ON MARCH 20, 1944, MARLENE DIETRICH entertained more than twelve hundred soldiers based at Fort Meade, Maryland.
Wearing an elegant long-sleeved, flesh-colored net gown with gold sequins, she was every inch the elegantly sultry Hollywood star the men in uniform recognized. She sang “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” (from her 1939 film Destry Rides Again) and her signature tune, “Falling in Love Again” (from The Blue Angel). She then played “Pagan Love Song” on the musical saw. After that, Marlene Dietrich’s accompanist, a thirty-year-old nightclub entertainer from Michigan named Danny Thomas, assisted her in a mental telepathy act she had learned in Hollywood from Orson Welles. She recruited soldiers from the audience, engaging them in the trick and exchanging racy anecdotes. The crowd went wild, and her tumultuous reception confirmed Dietrich’s resolve to go abroad to the front lines, to entertain as many young men as she could.
From Fort Meade, Dietrich proceeded to New York, where final papers were put in order for her to entertain troops in Europe; accordingly, she spent the last of her savings on a chic tan hat from John-Frederics and, from Franklin Simon, a fashionable olive gabardine suit with beige scarf. The colors may have been military, but the outfit was strictly Beverly Hills/Park Avenue. Dietrich had no intention of disappointing the boys she was following to camp. She also learned at this time that she would have the simulated rank of major in the United States Army: USO entertainers were routinely given rank so that, if captured, they might hope to be treated like officers. (Danny Thomas was merely captain.)
While in New York, she also learned a great deal about live performances from Thomas, an expert showman who taught her the fine points of phrasing and breath control for singing and the right comic timing for her repartee. All this was new to her. “He taught me everything,” Dietrich said later of Thomas; “how to deal with an audience, how to answer if they shout, how to play them, how to make them laugh. Above all, he taught me how to talk to them.” Together the pair continued to refine and rehearse what quickly became her one-woman show: Dietrich at the microphone singing, Dietrich playing the saw, Dietrich trading jokes, Dietrich telling stories, Dietrich encouraging the troops, Dietrich hosting a telepathy act.
At this point in her wartime service, her wardrobe, her array of cosmetics, her musical preparations—everything in her possession and attitude, in fact—indicated that she was indeed preparing to establish herself as a solo entertainer, to disprove those who claimed that her string of movie failures from 1940 to 1943 spelled the end of a career.
In this regard, Dietrich’s volunteer service is easy to understand, for many actresses and singers performed USO work—especially those not under contract or committed to a specific film. But in her case this was not only her way of demonstrating good citizenship, it was also a means to gain the male attention she thrived on and the public adoration she required.
As a star, too, there was something of noblesse oblige in this, as in all her menial efforts for others: in this case, she was the queen mother (if not quite any longer regnant), visiting her men in action. In another sense, of course, it was the logical extension of her “manly woman” role, which had long conjoined her own character with those she played in the von Sternberg films. She was, then, at last becoming one of the boys, the ambiguous and ambivalent woman-in-drag, the masculinized female who identified with men, loved them for themselves and as surrogates of herself, the woman of an embattled era who was striving to be all things to all men and women. Some of this psychospiritual medley was perhaps commingled in the murky depths of motivation as she entered the USO, claiming she wanted only to help the boys in battle. There had been no precedent in her character for such single-minded, altruistic sacrifice, after all. And human psychology is never so simple as to admit of a single basis; “only God is Love straight through,” as Thomas More said. And whatever Dietrich’s primary, conscious intentions, her purpose and her courage would soon be tested—in an ordeal worse than any devised by a tyrannical movie director.
ON APRIL 2, MARLENE DIETRICH BOARDED AN AIRplane for the first time in her life—a C-54 transport she took from New York with Danny Thomas and a little troupe who would perform supportively in their act: comedienne and harmonica player Lynne Mayberry, pianist-guitarist Jack Snyder and Milton Frome, a “straight man” for the humorous repartee. Not until they were airborne, huddling together for warmth and drinking steaming mugs of coffee to fight the cold, were they permitted to open a sealed envelope with their destination: Casablanca. They might have imagined themselves a road company banding together for a reprise of the previous year’s popular movie romance with that city’s name for its title—until a fierce electrical storm raged round the plane, tossing the passengers like so many rag dolls for several hours. Everyone was desperately ill except the star, as Lynne Mayberry recalled. Dietrich covered the soldiers with blankets, poured Danny Thomas and herself tumblers of smuggled scotch whiskey (which he promptly threw up) and distracted her companions from the unpleasant flight by telling stories of Berlin in the twenties. Her protective instincts had perhaps never been so beneficially demonstrated.
