20,000 a week for less than an hour’s work nightly. Some performers were contracted to movie producers or television networks, but in a town controlled by organized crime, all manner of means were found to secure the services of a big name.“KLONDIKE IN THE DESERT,” A REPORTER CALLED Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1953. That year, seven million tourists flocked to its legal gambling tables, and a major expansion of the city’s many hotels and resorts was in progress. At the Desert Inn, the Flamingo, the Sahara and the Sands, guests passed through garish foyers to reach vast casinos filled with the cries of croupiers, the endless chiming of slot machines, the snap of cards and the clatter of chips.
In the restaurant-nightclub spaces of these hotels, cabaret performers could earn astonishing salaries, although they often had to compete with animals, circus and novelty acts and a distracted audience. “A wayfarer arriving in Las Vegas during any given week has a wider choice of top banana talent than the average New Yorker,” reported the New York Times that year. But some artists agreed with Lena Horne that “the audience is a captive one, but the thing that has captured them is the gambling. They really only come to see you in order to take a rest from the crap tables.” Nevertheless, a diverse roster of celebrities was regularly billed—Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, Georgia Gibbs, Ray Bolger, Ezio Pinza, Jeanette MacDonald, all of them lured by fees of 20,000 a week for less than an hour’s work nightly. Some performers were contracted to movie producers or television networks, but in a town controlled by organized crime, all manner of means were found to secure the services of a big name.
Marlene Dietrich, free of studio interference, needed no doubtful company for permission to work here. Arriving in Las Vegas in 1953 to negotiate for her debut that December, she surveyed the sound and lighting facilities, gauged the effects of this position and that gesture, assessed the sightlines and inspected the dressing rooms. She also listened to other performers—among them the twenty-five-year-old singer Eddie Fisher. A smooth tenor with a shy personality, he was carefully piloted by managers and billed as one of America’s most adorable teenage heartthrobs. Fisher’s boyish charm also made him the darling of the grandparents, and so for agents and record producers he was that rare find, a singer popular with both audiences.
Dietrich invited Fisher to her table after his performance one night and explained her plans, but he thought of her as an actress, not a nightclub star. “Eddie,” she replied, “I was singing in cabarets before you were born.” That age difference (twenty-seven years) apparently made no difference to their reunion a few weeks later in Dietrich’s New York apartment, to which she invited him for a home-cooked supper. Greeting Fisher in a revealing, low-cut beige gown, she served a candlelit meal and, as he recalled years later, completely took charge of the situation: “I was both excited and a little scared. But Marlene knew how to make me feel like a man. The ceiling of her bedroom was mirrored.”
Predictably, the affair (conducted mostly in New York during the summer and autumn of 1953) was intense but brief. On the one hand, it was flattering to an eager young singer from Philadelphia who appreciated every personal, social and professional endorsement offered by this “remarkable woman who knew how to enjoy life, the most stimulating woman I had ever met.” But as in the case of Michael Wilding, Fisher was really more important to Dietrich than she to him. Although the charms of a handsome young lover were certainly not to be disregarded, she was, as usual, attracted by the situation of nurturing as much as by sex. More vital still, she needed to know that she was attractive to and could please a new generation of admirers. What she longed for in public—the attention and love of thousands—required a private supplement. Once again, a transitory affair signalled her need to be worshipped rather than loved, although by the paradox often engendered by sex, it was perhaps simultaneously a plea for affection. But if, as she always contended, work was her cardinal value, she did not (at least past the age of forty) select lovers who would threaten that primacy; each affair had within it the seeds of its own demise.
FOR THREE WEEKS BEGINNING DECEMBER 16, 1953, Marlene Dietrich sang a half-dozen songs each night at the Sahara in Las Vegas; for this she was paid 90,000, which again made her the highest-paid entertainer in America (and very likely in the world). Half-singing, half-speaking with a strategic mutter, a purr, a wink and a flutter of her half-closed eyelids, she was more a diseuse—a husky, gauzy lady baritone blithely unconcerned for accuracy of tone yet somehow communicating the sly, world-weary sagacity of what the French call une femme d’un certain âge. Her audience clapped, whistled, stomped the floor and banged their tables after she sang “The Boys in the Back Room,” “Falling in Love Again,” “Lili Marlene,” “The Laziest Gal in Town,” “Johnny” and “La Vie en Rose,” and she closed her thirty-minute set in her scanty ringmaster’s outfit from the circus; she was, after all, the owner of legendary legs. In a way, she had come full circle, revising for modern audiences certain key aspects of earlier Berlin entertainments—and always teasing her audiences, inviting them yet maintaining a cool distance.
