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

by Wieland, Karin

  Once the storm had subsided, she calmly went about her business in New York. She continued to prune her possessions and put her furniture and jewelry up for auction. Earning money was no easy matter during the war. Dietrich had to take care of the entire family, and complaints about payment of back taxes and a lack of money were ongoing in her letters to her financial adviser, who was often appalled by her lack of cooperation. She did not know how to handle money. Dietrich hated the idea of not being able to spend money left and right. She spent a sunny afternoon on a roof garden in Manhattan being interviewed for Vogue by Leo Lerman, who wanted to learn all about her role in the war. The first thing he noticed was that her eyebrows were no longer shaved off and traced on, but had grown in naturally. “And Dietrich is funny, with that baggy pants comedian funniness, that belly-laugh vigor which her friends adore, but which Hollywood hid behind six-inch eyelashes and a million-dollar languor.”26 She wore no makeup apart from lipstick, and of course she had on her GI shirt and trousers. She struck Lerman as very thoughtful. The conversation went on for fifteen hours, and she seemed pleased that Lerman wanted to know how she was faring in Europe. She provided a particularly impressive description of her visits to the front-line hospitals:

  There are those rows of beds. In them, boys are sleeping or unconscious. Next to each bed stands a pole, and on that pole hangs a jar—a jar of blood. The only movement in that whole place is the bubbling blood, the only sound in that whole place is the bubbling blood, a little wisp of a sound . . . the only color in that place is the color of blood. You stand there with actual life running from bottles into the boys. You see it running into them. You hear it.”27

  She was asked to visit the German soldiers in the military hospital. “ ‘Please go over and talk to them. You can speak German.’ And I’d go over to those blank faced, very young Nazis. They look me over and ask, ‘Are you the real Marlene Dietrich?’ ”28 The German soldiers knew her only from what their mothers had told them; in their stories, she was always the blue angel.

  Dietrich was deeply impressed by the morale of the American soldiers and the incredible efficiency of the army. In any case, she wanted to get back to the war. “I won’t sign any contracts here that would tie me down. I will not sit here working at my little job and let the war pass me by.”29

  Kismet opened on August 22, before she left New York. She cleverly managed to interweave stories about her work with the troops when asked about the movie. She told one journalist the story of a severely wounded soldier who had lost the will to live, but regained it when he was overcome with eagerness to see her golden legs in Kismet. Going to the movies was his first plan for the future. The doctors asked her to put on quite a lot of perfume before heading to the front-line hospitals; smelling perfume on a woman, they explained to her, could make the difference between life and death. The wounded men even asked her to kiss their bandages, and she did. Dietrich knew how to shape her public presence. She mastered all the roles, from the soldier to the patriot to the saint. On one of her last evenings in New York, she enjoyed herself at her favorite club, El Morocco—in uniform, of course.

  When Dietrich left for her second USO tour in early September, she knew that Paris had been taken back. Her itinerary began in the northern American bases: Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador. In Iceland, she was photographed looking lost and freezing in a desolate landscape; behind her, in a nod to her homesickness, a handmade sign read: “Park Avenue.” In another photograph, she was at the stove in an army shirt and apron, with military officers all around her. “Iceland—kitchen making potato pancakes,” she jotted on the back. Dietrich made a point of eating her meals with the enlisted men as a way of showing that she was there on their behalf. She listened to their stories, laughed at their jokes, and gave them a feeling of importance. Her shows, jokes, and skits were also attuned to their taste.30 In one important respect, however, she and “the boys” were quite different. For the soldiers, the end of the war meant that they could go home, but she would have to figure out just where “home” was.

  Her relationship with Gabin was moving along as usual. He waited for signs of life from her and was beside himself with happiness if she wrote him a letter. In November 1944, he told her he was tired of being alone and spending the years without her. He would likely have been horrified to learn that Sieber was the first one to read his love letters, then tell her whether they contained something important beyond the fact that Gabin was sad. Rudi wrote to her, “I shall make copies of all of them to send them to you and shall keep the originals for future reference.”31 Sieber no longer kept a tally of her income and expenses, but he took a rather sadistic pleasure in passing judgment on the feelings of others, and archiving his wife’s love letters.