With stops for refueling in Greenland and the Azores, the flight to North Africa took twenty-two hours. They finally reached Casablanca, Morocco’s chief port, at night and (because of the blackout) without benefit of runway lights. The poorly heated airplane had given Dietrich a chill, and she was exhausted after only three hours of fitful sleep. Casablanca was no idyllic spot, however, nor were there attractive characters like Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart or Paul Henreid greeting them in sparkling white suits. An eerie calm had settled over the city, site of the previous year’s Anglo-American Conference that had planned the Allied bombing offensive known as “Pointblank” in preparation for the invasion of Europe. Everywhere were military units and English, American and Canadian soldiers on the exacting rounds of their duties.
The Camp Show volunteers, separated from the GIs, were then bundled into a hastily requisitioned Red Cross convoy truck. Officers from the American base charged with the show had been misinformed of their arrival date, and there were no quarters for them. Finally a bungalow was found, for which modest would be too extravagant a word—it was a damp, cold, putrid hut near soldiers’ barracks. Without a word of complaint, Dietrich settled into a single room with her five companions. She had not come expecting much comfort, she told Danny Thomas, and with that she found the crude latrine, then returned to the group, pushed her hair under her cap and, curling up in her uniform and a regulation bomber jacket, tucked herself in for the night. Four sequined evening dresses, intended for her show, were wrapped in a knapsack; these she used for a pillow.
The next afternoon, Dietrich and company performed their first show. To cacophonous whistling and hooting, she stepped onto a makeshift platform behind an outpost of the Free French, sang a medley from her films and began her mind-reading routine. But the success of this telepathy stunt depended on a careful set of signals between her and Danny Thomas, and as she tried to make her way through the first few rows of the audience she was whirled around, asked for autographs, a kiss, an impromptu dance and a view of her famous legs. The act was sabotaged, but no one seemed to care.
From Casablanca the troupe proceeded, hugging the North African coast to Rabat and then Tangiers. Dietrich performed twice daily for gatherings of American and Allied forces along the road, coping constantly with short supplies of water and soap, erratic microphone systems and sudden windstorms. There were, of course, neither limousines nor gourmet cuisine—no comfort of any kind, in fact: Dietrich travelled in open jeeps and ate regulation tinned food. Nothing could have been in greater contrast to her comfortable life in California, but she was in her element—one of the lads, indeed. “Wherever I went to entertain troops, there were frankfurters and sauerkraut,” she told a foreign correspondent. “Frankfurters and sauerkraut, all over. And always outdoors. Even when there was an indoors, we ate outdoors, often in the rain, with rain on the food and cold grease running down. We didn’t mind. It was food, and millions were perishing of starvation in Russia.” At the Strait of Gibraltar, Dietrich asked the driver to stop. She jumped out, saying she had a dear friend in France, and stood tearfully for several moments, gazing across the water. Her thoughts for Jean Gabin may have been clear and tender, but geography was never her strong suit.
After a stopover in Oran, they arrived in Algiers on April 11. To Dietrich’s surprise, Gabin was there to greet her, for his transfer into France had not yet been arranged. The couple, according to Danny Thomas, “attached themselves to each other so amorously that the GIs cheered for at least five minutes while they clutched and kissed in full view of everyone.” They had a day-and-a-half reunion before Gabin finally left Algiers.
At the Opera House, the wail of air-raid sirens interrupted her performance several times, and she had to be hauled offstage and pushed to the floor by Thomas and Mayberry (“I was more afraid about my teeth than my legs!” Dietrich said). Later, she stood with soldiers and civilians on the waterfront, peering at flashes of orange and yellow light which, they were told, were airfire from Allied Beaufighters as they shot down three Junker 88s and a Dornier 217 only a few miles offshore. Flying from bases in Occupied France, the Germans were attempting attacks on convoys like hers moving along the North African coast. “It was my first real air raid,” she said next morning, “although we had practices at home when I was a girl. But I didn’t feel at all frightened.” Although by every account she remained calm throughout, Dietrich must have summoned her old Prussian reserve, for the terrifying air battle garishly illuminated the sky until dawn.
