Dietrich spent the summer in New York after the Germans were defeated, healing from an inflammation of the jaw and the aftermath of the frostbite on her hands and feet. Once the war was over, her life grew complicated all over again. There were no more orders, performances, or audiences for her, and she did not have enough money to cover the checks she was writing. Her friends, who had envied her courage, were delighted to see her but were not terribly interested in hearing war stories. Since Dietrich had no desire to go back to Hollywood and had no idea what she would do in New York, she went off to Paris, where Gabin was waiting for her. He had not been demobilized until July 1945. After the long strain of the war he felt weary and drained, and had no intention of joining the victory parade on the Champs-Élysées; instead, he watched his comrades go by from his hotel room window.
The tone of Dietrich’s latest letter to Gabin was testy. She did not appreciate having to account for her comings and goings. Dietrich assured him that she was moving ahead with an amicable divorce from Sieber, and informed him that when she reached Paris, she would be heading on to Berlin to see her mother as soon as she could—but once that visit was over, she would belong to him completely. “If you are nice to me, I will stay with you the rest of my life,” she wrote to him, and added that if he wanted to have a child, they ought to get married.1
However, her stay in Paris turned out to be a fiasco. Gabin’s arrangements at the Hotel Claridge did not live up to her requirements. She felt that staying together in a single bedroom and a salon was out of the question. She stubbornly insisted on her privacy, and on having a room for herself. “How can I live during winter in two rooms and one bathroom making a film. Where one has to wait for the other in the morning!!”2 She had spent months living under far more adverse conditions, so the problem appeared to be not the number of rooms, but Gabin himself. He started to insist on having a child, and she pointed out that people have children when they’re young—as she had done.
In late September, she finally got her visa for Berlin. Her mother picked her up at the Tempelhof airport. Dietrich was returning to her hometown as an American, in military attire and with a forage cap on her head. Both mother and daughter were wearing ties. Photographs show Dietrich leaving the airport, arm in arm with her mother.
The Berlin that Dietrich had left fifteen years earlier no longer existed. She recognized quite a few things, yet everything had changed, as she wrote to Sieber in New York: “The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church is destroyed, Bahnhof Zoo, Tauentzienstrasse, Joachimsthaler—everything reduced to rubble. . . . Pappilein—how sad the world is. Our building, number 54, is still standing, and even though the building is full of shell holes, there are red geraniums on our balcony. Number 133 has nothing but the outer walls; it’s gutted, and the balcony is sagging. Mutti spent several days rummaging in the wreckage and on top of the debris was the bronze mask of my face, intact! Then she sat down and cried for quite a long time.”3 In an apparent attempt to shield herself from this shattered world, she sought refuge in work. Dietrich gave two performances a day at the American clubs, danced the nights away, and barely ate. After many long years at the Hollywood studios and on the stage of the international, glamorous world, Dietrich found herself confronted with the confinement and pettiness of familial woes. She was a guardian angel in American uniform, and her family looked to her for salvation. But because she had only a limited residence permit, she headed back to Paris in October.
During the war, she had begun an affair with an American general, James M. Gavin. Uncharacteristically romantic, she called this military man, who was six years her junior, athletic (his men called him “Slim Jim”), and brave, “Abelard.” Gavin had had a storybook career, starting life as an orphan from Brooklyn and rising to become a highly decorated general.4 A series of photographs captured an encounter between the two on a secluded road. Dietrich, wearing a skirt, nylons, and an Eisenhower jacket, is casting an adoring glance up at the tall Gavin. The combination of love, war, and death must have had an irresistible effect on her. Her relationship with him turned out to be extremely helpful in the postwar period. At her request, he had visited Josefine von Losch and brought her groceries.5 On November 3, 1945, Dietrich’s mother died at the age of sixty-eight. Once again, Dietrich asked Gavin, who was now the city commandant in Berlin, for his help. He defied his government’s non-fraternization policy and entrusted Colonel Barry Oldfield with the task of burying Dietrich’s mother. At night, American soldiers dug a grave for the Prussian officer’s widow.6 Dietrich arrived in Berlin on a military aircraft just in time. She sat and stared at the coffin. When the ceremony was over, she was led away, and did not turn around a single time.
Dietrich sought emotional support from Maria, who was touring through Germany with the USO at this time, although she did not have the glamorous receptions her mother had been accustomed to. Now that peacetime had come, the theaters were only half-full and she did not have the feeling that she was accomplishing anything important. Maria sent affectionate telegrams, but she could not cancel her tour as her mother wanted her to do. Dietrich felt abandoned in her grief. It was only when she returned to Paris that the news really sank in. “Only then I realized that my mother had died. Even when I stood at the grave—even the second time before I left Berlin, I did not quite know.”7 She quickly made sure that her love affairs would not leave too much time on her hands for mourning. Gabin felt that it was high time for him to know where he stood. He kept his hopes up and sent her flowers while Gavin was visiting and distracting her. Dietrich tried to lean on her daughter to help her bring order to her head and heart, although Maria had plenty of problems of her own. She had lived with her husband, Dean Goodman, for only a few months after marrying him in 1943, and was now contemplating divorce, which pleased Dietrich, who hoped to have her daughter all to herself once again. Dietrich repeatedly appealed to Sieber to take charge of their daughter’s divorce. She did not hesitate to suggest unsavory methods to achieve this goal: “Papi . . . we must with detectives or other way prove Goodman to be homosexual. . . . The best thing is to get some proof and then put the irons on him. . . . Goodman lived always with men. But he has to be confronted with proof.”8 Dietrich had no qualms about blackmailing her son-in-law with accusations of homosexuality. She was happy at the prospect that no man would stand between herself and Maria anymore. In the emotional chaos she was experiencing, she clung to her family. Rudi not only had to send her pills, shoes, cosmetics, food, and clothing, but also put up with her letters. When he read about how much she missed him, he knew full well that she did not mean him, but rather a fictitious someone who loved her, someone she could pine for who did not contradict her. Sieber met her professions of love with silence.
