Authors: Donald Spoto
With Fairbanks, Dietrich had a polished, sophisticated and compassionate gentleman for a lover; Remarque was the dour, grave intellectual she could both comfort and learn from; but with John Wayne, it seems, the matter was simpler. According to all accounts, they never spoke of marriage; they were simply buddies who bedded. And when it was over (after they had made a trio of films together), Dietrich clearly felt neither residual affection nor loyalty. “Unpleasant people, actors,” she wrote curtly years later. “First of all, John Wayne. He needed money, and he begged me to help him . . . John Wayne wasn’t exactly brilliant: he spoke his lines and that was all. Wayne was not a bright or exciting type. He confessed to me that he never read books, which proves you don’t have to be terribly brilliant to become a great film star.”
Their first picture remains their best, for
Seven Sinners
offers one of Dietrich’s splendid comic portraits as well as a performance of gentle, self-knowing sadness. The action begins at the Blue Devil Café (clearly homage-by-inversion to
The Blue Angel)
, where she causes a riot by simply being. Deported with her cronies to another South Seas isle, she sings “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” en route and later “The Man’s in the Navy” at her new venue (the
latter crooned in sparkling white navy drag). Learning that the fleet has arrived, she turns, takes in a sea of white-coated sailors and whispers, “Oh—the navy!” Slowly approaching them, she smiles, then stops everything in the room by asking, “Will someone please give me an American . . . [pause] . . . cigarette?”
Of all Dietrich’s films between the last with von Sternberg (1935) and her work for Hitchcock (1949), her Bijou is—with Frenchy—one of her two best performances, for in it she perfects the art of the double-take, the wordlessly smoldering reaction, the cool ingestion of a man’s intention. “How about coming to my cabin for a snack?” asks Albert Dekker as the ship’s doctor. She stares at him, and he has to elaborate: “A snack is food.” Her comic turns were carefully timed, her glances alternately inciting and reflective; there was, in other words, a recognizable woman, and some of each character she played was part of herself. Cunning, versed in masculine wants and feminine wiles, Dietrich was clearly in her element as Bijou. She was in this picture, as a typical review noted, “giving one of the finest performances of her career with verve and brilliance.”
Pasternak and his colleagues at Universal knew they had another Dietrich success in
Seven Sinners
, and after filming was completed on September 14 they rushed through editing and scoring; the picture was released within weeks. Throughout the autumn, meanwhile, it became clear to more and more people across the country that the Dietrich-Wayne friendship was more than professional, for they were still seen as a nightclubbing couple—and not just as a duet. In a ploy to confuse everyone, she insisted that photographers snap them with Erich Maria Remarque, or her old friend Stefan Lorant, or with Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., or Jean Gabin (soon to play an even larger role in her life), or even with Mercedes de Acosta and a visiting Rudi Sieber. Indeed, that entire curious octet attended the Hollywood premiere of
The Thief of Baghdad
together in December.
Arranging a squad of escorts for the benefit of local cameramen was inspired. First of all, she knew it would be difficult for people to believe what was in fact the truth—that she would flaunt multiple, simultaneous love affairs. Second, the photograph, with a smiling
Sieber in attendance, would neatly suppress any rumors that her marriage was threatened. Finally, the image of Marlene Dietrich surrounded by so adoring a team effectively presented her as one of the most daringly irresistible women around town. No publicist could ever have promoted her more shrewdly.
*
In this regard, it is perhaps important to remember how much a woman’s medium film is; there is considerable truth in the generalization that women provide beauty and emotion onscreen, while men supply mere action. In film, men (no matter how attractive) are very much of this world, while women are always more susceptible to the transforming effects of lighting and makeup and can be rendered almost supernaturally beautiful creatures.
*
In 1958, he married the American actress Paulette Goddard. They lived mostly in Locarno, Switzerland, where he died in 1970 at the age of seventy-two.
*
The line was somehow approved by censors, heard by preview audiences and noted in critics’ reviews. But when it was widely reported as an example of the movie’s humor, it was ordered cut by Motion Picture Production Code chief Joseph I. Breen during major national release.