Next morning, she went to a makeshift hospital and could scarcely suppress her horror at the sight of so many boys wounded, limbless and blind. Trying to hide her emotion, she visited each bedside and, when one ward would not stop cheering her, she unpacked her musical saw and improvised “Swanee River,” “Oh, Susanna” and “My Darling Clementine.” There was, as reporter Louis Berg remembered, scarcely a dry eye in the room.
Such an emotional response from soldiers to Dietrich is easy to understand—not only because she was a warm, maternal figure bending over them with loving concern, but precisely because she was a beautiful, somewhat remote and glamorous Hollywood star. Her customary array of cosmetics, powders and rouges had to be abandoned, and there was no key light to accent her features just so. Instead, colleagues and soldiers were surprised to see a short, weary woman over forty, with lines of exhaustion and anxiety clearly traced around her mouth and eyes. Star performer she may have been, laying the foundation of her future one-woman show, triumphant abroad in a way she had not been recently in Hollywood. But for this—and for them, she made it clear—Dietrich was disdaining safety, rejecting special treatment and risking her life. Additionally, she was a naturalized German who loudly sided with the men fighting against her native country.
But she also flirted outrageously, according to Danny Thomas; she doffed her khakis, slinking around whenever she could in a form-fitting gown without underwear. He called her the Golden Panther.
Throughout April and early May, the show toured from Tunis, through Sicily and up the Italian coast, while Dietrich set her cap for Danny Thomas. In Naples the company stayed briefly at a small hotel, and one afternoon she asked Lynne Mayberry to send him to her room, ostensibly to ask why he refused to be photographed with her. “I went in,” Thomas recalled, “and there she was, stark naked, sunning herself on her balcony.”
“Come on now,” Dietrich said. “Don’t be such a baby.”
Thomas, then married and a father, tried to resist, but Dietrich was insistent. “You don’t like me,” she continued.
“That’s not true. I love you.”
“Then why don’t you want to have pictures taken with me?”
Thomas explained that he preferred not to exploit the war or his USO service for publicity purposes (as, he could have implied, she did so readily). She replied that he was a very unusual man—a reaction that may have had more to do with his carefully preserved chastity than his ideas about photographic self-aggrandizement. And with that, according to Danny Thomas, he promptly left Marlene’s room.
SOME OF THE MOST SAVAGE FIGHTING OF THE ALLIES’ push toward Rome was in progress when Dietrich’s convoy reached Cassino, a major Nazi stronghold. The siege centered on the hill near the ancient monastery that could trace its origins back to St. Benedict in the sixth century. From a mile away, she and her comrades—part of a small splinter group that had accidentally taken an alternative road toward the assigned camp—watched through field glasses as British and Polish troops backed up the Americans, whose most powerful mobile gun, the 240-millimeter howitzer, eventually destroyed the abbey and the entire town in days. The Nazis then moved into the monastic ruins, which provided them with an excellent defensive position.
The area was thus particularly dangerous when Dietrich and her troupe could not relocate their division on the evening of May 15 and began to wander, lost in a no-man’s-land near enemy territory. Their jeep broke down, and during a cold and terrifying night they listened to the gunfire while huddled in a grove. Eventually a truck drove up and a group approached them. This turned out to be a detachment of Free French soldiers, among whom was the actor Jean-Pierre Aumont.
“I am Marlene Dietrich,” she said in French after hearing their language.
The reply was instantaneous and sarcastic: “If you are Marlene Dietrich, I am General Eisenhower.” But with a flashlight, Dietrich proved her identity.
Aumont then found himself responsible not only for his comrades but for a wandering band of American performers. “Being made prisoner wasn’t a very agreeable prospect for me,” he reflected later.
But to be responsible for Marlene’s capture! In the eyes of the Germans, she was a renegade serving on behalf of the American army and against her own people . . . Under the veneer of her legendary image, however, I saw a strong and courageous woman. There were no tears, no panic.
Instead, she tried to ignore the danger to them all, commenting on the peculiar odor from Aumont’s uniform. He explained that he had just had his first sleep in days, under a tank, next to the corpse of a Senegalese soldier. Eventually they found the French camp and hours later they located the Americans, who were not at all pleased at the temporary absence of Dietrich and her companions. By this time commanding officers had become accustomed to seeing her as a feisty, peripatetic den mother, Joan of Arc mustering her troops. She always obeyed orders, but when they were contravened by circumstances beyond her control she remained unperturbed and unapologetic.