Once the war had ended and no longer dominated Dietrich’s state of mind, her life went awry. She missed the war and the way it had held sway over her. In comparison with the war, everything else had become trivial and inconsequential. Worries about her love for Gabin, and her career, had been put off until the war was over. The war had brought her sold-out concerts, banner headlines, and great admiration. But that phase now lay in the past. This was the second time Dietrich was coping with the end of a war. In 1918, she had been young and able to take advantage of the opportunity for a fresh start. In 1945, she was more than forty years old, and younger actresses were now determining what constituted a new beginning. Gabin pulled a few strings with his old contacts to get himself and Dietrich roles in a Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert movie. Carné and Prévert were the great actors of French cinema, internationally acclaimed artists, but the whole slant of the project was not to Dietrich’s liking. She found the script bland and the dialogues sophomoric. Unexpectedly, she had changed her mind about Hollywood: “Hollywood is decent compared to the business people here—the Jewish film producers are not back yet and the goys just don’t understand how to make good pictures and treat artists.”9 The project was called off. Gabin already had a new offer on hand: “It is a sort of Blue Angel role in a bourgeois environment. She is a bourgeois too, no singer, I just mean the traits in her character. He kills her out of jealousy. Wonderful role.”10 She decided to wait and see what came of it. If it fell apart, she saw no reason to stay on. Dietrich was let down by Paris. Occupation and war had altered the city, and some felt that it would never go back to being the way it had once been. “Only when I walk up the Champs-Élysées and see the Arc is it still the same place and just as beautiful.”11 She was not spared the adversities of everyday postwar life, which she seems to have taken as a personal affront on the part of the French. Bread was being rationed, and apartments were unheated. Dietrich froze as well, because she could not afford the coal from the black market. The electricity did not always work, and she often spent long hours in the dark, unable to make coffee or dry her hair. “It looks as if we fought the war for nothing. The people have changed (or didn’t they?) so terribly, they seem to think only of their little life and the great spirit that was there during the war has gone or maybe was never there in civilians.” Her life as a soldier had had meaning; now she had to adapt to peacetime.
Her only friends were Max Kolpé, with whom she shared packets of soup in his hotel room, and Margo Lion, who had made a name for herself in France as a singer of Brecht’s songs. But both of them were busy during the day, whereas she had nothing to do but to think dismal thoughts. “No fittings, no Hütchen, Schühchen, nothing to do.” She even had wool sent to her from New York. Sitting in her room, she crocheted for her friends out of sheer boredom. “From my window I see the planes going off to the sea. I look after each of them and feel like the girl in a fairytale looking after the birds flying away for the winter.”12
Gabin was looking forward to a quiet life after the war. He wanted to marry and start a family, and preferably move to the country. This new phase would spell the end of Dietrich’s unsettled life, divided between two continents and various lovers. Gabin was offering Dietrich the life of a French wife. At his side, she could try to find inner peace. But Dietrich was terrified at the thought of the intimacy of a marriage.
She systematically destroyed her relationship with Gabin. She complained to her daughter, her husband, and her friends about Gabin, whom she labeled unsociable and pessimistic, and whipped herself into a frenzy of dislike. She had no intention of breaking up with Gavin, who called her every night. Readers of his letters to Dietrich get to know him as a reticent man, who, like most of her lovers, could not believe his good fortune. In his letters, which were written in blue ink on airmail stationery in a large, loopy handwriting, he kept telling her that she was a wonderful woman and a special person. Although he was divorced, he did not pester her with plans for the future. General Gavin was what was left of the war for Dietrich. Her affair with him was reminiscent of an exciting and upbeat time in her life. Moroever, Gavin offered her a welcome change of pace because he was “no actor, no writer or chi-chi.” At some point, Gabin had had enough of her infidelity and started an affair with a young actress. He went out with her every evening while Dietrich supposedly stayed at home and read old books by Erich Kästner or poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. Shortly before Christmas in 1945, the situation escalated. During a dinner with friends, Gabin verbally attacked Dietrich, and she responded with physical force: “I gave him a smack in the face. He then hit me unmercifully and the women cried and it was all very embarrassing.”13 She was at her wit’s end. Their discussions about children, marriage, movies, Hollywood, and life in the country were going around in circles.
Even as their love was fading, Dietrich and Gabin were still united in their feeling of having been let down now that there was peace. They had fought for freedom and democracy, but now had to accept the fact that the memory of their dedication had faded. The death of Dietrich’s mother shortly after the end of the war had been her absolute emotional low point, and she began to have her doubts about Europe: “This Europe I loved so much has dwindled down to some vague form of memory like in a strong way I have for my mother. I still long for it, forgetting that I am here and then realizing that it has probably gone forever too.”14
When she and Gabin pursued acting roles, they were frequently told that they had been away from the screen for too long. Their greatest fear was that being labeled prewar stars in a world that longed for the new and unscathed was tantamount to a death sentence. Gabin had grown stouter, his blond hair was streaked with gray, and his facial wrinkles were becoming more pronounced. People in France still associated Dietrich’s name with The Blue Angel. In early 1946, Dietrich and Gabin had to decide whether to make The Room Upstairs (Martin Roumagnac). Their fame as a couple could work to the advantage of the movie, but by the same token, their performance together might provide an unwanted reminder of the prewar era. Neither could risk a stigma of this kind. “Only artistic success interesting. . . . Cannot afford mediocre film.”15
They did go ahead with it, and the shooting with director Georges Lacombe began in the summer of 1946. Gabin played Martin Roumagnac, a mason and building contractor from the country who falls in love with the beautiful widow Blanche Ferrand (Dietrich) and builds her a villa. Blanche, who comes from a good family and has lived in Paris for quite some time, now earns her keep by having affairs with rich men. Everybody in the village knows this aside from Roumagnac. He truly loves Blanche, but in a jealous rage, he strangles her. A sensational trial follows, and he is acquitted. Once he learns that his jealousy was unwarranted, he is a broken man. In the end, he is killed by Blanche’s fanatical admirer.
The Room Upstairs turned out to be the flop they had feared. Even today, this movie is (unjustly) considered a failure. The black-and-white images of the French countryside still bore the traces of the years of occupation and war. Some scenes might well give viewers the impression that they are watching not Martin Roumagnac and Blanche Ferrand, but Gabin and Dietrich themselves. In one dialogue, which takes place in their hotel room in Paris, Blanche says to Martin that he doesn’t know what Paris is, and he replies by singing the praises of the country. Martin, the decent mason from the country, and Blanche, the duplicitous lady from the city, bear a striking resemblance to the down-home patriot Gabin and the former Hollywood star Dietrich. In another scene, Blanche is standing in front of Martin in her high-heeled shoes and casting him a signature Dietrich lascivious glance. This brief moment gives viewers a glimpse into a very private scene.
Dietrich was unable to give her performance a new twist. She appeared to be oddly out of step with the times. Her clothing, hats, facial expressions, and gestures seemed passé.
