In April 1976, when Dietrich’s health had improved, she once again flew the familiar route from Paris to Los Angeles to be with her husband. She spent several days with Sieber and was relieved to find that all the money she had paid to the army of doctors, nurses, and therapists had been worth it. In early June she returned to Europe. Fourteen days later she got the news that Sieber had died.
It somehow typified the life they shared that he passed away in Los Angeles while she was furnishing her apartment in Paris. She did not want to fly to America again, and she tried to avoid going to funerals anyway, especially when everyone was just waiting to take pictures of her as the grieving and ailing widow. Maria would take care of everything.
On June 30, 1976, Rudolf Emilian Sieber was buried in Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery. His grave is near Tamara’s and a stone’s throw from Paramount Studios. The inscription on his gravestone reads: “Rudi 1897–1976.” His last name was left off; he had spent his life being “Herr Dietrich.”
On November 15, Dietrich’s daily planner noted the death of Jean Gabin. Her last great love had died of heart failure. In the days to follow, sleep was out of the question. Billy Wilder called her up; perhaps he was thinking about the lonely old Dietrich mourning her ex-lover. Shortly before Christmas, she received a letter from Gabin’s attorney, who told her that Gabin had bequeathed her photographs and a cigarette case. One day before New Year’s Eve, these items were delivered to her, and a few months later, she put them on her auction list.1 Since she no longer smoked, she had no need for the cigarette case, and she preferred money to sentimental keepsakes. Now that Gabin had died, all the men who had been truly important to her were gone. Jo was the first, then Boni, and now Rudi and Jean in the same year. Jo, Boni, and Jean had become nothing but memories over the years, but Rudi was still part of her daily life. In September, Dietrich wrote to her daughter Maria that since his death, nothing mattered to her anymore. “His handwriting in my telephone books, his notes that pop up everywhere keep me running back in my mind and torture me. ‘Never more’ is a horrible saying. From the things he liked from here to the magazines I used to send—I stop so many times and remind myself that all is over.”2 Since there were no longer performances or planes to catch or rendezvous, she had nothing to divert her from her pain about the past. The nights were the worst. She slept until two o’clock and then woke up. “Think Papi is sitting all alone in the livingroom and I get up to look. Stupid.”3
On top of that, she now needed to write those silly memoirs, which meant dredging up old memories. Every completed chapter went straight to Maria. If Dietrich died before finishing the book, Maria would know how to carry on. She had to churn out pages in order to get the advance, but writing felt like torture. She did not really want to reflect about herself. Dietrich had no desire to divulge the details of her life and felt trapped. She told Kenneth Tynan, who had wanted to write a biography together with her some years back, that her accidents and Sieber’s death had deeply depressed her. What could she do without Rudi? He always carried a postcard with him on which she had written the text of “Falling in Love”: a true sign of abiding love.
She went back to Paris so as not to be a burden to Maria. “It bores me stiff. I guess I was always spoiled and had people who recharged my batteries. Now, there is nobody to talk to, to advise me.”4 She found the chapters about Hemingway and Remarque quite difficult, but the one about Coward was easy. “The Childhood Chapters are by far the best because I find it so much easier to write from a child’s viewpoint.” But she knew that this would not be enough. She did not want to compose a set of anecdotes, because she had hated anecdotes her whole life. Her readers would not be getting any bedtime stories from her.
She was particularly hard on her old friend and assistant Max Kolpé. He was part of the memoirs project right from the start because he would be doing the German translation. They had put their heads together to figure out which publisher would be likely to pay the highest advance. If Hildegard Knef had made millions with an uninteresting story of her life, this project ought to be a breeze for Dietrich. She was dissatisfied with Kolpé’s translation and insinuated that he was translating into Bavarian rather than German. Finding his German sloppy, she pointed out that Sieber had always been a stickler for proper German grammar. She herself read, spoke, and wrote primarily in English, yet she found fault with friends who had forgotten standard German.
Dietrich noted which chapter was complete and who had been asked to look it over. Criticism was of course unwelcome. She had no idea how she would complete the project. The secretaries were incompetent, Kolpé was bungling his work, and there was too much noise in the house. “Mme. Miron gave me the weekly bath. She is still the best. I am all scrubbed and clean. Otherwise there is nothing but a terrible vast emptiness that I know I have to fill and write about my—what? I ordered food from the restaurant because I could not face the cooking. God knows how I am going to pay for ALL of that.”5 She began to count up what she had written character by character. When would the advance be coming? And what in the world was a keystroke? If it were not for the money, she would not be writing a single line. Her recollections were nobody’s business. “What an easy time when I worked on stage.”
