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

by Wieland, Karin

  She wrote to Willi Forst, but he rebuffed her with the remark that you cannot warm things up again in old age. Her former lover Brian Aherne was different; he kept his word and stayed in touch with her from time to time. He was stung to realize that she barely mentioned him in her memoirs, but that did nothing to diminish his admiration. “You are one of the great ones of the world and God bless the memory of Josef von Sternberg who was the first to see that and to put you on the track.”12 She must have been delighted to read that. Her opinion of von Sternberg had mellowed, and she stayed in touch with his widow. Every letter from Walter Reisch expressed the hope that she would come to California again. He was horrified at how she had hidden herself away in Paris and was so isolated. What had happened to her vitality and her “affirmation of life”? Wasn’t there anyone who loved her? In California, she could get together with people from the old clique: the Wilders, Preminger, Mia May, Eric Ambler and Joan Harrison, and Reisch himself. He kept her up to date about how things were in Hollywood after the war. The new producers wanted nothing to do with old-timers like himself, so he was now giving lectures and was pleased about the students’ great interest in Lubitsch, May, and Lang.

  Dietrich did not agree to see even Billy Wilder, with whom she could have indulged in some juicy Hollywood gossip.13 Like Reisch, he called her up every time he was in Paris. Although she disguised her voice, he recognized her instantly. “Come on, for Christ’s sake, Marlene, we know it’s you! . . . Marlene, I’ll come up, I want to see you. I’ll blindfold myself, how about that?”14 She agreed to call him the following day, but then demurred, claiming she had to go to Neuilly for an eye-doctor appointment. This went on for several more days, and he eventually flew back to Los Angeles without having seen Dietrich.

  People could call her up or write her letters, but a face-to-face meeting was out of the question.15 If one of her friends dared to say something about her, she sent offended and offensive letters. If they asked what she was doing, they would get answers along the lines of “I’m the same . . . in bed, with a book and a bottle.”16

  She maintained contact with the outside world by writing letters or making telephone calls. She called her telephone “my only extravagance.” It was always within reach, and she availed herself of it whenever the mood struck her. And that was often, as we can see just by looking at it today. This white telephone is in pitiful shape. It is filthy, stained, and pasted together in many spots. Dietrich’s telephone looks more like a scruffy, exhausted animal than a piece of technical equipment. Books and the telephone helped combat her loneliness. She spent Christmas, her birthday, New Year’s Eve, Easter, Pentecost, and the long French summer vacations alone.

  Apart from the big wide world in which she thought she still had a role, there was also the small world of the apartment in which she set the tone. Dietrich was intent on cleanliness, and noted when the curtains had been washed, the mattresses turned, and the linens changed. Throughout her life, she had been dissatisfied with the people who were inclined to spend their time with her. Her old age did nothing to change that, except that back then they had come out of love, and now she had to pay people to keep her company. Sooner or later, she quarreled with her secretaries, promoters, and maids. In her eyes, they were hysterical, neurotic, incompetent, alcoholic, ungrateful, or insolent. She really wanted Maria to be with her, and called her up several times a day. If Maria did not answer the phone, her mother was utterly distraught and feared that something had happened to her. Maria did not come very often, but when she did visit, she bathed her mother and cooked for her.

  Once the prose of her life had been committed to paper, Dietrich began to write poems. One of them contains these lines: “If a surgeon / Would open my heart / He would see / A gigantic sea / Of love / For my only child. / He would be stunned / At the force of it / The violence / The fury of it / All entangled in / One human heart.”17 These poems may be the only things she did not try to turn into money. She never stopped thinking about how she could get her hands on money, which prompted her to dig out an old photograph from The Blue Angel to compare what Madonna might have copied from her costume. She offered her clothing for sale, wrote articles about Garbo’s death, mulled over whether she ought to make commercials for beer, and approached her friend Karl Lagerfeld with the suggestion that he market a perfume named “Marlene.”

  Josef von Sternberg had made Dietrich’s face an icon of the twentieth century. Old age had destroyed not Dietrich’s beauty, but the work of art that her face had been. Dietrich’s twentieth century came to an end when she announced that she would no longer be showing her face. She herself had turned off the spotlight. By retreating from the world, she could ensure that “Marlene Dietrich” would remain intact as a work of art. The myth of Marlene lived on, while the phantom, the mortal Marlene, stepped into the obscurity of solitude.

