10: 1937–1940
FROM JUNE 1937 TO SEPTEMBER 1939, MARLENE Dietrich did not receive any offer to work; her career had suddenly stopped, although she had by this time achieved international fame and unprecedented compensation.
She was certainly not without a minor but effective talent, but this had mostly to do with her relationship to the camera; she was no Duse, and she knew it. Dietrich was, however, absolutely sui generis, and she never indulged in the petty hypocrisies of many stars. She stamped her own trademark, lived according to her own creeds, forged an image that was a direct reflection of her own social and sexual complexity. In important ways, therefore, she was perhaps the first triumphant example of self-promotion.
The suppressed passion, the mysterious allure and the almost diffident sensuality Dietrich conveyed were regarded by audiences during the Great Depression with the same adoration offered to Greta Garbo. But styles were changing, and in surveys conducted in fan magazines and theater lobbies, moviegoers listed their female favorites as Ginger Rogers, Irene Dunne, Luise Rainer, Bette Davis, Jean Arthur and Claudette Colbert—all of them more accessible, more real, somehow, less elusive and illusory—and none of them radiating the fatal sensuality of Dietrich or the inviolable allure of Garbo, both of whom were more suited to the earlier conventions of deliberately artificial, more romantic films. Much of this change derived from the techniques of cinematography and lighting, which by the late 1930s were sharper, more clarified—just as audiences no longer required the ever more fantastic escapist fare popular at the height of economic disaster. None of this was part of anything like a programmed approach to the business of moviemaking. Studios continued, on the contrary, to operate as they always had, responding seasonally to the whims of audiences and occasionally risking, on order from an executive, the creation of a new star.
In 1938, Dietrich could assume that she was only in temporary stasis, awaiting a new director, a first-rate script, a fresh offer from Paramount, a return to favor—or even, as she expressly hoped, an offer to work in France for a director like Jean Renoir; or in England, where, it was rumored, Josef von Sternberg would be welcome despite the collapse of I, Claudius. She bided her time, and on American radio programs she read some pallid romances with actors like Don Ameche, or engaged in comic repartee with Edgar Bergen and his wisecracking dummy Charlie McCarthy (who, as some might have observed, also wore a top hat and formal dress suit).
Tax authorities continued to hound her for monies past due, and that spring (acting on a suggestion from Harry Edington) she took a brilliant counteroffensive, claiming that she had not reneged but actually overpaid. Her husband could not work in America because he could not speak English, she said; therefore she wished to refile for each year since 1931, on the basis of community property and a shared loss. The case would continue to be argued for three years.
But her hopes for a new contract to revive her fading career were dealt a severe blow in May 1938. Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners of America, announced in the trade journals Variety and The Hollywood Reporter (and newspapers across the country soon promulgated it) that certain players no longer pleased moviegoers and were therefore undesirable at the box office. This was not merely a rude display of Brandt’s personal taste, for in the case of Dietrich, for example, The Garden of Allah, Knight Without Armour and Angel were indeed crashing financial failures in the theaters. Studios were accordingly urged not to make pictures with Mae West, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and a few men like Edward Arnold.
West, munching breakfast in bed at one in the afternoon, took a reporter’s inquiring telephone call: “Well,” she drawled, referring indirectly to one of her classic comedies, “Brandt and his little men have done us wrong. All I know is that whenever the guys in the front office want to pay their mortgage, they call me up with an idea for a picture.”*
Dietrich’s response to the Brandt manifesto was an icy, wounded silence. But privately her life continued more or less cheerfully. By autumn 1938, the unstable European situation leading to war had brought Maria back to California (Rudi and Tamara were still in Paris). Dietrich enrolled her daughter in a private school and engaged tutors for extra language lessons and trainers for horseback riding. (One of Maria’s best friends and sporting companions at the time was a wistful, nervous fourteen-year-old whose name had recently been changed from Frances Gumm to Judy Garland.)
That same season, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was making a picture in Hollywood, and he and Dietrich virtually lived together, spending nights at his home or in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They went out but rarely, and when photographed together at a restaurant or nightclub, Dietrich (as he recalled) “took this in her famous ‘world-weary’ manner, and I took it with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.” Despite her professional crisis, he noted no especial sadness or anxiety in her manner that year, and they went through what he called “the motions of secrecy” about their affair—though he was sometimes “in a fury because Marlene occasionally swam in the buff” at the pool parties she gave on Sunday afternoon at her rented Santa Monica beach house (some luxuries evidently still being necessities).
“She enjoyed having her beauty appreciated,” said Fairbanks with bemused diplomacy; such had been the opinion, too, of the film crew of Knight Without Armour, and of John Engstead, who recalled that she often welcomed photographers and reporters to her Paramount dressing room wearing only a sheer foundation garment or the skimpiest covering. Every performer has to be a kind of exhibitionist; a few can sometimes be defined by the term quite literally. For Marlene Dietrich—always comfortable exhibiting herself—“more” often meant “less.”
