by George Baxt
“You’re putting me on!”
“You know better than that. I sensed you and that’s that. I’ve also been sensing Eleanor Roosevelt. I sent her a note assuring her her husband would win the Democratic nomination for president. And he’s going to win. Actually, if they ran Rex the Wonder Horse opposite Herbert Hoover he’d also win. Nice people, the Roosevelts, but his mother’s a harridan. I visited them at her Hyde Park estate this past September. Tastelessly furnished. What time is the party?”
“I don’t believe this!” Anna May said to Dietrich, “She answered the phone with ‘Hello, Anna May; so nice to hear from you’ and now she asks, ‘What time is the party’!” Marlene was fascinated. “I’ll have my car pick you both up.”
“Wonderful. I hate driving on New Year’s Eve.” Anna May and Mai Mai agreed that the car would first pick up Anna May and then come for Mai Mai at her building on the outskirts of Chinatown. After a moment’s silence, Mai Mai said, “There could be danger.”
Anna May paled. “What kind of danger?” This drew Dietrich to Anna May’s side, holding a glass of champagne and puffing anxiously on a cigarette. Anna May’s hold on the telephone had tightened.
Mai Mai said, “The instruments of danger are a group of Miss Dietrich’s guests.”
Anna May repeated this to Marlene, who gave no reaction. “Just a minute,” said Mai Mai. She placed the receiver down on the table and pressed her delicate fingertips against her temples.
Marlene was disquieted. “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you talking? Has she hung up?”
“No no. She’s done this before. She’s probably placed the receiver on the table while she presses her fingertips against her temples. She does this when she needs to release tension.” Mai Mai returned. “It is nothing. Anna May, shall I expect you around nine?”
“Yes, I’ll be there promptly at nine.”
After she replaced the receiver, with delicate mincing steps, Mai Mai Chu wafted to her crystal ball, which rested on a purple velvet-covered cushion on a small table handcarved from ivory. She looked into the crystal ball and asked, “What shall I wear tonight?”
“Danger,” whispered Marlene. And then her face was aglow, “How exciting!”
“Danger from some of your guests.” Anna May’s eyes were dark with foreboding.
“That is quite possible,” said Marlene as she refilled her glass with champagne and filled another for Anna May, “I’ve invited the Marx Brothers.”
TWO
IVAR TENSHA’S CUSTOM-BUILT orange Rolls-Royce smoothly made its way toward Marlene Dietrich’s New Year’s Eve party. To Tensha, it was like floating on a magic carpet to the palace of an Oriental potentate. He knew a lot of Oriental potentates, but he couldn’t think of one as exotic and as glamorous as the glorious Marlene. He sat in the back of the magnificent machine with Countess Dorothy di Frasso and Monte Trevor, a self-styled film producer from Great Britain. The portable bar was well stocked with champagne, a brand bottled in France exclusively for Ivar Tensha. His signature was on the label. Nothing was too good or too expensive for Ivar Tensha, the Romanian munitions czar.
“Ivar, you have a very silly expression on your face,” said di Frasso. Trevor was refilling their glasses. He didn’t spill a drop, so smooth was the drive.
‘‘I was thinking of Marlene,” he said with a heavily accented voice.
“Marlene deserves better than a silly expression. Don’t you agree, Monte?”
“I wish I could get her for a movie,” said Trevor, “I dream of casting her as Salome.”
“Salome,” whispered Tensha, “the dance of the seven veils.” Di Frasso expected drool to seep from his mouth, but none was forthcoming.
“And as Herod,” continued Trevor, “I see this young actor Paramount has brought over from London, Charles Laughton.”
Di Frasso agreed. “That would be very interesting. You’ll need someone sexy for John the Baptist. How about Gable?”
“Dietrich and Gable. Now wouldn’t that be a fascinating combination.” Tensha licked his lips. If he wasn’t so damned rich, thought di Frasso, he’d be repulsive. She wondered if there was a Mrs. Tensha, and if so, how to get rid of her.
Said Monte Trevor, “Louis B. Mayer doesn’t lend his stars without driving a hard bargain.”
“Whatever the money,” said di Frasso, “it would be worth it for Gable. He’s hot box office.”