The filming of Just a Gigolo offered a change of pace. This movie, set in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, was about Prussian officers, lost honor, cocottes, communists, and Nazis. The “Eden” bar that Boni liked so much was also in it. Dietrich, as the Baroness von Semering, her face hidden in the shadow of a large hat, sang the title song. She considered the story inane and did the movie just for the money. David Bowie, who played the leading role, reminded screenwriter Walter Reisch of the young Rudi Sieber. Perhaps Dietrich felt the same way, and she had one more reason to appear before the camera again. Just a Gigolo would be her final motion picture. The film was a box-office and critical flop. Under a film still showing her as the Baroness von Semering, she noted, “How ugly can you get?”6
On March 14, 1979, Dietrich received a telegram from her publisher, Bertelsmann, informing her that her book had been published. After considerable thought, she had chosen the title of a poem by Goethe, Just Take My Life, as the book’s title. Kolpé asked not to be listed as the German translator, “so that people won’t keep saying that you refuse to speak German.”7 She enjoyed reading the review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which put her on par with Wolfgang Borchert and Heinrich Böll. Reviewers delighted at the way her words mirrored her world of artifice. After all, who would be expecting the truth? “The memoirs are as stylized as she herself is, and as true as the artful Dietrich when onstage in Las Vegas.”8 The book did not become the bestseller she had hoped for. Dietrich refused to boost sales with readings, television appearances, or book signings. She did not need the aggravation.
She had decorated her parlor in Paris with photographs of her famous lovers and admirers. Ronald Reagan and Jacques Chirac had been added recently. She had the private telephone number of both politicians. Chirac sent her flowers, and she wrote him letters. She enjoyed telephone conversations with Nancy Reagan, who gave her a signed copy of her memoir. Dietrich had no intention of dreaming about the past once she retired; she took a lively interest in current events, yet her interest in movies, the theater, and fashion seemed to ebb once she had left the stage. She delighted in watching Frank Sinatra on television, but she was far more absorbed in the issues surrounding Watergate, the strikes in France, and the neo-Nazis in Germany. She kept up with an impressive number of newspapers and magazines, reading the London Times, the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, France-Soir, Le Figaro, and Die Welt on a daily basis, and supplemented these with Die Zeit, Bunte, Quick, Stern, and The New Yorker. While she was still active in the world of performance, she had disparaged television, but in her later years she made her peace with it.
She had to attend to business on a near-constant basis. She continued to record her schedule on a calendar. Dietrich preferred British daily planners that came with a map of the London Underground and of England. As someone who had so often crossed the Atlantic, she made a point of noting the time difference between Paris and New York, and between Paris and Los Angeles, at the beginning of each new year. She wrote an average of four letters a day, which went out to destinations around the world. She had two typewriters and a copy machine in her apartment. “When I worked on the stage I had 6 different dresses, so, why not now when my only source of income is this bloody book, have 2 typewriters?”9 In most cases, she gave Maria copies of the letters she received or sent. When books about her were published, she requested a copy and carefully inspected what had been written about her and which photographs had been selected to accompany the text. She sent her famous chicken soup to sick friends by taxi. She spent whole days drawing up lists of things that could be sold. Requests for interviews interested her only if they came with the offer of a good fee. Most of the time, she pretended not to be at home, and said that she was in the United States or Switzerland.
When Maximilian Schell announced his arrival, she claimed to be elsewhere as well. He had taken a room at the Hotel George V and was waiting for her to call. Dietrich sent a message that she had an appointment in London. The two of them knew each other from the filming of Judgment at Nuremberg. He had garnered the Oscar for best actor for that movie, an honor to which she had felt entitled for so long. But eventually she did do a project with him. In the fall of 1982, they got together to shoot a film about Dietrich’s life. She spent six days conversing with him for three-hour stints, one day in German and the next in English. Once again, she was doing this only for the money, and she was furious to learn that she was expected to speak the whole time. She stubbornly referred to her book, where all this could be read. She had figured that in the film he would show pictures or film clips and read from her book or from von Sternberg’s. Instead, he tried to force her to reflect about herself on camera. She considered Schell good-looking, but timid and unimaginative. When the two of them had a look at scenes from her old movies, an activity she considered silly, Dietrich astonished her viewers. She still knew every image, recalled every shot. But overall, her performance in Marlene—as the film would be named—was proof positive of Remarque’s playful observation: “You can’t argue with Aunt Lena.”10 She constantly contradicted herself, but that did not bother her. At the age of eighty, she was witty and sharp, and a larger-than-life presence. Schell might as well have packed up and gone home. Only at the very end of the film did he try to prove to her that she was a sentimental person. When they recite Freiligrath’s famous love poem together: “Oh, love as long as you can love! / Oh, love as long as you wish to love,” there is a catch in Dietrich’s voice. Her mother had loved this poem. It had been framed and displayed on the living room wall in Berlin. It might seem kitschy, but she could not recite these words without weeping.