But it was not Marlene Dietrich’s talent as a vocal artist that was earning her headlines, feature photographs and the greatest press coverage of her career thus far. In fact, her singing was ignored by the critics; her success was in what she wore and how she was lighted—in other words it was all style. “Her voice deficiencies were neatly offset by her rather radical costume,” read a typical press report, “the most revealing gown” anyone could recall on an entertaining figure anywhere.
“My outward appearance was extremely important, since I had no illusions about my voice,” Dietrich later admitted. For that reason, she had a few Las Vegas entrepreneurs pressure the reluctant Harry Cohn, chief executive at Columbia Studios, to loan her his chief wardrobe designer, Jean Louis.* He had designed a seductive trompe l’oeil costume for Rita Hayworth’s film Salome which consisted of a thickly padded, girdlelike “living foundation” covered with a body stocking of flesh-colored chiffon. This was then overlaid with beads to hide the seams, and with the right lighting and camera angles Hayworth upset the censors. Dietrich had seen the film the previous spring and had been impressed. Jean Louis then drew up the basic blueprint for Dietrich—furs, spangles and diamonds, she insisted—and then, all during the autumn, fifteen seamstresses worked on three versions of the gown, sewing and resewing the sequins, glass brilliants, six hundred rhinestones and yards of chiffon, tearing and refashioning according to Dietrich’s alterations. According to Jean Louis, Dietrich had “almost a mania for everything to be just right. She flew to Hollywood from New York maybe six times until everything was perfect. And then she would move one more bead the size of a pinhead—just an eighth of an inch to the right or the left and back again until she was satisfied. I have never seen such patience—and such tenacity to get just the effect she wanted!”
The notorious dress (which appeared in magazines and newspapers internationally) cost just over 6,000 and weighed about fourteen pounds. It was a masterpiece of the couturier’s artifice, creating the illusion that—after Dietrich tossed aside her white fox stole—there was a firm and youthful body, nude from neck to waist but for a few scattered sequins, rhinestones and pearls. “Jean Louis’s creations metamorphosed me into a perfect, ethereal being,” Dietrich said, “the most seductive there was.” Not even patrons in the first row could tell she was tightly enveloped in astutely dyed layers of rubber foundation covered with a body-stocking and then chiffon. “Well,” Dietrich sighed to a journalist, “this is Las Vegas. If not here, then where?”
Her act—in the Sahara’s Congo Room—was a model of Teutonic detail, from her coiffure to the position of a light, from the tempo of each song to the few moments of gesture. Her recent experiences in film (with Fritz Lang especially) had been so dreadful that she had taken the idea of her wartime one-woman show a decade earlier and raised it to a precise art. At last she needed no one but herself and her audience. “Technique and control,” she said, “they are all that matter. In every single bar of my music, every single light that hits me—I know it and control it. In films, [there are] too many people, too many intangibles . . . [but in my solo act] nobody cuts or dubs or edits me afterwards.”*
Several nights, from one to four in the morning, Dietrich stood and sat for still photographs with John Engstead, who rushed them to a laboratory and then raced back to Dietrich with the proofs for her to approve at seven o’clock. She slept only after she had supervised every detail and Engstead and his assistant had departed for Los Angeles to do the retouching and the final printing, so that her publicist would have copies for the press that afternoon. Dietrich wanted every detail correct, Engstead recalled, and every detail was elaborated in her contract with him as it had been with her night-club hosts. According to Engstead, she loved her own face more than any other; she was her own creation for an audience, and she required that he help her maintain that creation. George Hurrell, who also photographed Dietrich that year, remembered that she returned a number of shots with multiple marks indicating which facial lines were to be removed by the retoucher. “You don’t take pictures like you did fifteen years ago, George,” she said sadly. “But Marlene,” Hurrell replied with consummate diplomacy, “I’m fifteen years older!”
The occasional photographic disappointment notwithstanding, Dietrich’s time in Las Vegas was triumphantly happy, for almost everyone who knew her personally came to see her show during the holidays; she was, she wrote to friends in Europe, exceedingly pleased, making lots of money and in control of her own destiny at last.