Their names were not enough to act as a box-office magnet; the planned breakthrough turned out to be a fiasco. Dietrich was devastated. She could not forgive either Gabin or France for the failure of this film, and she concluded that her future did not lie with either of them: “This is a terrible country—twenty years behind. No work on Saturdays (except studio), no work on Mondays, holidays all the time and no tempo—just eat eat eat. . . . I thought of staying in France but changed my mind and coming back. . . . ”16 She wanted to go back to America and earn money.
She urged her agent, Charles Feldman, to get her a role in a movie that Mitchell Leisen would be making for Paramount Studios. At first, the studio turned her down. DEAREST CHARLIE . . . PLEASE ARRANGE FOR EARRINGS WANT SO MUCH TO DO IT . . . WANT TO COME HOME TO MITCH AND YOU . . . PLEASE DO ALL YOU CAN FOR EARRINGS.17 Feldman’s negotiations were ultimately successful, and by June Dietrich knew that she would indeed be joining the cast of Golden Earrings.
A letter she wrote to her daughter while en route to the United States tells of her poor state of health. Bothered by the way her fellow passengers were looking at her, she stayed alone in her cabin until the afternoon. She launched into lengthy descriptions of the various powders and pills she took for her many aches and pains. Her freezing hands turned red, which unnerved her. She was suffering from insomnia. Not even sleeping pills could bring her the sleep she longed for. Dietrich was apprehensive about coming back to Hollywood. She had closed the studio door rather haughtily behind her just two years ago, and announced that she would find something better almost anywhere else. In Hollywood, everyone knew that the best years of her life lay behind her and she was coming only for the money. In order to be able to pay the hotel bill in Paris, she had had to sell furs. Dietrich prepared to conquer America a second time in lamentable shape: she was an actress in her mid-forties with red hands, insomnia, and hemorrhoids, one who wore out her old dresses and felt forced to play an absurd role in a preposterous movie. But she did not let on to the outside world how this bothered her.
Her “repatriation,” as she called it, was eased by dividing up the world into civilians and military personnel. She felt like a soldier and longed for the lost world of camaraderie. Standing alone at the side of the road in Paris, she had watched the victory parade go by. “Angel Child came back from Champs-Élysées where I watched all alone victory parade. Only a few MP represented us. My heart was heavy with memoirs and loneliness in rain.”18 Nobody wanted to hear what they had endured. But in contrast to her, the former soldiers knew where they belonged, even if they felt out of place in their marriages and families.
Dietrich’s most pressing question remained: “Where should I live, and with whom?” In Paris and with Gabin she had not found an answer, and she would not find one right down to her final retreat from the world. She scraped along through the somber postwar period. Her name still cropped up in the gossip columns, such as in reports that she had been seen with Burt Lancaster and had had an affair with a high-ranking officer. Her daughter was now also her secretary. Her name no longer had enough appeal for big headlines. At times she claimed to love Hollywood, and at others she said she preferred filming in France. She did not hold out for long in either the United States or Europe. Her life in the postwar period was one long state of transit.
Feeling forlorn, she got in touch with Remarque again. He knew her; she did not have to pretend with him, and unlike Rudi, he answered letters. “I’m writing you because I suddenly have an acute longing—not the kind I usually have. Maybe I need liverwurst sandwiches, the solace of the afflicted—and emotional liverwurst sandwiches. . . . I am at loose ends and empty and aimless. . . . I have no one left. . . . I’ve rebelled and lashed out (not always with the fairest means) and have cut myself free, and now I sit in freedom, alone and abandoned.”19
But Remarque had gotten over her. His life had moved forward happily—or so he claimed. Remarque was exasperated when he thought about what had become of his great love, Marlene Dietrich. The idiocy of Hollywood, with its trivial images and wretched transformations, had rendered her unrecognizable. He desperately sought any remaining element of the time they had shared, but even the memory of their love was “failed, forgotten, futile, finished.”20
Remarque had worked on the book about Ravic for years. In 1941, as he was coming up with the title, he realized that this book was evolving into an emotion-packed autobiography of the past years. In August 1944, he completed the first draft, and in mid-September the advance publication began to run in Collier’s. Dietrich must have been bitter to realize that he had reworked their love story into a literary success, yet her own role was restricted to that of a reader.21
Arch of Triumph was adapted for the screen by Lewis Milestone. The role of Joan Madoux, which Dietrich had awaited for years, went to Ingrid Bergman. Even so, Dietrich and Remarque remained quite close. He sent her the German version of “our book,” as he called it, and asked to meet up with her. Neither of the two wanted to relinquish the intimacy and closeness they had experienced. They were often seen together in New York nightclubs, and for her birthday he gave her a gold cigarette lighter encrusted with small rubies representing the Arch of Triumph, in memory of the city of their love.
Dietrich kept Sieber up to date about her unhappiness with Gabin, but she rarely got answers to her letters and was deeply disappointed in his lack of interest in her life. She enumerated everything she had done for him and complained about his lack of gratitude. “As I have lost everything to the Germans and you have saved everything you could at least get me the things that belong to me.”22 Her letters to him in 1945 and 1946 were filled with requests for makeup and laments about her loneliness.
Dietrich’s life was more unsettled than ever. She had no permanent residence, had clothing sent to her, and lived in a hotel. Meanwhile, her daughter was starting a family. One year after divorcing Dean Goodman in June 1946, Maria married the set designer William Riva. Riva was a good-looking man who was not fazed by his mother-in-law’s fame. It looked as though Dietrich was finally resigned to the idea of her daughter’s finding happiness. The press reported how delighted she was about the marriage of her daughter. By marrying for love, Maria had chosen a different path from that of her mother. Neither her mother nor her father attended Maria’s wedding. For once, the two of them were on the same continent in 1947: Dietrich was in Paris, and Sieber in Locarno. Maria’s wedding day was not upstaged by either parent.
