When the German troops invaded Poland, Marlene Dietrich was preparing to play an American in the Californian desert. In September 1939, shooting began for the Western Destry Rides Again. Dietrich finished out the 1930s as she had begun the decade: as a cheap nightclub singer, but this time in an American town rather than a German one. Because she desperately needed money and work, she had accepted Pasternak’s offer. She no longer had much to lose, and this role was essentially no different from the ones she had always played: a wanton woman with a heart of gold. Her old friend from Berlin, Friedrich Hollaender, wrote her songs together with Frank Loesser, and Pasternak chose Jimmy Stewart to play opposite her. Stewart, who was several years younger than Dietrich, was considered the epitome of the boring, stodgy American. Next to her, he came across as naïve and conventional. In a reversal of the Western cliché, Pasternak wanted to give the male lead feminine attributes, and the female lead masculine attributes. Dietrich plays Frenchy, a saloon singer who helps Kent, the owner of the saloon, rig poker games. When the sheriff wants to put a stop to the con games, he is shot by Kent and his cronies. The town drunk is appointed the new sheriff, but to everyone’s surprise, he takes his job seriously and brings in the son of a friend to help him out. That friend is Tom Destry, played by Stewart. Destry does not carry a weapon, and he earns scorn and ridicule. In the end, he does have to shoot in order to defend himself against Kent. Frenchy, who has come to warn Destry, is killed in the crossfire. This was an American-style love story of a girl sacrificing herself for the hero, with Frenchy as the indisputable focal point of the saloon and Dietrich the star of the film. She keeps the boys on their toes with her sayings and songs, belting out “The Boys in the Back Room” while gamboling along the counter, as the whole saloon roars with pleasure.
In none of her films does Dietrich put her body to more aggressive use than in this Western. In one famous scene, she gets into a fight with a jealous wife. Dietrich is said to have insisted on playing this scene herself. The two actresses scratch, bite, shriek, and scuffle on the floor until Destry pours a bucket of water over them. The American press raved about this scene. Dietrich had shed her European grandeur at long last. Frenchy’s clothing is quite simple: she wears low-cut, figure-hugging dresses with spaghetti straps. Underneath her skirts are several layers of delicate, pleated chiffon petticoats, which accentuate her every move. Dietrich rarely showed so much skin, and her upper arms are muscular. Her short, curly hair gives her face a sassy look. She is heavily made up and sways past the men with a coquettish smile on her lips. Although these men can confide in Frenchy, who is strong, self-confident, big-hearted, and willing to lend a sympathetic ear to all, she will never belong to any one of them; Frenchy belongs only to herself. A woman of this sort cannot survive, so she has to die at the end. The genre of the Western dictates that women are good, and only men can be evil. The saloon is the alluring alternative to the puritanical home front. The men are glad to escape the morally complex world of their wives. In saloons, everything is easy and carefree. Here they enjoy their drinking, gambling, singing, and fistfighting, and have fun with women like Frenchy. With Destry Rides Again, Dietrich had left the European setting.
She now had a passport and a movie to show that she was an American. Pasternak’s plan worked: Americans liked Destry Rides Again. The film is considered a classic Western. “Boys in the Backroom” became one of Dietrich’s most popular songs. In her old age, she recalled that it had been fun to make this movie, and her pleasure shows. She enjoyed working with Pasternak, who spread cheer to everyone.
Dietrich was in demand once again, although she could not help noticing that she had yet to achieve a major success. It was 1939, the year in which Gone With the Wind trumped every other movie. Perhaps it was some consolation for Dietrich that her great rival, Greta Garbo, also lost out to Gone With the Wind. Garbo’s career suffered as well, and just as Dietrich had to fight her way back into the headlines, Garbo had to laugh to draw attention to herself.
In Dietrich’s next film, Seven Sinners, her acting seems wooden and lifeless, which might be attributable to the fact that she once again had to play a nightclub singer who falls in love with the wrong man. Echoes of von Sternberg films blend with scenes from the previous Western. The idea was to produce a box-office hit. Dietrich plays the singer Bijou Blanche, who is on tour in the South Pacific. Wherever she turns up, the men go crazy for her. She falls in love with Dan Brent, a handsome naval officer who is supposed to marry the governor’s daughter. Brent, played by John Wayne, prefers the less respectable woman, which lands him in trouble. When Bijou and Brent meet for the first time, Dietrich is slowly descending a staircase, dressed in her white naval uniform and singing a song (this scene recalls von Sternberg’s Blue Angel). When she is brought to the harbor in a rickshaw, Shanghai Lily comes to mind. In both movies, the events play out in a scintillating alien world, but the most exotic creature of all is Dietrich in her various guises. Brent visits her in her dressing room on a sultry night, the way Tom Brown visited Amy Jolly in Morocco. Bijou assures her officer that she will never desert him, but in the end she steps aside and leaves him to the respectable governor’s daughter. One of the sailors beats Bijou because he does not approve of her romantic entanglement with his boss. There was no surer sign that Dietrich was no longer the unapproachable woman who ruled her own destiny. The former femme fatale had hit bottom. She had to get beaten up by stupid sailors, and her only potential lovers were the ship’s tipsy doctors. Von Sternberg’s diva had become a floozy. The songs in this film are better than the film itself. The critics were hardly effusive, but a reasonable amount of praise was forthcoming.
The war in Europe was far away, but many Americans were worried that history would repeat itself: first, neutrality, then war. President Roosevelt’s “fireside chat” of September 3, 1939, affirmed that America would remain neutral: “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.”1 But once the German troops had marched into Paris in June 1940, Roosevelt knew that he would soon have to take a stand. While the Germans occupied one country after another, Americans were embroiled in debates about military intervention, with the majority still against entering the war. American artists and intellectuals, many of whom had spent years living in Europe, were emphasizing again and again that what was happening in Europe mattered to America as well. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America entered the war. At long last, Churchill heard Roosevelt say what he had waited so long to hear: “We are all in the same boat now.”
