Blue Angel (37 page)

Aachen, twenty miles from Maastricht, had been the first large German city to fall (on October 20, 1944); it was on the route to
Berlin when the Allies and Dietrich’s USO camp arrived at the end of January 1945. Acting now as interpreter for the American army, she was asked to tell the frightened inhabitants to evacuate the streets so that tanks could move through; to her surprise, she received a warm welcome from these Germans: “they couldn’t have been friendlier, even though they knew I was on the other side.” But Aachen bestowed another, less clement memory, for there the entire company contracted an infestation of body lice. With no showers, soap or medicine, the situation was grim until Dietrich selected a soldier from her audience and, to the accompanying hoots of his comrades, asked that he report later to her tent behind the truck. The young man’s subsequent report to his waiting friends has not been documented, but he was only invited to offer Marlene Dietrich delousing powder and instructions for its use.

The next stop was Stolberg, a few miles from Aachen, where she met a correspondent with the International News Service. “I am through with Hollywood,” she told reporter Frank Conniff, perhaps more from her doubts about her career possibilities than from a settled moral conviction about Hollywood. Gazing at the wreckage of the city, she added, “I hate to see all these ruined buildings, but I guess Germany deserves everything that’s coming to her.”

F
ROM
F
EBRUARY THROUGH
J
UNE
1945, D
IETRICH
shuttled from Germany to Paris, alternating shows for both Allied and enemy wounded soldiers with long intervals at the Ritz, usually with Patton. And that spring, through Hemingway, she scored an important strategic victory for herself and ultimately for her mother. Because Patton then proceeded eastward through the Saar toward Berlin and the USO was deployed on a slower, more circuitous route, his contact with Dietrich was subsequently diminished. In fact he was replaced, for her attention was then lavished almost exclusively on General Gavin, and their affair affected both lives in important ways.

In 1945, James M. Gavin was a slim, six-foot-two-inch, dark-haired, boyish gentleman who looked almost a decade younger than his thirty-seven years. The youngest general in the history of
the army, Gavin had lied about his birthdate to enter military service without a high school diploma, and from his first years with the army he impressed superiors with his thorough dedication and serene, methodical approach to supervising men and solving problems. Zealous in his duty as a paratrooper, he commanded the parachute combat team that first invaded Sicily in 1943, and by the time he landed at Normandy on D-Day had risen to the rank of brigadier general and soon commanded the entire 82nd Airborne Division. Because he was known to be a man of extraordinary valor (he fought for a month with a broken back, earning himself the Silver Cross and the Purple Heart), and because his military prowess was combined with a gentle, courtly manner, women—and some men as well—found him fascinating, even seductive. As Barney Oldfield recalled, “Gavin was a very glamorous figure, not only respected but much talked about by everyone. Many strong-minded women, including Mary Welsh and Marlene, were attracted to him.”

Dietrich and Gavin met when Hemingway invited the general for drinks at the Ritz and Dietrich was among the guests—to the chagrin of Mary Welsh, with whom (as Barney Oldfield recalled) Dietrich had an immediate standoff for Gavin’s attention. The Dietrich-Gavin affair, conducted with the utmost discretion, began that night in Gavin’s suite and continued when Dietrich followed him back to Germany. Although for obvious reasons he made no explicit reference to Dietrich in his later account of that time, Gavin did describe an allusive incident in his book
On to Berlin
. As the 82nd was taking German soldiers prisoner, his men found a concertina and sang the German tune “Lili Marlene,” which—although as familiar to Allies as to the enemy—had become, at Gavin’s insistence, the anthem of the 82nd Airborne Division.

There were several reasons for Dietrich’s attraction to Gavin. Because she was close to him, as she was to Patton and Hemingway and a number of journalists and correspondents, she shared the knowledge of Operation Eclipse, the Allied plan to storm Berlin—a strategy which was to feature Gavin’s 82nd Airborne Division (and a tactic which was eventually abandoned). Since Gavin was to be the first commanding officer entering the German capital, he would be the man Dietrich could enlist in the search for her mother. Ever
conscious of the power of her glamour and allure, Dietrich was certainly willing to exploit them in this matter.

