“ONE AMERICAN CRITIC WROTE THAT I had contrived to parody her,” the French director René Clair said of Marlene Dietrich’s role in The Flame of New Orleans, his first American film. “But she understood this. I didn’t do it against her will. When Norman Krasna and I wrote the script, we intended that it be ironic—a romance with a sense of humor. Perhaps that’s what surprised the public: they didn’t know quite how to take it.”
Alas, there was little to take. “I’m going back to New Orleans,” said Dietrich as Frenchy toward the end of Destry Rides Again; that was the inspiring cue for Clair, Krasna and producer Joe Pasternak. As an elegant adventuress who courts a rich man, pretends to be her own slatternly cousin and eventually falls in love with a poor sailor, she was The Flame of New Orleans, and the picture was designed to be suffused with those delicate Gallic ironies for which Clair was previously admired (as, for example, in his French films Sous les Toits de Paris and Le Million). But the antic glee and appealing nonsense of Destry or Seven Sinners are absent from this mild confection, which —only on paper—had all the ingredients of a riotous Feydeau farce.
Disliking the script (“a flop”), her director (“he wasn’t exactly one of the friendliest men”) and her co-star Bruce Cabot (“an awfully stupid actor”), Dietrich was bored from the first day of production in February 1941. As usual, she had a song, but it required a soubrette’s range and delicacy; consequently—much to her dismay—her voice was electronically altered, the speed of the post-dubbing accelerated so her voice would sound higher. Attempting to salvage a doomed project, Dietrich assured that she was properly lighted and then simply purred her lines seductively, with a kind of dry-ice eroticism. (“There’s more to being a gentleman than wearing tight pants,” she murmurs to Cabot, surveying him head to foot with astonishing indelicacy.)
Pasternak and Clair had tried valiantly to satirize the world-weary romanticism of von Sternberg’s Dietrich; oddly, the result was anemic—simply Dietrich exagérée, nearly suffocated in a profusion of rococo white ruffles and feathers. Neither critics nor audiences were much amused by its windy languor, and The Flame of New Orleans fizzled quickly when it was released in May 1941, just weeks after production had been completed. Because Universal had also lost money on Seven Sinners, executives were glad to loan Dietrich out to Warner for her next film, which turned out to be the second of three failures for her that year. The Dietrich renaissance seemed suddenly imperilled.
Not so her romantic life. In the spring of 1941, John Wayne was still meeting Dietrich regularly at the Beverly Hills Hotel, behind the locked door of her studio dressing-room, and for occasional weekends at a Santa Barbara inn. She dictated what ought to be the terms of his contract renewal, and Wayne explained to her the fine points of football and boxing. Their affair was monitored gloomily by Erich Maria Remarque, who hoped it would not long endure and so expressed himself to Dietrich, who calmly insisted on her independence. As it happened, Remarque’s hope for an end to the fiery romance was fulfilled, although the embers were not completely extinguished for another year. But in 1941, Remarque had a more serious rival than John Wayne.
Dietrich had first met the French actor Jean Gabin in Paris, in 1939. Almost three years her junior, he had been an adolescent runaway and street brawler who eventually danced with the Folies-Bergère at the age of nineteen and appeared in plays and films from 1930. Then, in a series of French films (among them Pépé le Moko, La Grande Illusion, Quai des Brumes and La Bête Humaine), Gabin became firmly established as the prototype of the tough, sardonic marginal hero or the curiously sympathetic antihero. In private life he seemed to most people very like his movie-role image—sullen, moody, antisocial and blunt as a peasant. A naturally gifted actor, Gabin was nevertheless unresponsive to culture and literature and indifferent to social proprieties—especially those defining Hollywood life, which he endured as a mere necessity; he was there only to earn enough money to rejoin his second wife and fight with the Free French. Von Sternberg was an idiosyncratic and obsessive visionary, Fairbanks an amiable and attentive squire, Remarque a formidable and romantic intellectual, and Wayne an attractive diversion. Jean Gabin, with his rough, rustic exterior, was entirely different.
But this was not Beauty and the Beast. As their affair began that year (while he was working in a film called Moontide), it quickly became evident to Remarque and to friends like Stefan Lorant that Dietrich’s ardor was even more fierce than for John Wayne—and this seems to have been based, more than in any other affair, very much on her role as care-giver and emotional provider. She later wrote that Gabin clung to her “like an orphan to his foster mother, and I loved to mother him day and night.”
First (as she had with Wayne), Dietrich supervised the negotiations for his movie contract and then proceeded to manage his finances, although Gabin soon learned she was better at evaluating the first than administering the second. Although he lived mostly in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Dietrich selected a small house in West Los Angeles for him to rent as an official address, for propriety’s sake, and there—because he was completely incompetent in the ordinary tasks of household maintenance—she cooked, cleaned and purchased everything from drinking glasses to bath towels. “I helped him overcome all obstacles,” she claimed majestically.