Two weeks later, Dietrich turned forty. The fact that she was working again did not blind her to the fact that her career had reached an impasse. Her glamorous femme fatale image seemed quite outdated. Now that women could be downright mean in “film noir,” she came across as anything but. Moreover, she was broke and could not afford to pick and choose when she was offered a part. In 1941 she made a movie with René Clair, playing the role of Countess Claire Ledoux. The Flame of New Orleans shows that women in the New World are prudish, ugly, and gabby. Women from the Old World, by contrast, are erotic, sophisticated, and beautiful. Neither Dietrich nor Clair nor audiences liked The Flame of New Orleans. If we bear in mind that John Huston was shooting The Maltese Falcon at the same time, we can see what an artistic nosedive Dietrich’s career had taken. In many portraits from this period she looks frozen in place, as though fearing that any motion she might make could break the spell of her beauty.
The war added to her worries about the future and her financial situation. As a German living in America, she was an ocean apart from her mother, sister, and extended family. Josefine von Losch kept her daughter up to date about life in Berlin when she could. On March 4, 1940, she wrote to Dietrich that Shanghai Express was playing there.2
Once the United States had entered the war, the mood in the country changed. Young men full of patriotic zeal enlisted in the army. Dietrich had an American passport and behaved like an American, yet she felt that as a native German, she shared in the responsibility for this war that the Germans had begun. In December 1941, the Hollywood Victory Committee was established. Actors and singers were called upon to use their talents to serve their country. Dietrich appealed to radio audiences to buy war bonds, and from January 1942 to September 1943, she traveled throughout the country to promote war bonds in bars, on street corners, in factories, and in cafés, often six to eight times in a single day. She felt like a traveling saleswoman. She spent her evenings in nightclubs, selling bonds there as well. Accustomed to these kinds of performances from her earlier days in Berlin revues, she struck the right tone and was responsible for collecting a million dollars for the war effort. “I go on tour to collect money for the bombs that fall on Berlin. That’s where my mother lives, and I haven’t heard a word from her since the beginning of the war.”3 She was grateful to the country that had accepted her as a citizen, and she dedicated herself to her new homeland and to the victory over Germany with single-minded determination. At the same time, the thought of how her mother would fare in Berlin with bombs falling preyed on her mind. On March 30, 1943, she sent a telegram to Kaiserallee via the Red Cross:
EVERYONE HEALTHY, HOPE THE SAME OF YOU. HAVE GREAT LONGING. PLEASE WRITE AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. WE ARE WORRIED. ALL OUR LOVE AND THOUGHTS. MARIE MAGDALENE SIEBER.4
She also pitched in at the Hollywood Canteen, which opened in October 1942. The canteen was a restaurant with a bar and dance floor for servicemen headed overseas. Not only was everything free for the soldiers, but Hollywood stars also cooked for them. With any luck, they could have their soup served by Rita Hayworth while Dietrich made them a hamburger in the kitchen. Dietrich was in her element. She was delighted to display her domestic prowess and her patriotic feelings. Anything was better than the film studio. Erich Maria Remarque had nothing but scorn and derision for her charitable, military, and patriotic pursuits:
Little film ninnies as captains, dopey housewives looking self-important, giving orders, etc. Hundreds of different uniforms. Men in aprons instead of in the army, washing dishes in the soldiers’ canteens, feeling wonderfully patriotic. Carnival of conceit. Our puma in the thick of it. Frustration finds an outlet: WAAC and the WAVES—women’s organizations in the army and navy, with a full military rank.5
At this time, Remarque had been living in the United States for close to three years. In August 1939, he was in the south of France with Dietrich’s family and they set out for Paris with his Lancia. The streets were full of military vehicles. Paris was dark. The war was weighing heavily on them. While preparing to leave, he contacted the puma, who was on the Queen Mary between Europe and America and was gripped with fear about her husband and child. He knew that he could not tell her what Rudi had confided to him. There was supposedly a Russian man in Tamara’s life who wanted to marry her and take her to Berlin with him. If that were to happen, Rudi had told him, he would not be coming to America. Remarque had no idea what would happen to Dietrich, who was already questioning where she truly belonged. And if Rudi were to remain in Europe, Dietrich would be unnerved. In all this chaos, Remarque acted as the intermediary, and ultimately everyone agreed to travel to Dietrich.
Remarque spent the last evening with her at his favorite restaurant, Fouquet’s. He was feeling wistful and conflicted about being able to get away while others had to stay in Europe, yet he firmly believed that the puma needed him. One day after the British and French declared war on the Germans, the travelers arrived in New York on the Bremen. Thanks to Dietrich’s connections, Tamara Matul could enter the country with her Nansen passport, a document issued to stateless refugees. Matul’s passport had been issued in 1933 in Paris—this long, colorful stream of paper reflected the fact that she did not belong anywhere. Every time she crossed a border, a new piece of paper was added on. Matul had no national identity; there were only countries that tolerated her presence. The final piece was issued in New York in 1939. Sieber and Matul took up residence in New York, where Dietrich had arranged for a job offer for Rudi at Universal.
Remarque headed out to Los Angeles to be with Dietrich. When he got there, he realized that he had been fooling himself. She did not need him; in fact, he was clearly in her way. Dietrich was in the middle of filming Destry Rides Again. He was amazed to observe the transformation of the woman he loved into a coarse American saloon lady. At home she was fidgety and volatile, and unfair to him. She had evidently entered into an affair with her costar, Jimmy Stewart. She often went out alone in the evening and did not come home until dawn. Whenever her new lover failed to call her several times a day and send her flowers, she sulked, and took it out on Remarque. He was living with her and working on his next novel about emigration. Her moodiness made it hard for him to get work done, and the American authorities were also making life difficult for him. His Panamanian passport was not recognized, and his wife, Jutta Zambona, who also had a Panamanian passport, had been detained on Ellis Island. His immigration attorney informed him that Dietrich had attempted to use her influence in Washington to have Zambona’s entry into the United States denied. He was dumbfounded.6 Dietrich was sabotaging him because he had not gone through with a divorce, even though she was now utterly preoccupied with her Jimmy.