  She had no more use for glamorous get-ups, haute couture clothing, tailor-made suits from famed haberdashers, and intricately detailed works of art by Italian shoemakers. Dietrich now dressed in bed jackets—not just any old ones, of course: they were by Dior. These bed jackets were gossamer works of art in blue, pink, and white wool. Under the knitted fabric, they were lined with chiffon in the same color scheme and gathered at the sleeves, with a ribbon at the neckline. Some of the bed jackets have big holes in the delicate weave. Someone who no longer had good vision had tried to patch up these spots. Under the jackets she wore plain cotton nightshirts or men’s pajamas. Even though she was no longer in the public eye, she remained true to herself; her sleepwear was simple and elegant. Her pink and bright blue slippers appear to be unworn. It is impossible to picture Dietrich’s famous legs in these woolen, pompom-topped shoes.

  “The ranks are thinning out,” Reisch had written her from Hollywood.18 Just as Sieber had done, she now began to note a whole series of death dates in her daily planner: Orson Welles, Simone Signoret, Mischa Spoliansky, Lilli Palmer, the Duchess of Windsor, and Romy Schneider. She sent flowers for Michael Wilding’s funeral, and when Axel Springer’s son took his own life, she wrote to him that her thoughts were with him. Serge Gainsbourg died, and Dietrich sent her condolences to Jane Birkin in a letter that was delivered by taxi. The death of Kenneth Tynan weighed on her heavily, and she was shocked by the death of Ernst Sieber, Rudi’s brother, probably because she realized he was the last of the Siebers to go.

  She did not accept her relatives’ invitations to Germany. The German language was no more than a memory for her, although there were things she could express only in German, such as weltfremd, Jugendzeit, Hopfen und Malz verloren, In der Not frisst der Teufel Fliegen, Schnitzel, and Langschläfer.

  When a pre-publication excerpt of Leni Riefenstahl’s Memoirs appeared in print in the German magazine Bunte, Dietrich sent her maid to the Champs-Élysées to pick up a copy for her. She promptly called Max Kolpé to tell him about it. The two of them seemed to be in full agreement about their contempt for Riefenstahl. Kolpé wrote to her: “What can you say about this? Everything is a pack of lies! Did you expect anything else? Of course they happily go on printing these lies by ‘the Reich’s glacial crevasse,’ as this fiery narcissus was called. . . . L.R.’s most unabashed lie of all is that she supposedly heard the name ‘HITLER’ for the first time in 1932.”19

  Avenue Montaigne was an upscale address situated near the Eiffel Tower, the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and the Champs-Élysées. Here, Paris has the kind of dove-gray, silent elegance that is not found anywhere else in the world. Dietrich lived on the fifth floor of a large apartment building that connotes genteel anonymity. Soraya, the beautiful woman who was cast off by the Shah of Iran, also lived in this building. Paris, declared Franz Hessel, was the “home of the foreigner.” Empresses without a country, wearing dark sunglasses to shield them from prying eyes, were at home on this broad, tree-lined avenue of high fashion and luxury hotels. Dietrich’s apartment was a sanctuary and an archive. She would spend hours looking for a Chanel outfit and
was vexed when she did not find it, then suspected that one of her helpers had taken it. Sometimes she gave away or sold her belongings. Fashion was part of her former life, when she could still stand, sing, and fly. “Isn’t it strange: / The legs / That made / My rise to glory / Easy, No? / Became / My Downfall / Into Misery! / Queasy, No?”20

  She cleaned her medals and polished her rings. Then there were the many photographs, presents, and letters that she kept looking over, commenting on, and sorting through. Her estate includes large brown envelopes, in no apparent order, on which she noted names and dates with her elegant, straight-up-and-down penmanship. She was critical of her appearance on many photographs, and jotted down, “Is that me?”

  Her walls were covered with photographs of people she loved and those who loved her. Everywhere there were piles of paper and books, and countless newspapers in English, French, and German—Dietrich’s languages. Cartons, boxes, a television set, and a grand piano. The soaring elegance of the city was in evidence here as well. Mirrors, a cream-colored sofa, Louis Vuitton luggage, and silk pillows.