Schell, in turn, could not get her to pose for the camera. Her reasoning was short and sweet—and smart: “I’ve been photographed to death my whole life. That’s enough.”11 She did not want any camera to capture what old age had done to her face. It was nobody’s business that she had lost the battle for youth. This was not vanity but an artistic stance. In this film, which is about her, she is never onscreen. She was declaring the official end of her lifelong romance with the camera. Von Sternberg would have liked that.
It was not only the public that was no longer permitted to see her; she was also shutting out her old friends, such as Romy Schneider and Hildegard Knef, who received a generous supply of prescription pills from Dietrich by mail. Dietrich did not appreciate the way Knef kept putting herself on a pedestal. When Knef asked her for a French fashion designer, Dietrich felt it was time to give her a piece of her mind and declared that a world-famous man like Yves Saint Laurent would not travel to Germany for some lady named Hildegard. Her own situation was, of course, a different matter. The couturiers worshipped her and considered themselves lucky if Dietrich wore their creations.
She wrote to Willi Forst, but he rebuffed her with the remark that you cannot warm things up again in old age. Her former lover Brian Aherne was different; he kept his word and stayed in touch with her from time to time. He was stung to realize that she barely mentioned him in her memoirs, but that did nothing to diminish his admiration. “You are one of the great ones of the world and God bless the memory of Josef von Sternberg who was the first to see that and to put you on the track.”12 She must have been delighted to read that. Her opinion of von Sternberg had mellowed, and she stayed in touch with his widow. Every letter from Walter Reisch expressed the hope that she would come to California again. He was horrified at how she had hidden herself away in Paris and was so isolated. What had happened to her vitality and her “affirmation of life”? Wasn’t there anyone who loved her? In California, she could get together with people from the old clique: the Wilders, Preminger, Mia May, Eric Ambler and Joan Harrison, and Reisch himself. He kept her up to date about how things were in Hollywood after the war. The new producers wanted nothing to do with old-timers like himself, so he was now giving lectures and was pleased about the students’ great interest in Lubitsch, May, and Lang.
Dietrich did not agree to see even Billy Wilder, with whom she could have indulged in some juicy Hollywood gossip.13 Like Reisch, he called her up every time he was in Paris. Although she disguised her voice, he recognized her instantly. “Come on, for Christ’s sake, Marlene, we know it’s you! . . . Marlene, I’ll come up, I want to see you. I’ll blindfold myself, how about that?”14 She agreed to call him the following day, but then demurred, claiming she had to go to Neuilly for an eye-doctor appointment. This went on for several more days, and he eventually flew back to Los Angeles without having seen Dietrich.
People could call her up or write her letters, but a face-to-face meeting was out of the question.15 If one of her friends dared to say something about her, she sent offended and offensive letters. If they asked what she was doing, they would get answers along the lines of “I’m the same . . . in bed, with a book and a bottle.”16
She maintained contact with the outside world by writing letters or making telephone calls. She called her telephone “my only extravagance.” It was always within reach, and she availed herself of it whenever the mood struck her. And that was often, as we can see just by looking at it today. This white telephone is in pitiful shape. It is filthy, stained, and pasted together in many spots. Dietrich’s telephone looks more like a scruffy, exhausted animal than a piece of technical equipment. Books and the telephone helped combat her loneliness. She spent Christmas, her birthday, New Year’s Eve, Easter, Pentecost, and the long French summer vacations alone.
Apart from the big wide world in which she thought she still had a role, there was also the small world of the apartment in which she set the tone. Dietrich was intent on cleanliness, and noted when the curtains had been washed, the mattresses turned, and the linens changed. Throughout her life, she had been dissatisfied with the people who were inclined to spend their time with her. Her old age did nothing to change that, except that back then they had come out of love, and now she had to pay people to keep her company. Sooner or later, she quarreled with her secretaries, promoters, and maids. In her eyes, they were hysterical, neurotic, incompetent, alcoholic, ungrateful, or insolent. She really wanted Maria to be with her, and called her up several times a day. If Maria did not answer the phone, her mother was utterly distraught and feared that something had happened to her. Maria did not come very often, but when she did visit, she bathed her mother and cooked for her.