Remarque acted friendly and aloof because he knew that this was the only kind of behavior that had the desired effect. If she got the feeling that a lover was losing interest in her, she would try to win him back. She tried to seduce him on several occasions, but he had grown wary since hearing her tell Carl Zuckmayer on the telephone that she could feign pleasure in bed. Remarque had to admit to himself that their love affair was coming to an end. He abhorred film people with their lies and pompous posturing. His thoughts kept returning to his final days in Paris, where fear of the Germans dominated everything and everyone. In Los Angeles, by contrast, people seemed naïve, cheerful, and confident. Although Dietrich was a German, she acted the very same way. Remarque could not make peace with the fact that she had decided to be an American. And Dietrich could not see why he was so intent on pining away for Europe instead of seizing the opportunities that America had to offer.
In order to take care of passport issues, Remarque traveled to Mexico with his wife in March 1940. His homesickness for Berlin was tempered by his longing for the puma. He sent her a postcard with a picture of a Mexican boat, which reminded him of the Spreewald nature reserve in Germany. Remarque felt the homesickness for Europe that Dietrich had not indulged in for so long. Time and again, he wrote to her about romantic evenings they had shared in Paris hotel rooms, about the Nike in the Louvre, or about the chestnut trees in blossom on the Champs-Élysées. He wanted to cheer up his sad puma, but she was far too busy surviving in Hollywood to find the time to share in his sentimentality. Although he did not hear from her at all, she was at the airport when he came back from Mexico four weeks later with an American visa in his pocket.
The time for long love letters had passed. He sent her little greeting cards that seem almost sheepish, as though he were shyly reminding her of his existence. This tactic did no good, because she rarely paid heed to her old lovers. They continued their sham of a relationship for quite some time. Dietrich was shooting a film in the desert and sleeping on the set; he gadded about from one dinner party to the next with Werfel, Mahler, and Stravinsky. All he really wanted was to be with her, which was exactly why she avoided him. Von Sternberg, “with his everlasting affection for the puma,” became a cautionary example to him.7 While Dietrich was fighting for her career and embarking on one affair after another, Remarque was battling homesickness and his lover’s indifference.
At some point he had had enough, and he moved out. Having escaped the war in Europe, he had no intention of spending any more of his time in sunny California agonizing over Dietrich’s moods. He resignedly returned to his old ways, visiting brothels, having affairs, drinking and smoking to excess, and dreaming of Paris. Meanwhile, Berlin and London were being bombed.
Dietrich kept up her punishing work schedule and did not let up on Remarque, impatient for him to start “her novel.” He wrote letters to her, but what she truly wanted was movie material. Arch of Triumph, a novel of love and emigration about Ravic, the clear-eyed romantic, and the amoral Joan Madou, would not be published until many years after their relationship had ended.
Their final split came in November 1940 after a party in Josef von Sternberg’s villa. Dietrich accused Remarque of being drunk and impotent when she wanted to sleep with him; he retorted that this was the result of having to have discussions about condoms beforehand “with someone who lies in bed like a fish afterwards.” She claimed he had called her a whore; he replied that whores give something for what they get.8 Remarque went off to New York for several months, and when he returned in the spring, she tried to win him back. When she found out that he had taken up with her rival, Greta Garbo, she went on the warpath, claiming that Garbo had syphilis and breast cancer and that she, Dietrich, was the one who had loved him so deeply and done so much for him.9 He reveled in the breakdown of the woman he had loved so much. Sex with Garbo was Remarque’s revenge on the fickle puma.
In the summer of 1941, Dietrich met Jean Gabin, who was the diametric opposite of Remarque. Remarque was intent on looking suave and urbane, and did not like to be reminded of his petit bourgeois background in the small German city of Osnabrück. Gabin, by contrast, did not stand for some sort of vaguely defined cosmopolitanism; he was French through and through. He would not spend his nights on bar stools. The latest trends held no particular appeal for him, nor did nightlife and cultural events. At home he enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle, perhaps because he had grown up in the entertainment world as the son of cabaret singers. He was all too familiar with the life Dietrich portrayed onscreen. When he came to the United States in 1941, he was thirty-seven years old, and a star in his home country. His greatest films were La grande illusion (1937), La bête humaine (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939). His favorite directors were Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. Gabin was the bon mauvais garçon who stood for the melancholy peculiar to those outside the city.
Gabin preferred refuge in America to a life in occupied France. Dietrich made him feel at home in his new surroundings by creating a little French oasis in Hollywood. “We furnished his house according to his taste, with all the French objects we were able to scrape together from farmer’s markets and Beverly Hills shops,” she wrote.10 Gabin was wary of anything that was not French—apart from Dietrich herself. Dietrich, who spoke fluent French, tutored him in English and cooked French meals for his friends. For Renoir she made stuffed cabbage, and her pot au feu was legendary among the French in Hollywood. She now spent many evenings with Gabin and his friends at the kitchen table. Dietrich explained America to them, helped them navigate contracts and applications for driver’s licenses, and dispensed advice to the lovelorn.
Dietrich confided in Sieber what she hoped to gain from loving Gabin: “I am clinging not only to him, but also to the chance to be a real woman at long last.” All she truly wanted was to provide happiness, but she had never succeeded in doing so with a man. She did not want things with Gabin to end the way they had with all the others, and used her influence to get him a visa.11
Her love for Gabin brought Dietrich back to Europe. Remarque was ultimately too German for her, but Gabin was so French that, as a German-American, she could feel European. When they went out together, she liked to belt out the Marseillaise at the top of her lungs. Gabin found that idiotic and laughingly called her “ma Prussienne.” She rented a little house for the two of them in which she played the French housewife. When he came home, she brought him his slippers and kissed and admired him. But she also mocked him gently by knocking on his forehead and declaring that what she loved about him was his absolutely empty head. During a period in which the world was falling apart, she found a brief haven of peace in her tranquil life with Gabin.
