Authors: Donald Spoto
Undaunted, Dietrich’s agents then marketed the rejected English manuscript in France, where it was translated and published in 1984 by Grasset as
Marlène D
. Three years later, Ullstein published an abbreviated German rendering of this as
Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin (Thank God I’m from Berlin)
. The first publication of any of this in English was a translation of
Ich bin
, issued by Grove Press in 1989 as
Marlene
.
In each version, Dietrich warned her editors and readers that “facts are unimportant,” a prudent caution since she provided so few. There was no mention of a sister; she conveniently combined father and stepfather; Rudi was hardly mentioned, and Maria was
only a vague parenthesis across a page or two. More alarming were her frank errors: actors, writers and producers are assigned the wrong credits, and some of her most important colleagues (Paramount’s designer Travis Banton, for example) are misidentified. The dates of several of her films are given incorrectly (by as much as a decade), and she has a remarkably vague idea of the characters she played and the stories in which they figured. The pages are further diminished by an abrasive, defensive petulance; the book was not even, alas, an engaging novelette.
There were also unintentionally hilarious gaffes. Writing approvingly of the Jewish tradition of grieving at funerals, Dietrich added that “in the Christian world we are taught to hide our feelings”—an assertion doubtless shocking to Italian, Greek and Iberian cultures, among others. She also claims that acting is not, after all, the right profession for men, “but only for those with talent.” Regarding her private life there was not a single disclosure.
F
ROM
1976
TO HER DEATH IN
M
AY
1992—
EXCEPT
for her two half-days of work on
Just a Gigolo
and one month when she allowed a colleague to record an interview—Dietrich resided in a twilight of isolation, a woman vaguely connected to the world by newspapers, books and telephone but insistently reclusive, inaccessible to all but an employee or two, receiving no visitors except (on infrequent occasions) her daughter Maria. In a way she became a character in a von Sternberg picture—veiled and remote, victimized by the legacy of the fame for which she always expressed undiluted contempt, but on which she counted for her very existence.
Only once since
Just a Gigolo
did she mitigate that severe disengagement, and then only partially. Dietrich and actor-director Maximilian Schell (who had also appeared in
Judgment at Nuremberg)
came to an agreement about a documentary on her life and career. There was, however, a difficult proviso, for just before filming was to begin in her apartment she refused to be photographed; only her voice would be heard. From this appalling requirement, Schell
somehow fashioned a work of considerable virtues, intercutting documentary footage, film clips, still photographs and a series of hallucinatory images reminiscent of a Fellini dreamscape. The result, called simply
Marlene
, was rightly praised. Connecting the visuals of this film are the voices of director and star (speaking now in German, now in English), as he coaxed, cajoled, grew impatient with her scolding—and finally evoked more of the real Marlene Dietrich than any cameraman had ever dared attempt.
There are, of course, the usual snappy Dietrich retorts and outrageous contradictions peppering the occasional honest assessment:
—Of her old films, she says: “I’m not at all interested. Do you think I’d go and sit in some stuffy cinema and watch movies?”
—Of Emil Jannings in
The Blue Angel
: “What a ham!”
—Of Josef von Sternberg: “He was always forcing me to think, to use my brain and learn something when I was working—not merely to do what I was told.”
—Of women: “In universities they’ve weighed women’s brains—they weigh half as much as men’s, you know.”
—Of feeling in poetry, sentiment in films, nostalgia in real life: “Quatsch!”—“Nonsense! Rubbish!”
—Of herself: “I’m no romantic dreamer. I have no time for that. I’m a logical, practical person who has worked all her life.”
—Of God and the afterlife: “I don’t believe in a superior power. Once you’re dead, that’s it—it’s all over!”
She did, however, agree to watch with Schell some excerpts from a few of her films on videocassette, and to discuss certain interesting moments. Despite her stated insistence that she found herself and her career monumentally boring, it was clear from her sudden animation that she found only these moments really interesting. But seeing her younger self was evidently painful, for as she continued to comment there was a rueful but futile attempt to disconnect herself from her own memories. Her agent had handed Schell a slip of paper with a citation from Dante, a clue to Dietrich’s vulnerability during the tapings:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria
.
There is no greater pain
Than the recollection of past happiness
In times of misery
.
According to the conventional wisdom, people do not change very much, especially in senior years; like figures in stories, it is believed, men and women usually become fixed in their own characters.
But something indeed shifted in Marlene Dietrich during the last years of her life—something that was perhaps due to the simple transforming effect of time and solitude. A woman who never showed the slightest inclination to share her feelings, who gloried in her Teutonic training to conceal emotions, was at last led to a kind of epiphany.
Surrounded by a tangle of wires and a crew of technicians, she listened while Schell began to read the old lines from Ferdinand Freiligrath. Then her memory recaptured a few words, and, on the soundtrack of the film
Marlene
, the voices of Maximilian Schell and Marlene Dietrich meet, part, blend again:
O love, as long as you can love
,
O love, as long as you may love
.
The hour comes when you will stand at gravesides weeping
.
Whoever opens you their heart, do all you can to please them
.
Fill all their lives with joy and never cause them sadness—
And guard your tongue! Harsh words are easily said—
O God, I meant no harm!
The other leaves and complains
.
You kneel down at the graveside and say
,
“O look down upon me, crying here on your grave
,
Forgive me for hurting you—oh God, I meant no harm.”
But he neither hears nor sees you
,
he shuns the welcome of your arms—
the mouth which often kissed you says no more
“I’ve long since forgiven you.”
In truth, he has forgiven you
,
though many a tear was shed for you and your harsh words
.
But still, he rests—he’s reached his end
.
There is a moment of silence, and then Marlene Dietrich begins to weep, softly, uncontrollably. “I’m afraid I can’t say that—I just can’t,” she whispers, unable to hold back after so many years.
