Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  She had found a new lover in London. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., the twenty-six-year-old son of the great actor Douglas Fairbanks, was divorced from Joan Crawford. He was a rich American who was generous with his money. He made her a present of a gold cigarette case studded with diamonds and sapphires. Fairbanks was not as poetic as von Sternberg; the engraving he chose was a simple Duschka (darling).

  On one of her many trips to Europe, Dietrich had bought a 16-millimeter camera and enjoyed making home movies or being filmed off the set. She often brought her camera to work and filmed the crew, but most of her pictures were of her family, friends, and colleagues. Of the twenty-eight minutes of Dietrich’s home movie material that have been released, a good many are devoted to Fairbanks. Dietrich and Fairbanks did not act like two American film stars, but like a British upper-class couple. They liked to put in appearances at the race track. During a boat ride on the Thames, a beaming Douglas sat with a pensive Dietrich, and in a second boat sat an awkward Rudi Sieber, his daughter at his side. Dietrich, quite pale, with lips painted bright red and a high-necked pullover, looked like a lady. In a rare harmonious scene, we see Dietrich lying on a ship, the sleeping Douglas on her lap. She is dressed all in white, her outfit forming a nice contrast to the blue water, and she has placed a hand on his shoulder as though to protect him.

  In the summer of 1937, Fairbanks traveled with her to Arlberg, Austria. Sieber and Tamara Matul came with them. A photograph shows Fairbanks standing in front of the train with a Tyrolean hat, with Dietrich, Sieber, and Matul approaching on the railway platform, all four dressed in the traditional garb of their travel destination. The women are wearing crocheted jackets that are fitted at the waist; Dietrich is in white, and Matul in black. Fairbanks took pictures of them in short lederhosen in front of their vacation cottage. He is lying in the grass, playing with a blade of grass between his lips, his white shirt unbuttoned. He is a handsome, strong, suntanned man with a distinctive face who looks like the embodiment of temptation. Dietrich is clearly impressed.

  Just a few days after Fairbanks left Austria, Dietrich went to Venice to see von Sternberg. Since their split, he had sought solace in travel and collecting works of art. In 1935, the Los Angeles County Museum dedicated an exhibit to his art collection, which included works by Egon Schiele, Vincent van Gogh, Aristide Maillol, Oskar Kokoschka, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Auguste Rodin, Rudolf Belling, Constantin Brancusi, Georg Kolbe, Alexander Archipenko, and Picasso’s La Gameuse as the highlight. In the same year, von Sternberg had a house built. The architect was Richard Neutra, who was also born in Vienna. Neutra was regarded as the radical modernist. The house was a fortress of solitude. The structure was elegant and elongated, and the building was surrounded by a castle moat filled with water. The outer walls were covered with aluminum. The rooms were bathed in light, and in front of the house, an American flag waved in the desert wind. This is where von Sternberg safeguarded the treasures of his past and yearned for Dietrich. She did not like his new house. Avant-garde solitude was not her style. A single visit to inspect the place was quite enough for her. Von Sternberg did not hold out for long in San Fernando Valley.110 He had intended to make this desert castle a refuge from Dietrich, but he was not far enough away from what he wanted to leave behind him.

  So he set out on a trip around the world. While Dietrich was staying at Claridge’s in London, enjoying her love affair with Fairbanks, she received cards full of longing from Jo in Asia. She got a postcard from the temple at Angkor Wat. In the jungles of Cambodia, he lit a candle for her. He visited the gods and wrote to his goddess. In the fall of 1936, he wrote her one of his last long love letters from the Great Wall of China. He had been to Korea, Japan, China, and Manchuria, yet the letter conveys the impression that all he had found anywhere was Marlene: “Shanghai Lily was often sitting next to me.” He was still struggling with the end of their romance. “Every now and then, I’ll let you know where I’m staying, so that you can send me a telegram every now and then. You still write lovely words, but unfortunately not only to me.” He was uncertain about whether he would ever make another motion picture. “Get some nice work done and give me a treat—and if you often think of me, I’ll know it, and the place in my heart where I have tucked you away will glow, Jo.”111 In the summer of 1937, he was in Europe preparing for a new movie. Dietrich had been filming Angel with Lubitsch in Hollywood until June and had no other contract lined up. In recent times, she may have paid too much attention to the fee she was offered and too little to the quality. Getting together with her creator, and in Venice at that, would draw the press’s attention to her.

