherland.
Apart from the usual Nazi malevolence, Streicher had the facts wrong: Dietrich would not in fact win her citizenship for two years (this was an application to begin the process), and Ruperich was third-generation Bavarian Catholic.
AFTER PLAYING THE LAST SCENES OF ANGEL, DIEtrich lost no time preparing to depart for an extended European holiday. Paramount, she knew from her agent Harry Edington, had no idea how to remedy the disaster they expected from the film and so were disinclined to renew her contract. Except for some kind words for her subtle comic gifts in Desire, she had not received any really glowing critical notices since Morocco. Additionally, The Garden of Allah was a terrific disappointment and advance word on Knight Without Armour was discouraging. Now thirty-five, she knew the film-fan polls showed disenchantment—even uninterest—after seven years and ten films of basically insubstantial Dietrich exoticism. For the past two years, she had been the highest paid woman in the world, receiving almost half a million dollars a year for very little actual working time. But that was all about to end, and now she had no indication that her career would endure; accordingly, she decided to retreat rather than sustain the scorn Hollywood so likes to heap on those once adored.
The summer of 1937 began in Switzerland, where she collected Maria at school and planned a holiday with her, Rudi and Tamara. Dietrich then dispatched a telegram to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in London, inviting him to join her in Austria. Unaware that the plans included an extended family, Fairbanks arrived two days later, astonished and disappointed to find what he termed “really a rather curious ménage.”
The arrangement was indeed knotty even by the most tolerant criteria, and it suggested that Dietrich’s relationship with Sieber could occasionally be at least casually carnal. Even as she shared a room with Fairbanks, she extended herself liberally, leaving their bed and blithely toddling down the corridor to join Rudi and Tamara—and not only for hot chocolate. This may, in an odd way, have had more to do with the latter than the former, for Dietrich saw “Tami” as a necessary, helpful adjunct to her own life: Matul not only made Rudi happy, she also looked after Maria’s needs in Europe. And because Matul (also a product of the freewheeling Berlin life of the 1920s) was not immune to feminine blandishments, Dietrich may well have known that to please her would be, in effect, to please Rudi (and by extension Maria). “This design for living,” Fairbanks reflected years later (alluding to the Noël Coward play about a romantic trio), “was really not within my experience, much less my desire, and I made known my displeasure—to no avail, of course. Why did I sustain it? I was completely carried away with Marlene.” In this he was not unique.
Apart from this element, which seemed of concern only to Fairbanks, the summer was passed in pleasant indolence, and mother and daughter enjoyed an unusually protracted period together. “Her devotion to Maria was very touching,” Fairbanks added,
although she was so extremely maternal one wasn’t sure whether this, too, was a part she was playing. But I remember thinking that the child had not much sense of who or where she was. It seemed to me an odd way of bringing her up, but of course no one criticized. That summer Marlene was the doting mother—until she decided to go with her public image again, and then she was the distant, remote and cool Venus.
This odd quintet remained several months at a rustic, timbered chalet on a lake near Salzburg. They visited Max Reinhardt at his summer festival there, sat on benches in the sunshine and drank huge steins of beer, dined at a local inn (or at home, where Dietrich as usual prepared the meals) and listened to Tyrolean music in the summer twilight.
By mid-November, Maria had been returned to her Swiss academy, Rudi and Tamara were en route to Paris, Fairbanks to London and Dietrich to Hollywood. During a stopover in New York, she received the unsurprising news from Harry Edington that Paramount had definitely decided not to renew her contract. The woman who could so recently command the richest deal in the history of movies was now unemployed, had established an expensive and indulgent lifestyle, and—with two years of back taxes still owed—lacked any source of income.
Before Christmas, on Rudi’s advice, she sped to Los Angeles, moved her clothes out of her furnished house, dismissed her maid and chauffeur, sold the car and moved to a hotel. But despite the widespread knowledge that she was in effect out of work, she comported herself publicly with the serene dignity befitting Alexandra, the exiled countess she had played so prettily in Knight Without Armour. Independent as ever, she refused an offer to live with Mercedes de Acosta; instead, she exploited the sheer force of her charm and prevailed on the management of the Beverly Hills Hotel to open a long-term account in her name. That Christmas, she invited fourteen friends and cooked a lavish roast beef dinner in her private bungalow.
* Later the film was resuscitated as Hotel Imperial with Margaret Sullavan, but she fell and broke her arm on the set. Two years later, the film was completed and released, starring Ray Milland and Isa Miranda.
* Reviewing Knight Without Armour, Frank Nugent commented on Dietrich’s attitude of “unpardonable complacence, as though she had just turned from a mirror” (New York Times, July 9, 1937).