Worse anxiety awaited everyone as they moved north toward Rome. On May 23, the Allies began a drive on the Anzio beachhead and soon the German stranglehold on Italy was definitively broken. On roads secured by the Allies there were large, leggy drawings of Dietrich—illustrated directions by amateur military artists, pointing the way to her unit. She insisted that her show must go on despite the evident danger of being so perilously close to the site where fighting had not yet ceased.
Surrounded by a protective ring of tanks, the Camp Show began the night of May 25, and as she sang “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby,” hundreds of soldiers provided the lighting by pointing their flashlights on the performing area. The effect was almost cinematic, as the shimmering, shifting lights sought her out and her low voice broke through the darkness. At that moment she thought (as she told a reporter next day), If they don’t like my act, all they have to do is turn off their flashlights! But the lighting remained—as haunting as anything ever devised by von Sternberg. “I felt,” she said, “as if I had passed the toughest test of my career.”
Several days later, Dietrich came down with viral pneumonia, but she continued to perform; eventually, however, she collapsed, dangerously close to delirium with fever and dehydration. She was sent to a hospital tent, treated with injections of penicillin and five days later resumed two shows daily from Naples to Bari, entertaining groups of from fifty to twenty-two thousand. “Anyone who has played for soldiers overseas,” she said later, “is not going to be satisfied with another kind of audience for a long time. The boys are full of generosity and never gloomy.”
On June 4, the Allies broke through into Rome, and when Dietrich and her companions arrived a week later the street battle was still fierce. Fanning out through the city, soldiers fought a Nazi rear guard at the Forum, an armored convoy near Trajan’s column and snipers round almost every corner. Dietrich and her troupe then wheeled dozens of the injured to a large hall, where she sang and joked until darkness. “It gave me the opportunity of kissing more soldiers than any woman in the world,” she said later. “No woman can please one man; this way, you can please many men.”
Before the end of June, her ten-week assignment completed, she was in New York, fulfilling her obligation to appear at the premiere of Kismet. Urged during publicity and press conferences to comment on what seemed the imminent collapse of the German Reich, she spoke frankly: “The Germany I knew is not there anymore. I don’t think of it. I suppose if I did, I could never do these tours.”
Telephone calls to her agent confirmed what she suspected. Her absence had not made Hollywood’s heart grow fonder; on the contrary, she was out of sight and therefore not much in their business minds. Despite her two-picture contract with MGM, the studio could not find a suitable project for her after Kismet, and so she returned to the USO Camp Shows. Leaving New York at the end of August, she again performed twice daily at bases in Greenland and Iceland, with a new troupe of musicians and a new accompanist replacing Danny Thomas.
BUT THE SPIRIT OF JOAN OF ARC HAD NOT ENTIRELY taken possession of Marlene Dietrich, and during this second (and, as it happened, longer) tour, she seemed to eyewitnesses quite conscious of her legendary status and fully prepared to exploit it for her present and future.
This she did first in London. Dietrich arrived in September, briefly met another old flame, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and then attached herself securely as a regular visitor to the headquarters of the European Theater of Operations—which by an odd coincidence happened to be housed at 20 Grosvenor Square, the former apartment-hotel where she and Fairbanks had lived six years before. With the regal grace worthy at least of a princess, she toured the apartment she had once occupied, showing Commanding General Jacob Devers, his officers and the press what could be stored in which cupboards, and how the rooms might be best furnished. “Only the door to [the] fuchsia bathroom had to be closed when visitors arrived,” according to Colonel Barney Oldfield. He had been a journalist and publicist before the war, and was then entrusted with the complex job of managing military press and public relations throughout the European campaign.
Oldfield, a commissioned officer for thirty years, was known for being (as newsman Charles Kuralt later called him) “the king of the press agents.” But he was also a sharp strategist and tactician, and General Floyd L. Parks, the first American commander in Berlin in 1945, confirmed that he did nothing during the first days of occupation without Oldfield at his side. Oldfield became a dutiful guardian and occasional facilitator for Dietrich throughout the next year, tasks required on her behalf by top-ranking American officers. Among them were Generals Mark Clark, Omar Bradley and George S. Patton—and especially the handsome, enigmatic and controversial Major General James M. Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who took the offer of Marlene Dietrich to be his company’s mascot and friend, and eventually his lover.
