Authors: Donald Spoto
B
UT SOON
D
OUGLAS
F
AIRBANKS
, J
R
.,
GREW WEARY
of being a rival for her time and attention—“not only from the more assured and intellectual Erich Maria Remarque,” as he admitted, “but [also when I discovered] some intense love letters from
someone I’d never heard of.” The writer of these passionate documents was none other than Mercedes de Acosta, with whom Dietrich was of course still involved (most often at de Acosta’s home in Brentwood once or twice a week, and sometimes for weekends at a Santa Barbara hotel). Fairbanks confronted Dietrich with the letters, and she was as resentful of his prying as he was of her bisexual philandering. Harsh words were exchanged, the relationship swiftly began to cool, and by spring 1940 Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., ended an affair that had blazed brightly for almost four years. After the war, a less complicated, platonic friendship resumed.
On the other hand, Dietrich’s relationship with Remarque was unaffected by the de Acosta affair, perhaps because his earlier years in Germany had familiarized him with a more freewheeling lifestyle. As a student of human nature, he found Dietrich an endlessly fascinating conundrum as well as an admiring and attentive mistress. Sometimes he viewed her, as he told their friend Stefan Lorant, rather like a “sailor’s daughter,” an unsubtle woman of roaring ardor; when she wished, however, she was “[the goddess] Diana of the woods, with a silver bow—invulnerable, cool and fatal.”
But whatever his sexual enthrallment, Remarque accepted the paradox of Dietrich’s attachment even while he knew of her inconstancy. Perhaps the most perceptive and reflective among her men, he also recognized the difference between sexual passion and commitment, and Marlene Dietrich (he soon realized) was proficient at the former but apparently incapable of the latter; she was entirely a creature of whim and of the moment. Nevertheless, he became (like Fairbanks before him) a complaisant lover, and as permanent witness to this he left an encoded account of their romance in the novel he was writing at this time—
Arch of Triumph
. (Much altered,
Arch of Triumph
became a rather dewy 1947 romantic film starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.) The published book bore no dedication, but Dietrich knew it was hers.
Set in Paris and on the Riviera in 1938 and 1939, the narrative concerns a German refugee surgeon named Ravic (surrogate for Remarque) and his tortured affair with an enigmatic cabaret actress and occasional film star named Joan Madou (Dietrich), who is described as pale and detached, “an exciting and forlorn beauty [with]
high brows . . . [and] a face whose openness was its secret. It neither hid nor revealed anything. It promised nothing and thereby everything.” Joan is “sometimes superstitious . . . and she was everything that enticement and temptation could give without love.” One scene neatly synthesized the author’s ambivalent feelings about Dietrich:
“Joan,” he said slowly, and wanted to say something entirely different, “it is good that you are here.”
She looked at him.
He took her hands. “You understand what that means? More than a thousand other words . . .”
She nodded. Suddenly her eyes were filled with tears. “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “I know.”
“That’s not true,” Ravic replied, and knew that she was right.
“No, nothing at all,” she said. “You must love me, beloved. That’s all.”
He did not answer.
“You must love me,” she repeated. “Otherwise I’m lost.”
Lost, he thought. What a word! How easily she uses it. Who is really lost does not talk . . . He knew their love would not endure, that it would become the stale vinegar of dead passion. It would not last.
Arch of Triumph
did not reach its final form until 1945, long after the Remarque-Dietrich affair had ended; it has both the luxuriant guilt and the tainted wistfulness often found in novels that are simultaneously defensive and sealed with the author’s regret for a failed romance. Even while Ravic and Joan Madou manage to visit every colorful locale frequented by their real-life models, the wine of their love indeed turns sour. The protagonist resents both his mistress’s free love life and his own fierce passion for her. At the conclusion of
Arch of Triumph
, Remarque the benighted lover clearly inspired Remarque the professional fantasist: just as his affair with Dietrich ended when she invited actor Jean Gabin to live with her, so the actress Joan cavalierly moves to a jealous new lover—who finally
shoots her. Ravic is summoned, but even his medical skill cannot save her, and she dies in his arms, begging forgiveness. The book remains valuable as a testimony of Remarque’s tortured, ambivalent feelings for Dietrich. But judged even according to the most lenient literary standard,
Arch of Triumph
is bloodless, ersatz Hemingway; to call it unremarkable would be high praise.