  In 1979 she got a wheelchair, and it became part of the furnishings. In a wheelchair, she could wash herself and sit at the window and look up at the trees. Her future was the next day. When the telephone rang at night, she was taken aback. Her publicly announced retirement had made her fodder for the tabloids. When a photographer found his way into her apartment and took pictures of the defenseless old lady in her wheelchair, she threw a towel over her head—the only form of self-defense she had left.21 From then on, she kept the heavy curtains closed as a safeguard. Her hair was cut short. She was in pain and on medication. Her blood and urine were monitored at regular intervals. Sleeping pills and books helped her make it through the long nights. In addition to her old favorite authors, namely Goethe, Heine, and Rilke, she immersed herself in books by John Updike, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Virginia Woolf, Norman Mailer, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Her book collection, which is now stored in a warehouse in Berlin-Moabit, contains many English and German titles, but very few in French. These books range from volumes of photographs to Hans Fallada, Knut Hamsun, Peter Handke, Erich Kästner, Irmgard Keun, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin, Johannes Mario Simmel, John Steinbeck, and Jakob Wassermann. She liked Michael Jackson, but she also listened to Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt.

  There were days in Dietrich’s “mattress crypt” that were so bleak that even her gallows humor did not help her to rise above them. She was tormented by isolation and hunger. Sundays and holidays were the worst. No one came to see her; no one called. No one went shopping for her, or cooked her a meal. There was no cheese or bread to be found in the kitchen. Luckily, she had a telephone and could order Chinese food. Three years before her death, she began to have food brought to her from the Maison d’Allemagne. Perhaps she was fighting off her vague feeling of homesickness with lentil stew, Teltow turnips, veal sausages, potato salad, and cut-up sweet pancakes with raisins.

  Every year on the eighth of May, she thought about the end of the war and heard the parade on the nearby Champs-Élysées. She was deeply concerned about the crisis in Iraq and the outbreak of the war. She watched the television coverage of Mitterand’s and Bush’s politics. She was haunted by the fear of war. Where would she go if there was war? Back to the States?

  In 1989, Dietrich was appointed Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur and given an honorarium. Congratulations poured in from around the world. Her penmanship in her daily planner evened out, as though to say: Look at me; I’m still worth something. It was the last major event in her life.

  One day the bailiff came to her door. Her rent was in arrears. Could the eighty-six-year-old Dietrich be put out on the street along with her letters from Jean Gabin and her medals for bravery? The city of Paris began to pay her rent, and Commandeur Dietrich could save face.

  She felt she could no longer afford help in the house and she lived alone, typing her letters by herself and leaving the phone off the hook. She could have sold her apartment on Park Avenue in New York, but she was determined to leave a good inheritance for Maria and the grandchildren, as befitted a daughter of a Prussian officer, even if that daughter had been an American movie star. The doctors were making more frequent visits. Dietrich was in pain and no longer wanted to live. She could not commit suicide, because her life insurance would not pay out if she did. She spent her ninetieth birthday alone, as she had in the preceding years. To cheer herself up, she called Billy Wilder and Beate Klarsfeld. Her days were long, dark, and lonely. The German newspaper Bild reported that she lay dying. She continued to make entries in her daily planner in a shaky handwriting. The proud, modern haughtiness that had characterized her penmanship was no longer in evidence. After a second stroke, she could barely speak. She was down to three words: yes, no, and Maria. Her grandson Peter came to her side. He carried her from her bedroom into the parlor.22 She had been washed and dressed in clean clothes for a visit with the doctor. She knew that death was imminent, but she remained calm and collected. Dietrich lay on the couch and looked at the photographs on the wall: her family, lovers, friends, and herself. The last important conversation of her life was a telephone call from Paris to New York, in which Maria told her she would be taking the next plane to see her.

  It was springtime in Paris. Dietrich was alone when she died on May 6, 1992. The Cannes Film Festival would begin the following day. All of France was awash with posters advertising the festival and featuring Dietrich in all her glory as Shanghai Lily.

  The image outlived her; art had prevailed.

  AT THE

  BOTTOM

  OF

  THE SEA

  The dream that had eluded her during Hitler’s lifetime came true in the 1970s: Leni Riefenstahl was an internationally acclaimed artist, traveling to Paris, London, and New York. Now it was not old or new Nazis trying to claim her as one of their own, but rather the artists of pop culture.

