I worried over potential repercussions in Berlin if I went out to entertain the troops. It was an overt declaration I’d not be able to rescind, even if I told myself that no one in my family had been arrested yet and I’d done plenty already to incite it. I couldn’t hide away anymore, not with Hitler intent on ravaging Europe. Though I couldn’t vanquish the fear that my actions might bring harm to my loved ones, I had to take a stand, both as a public personality and as a German. For years, I’d sought to protect my career and my family by remaining silent. I couldn’t do it any longer. If I kept to the sidelines, I would be condoning the very thing I detested, participating in the carnage from afar because I was too frightened to do something.
In early 1944, I went to New York to submit my application for a formal United States Entertainment Organization (USO) permit, following an appearance before twelve hundred soldiers at Fort Meade. I’d finished Kismet for MGM, where I’d performed an unfathomable dance number—my first and last on film—layered in Arabian veils, braided headgear, and enough gilded spray paint to turn my legs green. I worked at the canteen in my costume; Bette scolded me. The fury of servicemen trying to dance with me brought the police in to accuse her of inciting a riot. I’d also taken part in Orson Welles’s magic act for Universal’s all-star picture revue Follow the Boys—a showcase featuring Hollywood talent, in which I did a mesmerizing act, was sawed in half by Orson, and the studio pocketed the screening profits.
Bette fumed. “Those greedy motherfuckers. When the history of this town is written, they’re going down as collaborators. They’d exploit Hitler himself if they could sign him.”
I doubted anyone would bother with how terribly the studios behaved, but I was also so disgusted by the flagrant money grab that it sealed my decision to go off on my own, with Bette’s encouragement and Orson’s blessing to steal his mesmerizing act. Packing up three flesh-colored net gowns designed to be both provocative and practical (no ironing), I went on the road to dazzle soldiers waiting to deploy, their rousing cheers buoying me all the way to Manhattan.
At home, travails with my daughter had resulted in her own departure to live with Rudi and pursue her acting career. Despite my determination to be more attentive and my hope that studying acting would dampen her enthusiasm for it, my long days on the set and nights at the canteen had left me unaware of her precipitous affair with a fellow student until she proclaimed her engagement. Nothing I said made a difference; they went ahead despite my protests, though I deemed him a mediocre talent with no future and doubted Heidede truly loved him. She seemed lost, confused; again, I blamed myself. But she was obstinate, like me; and on principle alone, Rudi and I did not attend the wedding. I did go to their apartment after they left on their honeymoon, however, ordering some of my furniture brought from storage (I still lived in my crammed bungalow) and arranging it after I scrubbed everything from windowsills to floors. In my apron and scarf, without makeup, the building manager thought I was a maid and gave me a two-dollar tip, suggesting I could find extra work with the other tenants. I thought Mutti would be proud that I’d apparently not forgotten how to properly wax a floor.
Six months later, Heidede, or Maria, as she now wanted to be called, rejecting her childhood name, admitted her marriage had been a mistake. She petitioned for a divorce; when I questioned her, she said flatly, “I don’t want to talk about it. It never happened.”
Rudi and I encouraged her to pursue her studies in New York. She’d never escape my shadow in Hollywood, and stage training, we told her, was essential to the rigors of the craft, even if we both had our misgivings over her hopes for a career in the midst of a world war.
But I understood her silence, because the reason I hadn’t taken to Broadway was something I didn’t want to talk about. The offer to star in a play titled One Touch of Venus should have filled me with joy. The producers courted me; Kurt Weill, he of the gloomy disposition in Paris but now happily employed in America, was the composer. The role was ideal—a statue of Venus comes to life, only to discover that mortal life isn’t what she envisioned. Weill was enthusiastic during the visit to woo me. Everything had been conceived with my talents in mind. “You never recorded what I wrote for you in Paris,” he said. “But now, you’ll have many songs and will be the toast of Broadway.”
Many songs, I learned, were too many. I knew it the moment I attempted the score. In addition to mastering Weill’s convoluted music, I’d not been on an actual stage in fifteen years, and the part required a vocal range I’d never had. It was also too seductive, even for me. I wasn’t Lola-Lola anymore, much as I might feign otherwise. Weill was enraged. I insisted I had a war duty to undertake, and they hired Mary Martin instead, who brought down the house.
