Blue Angel (38 page)

Despite an arduous production schedule and much evening reshooting, Dietrich insisted that she and Gabin make themselves available to Parisian social and cultural life whenever possible. She sang at a gala revue honoring the Royal Air Force, and on March 15 the couple dined with Noël Coward, whose plays and films she had admired for over a decade, and whose friendship she vigorously cultivated; Coward, on the other hand, had the unenviable task of trying to mediate a Dietrich-Gabin argument that raged throughout the meal. According to Coward, Dietrich “looked lovely but talked about herself a good deal”—her favorite topic of conversation, as he and others learned.

The dispute apparently concerned Gabin’s resentment over Dietrich’s resumption of her affair with General Gavin. For one thing, the names of Gavin and Gabin confused Parisian gossips and journalists, who reported that Dietrich was seen somewhere with Gavin when she had actually been at another place with Gabin, and vice versa; at one point, it was rumored that Gavin would be her co-star in a forthcoming film. Public confusion or no, Dietrich demanded (as always) her independence. But when Gabin countered that he would, therefore, pursue another actress he had met, Dietrich was furious. As usual, she could not approve her lover’s dalliance. Referring to Sarah Bernhardt, she insisted, on the contrary, that it was the prerogative of a woman artist like herself to have a lover (even, presumably, simultaneous lovers).

Coward was not the only witness to the troubles. The writer Max Colpet (formerly Kolpe), whom she had known earlier in Berlin and recently met again, was also in Paris, and in the middle of one night his telephone rang:

“Are you alone?” she blurted, without introduction.

“Yes, why?” Colpet replied, recognizing her voice.

“Can I stay overnight at your place?”

“Of course. What’s happened?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there.”

The matter was simple. Dietrich had had a terrific fight with Gabin when she was preparing for an evening with General Gavin. She took refuge with Colpet, prevailing on him to escort her for her rendezvous with the general at Monseigneur, a faded old romantic nightclub overladen with Russian artifacts. In such movie-set surroundings, filled with the sound of a strolling gypsy orchestra, Gavin looked very much the young, heroic leader, recalled Colpet, who added that he “had the impression that she had protracted her affair with Gavin in order to demonstrate her independence from Gabin, who was very possessive.” She also needed good contacts, superb references, and access to quick transport to London or New York, where she had possible film work pending. For all these reasons—and because Gavin was the perfect, glamorous escort and an adoring admirer—the affair continued through 1945 and much of 1946.

But Dietrich’s cavalier independence and the role of lover
primus inter pares
was finally too much for Jean Gabin; within the year he married the French actress Maria Mauban. This was a devastating blow to Dietrich, who could never understand why a man she still loved (or ever had loved) would commit to another woman. When Robert Kennedy asked her, at a Washington luncheon in 1963, why she said she left Jean Gabin, she replied, “Because he wanted to marry me. I hate marriage. It is an immoral institution. I told him that if I stayed with him it was because I was in love with him, and that is all that mattered. He won’t see me anymore. But he still loves me.”

Josef von Sternberg’s postwar marriage was an equivalent shock to her. (An aphorism frequently on her lips was: “When I devote myself to someone, no one can undo it.”) So far as she was concerned for herself, the Sieber marriage was a sensible model anyone could follow: one married once, for the protection it provided from other, overeager lovers; one married once for the social status and for the children’s legitimacy—and then damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

This attitude was for a time inherited by her daughter. Not until 1946, when Maria wanted to become engaged to a New York scenic
and toy designer named William Riva, did she yield to Dean Goodman’s request to terminate their marriage, which had been in name only since the end of 1943. As Maria might have expected, Dietrich again disapproved of the man she chose and strongly discouraged another precipitous marriage. But this second engagement lasted a year, by which time the couple decided to marry (on July 4, 1947) with or without Mama’s blessing.

On January 11, 1946, the night before the Victory March in New York, Walter Winchell announced that Marlene Dietrich and “a certain very young general,” who were both in town for the parade, would soon marry. Informed of this embarrassing (and untrue) development by a phone call from Barney Oldfield, Gavin coolly said the story was of no concern to him. His wife, who had known of the affair for some time, reacted differently, and within two years she was granted a divorce. “I could compete with ordinary women,” she said privately, “but when the competition is Marlene Dietrich, what’s the use?”

A
FTER SEVERAL WEEKS IN
P
ARIS THAT SPRING AND
summer, the Gavin affair ended. Dietrich now had no prospects of European film work and therefore accepted an offer from Hollywood to appear in a film called
Golden Earrings
. “I must call the general in Paris” were her first words as she stepped off the airplane and was met by the director Mitchell Leisen.

“But you’ve just come from Paris!” he said.

“He made me promise I would call him,” Dietrich replied, “because he was worried about me. He wants me to marry him, but I can’t be an army wife.” Leisen was an expert filmmaker but a poor keeper of confidences, and within hours Hollywood buzzed with the news of Dietrich’s romance with a military hero. Nonsense, insisted the most alert gossips: it was
Gabin
she would eventually marry; there was no one in her life named
Gavin
.

Because she had been absent from Hollywood three full years (and had not starred in a successful film since 1939), Leisen had to convince Paramount that Dietrich was the right choice to play Lydia, a vulgar but seductive Middle European gypsy who helps a
British intelligence officer smuggle a poison-gas formula out of Nazi Germany just before the war by disguising him as her peasant husband. When she was first offered the role, Dietrich was still in Europe and visited gypsy camps to see how the women looked, dressed and behaved. Now at the studio for wardrobe and makeup tests, she assured Leisen she would play Lydia with complete fidelity to realism—to European neorealism, in fact, which flinched at nothing.

