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

by Wieland, Karin

  Dietrich’s losses in her love life were somewhat balanced out by the growth of her family. May 1950 marked the birth of Maria’s second son, John Michael. Sieber and Dietrich were in New York at the time. They drank a champagne toast to the second grandchild, and Sieber proudly wrote to his parents in Berlin that he had become a grandfather again. The role of grandmother kept Dietrich busy. Alexander Liberman, with whom she formed a friendship in the 1950s, photographed her in this role.37 She sat on the floor with John Michael, beaming with pride and opening up presents. The private Marlene—the grandmother—always remained the public Marlene—the star. With her perfectly made-up face concealed behind netting, she rollicked with her grandsons in the back seat of a New York taxi. She had eyes only for the camera. Liberman also photographed her while she was cooking. The femme fatale had been transformed into an elegant housewife wearing a white blouse and apron with a part in her hair, contentedly stirring food in big pots. Dietrich was often a guest at the home of Liberman and his wife, Tatjana. They played canasta, and Dietrich did the cooking. The screen goddess had the hands of a housewife. Dietrich masked her immoderate demands on life under a cloak of modesty.

  She could now be heard on the radio quite often, and she devoted herself to charity work, hoping not to be forgotten altogether. A film project with Wilder did not materialize, and to judge from Wilder’s letter to her, she must have been upset, even deeply distraught, by the collapse of this project: “We are still young, Marlene. There are a lot of pictures left for us to do. If it wasn’t this one, there’s going to be another one. You know how much I love and admire you. It aches me just as much as you that it’s not going to be the next one.”38 Her current and discarded lovers complimented her appearance, and it was left to her agent to tell her the bitter truth. The heroic Dietrich who had fought against Hitler no longer drew audiences; they wanted to see young, fresh actresses who were unencumbered by the past, actresses like Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe.

  When an offer came from film director Henry Koster to act in a movie with Jimmy Stewart, Feldman pressed her to accept it. He tried to make her understand that she was no longer in a position to choose her roles, whether she liked it or not. It must have been the money that clinched the deal. In October 1950, Dietrich flew to London to shoot her new movie, No Highway in the Sky. As in Stage Fright, she had a younger actress at her side, and once again she played a film star who wore clothing by Dior. Her former lover Stewart, who played an eccentric scientist, no longer thrilled her, and she thought that Koster, the Berliner who was three years younger, was awful.

  Old German jokes all day long, no one laughs, German accent in American English, systematically attack the other so that he has to defend himself instead of making suggestions, vain. (I am a great comedy director—this line is funnier! It’s easy to see that he knows only Hollywood jargon and not the language.) Maybe he’s all right in Hollywood, where the zookeepers look out for him and watch the rushes and steer him, but here, all alone, he is dangerous.39

  Dietrich considered it outrageous to have to work with a director like this, but the worst part was that he could not stop ribbing her about her age. “With me nothing but: Grandmoththththther (he has a strong lisp): can you make it with your 75 years, careful, don’t fall, you know bones get brittle with your age, etc.”40 She was plagued by bouts of pain, hated this movie, and grew thinner and thinner, yet she knew that she had to hold out. All she really wanted was to go straight to New York to be with her grandchildren.

  By Christmas, she was back home. Photographs show her in the Rivas’ living room with Iva Patcevitch, the editor of Vogue. Everything looks quite dignified: the big Christmas tree, the presents, the children, and the radiantly beautiful Maria. Dietrich is with the gray-haired, elegant Patcevitch, the two of them looking like aristocratic grandparents. To see her sitting smugly on the sofa in her elegant clothing, it is hard to imagine that she had to endure being bossed around on the set.

  Yul Brynner, an exotic-looking young man with a mysterious background, piqued her interest. Noël Coward had introduced the two of them. Dietrich spent the next few years floating on air whenever he was with her, or agonizing when he kept her waiting. Brynner was nearly twenty years her junior. As his son put it, “For the first time, Yul found himself making love to a woman whom he had admired since his childhood.”41 Born in Vladivostok, he lived in China and Paris before coming to the United States in 1940. He had worked as a trapeze artist in France, but by the time Dietrich met him, he was a Broadway sensation in the musical The King and I. After the performance and before going home to his wife, he found time to have affairs. Night after night, Dietrich waited for him. Even if he had no more than thirty minutes for her, she considered herself lucky. Brynner declared his love for her, but stopped short of planning for a future that would include her. She attributed this to her advanced age and accused him of looking to other women for the long term. When he left without making plans for the next time they would see each other, she was depressed for days on end. She could not grasp the idea that a man might actually turn down the chance to be with her. She vilified his wife, the way she did with every rival. In a draft of a letter to him that ran to twenty-two pages, she launched into endless detail about how his wife was a bad mother. She evidently wanted to gain complete control over him and insisted that he inform her about his comings and goings. When she did not know where he was, or he forgot to call, she sank into a deep depression. The proud Dietrich sat next to the telephone for hours, waiting for a call from Brynner, a bald-headed, mediocre musical star. If he promised to call, she would often stay at home the entire day and get other callers off the phone as quickly as she could. On one occasion, she suggested they meet at Maria’s apartment. “The children won’t be there and we could put the babies to bed like if they were ours.”42 Dietrich, who was nearing the age of fifty, was trying to play house with her young lover. Brynner wrote Dietrich short letters in large, loopy handwriting. We can only hope that he was more imaginative as a lover than as a letter writer, as his correspondence was full of the usual clichés about longing, desire, and kissing. The young man was flattered by her attention; for him, theirs was an amusing affair that appealed to his vanity. His wife was not the only woman with whom he was betraying Dietrich.