Unfortunately, her return trip, just as the new year 1954 began, broke the spell. Dorothy, Countess di Frasso, an American millionairess who had married an Italian aristocrat, had come for Dietrich’s final performance and, with their mutual friend Clifton Webb, had booked sleeping compartments on the train journey back to New York. A somewhat madcap member of café society, an international party-giver and a pursuer of the Hollywood elite, di Frasso also had some doubtful (if only transiently romantic) relations with the underworld. En route from Las Vegas, Webb found her in her roomette, dead of a heart attack at sixty-six, lying fully clothed in her expensive mink coat and wearing a diamond necklace worth almost 200,000; her luggage contained as much in additional precious stones and jewelry. The event troubled Dietrich very much: Dorothy di Frasso was not an intimate, but she was nearly a contemporary, and they intersected the same social circles. Age Dietrich could try to ignore; death was unspeakable, and the death of a rich, buoyant, elegant, life-loving woman like Dorothy must have reminded her of her own mortality as nothing else had. (Mentioning a seamstress who worked for her in Las Vegas and died later of natural causes, Dietrich said flatly that her death was “unjust.”)
Still more unhappiness awaited in New York, where Rudi told Dietrich that Tamara, who had suffered from vaguely defined and intermittent emotional ailments for several years, had finally been diagnosed as severely manic-depressive with occasional frankly psychotic episodes. Doctors recommended that Matul enter an asylum for several months, but because Sieber was virtually without work by this time that was not feasible. Without hesitation, Dietrich suggested that they both return to California at her expense. Before the end of that year, Rudi and the frail Tamara had gone West, where Dietrich’s money set him up in the rustic life of a chicken farmer, an idea very much his own. This he preferred to the vagaries of working as a minor film company employee, and for a time Tamara, too, seemed to respond favorably to their new environment in the heart of the San Fernando Valley.
For Dietrich, the first months of 1954 were otherwise quiet. Stefan Lorant arrived early at her Park Avenue apartment one Sunday afternoon to take her to dinner, but Dietrich was in the midst of a major housecleaning, scrubbing the floors in each room. She then excused herself and returned from her bedroom and bath “transformed into a major star” (thus Lorant). After finding the doors of several East Side restaurants closed on Sunday evening, they finally located a quiet venue, but when the host said, “Of course, Miss Garbo, I have a lovely table for you,” Dietrich turned to Lorant and said, “This is not my evening.” They left at once and settled for pastrami sandwiches at Reuben’s Delicatessen.
She also turned up regularly at the Riva house, where Maria interpreted her mother’s frequent housecleaning as an implicit criticism. Dietrich fussed over her grandchildren, bought them clothes, and insisted on doing the same for Maria, for whom she bought what she considered to be the proper shoes and accessories.
There was also the usual round of theater-going with visiting friends like Noël Coward or Orson Welles, dining with literati like Hemingway when he passed through the city, and attending a United Nations reception at the special invitation of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, whom she did not know. Dietrich also repeated her benefit appearance at the circus that April, and over the course of several transatlantic telephone calls, finalized the details for the transfer to London of her Las Vegas act. Although England could afford to pay only about half her American fee, this was prestigious new territory to conquer.
And so on June 16, Noël Coward, a crimson carnation in his blue suit and carrying a bouquet of the same mixed with sweetpeas, met her at London Airport. Wearing a grey beret, a tightly fitted grey suit with its skirt two inches higher than the year’s fashion, Dietrich smiled demurely, stopped to sign a few autographs and, ignoring reporters’ questions, was summarily whisked off to the Dorchester Hotel. There she was installed in the very grand seventh-floor suite decorated by Oliver Messel (complete with a grand piano and a gold bed in a gold bedroom) and prepared, as secretly as if her task were atomic research, for her debut at the Café de Paris, Leicester Square. On Monday morning, June 21, crowds began to gather outside the dinner club on Coventry Street; the five hundred available tickets had been sold weeks earlier, but fans jockeyed for the best positions to see the elite arrive that night, and perhaps the star, too.
While the patrons dined on salmon, sole, broiled chicken and strawberry ice cream, Dietrich slipped quietly into her dressing room at ten o’clock that evening. Precisely on schedule, at a quarter past midnight, Noël Coward stepped to the microphone:
Though we all might enjoy
Seeing Helen of Troy
As a gay cabaret entertainer,
I doubt that she could
Be one quarter as good
As our legendary, lovely Marlene.