Once the prose of her life had been committed to paper, Dietrich began to write poems. One of them contains these lines: “If a surgeon / Would open my heart / He would see / A gigantic sea / Of love / For my only child. / He would be stunned / At the force of it / The violence / The fury of it / All entangled in / One human heart.”17 These poems may be the only things she did not try to turn into money. She never stopped thinking about how she could get her hands on money, which prompted her to dig out an old photograph from The Blue Angel to compare what Madonna might have copied from her costume. She offered her clothing for sale, wrote articles about Garbo’s death, mulled over whether she ought to make commercials for beer, and approached her friend Karl Lagerfeld with the suggestion that he market a perfume named “Marlene.”
Josef von Sternberg had made Dietrich’s face an icon of the twentieth century. Old age had destroyed not Dietrich’s beauty, but the work of art that her face had been. Dietrich’s twentieth century came to an end when she announced that she would no longer be showing her face. She herself had turned off the spotlight. By retreating from the world, she could ensure that “Marlene Dietrich” would remain intact as a work of art. The myth of Marlene lived on, while the phantom, the mortal Marlene, stepped into the obscurity of solitude.
She had no more use for glamorous get-ups, haute couture clothing, tailor-made suits from famed haberdashers, and intricately detailed works of art by Italian shoemakers. Dietrich now dressed in bed jackets—not just any old ones, of course: they were by Dior. These bed jackets were gossamer works of art in blue, pink, and white wool. Under the knitted fabric, they were lined with chiffon in the same color scheme and gathered at the sleeves, with a ribbon at the neckline. Some of the bed jackets have big holes in the delicate weave. Someone who no longer had good vision had tried to patch up these spots. Under the jackets she wore plain cotton nightshirts or men’s pajamas. Even though she was no longer in the public eye, she remained true to herself; her sleepwear was simple and elegant. Her pink and bright blue slippers appear to be unworn. It is impossible to picture Dietrich’s famous legs in these woolen, pompom-topped shoes.
“The ranks are thinning out,” Reisch had written her from Hollywood.18 Just as Sieber had done, she now began to note a whole series of death dates in her daily planner: Orson Welles, Simone Signoret, Mischa Spoliansky, Lilli Palmer, the Duchess of Windsor, and Romy Schneider. She sent flowers for Michael Wilding’s funeral, and when Axel Springer’s son took his own life, she wrote to him that her thoughts were with him. Serge Gainsbourg died, and Dietrich sent her condolences to Jane Birkin in a letter that was delivered by taxi. The death of Kenneth Tynan weighed on her heavily, and she was shocked by the death of Ernst Sieber, Rudi’s brother, probably because she realized he was the last of the Siebers to go.
She did not accept her relatives’ invitations to Germany. The German language was no more than a memory for her, although there were things she could express only in German, such as weltfremd, Jugendzeit, Hopfen und Malz verloren, In der Not frisst der Teufel Fliegen, Schnitzel, and Langschläfer.
When a pre-publication excerpt of Leni Riefenstahl’s Memoirs appeared in print in the German magazine Bunte, Dietrich sent her maid to the Champs-Élysées to pick up a copy for her. She promptly called Max Kolpé to tell him about it. The two of them seemed to be in full agreement about their contempt for Riefenstahl. Kolpé wrote to her: “What can you say about this? Everything is a pack of lies! Did you expect anything else? Of course they happily go on printing these lies by ‘the Reich’s glacial crevasse,’ as this fiery narcissus was called. . . . L.R.’s most unabashed lie of all is that she supposedly heard the name ‘HITLER’ for the first time in 1932.”19
Avenue Montaigne was an upscale address situated near the Eiffel Tower, the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the Champs-Élysées. Here, Paris has the kind of dove-gray, silent elegance that is not found anywhere else in the world. Dietrich lived on the fifth floor of a large apartment building that connotes genteel anonymity. Soraya, the beautiful woman who was cast off by the Shah of Iran, also lived in this building. Paris, declared Franz Hessel, was the “home of the foreigner.” Empresses without a country, wearing dark sunglasses to shield them from prying eyes, were at home on this broad, tree-lined avenue of high fashion and luxury hotels. Dietrich’s apartment was a sanctuary and an archive. She would spend hours looking for a Chanel outfit and was vexed when she did not find it, then suspected that one of her helpers had taken it. Sometimes she gave away or sold her belongings. Fashion was part of her former life, when she could still stand, sing, and fly. “Isn’t it strange: / The legs / That made / My rise to glory / Easy, No? / Became / My Downfall / Into Misery! / Queasy, No?”20
She cleaned her medals and polished her rings. Then there were the many photographs, presents, and letters that she kept looking over, commenting on, and sorting through. Her estate includes large brown envelopes, in no apparent order, on which she noted names and dates with her elegant, straight-up-and-down penmanship. She was critical of her appearance on many photographs, and jotted down, “Is that me?”