On June 9, 1939, however, she dressed like the movie stereotype of a grade-school librarian, wearing a grey serge suit to take her oath of American citizenship—stating on her affidavit that she was born in 1905—not, as she had previously stated on the application, 1904 (much less the truthful 1901). Everyone politely ignored her new birthdate, and that evening, she and Maria left Los Angeles for New York, where Rudi awaited; they were to proceed thence for a European holiday. “I am glad to be a niece of Uncle Sam,” she told reporters as she drew a gold-tipped cigarette from a platinum case after the ceremony.
As it happened, her Uncle Sam immediately decided to extract more than the tribute of gratitude from his new niece. On June 14, the Siebers boarded the Normandie for a summer on the Riviera, to be financed by savings Rudi had kept jointly on behalf of himself and his wife. But in addition to the passengers and well-wishers, the ship was bustling with agents of the Internal Revenue Service, who were much more punctilious about details than the Naturalization Office. For six hours, embarkation was delayed as federal officers Bernard Campbell, J. B. McNamara and Steve Ryan presented writs, liens and attachments, arguing with Dietrich and Rudi about a tax debt of 
248,000, due on her 1936 British salary for Knight Without Armour. Her thirty-four pieces of luggage were at first removed from the Normandie, returned to her an hour later, then taken away again and finally restored while Dietrich, her New York lawyer William B. Jaffe and United States attorney John T. Cahill debated whether she should be forbidden to leave the country (and perhaps even be subject to arrest) with such an array of possessions while so large a tax debt was pending. (Wisely, Sieber—who had no legal responsibility for his wife’s case, since he was not a citizen and had earned no American income—kept a quiet distance.)
At last they reached an agreement, much to the relief of impatient passengers, of weary baggage handlers and of the Normandie’s officers, who were more concerned with tides than taxes. Dietrich, perched atop her largest trunk, dipped into a large handbag and withdrew 108,000 worth of diamonds, emeralds and gold. These she offered for an escrow account held by the IRS and by her attorney Jaffe against the final disposition of the government’s claims; the shipboard brouhaha was the lead story in every New York newspaper the next day. (Remarkably, the government decided in Dietrich’s favor, and all the gems were returned to her in May 1941—along with more than 23,000 she duly claimed to have overpaid for 1936.)
BUT THIS ANNOYING DELAY DID NOT FORESTALL THE gaiety of the six-day crossing. With the Siebers for the summer holiday was von Sternberg, whom they invited at the last minute. Recovering from his breakdown, he was carefully attended by Dietrich throughout the journey—but not as the recipient of her amorous adoration. That was reserved for another addition to their party, a famous German writer in exile whom the Siebers had just met that week in New York.
Born in Westphalia in 1898, Erich Maria Remarque had served in the German army during the first World War and was seriously wounded five times. Discharged after the armistice was signed, he worked as a teacher, cemetery stonemason, race-car driver and advertising copywriter, and then he began to compose articles on automobiles and sports. Throughout the 1920s, he worked diligently on his first novel, Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), a powerful denunciation of war which, published in 1929, brought him permanent fame and considerable wealth, inaugurating as well a serious if uneven literary career. The film version of that book, made in 1930, earned him a small fortune and ensured the future movie sale of several less impressive novels. In 1938, Germany officially deprived him of citizenship on the basis that All Quiet offended his country’s soldiers.
A quiet, soft-spoken man who wore a monocle and drank too much, Remarque had arrived in America in early 1939 with his wife, Ilsa Jeanne Zamboui, whom he had divorced in 1932 but remarried in 1938 (somewhat diffidently and, it seems, only to provide her with egress from Germany and entry to America). By June 1939, Zamboui was in Mexico seeking a second divorce.* Shunning literary fame and the adulation of strangers, Remarque’s taste for fine food and wine nonetheless made him a regular patron of those restaurants frequented by celebrities. Certainly no womanizer, he was also, at forty, not immune to the importunate charm of someone like Dietrich.
At New York’s “21” Club that June, he was therefore not unresponsive when introduced to Dietrich. She shared Remarque’s interest in nineteenth-century art (although she was far less knowledgeable), and he told her of his growing collection of works by van Gogh, Cézanne, Renoir and Degas. At once she was taken with this handsome, articulate man; and he with her, as he later told their mutual friend Stefan Lorant. That first evening, Dietrich invented an affectionate pet-name for Remarque: “Boni,” an old Berlin schoolgirl’s version of the Latin substantive meaning “good man” or “good guy.”