  During September of 1937, von Sternberg’s heart was not likely to have glowed very often. “A great deal happened to us in September—the Lido with the boats along the horizon in the evening like butterflies,” Erich Maria Remarque wrote to Dietrich after the end of their love affair. She would be his “autumn love.”112 It was not the first time that their paths had crossed. In 1930 in Berlin, they had met in the bar of the Eden Hotel. Remarque recalled the vision of the young Dietrich in a light gray suit with her even shoulders, which he loved so dearly. Back then, in Berlin, he claims already to have known that she would be staying in his life. In the hotel bar, he ought to have risen from his chair, gone up to her, and said: “Come away with me—why stay here?”113 But he backed away instead. For seven years, he sought refuge “in indifference and adventures, in ruination and dissipation, in the vapid freedom of the witless.”114 Venice brought them together again. We do not know whether Dietrich recalled this meeting in Berlin when she saw Remarque in Venice; she was probably just attracted to this elegant, good-looking, successful, and well-to-do man. Although Remarque was charming and amiable, she sensed his shy reserve and regarded it as a challenge to break through it. In her memoirs, she told of having met up with him again the following day on the beach with a volume of Rilke poems under her arm, which impressed him. He commented sarcastically: “I see you read good authors.” She replied: “Shall I recite a few poems to you?”115 Decades later, however, she described their encounter somewhat differently in a telephone conversation with her friend Johannes Mario Simmel: “On the way to the hotel, he said: ‘By the way, just to clarify things right away so there are no silly discussions later: I am totally impotent . . . but, at your request, I can of course be quite an enchanting little lesbienne.’ Marlene: ‘God, was I relieved! God, did I love that man.’ ”116 His impotence was only temporary, and she kept on loving him nevertheless.

  Of all of Dietrich’s many lovers, Remarque was most similar to her in nature. Remarque, a soldier and teacher from Osnabrück with a penchant for writing, had come to Berlin in 1925 as an editor of a sports newspaper. He was a dapper dresser, and his colleagues regarded him as a stuffed shirt. He had no political affiliations. In 1927, he wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, an antiwar novel that became the most successful German-language book of the twentieth century and brought him fame and fortune overnight. Regarded with hostility in Germany, he left the country and led a nomadic life that his newfound wealth made possible. Remarque became an art collector and a wine connoisseur, and lived in luxury hotels. As was the case with Dietrich, this early departure from Germany gave him a cosmopolitan outlook tinged with a vague sense of homesickness. Both had nagging doubts about their own talent and were tormented by thoughts of failing as artists. Remarque, like Dietrich, would not return to Germany. He bought himself a villa outside of Ascona in Switzerland, right on Lake Maggiore. In the 1930s, he spent lengthy periods of time in his lakeside house far away from people and cities with his dogs, his pictures, and his books. His neighbor, Emil Ludwig, commented that Remarque cultivated a life of solitude, enlivened by women and cocktails. He could spend his nights on bar stools for months on end, listening to other people’s confessions, then head to a dive to pick up a streetwalker and bring her to his room. Remarque was considered an homme à femmes; he loved women, and they loved him. He tended to fall for slender, aloof,
beautiful women like Dietrich.

  In September 1937, Dietrich and Remarque became lovers in Venice. Since neither of them had to answer to anyone else, they spent the months up until her November 10 departure at Hotel Lancaster in Paris. Their romance centered on hotels. Remarque kept hoping that she would visit him at his house on the lake, which he talked up with such pride, but she never did.117 Dietrich would never row across the lake with him, never drink an aperitif in the small bars he frequented, and never walk with the dogs. She was not interested in his garden or the village life in the south, and she had no intention of sharing his solitude. Anyone who wanted to be with her would have to adapt to her lifestyle. In her own capricious way, though, Dietrich loved this man with “his ever-skeptical eyes,” and was touched by his vulnerability and almost pathological melancholia.

  The letters that he wrote to her over the following months reveal how they fared during their first autumn in Paris. He spent the nights in his house in Porto Ronco longing for his lover.

  It is nighttime, and I’m writing for you to call from New York. The dogs are sleeping around me, and the gramophone is playing—records that I found—easy to love—I got you under my skin awake from a dream . . . but it’s daytime where you are, the lights in the streets are just going on, you’re standing in your room, someone will go out with you to eat, to go to the theater, and the evening gowns are lying on the bed and you don’t know whether to wear the white one with the gold bodice by Schiaparelli or the black and gold one by Alix.