I didn’t regret it. While waiting for FBI clearance on my USO assignment, I received a telegram from Gabin. He was in Algiers, his passage to France delayed. He’d joined a tank regiment of the Free French of course; Nazi tanks were prized Allied targets. “Grande,” he wired, “I am happy.” I had no way to send word back to him, his wire routed through several clearances so that it had taken weeks to reach me, but I was elated that he had thought of me.
I stayed with Rudi and Tamara, saw Maria settled in her new academy, and, buoyed by the news from Gabin, began rehearsals with my accompanist, Danny Thomas, a comedian from the nightclub circuit. He taught me how to engage a temperamental audience; how to make the material seem spontaneous; and, most important, how to perform without cameras and lights. Broadway might have been too challenging but I’d been playing Dietrich all my life. As for the act itself, composed of my greatest hits, all I had to do was remember Bette’s canteen.
On April 2, 1944 (under the designation Major Dietrich in the unlikely case I was captured and required military treatment), my troupe boarded a C-54 transport with a platoon of new soldiers. It was the first aircraft I’d been on; not until we were aloft was our destination disclosed.
We were going to Casablanca, in Morocco.
I considered it a good omen.
IV
Electrical storms jolting the plane caused my troupe to cluster in misery, while the soldiers suddenly looked as if they wished they’d never enlisted. I’d packed a flask of cognac to keep warm, having been forewarned that the plane would be cold. Danny puked it up, but I got pleasantly drunk and distracted the soldiers with tales of my days in Berlin, singing for them as the plane veered and swooped, and anything not strapped down slid across the floor. Twenty-two hours later, after two fueling stops in Greenland and the Azores, we touched down on a pitch-black tarmac in pitch-black Casablanca, where Allied forces fought off Nazi air raids.
Slight chaos ensued when the officers in charge discovered who we were. A mistake in USO scheduling meant there was no place to lodge us. After hurried consultations on the tarmac as Danny and I nervously eyed the bomb strikes flashing on the horizon, we were escorted to a nearby empty barracks, closer to the soldiers than was permitted by regulations.
Our accommodation was a pit—dirty, smelly, with bunk beds as hard as planks, and no latrine. My troupe, composed of Danny, an accordionist, and a piano player, was wretched, exhausted from the trip and clearly wondering what kind of hell we’d signed up for. I tidied the place, took a bunk, and used my satchel packed with my gowns and makeup case as a pillow.
I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep. At last, I was about to do something worthwhile.
The next day, bouncing around in a Red Cross convoy truck, we drove along pitted, dust-choked roads to Rabat and Tangiers, where we did two shows a day for weary masses of men. We were a hit; they’d not seen anything like me before, with my sequined gowns and quick banter, but Danny warned that we shouldn’t rest on our laurels.
“These are the reserves. The guys are so bored, they’d cheer King Kong. Wait until Algiers. We’re scheduled to perform in the opera house there before over a thousand Allied soldiers, and I hear they’re a tough crowd. They threw frankfurters at Josephine Baker.”
> Frankfurters and sauerkraut, I discovered, along with some unidentifiable canned meat, were the cuisine of choice when we could get it. Otherwise, it was gruel and soda crackers.
In Algiers, which was partially submerged in rubble, the shell-pocked opera house was packed to the rafters with men from all the Allied nations—soldiers who had fought, suffered losses, and were very demanding of suitable entertainment.
Danny and I had spruced up the act to include an element of surprise. But when he first bounded onto the stage in his rumpled tuxedo, two thousand angry voices derided him for not wearing a uniform. “Uniform?” he quipped. “Are you nuts? Haven’t you heard there’s a war?”
He broke the tension. As laughter erupted, he went on, “Marlene Dietrich was supposed to be here tonight, but an American officer pulled rank for her . . . services.”