11: 1941–1944
“O
NE
A
MERICAN CRITIC WROTE THAT
I had contrived to parody her,” the French director René Clair said of Marlene Dietrich’s role in
The Flame of New Orleans
, his first American film. “But she understood this. I didn’t do it against her will. When Norman Krasna and I wrote the script, we intended that it be ironic—a romance with a sense of humor. Perhaps that’s what surprised the public: they didn’t know quite how to take it.”
Alas, there was little to take. “I’m going back to New Orleans,” said Dietrich as Frenchy toward the end of
Destry Rides Again;
that was the inspiring cue for Clair, Krasna and producer Joe Pasternak. As an elegant adventuress who courts a rich man, pretends to be her own slatternly cousin and eventually falls in love with a poor sailor, she was
The Flame of New Orleans
, and the picture was designed to be suffused with those delicate Gallic ironies for which Clair was previously admired (as, for example, in his French films
Sous les Toits de Paris
and
Le Million)
. But the antic glee and appealing nonsense of
Destry
or
Seven Sinners
are absent from this mild confection, which
—only on paper—had all the ingredients of a riotous Feydeau farce.
Disliking the script (“a flop”), her director (“he wasn’t exactly one of the friendliest men”) and her co-star Bruce Cabot (“an awfully stupid actor”), Dietrich was bored from the first day of production in February 1941. As usual, she had a song, but it required a soubrette’s range and delicacy; consequently—much to her dismay—her voice was electronically altered, the speed of the post-dubbing accelerated so her voice would sound higher. Attempting to salvage a doomed project, Dietrich assured that she was properly lighted and then simply purred her lines seductively, with a kind of dry-ice eroticism. (“There’s more to being a gentleman than wearing tight pants,” she murmurs to Cabot, surveying him head to foot with astonishing indelicacy.)
Pasternak and Clair had tried valiantly to satirize the world-weary romanticism of von Sternberg’s Dietrich; oddly, the result was anemic—simply Dietrich
exagérée
, nearly suffocated in a profusion of rococo white ruffles and feathers. Neither critics nor audiences were much amused by its windy languor, and
The Flame of New Orleans
fizzled quickly when it was released in May 1941, just weeks after production had been completed. Because Universal had also lost money on
Seven Sinners
, executives were glad to loan Dietrich out to Warner for her next film, which turned out to be the second of three failures for her that year. The Dietrich renaissance seemed suddenly imperilled.
Not so her romantic life. In the spring of 1941, John Wayne was still meeting Dietrich regularly at the Beverly Hills Hotel, behind the locked door of her studio dressing-room, and for occasional weekends at a Santa Barbara inn. She dictated what ought to be the terms of his contract renewal, and Wayne explained to her the fine points of football and boxing. Their affair was monitored gloomily by Erich Maria Remarque, who hoped it would not long endure and so expressed himself to Dietrich, who calmly insisted on her independence. As it happened, Remarque’s hope for an end to the fiery romance was fulfilled, although the embers were not completely extinguished for another year. But in 1941, Remarque had a more serious rival than John Wayne.
Dietrich had first met the French actor Jean Gabin in Paris, in 1939. Almost three years her junior, he had been an adolescent runaway and street brawler who eventually danced with the Folies-Bergère at the age of nineteen and appeared in plays and films from 1930. Then, in a series of French films (among them
Pépé le Moko, La Grande Illusion, Quai des Brumes
and
La Bête Humaine
), Gabin became firmly established as the prototype of the tough, sardonic marginal hero or the curiously sympathetic antihero. In private life he seemed to most people very like his movie-role image—sullen, moody, antisocial and blunt as a peasant. A naturally gifted actor, Gabin was nevertheless unresponsive to culture and literature and indifferent to social proprieties—especially those defining Hollywood life, which he endured as a mere necessity; he was there only to earn enough money to rejoin his second wife and fight with the Free French. Von Sternberg was an idiosyncratic and obsessive visionary, Fairbanks an amiable and attentive squire, Remarque a formidable and romantic intellectual, and Wayne an attractive diversion. Jean Gabin, with his rough, rustic exterior, was entirely different.
