Authors: Donald Spoto
On June 4, the Allies broke through into Rome, and when Dietrich and her companions arrived a week later the street battle was still fierce. Fanning out through the city, soldiers fought a Nazi rear guard at the Forum, an armored convoy near Trajan’s column and snipers round almost every corner. Dietrich and her troupe then wheeled dozens of the injured to a large hall, where she sang and joked until darkness. “It gave me the opportunity of kissing more soldiers than any woman in the world,” she said later. “No woman can please one man; this way, you can please many men.”
Before the end of June, her ten-week assignment completed, she was in New York, fulfilling her obligation to appear at the premiere of
Kismet
. Urged during publicity and press conferences to comment on what seemed the imminent collapse of the German Reich, she spoke frankly: “The Germany I knew is not there anymore. I don’t think of it. I suppose if I did, I could never do these tours.”
Telephone calls to her agent confirmed what she suspected. Her absence had not made Hollywood’s heart grow fonder; on the contrary, she was out of sight and therefore not much in their business minds. Despite her two-picture contract with MGM, the studio could not find a suitable project for her after
Kismet
, and so she returned to the USO Camp Shows. Leaving New York at the end of August, she again performed twice daily at bases in Greenland and
Iceland, with a new troupe of musicians and a new accompanist replacing Danny Thomas.
B
UT THE SPIRIT OF
J
OAN OF
A
RC HAD NOT ENTIRELY
taken possession of Marlene Dietrich, and during this second (and, as it happened, longer) tour, she seemed to eyewitnesses quite conscious of her legendary status and fully prepared to exploit it for her present and future.
This she did first in London. Dietrich arrived in September, briefly met another old flame, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and then attached herself securely as a regular visitor to the headquarters of the European Theater of Operations—which by an odd coincidence happened to be housed at 20 Grosvenor Square, the former apartment-hotel where she and Fairbanks had lived six years before. With the regal grace worthy at least of a princess, she toured the apartment she had once occupied, showing Commanding General Jacob Devers, his officers and the press what could be stored in which cupboards, and how the rooms might be best furnished. “Only the door to [the] fuchsia bathroom had to be closed when visitors arrived,” according to Colonel Barney Oldfield. He had been a journalist and publicist before the war, and was then entrusted with the complex job of managing military press and public relations throughout the European campaign.
Oldfield, a commissioned officer for thirty years, was known for being (as newsman Charles Kuralt later called him) “the king of the press agents.” But he was also a sharp strategist and tactician, and General Floyd L. Parks, the first American commander in Berlin in 1945, confirmed that he did nothing during the first days of occupation without Oldfield at his side. Oldfield became a dutiful guardian and occasional facilitator for Dietrich throughout the next year, tasks required on her behalf by top-ranking American officers. Among them were Generals Mark Clark, Omar Bradley and George S. Patton—and especially the handsome, enigmatic and controversial Major General James M. Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, who took the offer of Marlene Dietrich to be his company’s mascot and friend, and eventually his lover.
“Dietrich was a very strong-minded lady,” Oldfield recalled many years later. “She could be glamorous and she could be earthy. I saw her gnaw on a German sausage like a hungry terrier, but of course she could make a grand entrance that would upstage a reigning queen. She could be as authoritarian as Caesar, and she could pout as prettily as a six-year-old whose lollipop was stolen after only one lick.”
During her time in London early that autumn of 1944, Dietrich made several propaganda appearances on
ABSIE
(the American Broadcasting Station in England), on a program aptly called “Marlene Sings to Her Homeland.” In these transmissions, beamed to all of Germany, she sang songs from her films as well as familiar beer-hall melodies and German airs, always dedicating them to the Allied soldiers who were “about to meet up with you boys and destroy the Reich.” These broadcasts, and her outspoken rage against Nazi Germany made her extremely unpopular—indeed, very much reviled—in her homeland, both during and after the war.
Dietrich’s greatest concern, as the Allies proceeded to sweep across Europe toward Germany, was the fate of her mother, Wilhelmina Felsing Dietrich von Losch. As Oldfield remembered, this was the topic to which she turned in every conversation with officers, journalists, pilots and paratroopers. She intended to enlist every kind of aid in learning if Wilhelmina, whom she had not seen since 1931 (and from whom there had been no letters since 1938), was alive or dead.
