The war in Europe was far away, but many Americans were worried that history would repeat itself: first, neutrality, then war. President Roosevelt’s “fireside chat” of September 3, 1939, affirmed that America would remain neutral: “Let no man or woman thoughtlessly or falsely talk of America sending its armies to European fields.”1 But once the German troops had marched into Paris in June 1940, Roosevelt knew that he would soon have to take a stand. While the Germans occupied one country after another, Americans were embroiled in debates about military intervention, with the majority still against entering the war. American artists and intellectuals, many of whom had spent years living in Europe, were emphasizing again and again that what was happening in Europe mattered to America as well. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and America entered the war. At long last, Churchill heard Roosevelt say what he had waited so long to hear: “We are all in the same boat now.”
Two weeks later, Dietrich turned forty. The fact that she was working again did not blind her to the fact that her career had reached an impasse. Her glamorous femme fatale image seemed quite outdated. Now that women could be downright mean in “film noir,” she came across as anything but. Moreover, she was broke and could not afford to pick and choose when she was offered a part. In 1941 she made a movie with René Clair, playing the role of Countess Claire Ledoux. The Flame of New Orleans shows that women in the New World are prudish, ugly, and gabby. Women from the Old World, by contrast, are erotic, sophisticated, and beautiful. Neither Dietrich nor Clair nor audiences liked The Flame of New Orleans. If we bear in mind that John Huston was shooting The Maltese Falcon at the same time, we can see what an artistic nosedive Dietrich’s career had taken. In many portraits from this period she looks frozen in place, as though fearing that any motion she might make could break the spell of her beauty.
The war added to her worries about the future and her financial situation. As a German living in America, she was an ocean apart from her mother, sister, and extended family. Josefine von Losch kept her daughter up to date about life in Berlin when she could. On March 4, 1940, she wrote to Dietrich that Shanghai Express was playing there.2
Once the United States had entered the war, the mood in the country changed. Young men full of patriotic zeal enlisted in the army. Dietrich had an American passport and behaved like an American, yet she felt that as a native German, she shared in the responsibility for this war that the Germans had begun. In December 1941, the Hollywood Victory Committee was established. Actors and singers were called upon to use their talents to serve their country. Dietrich appealed to radio audiences to buy war bonds, and from January 1942 to September 1943, she traveled throughout the country to promote war bonds in bars, on street corners, in factories, and in cafés, often six to eight times in a single day. She felt like a traveling saleswoman. She spent her evenings in nightclubs, selling bonds there as well. Accustomed to these kinds of performances from her earlier days in Berlin revues, she struck the right tone and was responsible for collecting a million dollars for the war effort. “I go on tour to collect money for the bombs that fall on Berlin. That’s where my mother lives, and I haven’t heard a word from her since the beginning of the war.”3 She was grateful to the country that had accepted her as a citizen, and she dedicated herself to her new homeland and to the victory over Germany with single-minded determination. At the same time, the thought of how her mother would fare in Berlin with bombs falling preyed on her mind. On March 30, 1943, she sent a telegram to Kaiserallee via the Red Cross:
EVERYONE HEALTHY, HOPE THE SAME OF YOU. HAVE GREAT LONGING. PLEASE WRITE AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. WE ARE WORRIED. ALL OUR LOVE AND THOUGHTS. MARIE MAGDALENE SIEBER.4
She also pitched in at the Hollywood Canteen, which opened in October 1942. The canteen was a restaurant with a bar and dance floor for servicemen headed overseas. Not only was everything free for the soldiers, but Hollywood stars also cooked for them. With any luck, they could have their soup served by Rita Hayworth while Dietrich made them a hamburger in the kitchen. Dietrich was in her element. She was delighted to display her domestic prowess and her patriotic feelings. Anything was better than the film studio. Erich Maria Remarque had nothing but scorn and derision for her charitable, military, and patriotic pursuits:
Little film ninnies as captains, dopey housewives looking self-important, giving orders, etc. Hundreds of different uniforms. Men in aprons instead of in the army, washing dishes in the soldiers’ canteens, feeling wonderfully patriotic. Carnival of conceit. Our puma in the thick of it. Frustration finds an outlet: WAAC and the WAVES—women’s organizations in the army and navy, with a full military rank.5
At this time, Remarque had been living in the United States for close to three years. In August 1939, he was in the south of France with Dietrich’s family and they set out for Paris with his Lancia. The streets were full of military vehicles. Paris was dark. The war was weighing heavily on them. While preparing to leave, he contacted the puma, who was on the Queen Mary between Europe and America and was gripped with fear about her husband and child. He knew that he could not tell her what Rudi had confided to him. There was supposedly a Russian man in Tamara’s life who wanted to marry her and take her to Berlin with him. If that were to happen, Rudi had told him, he would not be coming to America. Remarque had no idea what would happen to Dietrich, who was already questioning where she truly belonged. And if Rudi were to remain in Europe, Dietrich would be unnerved. In all this chaos, Remarque acted as the intermediary, and ultimately everyone agreed to travel to Dietrich.