A single spotlight found her, at the top of a staircase, wearing the notorious Las Vegas gown and a floor-length white fox coat. The hush throughout the Café was followed by a collective inhalation of breath, then a rapturous sigh, then clamorous applause as she glided down to the stage. With another face-lift, she looked perhaps too perfect, her features almost unnaturally smooth, her expression daringly impersonal. With eyes almost closed and lips tentatively parted, she barely acknowledged the presence of her audience, and by this calculated aura of something perilously close to apathy, she announced—substituting authority for warmth and domination for intimacy—“a few songs I have sung in pictures, on records and during the war.” There was absolute silence, not the lightest clink of dinnerware, not a cough in the room; had she called “Attention!” the crowd would have leaped to their feet.
Dietrich pointed an index finger at the orchestra leader and then stood almost motionless for a half-hour, hands on hips, occasionally raising an arm defiantly, crooning with amiable disdain in a voice that no one criticized for its narrow range or its vacillation somewhere between harmony and hoarseness. As usual, she asked what the boys in the back room would have; she fell in love again, never wanting to; she was the laziest gal in town and not the marrying kind. Her inflections were alternately subtle, racy, forlorn; she did not ask to be loved or admired. She defied anyone to reject her, and that night no one did. She was simply there, a memorial to discipline, a statue of Eternity.
In the final analysis, that is what people came to see—a monument made famous by transcending time; a woman representing sex, yet implying that she was beyond it; an insolent, iconoclastic grandmother; a beautiful, overpowering and utterly unapproachable being whose manner on- and offstage said at once “Come hither” and “Keep your distance.” Everything about her expressed what she had recently told the press:
It is a woman’s job to sense the hungers in men and to satisfy them without, at the same time, giving so much of herself that men become bored with her. It is the same with acting. Each man or woman should be able to find in the actress the thing he or she most desires and still be left with the promise that they will find something new and exciting every time they see her again.
And so it was for six weeks, in the most successful cabaret show in postwar London. By being in complete control, never granting an encore no matter how insistent the applause, she impressed every patron of the Café de Paris and had London at her command. It did not matter that she had become an institution, almost a spectacle, a Snow Queen trapped, as Noël Coward said privately, in her own legend.
TYPICALLY, SHE ENTERTAINED AFTER HER SHOW UNtil four or five in the morning, then slept until late afternoon. To the Dorchester came old friends and new acquaintances, who cheerfully listened to recordings of her opening night. Among others was Jean Howard (the wife of Charles Feldman, producer of two Dietrich pictures at Universal), who years later recalled a meeting one afternoon. “Van Johnson and I arrived at her suite, and she put on a record. It was nothing but excerpts of the applause to her numbers! For her it was wonderful, but it hardly seemed the thing to do for guests.”
There were also charity excursions—beneficial publicity, she was assured—an occasional garden party benefit for blind babies or old age pensioners. When she heard that composer Harold Arlen was hospitalized with ulcers, she kept several days’ vigil at his bedside, occasionally soothing him by humming his tunes “Stormy Weather” and “That Old Black Magic.” As Billy Wilder recalled, “Arlen was on his deathbed when she took care of him—just as she had cared for Kirk Douglas, and for [actor-director] Gregory Ratoff when he was sick.” Her compensation was the act of mothering itself.
Dietrich then dashed to the Café, where each night a different celebrity introduced her (Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness and David Niven, for example); the patrons at the final performance included Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent.
On August 17, Dietrich attended the Bal de la Mer in Monte Carlo, where Jean Cocteau and his mate, the actor Jean Marais, introduced her to a crowd as “a bird of paradise, a magnificent ship with sails unfurled, a woman whose plumes and furs seem to grow naturally from her skin. Her name begins tenderly and ends with the sound of a cracking whip—Marlene Dietrich.”
She returned to Paris with Marais to visit Piaf, Chevalier and the Seidmanns, but Marais had a clear impression that she was lonely and sad after the great London triumph. Dietrich claimed to harbor an enduring love for Gabin, and over several weeks Marais had to escort her to a small bistro near Gabin’s home on the Rue François. From there she gazed longingly, watching for him to emerge, waiting hours for a mere glimpse. She also asked Marais to escort her to various retrospective cinemas screening Gabin films, at which she laughed, cried, commented on his acting and reminisced about her love affair.