In performing these chores, more was at stake than simple loving assistance. Dietrich’s lifelong inclination to assume the role of another’s housekeeper may have been an attempt to be Earth Mother as well as Glamour Queen, and her self-abasement for many men a subtle atonement for her years of neglect of Rudi. There is a hint of the heroic gesture that manipulates and controls even as it seems to serve, for few gestures could arouse such gratitude and amazement as the sight of Marlene Dietrich on her knees, a bandana round her hair, her face smudged with dirt as she scrubbed a floor. “I am just a simple Hausfrau,” her actions shouted—and so a part of her may have wished to be. But her role as eager domestic was always assumed for the particular benefit of one she wished to impress, or from whom she wished to exact some kind of tribute.
Helpmate and passionate companion she certainly was, but by Dietrich’s own admission the fires of the Gabin romance were banked by her activities as “mother, cook, counselor and interpreter, sister, friend—and more!” She found that his craggy posture was a façade, that he was a man of exquisite sensitivity who showed to others a mask of indifference but with her was gentle as a timid schoolboy: “my lonely child,” she called him. In pampering and soothing Gabin, she was in a way treating a mirror image of herself, the woman of serene control who preferred to think (as she insisted to Remarque) that she was completely dependent on the love and devotion of another, lost without the man she loved.
Enjoying her role as provider, Dietrich often surrounded Gabin with compatriots like the directors René Clair and Jean Renoir, preparing lavish French dinners and concluding the evening by leading guests in a rousing chorus of the “Marseillaise.” “He called her ‘my Prussian,’ ” Renoir recalled, “and she would reply to this by tapping his forehead and saying in a languishing voice, ‘That’s what I like about you—it’s quite empty. You haven’t a single idea in your head, not one, and that’s what I like.’ ” The insult, Renoir added, apparently left Gabin untouched.
Also among the occasional dinner guests was the French actress known simply as Annabella, once a leading lady for René Clair and a co-star of Gabin’s. In 1941 she, too, was making films in Hollywood, and since 1938 had been married to Tyrone Power. They arrived at Gabin’s house and were greeted by a slightly breathless but beautiful Dietrich: “Oh, hello! Excuse me, I am cooking a ragout for mon Jean and I must stay in the kitchen.” Gabin had not yet returned from his day at the studio, and the guests were left alone while their hostess scurried about preparing dinner. When he finally arrived, the Powers were astonished at Dietrich’s welcome. After several minutes of passionate embraces and kisses, she prostrated herself before Gabin, removed his shoes, massaged his feet and lovingly put slippers on him. “Gabin glanced in [Annabella’s] direction and winked,” according to Power’s biographer, “as if he was helpless, a victim of Marlene’s adoration.” After dinner, Dietrich played her musical saw for the guests.
In public, Dietrich was often seen with Gabin at the popular and lavish club Mocambo, which opened on Sunset Boulevard in January 1941. Privately, as she disclosed, her tender moments with Gabin were characterized by an overtly parental element: the seventh child of poor music-hall performers, he depended on Dietrich’s strong maternal instinct. “He took the place of my daughter,” she stated oddly, adding that “he was gentle, tender and had all the traits a woman looks for in a man.” Or at least the traits sought by a woman with Dietrich’s own tangled need to be needed: “He was a little baby who liked to curl up in his mother’s lap and be loved, cradled and pampered.”
Dietrich often signed her letters to Ernest Hemingway “from Mama.” But no one ever had more maternal sustenance from her (nor, perhaps, was any man ever more dependent on it) than Jean Gabin. “The mothering is more important than the sex,” Dietrich said (to her daughter) about her relations with men. (“She is mother as sex,” said her next movie co-star, Edward G. Robinson.) In the 1950s, Dietrich, Sieber and Lorant were discussing her many liaisons. “Who do you think I loved more than anyone else?” she asked them without a trace of irony. “Jean Gabin?” suggested Rudi. “Gabin, yes,” she replied. “Certainly, Gabin.” And in 1963, when Attorney General Robert Kennedy met Dietrich at a Washington luncheon and asked who was the most attractive man she had ever met, she replied, “Jean Gabin.”
Ursula Petrie, who knew Dietrich well in the early 1940s, was one of many who noted that with Gabin on the scene, “almost overnight, Dietrich’s interest in Remarque waned.” This may have been at least partly owing to the fact that even for a woman with Dietrich’s prodigious energies it must have been difficult to make three films in one year while simultaneously maintaining ardent affairs with one woman and at least three men. But there was another issue, as Dietrich later wrote: Gabin was “stubborn, possessive and jealous.” He soon learned, however, the common lesson of everyone close to Dietrich: it was futile to demand exclusivity.
This became clear to Gabin when she began her assignment at Warner in late March—a tedious business called Manpower, in which she played a tough floozy opposite Edward G. Robinson (who had top billing) and George Raft as electrical linemen whose dangerous job is nothing compared to their rivalry for her favors. Robinson and director Raoul Walsh later recalled that Dietrich was as usual obsessed with her hair and makeup, placing a mirror near the camera and supervising her own lighting and photography—“so subtly and sexily,” according to Robinson, “that no one was offended and she got precisely what she wanted . . . [She had] arrogant self-assurance and was sexy, temperamental, demanding . . . and rough and tough.”