Remarque spent the last evening with her at his favorite restaurant, Fouquet’s. He was feeling wistful and conflicted about being able to get away while others had to stay in Europe, yet he firmly believed that the puma needed him. One day after the British and French declared war on the Germans, the travelers arrived in New York on the Bremen. Thanks to Dietrich’s connections, Tamara Matul could enter the country with her Nansen passport, a document issued to stateless refugees. Matul’s passport had been issued in 1933 in Paris—this long, colorful stream of paper reflected the fact that she did not belong anywhere. Every time she crossed a border, a new piece of paper was added on. Matul had no national identity; there were only countries that tolerated her presence. The final piece was issued in New York in 1939. Sieber and Matul took up residence in New York, where Dietrich had arranged for a job offer for Rudi at Universal.
Remarque headed out to Los Angeles to be with Dietrich. When he got there, he realized that he had been fooling himself. She did not need him; in fact, he was clearly in her way. Dietrich was in the middle of filming Destry Rides Again. He was amazed to observe the transformation of the woman he loved into a coarse American saloon lady. At home she was fidgety and volatile, and unfair to him. She had evidently entered into an affair with her costar, Jimmy Stewart. She often went out alone in the evening and did not come home until dawn. Whenever her new lover failed to call her several times a day and send her flowers, she sulked, and took it out on Remarque. He was living with her and working on his next novel about emigration. Her moodiness made it hard for him to get work done, and the American authorities were also making life difficult for him. His Panamanian passport was not recognized, and his wife, Jutta Zambona, who also had a Panamanian passport, had been detained on Ellis Island. His immigration attorney informed him that Dietrich had attempted to use her influence in Washington to have Zambona’s entry into the United States denied. He was dumbfounded.6 Dietrich was sabotaging him because he had not gone through with a divorce, even though she was now utterly preoccupied with her Jimmy.
Remarque acted friendly and aloof because he knew that this was the only kind of behavior that had the desired effect. If she got the feeling that a lover was losing interest in her, she would try to win him back. She tried to seduce him on several occasions, but he had grown wary since hearing her tell Carl Zuckmayer on the telephone that she could feign pleasure in bed. Remarque had to admit to himself that
their love affair was coming to an end. He abhorred film people with their lies and pompous posturing. His thoughts kept returning to his final days in Paris, where fear of the Germans dominated everything and everyone. In Los Angeles, by contrast, people seemed naïve, cheerful, and confident. Although Dietrich was a German, she acted the very same way. Remarque could not make peace with the fact that she had decided to be an American. And Dietrich could not see why he was so intent on pining away for Europe instead of seizing the opportunities that America had to offer.
In order to take care of passport issues, Remarque traveled to Mexico with his wife in March 1940. His homesickness for Berlin was tempered by his longing for the puma. He sent her a postcard with a picture of a Mexican boat, which reminded him of the Spreewald nature reserve in Germany. Remarque felt the homesickness for Europe that Dietrich had not indulged in for so long. Time and again, he wrote to her about romantic evenings they had shared in Paris hotel rooms, about the Nike in the Louvre, or about the chestnut trees in blossom on the Champs-Élysées. He wanted to cheer up his sad puma, but she was far too busy surviving in Hollywood to find the time to share in his sentimentality. Although he did not hear from her at all, she was at the airport when he came back from Mexico four weeks later with an American visa in his pocket.
