Blue Angel (45 page)

On August 17, Dietrich attended the Bal de la Mer in Monte Carlo, where Jean Cocteau and his mate, the actor Jean Marais, introduced her to a crowd as “a bird of paradise, a magnificent ship with sails unfurled, a woman whose plumes and furs seem to grow naturally from her skin. Her name begins tenderly and ends with the sound of a cracking whip—Marlene Dietrich.”

She returned to Paris with Marais to visit Piaf, Chevalier and the Seidmanns, but Marais had a clear impression that she was lonely and sad after the great London triumph. Dietrich claimed to harbor an enduring love for Gabin, and over several weeks Marais had to escort her to a small bistro near Gabin’s home on the Rue François. From there she gazed longingly, watching for him to emerge, waiting hours for a mere glimpse. She also asked Marais to escort her to various retrospective cinemas screening Gabin films, at which she laughed, cried, commented on his acting and reminisced about her love affair.

I
N
O
CTOBER
1954,
SHE WAS BACK IN
L
AS
V
EGAS
,
IN
a new peek-a-boo Jean Louis creation that had fewer bugle-beads but, with the same artful foundation and construction, gave the identical illusion of nudity beneath diaphanous chiffon. For her final song, a wind machine strategically positioned offstage blew the billowing fabric round her, effecting for a moment the image of a heavenly Aphrodite, or of Venus rising none too demurely from the waves.

A week into the run of her show, she was offered contracts to return during the next two years, at
100,000 annually for four weeks work. One evening not long after that she noticed John Wayne in the audience, blew him a kiss and, when she took her bow, beckoned him to follow her backstage. This he did cheerfully, taking along his fiancée. Dietrich greeted him with a passionate kiss, but turned her back suddenly and began to speak with another guest when Wayne introduced his future wife. Her attitude about the fealty of former lovers had obviously not changed.

Nor had her mothering instincts. That winter, Harold Arlen’s musical show
House of Flowers
was scheduled to open on Broadway, and during its Philadelphia tryout Dietrich, worried about Arlen’s ulcers, sped to his side with cartons of milk. She also made herself the production’s servant, preparing coffee for the cast, stitching wardrobe and sending for her own brilliantly deceptive costume jewelry when Pearl Bailey’s real gems failed to sparkle under stage lights. But by the time
House of Flowers
came to Broadway, Arlen—simply an acquaintance flattered by her attention and her desire to sing some of his most famous songs—had clearly allowed Dietrich too much latitude as a kind of unofficial mascot. She freely offered actors and technicians so much advice and direction that there was considerable dissension onstage and off, and she had to be politely asked to keep still.

Dietrich left the company before the Christmas premiere in New York, and during the holidays she complained bitterly (to visiting friends like Coward and Hemingway) that apart from her nightclub act there was really nothing to engage her energy or talent. In a
letter to her Hollywood agent, Charles Feldman, she complained that she longed to try new kinds of film, and that no one had yet “taken advantage of the worldwide publicity resulting from my initial appearance in Vegas and London. I don’t think there is another film actress idol for so many years who had such a success in a new field.” She received a polite but indifferent reply; it was, after all, the era of Marilyn Monroe.

At the same time, there was little emotional constancy in her life at the age of fifty-three. She lavished on her daughter and grandsons the attention she had not given Maria in childhood, but her generosity was often excessive, embarrassing and frankly smothering to the Rivas. Coward put the matter succinctly when, addressing the complaints of fortunate actresses with brittle bitterness, he described Dietrich as

fairly tiresome. She was grumbling about some bad press notices and being lonely. Poor darling glamorous stars everywhere, their lives are so lonely and wretched and frustrated. Nothing but applause, flowers, Rolls-Royces, expensive hotel suites, constant adulation. It’s too pathetic and wrings the heart.

Each item from applause to adulation was hers again in London that June of 1955, where Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., introduced her second summer engagement at the Café de Paris, and where the opening night audience included patrons as diverse as Danny Kaye, Tyrone Power and Dame Edith Evans. Even the government pursued her this time. After Dietrich was introduced to the audience on July 5 by Bessie Braddock, the formidable Member of Parliament whom opponents compared to a Sherman tank, the two met backstage. “We chatted like one working girl to another,” Dietrich said and promptly accepted Braddock’s invitation to visit the Houses of Parliament the following week. When she did (on July 13), members of both Lords and Commons flocked to meet her, and the ordinary business of the day was interrupted by her simple presence in the galleries.

O
N
O
CTOBER 4, 1955
, D
IETRICH RETURNED FOR
another engagement in Las Vegas (with a new, equally deceptive outfit), and at Christmastime she was in New York, attending the premiere of the film
Oklahoma!
with its producer, Mike Todd. They were, at the time, discussing his idea of casting dozens of major stars in cameos for his forthcoming epic
Around the World in 80 Days
, and Dietrich was readily persuaded to join the ranks: other actors passing momentarily through the picture included Noël Coward, John Gielgud, Charles Boyer, Frank Sinatra, and Ronald Colman. Dietrich agreed to appear for a half-minute as a San Francisco saloon queen (protected by bouncer George Raft), one of hundreds of colorful characters encountered by David Niven in his worldwide balloon excursion. (“I am looking for my man,” Niven says to Dietrich when he needs his valet in the noisy, brief sequence. “So am I,” she murmurs.)