Suddenly, Dietrich got an offer for a Billy Wilder movie in Hollywood. In 1926 Wilder had come to Berlin, where he eked out a living as a reporter, paid dance partner, and screenplay writer. He had worked on the early Dietrich movie Madame Doesn’t Want Children, and he was a good friend of Max Kolpé and Walter Reisch’s, who were also close friends of Dietrich’s. Wilder managed to produce one high-quality box-office hit after another. In every one of his movies, he tested the threshold of what American audiences would accept, and A Foreign Affair was no exception. He set this love story in the ruins of Berlin. Wilder had been sent to Germany just after the end of the war by the Psychological Warfare Department, which sought to set up new film industry rules for the Germans to comply with on their path to democracy. After twelve years away, he was coming back to Berlin in the fall of 1945 bearing the rank of an American colonel. “I will never forget how the city looked back then. I came with a camera man, we flew over Berlin, and I saw the devastation. It looked like the end of the world. I later used the documentary material for my film A Foreign Affair.”23 Wilder, whose grandmother, mother, and stepfather had been murdered in Auschwitz, recommended converting the Germans to democracy not only with educational documentary films, but also by means of entertainment sprinkled with a dash of ideology. Washington was not thrilled with this recommendation, but when he was planning A Foreign Affair a year and a half later, he used it as his guiding principle. During his stay in Berlin, Wilder observed the devastated city with a professional eye. He decided that this “crazy, squalid, and starving city” was the ideal setting for a film. Wilder knew Berlin; he picked out the right corners and took photographs. He studied the Germans, “from the university professor who lost his home during the bombing of Berlin to the three-cigarette whores in the Femina Bar,” to gather material for his movie.24 In late May 1947, his screenplay was complete. He could not imagine anyone other than Dietrich in the role of Erika von Schluetow, the former mistress of a Nazi, for two reasons. First, Dietrich, who was herself from Berlin, would lend the movie a note of authenticity better than any other actress could; and second, she was the only German actress who could get away with playing this role. She had misgivings, and at first turned down Wilder’s offer on the telephone, whereupon he paid her a visit in Berlin to try to win her over. The $110,000 fee and the opportunity to work with a renowned director appear to have been motive enough for her to rethink her initial response.
A Foreign Affair opens with the approach to Berlin of an airplane bearing a congressional delegation from the United States, which has come to find out what they can about the morale of the troops stationed there. Gazing down at the city from above, they cannot imagine that people could be living in these ruins. “Like pack rats been gnawing at a hunk of old mouldy Roquefort cheese,” is one of the cynical comments. There is one woman in this upstanding group: Phoebe Frost, a congresswoman from Iowa. Jean Arthur played Frost as a prim and proper puritan from the New World, but we come to realize that under her steely exterior, she yearns for love. Frost distrusts the way in which Colonel Rufus J. Plummer, the pragmatic commander in chief in Berlin, is going about this assignment. During his tour through the city, he points to some boys playing baseball as evidence of his success in bringing democracy to the Germans. He advocates patience and forbearance with the Germans. He conceives of his task as restoring order and reviving the defeated people’s will to live. Frost will have none of that. Her focus is the moral integrity of the boys. She heads off to explore Berlin on her own and winds up at an illegal nightclub called Lorelei, which features the seductive, inscrutable Erika von Schluetow. The American and Russian soldiers cheer for her in equal measure. Dietrich played von Schluetow as a world-wise, cynical representative of the Old World. Von Schluetow is well-versed in guilt and atonement, but her only goal is survival. She sings “Black Market,” a song about venality that has people selling their “souls for Lucky Strikes.” For the first time in her life, the congresswoman from Iowa is confronted with an utterly cynical state of mind. “I’m selling out, take all I’ve got—ambitions, convictions, the works. Why not? Enjoy these goods.” Frost is disgusted. When she also finds out that von Schluetow was the lover of a high-ranking National Socialist and is being protected by an American officer, she knows what she has to do. She asks Captain John Pringle (played by John Lund) for help in exposing von Schluetow’s lover. Wilder did not want Pringle to embody the American hero: “Yeah, I wanted him to be a grown-up man, with pros and cons, not goody-goody, and then not a guy who fucks everybody, but just a human being. With errors, with faults, with wonderful things.”25 What Frost doesn’t know is that Pringle is the American officer she is looking for: he is Erika von Schluetow’s lover. Consequently, he plays a double game; by making Frost fall in love with him, he tries to distract her from pursuing her investigation. Von Schluetow wins the first showdown. She carries on about her rival’s lack of makeup and odd hairdo. American women may be good democrats, but they lack any kind of refinement. Von Schluetow instantly senses that Frost is insecure and vulnerable in her femininity, yet this is the woman that poses a danger to her. Pringle spends too much time with her, and eventually they show up at the Lorelei together. Frost’s infatuation has made her morally corruptible, as is evident from her clothing. Instead of her uniform-like suit, she is now wearing an evening gown she bought at the black market. At this encounter, von Schluetow is wearing a dress that Dietrich had worn for her performances in the war. She is accompanied on the piano by Friedrich Hollaender, who had also written the songs for The Blue Angel. On this evening, Frost gets her second lesson in disillusionment. The song that von Schluetow sings is called “Illusions,” about buying “lovely illusions . . . second-hand,” that reach far but are “built on sand.” Frost’s ecstatic delight comes to an abrupt end when the police raid the Lorelei. It is von Schluetow who saves Frost from having to reveal her identity, but in doing so robs her of her illusions about the man she loves. In a matter-of-fact monologue, von Schluetow opens the eyes of the woman from Iowa: “Everything [is] caved in . . . My country, my possessions, my beliefs.” However, she draws the line at relinquishing the man who protects her and gets her nylon stockings. As a German, she cannot afford the luxury of generosity. As an “old gambler” at the roulette table of love, she advises Frost to leave the table and end the game. The American woman, who has experienced neither war nor love, understands her. She is now one of the disillusioned and has lost her naïve innocence. At the end, Frost takes Pringle with her to the Unites States, where he belongs. Von Schluetow sings her final song in a low-cut floral dress. “Amidst the ruins of Berlin / Trees are in bloom as they have never been.”
A Foreign Affair was Wilder’s triumph over Hitler. Hitler was dead, but Wilder and Hollaender had survived. Hollaender found his place at the piano, just as he had fifteen years earlier, and the Lorelei was a smoke-filled, cramped club, just as it had been in The Blue Angel. Wilder’s Berlin is a beaten-down city in which the victors and the vanquished try to get something out of life after so much has been withheld from them for so many years. Von Schluetow speaks on behalf of the vanquished, who haven’t been able to sleep for fifteen years: “First it was Hitler screaming on the radio, then the war of nerves, then the victory celebrations, then the bombing.” Pringle, speaking for the military, complains that everyone has gone back to their daily routines and forgotten the soldiers. Frost, who represents the victors, is overwhelmed by the moral complexity of the situation. Her rigid moral values make it impossible for her to grasp the psychological anxiety and disorientation the victors and the conquered were facing. In real life, Dietrich was in all three positions: as an American citizen she was one of the victors; as a Berliner she was one of the vanquished; and as a combatant against the National Socialists she was one of the soldiers. A Foreign Affair was Dietrich’s film, portraying her own history. Erika von Schluetow was a logical follow-up to the Lola Lola role of fifteen years earlier. Von Schluetow moves with the times, flirts with a Nazi, and extricates herself neatly from the situation once his power had ebbed, returning to the stage of a disreputable club and singing her sage songs.