The film’s final image holds just a few seconds—it is her last screen appearance, as the frail baroness in
Just a Gigolo
—and then this picture, too, slowly fades.
“It makes me cry,” Marlene Dietrich says as we see the blurred image gradually vanish. And then there is only her voice, veiled with memory:
“Maybe it’s just a kitschy poem. But I don’t know. My mother—my mother really loved it. It’s something so many people say—‘I meant no harm.’ Maybe nowadays it’s too sentimental. Maybe.”
O
THERWISE, VERY LITTLE HAPPENED OUTWARDLY IN
Marlene Dietrich’s life in the final years. She had in a way become like one of her favorite poets, Heinrich Heine, living in voluntary Parisian self-exile, an inactive recluse claiming the pedestal to which she believed her fame entitled her. Her career had for years kept her away from her daughter and grandchildren and all during her life she had never made the kind of time necessary for establishing authentic friendships. Her distance from others, her pursuit of affirmation, her longing to be a buddy to as many men and women as possible—all these exacted a fearful cost. A lifetime of emotional isolation, long before her final physical seclusion, had in fact necessitated and sustained precisely the illusions she lived by, the fantastic chimeras she constantly denied. “All her life she was wearing a mask,” said Maximilian Schell. “The real Marlene has never been visible. Her mind is filled with the creation of a legend as she conceives it.”
Agreeing with Coward’s assessment that she was confined within her own legend, Bernard Hall (eventually her live-in majordomo as
well as secretary) said that she “made herself a prisoner in her own home, striding around like a caged tigress, because she had a fear that someone would photograph her in her twilight years—like they did her old rival Greta Garbo in the streets of Manhattan. So she rarely went out.”
In her retreat from society, one day became very like the next, and few were happy. Awake before six in the morning, she cried out to Hall for some food and by eight o’clock she began drinking scotch. According to Hall, “I didn’t know what to do. I gave [the whiskey] to her—it was impossible saying no. Anyway, she had two bottles under the bed. She was brilliant until ten
A.M
., then zonk, she’d collapse. It was sad to watch, heartbreaking.” In fact Dietrich was in her last years a restless, pathetic alcoholic. “It’s difficult to say when she became so,” Hall added. “But even when we were on tour together, I’d think, ‘How much can a person drink?’ ”
At last—about the spring of 1979—weak, weary and angry, Marlene Dietrich simply announced, “I’m going to bed.” Hall had attended her for over thirty years, but finally her condition so saddened him that, as he later admitted, he “simply couldn’t cope with caring for her full-time any more. She was totally impossible to live with.” In 1987, he moved to London, and Dietrich was cared for by a series of secretaries, daytime companions and, occasionally, visiting nurses.
Her cluttered, modest apartment was filled with mementos, glorious photographs of Dietrich in the films she loved the most—primarily
The Devil Is a Woman
(“because I was never more beautiful”)—and pictures of her with her great and adoring mentor von Sternberg, with her comrade Ernest Hemingway, with the handsome young Gary Cooper, the confidently charming Maurice Chevalier, the jealous peasant Jean Gabin. “I’m never lonely,” she insisted to Maximilian Schell at the start of their interviews in 1983. Bernard Hall, as well as friends like Stefan Lorant and Billy Wilder, disagreed.
Her reclusiveness, said Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., “was very strange and unfortunate. For years she rang up to chat with me and my wife, and then this stopped. Once I visited Paris and telephoned. I recognized her voice and greeted her, but she denied it was she and
pretended to be the maid.” Jean-Pierre Aumont, among many others, had a similar telephone experience of Dietrich’s denial of self.
“We were in Paris in 1987,” recalled Billy Wilder, “and after pretending to be her own masseuse or a cook, she admitted it was herself. At first Marlene had agreed to see my wife and me. We offered to take her out to dinner, or to bring food to her apartment—anything that would please her. But then she changed her mind, saying that she had to go to an eye doctor. It was obvious she just didn’t want to see anyone. Or anyone to see her.”
When Dietrich did wish to communicate, however, her telephone bills must have been among the highest in Europe, for a two-hour conversation with an old acquaintance in London, New York or Los Angeles was quite typical. Among the regular recipient of such calls was Stefan Lorant, a friend for seventy years.
But the name Marlene Dietrich was still worthy of page one of the
New York Times:
on the occasion of Germany’s celebration of reunification in 1990, a headline proclaimed, “United Germany’s Joy, and Marlene Dietrich Too.” The accompanying story announced:
The day also brought a legendary voice from the past. Marlene Dietrich, the screen star, welcomed the unification of the homeland she has not visited in thirty years in a rare public statement: “Of course I’m happy. Anything that brings people together and encourages peace always makes me happy. Happiness is so rare in this troubled world.”
And despite her disclaimer of sentiment, she told German television on January 14, 1991, that the old UFA film studios in Babelsberg, south of Berlin, ought not to be demolished for merely economic reasons. “I’m still nostalgic for Babelsberg,” she said, “and I only hope you find the success you rightly expect. Goodbye—I’ll cross my fingers for you!”
Occasionally, she wrote to the author of a book that delighted her: “Thanks a million for writing
Hit Me With a Rainbow
,” she typed in a note to the American novelist James Kirkwood, whom she had never met. “If you could send me [the book’s character]
Stash, it would make me happy. I really cried laughing—a rare event in this lousy world. Love and kisses, Marlene Dietrich.”
Kirkwood replied, sending his other works and threatening to “set the witches to work on you” if an autographed picture were not forthcoming from her. The photo arrived, on which Dietrich had written, “Don’t set the witches to work—it is bad enough as it is. Please send books and write again. Am lonely. Love, Marlene.”