Tensha spoke softly. “I can get anything I want from Louis B. Mayer.” Di Frasso thought she detected menace in that simple statement. Monte Trevor thought, here I am in the backseat of a Rolls-Royce owned by one of the world’s wealthiest men, a man who seems to be actually buying my bullshit of producing a film about Salome. Maybe he’s interested in putting up the money. I could budget it for two million and walk away with half a million for myself. That’s how Alexander Korda operates in England, that shrewd Hungarian.
Trevor heard di Frasso saying, “Monte, your lips are moving but no sounds emerge. Are you all right?”
“Oh quite, quite my dear. I was just formulating a budget for Salome off the top of my head.”
“Is that where you keep your money?”
Trevor laughed, but not heartily. This woman is dangerous, he thought, I wouldn’t want her for an enemy. “I think Salome needs to be done on a lavish scale. The way Cecil B. DeMille would do it.”
“How lavish?” asked Tensha.
“Roughly I’d say two million.”
“Dollars?”
“He doesn’t mean dinars.” said di Frasso flatly.
“Even if it was dinars, it would be too much,” said Tensha, who proceeded to light a cigar that to di Frasso resembled a miniature torpedo. Tensha’s cigars were made especially for him in Cuba from tobacco grown on his own subsidized farm fifty miles outside Havana. The cigar bands of course carried Tensha’s signature.
Trevor felt himself deflating, but he persisted as any good con artist would. “Don’t you find the prospect of being involved with motion pictures exciting?”
“War pictures. I like war pictures!” Tensha’s eyes were ablaze with fervor. “Bombs. Bullets. All calibers. Blood. Lots of blood. Maimed and mangled bodies. Explosions. Soldiers trembling and quivering on barbed wire. Women sobbing and screaming as their children are swept with machine-gun fire.”
Di Frasso commented dryly, “I’m sure Monte plans on some spears and a few flaming arrows and perhaps a catapult or two hurling rocks onto parapets.”
Tensha made a vulgar noise. “Too tame. By me, Salome is salami.”
Trevor said in a tiny voice he didn’t recognize as his own, “But what about the dance of the seven veils?”
Di Frasso interrupted. “Perhaps she could do it during the Battle of the Marne?”
“That,” said Tensha, “could be very interesting.”
“Yes!” said Trevor enthusiastically, “for each veil she sheds, she shoots an officer.”
“From the hip?” asked di Frasso.
Trevor glared at her. She was busy renewing her face. They were almost at their destination. The cigar smoke was causing her eyes to tear. She asked Trevor to lower a window. While carefully rouging her lips, she eyed the chauffeur, who was staring at her in the rearview mirror. Not that young, thought the chauffeur, but what the hell. If she could be a ticket to a screen test. Gable got to where he is by using older women, Pauline Frederick, Alice Brady, Jane Cowl. His first wife who taught him all he’d ever know about acting, Josephine Dillon, was twenty years older. And his current wife, Rhea, she’s at least fifteen years older and rich to boot. His eyes sent di Frasso an unsubtle signal. She rewarded him with a raised eyebrow, which she hoped he recognized meant she was lowering her guard.
“My dear,” she heard Tensha saying, “never with the hired help. It is so bourgeois.”
She replied with a smile, “And where did you get the impression I’m descended from landed gentry?”
“My guests will be arriving any minute now!” shouted Marlene in her
magnificent ballroom. “You must hurry!” She was yelling at a workman atop a ladder fixing clusters of balloons to the ceiling. His was the last to be set in place. At a signal, all the clusters of balloons affixed to the ceiling would fall at midnight. She had borrowed technicians from the studio to set up the electrical system that would release the balloons at the touch of a button. Her maid Gloria was urging her to return to her suite and finish dressing. Marlene waved her away impatiently as she spoke to the orchestra leader. “Not too many waltzes! Waltzes are for Marie Dressier’s parties. And when I make my entrance down the stairs …”
“I have a magnificent arrangement of ‘Falling in Love Again,’” said Gus Arnheim, the orchestra leader whose usually hefty fee she had beaten down to scale for him and his musicians. After all, wasn’t it a privilege to play at Dietrich’s party?