Dietrich had returned to Berlin in the role of Erika von Schluetow. Surrounded by sets of her destroyed hometown at the film studio in Hollywood, she played an artist who knew how to turn the Nazi reign to good advantage. In this role, Hitler’s most famous opponent showed that the era of morally unequivocally positions was over, which was precisely why this film was disliked. The critics were furious about not seeing any American heroes. Captain Pringle thinks only of his own pleasure, not the dissemination of democratic ideals. And Phoebe Frost may be proper, but her puritanical zeal comes across as neurotic. The unflappable character in this trio is the ex-lover of a Nazi. A Foreign Affair was nominated for two Oscars, but neither was for Best Actress. Hollywood shrank back from honoring Dietrich for her portrayal of Von Schluetow. In Germany, screening of the film was forbidden. The screening committee was not amused by what it saw.
Wilder considered A Foreign Affair one of his better films. Working with Dietrich went smoothly. It was apparent to him right from the start that he could not put anything over on Dietrich, who had been trained by von Sternberg. In order to avoid conflict on the set, he granted her the privilege of selecting her own lighting. Wilder was one of Dietrich’s few good friends. There are very few directors that she enjoyed working with as much as she did with him. During the shooting, Dietrich lived at Wilder’s house, and it is easy to picture these two scandalmongers having quite a lot of fun bad-mouthing the others in the evening.
Hollywood may have withheld the Oscar from Dietrich throughout her life, but the military did not forget her. In November 1947, just before shooting began for A Foreign Affair, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom at West Point. This was the American military’s highest distinction for civilians, and Dietrich was the first woman ever to receive it.26 For the awards ceremony, she wore a high-necked dark suit, tasteful earrings, red lipstick, and a small hat. With perfect posture and an impassive expression on her face in front of the colonel, she is the very picture of poise. Her telegram to Rudi read: LEAVING TRAIN NOW GOT MEDAL FREEDOM ALL LOVE.27 Her French lover and wartime comrade sent her his congratulations: MY ANGEL BRAVO POUR MEDAILLE . . . PENSE A TOI TOUT MON COEUR JEAN.28
“10:28 a.m. Maria’s boy born” is written in red in Rudi’s daily planner. When Dietrich began in Hollywood, having children was considered a blow to a woman’s career. Almost twenty years later, history was repeating itself. The press pegged her “the most beautiful grandmother in the world.” For an actress, a description of that sort could be deadly, but Dietrich tried to ignore the gossip that ensued.
Her personal life changed with the birth of her grandson. It almost seems as though she and Rudi were rediscovering family life. But she had no intention of retiring. She believed that Roberto Rossellini was the director who would know how to give expression to her postwar enervation. During her stay in Paris, she had often spent time with him and with Anna Magnani. She had even translated the screenplay for Rossellini’s film Allemagne année zéro into German and typed it up herself.29 However, Rossellini did not offer her a role. His star was the young Ingetraud Hinze.
The fact was that Dietrich was remaining in America only because she did not want to be in Paris. Gabin had sent her a positively exuberant telegram as the new year approached with the message that the coming year would be her year; he would make her the happiest woman on earth. But no sooner had the year begun than he realized that she actually wanted to be rid of him. Dietrich’s letters were matter-of-fact. She did not understand what all the fuss was about. The final quarrels were about Gabin’s belongings in America, and the matter was left to her business manager, Charlie Trezona. Gabin wanted to have his refrigerator and Cadillac, which led to an extensive correspondence between a patient Trezona and an increasingly peeved Dietrich, who made her opinions known primarily by telegram. Trezona gently reminded her that Gabin’s refrigerator and Cadillac were making quite a lot of work for him and costing her quite a bit of money that she did not have. The correspondence with Trezona provides insights into the dreary life of a woman who is at her wit’s end. The complaints about tax liabilities, a lack of work, and dishonorable lovers ran on endlessly. Her movable possessions were spread among various warehouses; her valuable assets, such as furs, jewelry, and paintings, had to be insured and thus entailed expenses. The bills for her hotels, telephones, and flights were high, and Sieber and Matul also had to live from her assets. Gabin’s Cadillac was eventually sent to France by ship; his agent sent a letter of thanks. Trezona commented that Dietrich agreed to send it out of love. The Cadillac would be the final token of that love.
Gabin left Dietrich, and on March 28, in Paris, he married Dominique Fournier, a fashion model. She was fifteen years younger than he and bore a startling resemblance to the young Dietrich. Gabin had known her for only two months. This utterly unexpected marriage followed on the heels of Dietrich’s earlier public degradation as the “youngest grandmother”; now she was the abandoned older lover. Marlene minus fifteen equals Dominique, the newspapers reported. The photographs of the wedding ceremony show a beaming Gabin sitting next to a beautiful young woman. In November 1949, Dominique gave birth to the first of their three children. With this marriage, Dietrich was dead to Gabin. When they ran into each other on the street, he did not even look her way. He shielded his wife from her, not wanting to give Dietrich any more power over his life.
In June, she flew to Paris. In a letter to Maria, she wrote about how she was coping with her feelings. “I played gay and almost felt like it.”30 She sat at her old table at Fouquet’s with Remarque and an acquaintance and suddenly thought: Why isn’t Jean here? She found out that his baby would be born in October. “We joked that in France they now make Babies in much a shorter time than it usually takes, and said that it must have happened the first night he knew her and there one can not be quite sure one is the father.” She was full of sorrow and hatred. Dietrich lost her authority to the women who supplanted her, and reacted by painting Dominique as a slut who had already aborted many children. Overcome with panic, she was afraid of going out; what if she ran into Gabin? “And shaking hands with him and his wife I cannot imagine and know that I am not good enough an actress for that.” She felt just as bad as she had as a child when she had eaten unripe cherries. In this sad letter, she may have found the most loving parting words for her daughter: “Forgive me for not yet being my age and a wise old Grandmother. Kiss your two men for me and be happy Mami.” It was only when she had lost Gabin forever that she realized he was probably the last great love of her life.
She still had Remarque. They were both just as lost after the war as they had been before, and she wrote to let him know how much she missed him.31 Dietrich had been one of Remarque’s last ties to the Old World. Once he was back in Europe, he realized that this situation had not changed in the slightest. In the summer of 1948, he wrote sadly to her from Porto Ronco about his first trip to Europe and declared that one should never come back.