Such must also have been the reaction of Gabin, who could do nothing to prevent Dietrich’s indulgence with George Raft during the six weeks of filming that spring. Tough and cynical like him (although presented onscreen with a sleek menace), Raft fascinated Dietrich with details of his underworld connections to racketeers and gangsters. Their brief affair, according to a few friends like Ursula Petrie, had a rather bizarre beginning when Raft took Dietrich (apparently in the mistaken notion that she would be shocked) to a notorious downtown venue where live sex shows were performed. But Raft had not taken into account her years in Berlin, for Dietrich was not only unfazed but downright amused.
The trysts with Raft, which occurred with little discretion in various Warner studio dressing rooms, aroused sufficient ire in Gabin that he, too, resolved to dally, and by the time Manpower was completed at the end of May, Dietrich feared that her nonchalance had jeopardized the primary relationship of her life at the time. Lunching with Raft at the studio, she telephoned Gabin from their table and conducted a long and obviously amorous conversation in French (later translated for Raft’s benefit). Had Gabin enjoyed the previous evening with his girlfriend? Would they be dining together that evening? Did he still love her? The conversation over, Marlene reached for Raft’s hand: “I was advising Jean about his career,” she said without blinking. “Oh, Georgie, it is too bad you are taken by Betty Grable [another leggy transient in Raft’s busy schedule]. I am so lonely.” She was not, of course, bemoaning the lack of anything more permanent with Raft; Dietrich simply did not sustain rivalries as calmly as she caused them. Once their film was completed, her co-star waved farewell, after presenting her with a gold bracelet—engraved with “George” on one side and a tiny raft on the reverse.
The dismal picture called Manpower was an immediate failure and marks the lowest point in Dietrich’s career. Everything in it seems unreal: relationships, dialogue, sets, costumes—even Los Angeles, where the story occurs, is beset year-round by fierce winter tempests, hail and ice storms.
That the resuscitation of Dietrich’s professional fortunes had indeed been only temporary was clear to her and to just about everyone in Hollywood when she had a third critical and box-office loser in a single year. At Columbia Pictures, under the direction of Mitchell Leisen, she played (for a salary of 
100,000) an unmarried Broadway star who encounters legal obstacles after she sweeps up a neglected Manhattan baby and tenderly brings him home for adoption. The Lady Is Willing was planned as a warmly touching comedy about a woman whose heart is broken open by maternal love, but the only fracture that summer was to Dietrich’s ankle. Tripping over prop toys on August 25, she whirled round awkwardly and, to prevent injury to the infant in her arms, took a terrible fall.
Rushed to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, she was soon encased from toe to thigh in a plaster cast, requiring her to be photographed only in close-up for the remainder of the film, further restricting a weak script. On October 29, the company moved to New York for location shooting, Dietrich’s ankle now almost healed and simply taped. “Watch Mama make the front pages of every paper in New York,” she whispered to a press representative as they stepped from the train at Grand Central Station. She then appropriated Leisen’s decorative walking stick and, cannily aware of every excuse for publicity, stood for photographers and described in excruciating detail her baby-saving accident.
But back in Hollywood for the final scenes, she could not so easily win the attention she craved from two people. “She couldn’t understand why [her co-star] Fred MacMurray wouldn’t fall madly in love with her,” said Leisen some time later, referring to Dietrich’s traditional ploy of seducing her leading men, the better to assert her authority over them for the course of their collaboration. “I said, ‘Listen, Marlene, Fred’s so happily in love with his wife, he couldn’t care less about any other woman, so you lay off. Just make the picture.’ ” She had no more luck, soon afterwards, trying to woo young Ann Miller, then a rising musical performer who was as cool to Dietrich’s blandishments as Carole Lombard and Frances Dee had been. Dietrich did not take this rejection easily, and for days she pouted at home and at work; Gabin had not the remotest idea of the reasons for her disagreeable mood.
CHRISTMAS 1941 WAS A CHEERLESS TIME FOR DIEtrich, and in fact by New Year’s Eve she was in an acute state of depression. The bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7 and America’s forced entry into world conflict frightened her and evoked memories of her earlier hardships in Germany during the first World War. Additionally, despite her naturalization she shared the wary discomfiture common to immigrants from countries now at war with the United States. For several years it had been too awkward for her to play a German character in films, and so her accent and background were ignored or she was presented otherwise.*
But there were deeper personal reasons for her anxiety. On December 27, Marlene Dietrich turned forty—a crucial moment for a woman whose career very much depended on her ability to be perpetually alluring and agelessly beautiful. She calmly told the press, friends and even lovers that she was in her midthirties; the record, after all, variously stated that she was thirty-four, thirty-five or thirty-six, and this fiction was politely accepted.