But Remarque was attractive to Dietrich for reasons other than cultural: he had a somewhat dispirited, rueful demeanor when discussing the rise of Nazism and the world’s apparently headlong rush toward another hideous conflagration. This combination of good looks, talent, sensitivity and a kind of general sadness was again irresistible to Dietrich (as they had been part of her attraction to Kreuder, von Sternberg and Gilbert, among others). “His melancholy and sensitivity bordered on the pathological,” Dietrich wrote after his death. “I was deeply moved by this trait of his personality. Our special relationship all too often, unfortunately, gave me an opportunity to witness his despair.”
That first evening, she offered her usual brand of consolation—herself. After spending the night with Dietrich in his suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel (where, concidentally, she and Rudi were also booked), he immediately accepted the offer to join her little retinue for a summer in France. Romantic and visionary he may have been, but Remarque was after all a European, and he did not find Dietrich’s domestic arrangement indecorous; for the next two years he was her most constant and frequent lover.
During the summer, the group’s social circle widened in Paris and on the Riviera, and at various times the Siebers, Tamara, von Sternberg and Remarque dined and toured the countryside with the French actor Jean Gabin, whom they met in Paris. They also gave a cocktail party for the American ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, vacationing with his son John; and they attached themselves to a circle round the multitalented Noël Coward, whose stylish wit enchanted Dietrich. Without ever being introduced, she had telephoned him in May 1935 from Hollywood to congratulate him on his film appearance in The Scoundrel. Now, pursuing his friendship as she did that of Hemingway and Remarque, she began to learn Coward’s songs.
This motley group assembled for much of July at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden Roc in Antibes, where in the evenings Dietrich held court with Coward as she crooned his songs and those of Hollander in her now smoky, swooping baritone. For European society and the social press, Marlene Dietrich was, at thirty-seven, a film actress on extended holiday and the star of a small but glittering cast of worshipful international luminaries. She led her friends a merry chase, wining and dining from Paris to Cannes and back again, to the gambling casino at Monte Carlo, to bistros in Juan-les-Pins. (“Nobody knows to what extent Marlene was seen with some of her men primarily for the publicity value,” as playwright Moss Hart said.)
Several days each week, however, she and Remarque slipped quietly away from the group, motoring for an evening tryst at an inn near Antibes, or for picnics in the hills of Vence and Grasse and a night in a petite auberge. They drank Calvados and drove (at least twice) to Paris for weekends, strolling over and under the city’s bridges and through the Tuileries and Jardin du Luxembourg: “the sturdy Kraut,” as Hemingway called her, could obviously play the Gallic amorist, and Remarque was now the leading man in her drama.
Passionate the romance may have been; it was also laced with mutual suspicion and the remnants of Remarque’s Bavarian Catholic guilt. Confident that their affair would sooner or later end, Remarque became the kind of gloomy, jealous lover who seemed fated to pursue his own unhappiness. He had perhaps tried to counteract his own rigid past with her unfettered present, but this was asking too much of himself, for he had come to resent her independence, her freedom to pursue another amour if that suited her.
For her part, Dietrich constantly told Remarque she could not live without him. In her way, she perhaps meant this, but her way was not so profound and imbued with philosophy as his. He wanted to discuss history, the arts, international affairs with her and with their friends; into such conversations she entered, but Dietrich preferred to haul out a portable phonograph, put on her recordings and describe for the group the difficult circumstances of each one’s production or the film from which it was excerpted. She appreciated (in the words Ophelia used to describe Hamlet) being the observed of all observers. Nevertheless, that summer of 1939, Dietrich much depended on a kind of fierce sexual bonding with a fellow countryman who also provided intellectual excitement.
But by August, as the threat of war loomed ever larger, there were also career developments impinging on the summer’s idleness. Although she had an offer to appear in a French film under the direction of Julien Duvivier (who had made Pépé le Moko and Un Carnet de Bal), there was also a most unusual bid from Hollywood. Joe Pasternak, an independent producer contracted to Universal Pictures, sent cables and portions of a script in progress called Destry Rides Again, planned as a raucous musical parody of cowboy movies, but with an underlying tenderness and a clear if subtle antiwar subtext.
Pasternak wanted Dietrich for the role of Frenchy, a hardboiled dance-hall girl who falls for the gentle strength of a new sheriff named Tom Destry; she begins to mend her evil ways, discovers the proverbial true love with Tom, and finally dies, stopping a bullet meant for him and fired by her former lover. But there was one serious drawback to the contract for her services. After the Brandt manifesto, Universal authorized Pasternak to offer Dietrich only 75,000 for the picture, just one sixth of her previous price. She hesitated, and not only because of the salary and the unglamorous role; additionally, at that time Universal did not have the prestige of, say, Paramount or MGM.