T
HE FIRST RENAISSANCE OF
D
IETRICH
’
S CAREER HAD
been inspired by Josef von Sternberg in 1930, but Joe Pasternak was now responsible for the second revival of her career. Audiences loved Dietrich’s rough-and-tumble humor in a musical western, and critics admired her complete abandonment to a self-contained satire on her own demimondaine image.
Destry Rides Again
could have been marketed as
Dietrich Rides Again
.
She had, therefore, good reason for optimism at the start of 1940. The principal witness to this was Remarque, “one of the first refugees who benefited from my protection,” she said rather loftily. Remarque took a room at the Beverly Hills Hotel near Dietrich’s bungalow, where she lived with Maria, whom Rudi and Tamara had delivered to California before returning to settle for several years in New York (where he worked at Paramount’s East Coast office). In such proximity to the glumly adoring Remarque, Dietrich could easily be very protective indeed.
Contrary to her mother’s good fortunes, Maria was enduring a most unhappy period in her life. Although she had never lacked life’s material necessities and had been pampered with gifts and good times by her father and (when work and affairs permitted) by her mother, Maria felt she could neither please her nor ever compare favorably with her—could never, in other words, really be worthy of so famous and glamorous a parent. “The greatest compliment ever paid to me,” Dietrich said at the time, “was ‘You spoil your daughter.’ ” But as usual the spoiling was not entirely beneficial. Dressed in miniature versions of her mother’s elegant clothes, she was from the start groomed for beauty and fame; she had even been taught something about makeup and costumes the day she filmed her scene
as young Sophia in
The Scarlet Empress
. Thenceforth, as she grew, Maria was (always with the excuse of economy) given her mother’s cast-off designer clothing.
As playwright Enid Bagnold wrote in
The Chalk Garden
, “An only child is never twelve.” For Maria Sieber, the years between twelve and seventeen were unnaturally desolate, with her father rarely present and her mother courting both her career and a small platoon of lovers. Imprudently, always offering the fear of kidnapping as reason enough, Dietrich kept her daughter home from traditional schools and engaged private tutors, thus effectively depriving the girl of normal socialization. “I had no friends my own age, and I was never permitted to leave the grounds,” Maria later said wistfully. “Bodyguards were the only friends I had.”
The outcome was perhaps predictable. By age fifteen, in spring 1940, Maria was bearing—to the point of almost seventy excess pounds—the burden of a lonely and troubled adolescence. Her sudden and alarming weight gain (to almost two hundred by the following year) may have derived from a subtle refusal to wear her mother’s clothes and thus be a mini-Marlene, as well as from her sense of social isolation.
“I was always self-conscious because of my mother’s beauty,” Maria acknowledged later. “She was so beautiful that it always gave me a feeling of ugliness and unworthiness. All my life I suffered because I was terribly overweight and I felt my mother [was] ashamed of me . . . I got fat because my childhood was miserable.” In this regard, Dietrich’s failure to seek medical treatment or counselling for Maria is (notwithstanding her evident good intentions) not hard to understand. Actresses who depend professionally on their beauty cannot, as their children mature, deny the truth of their own inevitable aging—whatever the extent of nature’s gifts or a surgeon’s cosmetic remedies. More to the point, an unattractive daughter is no threat to a mother’s primacy. The pattern has nothing to do with malevolence; such is often the garden variety of parent-child rivalry.
“Mother and I were never like mother and daughter,” Maria added. “As I matured, I was often taken for her sister—an older
sister, because I was so heavy. I have always felt the older one in our relationship.” Dietrich, on the other hand, was quite oblivious to any difficulty. With no awareness of her condescending irony, she remarked that year, “Maria is as American as a colored girl.”
The problem became more poignant throughout 1940 and 1941, when Maria—obviously feeling unattractive, unwanted and unloved—for a time seemed to harbor an alarming death wish. At first her obsession was merely academic, as she immersed herself in books about cancer, tuberculosis, infantile paralysis and all sorts of life-threatening illnesses. But then she began to speak occasionally of taking her own life, in which mood she wrote a morose little lyric she handed to her mother:
A man who was committing suicide
Said, as his feet left the earth
Which had grown too small for him:
“How soon shall I regret this?”