The subterfuge was more comforting to the public than to herself. Privately (as Maria told her first husband), Dietrich was, at the end of 1941 and for much of the next two years, very often near panic for several reasons. First, she was aware of the indifferent and sometimes hostile reviews she was receiving in a series of wretched pictures. Second, there were (as usual) very few leading roles for those who were called “mature women.” In a business that has always depended on fantasy and the promulgation of eternal appeal, she now feared for her own ability to maintain an impossible ideal.
For decades, the self that Marlene Dietrich presented to the world had been wrapped in a tissue of illusions and deceptions. Some of this had its roots in the early demands of Prussian-Victorian etiquette, the polite repression of emotions, the social and cosmetic artifices enjoined on her from infancy by society, her mother and her grandmother—a culture, in other words, that canonized appearance and propriety but courted luxury and grandeur. As a music and drama student she then created the persona of an aristocratic girl with an impressive Weimar pedigree, blithely falsifying basic truths about her family—the identities of her father and stepfather, for example, and the very existence of her sister Elisabeth. For the benefit of a carefully contrived public status, she revealed as much of her private life as was helpful to her controversial image, and so she actively altered her history and her identity, taking any means to offer a more acceptable and even a more desirable person than she may have considered herself.
In her marriage and social life, too, there were many roles and fictions that made her life a series of playlets. Dietrich cherished a persona of simple domesticity while cultivating a score of serial, often simultaneous, paramours, and although she had many lovers, there seems to have been little depth or security with them. Her affairs were little melodramas—sometimes satisfying, often tempestuous, always containing the preparation scenes of their own finales, perhaps because of her fierce independence and the nonexclusivity she demanded.
In this regard, her prodigal sex life is not hard to understand, for it was perhaps most of all her attempt to supply the missing intimacy in a life otherwise spent maintaining the image—remaining unpredictable, mysterious, even desirable by being always somewhat remote. Her lovers she tended to treat the way she did that image: by control, by meticulous management of a carefully created scenario. But in time the result would be a solitude which every public and private gesture had perhaps inevitably foreordained.
Josef von Sternberg had enabled Maria Magdalene Dietrich to become (as the press so often called her) La Dietrich—the beautiful, exotic, languorous creature, artificial and representing mostly his own fantasies. In some ways, of course, the Dietrich of the von Sternberg films was indeed a mannequin both sensual and detached, seductive and remote, desirable yet obviously unreal. From that time forward, with her own active cooperation, she was dedicated to maintaining the mythicizing process he had begun.
But life cannot sustain the burden of perpetual fantasy, and in a curious way the changes in public taste and the gradual depopularization of her image confirmed that. The spectral and illusory Dietrich, imagined and meticulously created by von Sternberg, coincided perfectly with the dreamlike, escapist rapture desired by Depression-era audiences. In the late 1930s, both film and the world situation altered dramatically. Lighting and lenses represented people more sharply and distinctly, and backgrounds now appeared clarified; actors were, in other words, recognizably situated. Screenplays, too, kept pace with the public’s demand for fresh humor, visual realism and real if subtle eroticism. (In this regard, it is easy to understand the popularity of films like Gone With the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Letter, The Little Foxes and The Maltese Falcon.)
THE APPROACH OF WAR SUDDENLY MADE AT LEAST temporarily obsolete (or unfashionable) many of the conventions and genres of earlier films—screwball comedies, heroic westerns, tales of mere urban gangsters. But even at the end of 1941 Marlene Dietrich was still unprepared and unwilling to accept the fact that she had come from a particular era, that she was of a certain age, that she stood for a vanishing ideal: the lessons of Destry Rides Again had apparently been forgotten. And so, just as she had dedicated herself completely to the manufacture of illusion, so she became one of the first unwitting victims of the price it extracts—a loss of emotional balance and of purpose, a spiritual vacuum at the core of herself and her life. She spent New Year’s Eve alone, pacing in her bungalow, and (as Maria recalled) during the following months she suddenly and without apparent reason broke down weeping. Von Sternberg, Fairbanks and Remarque were no longer available to her, Mercedes de Acosta had gone to Europe, Jean Gabin spoke daily of returning to France. There seemed nothing for her to cling to, nothing substantial, secure or solid to reassure Marlene Dietrich that her life had any meaning at all.
SHE HAD LITTLE CHOICE OR REFUGE OTHER THAN her craft, and in the first two months of 1942 at least she could work, again with John Wayne; he both adored and bored her, but at least she could count on the raw comfort of their affair. Attempting to capitalize on the Dietrich-Wayne chemistry in Seven Sinners and her Frenchy in Destry Rides Again, Universal cast them in the fourth screen version of Rex Beach’s novel The Spoilers, about crooked gold mining claims during the Alaskan boom of 1900. Dressed, photographed and given dialogue sprinkled with double meanings that recalled Mae West, Dietrich played a saloon proprietor, strutting uneasily between Wayne and the smoothly villainous Randolph Scott. Destry was supposed to ride again; no one, alas, even trotted.*
In the finished picture, Dietrich looked as she really felt off-screen—almost stiff with ennui. When production was complete, she was so depressed she fell ill, and after staying home for a week was driven to a desert inn at La Quinta, southeast of Palm Springs. Compounding her dejection that season was the news, on January 11, of Carole Lombard’s death in a plane crash; the actress had been returning from a tour, using her fame and appeal to help sell war bonds. From her retreat, a distracted and disaffected Dietrich announced that she would soon abandon Hollywood and return to the theater for a New York revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband; when the producer reneged on the offer, she simply said to the press, “I’m not thinking of the stage now. Time enough for that later, when you get older and harder to photograph.”