Her walls were covered with photographs of people she loved and those who loved her. Everywhere there were piles of paper and books, and countless newspapers in English, French, and German—Dietrich’s languages. Cartons, boxes, a television set, and a grand piano. The soaring elegance of the city was in evidence here as well. Mirrors, a cream-colored sofa, Louis Vuitton luggage, and silk pillows.
In 1979 she got a wheelchair, and it became part of the furnishings. In a wheelchair, she could wash herself and sit at the window and look up at the trees. Her future was the next day. When the telephone rang at night, she was taken aback. Her publicly announced retirement had made her fodder for the tabloids. When a photographer found his way into her apartment and took pictures of the defenseless old lady in her wheelchair, she threw a towel over her head—the only form of self-defense she had left.21 From then on, she kept the heavy curtains closed as a safeguard. Her hair was cut short. She was in pain and on medication. Her blood and urine were monitored at regular intervals. Sleeping pills and books helped her make it through the long nights. In addition to her old favorite authors, namely Goethe, Heine, and Rilke, she immersed herself in books by John Updike, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Virginia Woolf, Norman Mailer, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Her book collection, which is now stored in a warehouse in Berlin-Moabit, contains many English and German titles, but very few in French. These books range from volumes of photographs to Hans Fallada, Knut Hamsun, Peter Handke, Erich Kästner, Irmgard Keun, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin, Johannes Mario Simmel, John Steinbeck, and Jakob Wassermann. She liked Michael Jackson, but she also listened to Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt.
There were days in Dietrich’s “mattress crypt” that were so bleak that even her gallows humor did not help her to rise above them. She was tormented by isolation and hunger. Sundays and holidays were the worst. No one came to see her; no one called. No one went shopping for her, or cooked her a meal. There was no cheese or bread to be found in the kitchen. Luckily, she had a telephone and could order Chinese food. Three years before her death, she began to have food brought to her from the Maison d’Allemagne. Perhaps she was fighting off her vague feeling of homesickness with lentil stew, Teltow turnips, veal sausages, potato salad, and cut-up sweet pancakes with raisins.
Every year on the eighth of May, she thought about the end of the war and heard the parade on the nearby Champs-Élysées. She was deeply concerned about the crisis in Iraq and the outbreak of the war. She watched the television coverage of Mitterand’s and Bush’s politics. She was haunted by the fear of war. Where would she go if there was war? Back to the States?
In 1989, Dietrich was appointed Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur and given an honorarium. Congratulations poured in from around the world. Her penmanship in her daily planner evened out, as though to say: Look at me; I’m still worth something. It was the last major event in her life.
One day the bailiff came to her door. Her rent was in arrears. Could the eighty-six-year-old Dietrich be put out on the street along with her letters from Jean Gabin and her medals for bravery? The city of Paris began to pay her rent, and Commandeur Dietrich could save face.
She felt she could no longer afford help in the house and she lived alone, typing her letters by herself and leaving the phone off the hook. She could have sold her apartment on Park Avenue in New York, but she was determined to leave a good inheritance for Maria and the grandchildren, as befitted a daughter of a Prussian officer, even if that daughter had been an American movie star. The doctors were making more frequent visits. Dietrich was in pain and no longer wanted to live. She could not commit suicide, because her life insurance would not pay out if she did. She spent her ninetieth birthday alone, as she had in the preceding years. To cheer herself up, she called Billy Wilder and Beate Klarsfeld. Her days were long, dark, and lonely. The German newspaper Bild reported that she lay dying. She continued to make entries in her daily planner in a shaky handwriting. The proud, modern haughtiness that had characterized her penmanship was no longer in evidence. After a second stroke, she could barely speak. She was down to three words: yes, no, and Maria. Her grandson Peter came to her side. He carried her from her bedroom into the parlor.22 She had been washed and dressed in clean clothes for a visit with the doctor. She knew that death was imminent, but she remained calm and collected. Dietrich lay on the couch and looked at the photographs on the wall: her family, lovers, friends, and herself. The last important conversation of her life was a telephone call from Paris to New York, in which Maria told her she would be taking the next plane to see her.
It was springtime in Paris. Dietrich was alone when she died on May 6, 1992. The Cannes Film Festival would begin the following day. All of France was awash with posters advertising the festival and featuring Dietrich in all her glory as Shanghai Lily.
The image outlived her; art had prevailed.