After the grueling yet glamorous years at the side of the darkly depressive Remarque, the stoic homebody Gabin was a welcome change of pace. He could be a great seducer if he was so inclined, and was utterly dependable. Dietrich described Gabin as the most sensitive man she knew. He was an intriguing combination: reliable yet daring, sensual yet faithful. Life in America, particularly in Hollywood, seemed to cast doubt on his identity as a Frenchman: “J’avais l’impression de ne plus être ce que je souhaitais rester, c’est-à-dire un Français (I had the impression that I was no longer what I wished to remain, that is to say, a Frenchman).”12
Home movies capture scenes from their love life. On horseback in the desert, they are dressed like cowboys. We see Gabin in a bathrobe smoking and smiling in a way that helps us understand why Dietrich has fallen for this man. The table is set for coffee, and the bicycle leaning up against the wall casts a shadow. She is sitting in the sun in front of the house having breakfast. Dietrich looks relaxed; her hair is tousled, and she is smiling at her lover and smoking. He is swimming laps, and a suntanned Dietrich watches him from the edge of the pool. These Brentwood images reflect their happiness. The sun is shining, the sky is unnaturally blue, and the war is far away.
Dietrich took every opportunity to be seen in public with her lover. Gabin, with his compact body, was a skilled dancer. There is a photograph of the two of them at a table in a nightclub. Gabin is wearing a tuxedo and bow tie. He is sitting close to her, his eyes gazing warily into the camera. Dietrich, in a strapless evening gown, looks delicate and luminous, and her face has a timeless, youthful quality. She was seriously considering marrying Gabin. She signed a letter to him in which she adopted his actual surname (Gabin was a stage name) as her own: “Marie Madeleine Moncorgé.”13
In late February 1942, she was planning to take a trip and leave her canary with Remarque. Over vodka, she told him that she wanted to get a divorce. She seemed to have aged, yet was still on the quest for liberating love. The pinnacle of her yearning for lasting happiness was her suspicion that she was pregnant with Gabin’s baby. Dietrich got caught up in the idea of this pregnancy and dreamed of beginning anew as a wife and mother at the age of forty.
From her vacation with Gabin in Mexico, she wrote to Sieber: “You close your eyes and know that life isn’t really like this. It may be so for many women—but I always figure that it can never be that way for me. . . . I have been through the mill of responsibilities for so long that I can’t get used to the idea of a man taking on all my burdens. Most of the time, I have been the one to take on the burdens of others.”14
As might be expected, Maria had decided to become an actress, and she was now attending workshops. Her first performances showed that she had inherited her mother’s talent. Maria adopted the stage name “Maria Manton” and married Dean Goodman, a comedian. Now Dietrich had to take care of both of them, even though she was facing financial difficulties of her own. She wrote to her husband in New York that she needed to borrow money to provide their child with the necessities: “I had to buy plates, silverware, pots, tablecloths, etc., etc., and everything costs a lot of money. Besides, I can’t let my life insurance lapse—so I have no money. I’m trying to sell my jewelry, but that’s not easy. I have to rush off to the studio.”15 Although she had been working hard for years, she was low on funding. In Manpower, she costarred with George Raft as Fay Duval, a nightclub hostess who has been released from prison and has not gotten any breaks in life; she plays her as a vulnerable woman with no illusions. Fay believes that all she is able to do is entice drunk men to keep spending money on drinks. During the shooting of her next film, The Lady Is Willing, Dietrich broke her ankle, but that did not slow her down. Her willpower and work ethic were admired far more than the film itself. The Spoilers (1942) takes place in a saloon once again, complete with a sheriff, a free-for-all, and an inane maid. The sight of Dietrich as Cherry Malotte, who works in the saloon, is almost frightening. She looks like an old lady who thinks she is still sexy. With her hair upswept and wearing a white blouse, she is subjected to insults and affronts to her dignity. She acts like a wind-up doll, bored stiff. She wrote to Sieber, “I think I ought to take a break from this business, which drives me to earn money; after all, I’m not going to keep the money anyway. If I were still happy in this work, I would still have something, at least, but this hasn’t given me any pleasure for quite a long time; instead, every movie is a false hope that brings only pain.”16 Actually she could not do it anymore. “I am tired, in body and soul. I don’t know how the movie turned out—and I don’t really care.”17
One year after the United States entered the war, Dietrich acted in a propaganda film. The impetus was the mobilization of the American economy for rearmament. A voiceover speaks with a triumphant undertone about the weapons from the arsenal of democracy that will engulf the totalitarian tyranny. The movie features two men and one woman. Dietrich plays Josie, a coal miner’s daughter of Polish ancestry who wants to escape her father’s world, which centers on filth, sweat, hunger, and strikes. Pittsburgh is interspersed with documentary shots of the German invasion of Poland. Josie finds her soulmate in a miner named Pittsburgh Markham, who eventually strikes it rich and casts her aside. Josie commits herself to Pittsburgh’s friend Cash Evans, who has loved her for a long time. Pittsburgh loses everything, and it takes his working in Cash’s steel mill to make him a good American again. The patriotic mission of the war brings the three friends together. Josie turns to her quarreling friends and exclaims, “This is no time to think about personal feelings and personal grievances. There is a greater, far more important emotion. The only emotion that should guide each and every one of us today: devotion to our country!” In Pittsburgh, Dietrich is the good, patriotic comrade-in-arms along with the men. The film was intended to demonstrate to Americans the need for civilian commitment for a just war. American moviegoers and critics did not seem to care for Dietrich in the role of upstanding patriot. Pittsburgh was not well received.
By contrast, Dietrich’s dedication to the soldiers was greatly admired. She visited wounded men in military hospitals, handed out photographs of herself, and paid for lampshades to protect the eyes of the wounded. She made radio broadcasts of texts that the Office of War had put together for her. The American military officers were pleased with the results: “The impact of your appearances on the air has already shown tremendous results and bond sales are mounting steadily day by day. I wish I could tell you how gratifying it is to work with people whose keen interest and honest patriotism makes it possible to do the kind of job that you did.”18 Her former lover, Remarque, found these activities sickening. He despised the Nazis, but he preferred bellyaching and drinking to taking political action.