The sudden silence confirmed that the men had no idea who’d been scheduled. Then, as more jeering boos were flung at Danny, I cried out from the back, “No. Wait. I’m here,” and I ran down the aisle in my military uniform, fleece-lined cap on my head and suitcase in hand. Onstage, I removed one of my gowns from the suitcase and began to undress.
The boys howled. Yanking me behind a tattered screen, Danny made suggestive eyes at the panting audience until I emerged minutes later in my gown.
Their cheering must have echoed all the way to Berlin.
I launched into “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.” As I sang, I felt them, all of them, leaning hungrily toward me in their seats. That surge of warmth, of raw adulation, was so tangible, so intoxicating, it was unlike anything I’d felt before. After four songs, playing my Viennese saw, and another costume change, I had them shouting and whistling in cacophonous rapture, and my voice was hoarse. Twice, an air-raid siren sent everyone hurtling to the ground, with Danny throwing himself so forcefully on top of me to shield me from the expected blast that I hissed, “Stop protecting me. You’re going to chip my teeth.”
Our mesmerizing act was a mess. The boys kept yelling at me to sing more until I finally went down among them, ignoring Danny’s worried attempt to keep me onstage. Sidling along the jammed aisles and pausing now and then to meet a pair of lustful eyes, I sang “Falling in Love Again,” my voice breaking, my own eyes spilling over with unabashed emotion.
I was falling in love again, for the fourth and most enduring time in my life.
I fell in love with legions I’d never met, flung across trenches and the pillaged cities of Europe, with their courage and strength, their indefatigable resolve to rid us of peril.
And they must fall in love with me.
Hours later, after signing autographs, giving lipstick-smeared kisses, lifting my gown to display my legs while posing with GIs who smothered me in their arms for candid shots, I returned to my lodgings, as limp as a wet rag, every nerve in my body pulsating.
Danny remarked, “I guess that went better than I thought.”
It was the understatement of the year.
The next morning, a general accompanied me to visit the infirmary. On endless rows of cots, I beheld such a horror of missing limbs, blinded eyes, wounds, and putrefaction that I nearly gagged. But the gratitude and feeble joy I found in those pain-twisted faces, the clasping of my hand as I leaned over them to hear them whisper, “Are you the real Marlene Dietrich?” filled me with equal anguish and resolve. These boys were dying for us. They were our saviors. What I’d endured, what I thought had been hardship—I had no idea.
Then one of them, a cherubic Brit whose left forearm had been blown off, told me, “Go over there, in the back ward. They’re Nazis and you speak German. I bet they’d like to see you.”
I froze for a moment. Then as I looked up at the general, he said, “Prisoners of war and in no better shape. You don’t have to, Miss Dietrich. Your convoy is due to leave in an hour.”
“No,” I said, surprising myself. “I . . . I want to see them.”
What did I expect to find? Monsters with skulls on their caps, leering from black sheets? I couldn’t say, but as I neared the ward separating them from the others, guarded by soldiers with guns, I found more boys—pale, wasted boys with shocking white bandages covering severed arms and legs, masking burnt faces and clutching, scarred hands.
I stopped by a cot. The Nazi looking up at me couldn’t have been older than nineteen.
“What is your name?” I asked, hearing those nearby struggling upright to stare.
“Hans,” he said faintly. The entire right side of his face was mangled; morphine dripped into his arm, but he was coherent, aware of me. I detected fear, as any German soldier must feel, but also his ragged humanity, the bewilderment of a young man ordered to fight for country and honor, without understanding what that fight would entail.
“Hello, Hans.” I touched his hand. “Ich bin Marlene.”
“The actress?” piped up a voice from a cot behind me. I turned to him—dark haired, with a rash of pimples on his cheeks, sad green eyes, and both legs amputated above the knees. The long tube dripping blood into his arm was brutally red against his pallor.
I nodded.
All of a sudden, he began to warble. I recognized the lyrics at once, from the first war—a song about a soldier yearning for his lost love:
“Outside the barracks, by the corner light,
I’ll always stand and wait for you at night.
We will create a world for two.
I’ll wait for you, the whole night through,
Lili Marleen. For you, Lili Marleen . . .”