“No!” she boomed. “For my entrance you will play ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’!” Arnheim blanched. “We don’t have the sheet music.” Dietrich bristled. “You’re musicians, aren’t you? You’re professionals, aren’t you? You can improvise! Improvise! Start rehearsing!” She hurried away to check the trays of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres stacked in the pantry.
Arnheim commanded, “Okay, boys, let’s give the lady what she wants.” The drummer made a nasty noise, to which Amheim said, “You’ll never give her that.”
Somewhere on a bumpy road in Benedict Canyon, a tired Hispano-Suiza dreaming of an imminent retirement after too many years of service coughed and chugged its way to Dietrich’s party. The chauffeur prayed the old veteran would make it back to the Russian Embassy before breaking down. In the backseat, Gregory Ivanov, one of Russia’s most skillful diplomats, held his wife’s calloused hand. Natalia Ivanov had worked on a collective farm outside Minsk, where she guided tractors and maneuvered ploughshares and hoed and raked and seeded until her arm muscles were the envy of every male comrade she had bedded with unrestrained alacrity. The Russian word for ‘nymphomaniac’ is much too complicated, but Natalia was too simpleminded to be bothered by complications. On an official visit to her collective while Gregory Ivanov was still a small cog in the vast Bolshevik wheel, Ivanov took one look at her tensors and her threatening breasts and it was love at first sight. With the not-so-little woman behind him and pushing, he soon made his way into the diplomatic corps and rose rapidly to the top, like cream in a bottle of unpasteurized milk. There was no end to his ambitions, and wangling his post in Los Angeles by betraying three of his closest friends and his mother, who wrote odes to wheat and scythes, was just the beginning of the progression of his own five-year plan.
Natalia grunted.
“What bothers you?” asked Gregory Ivanov.
“I will look like a gnarled oak tree in a room full of movie stars.”
“If so, Natalia Ivanova, then you will be an original. Movie stars! Poo! With their perfect bodies and their lacquered nails and their coiffured hair, can they compare to you?”
“No,” she said darkly, “because I’m a mess.”
“I love you the way you are, my beloved. Warts and all.”
“I’m homesick.”
“I know. But we can’t leave until I have finished … you know.”
She nodded. Although they spoke in Russian and the chauffeur was a college student who was hired because he claimed he didn’t understand Russian, they trusted no one. But soon, if all went according to plan, he whispered to her, “We will rule the world.”
She snuggled against his chest and smiled, revealing a row of brown stumps that passed for teeth. The chauffeur wondered as he stared at her in the rearview mirror if she enjoying gnawing tree bark.
Dietrich stood in front of a floor-length mirror, admiring the silver lame dress designed for her for this occasion by Paramount’s Travis Banton. Its line was simple and majestic. The neckline was trimmed with mink. Gloria, the maid, adjusted the mirror and Marlene admired the back of the dress. It was cut to the base of her spine, daringly sexy. She didn’t need a brassiere. Her breasts were arrogantly firm. It would be years before they’d need an adjustment. She would wear no jewelry. She had no need to. She was a sun that had no need of satellites.
“Madam, you are exquisite,” said Gloria.
“I know.” Gloria was in her mid-twenties and said she aspired to nothing but a husband, children, and a small house at the beach, any beach. She had been an extra in the nightclub scene in Morocco and caught Dietrich’s attention when the star saw Gloria move another extra out of the way of an arc light that made Dietrich look five years younger. Dietrich was impressed, struck up a conversation with the girl, and offered her the job as her maid. Gloria was thrilled and accepted at once. Although she tended to shout a lot and raise her voice and demand perfection in everything, underneath it all Marlene was Mother Earth. She was kind to the people who served her and her daughter, and her generosity was legend. It was predicted by her advisers she would die a pauper, a prediction she responded to with a shrug. She believed in herself. She would always overcome adversity. After all, wasn’t she the only movie star in the world who could play a musical saw? Darling Igo Sym, he said she was his best pupil. She toyed with the idea of regaling her guests with a few selections tonight, but then tabled the idea as they might find it unsophisticated.
“Gloria … ”
“Yes, Miss Dietrich?”