Gabin, who knew that he would have to remain in the United States if the Germans won the war, reacted the opposite way. He reported to the representative of the Free French Forces in New York and enlisted to fight on the side of de Gaulle for the duration of the war. In January 1944, he was ordered to embark from Norfolk, Virginia, where there was a key marine base. He had been appointed tank commander in the 2nd Free French Armored Division. Dietrich accompanied her lover to Norfolk. Like thousands of other couples, they spent their final evening together having dinner and going to the movies. His ship sailed at 2 a.m. Gabin went off to fight for his beloved France and left Dietrich behind. His homesickness for France won out over his love for Dietrich. She had no idea if they would ever see each other again.
But Dietrich took control of her destiny. She reported to the American army and waited for her induction order from the United Service Organizations (USO), a civilian group that provided live entertainment for the U.S. troops. Once Gabin had left America, she could go as well. Before following her lover off to war, she costarred in Kismet to earn some money. Kismet was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie, and her director was William Dieterle. She had costarred in his first film, Man by the Roadside, in 1923, and had had her legs lacquered in gold for the role of Jamilla, queen of the harem. Now she would be closing the studio door. Without a word of farewell, she was leaving thirteen years of her life behind her. It almost seems as though she was glad to escape the dream factory.
On June 29, she received a telegram in her New York hotel from Abe Lastfogel: DEAR MARLENE YOUR TELEGRAM WAS REALLY A TONIC THAT MAKES UP FOR ALL OF DISAPPOINTMENTS WE RECEIVE HERE IN OUR WORK FROM DAY TO DAY.19 Lastfogel was the director of the USO. He expressed his delight at her generous offer to entertain the troops and hoped that Danny—the comedian Danny Thomas—would have time to serve as master of ceremonies for Dietrich. Day after day she headed to One Park Avenue, where Lastfogel evaluated shows and entertainers for domestic and foreign performances. Censorship was ubiquitous. Artists had to be politically trustworthy and the shows entertaining, but they had to stay on the level of good, clean fun. Dietrich had to swear that only the material that had been approved by the censors would be performed, and any deviation from the script would be reported.
The time for expecting to be treated like a film star was over. Both personally and professionally, she was serving the United States of America. From now on, different rules from those in Hollywood applied. In the smoke-filled waiting room at One Park Avenue in New York, she would think of her mother on Kaiserallee in Berlin, who had insisted on maintaining wartime rules. As a child, she had regarded these rules as protective, a precious constant in a world that had come apart at the seams. She felt much the same way now that she was past the age of forty: “What a pleasant feeling it is to wait for orders.”20
Dietrich had stored away her personal possessions in two places: on Landsberger Strasse in Berlin, where she kept whatever was left of her family life with Rudi and Maria, and in Los Angeles at a Bekins storage facility, where she had rented three units to preserve her memorabilia as a Hollywood movie star. Nothing was keeping her in the United States, and she was ready to leave. Of course she was thinking of the future, fully aware that she was venturing into unknown territory. It was one thing to perform in revues when you were in your mid-twenties, but quite another to stand onstage in front of thousands of men in your early forties. Danny Thomas taught her the tricks of the trade that a solo artist needs to survive.
Before she left, Dietrich was given a uniform and a military rank of captain.21 She tried on her tailor-made USO uniform at Saks Fifth Avenue; she put on boots and applied red fingernail polish. Instead of the usual innumerable wardrobe trunks and hat boxes, she was traveling light this time, since she was allowed to take no more than fifty-five pounds. She complied with this order without a word of complaint, but made sure to include sequined evening gowns, crisply pressed uniforms, and her musical saw. On April 5, she and the musicians, comedians, and other performers in her show flew to Algiers by way of Greenland, the Azores, and Casablanca. Before departing from New York, the two women and three men in uniform in this troupe were photographed gazing cheerfully into the camera. Dietrich did not stand out from the rest; she was simply part of the team.
Typically the artists did not learn where they were headed until they were already on board, but Dietrich must have known her destination in advance, because Gabin was waiting for her in North Africa. In March he had sent her several telegrams to say that he would be there, and then, to his delight, she arrived. Several extant photographs convey a sense of their time in Algiers. One shows Gabin—quite elegant in his dark blue naval uniform with gold buttons—with his arm proudly around Dietrich; he seems to be telling the camera that no one has a lover like his. She is also in uniform, her forage cap perched jauntily on her blond curls. Both seem happy and relaxed, and it is hard to bear in mind they are not on vacation, but in a war. The other photographs confirm this insouciant impression. In one, they are strolling arm in arm under palm trees; in the downtown area of Algiers, she is sitting on a small wall wearing men’s shoes and slacks and has rolled up her shirt sleeves. She is wearing no jewelry apart from a few gold bangles.
Dietrich had come only because of Gabin, but once she was there, she was there for everyone. She gave her first concert for GIs at the opera house in Algiers, looking like a vision in her tight sequined dress. They could not believe that this beautiful woman had turned her back on Hollywood and luxury to be with them. From the very first moment, Dietrich made them feel that they were her greatest audience ever. She kicked up her famous legs, played her musical saw, indulged in self-irony, and sang. “The Boys in the Backroom,” “You Do Something to Me,” “Taking a Chance on Love,” “Annie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” and “You Go to My Head” would become her standard repertoire. They are sad yet witty songs, easy to sing or hum along to.
In spite of the story the pictures tell, things were not going well for Gabin and Dietrich. The letters he wrote to her over the coming weeks and months tell of his despairing wait for news. He launched into descriptions not of the war, but of his great love for Dietrich. His declarations of love were composed on sheets of translucent, yellowed stationery without letterhead. In the upper margin he made careful note of the date and time, then recorded his thoughts about his love and doubts in dark ink. He complained bitterly that she was withholding something from him. He found it harder and harder to believe that she loved him. Feeling that he was not being taken seriously, he turned to Sieber for help, but the latter was unable to intercede on his behalf. Gabin’s letters to Dietrich went to her USO address in New York and were forwarded to her, so he had no idea where she was at any given time or whether his messages were getting through to her at all. When he met American soldiers, he would ask how she was faring. It was a mystery to him why she would put him in a spot like this. Like all her other lovers, he could not accept the fact that she no longer loved him. On May 17, his fortieth birthday, he was feeling melancholy; this was the third birthday he had had since he was together with her, but the first that he spent alone.