  He delighted in picturing her trying on her clothes, imagining her transformation into a vision of beauty. He had studied her every detail in the weeks they had lived together and knew all her gestures and sounds. “But first your hair is combed with the black comb. Quickly, your head tilted to the side, and harshly torn through. Then the sigh, the gaze starting out somewhere and ending somewhere, the drifting smile directed at no one and everyone, the swift walk and the warm evening breeze on the wide Champs-Élysées.”118 Dietrich replied to his elaborate, handwritten letters with brief, infrequent telegrams, which confounded him because he was normally the one to make himself scarce. They rarely had time alone. Even when they were together, they were always surrounded by other people or hurrying off to meetings. Remarque longed for telephone calls so that he could hear her voice at night.

  But Dietrich had other things on her mind. Back in Hollywood, her persistent fears that she had been shunted aside proved to be well founded. The Americans had seen quite enough of her and her European-inspired movies. Besides, she was not a young actress like Hedy Lamarr or Ingrid Bergman, who had now arrived in Hollywood. Harry Edington had told her back in August that he was not making much headway in his quest for a new contract. Knight Without Armour had been a flop. He implored her not to make any more movies in Europe for the time being: “It is my firm belief that you should not attempt any picture in Europe until after your citizenship is established here.”119 In March 1937, Dietrich had filed an application for American citizenship. Edington assured her that it would take no more than seventeen or eighteen months for the application to go through, and then she would be an American, which would greatly improve her position in the studios.

  In Germany, the news that Dietrich sought to acquire American citizenship caused quite a stir, and officials felt compelled to issue a denial. Goebbels sent Heinz Hilpert to Paris. Hilpert had staged George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance during the 1929–1930 season, with Dietrich playing the part of Hypatia. Max Reinhardt had left Berlin for good in May 1933, and one year later, Hilpert had been appointed director of the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele. In November 1937, Goebbels was counting on Dietrich’s return to Berlin. “At our embassy in Paris, Marlene Dietrich issued a formal statement disparaging her slanderers and emphasized that she was, and would remain, a German. She will also be performing with Hilpert at the Deutsches Theater. I will now take her under my wing.”120 Once Hilpert had reported back to him, Goebbels thought Dietrich would be performing in Berlin.121 She made no written mention of her encounter with Hilpert. In order to return to the United States, she needed to renew her German passport, which is why she was visiting the German embassy. She would not come back to Berlin until the end of the war, clad in an American uniform.

  Remarque must have told Dietrich that his most recent novel, Three Comrades, had been bought by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the previous year.122 F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay, and shooting was set to begin in November 1937. She cabled Edington in October 1937 that she would do anything in her power to act in the film version of Remarque’s last book. In December 1937 word got out that Paramount was giving Dietrich $250,000 in severance pay if she agreed not to make her next picture there. This was a tidy sum of money, but it was also a degrading situation for a woman who was used to success, because it meant that the studio was losing money on her movies. At roughly the same time, a group of independent film distributors took out an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter, highlighted with a red border, that listed the actors they considered “box office poison.” Dietrich was on this hit list, along with Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, and others. By the beginning of the following year, Remarque had become aware of the unpleasant position his lover was in. On January 9, 1938, he sent off one of his relatively rare telegrams, offering her the lead role in Three Comrades. Although another actress had already been cast in this role, he intended to offer his services as coauthor of the screenplay to MGM if Dietrich played the lead. BEGINNING NEW BOOK FOR YOU EXCLUSIVELY CABLE WHAT IS GOING ON AND WHO SHOULD COME YOU OR I DON’T RUSH NEVER FEAR NEVER GET UPSET WE’RE JUST STARTING AND EVERYONE WILL BE AMAZED.123

  There is no record of her response to this offer, but Margaret Sullavan did not hand over the star role, and Dietrich came away empty-handed. The new book Remarque wanted to write exclusively for her would take several years to complete. But “Ravic,” as the main character would be named in the novel Arch of Triumph, is mentioned in his letters as early as 1938. When Remarque realized that he was unable to hold Dietrich’s interest for long, he got the idea of splitting himself into several male selves. Most of the time he turned himself into either “Alfred,” the innocent little boy who loves Aunt Lena (Dietrich) passionately and writes her postcards and letters in old-fashioned penmanship, or “Ravic,” the valiant and melancholy man who loves and supports Dietrich. With “Ravic,” the war and the hardships of emigration enter into their correspondence. Although Remarque was not taken seriously by his left-wing colleagues because of his lack of party affiliation, the National Socialists regarded him as their enemy. In 1933, Remarque’s books were burned and banned. He abhorred the National Socialists and tried to embody “the other Germany”: cultivated, intellectual, and cosmopolitan. At the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, he believed that he was keeping a safe distance, but by 1938 he realized that the threat was drawing closer and encroaching on his life. His ex-wife, Jutta Zambona, panicked that she might be deported to Germany, and he agreed to remarry her.124