But this was not
Beauty and the Beast
. As their affair began that year (while he was working in a film called
Moontide
), it quickly became evident to Remarque and to friends like Stefan Lorant that Dietrich’s ardor was even more fierce than for John Wayne—and this seems to have been based, more than in any other affair, very much on her role as care-giver and emotional provider. She later wrote that Gabin clung to her “like an orphan to his foster mother, and I loved to mother him day and night.”
First (as she had with Wayne), Dietrich supervised the negotiations for his movie contract and then proceeded to manage his finances, although Gabin soon learned she was better at evaluating the first than administering the second. Although he lived mostly in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Dietrich selected a small house in West Los Angeles for him to rent as an official address, for propriety’s sake, and there—because he was completely incompetent in the ordinary tasks of household maintenance—she cooked, cleaned and purchased everything from drinking glasses to bath towels. “I helped him overcome all obstacles,” she claimed majestically.
In performing these chores, more was at stake than simple loving
assistance. Dietrich’s lifelong inclination to assume the role of another’s housekeeper may have been an attempt to be Earth Mother as well as Glamour Queen, and her self-abasement for many men a subtle atonement for her years of neglect of Rudi. There is a hint of the heroic gesture that manipulates and controls even as it seems to serve, for few gestures could arouse such gratitude and amazement as the sight of Marlene Dietrich on her knees, a bandana round her hair, her face smudged with dirt as she scrubbed a floor. “I am just a simple
Hausfrau
,” her actions shouted—and so a part of her may have wished to be. But her role as eager domestic was always assumed for the particular benefit of one she wished to impress, or from whom she wished to exact some kind of tribute.
Helpmate and passionate companion she certainly was, but by Dietrich’s own admission the fires of the Gabin romance were banked by her activities as “mother, cook, counselor and interpreter, sister, friend—and more!” She found that his craggy posture was a façade, that he was a man of exquisite sensitivity who showed to others a mask of indifference but with her was gentle as a timid schoolboy: “my lonely child,” she called him. In pampering and soothing Gabin, she was in a way treating a mirror image of herself, the woman of serene control who preferred to think (as she insisted to Remarque) that she was completely dependent on the love and devotion of another, lost without the man she loved.
Enjoying her role as provider, Dietrich often surrounded Gabin with compatriots like the directors René Clair and Jean Renoir, preparing lavish French dinners and concluding the evening by leading guests in a rousing chorus of the “Marseillaise.” “He called her ‘my Prussian,’ ” Renoir recalled, “and she would reply to this by tapping his forehead and saying in a languishing voice, ‘That’s what I like about you—it’s quite empty. You haven’t a single idea in your head, not one, and that’s what I like.’ ” The insult, Renoir added, apparently left Gabin untouched.
Also among the occasional dinner guests was the French actress known simply as Annabella, once a leading lady for René Clair and a co-star of Gabin’s. In 1941 she, too, was making films in Hollywood, and since 1938 had been married to Tyrone Power. They arrived at Gabin’s house and were greeted by a slightly breathless but
beautiful Dietrich: “Oh, hello! Excuse me, I am cooking a ragout for
mon Jean
and I must stay in the kitchen.” Gabin had not yet returned from his day at the studio, and the guests were left alone while their hostess scurried about preparing dinner. When he finally arrived, the Powers were astonished at Dietrich’s welcome. After several minutes of passionate embraces and kisses, she prostrated herself before Gabin, removed his shoes, massaged his feet and lovingly put slippers on him. “Gabin glanced in [Annabella’s] direction and winked,” according to Power’s biographer, “as if he was helpless, a victim of Marlene’s adoration.” After dinner, Dietrich played her musical saw for the guests.
In public, Dietrich was often seen with Gabin at the popular and lavish club Mocambo, which opened on Sunset Boulevard in January 1941. Privately, as she disclosed, her tender moments with Gabin were characterized by an overtly parental element: the seventh child of poor music-hall performers, he depended on Dietrich’s strong maternal instinct. “He took the place of my daughter,” she stated oddly, adding that “he was gentle, tender and had all the traits a woman looks for in a man.” Or at least the traits sought by a woman with Dietrich’s own tangled need to be needed: “He was a little baby who liked to curl up in his mother’s lap and be loved, cradled and pampered.”