Dietrich flew from Algiers to Italy. On the night of July 9, 1943, the Allies had landed in Sicily, and Mussolini was overthrown in Rome on July 25. In Northern Italy the Germans established a puppet state, the Republic of Salò, under Mussolini’s leadership. Dietrich and her troupe followed the Allied advance, and she emerged from her airplane in Bari wearing sunglasses and a warm jacket. There are pictures of her performance in the theater there. Everything looks improvised and almost shabby. Standing in front of a ragged curtain on the simple stage in her evening gown, she must have summoned up colossal energy to cope with these conditions. There were no props or lighting controls; everything had to come from within her. After the performance, she was invited to the officers’ club. A laughing Dietrich, clad in a simple dress, was gliding across the dance floor with a high-ranking military officer. Although she was under a good deal of stress, she must have welcomed the admiration and love she found here. She often performed on a stage that had been specially constructed for her, or outdoors beside an army truck. Sometimes as many as twenty thousand GIs came to see her perform. When she was onstage, she saw masses of soldiers sitting on their helmets and waiting for her to speak to them. These men—all in uniform—only had eyes for the woman with the bare shoulders and the high-heeled shoes. Sometimes the soldiers were able to scrounge up some roses to decorate Dietrich’s tent. When she moved on, she would make sure to take the flowers with her.
The war gave Dietrich a new mobility. No longer tied to studio work, she went from place to place with her evening gowns and uniforms in tow. The letters from her daughter, who had stayed behind in America, are surprisingly affectionate. Maria was unnerved by her mother’s long absence, and when a week went by without news, she grew alarmed and contacted her father, who had no idea of his wife’s whereabouts either. Maria tried to hearten her mother from afar, as in this excerpt from a letter she wrote her in May: “I saw your picture in Vogue in your uniform. You really look wonderful. You look like you did when you made your first pictures.”22
However, Dietrich’s performances were no easy task. Although she had never done anything but entertain her entire life, she felt overwhelmed. She had to stand in front of thousands of soldiers who kept shouting and whistling at her. She was unaccustomed to these kinds of audiences from her studio work, and they were not always welcoming. Danny Thomas taught her how to avoid getting fazed, how to make a joke work, and how to keep the audience in line. She entertained the soldiers with a few songs, a few witty remarks, and a few skits to make them laugh and cry and offer a refreshing pause from their daily reality.
After Bari, she continued on her way to Naples. Soldier Dietrich was helping to recapture the country from the Germans. Some houses were roofless; most were completely destroyed. There was rubble everywhere, and children played in the ruins. Wherever the Germans went, they left behind death and destruction.
On the Italian front, a total of twenty ethnic groups and nationalities were fighting the Germans. Dietrich occupied a unique position among them because she was a German fighting against the Germans. In Capua she sat in the courtyard of a castle, her sequined dress sparkling in the sunshine, surrounded by jolly GIs. Despite the adverse conditions, she managed to look glamorous. Her hair was beautifully coiffed, her makeup was impeccable, her nails were polished, and her clothes were a perfect fit. She and Irene, her fashion designer, had decided to go with sequined dresses because they did not need to be reironed before each performance. In Caserta she stood at the microphone with the soldiers at her feet. She scribbled on the back of a photograph, “No love, no nothing. . . . Sinatra never had an audience like that.” Each of these men wanted to attract her attention. They figured that if Dietrich was there, things could not be too bad; if the situation were truly dangerous, she would not be authorized to come to them. She was well aware of their thinking. Of course she was afraid, but she could not show any signs of fear.
Since January 1944, the Allies had been fighting for access to Rome. In May they finally achieved the crucial breakthrough. The conquest of Rome went according to plan once the Anzio beachhead was established. Dietrich was on the scene in the decisive days. She was the first Allied entertainer in Anzio. Then, on June 6, when news arrived about the success of the Allies in Normandy, Dietrich had the honor of announcing it onstage. She shed tears of joy when sharing the news about the crucial blow to Germany. The soldiers were jubilant. Everyone knew that the end of Hitler had come. Just a few days later, the Americans entered Rome with a long parade of cars. The soldiers threw around chocolate and cigarettes, and proudly shouted, “We told you we’ll do it!” The capital of Italian fascism had fallen. Dietrich later reported that the Romans could not believe their eyes when they saw her sitting in a jeep. “They must have thought Americans are wonderful. We bring them freedom, bread—even movie stars.”23
On June 17, she landed back in New York. Every newspaper of note ran a photograph of her emerging from the aircraft in an army flight suit with little luggage and many helmets, which were gifts from her soldiers. At the press conference, she was wearing army trousers, shirt, tie, boots, and a forage cap, and her fingernails were painted red. She lit her cigarettes not with matches, but with a GI lighter. Her responses were brief and matter-of-fact. She struck the journalists as serious and utterly transformed from the Dietrich they had known. She had turned military and put her femme fatale persona behind her. The diva was now a soldier. She reported about “the boys”: “They are very much alive and alert. That is why I want to go back.”24
Dietrich had come back to put together a new troupe. Her selection was limited, because not many artists were willing to be away from home for half a year. Charles de Gaulle visited New York on July 11, and Dietrich was invited to his reception at the Waldorf Astoria. The newspapers featured pictures of her chatting with Mayor LaGuardia. She was now a political figure fighting for a liberated Europe. Hollywood seemed far away.
When we see her looking relaxed and self-confident in the political arena, we find it hard to believe that she was having a difficult time with her lover at this time. In late June, Gabin was overjoyed to get a telegram from her and called her the love of his life. Five days later, his happiness had flipped into outright despair. He read in the newspaper that her latest romantic affair was with an air corps brigadier general she had met while on tour. Now he understood why he had heard from her so rarely. She no longer considered him important, and he wanted nothing more to do with her.