But Remarque (not von Sternberg, as she always insisted later) read the outline and sample script pages of Destry Rides Again and urged her to accept. Ignore the salary, he said; this movie might well revive her career and even create a new dimension to it. Her co-star was to be James Stewart, much praised for having rendered an appealing performance in Frank Capra’s patriotic comedy Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; he had been chosen for an important featured role in a forthcoming film of The Philadelphia Story (for which he eventually won a best supporting Oscar). Quickly rising star though he was, Stewart’s name would appear in the credits after Dietrich’s; it would be her picture if she could make it so, Pasternak promised. On August 16, she obtained the only remaining pair of connecting first-class staterooms on the Queen Mary and sailed for America, with Remarque as her companion; the others followed soon after (Rudi, Tamara and Maria settling temporarily in New York).
A few days after war broke out in September, Dietrich was safely at Universal Studios for wardrobe fittings on Destry Rides Again. To the press she expressed anxiety for her mother in Germany, but there was still no mention to anyone about her sister Elisabeth. Even a long-term friend like Stefan Lorant was unaware of Elisabeth’s existence. “Ah, that is easy to understand with Marlene,” he said when informed in 1991. “It is simply part of the myth she has created—the legend of the only child.”
The rest of the legend, however—the creature so rapturously conceived and presented by von Sternberg—was rousingly and immediately dashed to pieces by her performance as Frenchy, and as it happened audiences loved it. A vulgar, rowdy singer at the Last Chance Saloon in the town of Bottleneck, Dietrich had three songs, one of which—“See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have”—became as much a popular signature tune as “Falling in Love Again.” Only for these scenes was she attractively dressed and photographed; otherwise, Dietrich fully cooperated in her presentation as a tarty hellcat: she swilled whiskey, munched crudely on a chicken leg, stuffed cash in her bosom (muttering with a smile, “There’s gold in them thar hills”*) and engaged in a wild fistfight and wrestling match with Una Merkel, who played a jealous townswoman. Kicking, punching, rolling on the floor, shrieking like a savage, throwing chairs, doused with a bucket of water and still swinging her fists, Dietrich filmed the “catfight scene” over four days, after which she and Merkel were much bruised and scratched—but still friendly, especially after Joe Pasternak and director George Marshall promised that this sequence alone would make movie history. It did. In Destry Rides Again, Dietrich made Frenchy the most beautiful manly woman of her career, while her swagger made James Stewart appear even more gentle, more passive and feminine than Gary Cooper in Morocco.
Some of this is in the script, of course. First seen with a parasol and birdcage, Stewart is carefully introduced as the pacifist lawman who refuses to wear guns and speaks with an almost fearful gentleness. In the role of Thomas Jefferson Destry (the middle name capitalizing on his recent role as Jefferson Smith, who went so effectively to Washington for Frank Capra), Stewart—never really a sex symbol in American film—is not so much an adoring man but a kind of transforming, almost ministerial one, as sexless as a plaster saint. He recoils from Dietrich’s languid but aggressive manner and her coarse, exaggerated makeup, and she is so impressed by his sheer difference from other men that she wipes off her lipstick and gazes at herself in a mirror, wondering if he is right about her looks. The moment is reprised in the final scene, when she dashes in front of Stewart to shield him from a gunshot. Taking the bullet and dying in his arms, she again wipes off her lipstick with the back of her hand, begging to be worthy of his kiss at last. The moment works in spite of its rather arch melodramatics.
Dietrich is the macho gal throughout. Lawless, promiscuous, brash, a satiric study in tawdriness, she dispatched a performance that restored her to critical and popular favor and demonstrated her eagerness to find the right blend of comedy and romance in a new kind of role. By her thoroughly physical involvement, she accepted that her earlier glamorous image had become obsolete. She wanted, in other words, to be one of Hollywood’s popular breed of new leading ladies—to be ranked with the likes of Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, and even the imported Vivien Leigh—all of them strong, active heroines coping (sometimes toughly, sometimes comically) with serious social realities and, surprisingly often, outwitting male characters much in need of maturation and taming. These women played characters who were neither weaklings nor passive ciphers, and often they had the intellectual and moral superiority in the stories.
In this regard, Frenchy is no heroine, but she is certainly the only interesting character in Destry Rides Again, the sole person who changes and finally makes a grand gesture, even a sacrifice. Stewart’s Destry is simply the nice voice of decency, a kind of Mr. Smith Goes to Bottleneck; Dietrich’s Frenchy, however, moves the story forward from inner transformation to outer action. Her long, slow gazes in this picture are no longer the morally indifferent affectations of a world-weary mannequin; accompanied by her oddly appropriate pauses, these looks signalled the character’s fresh perceptions. Photographed by Hal Mohr with a sharp realism and minus the sanctifying diffusion favored by von Sternberg, Dietrich appears amused when others in the story are anxious, serene when they are frenzied, and at every moment she is a surprising counterpoint to the typical barroom moll. In her rumbustious manner and gun-toting singing, she had the opportunity to demonstrate her flair for comedy even more than in Desire. Her Frenchy conveyed an innate understanding that a hussy is not necessarily a harlot.