IN OCTOBER 1954, SHE WAS BACK IN LAS VEGAS, IN a new peek-a-boo Jean Louis creation that had fewer bugle-beads but, with the same artful foundation and construction, gave the identical illusion of nudity beneath diaphanous chiffon. For her final song, a wind machine strategically positioned offstage blew the billowing fabric round her, effecting for a moment the image of a heavenly Aphrodite, or of Venus rising none too demurely from the waves.
A week into the run of her show, she was offered contracts to return during the next two years, at 100,000 annually for four weeks work. One evening not long after that she noticed John Wayne in the audience, blew him a kiss and, when she took her bow, beckoned him to follow her backstage. This he did cheerfully, taking along his fiancée. Dietrich greeted him with a passionate kiss, but turned her back suddenly and began to speak with another guest when Wayne introduced his future wife. Her attitude about the fealty of former lovers had obviously not changed.
Nor had her mothering instincts. That winter, Harold Arlen’s musical show House of Flowers was scheduled to open on Broadway, and during its Philadelphia tryout Dietrich, worried about Arlen’s ulcers, sped to his side with cartons of milk. She also made herself the production’s servant, preparing coffee for the cast, stitching wardrobe and sending for her own brilliantly deceptive costume jewelry when Pearl Bailey’s real gems failed to sparkle under stage lights. But by the time House of Flowers came to Broadway, Arlen—simply an acquaintance flattered by her attention and her desire to sing some of his most famous songs—had clearly allowed Dietrich too much latitude as a kind of unofficial mascot. She freely offered actors and technicians so much advice and direction that there was considerable dissension onstage and off, and she had to be politely asked to keep still.
Dietrich left the company before the Christmas premiere in New York, and during the holidays she complained bitterly (to visiting friends like Coward and Hemingway) that apart from her nightclub act there was really nothing to engage her energy or talent. In a letter to her Hollywood agent, Charles Feldman, she complained that she longed to try new kinds of film, and that no one had yet “taken advantage of the worldwide publicity resulting from my initial appearance in Vegas and London. I don’t think there is another film actress idol for so many years who had such a success in a new field.” She received a polite but indifferent reply; it was, after all, the era of Marilyn Monroe.
At the same time, there was little emotional constancy in her life at the age of fifty-three. She lavished on her daughter and grandsons the attention she had not given Maria in childhood, but her generosity was often excessive, embarrassing and frankly smothering to the Rivas. Coward put the matter succinctly when, addressing the complaints of fortunate actresses with brittle bitterness, he described Dietrich as
fairly tiresome. She was grumbling about some bad press notices and being lonely. Poor darling glamorous stars everywhere, their lives are so lonely and wretched and frustrated. Nothing but applause, flowers, Rolls-Royces, expensive hotel suites, constant adulation. It’s too pathetic and wrings the heart.
Each item from applause to adulation was hers again in London that June of 1955, where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., introduced her second summer engagement at the Café de Paris, and where the opening night audience included patrons as diverse as Danny Kaye, Tyrone Power and Dame Edith Evans. Even the government pursued her this time. After Dietrich was introduced to the audience on July 5 by Bessie Braddock, the formidable Member of Parliament whom opponents compared to a Sherman tank, the two met backstage. “We chatted like one working girl to another,” Dietrich said and promptly accepted Braddock’s invitation to visit the Houses of Parliament the following week. When she did (on July 13), members of both Lords and Commons flocked to meet her, and the ordinary business of the day was interrupted by her simple presence in the galleries.
ON OCTOBER 4, 1955, DIETRICH RETURNED FOR another engagement in Las Vegas (with a new, equally deceptive outfit), and at Christmastime she was in New York, attending the premiere of the film Oklahoma! with its producer, Mike Todd. They were, at the time, discussing his idea of casting dozens of major stars in cameos for his forthcoming epic Around the World in 80 Days, and Dietrich was readily persuaded to join the ranks: other actors passing momentarily through the picture included Noël Coward, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, Frank Sinatra, and Ronald Colman. Dietrich agreed to appear for a half-minute as a San Francisco saloon queen (protected by bouncer George Raft), one of hundreds of colorful characters encountered by David Niven in his worldwide balloon excursion. (“I am looking for my man,” Niven says to Dietrich when he needs his valet in the noisy, brief sequence. “So am I,” she murmurs.)