“Pour two glasses of champagne.” She indicated the cooler that contained a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon of a vintage year. “I want us to greet the New Year now, alone. Go on. Pour them.”
“Oh, Miss Dietrich!”
“Don’t be silly, Gloria. I am a mere mortal, but don’t you ever tell Garbo.”
“You’re driving too fast!” yelled Dong See. “Slow down, for crying out loud, you’ll kill us!”
Raymond Souvir maneuvered the white Cadillac through the tricky and threatening curves of Malibu Canyon Road with the skill and dexterity of a professional competing in the Grand Prix. “I’ve never had an accident in my life, so relax.”
“There’s a first time for everything. ”
“Don’t be frightened, be excited. Tonight you’re going to meet the creme de la creme of motion pictures. I had tea with Marlene on Sunday and she let me see the guest list. There’ll be everybody but Rin Tin Tin. Marlene doesn’t approve of animals at large gatherings. Anyway, the dog’s a has-been.” Dong See’s fists were clenched, knuckle-white. There were tiny beads of perspiration on his forehead; he seemed paralyzed. He prayed in Chinese, English, and French, this an affectation. The speedometer continued to read eighty. He knew the car could do over one hundred. He prayed it wouldn’t. “Please Raymond …”
“Oh shut up and think about sex. Marlene’s arranging a test for me. She’s going to do it with me, and von Sternberg’s directing. What a terrific woman. She’s nothing like what you see on the screen. Do you know when I was first brought to her house by Claudette Colbert, she was in the kitchen …”
“I know she’s devoted to cooking …
“She was on her knees scrubbing the floor! Can you imagine? Dietrich scrubbing her kitchen floor! Unbelievable!”
“Look out for that truck!”
“Why? Is it doing something unusual?”
The limousine transporting Anna May Wong and Mai Mai Chu to the party was upholstered with zebra skin. A closed window separated the passengers from the chauffeur, and Anna May was glad the man couldn’t hear their conversation. Mai Mai was all doom and gloom. “There is no hope for our China,” she said sadly.
“I’m a native American, Mai Mai. I was born here.”
“Nevertheless, China is a lost cause. First overrun by the Japanese, who will torture the people and pillage the cities, and then the Communists will take command. A very grim scenario, very grim. I suppose Carroll Richter will be at the party?”
“And you will be very nice to him.”
Mai Mai smiled her charming, delicate smile. “I am always nice to everyone. I was even
nice to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and it is not very easy to be nice to them, although Gertrude is nicer than Alice, who is very possessive and very sharp-tongued and should either wax her mustache or shave it. Did you meet them when you were in Paris?”
“They were out of town looking for truffles.”
“Of course, Carroll Richter is a fraud. He despises me.”
“How do you know that?”
“I have done his chart. A mutual friend gave me his date and hour of birth. Actually, he doesn’t make the most of himself. He should be writing a syndicated newspaper column.”
“Perhaps one day he will. What’s wrong?”
Mai Mai’s eyes were closed, her tiny hands covering her tiny mouth. Then her eyes flew open and her hands dropped slowly to her lap. “It’s here again. The warning. Danger, Anna May, danger.”
“Do you see Marlene threatened?”
Mai Mai’s voice was sepulchral. “I see all of us threatened. All of us.” She reached over and took Anna May’s hand. “I have had this premonition before. In Paris, at a ball given by Ivar Kreuger, the match king. Of course you’ve heard of him.”
“Of course. He had a scheme to rule the world…”
“It seemed silly to a lot of people, but Ivar was a genius. And a group of very powerful people believed in his scheme and joined him in implementing it. But Ivar was a madman. He went out of control and had to be destroyed. Very little has been heard of the scheme since. But those people still exist. And my charts tell me they have reactivated. They are on the move again. Our very being is threatened, Anna May, the sword of Damocles hangs over our heads, waiting to fall and destroy.”
Then she fell silent. Anna May said nothing. She looked out the window at peaceful Beverly Hills, at houses still illuminated with Christmas decorations, some of them sweetly simple, such as a creche with the Virgin Mother cradling the infant Jesus. Some of them vulgarly garish such as an expensive electrical depiction of the first Christmas supper with waiters dispensing separate checks.