Remarque was suffering from Ménière’s disease, an inner ear disorder that affects balance and hearing, and Dietrich took care of him with homemade meals. Wilder called her a “Mother Teresa with better legs.” Remarque diagnosed her symptoms as a refugee illness of the kind suffered by the characters in his novels. “You need a strong heart to live without roots,” he had written in the epigraph to Flotsam.32 No one knew that better than the two of them. Their reemerging feelings of love fluctuated between affection, temptation, disdain, and intimacy. Remarque’s face was marked by leading too indulgent a life in restaurants, hotels, brothels, and dives. He envied the courage she had shown. Dietrich loved to feed him home-cooked meals and give him vitamin pills. What is more, she no longer tried to change him. He led an unsettled life, just as she did, and in contrast to Gabin, he understood her back-and-forth between the continents. However, they were both too restless and narcissistic to restart their romance for real.
Ernst Lubitsch, who had started life as a tailor’s son on Schönhauser Allee in Berlin, died in November 1947, and a few months later was followed by Richard Tauber, the Austrian tenor with whom Dietrich had worked in I Kiss Your Hand, Madame back in 1929. She had been one of the few friends willing to help him out financially.33 The voice she loved so much had stopped singing forever. The end of the war confronted Dietrich with the confined world in which she had grown up. Her relatives started showing up. She saw her sister, Elisabeth Will, on her second USO tour in Bergen-Belsen. Contrary to Dietrich’s initial assumptions, Elisabeth had not been in a concentration camp; she and her husband had run the officers’ movie theater. Her husband had now left her, and she was alone with her son. Elisabeth was a timid and anxious woman who lived in constant fear of doing something wrong. She hoped that Marlene would help her son get an apprenticeship as a cameraman in the United States, but her hopes were dashed. Dietrich did not want to be saddled with relatives. She supported her sister with care packages and kept in touch with her, but that was about all that could be expected of her.
The focal point of her family was now in New York. After Gabin left her, she went through quite a domestic phase. She gave Maria some free time by taking walks in the park with her grandson. She learned all about childhood diseases and became the perpetual know-it-all. Following A Foreign Affair, she was onscreen for all of two minutes in the forgettable movie Jigsaw. She was not missing the film business per se—only the money it brought in. Her agent, Charlie Feldman, was none too pleased with her behavior. She had finally taken his advice and returned to America, but she had become extremely demanding and hard to work with. She found fault with every script, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was difficult to cast. Feldman had to move heaven and earth to come up with roles for her. When he found out she was telling everybody that she found her jobs all on her own, he was furious: “This is far from the truth. . . . The talks I have had in connection with your business matters, expenses, and other problems would fill a book.”34 He milked his connections and got her a role in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright.
The filming in London went from late May until mid-September 1949. As usual, Dietrich stayed at Claridge’s. She complained to Maria about the bad food. The film moved ahead slowly, although they even used Sundays for shooting. Working with the famous Hitchcock seems to have been quite a challenge for Dietrich. She wanted to have a say in everything, and was bossy on the set. Hitchcock, who knew whom he had signed on, gave her a free hand and valued her expertise: “Miss Dietrich is a professional. A professional actress, a professional cameraman, a professional dress designer.”35 In a nod to Dietrich’s past, her character in Stage Fright, Charlotte Inwood, is a singer. Dietrich performs two songs, both of which became part of her standard repertoire for the next twenty years. One was Cole Porter’s “The Laziest Gal in Town,” which was relatively unknown before this movie; the other, Henri Salvador’s “La Vie en Rose,” had already been made world-famous by Edith Piaf. Piaf allowed her to sing it because the two of them were friends. Jane Wyman, who was much younger than Dietrich, was jealous of her. Every day when she saw the raw footage, she compared herself to Dietrich, and the following day she would come to the set looking more and more primped, which worked to the detriment of her role as an unattractive maid. Hitchcock blamed Wyman’s vanity for dragging down the quality of the movie: “She couldn’t accept the idea of her face being in character, while Dietrich looked so glamorous.”36 Dietrich’s wardrobe, which—as her contract specified—was hers to keep after the film was shot, was designed by Christian Dior, so she flew to Paris from time to time to try on new designs. Dior, who was three years younger than Dietrich, had caused a sensation in 1947 with his New Look. Wide skirts, unpadded shoulders, narrow waists, gloves, hats, and handbags transformed yesterday’s comrade in arms back into a woman of mystery. Dietrich would recall her grandmother Felsing, who had told her so much about the magic of femininity, and she now made a point of wearing Dior. A uniform was passé. She played Charlotte Inwood as a beautiful, elegant woman who, despite her success, hates her profession of singing and acting. However, she has no other choice, because performing is her life. Apart from Dietrich, the actors in the movie are all very British, including Michael Wilding, who played an inspector. Dietrich sought solace with him. Wilding was eleven years her junior; he was handsome and he admired her. His letters reveal that she told him about her financial, professional, and familial obligations. As usual, Wilding was willing to follow her anywhere, and she was always able to fend him off. He felt inferior to the world-famous Dietrich and her illustrious lovers, and apologized for his shortcomings. Eventually he could no longer endure the torment of her constant absences. In 1952, he married the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Taylor. Dietrich wondered why he had not stayed with her.
Dietrich’s losses in her love life were somewhat balanced out by the growth of her family. May 1950 marked the birth of Maria’s second son, John Michael. Sieber and Dietrich were in New York at the time. They drank a champagne toast to the second grandchild, and Sieber proudly wrote to his parents in Berlin that he had become a grandfather again. The role of grandmother kept Dietrich busy. Alexander Liberman, with whom she formed a friendship in the 1950s, photographed her in this role.37 She sat on the floor with John Michael, beaming with pride and opening up presents. The private Marlene—the grandmother—always remained the public Marlene—the star. With her perfectly made-up face concealed behind netting, she rollicked with her grandsons in the back seat of a New York taxi. She had eyes only for the camera. Liberman also photographed her while she was cooking. The femme fatale had been transformed into an elegant housewife wearing a white blouse and apron with a part in her hair, contentedly stirring food in big pots. Dietrich was often a guest at the home of Liberman and his wife, Tatjana. They played canasta, and Dietrich did the cooking. The screen goddess had the hands of a housewife. Dietrich masked her immoderate demands on life under a cloak of modesty.