However, Gabin could not tear himself away altogether and soon wrote her a letter in English, begging to learn the truth. He felt betrayed and lost, and asked her to write him if she wanted to renew the promise of their love; if she did not, however, he would resign himself to the situation, and she would never hear from him again. Dietrich laid his fears to rest, and he made the mistake of continuing to confess that he admired her “like a fool.”25 She was increasingly peeved with his admiration and jealousy, and knew all too well how wrathful, aggressive, and possessive he could be.
Once the storm had subsided, she calmly went about her business in New York. She continued to prune her possessions and put her furniture and jewelry up for auction. Earning money was no easy matter during the war. Dietrich had to take care of the entire family, and complaints about payment of back taxes and a lack of money were ongoing in her letters to her financial adviser, who was often appalled by her lack of cooperation. She did not know how to handle money. Dietrich hated the idea of not being able to spend money left and right. She spent a sunny afternoon on a roof garden in Manhattan being interviewed for Vogue by Leo Lerman, who wanted to learn all about her role in the war. The first thing he noticed was that her eyebrows were no longer shaved off and traced on, but had grown in naturally. “And Dietrich is funny, with that baggy pants comedian funniness, that belly-laugh vigor which her friends adore, but which Hollywood hid behind six-inch eyelashes and a million-dollar languor.”26 She wore no makeup apart from lipstick, and of course she had on her GI shirt and trousers. She struck Lerman as very thoughtful. The conversation went on for fifteen hours, and she seemed pleased that Lerman wanted to know how she was faring in Europe. She provided a particularly impressive description of her visits to the front-line hospitals:
There are those rows of beds. In them, boys are sleeping or unconscious. Next to each bed stands a pole, and on that pole hangs a jar—a jar of blood. The only movement in that whole place is the bubbling blood, the only sound in that whole place is the bubbling blood, a little wisp of a sound . . . the only color in that place is the color of blood. You stand there with actual life running from bottles into the boys. You see it running into them. You hear it.”27
She was asked to visit the German soldiers in the military hospital. “ ‘Please go over and talk to them. You can speak German.’ And I’d go over to those blank faced, very young Nazis. They look me over and ask, ‘Are you the real Marlene Dietrich?’ ”28 The German soldiers knew her only from what their mothers had told them; in their stories, she was always the blue angel.
Dietrich was deeply impressed by the morale of the American soldiers and the incredible efficiency of the army. In any case, she wanted to get back to the war. “I won’t sign any contracts here that would tie me down. I will not sit here working at my little job and let the war pass me by.”29
Kismet opened on August 22, before she left New York. She cleverly managed to interweave stories about her work with the troops when asked about the movie. She told one journalist the story of a severely wounded soldier who had lost the will to live, but regained it when he was overcome with eagerness to see her golden legs in Kismet. Going to the movies was his first plan for the future. The doctors asked her to put on quite a lot of perfume before heading to the front-line hospitals; smelling perfume on a woman, they explained to her, could make the difference between life and death. The wounded men even asked her to kiss their bandages, and she did. Dietrich knew how to shape her public presence. She mastered all the roles, from the soldier to the patriot to the saint. On one of her last evenings in New York, she enjoyed herself at her favorite club, El Morocco—in uniform, of course.
When Dietrich left for her second USO tour in early September, she knew that Paris had been taken back. Her itinerary began in the northern American bases: Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. In Iceland, she was photographed looking lost and freezing in a desolate landscape; behind her, in a nod to her homesickness, a handmade sign read: “Park Avenue.” In another photograph, she was at the stove in an army shirt and apron, with military officers all around her. “Iceland—kitchen making potato pancakes,” she jotted on the back. Dietrich made a point of eating her meals with the enlisted men as a way of showing that she was there on their behalf. She listened to their stories, laughed at their jokes, and gave them a feeling of importance. Her shows, jokes, and skits were also attuned to their taste.30 In one important respect, however, she and “the boys” were quite different. For the soldiers, the end of the war meant that they could go home, but she would have to figure out just where “home” was.
Her relationship with Gabin was moving along as usual. He waited for signs of life from her and was beside himself with happiness if she wrote him a letter. In November 1944, he told her he was tired of being alone and spending the years without her. He would likely have been horrified to learn that Sieber was the first one to read his love letters, then tell her whether they contained something important beyond the fact that Gabin was sad. Rudi wrote to her, “I shall make copies of all of them to send them to you and shall keep the originals for future reference.”31 Sieber no longer kept a tally of her income and expenses, but he took a rather sadistic pleasure in passing judgment on the feelings of others, and archiving his wife’s love letters.
In writing to her on the front, Sieber skirted around the subject of the war, concentrating instead on managing his wife’s lovers and ensuring that she had a steady supply of makeup. In return he received a monthly check, which enabled him to lead a good life. Dietrich’s business manager, Charlie Trezona, who was alarmed at her dwindling assets, wrote her a strongly worded letter in February 1945. He had contacted Rudi, who seemed to assume that Dietrich would provide for him and Tamara until the end of their lives. He told her, “Mr. Sieber seems very worried about the possibility of your not being able to keep up your insurance payments and the checks for him in maintenance.” Trezona tried to impress upon Dietrich that things could not go on this way. If she chose not to shoot any films and instead entertain the troops, that was her prerogative, but she had to be able to afford it. Dietrich had always opted for spending her money rather than investing it. Now she had nothing left. Trezona saw only one solution to this problem: she had to shoot a film or do radio broadcasts. American newspapers were printing letters from soldiers that were full of praise for her courage and dedication. On the other hand, the rumor persisted that she wanted to stay in Europe. Trezona admonished her, “This is very bad and should be corrected by you unless it is true. Your return should be looked forward to by producers of films and radio shows and the anticipation of your return should always be built with the view in mind of getting the maximum earning power when you return.”32
There she was in France, its fate hanging in the air, and she was dealing with the cold and with crab lice and needing to turn her thoughts to her next film role. Nothing was further from her mind than Hollywood. Then she heard from her friend Walter Reisch, who had immigrated to America and now wrote to her in English:
It gives a strange feeling to hear you talking about the cold and the dampness and the dark, but it is not a feeling of pity or regret, it is a feeling of pride and respect for your bravery and selflessness with which you serve the cause. Somehow we always felt it was just a whim of yours when you said time and again you will be first one to be over there—Paris and further on—and then you really did it. Grand! It is sunny and warm here, and still there are many who would trade with you.33
She found it irritating that her American friends acted as though the war was already over and done with while she was still in the thick of it. During her stopover in New York, she received an inquiry from the American secret service OSS (Office of Strategic Services) requesting her help with radio programs to be broadcast in the German transmission area.34 Dietrich, the unforgotten Blue Angel, seemed predestined for this assignment, and she accepted it. The broadcasts were recorded in London. She sang songs in German and English, most often “Lili Marleen,” the World War II soldiers’ song, the text of which originated during World War I.35 After the defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels had banned it on the grounds that it would “undermine defense efforts.” The Allied soldiers had also gotten to know this song on the army’s radio station in North Africa. Dietrich added it to her repertoire in late 1943. She sang this song for two years, in Africa, Sicily, Italy, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Hemingway said about his friend Dietrich: “If she had nothing more than her voice, she could break your heart with it.”36 This was intentional on the part of the OSS. The idea was to make the Germans melancholy and have them recall a time in their country that offered more than marches and exhortations to hold out. Dietrich sang this song as a soldier, unsentimentally and matter-of-factly, to bring back the poetry that the Germans had lost.