That spring, she asked Gabin to come with her for a brief holiday in New York, where they went to the theater and visited old acquaintances. To cheer herself, Dietrich spent three afternoons with the couturiers at Lily Daché, where she went into a paroxysm of buying—ninety-eight items, including a Persian lamb jacket, a two-hundred-dollar scarf, a one-hundred-fifty-dollar white turban, a silver possum muff, purses, and fur gloves and accessories more suited to the Russian tundra than Southern California. But she was not happy when she received the bill for almost 5,000, and by late summer the store had to sue for nonpayment; her account was not balanced for almost a year.
That summer, Dietrich accepted an invitation from Bette Davis, who had helped organize the Hollywood Canteen, a place where entertainment and meals were provided for servicemen during the war. Dancing with soldiers and sailors and preparing dinners and cakes, she “not only contributed glamour out front,” as Davis later wrote, “but backbreaking labor in the kitchen.” In the spirit of her friend Carole Lombard, Dietrich then joined colleagues like Linda Darnell and Dorothy Lamour on a nationwide bond tour, exploiting her fame (and in her case underlining her opposition to Germany) by raising funds for the War Department.
Just about this time—the late summer of 1942—Dietrich received visitors from New York, who had come to discuss her appearance in a Broadway musical. Composer Kurt Weill and producer Cheryl Crawford (who had collaborated on the 1936 musical Johnny Johnson) hoped to follow Weill’s Lady in the Dark with a show based on The Tinted Venus, by F. Anstey (pseudonym of the English writer Thomas Anstey Guthrie). One Touch of Venus, as it was eventually called, was a comic variation on the Pygmalion-Galatea myth. It tells the story of a barber who places an engagement ring on a statue of the goddess of love, who promptly comes to life and pursues him. But when she discovers what sort of life the typical housewife leads, she returns to Mount Olympus.
At the core of the musical comedy in progress was a character that seemed conceived for Dietrich, and so Weill and Crawford visited her to describe the story and ascertain her interest in a New York stage debut. According to the producer, Dietrich appeared attentive and interested, “but she also had an odd, rather remote quality—whether she wanted to seem as mysterious as her image, I couldn’t know, but Marlene was certainly elusive.” The visitors were not given more certitude when, after they had described their theatrical plans, Dietrich brought out her musical saw and accompanied herself in the Brecht-Weill song “Surabaya Johnny” from Happy End.
There were three or four such meetings. Weill and Crawford mapped out the plot, the musical numbers, the staging, the lush possibilities for a magnificent wardrobe. Dietrich listened, she nodded gravely, and then she inevitably entertained them on the musical saw. They were getting nowhere very fast indeed. In a final attempt to gauge some idea of Dietrich’s willingness to commit to the show, composer and producer invited her and Gabin to the Cock and Bull, a popular steak house on Sunset Boulevard. “There was very little talk about our project,” Crawford added, “but Marlene and Gabin were delightful to watch, two such beautiful people in love with each other.” At the end of dinner, coffee was ordered—to the horror of the two beautiful people: “We wouldn’t think of it!” they cried in unison. “It will keep us awake!” And that, said Cheryl Crawford and Kurt Weill later, shattered the romantic fantasies they were entertaining about Dietrich and Gabin. A last-ditch stab at the topic of One Touch of Venus was deflected when Dietrich told Crawford not to worry, she would soon be in New York for further discussions. Soon turned out to be late, but since there were difficulties with the musical’s book, Crawford was patient.
BECAUSE SHE NEEDED THE MONEY AND COULD DO little else, Dietrich undertook another disappointing picture at Universal in the autumn of 1942. For the third and final time she appeared with John Wayne, in a project of monumental tedium called Pittsburgh. He and (again) Randolph Scott played coal mine “hunkies” who climb to the top of the industry, brawl over Dietrich, fight over principles and finally knuckle down to a patriotic effort after her stout speech for the unity of labor and management during wartime. When the filming was over in late October, so was her romance with John Wayne; he did not like her incessant chatter about Gabin’s great acting talent, while Dietrich finally found Wayne simply too morbidly dull. What had begun as a torrid diversion concluded from a chill distance, as his telephone calls to her went unreturned and his flower deliveries unaccepted.