Produced the same year as Stagecoach, Drums Along the Mohawk, Jesse James and Union Pacific, Destry Rides Again was the second of four screen versions of the same story (inspiring some forgotten wag to call it Destry Rides Again and Again and Again). Inevitably overshadowed in 1939 by Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights, The Wizard of Oz and The Grapes of Wrath, the picture retains a lively sassiness, but it is the presence of Dietrich (at first undesired by Universal, who wanted Paulette Goddard) that enabled the story to find its deepest logic, uniting the tensions of the western-frontier tale with the exigencies of both the musical and the screwball comedy—and giving it, in the final analysis, a credible humanity. For the first time in years, audiences adored her.
DURING A DEMANDING SIX-WEEK SHOOTING SCHEDule that autumn and winter of 1939, Dietrich was also socially busier than ever. Always fascinated by astrology, she now began to consult professional stargazer Carroll Righter on a thrice-weekly basis. No, she would tell a friend, the stars were inauspicious for a weekend trip to Palm Springs; or yes, Carroll has approved her appointment for an interview and photo session two weeks from Thursday. To friends like Hemingway, Lorant, Fairbanks and others her belief in celestial influences seemed genuine; but invariably this philosophy enabled her to live according to her convenience, while offering the unassailable argument of faith as her sure defense. The intersection of Mars with Jupiter’s seventh moon somehow never dictated an inopportune duty or a troublesome engagement.
Righter, a cultured and influential homosexual with a large Hollywood clientele, was also an enthusiastic advocate of Dietrich’s industrious sex life, and this, too, may have won her appreciation and helped to justify her trust in his counsel. As if she were a historic lady predestined for majestic intrigues, Righter supported her dizzy round of alternate nights with Fairbanks and Remarque and with the French actor Jean Gabin, who began visiting Los Angeles in 1940. By grave references to heavenly charts and zodiacal concurrences, and with much furrowing of his brow, Righter advised Dietrich to see Fairbanks on this evening, Remarque on that, Gabin on the other, Mercedes de Acosta on such a weekend; this advice, which she frankly disclosed to each one, was received with amusement—at least, perhaps, when desires were not too often frustrated.
But besides acting like a kind of noble courtesan under the tutelage of a popular occultist, she often resembled a character in a bedroom farce by Beaumarchais. Once after a day at the studio, for example, she had planned—on Righter’s advice—an evening with Fairbanks, and in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel she was hurrying to prepare for his arrival when Mercedes de Acosta swept in unannounced and asked for a drink. This she sipped in the bathroom, chattering away while Dietrich bathed. When the telephone rang, de Acosta obligingly took the call and, recognizing the voice of Erich Maria Remarque, reported coolly that Dietrich had gone out for the evening. That was impossible, Remarque replied: he was to have visited her an hour earlier and was calling to announce he was nearby and en route. De Acosta lied that Dietrich had already departed—to which Remarque replied that he would come to see that for himself.
When Dietrich was told about the call, she suddenly remembered that indeed she had promised to listen to Erich read aloud some pages of a new novel he was writing. De Acosta, none too pleased with this ongoing male competition, then departed—but without telling Dietrich that Remarque was soon expected. Moments later, Fairbanks arrived and, typically, Dietrich brought him to her room while she dressed, intending to shuffle him out a back door with the protest of a sudden sick headache. But before she could play this scene, Remarque approached her door. Fairbanks sprang to answer the knock, and, although nonplussed, he acted with his usual grace and offered Remarque a drink. When Dietrich finally entered the room, she surveyed the awkward atmosphere and decided on a casual finesse. “I have so looked forward to introducing you two gentlemen,” she said. “Now, where shall we dine?” As they gazed at her blankly, the doorbell chimed again, and there stood Josef von Sternberg, who swept her up in a passionate embrace (ironic only to them both) as if she had no other love in the world.
BUT SOON DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, JR., GREW WEARY of being a rival for her time and attention—“not only from the more assured and intellectual Erich Maria Remarque,” as he admitted, “but [also when I discovered] some intense love letters from someone I’d never heard of.” The writer of these passionate documents was none other than Mercedes de Acosta, with whom Dietrich was of course still involved (most often at de Acosta’s home in Brentwood once or twice a week, and sometimes for weekends at a Santa Barbara hotel). Fairbanks confronted Dietrich with the letters, and she was as resentful of his prying as he was of her bisexual philandering. Harsh words were exchanged, the relationship swiftly began to cool, and by spring 1940 Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., ended an affair that had blazed brightly for almost four years. After the war, a less complicated, platonic friendship resumed.
On the other hand, Dietrich’s relationship with Remarque was unaffected by the de Acosta affair, perhaps because his earlier years in Germany had familiarized him with a more freewheeling lifestyle. As a student of human nature, he found Dietrich an endlessly fascinating conundrum as well as an admiring and attentive mistress. Sometimes he viewed her, as he told their friend Stefan Lorant, rather like a “sailor’s daughter,” an unsubtle woman of roaring ardor; when she wished, however, she was “[the goddess] Diana of the woods, with a silver bow—invulnerable, cool and fatal.”