In August 1939, she had left the Côte d’Azur on the luxury train known as the “Train Bleu”; little did she know that it would be five years before she set foot on French soil again. In late September 1944 Dietrich was back in Paris, staying in a suite at the Ritz. Everything was still there: the brass bed, the dove-gray wallpaper, the marble fireplace, and the large gray vanity with the mirror. The food was terrible, but no worse than the army food she was now used to. And the Ritz still had plenty of champagne.
Only VIPs could stay at the Ritz. Two such guests were Ernest Hemingway and his new lover, the reporter Mary Welsh. Hemingway affectionately referred to Dietrich as his “Kraut.” He admired her beauty and intelligence and thought she had the best “gallows humor” in the world. Both of them enjoyed making detailed plans for her funeral, which he would end by saying, “There’ll never be such a show. You’re immortal, my Kraut.”37 She would often head straight into his bathroom and have a seat at the edge of his bathtub to watch him shave while serenading him. They started drinking champagne in the morning. Hemingway valued her judgment, and every once in a while he read her parts of his new manuscript at the hotel bar. He expressed his admiration in an oddly worded message: “I was so proud of you in the Ritz and how you looked like a combat soldier and walked like one and even smelled a little like one.”38 Hemingway admired her Prussian nature, and she loved the writer and hunter in him. Their friendship was based on their mutual awareness of the other’s vulnerability. When Welsh met Dietrich for the first time, she described her as “sinuously beautiful in her khaki uniform and the knitted khaki helmet liner she wore askew on her head.”39 Welsh was struck by Dietrich’s matter-of-fact manner and characterized her as a businesswoman “concerned with every detail of her program from transport to accommodations, to sizes of states and halls, to lighting and microphones.”40
No sooner were the Germans driven out than the French couturiers began to design their next clothing line. A photograph shows Dietrich in a simple uniform, with men’s shoes and a big handbag, in front of Elsa Schiaparelli’s studio. There she bought the ginger-red silk coat in which Lee Miller photographed her at the Ritz for Vogue, sitting on the floor and looking out into the distance. Miller commented, “It is all right for her to shop in Paris, although the city is out of bounds—as she is in USO and has to dress up for the boys.”41 She continued to perform in eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, but she was exhausted and riddled with anxiety: “I’m afraid, period. A funny feeling. Fear of failing. Fear of having to give up, of being unable to endure this way of living. And everybody will say, with a smile, ‘Of course, of course, that was a silly idea.’ I can’t confide my fear to anyone.”42
Dietrich had now replaced her USO uniform with the standard-issue “Eisenhower jacket,” along with the mandatory trousers, helmet or cap, and heavy boots. The closer she came to Germany, the more secure she felt in her uniform. A series of photographs shows her standing next to General Patton in France. For Patton, the uniform was an indispensable part of a successful military campaign. He understood the critical importance of the theatrical element in battle and the disciplinary power of the uniform.43 Patton gave Dietrich a small revolver to defend herself if captured by the enemy.
After heavy bombing, Aachen, the “city of churches and kings,” was the first major German city to fall to the Allies. Dietrich was surprised to feel neither threatened nor fearful, and she was given a cordial reception: “We pushed into Germany, and much to our surprise, we did not feel the least bit threatened or fearful. The people on the street wanted only to embrace me; they asked me to put in a good word for them with the Americans. They couldn’t have been friendlier.”44 She had returned to her homeland with the victors. She was torn: she was a part of the old Germany, and she belonged to the new America that would decide Germany’s fate.
She spread out her sleeping bag in what remained of a bombed-out house; it was cold, rainy, and muddy. There was no roof, and rats scurried every which way: “Rats have icy paws. You’re lying on the bare floor in your sleeping bag, the blanket pulled up to your chin, and these creatures run over your face, their paws cold as death; they scare the life out of you.”45 By Christmas 1944, it was clear that this would be the final Christmas of the war. The Battle of the Bulge was a failed offensive. Dietrich was feeling glum; she was turning forty-three and had no idea what direction her life would be taking, both personally and professionally.
Dietrich was starting to forget where she was performing at any given time. The long months of the disorienting life on the battlefields of Europe had worn her out. She still refused to adjust to the demands of the war and continued to regard her life as chaotic right through to the day the war was won. She and the boys awaited their instructions like good soldiers. They were the victors, but they felt hollow inside. She finally received the order to fly back to LaGuardia Airport, where everything had begun. When the plane landed in New York, it was raining, and no reception committee was on hand. They were frisked from head to toe; Dietrich’s souvenirs from the war were confiscated, including the revolver General Patton had given her. Captain Dietrich returned unarmed to her suite at the St. Regis.