This she did astonishingly well, for although Dietrich could not of course completely abandon her pretension to youthful beauty (nor would the studio have desired it), she dispatched the role of a greasy, sloppy gypsy with the kind of fresh comic panache not seen since her Frenchy in
Destry Rides Again
. As a sex-starved wench, she swoops down on the stuffy hero played by Ray Milland, supervising his transformation into a Hungarian peasant. Munching bread, gnawing on a fish-head supper, spitting for good luck, diving for Milland’s lips and chest, she is the complete, man-hungry virago—at once crude, funny and sensuous throughout the aridly incredible narrative. “You look like a wild bull!” she whispers to Milland after she has finished with his disguising makeup, pierced his ears and clipped on the golden earrings; then she nearly growls, “The girls—will—go—
mad
—for you!” Often resembling the seductive young Gloria Swanson, Dietrich does not simply breathe in this picture; she seems to exhale fire.

But the appealing comic nonsense of the completed
Golden Earrings
did not apply to the rigors of production, for there were bitter feuds. Milland, who had just won an Oscar playing an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s harrowing film
The Lost Weekend
, disliked Dietrich and feared she would steal the picture (which she handily did). He also found her commitment to realism somewhat revolting—especially in the eating scene, when she repeatedly stuck a fish in her mouth, sucked out the eye, pulled off the head, swallowed it and (after Leisen had shot the scene) promptly stuck her finger in her throat and vomited.

To make matters even more awkward for Paramount as they considered her option, the finished film was condemned by the watchful Legion of Decency, which disdained both Dietrich’s sexually seething characterization (she could not keep her hands off Milland)
and this pair of unmarried gypsies romping lustily in the woods. The Legion’s censure was officially an acute embarrassment for the studio, although it was also splendid free publicity: the picture returned three million dollars in the next two years. After filming was completed in mid-October, she scrubbed off the four layers of dark makeup for the last time, tossed aside the greasy black wig, treated herself to an array of new suits and promptly departed for an extended holiday in New York.

On January 4, 1947, Dietrich embarked for Paris and a film deal that never materialized. Reunited with Rudi, she tried to obtain a visa so that he could visit his aged father in Germany. Then, to ease his disappointment when they were unsuccessful, she gave him half the profits on a sale of the Felsing jewelry stores in Berlin, which she inherited that spring when they were finally returned to the family after the liquidation of Nazi control of private businesses. Rudi was able to send his parents a large portion of the share he received from Dietrich, and thanks to her their final years were much more comfortable.

Neither of her parents replied to Maria’s announcement of her plan to marry William Riva that summer, although Dietrich sent a refrigerator to their tiny apartment at 1118 Third Avenue. Only after she realized that the marriage was indeed a happy and apparently permanent one did she (somewhat reluctantly) endorse the union. The birth of John Michael Riva on June 28, 1948, made Marlene Dietrich a grandmother, and by 1951 she was sufficiently resigned to the marriage to take
43,000 from a tax refund and buy the Rivas a town house on East Ninety-fifth Street.

From Paris that summer of 1947, Dietrich wrote to her Paramount hairdresser, Nellie Manley, that she was “living quietly at the Hotel Georges V, cooking whatever can be cooked. The attitude and the feelings of the people are not as good as they were during the war. It is depressing, but not hopeless. We must all see to it that this is changed and things are better.”

Her own fortunes improved that August, when Billy Wilder stopped in Paris to visit her after filming exterior shots for a forthcoming “black comedy” about life in occupied postwar Berlin; he offered Dietrich the role of Erika von Schlütow in the picture, to be
called
A Foreign Affair
. At first she rejected it, hesitating to play the German mistress of an American army officer who loses him to a winsome visiting congresswoman and is then taken away by military police after her Nazi past is revealed. Nor was she persuaded by the Frederick Hollander songs commissioned for her. Dietrich agreed to the job only when the director showed her screen tests made by two American actresses whose performances she considered hilariously bad. By the end of October she was packing for the trip to California.

But there was a good reason to stop in New York, for on November 18 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor (at the time conferred only by the War Department). At a ceremony at the United States Military Academy, West Point, General Maxwell D. Taylor read the somewhat inaccurate (and breathless) citation:

Miss Marlene Dietrich, civilian volunteer with the United States Service Organization Camp Shows, performed meritorious service in support of military operations in North Africa, Sicily and Italy from April 14 to June 16, 1944, and in the North Atlantic Bases in Europe from August 30, 1944 to July 13, 1945, meeting a gruelling schedule of performances under battle conditions, during adverse weather and despite risk to her life. Although her health was failing, Miss Dietrich continued to bring pleasure and cheer to more than five hundred thousand American soldiers. With commendable energy and sincerity she contributed immeasurably to the welfare of the troops in these theatres.

The allegation that the Medal of Freedom was unofficially sponsored by Patton or Gavin has never been confirmed. However, the fact that she deserved the award seems undeniable.

A week later she stepped from the train at Union Station and accepted a bouquet of flowers from her new director. Wilder, who had known her in Berlin even before
The Blue Angel
, had co-authored screenplays in Germany, France and America (among them Garbo’s
Ninotchka
, written with Charles Brackett) and had begun
directing in 1942. By 1947,
Double Indemnity
and
The Lost Weekend
were praised as remarkable excursions to the frontiers of human perversity;
Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment
and many more were yet to come. With his patented brand of acerbic moral cynicism, Wilder had prepared
A Foreign Affair
as a satiric criticism of widespread military corruption amid the ruins of Berlin, of the Allied involvement in a shameful black market, and of the self-righteous abuse of German civilians by occupying American soldiers. When filming began in December, Dietrich’s co-star as the prissy, investigating congresswoman was Jean Arthur; the leading man was John Lund; and the pianist in the cabaret was none other than Hollander himself, invited in tribute to his long association as Dietrich’s composer.