But whatever his sexual enthrallment, Remarque accepted the paradox of Dietrich’s attachment even while he knew of her inconstancy. Perhaps the most perceptive and reflective among her men, he also recognized the difference between sexual passion and commitment, and Marlene Dietrich (he soon realized) was proficient at the former but apparently incapable of the latter; she was entirely a creature of whim and of the moment. Nevertheless, he became (like Fairbanks before him) a complaisant lover, and as permanent witness to this he left an encoded account of their romance in the novel he was writing at this time—Arch of Triumph. (Much altered, Arch of Triumph became a rather dewy 1947 romantic film starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.) The published book bore no dedication, but Dietrich knew it was hers.
Set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1938 and 1939, the narrative concerns a German refugee surgeon named Ravic (surrogate for Remarque) and his tortured affair with an enigmatic cabaret actress and occasional film star named Joan Madou (Dietrich), who is described as pale and detached, “an exciting and forlorn beauty [with] high brows . . . [and] a face whose openness was its secret. It neither hid nor revealed anything. It promised nothing and thereby everything.” Joan is “sometimes superstitious . . . and she was everything that enticement and temptation could give without love.” One scene neatly synthesized the author’s ambivalent feelings about Dietrich:
“Joan,” he said slowly, and wanted to say something entirely different, “it is good that you are here.”
She looked at him.
He took her hands. “You understand what that means? More than a thousand other words . . .”
She nodded. Suddenly her eyes were filled with tears. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I know.”
“That’s not true,” Ravic replied, and knew that she was right.
“No, nothing at all,” she said. “You must love me, beloved. That’s all.”
He did not answer.
“You must love me,” she repeated. “Otherwise I’m lost.”
Lost, he thought. What a word! How easily she uses it. Who is really lost does not talk . . . He knew their love would not endure, that it would become the stale vinegar of dead passion. It would not last.
Arch of Triumph did not reach its final form until 1945, long after the Remarque-Dietrich affair had ended; it has both the luxuriant guilt and the tainted wistfulness often found in novels that are simultaneously defensive and sealed with the author’s regret for a failed romance. Even while Ravic and Joan Madou manage to visit every colorful locale frequented by their real-life models, the wine of their love indeed turns sour. The protagonist resents both his mistress’s free love life and his own fierce passion for her. At the conclusion of Arch of Triumph, Remarque the benighted lover clearly inspired Remarque the professional fantasist: just as his affair with Dietrich ended when she invited actor Jean Gabin to live with her, so the actress Joan cavalierly moves to a jealous new lover—who finally shoots her. Ravic is summoned, but even his medical skill cannot save her, and she dies in his arms, begging forgiveness. The book remains valuable as a testimony of Remarque’s tortured, ambivalent feelings for Dietrich. But judged even according to the most lenient literary standard, Arch of Triumph is bloodless, ersatz Hemingway; to call it unremarkable would be high praise.
THE FIRST RENAISSANCE OF DIETRICH’S CAREER HAD been inspired by Josef von Sternberg in 1930, but Joe Pasternak was now responsible for the second revival of her career. Audiences loved Dietrich’s rough-and-tumble humor in a musical western, and critics admired her complete abandonment to a self-contained satire on her own demimondaine image. Destry Rides Again could have been marketed as Dietrich Rides Again.
She had, therefore, good reason for optimism at the start of 1940. The principal witness to this was Remarque, “one of the first refugees who benefited from my protection,” she said rather loftily. Remarque took a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel near Dietrich’s bungalow, where she lived with Maria, whom Rudi and Tamara had delivered to California before returning to settle for several years in New York (where he worked at Paramount’s East Coast office). In such proximity to the glumly adoring Remarque, Dietrich could easily be very protective indeed.
Contrary to her mother’s good fortunes, Maria was enduring a most unhappy period in her life. Although she had never lacked life’s material necessities and had been pampered with gifts and good times by her father and (when work and affairs permitted) by her mother, Maria felt she could neither please her nor ever compare favorably with her—could never, in other words, really be worthy of so famous and glamorous a parent. “The greatest compliment ever paid to me,” Dietrich said at the time, “was ‘You spoil your daughter.’ ” But as usual the spoiling was not entirely beneficial. Dressed in miniature versions of her mother’s elegant clothes, she was from the start groomed for beauty and fame; she had even been taught something about makeup and costumes the day she filmed her scene as young Sophia in The Scarlet Empress. Thenceforth, as she grew, Maria was (always with the excuse of economy) given her mother’s cast-off designer clothing.