There had always been a distant antagonism between the bombastic, egocentric Patton and the sedate, reserved Gavin. “Patton seemed to be getting all the publicity,” Gavin wrote years later, “[but] the record now shows that it was the First Army [not Patton’s Third] that took the brunt of [the German attack on Bastogne] . . . Yet when
Stars and Stripes
arrived daily, it was full of stories about Patton and his Third Army and how the defenders at Bastogne [not the counteroffensive First Army] were winning the Battle of the Bulge.”

The younger general could not have been displeased, therefore, to find himself the object of Marlene Dietrich’s ardor under any circumstances, and his resentment of Patton may have added to the satisfaction of his affair with her. And on Dietrich’s side there was even more complexity, for in associating with the generals she was in a sense rediscovering the aloof officers of her childhood—her own uniformed father and stepfather—whose emotional endorsement she had long ago been denied.

G
ERMANY SURRENDERED ON
M
AY
7,
AND MOST
USO shows were disbanded by the end of June. After a sojourn in New York that summer, Dietrich returned to Paris, where Gavin contacted her with the news she had so long awaited. He, Colonel Oldfield and Lieutenant Colonel Albert McCleery were in the first American column to enter Berlin on July 1. While Gavin and Oldfield saw, respectively, to military and communications matters, McCleery located Wilhelmina Dietrich von Losch at the address Marlene had left with Gavin. Frightened, living in desperate poverty with an older sister, Wilhelmina did not at first understand McCleery’s news; indeed, because Goebbels had put out the fiction that London was totally destroyed, she presumed that her daughter (whose propaganda broadcasts she had heard) had been killed.

Oldfield then arrived with a car, an interpreter and two photographers. Wilhelmina was gently persuaded to accompany them to the Tempelhof airfield where, on September 19, Dietrich arrived on
the military shuttle flight from Paris. The airplane door opened and she stepped out carrying a briefcase and her musical saw, her uniform crisply pressed. After a tearful reunion, mother and daughter spent several days together, and through Gavin the most liberal rations were sent to Frau von Losch. Ten days later, Dietrich—obviously emboldened—directly approached the formidable Marshal Georgi Zhukov, commander-in-chief of the Russian occupying forces in Berlin, at his headquarters. Rudi Sieber’s parents, she had learned, were interned in a Czech camp. After a long private meeting, Zhukov arranged for the Siebers to be relocated to Berlin and given hospitality appropriate to the family of the international star; generous ration cards were supplied to them, too.

The reunion of Dietrich and her mother happened none too soon, for Wilhelmina’s health was frail and that autumn she declined rapidly. Finally, in Friedenau, the American sector of Berlin, she died in her sleep of heart failure on November 6 at the age of sixty-nine. From Paris, where she received the news, Dietrich at once telephoned Gavin, who was then attending an important press reception in London. Because of the strict regulations regarding non-fraternization between Americans and Germans, Gavin himself departed at once for Berlin with Barney Oldfield, to supervise the funeral details. But their plane encountered a blinding storm and they had to set down at Schweinfurt instead of Templehof.

At that point, Gavin received bad news of his own: the
IOIST
Division had been selected over his now legendary 82nd as the regular army’s postwar airborne unit (a decision later rescinded). This immediately involved Gavin in a flurry of calls, interviews and memoranda. He had not, however, forgotten the reason for his trip to Berlin: “Do everything you can for her,” he said quietly to Barney Oldfield before hurrying to attend to his own complicated business. That night, Wilhelmina’s coffin was carried from her apartment to a small cemetery, where Oldfield hurriedly arranged for a grave. Finally, Dietrich arrived from Paris, accompanied by William Walton. The final formalities were brief. “Miss Dietrich was heartbroken and wept constantly,” Barney Oldfield remembered.

13: 1945–1949

A
FTER SHE RETURNED FROM
G
ERMANY TO
H
OL
lywood at the war’s end, Marlene Dietrich was the guest of Orson Welles and his wife Rita Hayworth, at their home on Carmelina Drive in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Several film projects failed to reach even serious negotiations with Dietrich, and for several weeks she turned to managing the household chores and social calendar. After a few hints and then a blunt request, she prevailed on Welles to arrange an introduction to Greta Garbo, whom she had seen only from afar and longed to meet. According to him, Dietrich simply adored Garbo; others had the impression that she wanted to see how Garbo looked after several years’ absence from the screen, and that she also wanted to meet the woman whom Mercedes de Acosta had once loved, perhaps because Dietrich’s affair with de Acosta was also history by this time.