And as the boy’s voice faded, the echo of the lyrics moved through me, and his haunted green eyes met mine as he said, “They told us we couldn’t sing it anymore. After Stalingrad, Goebbels declared it unpatriotic.” He smiled wistfully. “But I always liked it. And the Allies . . . I think they might like it, too, fräulein.”
I managed to whisper, “Yes. I believe they would.”
At our next stop, in Tunis, I sang “Lili Marleen” for the first time.
I would continue to sing it until we were free.
V
While waiting to cross into Italy, a detachment of tanks run by the Free French rumbled onto the dock. I heard men talking in French and bounded from my jeep, wildly searching the stolid iron monsters around me. “Gabin?” I asked every man I saw. “Is the actor Jean Gabin here?”
Finally, one of them pointed. “Over there, mademoiselle,” and I saw him, clambering out of his tank. I ran toward him. As I neared, he called out, “What are you doing here?”
“I’m going to war like you,” I cried back. “I want to kiss you.”
He laughed as I plunged into his arms. “Ma Grande,” he murmured, stroking my matted hair under my cap. “You are insane. Where are my paintings and my accordion?”
“In storage.” I drew back, staring into his eyes. He looked exhausted, battle worn, but he looked like himself again, too. “If you ever want to see them again, you must kiss me first.”
He hesitated, until the men surrounding us started to cheer, and then he did kiss me—a quick, hard kiss on the lips.
“I think we must,” he said, and I caressed his face. “Yes, we must.”
We had an hour together before he departed. He held my hand and we sat quietly by his tank, the coalescing of our fingers enough to keep his curious comrades from approaching, although throughout my tour, soldiers had delighted in showing me photographs of their sweethearts back home, tattered shots of pretty girls that they carried around like shields. When we said good-bye, Gabin embraced me, still without a word. As I watched the huge landing ship swallow up his tanks like a whale and churn out to sea, I whispered a prayer for his safety.
I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. But somehow, it no longer mattered.
We had both found a cause more important than ourselves.
IT WAS MUD SWAMPED or arid, freezing cold and blazing hot, bloody and harsh, cruel and remorseless. It was not limousines or red carpets or shriekin
g fans. It was not anything any human being or animal should ever endure. I determined to never complain.
I had to abandon my luggage and makeup case, leaving them behind as our struggle to traverse Italy crammed us into ever-smaller trucks. I tore one of my gowns during a performance and left it hanging, like a flag, on an ashen tree. I caught dysentery from putrid water and found lice crawling in my pubic hair; a GI gave me a stinging antiseptic lotion and advised me to shave.
In Naples, we had a brief respite. On the balcony of a house commandeered for me, I reclined naked to sunbathe. I was later told that soldiers raced to every available rooftop in the area, braving sniper fire to catch a glimpse of me. Had I known, I would have stood up.
Near the medieval city of Cassino, we got separated from our convoy. We drove around for hours, lost in a scorched landscape punctured by back roads and dead livestock. As night fell over a nectarine sky torched by the Allied onslaught against the Nazis holed up in a monastic enclosure, refusing to surrender, we camped. Huddled together for warmth and scraping our tins for whatever we could ingest, afterward we went in pairs behind the thornbushes to empty our watery bowels. In the distance, we could hear the booming of a 240-millimeter howitzer mobile gun pulverizing the monastery and most of the adjoining city.
“The most effective diet I’ve been on,” I told Danny as he groaned, crouching beside me. “I’ll be a sylph for my next picture.”
“God, Marlene.” He winced. “How can you joke at a time like this?”
“What else is there to do? If I start crying, I might never stop.”
A detachment of French soldiers found us the next morning. As they rattled up in their battered truck and surrounded us, guns at the ready, I called out, “Je suis Marlene Dietrich.”
One of the soldiers chortled, “If you’re Marlene Dietrich, I’m General Eisenhower.”
Striding to him with a flashlight, I shone it under my chin, sucking in my cheekbones and arching my eyebrow. The effect must have been skeletal, as I’d lost so much weight, but he turned white. “Mon Dieu, c’est vrai.”
Marlene: A Novel Page 34