As playwright Enid Bagnold wrote in The Chalk Garden, “An only child is never twelve.” For Maria Sieber, the years between twelve and seventeen were unnaturally desolate, with her father rarely present and her mother courting both her career and a small platoon of lovers. Imprudently, always offering the fear of kidnapping as reason enough, Dietrich kept her daughter home from traditional schools and engaged private tutors, thus effectively depriving the girl of normal socialization. “I had no friends my own age, and I was never permitted to leave the grounds,” Maria later said wistfully. “Bodyguards were the only friends I had.”
The outcome was perhaps predictable. By age fifteen, in spring 1940, Maria was bearing—to the point of almost seventy excess pounds—the burden of a lonely and troubled adolescence. Her sudden and alarming weight gain (to almost two hundred by the following year) may have derived from a subtle refusal to wear her mother’s clothes and thus be a mini-Marlene, as well as from her sense of social isolation.
“I was always self-conscious because of my mother’s beauty,” Maria acknowledged later. “She was so beautiful that it always gave me a feeling of ugliness and unworthiness. All my life I suffered because I was terribly overweight and I felt my mother [was] ashamed of me . . . I got fat because my childhood was miserable.” In this regard, Dietrich’s failure to seek medical treatment or counselling for Maria is (notwithstanding her evident good intentions) not hard to understand. Actresses who depend professionally on their beauty cannot, as their children mature, deny the truth of their own inevitable aging—whatever the extent of nature’s gifts or a surgeon’s cosmetic remedies. More to the point, an unattractive daughter is no threat to a mother’s primacy. The pattern has nothing to do with malevolence; such is often the garden variety of parent-child rivalry.
“Mother and I were never like mother and daughter,” Maria added. “As I matured, I was often taken for her sister—an older sister, because I was so heavy. I have always felt the older one in our relationship.” Dietrich, on the other hand, was quite oblivious to any difficulty. With no awareness of her condescending irony, she remarked that year, “Maria is as American as a colored girl.”
The problem became more poignant throughout 1940 and 1941, when Maria—obviously feeling unattractive, unwanted and unloved—for a time seemed to harbor an alarming death wish. At first her obsession was merely academic, as she immersed herself in books about cancer, tuberculosis, infantile paralysis and all sorts of life-threatening illnesses. But then she began to speak occasionally of taking her own life, in which mood she wrote a morose little lyric she handed to her mother:
A man who was committing suicide
Said, as his feet left the earth
Which had grown too small for him:
“How soon shall I regret this?”
Dietrich, seeing only her daughter’s inchoate lyric gifts, proudly showed the quatrain to Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker (whose own grim sensibilities were perfectly matched to the young poet’s); they only remarked on the child’s gravity.
But Maria never acted out her darkest fantasies; instead, she began to take an interest in the theater. Her life had little comfort or stability until she contracted her second marriage (at the age of twenty-two) and began her own career. “Mommy grows younger and more beautiful every year,” she said when still young, “[but] I never felt good enough for her.”
During the summer of 1940, Mommy (then thirty-eight) was certainly considered beautiful and popular enough by executives at Universal that, when Joe Pasternak asked for her to star in another comedy, she was readily signed at twice the salary of Destry Rides Again. Pasternak had commissioned writers John Meehan and Harry Tugend to capitalize on the success of Destry and Dietrich’s self-satire by constructing a spoof of the Sadie Thompson–South Seas epic subgenre. Accordingly they created the role of “Bijou Blanche,” a torch singer of benevolent ill repute who floats from island to island, following and wreaking havoc among the fleet. They all arrive at a gin joint called—thus the film’s title—Seven Sinners, on the fictitious island of Boni Komba, a name contributed by Dietrich and inspired by her nickname for Remarque. Among the latest naval arrivals is a tall, handsome lieutenant (John Wayne) who almost loses his career for her sake; they part, and Bijou returns to a boozy ship’s doctor and a wandering life.
Pasternak and director Tay Garnett suggested the rugged, six-feet-four-inch John Wayne to play Dietrich’s leading man. Although Wayne, a contract player at the B studio called Republic Pictures, had made more than eighty films since 1927, he had just appeared in Stagecoach and was on the brink of his mythic stardom. But his salary was still merely four hundred dollars a week, and he was supporting a wife and children. Wanting Dietrich’s approval, Garnett invited Wayne to the Universal commissary for lunch and arranged for Dietrich to walk casually nearby to assess him. “With that wonderful floating walk,” according to the director, “Dietrich passed Wayne as if he were invisible, then paused, made a half-turn and cased him from cowlick to cowboots, then turned to me and whispered, ‘Oh, Daddy, buy me that!’ ”
According to John Wayne’s third wife, Pilar (not married to him at that time), the subsequent developments were sheer Dietrich. Wayne was invited for a private conference in her Universal dressing room one day that June, after a session of wardrobe fittings for Seven Sinners. Dietrich dismissed the others, closed and locked the door and fixed a provocative look on Wayne while slowly asking the time. Answering her own question, she then lifted her skirt, and there, encircling her upper thigh, was a black garter with a watch. She noted the time, slowly lowered her skirt and glided toward Wayne, whispering, “It’s very early, darling. We have plenty of time.” That afternoon began one of the most intense affairs of their lives, “one that wouldn’t burn itself out for three years,” as Pilar Wayne knew: “Dietrich was more than an ideal bedmate. She was the first person in the film industry, excepting John Ford, to tell Duke that she believed in him . . . Dietrich made Duke feel like a man again, both in bed and on the sound stage.”