The time for long love letters had passed. He sent her little greeting cards that seem almost sheepish, as though he were shyly reminding her of his existence. This tactic did no good, because she rarely paid heed to her old lovers. They continued their sham of a relationship for quite some time. Dietrich was shooting a film in the desert and sleeping on the set; he gadded about from one dinner party to the next with Werfel, Mahler, and Stravinsky. All he really wanted was to be with her, which was exactly why she avoided him. Von Sternberg, “with his everlasting affection for the puma,” became a cautionary example to him.7 While Dietrich was fighting for her career and embarking on one affair after another, Remarque was battling homesickness and his lover’s indifference.
At some point he had had enough, and he moved out. Having escaped the war in Europe, he had no intention of spending any more of his time in sunny California agonizing over Dietrich’s moods. He resignedly returned to his old ways, visiting brothels, having affairs, drinking and smoking to excess, and dreaming of Paris. Meanwhile, Berlin and London were being bombed.
Dietrich kept up her punishing work schedule and did not let up on Remarque, impatient for him to start “her novel.” He wrote letters to her, but what she truly wanted was movie material. Arch of Triumph, a novel of love and emigration about Ravic, the clear-eyed romantic, and the amoral Joan Madou, would not be published until many years after their relationship had ended.
Their final split came in November 1940 after a party in Josef von Sternberg’s villa. Dietrich accused Remarque of being drunk and impotent when she wanted to sleep with him; he retorted that this was the result of having to have discussions about condoms beforehand “with someone who lies in bed like a fish afterwards.” She claimed he had called her a whore; he replied that whores give something for what they get.8 Remarque went off to New York for several months, and when he returned in the spring, she tried to win him back. When she found out that he had taken up with her rival, Greta Garbo, she went on the warpath, claiming that Garbo had syphilis and breast cancer and that she, Dietrich, was the one who had loved him so deeply and done so much for him.9 He reveled in the breakdown of the woman he had loved so much. Sex with Garbo was Remarque’s revenge on the fickle puma.
In the summer of 1941, Dietrich met Jean Gabin, who was the diametric opposite of Remarque. Remarque was intent on looking suave and urbane, and did not like to be reminded of his petit bourgeois background in the small German city of Osnabrück. Gabin, by contrast, did not stand for some sort of vaguely defined cosmopolitanism; he was French through and through. He would not spend his nights on bar stools. The latest trends held no particular appeal for him, nor did nightlife and cultural events. At home he enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle, perhaps because he had grown up in the entertainment world as the son of cabaret singers. He was all too familiar with the life Dietrich portrayed onscreen. When he came to the United States in 1941, he was thirty-seven years old, and a star in his home country. His greatest films were La grande illusion (1937), La bête humaine (1938), and Le jour se lève (1939). His favorite directors were Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. Gabin was the bon mauvais garçon who stood for the melancholy peculiar to those outside the city.
Gabin preferred refuge in America to a life in occupied France. Dietrich made him feel at home in his new surroundings by creating a little French oasis in Hollywood. “We furnished his house according to his taste, with all the French objects we were able to scrape together from farmer’s markets and Beverly Hills shops,” she wrote.10 Gabin was wary of anything that was not French—apart from Dietrich herself. Dietrich, who spoke fluent French, tutored him in English and cooked French meals for his friends. For Renoir she made stuffed cabbage, and her pot au feu was legendary among the French in Hollywood. She now spent many evenings with Gabin and his friends at the kitchen table. Dietrich explained America to them, helped them navigate contracts and applications for driver’s licenses, and dispensed advice to the lovelorn.
Dietrich confided in Sieber what she hoped to gain from loving Gabin: “I am clinging not only to him, but also to the chance to be a real woman at long last.” All she truly wanted was to provide happiness, but she had never succeeded in doing so with a man. She did not want things with Gabin to end the way they had with all the others, and used her influence to get him a visa.11
Her love for Gabin brought Dietrich back to Europe. Remarque was ultimately too German for her, but Gabin was so French that, as a German-American, she could feel European. When they went out together, she liked to belt out the Marseillaise at the top of her lungs. Gabin found that idiotic and laughingly called her “ma Prussienne.” She rented a little house for the two of them in which she played the French housewife. When he came home, she brought him his slippers and kissed and admired him. But she also mocked him gently by knocking on his forehead and declaring that what she loved about him was his absolutely empty head. During a period in which the world was falling apart, she found a brief haven of peace in her tranquil life with Gabin.