She could now be heard on the radio quite often, and she devoted herself to charity work, hoping not to be forgotten altogether. A film project with Wilder did not materialize, and to judge from Wilder’s letter to her, she must have been upset, even deeply distraught, by the collapse of this project: “We are still young, Marlene. There are a lot of pictures left for us to do. If it wasn’t this one, there’s going to be another one. You know how much I love and admire you. It aches me just as much as you that it’s not going to be the next one.”38 Her current and discarded lovers complimented her appearance, and it was left to her agent to tell her the bitter truth. The heroic Dietrich who had fought against Hitler no longer drew audiences; they wanted to see young, fresh actresses who were unencumbered by the past, actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe.
When an offer came from film director Henry Koster to act in a movie with Jimmy Stewart, Feldman pressed her to accept it. He tried to make her understand that she was no longer in a position to choose her roles, whether she liked it or not. It must have been the money that clinched the deal. In October 1950, Dietrich flew to London to shoot her new movie, No Highway in the Sky. As in Stage Fright, she had a younger actress at her side, and once again she played a film star who wore clothing by Dior. Her former lover Stewart, who played an eccentric scientist, no longer thrilled her, and she thought that Koster, the Berliner who was three years younger, was awful.
Old German jokes all day long, no one laughs, German accent in American English, systematically attack the other so that he has to defend himself instead of making suggestions, vain. (I am a great comedy director—this line is funnier! It’s easy to see that he knows only Hollywood jargon and not the language.) Maybe he’s all right in Hollywood, where the zookeepers look out for him and watch the rushes and steer him, but here, all alone, he is dangerous.39
Dietrich considered it outrageous to have to work with a director like this, but the worst part was that he could not stop ribbing her about her age. “With me nothing but: Grandmoththththther (he has a strong lisp): can you make it with your 75 years, careful, don’t fall, you know bones get brittle with your age, etc.”40 She was plagued by bouts of pain, hated this movie, and grew thinner and thinner, yet she knew that she had to hold out. All she really wanted was to go straight to New York to be with her grandchildren.
By Christmas, she was back home. Photographs show her in the Rivas’ living room with Iva Patcevitch, the editor of Vogue. Everything looks quite dignified: the big Christmas tree, the presents, the children, and the radiantly beautiful Maria. Dietrich is with the gray-haired, elegant Patcevitch, the two of them looking like aristocratic grandparents. To see her sitting smugly on the sofa in her elegant clothing, it is hard to imagine that she had to endure being bossed around on the set.
Yul Brynner, an exotic-looking young man with a mysterious background, piqued her interest. Noël Coward had introduced the two of them. Dietrich spent the next few years floating on air whenever he was with her, or agonizing when he kept her waiting. Brynner was nearly twenty years her junior. As his son put it, “For the first time, Yul found himself making love to a woman whom he had admired since his childhood.”41 Born in Vladivostok, he lived in China and Paris before coming to the United States in 1940. He had worked as a trapeze artist in France, but by the time Dietrich met him, he was a Broadway sensation in the musical The King and I. After the performance and before going home to his wife, he found time to have affairs. Night after night, Dietrich waited for him. Even if he had no more than thirty minutes for her, she considered herself lucky. Brynner declared his love for her, but stopped short of planning for a future that would include her. She attributed this to her advanced age and accused him of looking to other women for the long term. When he left without making plans for the next time they would see each other, she was depressed for days on end. She could not grasp the idea that a man might actually turn down the chance to be with her. She vilified his wife, the way she did with every rival. In a draft of a letter to him that ran to twenty-two pages, she launched into endless detail about how his wife was a bad mother. She evidently wanted to gain complete control over him and insisted that he inform her about his comings and goings. When she did not know where he was, or he forgot to call, she sank into a deep depression. The proud Dietrich sat next to the telephone for hours, waiting for a call from Brynner, a bald-headed, mediocre musical star. If he promised to call, she would often stay at home the entire day and get other callers off the phone as quickly as she could. On one occasion, she suggested they meet at Maria’s apartment. “The children won’t be there and we could put the babies to bed like if they were ours.”42 Dietrich, who was nearing the age of fifty, was trying to play house with her young lover. Brynner wrote Dietrich short letters in large, loopy handwriting. We can only hope that he was more imaginative as a lover than as a letter writer, as his correspondence was full of the usual clichés about longing, desire, and kissing. The young man was flattered by her attention; for him, theirs was an amusing affair that appealed to his vanity. His wife was not the only woman with whom he was betraying Dietrich.
Her friends noted the change in her with a mixture of amazement and concern. Sieber spent countless hours on the phone with her listening to her unending aggravation with Brynner, and Leo Lerman called Brynner Marlene’s nemesis. Lerman was certain that Brynner had no intention of marrying her. Dietrich’s passion for Brynner took over her life. Her constant fear that he would stop loving her was evidence of her dread of growing old and lonely. Her greatest fear of all was the loss of her sexual attractiveness. In order to keep her affair as discreet as possible, she rented an apartment on Park Avenue. She furnished the bedroom like a brothel. Her friend Lerman remarked that it had a “cocotte kitsch touch.” There were mirrors everywhere, and she had fluorescent tubes installed under the bed to create a kind of indirect lighting. This was her stage set for the great passion with the bald-headed, muscular, and presumably potent Yul Brynner, lived from one night of ardor to the next.
Friends had died, and former lovers had gone their separate ways: Gabin was now the head of a household, and von Sternberg, married for the third time, had also become a father again at the beginning of the year. Boni had discovered psychoanalysis and yoga; he drank less and spent more time thinking about himself. After a visit to her Park Avenue apartment, he wrote:
An evening at Puma’s. Gave me something to eat; she ate potatoes with butter. Glued to the TV set, staring at her Yul and her daughter. Everything’s off; exaggerated; nothing goes together. The half-furnished apartment—too little light in the living room; the putrid blond and beige on the floors, walls, furniture; the many mirrors; all disconnected, Hollywood elegance, the synthetic celebrity who is run-down and coming apart at the seams yet encased in a shell that is still lovely, the mixture of genuine and fake, unbearable, because she is certainly intelligent enough to tell the difference.43
As if her anguish with her young lover were not enough, she also had to spend several weeks dealing with Fritz Lang. In March 1951, the filming of Rancho Notorious began. This movie was in some respects a remake of Destry Rides Again, this time in Technicolor. Lang had been a star in Berlin, the way Dietrich had become a star in Hollywood. He was unable to recapture his great success once he came to the United States, but he stayed in the movie business. In the mid-1930s, Dietrich and Lang had had a brief affair. His telegrams to her suggest that he was a romantic, somewhat awkward lover. The man who was considered impeccably precise and cold had a playful handwriting that looked like a young girl’s: instead of dotting his i’s, Lang added curlicues. He could not come to terms with the fact that he was no more than a common employee at MGM, and he was considered arrogant and conceited. Dietrich did not really want to make this Western, but once again, it was Feldman who insistently pointed out that it had taken quite a bit of wangling to get her the part. Hemingway bolstered her spirits and wrote that even if she made Westerns in Technicolor, she would still be his heroine.