IN FEBRUARY 1943, IT WAS HER TURN TO ACCOMpany Gabin to New York, whence he was to return to France by way of Morocco. But first they would have a New York holiday. At the same time, Dietrich wanted very much to appear in a stage version of Vera Caspary’s popular novel Laura, but the author finally decided simply to sell the rights to a Hollywood studio, and the stage version was unproduced until 1947.
That spring, however, the matter of One Touch of Venus came to a head, and Dietrich was apparently eager to make a Broadway musical debut. After a preliminary meeting with Crawford and Weill, she made daily visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she studied various paintings, statues and engravings of Venus. She also ordered vast quantities of grey chiffon and invited the producer and composer to her suite at the St. Regis Hotel, where she stripped (at least once in their presence) and draped herself in the fashion of the Venus she had seen that day. “She modeled,” Crawford recalled, “she struck poses, and she asked our opinions. She looked divine, of course, but we couldn’t figure out what this had to do with her commitment to our show. I remember that she was very keen on one Venus in particular—one with gorgeous buttocks.”
After several such fashion shows, Dietrich was asked to come to the Forty-sixth Street Theater so that Crawford, Weill and company might hear her voice in an auditorium. When she arrived (with Gabin for moral support), it was immediately evident to everyone that Dietrich was very anxious indeed. When she sang Hollander’s “Johnny,” those in the fourth row could scarcely hear her. Unaccustomed to projecting her voice from the stage and unfamiliar with the demands of musical theater in her fifteen years’ absence from it, Dietrich feared she was out of her depth and range. And when she heard the richness and complexity of Weill’s songs, she was convinced this would be a mistake (as indeed it would have been for her to have undertaken, at her age, the role of the twenty-four-year-old Laura).
But pride kept her from a flat withdrawal, and the show’s creators were convinced that with rehearsals and the proper audio doctoring Dietrich was the right Venus—but still there was no contract for her participation. Arriving the following day at the St. Regis with legal papers in hand, Crawford was surprised to find Dietrich packing for an imminent return to California.
“You’re leaving?” she asked.
“Yes, my darling,” Dietrich said with a deep sigh, “and I have the most terrible headache.” But Crawford had not become a successful Broadway producer without some education in the ways of stars. She promptly produced a modest quantity of a stimulating drug, and moments later Dietrich was gloriously exuberant. “Obviously she wasn’t accustomed to taking stimulants,” according to Crawford, “having declined even coffee that evening in Hollywood. However, I wasn’t above taking advantage of my windfall.” And with that, the contract was put before Dietrich, who signed it with a flourish. One Touch of Venus was now headed for an autumn premiere in New York. That evening, Gabin departed for Morocco and Dietrich for Hollywood, where she awaited the revisions of the show’s book.
But in more sober moments, Dietrich knew she would have to renege on this commitment. She could not command a Broadway stage, nor (she knew better than anyone) had she the vocal or dramatic equipment to carry a strong musical. When, on March 16, 1943, the creators of One Touch of Venus telephoned Dietrich for her reactions to the new script by S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash, she told Weill disingenuously, “I cannot play this—it is too sexy and profane.” For a moment, the New Yorkers must have thought they had a wrong number, but Dietrich continued as if everyone would believe her: “You know, Kurt, I have a daughter who is eighteen years old, and for me to get up on the stage and exhibit my legs is now impossible.”
“Marlene, what are you saying?” cried Kurt Weill. “Why, this play is delightful—it’s intriguing, it’s witty, it’s sophisticated—”
“No, it is too sexy and profane,” Dietrich repeated, as if she had just completed the title role in The Song of Bernadette and dared not sully her image. Weill became angry, scolding Dietrich for her ignorance and hypocrisy, but Dietrich was adamant. “No, Kurt, it is sexy and profane, and I will not now exhibit myself in that way.” And rather than take their reluctant star to litigation, the creators of One Touch of Venus dissolved her contract. That autumn, the show opened with a leading lady named Mary Martin, who became a Broadway sensation.
THERE WAS, THEN, NO IMMEDIATE WORK FOR MARlene Dietrich and so, by default, only her daughter claimed her care and attention. But Maria—who had faced the problem of her obesity and was slowly but consistently losing weight—had begun a social life and career of her own, and she neither understood nor appreciated her mother’s sudden, intense consecration of time and attention. That spring, in fact, Maria was taking serious steps to claim her independence; among them was the assumption of the professional name Maria Manton.
For almost a year (with her mother’s encouragement), she had also been taking drama classes at the Jack Geller Workshop, on the site of the former Max Reinhardt school at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. There Maria met a handsome and talented twenty-three-year-old actor named Dean Goodman, who had received a medical discharge after military service. He was an assistant to the legendary acting teacher Maria Ouspenskaya and had appeared to good notices in plays locally and throughout the West (most notably in a production of the thriller Love from a Stranger).