In October, Dietrich arrived in Paris (liberated since the end of August) and decided that henceforth she would make this the headquarters for her own European Theater of Operations. She would still present her one-woman show as close to the front as possible, still contact the most important officers for needs and favors, and still risk safety to secure the hearts of all-male audiences in the last brutal campaigns of World War II. But whenever possible she retreated to the relative comfort of the Ritz where, among other notables, she enjoyed the company of Ernest Hemingway.
As a journalist, Hemingway had made his way to London and managed to fly several missions with the Royal Air Force before crossing the Channel with American troops on D-Day. Attaching
himself to the 22nd Regiment of the Fourth Infantry Division, he fought in Normandy, participated in the liberation of Paris and, although officially a newsman, was highly respected as a skilled strategist for intelligence activities and guerrilla warfare. Dietrich sat on the edge of his bathtub at the Ritz, exchanging war news while he shaved, and telling him of the ardent hours she had just spent with General Patton, who had given her a pair of his pearl-handled pistols. Indeed, she said quite calmly, she and Patton had already shared the same bed more than once in London and in Paris.
The intervals at the Ritz in 1944 and 1945 remain examples of Dietrich’s canny abilities with the officers during these difficult times, for whenever she was present there were somehow ample supplies of liquor, champagne, cocktail food and caviar. Much of this turned up anonymously (the black market thrived), much of it was sent with the compliments of this officer or that general—especially her great admirer General Patton, called “Old Blood and Guts” by his men.
There were the usual rivalries around Dietrich, this time with
Collier’s
war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (the third and soon to be ex–Mrs. Hemingway) and with Mary Welsh (his current mistress and soon to be fourth wife). “Both were strong women,” Barney Oldfield said of Dietrich and Gellhorn,
tenaciously determined, probably in the land of the Amazons, and [acted like] opposing warlords. There was always the impression that each resented the other and denigrated her. To Gellhorn, Marlene was “that actress,” while Marlene thought of her as “that writer.” These two women jousted for the attention of General Jim Gavin . . .
. . . as they did, for different reasons, for the attention of Hemingway himself.
As for Mary Welsh, Hemingway was obviously in love with her, although time had not diluted his fascination with Dietrich. He proudly squired both women to official meetings and receptions in Paris at the end of the year, showing them off and boasting of their social help in his suite—which, he said, was “the Paris command
post for all veterans of the 22nd Infantry Regiment.” Although the relationship of these two women to Hemingway differed, neither suffered gladly the other’s presence. No one more than Dietrich coveted the attention of men—by the thousands in an audience or individually in friendship or affair.
To obtain and keep that attention, almost nothing was beyond her caprice. William Walton, the highly respected journalist then working for
Time
magazine (and later for the
New Republic)
, was subjected to the full Hollywood-party treatment. He, too, was billeted at the Ritz that year, and met Dietrich through Hemingway.
Walton had bought a chic Paris hat for a sweetheart in New York, which Dietrich insisted on modelling for all who came to her room. One evening, she passed Walton’s open door while he was working and awaiting friends. She stopped, walked back to her own room and returned—completely nude—wearing the hat at a rakish angle. “Don’t I look cute?” she asked innocently. Walton replied calmly, as if she were also wearing the latest Paris frock, and Dietrich had to attempt a dignified retreat. On another occasion, as Hemingway’s biographer documented, Dietrich wore the same hat and calmly used Walton’s toilet (taking a page from Tallulah Bankhead’s stylebook), not interrupting her conversation with him while he shaved. In some ways it seems remarkable that generals and war correspondents within her emotional-ballistic range managed to conclude the war.