The five weeks that Dietrich spent on the set with Lang, who signed his telegrams to her as “THE MONSTER,” made her hate him for the rest of her life. “Fritz Lang was the director I detested most,” she wrote in 1984.44 Her Prussian discipline was the only thing preventing her from walking away from the shoot. When Dietrich filmed a movie, von Sternberg was a constant presence in her mind, and she stuck to what he had taught her. Lang and von Sternberg, both filmmakers from Vienna, did not get along. Each resented the other, and Dietrich felt the consequences: “He despised my reverence for Josef von Sternberg, and tried to replace this genius in my heart and in my body.”45 Lang’s method was to humiliate and torment her in front of the whole crew. He marked the actors’ positions on the floor with adhesive tape, based on the length of his own stride. No matter how tall or short the actors were, they had to work with these positions. He sometimes made them repeat scenes a hundred times, shouting at them from start to finish. According to Dietrich, Lang delighted in tormenting people. Sporting a monocle and with his hair neatly slicked back, he would arch his eyebrows as he coldly observed his actors’ missteps. The film historian Lotte Eisner described his method as perfectionism, but for Dietrich, it was pure sadism. She later wrote, “I won’t shed a tear for him. I haven’t lost a thing; I felt no friendship for the man, so no tears.”46 Lang could not stop making snide references to her age, and he claimed that she blamed him for the fact that she was no longer young, yet continued to play the role of a desirable woman. “Now, Marlene resented going gracefully into a little, tiny bit older category; she became younger and younger until finally it was hopeless.”47 Rancho Notorious, “a story of hate, murder, and revenge,” received very few positive reviews. After working together on this movie, Lang and Dietrich parted ways for good.48
Fortunately, Dietrich found unfailing appreciation from Ernest Hemingway. He adored her looks and loved her without ever having slept with her: “I never thought you were a goddess nor a whore nor a cinema star. . . . I love to see you in a good picture and I love worse than hell to hear you sing. But I love you best in that beat up uniform and nobody could take punishment like we could.”49 Once she had lost sight of Gavin, Hemingway was the only one with whom Dietrich could talk and laugh about the war. He enjoyed telling her: “You know sometimes I miss you when we can’t kill krauts. . . . Heil Dietrich.” They kept their secrets to themselves, and no one else had any business telling them how the war was. “Toi and moi have lived through about as bad times as there ever were,” he wrote to her. “I don’t mean just wars. Wars are spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and give co-ordinates.”50 To lift her spirits, he offered to write a story about her and thus immortalize both of them. A few months after he made this offer, she reminded him of it when she needed him to write something about her for Life magazine. Ernest Hemingway kept his promise and wrote one of the most beautiful statements in existence about Dietrich.
She is brave, beautiful, loyal, kind and generous. She is never boring and is as lovely looking in the morning, in a GI shirt, pants and combat boots as she is at night or on the screen. She has an honesty and a comic and tragic sense of life that never let her be truly happy unless she loves. When she loves she can joke about it; but it is gallows humor. If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and the timeless loveliness of her face. It makes no difference how she breaks your heart if she is there to mend it.51
Dietrich allowed very few people entrance into her New York apartment. One of them was Hildegard Knef, whom Dietrich regarded as a younger version of herself. When Knef performed in Silk Stockings in New York, Dietrich invited her over. The dining table was in the alcove of the small foyer, and the kitchen was tiny. Knef was struck by the fact that there was not a single mink coat hanging in the closet. Dietrich, who had cooked a meal for her, watched her guest eat while she puffed away at her cigarette, gazed at herself in one of the many mirrors on the wall, and gave brusque replies. “She never sleeps. . . . In the morning, before anyone else even dreams of opening his eyes, she’s already read the papers and made soup, aired the rooms, cleaned the ashtrays, and told the maid which soap she should use for the doors and which for the bathtub—and on top of it she smokes like an industrial development area and has fittings and appointments the whole day long.”52 Knef described Dietrich with a mixture of admiration and bewilderment. People never knew where they stood with her. She hung up the telephone as soon as she had said her piece, spoke very softly, and never seemed tired or upset. Even her laughter was quiet. She remained aloof from nearly everyone but her close friends Wilder, Reisch, and Kolpé. When she did put in an appearance somewhere, everyone’s eyes were upon her. “Eyes followed her, devoured her, bored into her, envied, wanted to take possession, break through the majestic aura, the uninterest in surroundings and interest caused. She hovered along on legs that appeared too long to fulfill any function other than decoration, straightening the knees at every step, striding widely; she walked the way she ate, or stirred sauces: with complete concentration.”53
On a quick shopping spree through the sweltering streets of New York, they ran into Sieber, who was on his way to California. Evidently this father, mother, and child could not live in one town. Sieber felt uncomfortable being in such close proximity to his wife. She made herself the center of his life. He had to go with her to fashion boutiques, console her discarded lovers, send her clothing, and always come when she called him. The list of medications he took for his stomach problems grew longer and longer as the years went by. His partner Tamara Matul, who lived on an allowance of six dollars a week, was in bad shape, and he was apprehensive. In 1951, he attached a carefully clipped newspaper article, “New Hormone Used for Schizophrenia,” to his appointment calendar. Matul, who had been a beauty in her younger years, was still wearing Dietrich’s hand-me-down clothing and was expected to be grateful even though she detested these castoffs from her lover’s wife. The job in Paris had not worked out. Every day, Sieber noted the exact amount of money he had spent, down to the last cent. He was still living off Dietrich. In January 1953, he put an end to this situation by dispensing with “Marlene Dietrich Inc.” In May he underwent major abdominal surgery, and in June, he moved to San Fernando Valley, California. He continued to record every detail of how long he slept, what he spent, when the curtains were washed, and when and to whom telephone calls were made. There was one big change, however: his New York cocktail-party social life gave way to raising chickens. Sieber had borrowed money to buy a chicken farm. Every day he noted the number of eggs that were laid; each egg brought him one step closer to independence from Dietrich. On New Year’s Eve 1953, he and Tamara were in bed by nine-thirty in the evening. At midnight, the telephone rang. It was Dietrich calling from Las Vegas. Four days earlier, she had turned fifty-two, and now, at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, she had just started her second career. She would spend the next twenty years traveling the world as a singer. She had decided to carry on as a stage legend.