That winter, Dietrich and Todd became quite openly known in New York as “a twosome.” A good friend of Todd’s and still on amiable (although platonic) terms with Dietrich, Eddie Fisher soon learned the truth of this report when he attended a Todd party and found her clothes in Todd’s bedroom closet. “Mike knew of my romance with Marlene and was obviously a little embarrassed.”* But neither man need have been too chagrined, for it was only a matter of weeks before the dresses and cosmetics were removed when Todd went around the world with his production company. Then, not long after her cameo was filmed, Rudi suffered a slight heart attack at his home in California. Dietrich was at his bedside daily throughout most of that April 1956, conferring with physicians and seeing that Tamara was properly attended. Not until he was fully recovered did she proceed to New York and thence for her stint in London at the Café de Paris, which she followed with four performances at a Dublin theater.
For these shows Dietrich added a second outfit, making a quick change from her diaphanous gown to top hat, white tie and tails, straight from her cabaret scene in Morocco. Puffing a cigarette, she straddled a chair and sang “One for My Baby and One for the Road.”
To the amazement of her audience, she accomplished this wardrobe change in less than a minute and without intermission. Dashing offstage, she doffed her shoes and stripped off the gown and its foundation garments while her assistant removed the jewelry and wiped off the lipstick. Another assistant handed Dietrich two hairbrushes already thick with brilliantine, and her plastered hair was stuffed under the top hat. Over her body stocking went black socks, the trousers and shirt were put on in a single piece, and she slipped into the coat and shoes. Before the orchestra had completed the introduction to the upcoming song she was back onstage, unsmiling and ignoring the applause with the affectation of stoic detachment long familiar to moviegoers.
IN AUGUST, SHE TOOK A HOLIDAY WITH NOËL COWard in Paris, at the home of Ginette Spanier and Paul-Emile Seidmann, with whom she was still on intimate terms. But Rudi’s brush with death and Tamara’s instability made Marlene Dietrich (then in her fifty-fifth year) both more anxious and more unrealistic about the inevitabilities of age and illness. She spoke endlessly about her past, about John Gilbert, Erich Remarque, Jean Gabin and Michael Wilding, and “with her intense preoccupation with herself and her love affairs,” wrote Coward in his diary, “[she] is showing signs of wear and tear. How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door in the face of age. Much wiser to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance.”
The forms of her courtesy to those nearby—essentially endless physical activity on their behalf—were often curious. At the Seidmann home, Coward continued, Dietrich was “in a tremendously hausfrau mood and washed everything in sight, including my hairbrush (which was quite clean).” It may not have occurred to her that such duties were sometimes ill advised.
The rationale for this sustained motif of menial housewifery, as if Dietrich were exchanging the role of Queen Mother for that of Visiting Charwoman, is not difficult to understand. In her favor, it must be said that she certainly wanted to help, to please her friends (as housecleaning had pleased her parents and even, on occasion, lovers) and to demonstrate that she was—when she wished to seem so—an ordinary, practical woman, capable of lowly toil as well as high fashion.
But to offer such laborious assistance to someone ill or in need was one thing; to come upon Marlene Dietrich scrubbing one’s bathroom floor or washing windows was another, and it must have been disconcerting. This was an odd form of self-abasement, perhaps partly motivated by a repressed neurotic guilt for the little of depth she did for others, and for the consistent attention she denied them. Her chores were thus a kind of penance that predictably embarrassed those it was meant to honor. Even her support of Rudi and Tamara and the lavish gifts to Maria and her husband must have sprung at least in part from Dietrich’s remorse for past negligence. As for those she visited, her zealous housework spoke eloquently of a desire to be admired and thanked—and perhaps even to make debtors of those to whom she was, for their hospitality, obliged.