  Her friends noted the change in her with a mixture of amazement and concern. Sieber spent countless hours on the phone with her listening to her unending aggravation with Brynner, and Leo Lerman called Brynner Marlene’s nemesis. Lerman was certain that Brynner had no intention of marrying her. Dietrich’s passion for Brynner took over her life. Her constant fear that he would stop loving her was evidence of her dread of growing old and lonely. Her greatest fear of all was the loss of her sexual attractiveness. In order to keep her affair as discreet as possible, she rented an apartment on Park Avenue. She furnished the bedroom like a brothel. Her friend Lerman remarked that it had a “cocotte kitsch touch.” There were mirrors everywhere, and she had fluorescent tubes installed under the bed to create a kind of indirect lighting. This was her stage set for the great passion with the bald-headed, muscular, and presumably potent Yul Brynner, lived from one night of ardor to the next.

  Friends had died, and former lovers had gone their separate ways: Gabin was now the head of a household, and von Sternberg, married for the third time, had also become a father again at the beginning of the year. Boni had discovered psychoanalysis and yoga; he drank less and spent more time thinking about himself. After a visit to her Park Avenue apartment, he wrote:

  An evening at Puma’s. Gave me something to eat; she ate potatoes with butter. Glued to the TV set, staring at her Yul and her daughter. Everything’s off; exaggerated; nothing goes together. The half-furnished apartment—too little light in the living room; the putrid blond and beige on the floors, walls, furniture; the many mirrors; all disconnected, Hollywood elegance, the synthetic celebrity who is run-down and coming apart at the seams yet encased in a shel
l that is still lovely, the mixture of genuine and fake, unbearable, because she is certainly intelligent enough to tell the difference.43

  As if her anguish with her young lover were not enough, she also had to spend several weeks dealing with Fritz Lang. In March 1951, the filming of Rancho Notorious began. This movie was in some respects a remake of Destry Rides Again, this time in Technicolor. Lang had been a star in Berlin, the way Dietrich had become a star in Hollywood. He was unable to recapture his great success once he came to the United States, but he stayed in the movie business. In the mid-1930s, Dietrich and Lang had had a brief affair. His telegrams to her suggest that he was a romantic, somewhat awkward lover. The man who was considered impeccably precise and cold had a playful handwriting that looked like a young girl’s: instead of dotting his i’s, Lang added curlicues. He could not come to terms with the fact that he was no more than a common employee at MGM, and he was considered arrogant and conceited. Dietrich did not really want to make this Western, but once again, it was Feldman who insistently pointed out that it had taken quite a bit of wangling to get her the part. Hemingway bolstered her spirits and wrote that even if she made Westerns in Technicolor, she would still be his heroine.

  The five weeks that Dietrich spent on the set with Lang, who signed his telegrams to her as “THE MONSTER,” made her hate him for the rest of her life. “Fritz Lang was the director I detested most,” she wrote in 1984.44 Her Prussian discipline was the only thing preventing her from walking away from the shoot. When Dietrich filmed a movie, von Sternberg was a constant presence in her mind, and she stuck to what he had taught her. Lang and von Sternberg, both filmmakers from Vienna, did not get along. Each resented the other, and Dietrich felt the consequences: “He despised my reverence for Josef von Sternberg, and tried to replace this genius in my heart and in my body.”45 Lang’s method was to humiliate and torment her in front of the whole crew. He marked the actors’ positions on the floor with adhesive tape, based on the length of his own stride. No matter how tall or short the actors were, they had to work with these positions. He sometimes made them repeat scenes a hundred times, shouting at them from start to finish. According to Dietrich, Lang delighted in tormenting people. Sporting a monocle and with his hair neatly slicked back, he would arch his eyebrows as he coldly observed his actors’ missteps. The film historian Lotte Eisner described his method as perfectionism, but for Dietrich, it was pure sadism. She later wrote, “I won’t shed a tear for him. I haven’t lost a thing; I felt no friendship for the man, so no tears.”46 Lang could not stop making snide references to her age, and he claimed that she blamed him for the fact that she was no longer young, yet continued to play the role of a desirable woman. “Now, Marlene resented going gracefully into a little, tiny bit older category; she became younger and younger until finally it was hopeless.”47 Rancho Notorious, “a story of hate, murder, and revenge,” received very few positive reviews. After working together on this movie, Lang and Dietrich parted ways for good.48