The discipline of conduct in war never affected the part of Dietrich’s character that was calmly exhibitionist. She dangled naked legs from truck platforms before sighing soldiers, and more than once she burst in on a soldiers’ camp shower to bathe as if no one else were present—actions which could not have been as beneficial to morale as she may have intended, and which led more than one angry officer to label her a cruel tease. Jean Renoir recalled that his wife Dido was so often asked by Dietrich to accompany her to the ladies’ room of a restaurant that Dido feared an imminent proposition. “But Marlene simply wanted to show off her legs,” according to Renoir, “and [she] took Dido with her on the pretext that she needed to be protected against the women who assailed her. It was simply the enactment of a ritual.”
T
HAT AUTUMN AND DURING A VICIOUSLY COLD WIN
ter, Dietrich divided her USO entertainment duties between divisions of the Third and Ninth armies in eastern France, Belgium, Holland and at last in Germany. To banish shaking chills in the town of Nancy, in Lorraine, she drank Calvados (to which she had been introduced by Erich Maria Remarque). Imbibing on an empty stomach, she vomited constantly, “but I would rather vomit than be hospitalized,” she wrote later of that time. “Otherwise, what am I afraid of? Of failing . . . of being unable to endure this way of living any longer. And everybody will say, smiling, ‘Of course, of course, that was an absurd idea [for her to go to war] in the first place.’ ”
With the ruthless, proud and independent Patton, Dietrich and her performance troupe moved north in December from Nancy into Belgium—precisely at the time of the Battle of the Bulge, from mid-December 1944 to mid-January 1945. She frequently traveled and dined with this tough tactician, and on at least one occasion she fell asleep in his office. He carried her to his car, drove her to her barracks, and when she awoke next morning he was still by her side.
Whether she bestirred herself at some time before dawn is not clear, but members of Patton’s staff—like his aide, Frank McCarthy, who produced the film
Patton
—later confirmed that there was an intense affair between Dietrich and the general all during the time of her attachment to his army.
“She charmed her way onto more airplanes than Bob Hope—and with an entire troop,” according to Barney Oldfield. “She could commandeer a jeep and driver and all sorts of privileges, and these were accorded to her as if she were a queen in the eyes of those she dealt with.” Dietrich was, as she later said, frequently summoned to Patton’s quarters on the pretext of his needing a report on her shows or to inquire about her willingness to accompany him on a hospital tour. (When director Billy Wilder later asked her if her affair had not indeed been with Eisenhower instead of Patton, she replied, “But, darling, how could it have been Eisenhower? He wasn’t even at the front!”) During this critical time of the conflict,
Dietrich managed to brace Patton as she did his men. Needing an official password for her, he decreed “Legs,” in her honor.
Accompanying Patton all through the hostilities in the Ardennes, Dietrich suffered severe frostbite that plagued her for the rest of her life and exacerbated her later arthritis. Her twice daily song-and-joke shows continued during this last great German offensive on the western front in southern Belgium. While Allied aircraft were impeded by wretched weather, Nazi Panzers advanced toward Antwerp and the German Fifth Army completely surrounded Bastogne. Nazi Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt then demanded that Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe surrender the city; his response was the legendary “Nuts!” Only when Patton barrelled into Bastogne on December 26, with Dietrich at his side, did the situation begin to alter; the First Army joined them a week later, and with that the Germans began to retreat.
For the morale of troops in the thick of the fighting, the USO pitched camp two miles from the German-Dutch-Belgian border and performed in Maastricht, Holland—the first town in that country to be liberated from the Germans. “Like the rest of us that winter, she had to wear long, woolly, drop-seat underwear, heavy trousers and gloves,” according to Oldfield, who was there with a press corps, “but she ignored the weather and changed into nylon stockings and a sequined evening gown—and in this glamorous outfit she stuck the musical saw between her legs and played for her cheering audience.”
Seeing her discomfort in the severe cold, war correspondent Gordon Gammack (then with the
Des Moines Register and Tribune)
recalled that in Maastricht he gave Dietrich a small coal stove for warmth, which she willingly accepted. Several years later, he approached Dietrich as she strolled with her grandchildren on a New York street. He introduced himself politely as the man with the stove from Maastricht, and said how much he had enjoyed her brave performance during the war. “Thank you for the stove,” she said unsmiling, with a chill that recalled that winter of 1945. “Thank you and goodbye.”