And so a party was arranged, at the home of Clifton Webb in Beverly Hills. Welles introduced the two women, and Dietrich gushed that she was thrilled, calling Garbo divine, a goddess, an
immortal muse and inspiration. Garbo, who hated flattery as much as crowds, managed only a tight smile and a curt acknowledgment designed to end the conversation, but Dietrich persisted, her praise rising like religious veneration. Garbo, too, persisted, replying nothing but muttering distracted thanks until the exhausted worshiper finally withdrew. En route back to Carmelina Drive later that evening, Dietrich said to Welles, “Her feet aren’t as big as they say.” But the topic was not closed. Over drinks at the house, she insisted that, contrary to popular lore, Garbo certainly did wear makeup: “She has beaded eyelashes! Do you know how long it takes to have your eyelashes beaded?” Welles had no idea, but the matter was not further explored. In any case, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo had met at last; there is no evidence they ever did again.

B
Y
C
HRISTMAS
1945, L
A
D
IETRICH WAS IN
P
ARIS
with Jean Gabin. The war had aged him: his hair had gone to grey, he had gained too much weight despite military service, the facial lines were deep, and his normally dour expression seemed graver. She, however, kept her hair a lustrous, lacquered blond and her waistline slim, and the few lines round her mouth and eyes were artfully concealed with the best cosmetics. Gabin looked at least a decade older than forty-one, while Dietrich seemed five years younger than forty-four.

Their disparate appearances would perhaps have been meanly discussed in Hollywood, but in postwar Paris Dietrich and Gabin made an attractive Continental couple. “She is the only married actress whose romance is discussed openly by columnists, magazine writers and herself,” noted an American reporter. “There is nothing hush-hush about her and Gabin. She is married to Rudolf Sieber, but they have an understanding. So much so that he has accompanied her on dates with Gabin.” It was still to Rudi’s advantage to make himself agreeable, of course, since the bulk of his income came from Dietrich’s career (however inactive).

Thus happily reunited but each without work, Gabin and Dietrich decided to look for a movie they could make together to subsidize her protracted sojourn in Paris. To the rescue came the
great Marcel Carné, who had directed Gabin in two prewar pictures and during the war had made
Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)
, which was, then and forever after, generally regarded as one of the finest films of all time. With his screenwriter Jacques Prévert, Carné was preparing a kind of fatalist, allegorical romance about occupied Paris called
Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of Night)
, whose leading roles he immediately offered to Dietrich and Gabin.

In her statements to the press in 1945 and 1946, she insisted her USO tours had taught her much about “real life,” about courage and commitment, life and death and basic values. Dietrich said she could never return to Hollywood and her former custom of glamorous moviemaking. This was an appetizing morsel of self-promotion designed to suggest the New Dietrich, changed and chastened by the horror of war, and America swallowed it whole. But as Carné recalled, it certainly did not alter her approach to her first postwar film project in January 1946:

Marlene had stipulated in her contract that she would not have to do the picture until she had approved the script, and she began to review it with us, scene by scene. She was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic and began to make a thousand suggestions—each one of which seemed, to Jacques and me, utterly absurd. One example: she wanted to play a night scene completely out of character, descending from a cab and paying the driver by taking the money from the top of her stocking!

Director and writer stood firm, and not even Gabin could convince Dietrich that her role as a benighted wife in war-torn Paris simply must not be prettified. She was equally adamant, and so—“deeply hurt at seeing her talent misunderstood” (thus Carné, with light sarcasm)—she refused to do the picture.

Within days (before the end of February), producer Marc Pelletier contacted her with an alternative project, to be directed by Georges Lacombe.
Martin Roumagnac
was based on a novel about a high-class prostitute whose passionate affair with her building contractor ends when he learns about her profession, kills her, stands trial, and is then murdered by one of her former lovers. Neither the
actors nor the director could enliven the dreary script, and when the film was released (in America as
The Room Upstairs)
it was dismissed as a languid, unconvincing bundle of clichés, notable only for the many shots of Dietrich’s legs and the Sternbergian lighting—all of this unofficially supervised by herself. But she was consoled for its failure by her fee, which was then the equivalent of
100,000.