That winter, Dietrich and Todd became quite openly known in New York as “a twosome.” A good friend of Todd’s and still on amiable (although platonic) terms with Dietrich, Eddie Fisher soon learned the truth of this report when he attended a Todd party and found her clothes in Todd’s bedroom closet. “Mike knew of my romance with Marlene and was obviously a little embarrassed.”
*
But neither man need have been too chagrined, for it was only a matter of weeks before the dresses and cosmetics were removed when Todd went around the world with his production company. Then, not long after her cameo was filmed, Rudi suffered a slight heart attack at his home in California. Dietrich was at his bedside daily throughout most of that April 1956, conferring with physicians and seeing that Tamara was properly attended. Not until he was fully recovered did she proceed to New York and thence for her stint in London at the Café de Paris, which she followed with four performances at a Dublin theater.

For these shows Dietrich added a second outfit, making a quick change from her diaphanous gown to top hat, white tie and tails, straight from her cabaret scene in
Morocco
. Puffing a cigarette, she
straddled a chair and sang “One for My Baby and One for the Road.”

To the amazement of her audience, she accomplished this wardrobe change in less than a minute and without intermission. Dashing offstage, she doffed her shoes and stripped off the gown and its foundation garments while her assistant removed the jewelry and wiped off the lipstick. Another assistant handed Dietrich two hairbrushes already thick with brilliantine, and her plastered hair was stuffed under the top hat. Over her body stocking went black socks, the trousers and shirt were put on in a single piece, and she slipped into the coat and shoes. Before the orchestra had completed the introduction to the upcoming song she was back onstage, unsmiling and ignoring the applause with the affectation of stoic detachment long familiar to moviegoers.

I
N
A
UGUST
,
SHE TOOK A HOLIDAY WITH
N
OËL
C
OW
ard in Paris, at the home of Ginette Spanier and Paul-Emile Seidmann, with whom she was still on intimate terms. But Rudi’s brush with death and Tamara’s instability made Marlene Dietrich (then in her fifty-fifth year) both more anxious and more unrealistic about the inevitabilities of age and illness. She spoke endlessly about her past, about John Gilbert, Erich Remarque, Jean Gabin and Michael Wilding, and “with her intense preoccupation with herself and her love affairs,” wrote Coward in his diary, “[she] is showing signs of wear and tear. How foolish to think that one can ever slam the door in the face of age. Much wiser to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance.”

The forms of her courtesy to those nearby—essentially endless physical activity on their behalf—were often curious. At the Seidmann home, Coward continued, Dietrich was “in a tremendously
hausfrau
mood and washed everything in sight, including my hairbrush (which was quite clean).” It may not have occurred to her that such duties were sometimes ill advised.

The rationale for this sustained motif of menial housewifery, as if Dietrich were exchanging the role of Queen Mother for that of
Visiting Charwoman, is not difficult to understand. In her favor, it must be said that she certainly wanted to help, to please her friends (as housecleaning had pleased her parents and even, on occasion, lovers) and to demonstrate that she was—when she wished to seem so—an ordinary, practical woman, capable of lowly toil as well as high fashion.

But to offer such laborious assistance to someone ill or in need was one thing; to come upon Marlene Dietrich scrubbing one’s bathroom floor or washing windows was another, and it must have been disconcerting. This was an odd form of self-abasement, perhaps partly motivated by a repressed neurotic guilt for the little of depth she did for others, and for the consistent attention she denied them. Her chores were thus a kind of penance that predictably embarrassed those it was meant to honor. Even her support of Rudi and Tamara and the lavish gifts to Maria and her husband must have sprung at least in part from Dietrich’s remorse for past negligence. As for those she visited, her zealous housework spoke eloquently of a desire to be admired and thanked—and perhaps even to make debtors of those to whom she was, for their hospitality, obliged.

Contrariwise, once her self-imposed domestic tasks were dispatched that summer in Paris, Dietrich withdrew, reentering the Seidmanns’ living room looking beautiful, crisply attired in a simple beige suit. She then sat as still as an artist’s model (as John Engstead and others recalled), with her legs so perfectly posed that she seemed almost unnaturally arranged. Everything about her looked ideal, as Spanier said: “I don’t know how she [held this single pose] for half an hour!” Thus did Cinderella handily assume the role of Princess Royal. Later during the visit, when friends gathered round the piano to sing, Dietrich hung back gloomily from the group; at last she went to her room, returned with a few of her recordings, snapped on the phonograph and promptly turned the evening’s spotlight on herself. This was a habit she practiced regularly in her later life when visiting friends in Switzerland (Coward), London (Fairbanks), New York (Garland) and Los Angeles (her publicist Rupert Allen, who also represented Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe). Her friends’
quiet indulgence may have at least partially derived from astonishment.