After the grueling yet glamorous years at the side of the darkly depressive Remarque, the stoic homebody Gabin was a welcome change of pace. He could be a great seducer if he was so inclined, and was utterly dependable. Dietrich described Gabin as the most sensitive man she knew. He was an intriguing combination: reliable yet daring, sensual yet faithful. Life in America, particularly in Hollywood, seemed to cast doubt on his identity as a Frenchman: “J’avais l’impression de ne plus être ce que je souhaitais rester, c’est-à-dire un Français (I had the impression that I was no longer what I wished to remain, that is to say, a Frenchman).”12
Home movies capture scenes from their love life. On horseback in the desert, they are dressed like cowboys. We see Gabin in a bathrobe smoking and smiling in a way that helps us understand why Dietrich has fallen for this man. The table is set for coffee, and the bicycle leaning up against the wall casts a shadow. She is sitting in the sun in front of the house having breakfast. Dietrich looks relaxed; her hair is tousled, and she is smiling at her lover and smoking. He is swimming laps, and a suntanned Dietrich watches him from the edge of the pool. These Brentwood images reflect their happiness. The sun is shining, the sky is unnaturally blue, and the war is far away.
Dietrich took every opportunity to be seen in public with her lover. Gabin, with his compact body, was a skilled dancer. There is a photograph of the two of them at a table in a nightclub. Gabin is wearing a tuxedo and bow tie. He is sitting close to her, his eyes gazing warily into the camera. Dietrich, in a strapless evening gown, looks delicate and luminous, and her face has a timeless, youthful quality. She was seriously considering marrying Gabin. She signed a letter to him in which she adopted hi
s actual surname (Gabin was a stage name) as her own: “Marie Madeleine Moncorgé.”13
In late February 1942, she was planning to take a trip and leave her canary with Remarque. Over vodka, she told him that she wanted to get a divorce. She seemed to have aged, yet was still on the quest for liberating love. The pinnacle of her yearning for lasting happiness was her suspicion that she was pregnant with Gabin’s baby. Dietrich got caught up in the idea of this pregnancy and dreamed of beginning anew as a wife and mother at the age of forty.
From her vacation with Gabin in Mexico, she wrote to Sieber: “You close your eyes and know that life isn’t really like this. It may be so for many women—but I always figure that it can never be that way for me. . . . I have been through the mill of responsibilities for so long that I can’t get used to the idea of a man taking on all my burdens. Most of the time, I have been the one to take on the burdens of others.”14
As might be expected, Maria had decided to become an actress, and she was now attending workshops. Her first performances showed that she had inherited her mother’s talent. Maria adopted the stage name “Maria Manton” and married Dean Goodman, a comedian. Now Dietrich had to take care of both of them, even though she was facing financial difficulties of her own. She wrote to her husband in New York that she needed to borrow money to provide their child with the necessities: “I had to buy plates, silverware, pots, tablecloths, etc., etc., and everything costs a lot of money. Besides, I can’t let my life insurance lapse—so I have no money. I’m trying to sell my jewelry, but that’s not easy. I have to rush off to the studio.”15 Although she had been working hard for years, she was low on funding. In Manpower, she costarred with George Raft as Fay Duval, a nightclub hostess who has been released from prison and has not gotten any breaks in life; she plays her as a vulnerable woman with no illusions. Fay believes that all she is able to do is entice drunk men to keep spending money on drinks. During the shooting of her next film, The Lady Is Willing, Dietrich broke her ankle, but that did not slow her down. Her willpower and work ethic were admired far more than the film itself. The Spoilers (1942) takes place in a saloon once again, complete with a sheriff, a free-for-all, and an inane maid. The sight of Dietrich as Cherry Malotte, who works in the saloon, is almost frightening. She looks like an old lady who thinks she is still sexy. With her hair upswept and wearing a white blouse, she is subjected to insults and affronts to her dignity. She acts like a wind-up doll, bored stiff. She wrote to Sieber, “I think I ought to take a break from this business, which drives me to earn money; after all, I’m not going to keep the money anyway. If I were still happy in this work, I would still have something, at least, but this hasn’t given me any pleasure for quite a long time; instead, every movie is a false hope that brings only pain.”16 Actually she could not do it anymore. “I am tired, in body and soul. I don’t know how the movie turned out—and I don’t really care.”17
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 36