Dietrich, seeing only her daughter’s inchoate lyric gifts, proudly showed the quatrain to Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker (whose own grim sensibilities were perfectly matched to the young poet’s); they only remarked on the child’s gravity.
But Maria never acted out her darkest fantasies; instead, she began to take an interest in the theater. Her life had little comfort or stability until she contracted her second marriage (at the age of twenty-two) and began her own career. “Mommy grows younger and more beautiful every year,” she said when still young, “[but] I never felt good enough for her.”
During the summer of 1940, Mommy (then thirty-eight) was certainly considered beautiful and popular enough by executives at Universal that, when Joe Pasternak asked for her to star in another comedy, she was readily signed at twice the salary of
Destry Rides Again
. Pasternak had commissioned writers John Meehan and Harry Tugend to capitalize on the success of
Destry
and Dietrich’s self-satire by constructing a spoof of the Sadie Thompson–South Seas epic subgenre. Accordingly they created the role of “Bijou Blanche,” a torch singer of benevolent ill repute who floats from
island to island, following and wreaking havoc among the fleet. They all arrive at a gin joint called—thus the film’s title—
Seven Sinners
, on the fictitious island of Boni Komba, a name contributed by Dietrich and inspired by her nickname for Remarque. Among the latest naval arrivals is a tall, handsome lieutenant (John Wayne) who almost loses his career for her sake; they part, and Bijou returns to a boozy ship’s doctor and a wandering life.
Pasternak and director Tay Garnett suggested the rugged, six-feet-four-inch John Wayne to play Dietrich’s leading man. Although Wayne, a contract player at the B studio called Republic Pictures, had made more than eighty films since 1927, he had just appeared in
Stagecoach
and was on the brink of his mythic stardom. But his salary was still merely four hundred dollars a week, and he was supporting a wife and children. Wanting Dietrich’s approval, Garnett invited Wayne to the Universal commissary for lunch and arranged for Dietrich to walk casually nearby to assess him. “With that wonderful floating walk,” according to the director, “Dietrich passed Wayne as if he were invisible, then paused, made a half-turn and cased him from cowlick to cowboots, then turned to me and whispered, ‘Oh, Daddy, buy me
that!
’ ”
According to John Wayne’s third wife, Pilar (not married to him at that time), the subsequent developments were sheer Dietrich. Wayne was invited for a private conference in her Universal dressing room one day that June, after a session of wardrobe fittings for
Seven Sinners
. Dietrich dismissed the others, closed and locked the door and fixed a provocative look on Wayne while slowly asking the time. Answering her own question, she then lifted her skirt, and there, encircling her upper thigh, was a black garter with a watch. She noted the time, slowly lowered her skirt and glided toward Wayne, whispering, “It’s very early, darling. We have plenty of time.” That afternoon began one of the most intense affairs of their lives, “one that wouldn’t burn itself out for three years,” as Pilar Wayne knew: “Dietrich was more than an ideal bedmate. She was the first person in the film industry, excepting John Ford, to tell Duke that she believed in him . . . Dietrich made Duke feel like a man again, both in bed and on the sound stage.”
During the two months of shooting
Seven Sinners
that summer of
1940, Hollywood insiders soon knew that Marlene Dietrich had made an important conquest. While Erich Maria Remarque sat in his hotel room nursing his romantic wounds and forcing the typescript of
Arch of Triumph
, his inamorata was photographed all over town with John Wayne, whose estranged (but not legally separated) wife, Josephine, began to make a noise that eventually terminated her marriage. The press not only documented Dietrich and Wayne at the Brown Derby, at the Mocambo, the Trocadero and at the beach; it was also announced that Dietrich had taken Wayne’s financial future in hand, introducing him to her own business manager, a Swedish immigrant named Bo Roos. She cooked for Wayne in her bungalow and brought his meals to the Universal set each day; they played parlor games during shooting breaks, attended football games and prizefights, sped out of town on weekends for fishing trips to Lake Arrowhead or for quiet times in Montecito and San Luis Obispo.