  In writing to her on the front, Sieber skirted around the subject of the war, concentrating instead on managing his wife’s lovers and ensuring that she had a steady supply of makeup. In return he received a monthly check, which enabled him to lead a good life. Dietrich’s business manager, Charlie Trezona, who was alarmed at her dwindling assets, wrote her a strongly worded letter in February 1945. He had contacted Rudi, who seemed to assume that Dietrich would provide for him and Tamara until the end of their lives. He told her, “Mr. Sieber seems very worried about the possibility of your not being able to keep up your insurance payments and the checks for him in maintenance.” Trezona tried to impress upon Dietrich that things could not go on this way. If she chose not to shoot any films and instead entertain the troops, that was her prerogative, but she had to be able to afford it. Dietrich had always opted for spending her money rather than investing it. Now she had nothing left. Trezona saw only one solution to this problem: she had to shoot a film or do radio broadcasts. American newspapers were printing letters from soldiers that were full of praise for her courage and dedication. On the other hand, the rumor persisted that she wanted to stay in Europe. Trezona admonished her, “This is very bad and should be corrected by you unless it is true. Your return should be looked forward to by producers of films and radio shows and the anticipation of your return should always be built with the view in mind of getting the maximum earning power when you return.”32

  There she was in France, its fate hanging in the air, and she was dealing with the cold and with crab lice and needing to turn her thoughts to her next film role. Nothing was further from her mind than Hollywood. Then she heard from her friend Walter Reisch, who had immigrated to America and now wrote to her in English:

  It gives a strange feeling to hear you talking about the cold and the dampness and the dark, but it is not a feeling of pity or regret, it is a feeling of pride and respect for your bravery and selflessness with which you serve the cause. Somehow we always felt it was just a whim of yours when you said time and again you will be first one to be over there—Paris and further on—and then you really did it. Grand! It is sunny and warm here, and still there are many who would trade with you.33

  She found it irritating that her American friends acted as though the war was already over and done with while she was still in the thick of it. During her stopover in New York, she received an inquiry from the American secret service OSS (Office of Strategic Services) requesting her help with radio programs to be broadcast in the German transmission area.34 Dietrich, the unforgotten Blue Angel, seemed predestined for this assignment, and she accepted it. The broadcasts were recorded in London. She sang songs in German and English, most often “Lili Marleen,” the World War II soldiers’ song, the text of which originated during World War I.35 After the defeat at Stalingrad, Goebbels had banned it on the grounds that it would “undermine defense efforts.” The Allied soldiers had also gotten to know this song on the army’s radio station in North Africa. Dietrich added it to her repertoire in late 1943. She sang this song for two years, in Africa, Sicily, Italy, Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. Hemingway said about his friend Dietrich: “If she had nothing more than her voice, she could
break your heart with it.”36 This was intentional on the part of the OSS. The idea was to make the Germans melancholy and have them recall a time in their country that offered more than marches and exhortations to hold out. Dietrich sang this song as a soldier, unsentimentally and matter-of-factly, to bring back the poetry that the Germans had lost.

  In August 1939, she had left the Côte d’Azur on the luxury train known as the “Train Bleu”; little did she know that it would be five years before she set foot on French soil again. In late September 1944 Dietrich was back in Paris, staying in a suite at the Ritz. Everything was still there: the brass bed, the dove-gray wallpaper, the marble fireplace, and the large gray vanity with the mirror. The food was terrible, but no worse than the army food she was now used to. And the Ritz still had plenty of champagne.