“Dietrich was a very strong-minded lady,” Oldfield recalled many years later. “She could be glamorous and she could be earthy. I saw her gnaw on a German sausage like a hungry terrier, but of course she could make a grand entrance that would upstage a reigning queen. She could be as authoritarian as Caesar, and she could pout as prettily as a six-year-old whose lollipop was stolen after only one lick.”
During her time in London early that autumn of 1944, Dietrich made several propaganda appearances on ABSIE (the American Broadcasting Station in England), on a program aptly called “Marlene Sings to Her Homeland.” In these transmissions, beamed to all of Germany, she sang songs from her films as well as familiar beer-hall melodies and German airs, always dedicating them to the Allied soldiers who were “about to meet up with you boys and destroy the Reich.” These broadcasts, and her outspoken rage against Nazi Germany made her extremely unpopular—indeed, very much reviled—in her homeland, both during and after the war.
Dietrich’s greatest concern, as the Allies proceeded to sweep across Europe toward Germany, was the fate of her mother, Wilhelmina Felsing Dietrich von Losch. As Oldfield remembered, this was the topic to which she turned in every conversation with officers, journalists, pilots and paratroopers. She intended to enlist every kind of aid in learning if Wilhelmina, whom she had not seen since 1931 (and from whom there had been no letters since 1938), was alive or dead.
In October, Dietrich arrived in Paris (liberated since the end of August) and decided that henceforth she would make this the headquarters for her own European Theater of Operations. She would still present her one-woman show as close to the front as possible, still contact the most important officers for needs and favors, and still risk safety to secure the hearts of all-male audiences in the last brutal campaigns of World War II. But whenever possible she retreated to the relative comfort of the Ritz where, among other notables, she enjoyed the company of Ernest Hemingway.
As a journalist, Hemingway had made his way to London and managed to fly several missions with the Royal Air Force before crossing the Channel with American troops on D-Day. Attaching himself to the 22nd Regiment of the Fourth Infantry Division, he fought in Normandy, participated in the liberation of Paris and, although officially a newsman, was highly respected as a skilled strategist for intelligence activities and guerrilla warfare. Dietrich sat on the edge of his bathtub at the Ritz, exchanging war news while he shaved, and telling him of the ardent hours she had just spent with General Patton, who had given her a pair of his pearl-handled pistols. Indeed, she said quite calmly, she and Patton had already shared the same bed more than once in London and in Paris.
The intervals at the Ritz in 1944 and 1945 remain examples of Dietrich’s canny abilities with the officers during these difficult times, for whenever she was present there were somehow ample supplies of liquor, champagne, cocktail food and caviar. Much of this turned up anonymously (the black market thrived), much of it was sent with the compliments of this officer or that general—especially her great admirer General Patton, called “Old Blood and Guts” by his men.
There were the usual rivalries around Dietrich, this time with Collier’s war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (the third and soon to be ex–Mrs. Hemingway) and with Mary Welsh (his current mistress and soon to be fourth wife). “Both were strong women,” Barney Oldfield said of Dietrich and Gellhorn,
tenaciously determined, probably in the land of the Amazons, and [acted like] opposing warlords. There was always the impression that each resented the other and denigrated her. To Gellhorn, Marlene was “that actress,” while Marlene thought of her as “that writer.” These two women jousted for the attention of General Jim Gavin . . .
. . . as they did, for different reasons, for the attention of Hemingway himself.
As for Mary Welsh, Hemingway was obviously in love with her, although time had not diluted his fascination with Dietrich. He proudly squired both women to official meetings and receptions in Paris at the end of the year, showing them off and boasting of their social help in his suite—which, he said, was “the Paris command post for all veterans of the 22nd Infantry Regiment.” Although the relationship of these two women to Hemingway differed, neither suffered gladly the other’s presence. No one more than Dietrich coveted the attention of men—by the thousands in an audience or individually in friendship or affair.
To obtain and keep that attention, almost nothing was beyond her caprice. William Walton, the highly respected journalist then working for Time magazine (and later for the New Republic), was subjected to the full Hollywood-party treatment. He, too, was billeted at the Ritz that year, and met Dietrich through Hemingway.