Years later, Goodman recalled that he (among others) felt shy with the daughter of so famous a woman, and although they met casually and occasionally dated, there was at first nothing romantic about the friendship. But like her mother, according to Goodman, it was a challenge for the daughter to make people like her. He found Maria pretty, bright and talented, and by June they were engaged.* “Maria was the aggressor in our relationship,” according to Goodman, “and only later did it become clear to me that she wanted most desperately to get away from home and mother. She was also very adamant that I not meet Marlene, and she admitted why: she said she was afraid every man she brought home would eventually be found in her mother’s bed.”
Goodman understood that there was a tense balance of love and enmity between the two women. On the one hand, Maria longed for her mother’s approval but resented her unstable childhood. Never secure in Dietrich’s affections, she had been isolated from her peers and put in the care of various tutors, and then sent away to school in Europe—always feeling that she was entirely subordinate to her mother’s career and lovers. For her part, Dietrich was never overtly cruel to Maria; but there had been a pattern of neglect. Now Dietrich realized that Maria was no longer a child but an attractive and talented young woman, and this apparently aroused all sorts of tangled rivalries and unacknowledged fears in Dietrich—for one, that Maria might find a good man and have a stable life of her own without the necessity of her mother’s protection. In addition, Maria’s maturing was a sure sign of Dietrich’s inevitable aging. That these were subtle if unacknowledged reactions was evident from her mother’s summary rejection—sight unseen, man unmet—of everyone Maria said she liked, Goodman included.
At the time, Goodman’s friends (among them the actress Lillian Fontaine, mother of Joan and Olivia de Havilland) urged him to reconsider what was becoming a rush to the altar with Maria. “But Maria was convinced she was in love with me,” according to Goodman, “and I thought I was in love with her. Right up to the wedding—because I didn’t want to seem like an opportunist or a star-struck fan—I didn’t insist on meeting Marlene, she had no desire to meet me, Rudi simply wasn’t around, and Maria wasn’t eager for me to meet either one! It was a very strange and swift courtship.” A wedding date was set for late August.
Dietrich, meanwhile, swung into action with every stratagem to prevent the marriage. First, she investigated Goodman’s credit and character but could turn up only favorable reports; furthermore, to supplement his acting income and support his future wife, he had taken a part-time job as a warehouse clerk. Then Dietrich made a more desperate attack, as Maria told Dean: she asked her daughter if she had considered what it would be like to have Jewish children? This surprising objection was repeated in a meeting called by Dietrich’s lawyer, to whom Goodman simply replied that if he were Jewish he would not be ashamed. But even the fact of his gentile family background did not affect his worthiness, for Dietrich then flatly asserted that Dean Goodman was a fortune hunter (something she herself told him in a brief telephone conversation).
Neither of the Sieber parents attended the wedding on August 23, 1943, at the Hollywood Congregational Church; only a few friends were present. The newlyweds moved into a small apartment, to which Dietrich one day shipped pieces of furniture from her own collection in storage. And one evening the Goodmans returned home to find it scrubbed and cleaned, new curtains hung, the windows washed and the place banked with fresh flowers. “Marlene had done it all herself,” Goodman recalled. “The building manager and our neighbors had thought the woman in bandana and work clothes was a hired domestic.”
NO ONE MADE THAT MISTAKE IN HER ONLY TWO FILM appearances late in 1943. Wilhelm Dieterle, who had directed her in Berlin two decades earlier in the silent picture Der Mensch am Wege, had also emigrated and was directing in Hollywood as William Dieterle. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had given him that old chestnut of an Arabian Nights fantasy Kismet to enliven, with Ronald Colman, Technicolor, the full resources of the studio’s costume and set departments and a budget of over 3,000,000—surprising for those years of wartime restrictions. Again, Marlene Dietrich’s name appeared after the leading man’s and after the title, a small difference for audiences but, in the carefully negotiated scheme of things in ego-conscious Hollywood, a matter of considerable significance. She was seen briefly as Jamilla, the harem queen in the castle of the Grand Vizier in old Baghdad, romancing a beggar disguised as a prince (Colman).
Slinking none too voluptuously with layers of chiffon and veils, hairpieces carefully looped, braided and wired a yard above her head, Dietrich had the opportunity to do her first dance onscreen. In the only one of her four scenes lasting more than a minute, Dietrich attempted a five-minute wriggle, her legs sprayed with four layers of gold paint as she ambled, glided, swooned, waved her arms and tried (mostly with the help of judicious editing and the use of a double in long shots whenever there is dancing) to suggest something like a dance. Surely nothing like this—or much in the picture, for that matter—was ever seen in the Levant, for this is after all MGM’s Arabia, a salad of Balinese dancers in Chinese costumes left over from science fiction serials, a studio fantasy combining what seems to be Brazilian high fashion with the latest accessories from Bullock’s on Wilshire Boulevard.
From her arrival that autumn, she was in bad humor.
“Do you have a side of your face?” she asked Ronald Colman breathlessly. “A left side or a right side that’s better on camera?”
“Well—yes,” he replied.
“Darling, you are so lucky. I have none! I have to face the camera!”