During the two months of shooting Seven Sinners that summer of 1940, Hollywood insiders soon knew that Marlene Dietrich had made an important conquest. While Erich Maria Remarque sat in his hotel room nursing his romantic wounds and forcing the typescript of Arch of Triumph, his inamorata was photographed all over town with John Wayne, whose estranged (but not legally separated) wife, Josephine, began to make a noise that eventually terminated her marriage. The press not only documented Dietrich and Wayne at the Brown Derby, at the Mocambo, the Trocadero and at the beach; it was also announced that Dietrich had taken Wayne’s financial future in hand, introducing him to her own business manager, a Swedish immigrant named Bo Roos. She cooked for Wayne in her bungalow and brought his meals to the Universal set each day; they played parlor games during shooting breaks, attended football games and prizefights, sped out of town on weekends for fishing trips to Lake Arrowhead or for quiet times in Montecito and San Luis Obispo.
With Fairbanks, Dietrich had a polished, sophisticated and compassionate gentleman for a lover; Remarque was the dour, grave intellectual she could both comfort and learn from; but with John Wayne, it seems, the matter was simpler. According to all accounts, they never spoke of marriage; they were simply buddies who bedded. And when it was over (after they had made a trio of films together), Dietrich clearly felt neither residual affection nor loyalty. “Unpleasant people, actors,” she wrote curtly years later. “First of all, John Wayne. He needed money, and he begged me to help him . . . John Wayne wasn’t exactly brilliant: he spoke his lines and that was all. Wayne was not a bright or exciting type. He confessed to me that he never read books, which proves you don’t have to be terribly brilliant to become a great film star.”
Their first picture remains their best, for Seven Sinners offers one of Dietrich’s splendid comic portraits as well as a performance of gentle, self-knowing sadness. The action begins at the Blue Devil Café (clearly homage-by-inversion to The Blue Angel), where she causes a riot by simply being. Deported with her cronies to another South Seas isle, she sings “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” en route and later “The Man’s in the Navy” at her new venue (the latter crooned in sparkling white navy drag). Learning that the fleet has arrived, she turns, takes in a sea of white-coated sailors and whispers, “Oh—the navy!” Slowly approaching them, she smiles, then stops everything in the room by asking, “Will someone please give me an American . . . [pause] . . . cigarette?”
Of all Dietrich’s films between the last with von Sternberg (1935) and her work for Hitchcock (1949), her Bijou is—with Frenchy—one of her two best performances, for in it she perfects the art of the double-take, the wordlessly smoldering reaction, the cool ingestion of a man’s intention. “How about coming to my cabin for a snack?” asks Albert Dekker as the ship’s doctor. She stares at him, and he has to elaborate: “A snack is food.” Her comic turns were carefully timed, her glances alternately inciting and reflective; there was, in other words, a recognizable woman, and some of each character she played was part of herself. Cunning, versed in masculine wants and feminine wiles, Dietrich was clearly in her element as Bijou. She was in this picture, as a typical review noted, “giving one of the finest performances of her career with verve and brilliance.”
Pasternak and his colleagues at Universal knew they had another Dietrich success in Seven Sinners, and after filming was completed on September 14 they rushed through editing and scoring; the picture was released within weeks. Throughout the autumn, meanwhile, it became clear to more and more people across the country that the Dietrich-Wayne friendship was more than professional, for they were still seen as a nightclubbing couple—and not just as a duet. In a ploy to confuse everyone, she insisted that photographers snap them with Erich Maria Remarque, or her old friend Stefan Lorant, or with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., or Jean Gabin (soon to play an even larger role in her life), or even with Mercedes de Acosta and a visiting Rudi Sieber. Indeed, that entire curious octet attended the Hollywood premiere of The Thief of Baghdad together in December.
Arranging a squad of escorts for the benefit of local cameramen was inspired. First of all, she knew it would be difficult for people to believe what was in fact the truth—that she would flaunt multiple, simultaneous love affairs. Second, the photograph, with a smiling Sieber in attendance, would neatly suppress any rumors that her marriage was threatened. Finally, the image of Marlene Dietrich surrounded by so adoring a team effectively presented her as one of the most daringly irresistible women around town. No publicist could ever have promoted her more shrewdly.