Walton had bought a chic Paris hat for a sweetheart in New York, which Dietrich insisted on modelling for all who came to her room. One evening, she passed Walton’s open door while he was working and awaiting friends. She stopped, walked back to her own room and returned—completely nude—wearing the hat at a rakish angle. “Don’t I look cute?” she asked innocently. Walton replied calmly, as if she were also wearing the latest Paris frock, and Dietrich had to attempt a dignified retreat. On another occasion, as Hemingway’s biographer documented, Dietrich wore the same hat and calmly used Walton’s toilet (taking a page from Tallulah Bankhead’s stylebook), not interrupting her conversation with him while he shaved. In some ways it seems remarkable that generals and war correspondents within her emotional-ballistic range managed to conclude the war.
The discipline of conduct in war never affected the part of Dietrich’s character that was calmly exhibitionist. She dangled naked legs from truck platforms before sighing soldiers, and more than once she burst in on a soldiers’ camp shower to bathe as if no one else were present—actions which could not have been as beneficial to morale as she may have intended, and which led more than one angry officer to label her a cruel tease. Jean Renoir recalled that his wife Dido was so often asked by Dietrich to accompany her to the ladies’ room of a restaurant that Dido feared an imminent proposition. “But Marlene simply wanted to show off her legs,” according to Renoir, “and [she] took Dido with her on the pretext that she needed to be protected against the women who assailed her. It was simply the enactment of a ritual.”
THAT AUTUMN AND DURING A VICIOUSLY COLD WINter, Dietrich divided her USO entertainment duties between divisions of the Third and Ninth armies in eastern France, Belgium, Holland and at last in Germany. To banish shaking chills in the town of Nancy, in Lorraine, she drank Calvados (to which she had been introduced by Erich Maria Remarque). Imbibing on an empty stomach, she vomited constantly, “but I would rather vomit than be hospitalized,” she wrote later of that time. “Otherwise, what am I afraid of? Of failing . . . of being unable to endure this way of living any longer. And everybody will say, smiling, ‘Of course, of course, that was an absurd idea [for her to go to war] in the first place.’ ”
With the ruthless, proud and independent Patton, Dietrich and her performance troupe moved north in December from Nancy into Belgium—precisely at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, from mid-December 1944 to mid-January 1945. She frequently traveled and dined with this tough tactician, and on at least one occasion she fell asleep in his office. He carried her to his car, drove her to her barracks, and when she awoke next morning he was still by her side.
Whether she bestirred herself at some time before dawn is not clear, but members of Patton’s staff—like his aide, Frank McCarthy, who produced the film Patton—later confirmed that there was an intense affair between Dietrich and the general all during the time of her attachment to his army.
“She charmed her way onto more airplanes than Bob Hope—and with an entire troop,” according to Barney Oldfield. “She could commandeer a jeep and driver and all sorts of privileges, and these were accorded to her as if she were a queen in the eyes of those she dealt with.” Dietrich was, as she later said, frequently summoned to Patton’s quarters on the pretext of his needing a report on her shows or to inquire about her willingness to accompany him on a hospital tour. (When director Billy Wilder later asked her if her affair had not indeed been with Eisenhower instead of Patton, she replied, “But, darling, how could it have been Eisenhower? He wasn’t even at the front!”) During this critical time of the conflict, Dietrich managed to brace Patton as she did his men. Needing an official password for her, he decreed “Legs,” in her honor.
Accompanying Patton all through the hostilities in the Ardennes, Dietrich suffered severe frostbite that plagued her for the rest of her life and exacerbated her later arthritis. Her twice daily song-and-joke shows continued during this last great German offensive on the western front in southern Belgium. While Allied aircraft were impeded by wretched weather, Nazi Panzers advanced toward Antwerp and the German Fifth Army completely surrounded Bastogne. Nazi Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt then demanded that Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe surrender the city; his response was the legendary “Nuts!” Only when Patton barrelled into Bastogne on December 26, with Dietrich at his side, did the situation begin to alter; the First Army joined them a week later, and with that the Germans began to retreat.