This was really a warning, as Colman soon learned and later recalled: “She played every single scene looking straight ahead,” effectively ignoring her co-star and stealing the audience’s attention. This did not, however, effect a particularly flattering image, for (quite apart from the ridiculous wardrobe, hairstyles and sets) Technicolor was not kind to Marlene Dietrich. In The Garden of Allah, Kismet (and later in Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious), she looks glossy and garish, her face flat, masklike, without affect, nuance or subtlety. Like a number of actors, she needed cinematic chiaroscuro, the infinite black and white shadings of a master like von Sternberg to evoke and highlight her expression.
That same season, Dietrich was outfitted just as hilariously for her cameo appearance in an all-star Hollywood revue produced by Universal and starring mostly its own studio talent. The picture, at first called Three Cheers for the Boys, was an orgy of self-praise with songs, dances and skits featuring actors and dancers who had spent time entertaining troops at home-training camps and near the action abroad—among them George Raft, Sophie Tucker, Jeanette MacDonald, Dinah Shore and W. C. Fields. (The film’s considerable profits went not to servicemen or for wartime aid, but to Universal Pictures.) One of the scenes was to feature a portion of Orson Welles’s famous Mercury Wonder Show, a magic act he was staging that year in a tent on Cahuenga Boulevard. When Rita Hayworth, the actress soon to be Mrs. Welles, was enjoined by Columbia Studios’ Harry Cohn from appearing in Welles’s show, Dietrich stepped in and then agreed to do the brief film scene, in which (with the sloppiest special photographic effects in history) she was to be sawed in half.
At the same time, Dean Goodman returned home from acting in John Carradine’s Shakespeare tour, only to be told by Maria that she considered their life together a mistake and that she was leaving after four months of marriage. “But my parents never divorced,” she said airily, explaining her refusal to grant Goodman’s obvious request, “and like them we can have our freedom and the respectability of the contract.” (Three years later, when she wished to remarry, Maria changed her mind on the matter of divorce.) Of this brief and clearly miscalculated union, Dean Goodman said, “I liked and admired Maria—her talent, her energy, her perseverance, her cheerful personality despite the unhappiness and the difficulties she’d overcome.” Maria, on the same subject, was forever after more guarded: “I don’t want to talk about that. It never existed.”
Predictably, Dietrich was pleased at the news of Maria’s separation and urged her to get on with her career. But there was no time for maternal fussing. After nearly four straight years of professional disappointments and a long period of depression, Marlene Dietrich knew that she would have to take drastic steps to alter her destiny. Films were failing her; lovers had departed; age was an unavoidable fact.
During her bond tour, Dietrich had learned more about an important venture involving actors in the war effort, and to this she now turned her full attention. The United Service Organization—always referred to simply as the USO—had been founded in 1941 to provide off-duty recreational, social, welfare and spiritual facilities for the American military at home and abroad. Originally a consortium of social services (the YMCA and YWCA, the National Catholic Community Service, the National Jewish Welfare Board, the Salvation Army and the National Travelers Aid Association), the USO became a war agency after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated America’s entry into World War II. In towns near military posts as well as near battle lines in Europe and the Pacific, volunteers offered servicemen entertainment, meals and often dances. Its New York branch, the Stage Door Canteen, attracted Broadway actors to such volunteer work, and the Hollywood chapter (under Bette Davis, Orson Welles and many others) did likewise.
By 1945 there were over twenty-five hundred USO Clubs, and the USO Camp Shows were an important feature: supported by voluntary contributions, more than four thousand Americans went to posts and hospitals round the world and served more than a billion persons. Among the Camp Show entertainers were many celebrity performers popular in the 1940s who gave time and talent to appear for the armed forces (often at considerable personal risk near battle lines); their number included Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, Frances Langford, George Jessel, Jo Stafford—and Bob Hope, whose officer jokes and risqué wit made him a particular favorite, and who subsequently made troop entertainment a primary adjunct of his career.
The only pleasant interval in Dietrich’s life recently had been one day’s filming of Welles’s magic act, before a live audience of servicemen. That picture’s name had just been changed to Follow the Boys, and as the bells rang in the New Year 1944, that was precisely what she decided to do.
* This was a problem from 1933 to 1945. Dietrich was a Russian in The Scarlet Empress and Knight Without Armour, Spanish in The Devil Is a Woman, vaguely Middle European in The Garden of Allah, English in Angel, and French in Desire, Destry Rides Again, Seven Sinners, The Flame of New Orleans and Manpower. In The Lady Is Willing, The Spoilers and Pittsburgh the characters’ national origin was simply not specified, and she was, of all things, an Iraqi in Kismet.
* Such period films were popular escapist fare during the 1940s, since the narrative could blithely omit any mention of the war. Also, the roles “masked” popular stars whose accents indicated nationalities unpopular at the moment. From 1939, the German Dietrich was conveniently hidden in the American West, the South Seas, New Orleans, Alaska, Pittsburgh and Baghdad.
* Earlier, Maria had been engaged very briefly to the actor Richard Hayden, a bachelor almost twenty years older.