Contrariwise, once her self-imposed domestic tasks were dispatched that summer in Paris, Dietrich withdrew, reentering the Seidmanns’ living room looking beautiful, crisply attired in a simple beige suit. She then sat as still as an artist’s model (as John Engstead and others recalled), with her legs so perfectly posed that she seemed almost unnaturally arranged. Everything about her looked ideal, as Spanier said: “I don’t know how she [held this single pose] for half an hour!” Thus did Cinderella handily assume the role of Princess Royal. Later during the visit, when friends gathered round the piano to sing, Dietrich hung back gloomily from the group; at last she went to her room, returned with a few of her recordings, snapped on the phonograph and promptly turned the evening’s spotlight on herself. This was a habit she practiced regularly in her later life when visiting friends in Switzerland (Coward), London (Fairbanks), New York (Garland) and Los Angeles (her publicist Rupert Allen, who also represented Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe). Her friends’ quiet indulgence may have at least partially derived from astonishment.
The Paris sojourn preceded her first major film role in over five years (since the dreadful Rancho Notorious,) and every element for success seemed in place: a glamorous wardrobe (by Jean Louis), a photogenic setting (Monte Carlo) and one of the world’s most respected actors and directors as her leading man (the dashing former matinee idol Vittorio De Sica, whose films The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D., among others, she much admired).
The Monte Carlo Story was filmed there during that summer of 1956, but somehow none of the attractive constituents could counterpoise a wooden script, unappealing characters and uninspired direction. De Sica played a minor, faded aristocrat addicted to the gambling tables who decides to marry a rich woman (Dietrich) who turns out to be even poorer than he—an elegant fraud with her own designs on his dwindling fortune. According to the custom of European filmmaking, the dialogue was dubbed after photography, and in the finished film every scene is sufficiently asynchronous to make the actors seem as if they move on command.
Decked out in primary colors, Dietrich moved carefully (sometimes as if sleepwalking, it seems), and only in the relaxed, comic kitchen scene with De Sica did she appear interested or vivacious. The entire production was indeed an unhappy experience, beginning with Dietrich’s irrational and singularly graceless attitude toward a young American starlet cast in the film. Natalie Trundy was a pretty blond fifteen-year-old who, after appearing on the cover of Paris Match, incurred Dietrich’s jealous wrath simply because of the attention lavished on a young player by the press. For no good reason (and to the shock of cast and crew), the star slapped the poor girl after a scene one afternoon. The courtly De Sica was furious, referring thereafter to Dietrich as “that witch.” There was more trouble when Dietrich was barred from the Monte Carlo Casino because she attended in trousers. Even a telephone call to Aristotle Onassis (who owned a major share of the place) was of no avail in that instance, and she was shocked to learn that Princess Grace and Prince Rainier were away from the principality and unable to rush to her aid. Her temper finally flared when, in her suite at the Hôtel de Paris, she hurled abuse at the manager when only a dozen roses decorated her suite: “You call these flowers? I want five thousand roses, not a dozen!” Her tantrum had the staff hopping, as her secretary, Bernard Hall, recalled, “and vases upon vases were rushed to her suite.”
* The circumstances of the Dietrich-Louis collaboration were curious. Not long before, she had agreed to appear in a film version of the musical Pal Joey with Frank Sinatra, but when Harry Cohn decided to substitute Jack Lemmon, Dietrich withdrew, claiming Lemmon would not be right as her co-star. Cohn, still furious, at first flatly rejected her subsequent request for Jean Louis’s services, but after Dietrich complained to her Las Vegas management Cohn received cautionary telephone calls from certain underworld figures in Chicago, and Jean Louis was soon permitted to design Dietrich’s dress. (As it happened, Sinatra eventually did play Pal Joey.)
* According to Jean Louis, Dietrich agreed to loan one of the three copies of her dress to a starlet scheduled to hand out a prize at a charity ball. She attached two conditions, however: offering the value of the dress as a reason, she insisted that it should not be delivered to the wearer until moments before it was to be worn; it was also stipulated that the young lady wear nothing underneath (as, Dietrich lied to a gullible press, she had worn it). “The poor girl put on the dress hurriedly and as she had agreed,” Jean Louis recalled, “and of course all those sequins and bugles and everything were so heavy it just pulled the dress down, and with no foundation garments or anything sewn in, it just hung on her like wet cement.” Exactly, no doubt, as Dietrich had foreseen.
* In light of this brief affair, Dietrich could eventually claim that three of her former lovers subsequently married Elizabeth Taylor: in 1957, after divorcing Michael Wilding, Taylor wed Todd. A year later, Todd was killed in a plane crash, and the first to comfort the grieving widow was Fisher, who in 1959 divorced Debbie Reynolds to marry Taylor.