For the morale of troops in the thick of the fighting, the USO pitched camp two miles from the German-Dutch-Belgian border and performed in Maastricht, Holland—the first town in that country to be liberated from the Germans. “Like the rest of us that winter, she had to wear long, woolly, drop-seat underwear, heavy trousers and gloves,” according to Oldfield, who was there with a press corps, “but she ignored the weather and changed into nylon stockings and a sequined evening gown—and in this glamorous outfit she stuck the musical saw between her legs and played for her cheering audience.”
Seeing her discomfort in the severe cold, war correspondent Gordon Gammack (then with the Des Moines Register and Tribune) recalled that in Maastricht he gave Dietrich a small coal stove for warmth, which she willingly accepted. Several years later, he approached Dietrich as she strolled with her grandchildren on a New York street. He introduced himself politely as the man with the stove from Maastricht, and said how much he had enjoyed her brave performance during the war. “Thank you for the stove,” she said unsmiling, with a chill that recalled that winter of 1945. “Thank you and goodbye.”
Aachen, twenty miles from Maastricht, had been the first large German city to fall (on October 20, 1944); it was on the route to Berlin when the Allies and Dietrich’s USO camp arrived at the end of January 1945. Acting now as interpreter for the American army, she was asked to tell the frightened inhabitants to evacuate the streets so that tanks could move through; to her surprise, she received a warm welcome from these Germans: “they couldn’t have been friendlier, even though they knew I was on the other side.” But Aachen bestowed another, less clement memory, for there the entire company contracted an infestation of body lice. With no showers, soap or medicine, the situation was grim until Dietrich selected a soldier from her audience and, to the accompanying hoots of his comrades, asked that he report later to her tent behind the truck. The young man’s subsequent report to his waiting friends has not been documented, but he was only invited to offer Marlene Dietrich delousing powder and instructions for its use.
The next stop was Stolberg, a few miles from Aachen, where she met a correspondent with the International News Service. “I am through with Hollywood,” she told reporter Frank Conniff, perhaps more from her doubts about her career possibilities than from a settled moral conviction about Hollywood. Gazing at the wreckage of the city, she added, “I hate to see all these ruined buildings, but I guess Germany deserves everything that’s coming to her.”
FROM FEBRUARY THROUGH JUNE 1945, DIETRICH shuttled from Germany to Paris, alternating shows for both Allied and enemy wounded soldiers with long intervals at the Ritz, usually with Patton. And that spring, through Hemingway, she scored an important strategic victory for herself and ultimately for her mother. Because Patton then proceeded eastward through the Saar toward Berlin and the USO was deployed on a slower, more circuitous route, his contact with Dietrich was subsequently diminished. In fact he was replaced, for her attention was then lavished almost exclusively on General Gavin, and their affair affected both lives in important ways.
In 1945, James M. Gavin was a slim, six-foot-two-inch, dark-haired, boyish gentleman who looked almost a decade younger than his thirty-seven years. The youngest general in the history of the army, Gavin had lied about his birthdate to enter military service without a high school diploma, and from his first years with the army he impressed superiors with his thorough dedication and serene, methodical approach to supervising men and solving problems. Zealous in his duty as a paratrooper, he commanded the parachute combat team that first invaded Sicily in 1943, and by the time he landed at Normandy on D-Day had risen to the rank of brigadier general and soon commanded the entire 82nd Airborne Division. Because he was known to be a man of extraordinary valor (he fought for a month with a broken back, earning himself the Silver Cross and the Purple Heart), and because his military prowess was combined with a gentle, courtly manner, women—and some men as well—found him fascinating, even seductive. As Barney Oldfield recalled, “Gavin was a very glamorous figure, not only respected but much talked about by everyone. Many strong-minded women, including Mary Welsh and Marlene, were attracted to him.”
Dietrich and Gavin met when Hemingway invited the general for drinks at the Ritz and Dietrich was among the guests—to the chagrin of Mary Welsh, with whom (as Barney Oldfield recalled) Dietrich had an immediate standoff for Gavin’s attention. The Dietrich-Gavin affair, conducted with the utmost discretion, began that night in Gavin’s suite and continued when Dietrich followed him back to Germany. Although for obvious reasons he made no explicit reference to Dietrich in his later account of that time, Gavin did describe an allusive incident in his book On to Berlin. As the 82nd was taking German soldiers prisoner, his men found a concertina and sang the German tune “Lili Marlene,” which—although as familiar to Allies as to the enemy—had become, at Gavin’s insistence, the anthem of the 82nd Airborne Division.