  Only VIPs could stay at the Ritz. Two such guests were Ernest Hemingway and his new lover, the reporter Mary Welsh. Hemingway affectionately referred to Dietrich as his “Kraut.” He admired her beauty and intelligence and thought she had the best “gallows humor” in the world. Both of them enjoyed making detailed plans for her funeral, which he would end by saying, “There’ll never be such a show. You’re immortal, my Kraut.”37 She would often head straight into his bathroom and have a seat at the edge of his bathtub to watch him shave while serenading him. They started drinking champagne in the morning. Hemingway valued her judgment, and every once in a while he read her parts of his new manuscript at the hotel bar. He expressed his admiration in an oddly worded message: “I was so proud of you in the Ritz and how you looked like a combat soldier and walked like one and even smelled a little like one.”38 Hemingway admired her Prussian nature, and she loved the writer and hunter in him. Their friendship was based on their mutual awareness of the other’s vulnerability. When Welsh met Dietrich for the first time, she described her as “sinuously beautiful in her khaki uniform and the knitted khaki helmet liner she wore askew on her head.”39 Welsh was struck by Dietrich’s matter-of-fact manner and characterized her as a businesswoman “concerned with every detail of her program from transport to accommodations, to sizes of states and halls, to lighting and microphones.”40

  No sooner were the Germans driven out than the French couturiers began to design their next clothing line. A photograph shows Dietrich in a simple uniform, with men’s shoes and a big handbag, in front of Elsa Schiaparelli’s studio. There she bought the ginger-red silk coat in which Lee Miller photographed her at the Ritz for Vogue, sitting on the floor and looking out into the distance. Miller commented, “It is all right for her to shop in Paris, although the city is out of bounds—as she is in USO and has to dress up for the boys.”41 She continued to perform in eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, but she was exhausted and riddled with anxiety: “I’m afraid, period. A funny feeling. Fear of failing. Fear of having to give up, of being unable to endure this way of living. And everybody will say, with a smile, ‘Of course, of course, that was a silly idea.’ I can’t confide my fear to anyone.”42

  Dietrich had now replaced her USO uniform with the standard-issue “Eisenhower jacket,” along with the mandatory trousers, helmet or cap, and heavy boots. The closer she came to Germany, the more secure she felt in her uniform. A series of photographs shows her standing next to General Patton in France. For Patton, the uniform was an indispensable part of a successful military campaign. He understood the critical importance of the theatrical element in battle and the disciplinary power of the uniform.43 Patton gave Dietrich a small revolver to defend herself if captured by the enemy.

  After heavy bombing, Aachen, the “city of churches and kings,” was the first major German city to fall to the Allies. Dietrich was surprised to feel neither threatened nor fearful, and she was given a cordial reception: “We pushed into Germany, and much to our surprise, we did not feel the least bit threatened or fearful. The people on the street wanted only to embrace me; they asked me to put in a good word for them with the Americans. They couldn’t have been friendlier.”44 She had returned to her homeland with the victors. She was torn: she was a part of the old Germany, and she belonged to the new America that would decide Germany’s fate.

  She spread out her sleeping bag in what remained of a bombed-out house; it was cold, rainy, and muddy. There was no roof, and rats scurried every which way: “Rats have icy paws. You’re lying on the bare floor in your sleeping bag, the blanket pulled up to your chin, and these creatures run over your face, their paws cold as death; they scare the life out of you.”45 By Christmas 1944, it was clear that this would be the final Christmas of the war. The Battle of the Bulge was a failed offensive. Dietrich was feeling glum; she was turning forty-three and had no idea what direction her life would be taking, both personally and professionally.

  Dietrich was starting to forget where she was performing at any given time. The long months of the disorienting life on the battlefields of Europe had worn her out. She still refused to adjust to the demands of the war and continued to regard her life as chaotic right through to the day the war was won. She and the boys awaited their instructions like good soldiers. They were the victors, but they felt hollow inside. She finally received the order to fly back to LaGuardia Airport, where everything had begun. When the plane landed in New York, it was raining, and no reception committee was on hand. They were frisked from head to toe; Dietrich’s souvenirs from the war were confiscated, including the revolver General Patton had given her. Captain Dietrich returned unarmed to her suite at the St. Regis.

  THE

  WITNESS

  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: “Th
e 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.