  Fortunately, Dietrich found unfailing appreciation from Ernest Hemingway. He adored her looks and loved her without ever having slept with her: “I never thought you were a goddess nor a whore nor a cinema star. . . . I love to see you in a good picture and I love worse than hell to hear you sing. But I love you best in that beat up uniform and nobody could take punishment like we could.”49 Once she had lost sight of Gavin, Hemingway was the only one with whom Dietrich could talk and laugh about the war. He enjoyed telling her: “You know sometimes I miss you when we can’t kill krauts. . . . Heil Dietrich.” They kept their secrets to themselves, and no one else had any business telling them how the war was. “Toi and moi have lived through about as bad times as there ever were,” he wrote to her. “I don’t mean just wars. Wars are spinach. Life in general is the tough part. In war all you have to do is not worry and know how to read a map and give co-ordinates.”50 To lift her spirits, he offered to write a story about her and thus immortalize both of them. A few months after he made this offer, she reminded him of it when she needed him to write something about her for Life magazine. Ernest Hemingway kept his promise and wrote one of the most beautiful statements in existence about Dietrich.

  She is brave, beautiful, loyal, kind and generous. She is never boring and is as lovely looking in the morning, in a GI shirt, pants and combat boots as she is at night or on the screen. She has an honesty and a comic and tragic sense of life that never let her be truly happy unless she loves. When she loves she can joke about it; but it is gallows humor. If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and the timeless loveliness of her face. It makes no difference how she breaks your heart if she is there to mend it.51

  Dietrich allowed very few people entrance into her New York apartment. One of them was Hildegard Knef, whom Dietrich regarded as a younger version of herself. When Knef performed in Silk Stockings in New York, Dietrich invited her over. The dining table was in the alcove of the small foyer, and the kitchen was tiny. Knef was struck by the fact that there was not a single mink coat hanging in the closet. Dietrich, who had cooked a meal for her, watched her guest eat while she puffed away at her cigarette, gazed at herself in one of the many mirrors on the wall, and gave brusque replies. “She never sleeps. . . . In the morning, before anyone else even dreams of opening his eyes, she’s already read the papers and made soup, aired the rooms, cleaned the ashtrays, and told the maid which soap she should use for the doors and which for the bathtub—and on top of it she smokes like an industrial development area and has fittings and appointments the whole day long.”52 Knef described Dietrich with a mixture of admiration and bewilderment. People never knew where they stood with her. She hung up the telephone as soon as she had said her piece, spoke very softly, and never seemed tired or upset. Even her laughter was quiet. She remained aloof from nearly everyone but her close friends Wilder, Reisch, and Kolpé. When she did put in an appearance somewhere, everyone’s eyes were upon her. “Eyes followed her, devoured her, bored into her, envied, wanted to take possession, break through the majestic aura, the uninterest in surroundings and interest caused. She hovered along on legs that appeared too long to fulfill any function other than decoration, straightening the knees at every step, striding widely; she walked the way she ate, or stirred sauces: with complete concentration.”53

  On a quick shopping spree through the sweltering streets of New York, they ran into Sieber, who was on his way to California. Evidently this father, mother, and child could not live in one town. Sieber felt uncomfortable being in such close proximity to his wife. She made herself the center of his life. He had to go with her to fashion boutiques, console her discarded lovers, send her clothing, and always come when she called him. The list of medications he took for his stomach problems grew longer and longer as the years went by. His partner Tamara Matul, who lived on an allowance of six dollars a week, was in bad shape, and he was apprehensive. In 1951, he attached a carefully clipped newspaper article, “New Hormone Used for Schizophrenia,” to his appointment calendar. Matul, who had been a beauty in her younger years, was still wearing Dietrich’s hand-me-down clothing and was expected to be grateful even though she detested these castoffs from her lover’s wife. The job in Paris had not worked out. Every day, Sieber noted the exact amount of money he had spent, down to the last cent. He was still living off Dietrich. In January 1953, he put an end to this situation by dispensing with “Marlene Dietrich Inc.” In May he underwent major abdominal surgery, and in June, he moved to San Fernando Valley, California. He continued to record every detail of how long he slept, what he spent, when the curtains were washed, and when and to whom telephone calls were made. There was one big change, however: his New York cocktail-party social life gave way to raising chickens. Sieber had borrowed money to buy a chicken farm. Every day he noted the number of eggs that were laid; each egg brought him one step closer to independence from Dietrich. On New Year’s Eve 1953, he and Tamara were in bed by n
ine-thirty in the evening. At midnight, the telephone rang. It was Dietrich calling from Las Vegas. Four days earlier, she had turned fifty-two, and now, at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, she had just started her second career. She would spend the next twenty years traveling the world as a singer. She had decided to carry on as a stage legend.