There were several reasons for Dietrich’s attraction to Gavin. Because she was close to him, as she was to Patton and Hemingway and a number of journalists and correspondents, she shared the knowledge of Operation Eclipse, the Allied plan to storm Berlin—a strategy which was to feature Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division (and a tactic which was eventually abandoned). Since Gavin was to be the first commanding officer entering the German capital, he would be the man Dietrich could enlist in the search for her mother. Ever conscious of the power of her glamour and allure, Dietrich was certainly willing to exploit them in this matter.
There had always been a distant antagonism between the bombastic, egocentric Patton and the sedate, reserved Gavin. “Patton seemed to be getting all the publicity,” Gavin wrote years later, “[but] the record now shows that it was the First Army [not Patton’s Third] that took the brunt of [the German attack on Bastogne] . . . Yet when Stars and Stripes arrived daily, it was full of stories about Patton and his Third Army and how the defenders at Bastogne [not the counteroffensive First Army] were winning the Battle of the Bulge.”
The younger general could not have been displeased, therefore, to find himself the object of Marlene Dietrich’s ardor under any circumstances, and his resentment of Patton may have added to the satisfaction of his affair with her. And on Dietrich’s side there was even more complexity, for in associating with the generals she was in a sense rediscovering the aloof officers of her childhood—her own uniformed father and stepfather—whose emotional endorsement she had long ago been denied.
GERMANY SURRENDERED ON MAY 7, AND MOST USO shows were disbanded by the end of June. After a sojourn in New York that summer, Dietrich returned to Paris, where Gavin contacted her with the news she had so long awaited. He, Colonel Oldfield and Lieutenant Colonel Albert McCleery were in the first American column to enter Berlin on July 1. While Gavin and Oldfield saw, respectively, to military and communications matters, McCleery located Wilhelmina Dietrich von Losch at the address Marlene had left with Gavin. Frightened, living in desperate poverty with an older sister, Wilhelmina did not at first understand McCleery’s news; indeed, because Goebbels had put out the fiction that London was totally destroyed, she presumed that her daughter (whose propaganda broadcasts she had heard) had been killed.
Oldfield then arrived with a car, an interpreter and two photographers. Wilhelmina was gently persuaded to accompany them to the Tempelhof airfield where, on September 19, Dietrich arrived on the military shuttle flight from Paris. The airplane door opened and she stepped out carrying a briefcase and her musical saw, her uniform crisply pressed. After a tearful reunion, mother and daughter spent several days together, and through Gavin the most liberal rations were sent to Frau von Losch. Ten days later, Dietrich—obviously emboldened—directly approached the formidable Marshal Georgi Zhukov, commander-in-chief of the Russian occupying forces in Berlin, at his headquarters. Rudi Sieber’s parents, she had learned, were interned in a Czech camp. After a long private meeting, Zhukov arranged for the Siebers to be relocated to Berlin and given hospitality appropriate to the family of the international star; generous ration cards were supplied to them, too.
The reunion of Dietrich and her mother happened none too soon, for Wilhelmina’s health was frail and that autumn she declined rapidly. Finally, in Friedenau, the American sector of Berlin, she died in her sleep of heart failure on November 6 at the age of sixty-nine. From Paris, where she received the news, Dietrich at once telephoned Gavin, who was then attending an important press reception in London. Because of the strict regulations regarding non-fraternization between Americans and Germans, Gavin himself departed at once for Berlin with Barney Oldfield, to supervise the funeral details. But their plane encountered a blinding storm and they had to set down at Schweinfurt instead of Templehof.
At that point, Gavin received bad news of his own: the IOIST Division had been selected over his now legendary 82nd as the regular army’s postwar airborne unit (a decision later rescinded). This immediately involved Gavin in a flurry of calls, interviews and memoranda. He had not, however, forgotten the reason for his trip to Berlin: “Do everything you can for her,” he said quietly to Barney Oldfield before hurrying to attend to his own complicated business. That night, Wilhelmina’s coffin was carried from her apartment to a small cemetery, where Oldfield hurriedly arranged for a grave. Finally, Dietrich arrived from Paris, accompanied by William Walton. The final formalities were brief. “Miss Dietrich was heartbroken and wept constantly,” Barney Oldfield remembered.