  In Remarque’s dreamy letters to Dietrich, the word “war” started to crop up more and more often. During a nighttime air-raid drill, when all of Switzerland had gone dark, he turned on the gramophone and reveled in doom and gloom: “It is sending music into the tubercular night, music of a different continent, of a different star, weary music of ruination. When will the world break into pieces?”125 In a German magazine, he came across photographs of her and gazed in bewilderment and dismay at the woman he loved, posing for a picture eating breakfast at home, in an alien world. “Do people really believe what they’re claiming,” he asked her in a letter, “that you are going back to Germany and becoming an ornament for Ufa?”126 When he read in the newspapers that Paramount would not be extending her contract, he assumed she would come back to Europe, and to him. WILL EXPECT YOU SOUTHAMPTON EAT AT HORCHES LONDON THEN WITH THE CAR NAPLES CAPRI AND BUDAPEST WAR OFF SPRING ON.127

  But she did not come. He spent the spring alo
ne in his house at the lake. In his letters to her in Hollywood, he mourned for a past that they had not shared. “Why was I not with you everywhere, at least in that radiant time when the world was nothing but a really fast car and glittering froth, laughter, and youth! . . . We would never have been sad. We would have laughed and not spoken, and sometimes we would have had hours when the weight of the world would have felt like gray fog.”128 This opportunity was gone. Remarque smelled the gunpowder and heard the muffled rumbling on the horizon. His diary entry on February 21, 1938, read: “Swimming in the afternoon. Washing hair, cleaning up—after Hitler speeches, misery of the times, and expectation of the bleakest future. In the evening a bottle of Wormser Liebfrauen Stiftswein, 1934. Necessary. The night with all the stars—over martyrs, idiots, imbeciles, fanatics, the wounded and the dead; over Spain, China, battlefields, concentration camps, sprouting fields of daffodils, criminals, crimes, and the twentieth century.”129 In early March, Hitler incorporated Austria into the German Reich. Salzburg and Vienna were in the hands of the enemy. The impending war dredged up Remarque’s memories. “We all have so little warmth for ourselves in our hearts—we children of troubled times—so little faith in ourselves—far too much bravery and far too little hope. . . . Stupid little soldiers of life—children of troubled times—with a dream, sometimes, at night.”130

  On May 3, 1938 Dietrich arrived in Paris, where Remarque was waiting for her. Their first weeks together appear to have gone smoothly. She cooked mushroom soup, meatballs, scrambled eggs, Serbian rice with meat, apricot dumplings, and crabs for her family and for her lover in Sieber’s apartment. Together with Max Kolpé, they drank Pilsener in a little bar and touched on political issues as they chatted. Even though Dietrich was there, Remarque kept up his usual habits: he partied the nights away in fancy restaurants and backstreet bars, drank too much, and surrounded himself with prostitutes. After one of these nights, he wrote in his diary: “Letter from Marlene on the bed. Went over. Had waited. Was sweet. Even so, went away again. My room. She came. Stayed. I stank of liquor, garlic, and cigars.”131 Remarque was driven by feelings of farewell: farewell to peace, to Europe, and to happiness. At the same time, his lover was needling him incessantly. She was jealous of Zambona, who was also in Paris, and who, in turn, was jealous of her husband’s lover. Dietrich reproached him for having gotten married, and he countered that she had always had lovers on the side. Remarque’s diaries reveal a side of Dietrich that is at odds with the image of a libertarian love life. When he told her that he was off to meet up with his old girlfriend, Ruth Albu, she was not above hiding his shoes so that he could not leave the house. The worst part of life with Dietrich, he found, was the constant need to interact with her family. Rudi, Tami, and Maria were omnipresent. Remarque found Rudi in particular hard to take. In his view, Rudi was “an exquisite study of a glutton who constantly takes offense if anything is not right,” a “mindless glutton.”132 Because he loved Dietrich and her family was part of the package, he had no choice but to live in close proximity to these people. “I’d be better off not knowing the family,” he concluded.133 He nonetheless went along with this group for a two-month vacation at a summer resort in Cap d’Antibes.