  In 1974, she got a surprising offer from the Sunday Times to photograph Mick Jagger and his wife Bianca. The couple was willing to pose for the camera only if Riefenstahl was the photographer. She flew to London and was charmed by these fans. There is a beautiful color photograph in which Jagger, wearing a partially unbuttoned shirt, has flung his arm around a smiling Riefenstahl and is casting a lascivious glance at her. Her beaming expression tells us that she was finally able to eclipse Hitler. Bianca Jagger published an article about her new German friend in Andy Warhol’s Interview, which celebrates Riefenstahl as a brave, determined artist out to prove that a beautiful woman could also be intelligent and successful.1

  The Telluride Film Festival proudly called itself the smallest of the big film festivals, and regarded its artistic mission as seeking out films whose interest was not purely market-driven. Thus the program was not published until the morning of the opening day of the festival, because they did not want participants to come on the basis of name appeal. Telluride brought together Hollywood stars and avant-garde theorists. One of the Festival’s initiators was James Card, who worked closely with Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and Iris Barry of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The cofounder was Tom Luddy of the Pacific Film Archive, which has officially belonged to the University of California, Berkeley since 1971. Luddy in particular was intent on preserving nonprofit avant-garde films. Card and Luddy invited Riefenstahl to Telluride. She was one of the first three artists to be honored there, along with silent-film diva Gloria Swanson and director Francis Ford Coppola, although Paul Kohner had tried to dissuade the latter two from attending the festival and meeting with Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl’s Olympia film and The Blue Light were shown. From then on, she was mentioned in the same breath as internationally renowned film artists, and the 2012 festival featured several of her films:

  Since its inception in 1974, the Telluride Film Festival has paid tribute to numerous influential filmmakers and artists. Gloria Swanson, Francis Ford Coppola and Leni Riefenstahl w
ere the first to be honored, and forty years later the prestigious list has grown to include Pedro Almovar, Claudia Cardinale, George Clooney, Penelope Cruz, Daniel Day-Lewis, Catherine Deneuve, Laura Linney, Clint Eastwood, Colin Firth, Jodie Foster, Stephen Frears, Werner Herzog, Isabelle Huppert, Jack Nicholson, Jean Simmons, Meryl Streep, Tilda Swinton, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Agnès Varda, to name a few.2

  At about the same time that Riefenstahl was photographing the Jaggers, an essay by the young American scholar Peggy Ann Wallace about The Blue Light was published in Image, the journal of the George Eastman House in Rochester. The article was an excerpt from her dissertation about Riefenstahl.3 In reading it, we are astounded at Riefenstahl’s audacity, because we learn that Riefenstahl conjures up the very ghosts that she had shooed away during her liaison with the Nazis. Her Jewish producer, Harry Sokal, whom she had stopped mentioning in 1933, was now presented as her former fiancé. The Jewish screenplay writer Carl Mayer was suddenly part of her old circle of friends, and Béla Balász, communist and Jew, whose name had been deleted from the film poster for The Blue Light in 1938, was now billed as someone who had been an enormous help to her and who had written the dialogue. In 1973, Riefenstahl was portraying The Blue Light just as she had back in 1933, in Struggle in Snow and Ice: as a joint production of young, enthusiastic artists who did not want to bow to the laws of profit and the strictures of the industry, but instead sought to implement their artistic ideas freely and collectively and be their own bosses. And that was not all: The artistic center and head of this troupe was a beautiful woman who was intent on proving that women too could direct films. Because Riefenstahl supposedly feared prejudices against women artists, she stated that the script was based on a legend and did not mention that it had been her own idea. The main impression a reader takes away from Wallace’s essay is that Riefenstahl was a self-confident, avant-garde artist who preferred working in a collective. “The most important factor was the spirit” is a phrase that reveals a great deal about Riefenstahl’s ambitious career strategy.4 If the Goddess of Fortune offered no more than her coat tails, Riefenstahl clung to them tightly, in the 1970s as well as the 1930s. She had no artistic or personal loyalties because she was committed only to her own advancement, and had no qualms about tweaking the truth. In both 1933 and 1973, Riefenstahl was adept at adapting to the spirit of the times. In the 1970s, American feminists, proponents of collective work, and opponents of the film industry saw her as one of their own.