Blue Angel (25 page)

B
UT HER CONCERNS THAT YEAR WENT BEYOND THE
contours of her own glamorous image. Privately, the autumn and early winter were laced with the anxiety of a real-life drama and its tragic dénouement. Still encouraging her occasional sweetheart John Gilbert (then separated from Virginia Bruce), Dietrich insisted that Lubitsch and Borzage consider him for a supporting role—that of her suave ally in crime. Despite the ravages of Gilbert’s drinking and the fact that he looked much older than his thirty-six years, the test was successful and he was engaged for the film. But just before production began, while he and Dietrich were swimming in his pool at Tower Road, Gilbert suffered a mild heart attack and had to be replaced by John Halliday. Even as she worked daily at Paramount through the final months of the year, Dietrich hovered consolingly round Gilbert, and after another more serious attack in December she became virtually the night and weekend nurse. She also decorated his home for Christmas, ornamenting a tree, filling the rooms with candlelight and performing holiday chores, food and gift shopping for him and his young daughter. When she had to honor a radio commitment that month (reading scenes from
Desire
on the “Hollywood Hotel” promotional series), Dietrich paid for a trained medic to replace her for two hours.

Nor was her generosity at holiday time limited to intimates. Paramount employees who served her or were in special need because of erratic employment or personal hardship received gifts with notes of gratitude. To her makeup assistant, Dot Ponedel, she gave a pair of crystal lamps, and Jessmer Brown (her studio maid), Arthur Camp (the property master on
Desire)
and others all received
presents she knew they needed or fancied. When an elderly couple who had retired from the studio fell ill with influenza that winter, Dietrich twice drove to North Hollywood to prepare hot meals and clean their home. Such gestures may have had an element of
noblesse oblige
(and somehow Paramount’s publicity department was always informed of them); but the recipients were touched by her sentiments.

But Dietrich’s kindly vigilance did not entirely obliterate less admirable traits that could have serious consequences. One evening she and Gilbert saw that the car pulling into his driveway belonged to Greta Garbo; it was the closest the two women had come to meeting thus far. Gilbert rushed out for a brief chat with Garbo while her enduring rival remained in the house, misinterpreting the meeting as a grand reconciliation scene that would revive the embers of an old romance. When Garbo departed and he returned inside, Dietrich flew into a rage and left at once. Her refuge was Gary Cooper, only too eager to comfort her for what she described as Gilbert’s “rejection.” Imprudently miscalculating the effect of her actions on poor John Gilbert, Dietrich ensured that he knew of her resumed affair with Cooper. Gilbert then fell into a black depression at Christmas, drank himself into a stupor and sustained an even graver heart attack early in the new year. On the morning of January 10, despite the efforts of the physician she dispatched to his bedside, Gilbert suffocated to death in an alcoholic convulsion.

Crushed with remorse, Dietrich cancelled
Desire’s
postproduction still photography and confided her guilt to friends. More than that, she affected the role of Gilbert’s widow, collapsing at the funeral on the arm of Gary Cooper. A week later, Gilbert’s twelve-year-old daughter received a bouquet with a note attached: “I adored your father. Let me adore you.” This turned out to be a hyperbolic and impossible request, for the girl had her own mother, and in any case Dietrich scarcely found time even for Maria.

The Cooper affair survived until June 1, when she and Clark Gable read scenes from
Morocco
on a radio broadcast. Dietrich did not ask for Cooper to reprise his original role and he, annoyed at her courting of Gable even professionally, imitated her conduct vis-à-vis the hapless John Gilbert and stormed out of her house.

A
s IT HAPPENED, THE SAD EPISODE WITH
G
ILBERT
paralleled a time of professional unpleasantness owing to Dietrich’s demand for absolute authority. Her next Paramount picture was to be a tangled romance first called
Invitation to Happiness
and then renamed
I Loved a Soldier
, with recent French émigré Charles Boyer. But producer Benjamin Glazer left the project in January, complaining that Dietrich’s right of script approval and her insistence on instructing the cameraman were sabotaging his own creative contributions. Anxious when Ernst Lubitsch departed for an extended winter holiday, Dietrich was no more cooperative with the new studio production chief William Le Baron, nor was she satisfied when seasoned screenwriters tried to whip the scenario into shape. By February 11, 1936, more than a million dollars had been lost on a film two months delayed, for which only a few scenes had been shot. On March 4, she simply abandoned the production, and because by this time neither Le Baron, director Henry Hathaway nor writers Grover Jones and John van Druten had much enthusiasm for it, Paramount cut their losses.
*

Because of this (and perhaps also because the Gilbert affair had caused some unwelcome local talk), the studio readily allowed Dietrich to work on a loan-out deal for independent producer David O. Selznick; he paid her
200,000 for the privilege of starring her in one of the first Technicolor movies.

On March 26, Selznick announced Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer in his forthcoming production of
The Garden of Allah
, based on a turgid Robert Hichens novel about a sultry socialite who goes to the Moroccan desert seeking peace of soul. There she meets and marries a nervous, priggish Frenchman, a renegade Trappist monk who now tends to stagger uneasily backward at the sight of a crucifix. Predictably, neither finds heavenly solace, and on his honeymoon he virtually swoons with guilt until she delivers him back to the monastery gates. This ending was not so much spiritually edifying as it was dimwitted (and to some offensive), not least of all
because it implied that God can throw a jealous snit and command a rivalry worthy of a Hollywood star.

Studio filming began in April, and at first there was some trouble with Dietrich, who was insisting more and more on controlling every detail of her appearance. But
The Garden of Allah
involved the more complicated business of color, and here she was not in her Sternbergian element. “I told her about the tales around town [concerning her interference],” Selznick informed the director of
Allah
, Richard Boleslawski, in one of his notoriously protracted memos,

and she told me this was all nonsense and that she
never
indulged in such carryings on and certainly would not on this picture . . . I told her that my one other worry was about her performance—that she had demonstrated to the world that she was a beautiful woman, but that she had failed to demonstrate, undoubtedly through lack of opportunity, that she was an emotional actress . . . She said she had been wanting to prove this for years . . . [Since our conversation] Marlene has been working extremely hard, never leaving the studio until twelve or one in the morning. I think she has done a magnificent job on the costumes—better than could have been done without her supervision.

But the harmony was shattered within two weeks. By April 28, Dietrich was convinced that the script was dreadful and the film would therefore be a downright clinker. As it happened, she was right on both counts. Peppered with pseudopiety (“In knowing you and your beauty, I have known God!”) and crowded with characters who speak only Latter-day Apocalyptic (“This is the land of fire—and you are a woman of fire!”),
The Garden of Allah
offered not even an occasional oasis of sense or feeling.

Because no one would listen to her complaints or suggestions, Dietrich thought only of the impact on her own career. A telephone call from von Sternberg confirmed that yes, he would come to her rescue, and so she launched a campaign to replace Boleslawski (a Russian actor-director from the Moscow Art Theater). This she tried to engineer by attempting the seduction of twenty-seven-year-old
Joshua Logan, the dialogue coach and rehearsal assistant on the film (later an important stage and screen director). In his memoirs he artfully reconstructed an awkward comic scene that reproduced the effect of Dietrich’s lifelong difficulty with the letter R:

“It’s twash, isn’t it?” said Dietrich of the script. “Garbo wouldn’t play this part. They offered it to Garbo and she didn’t believe the girl would send the boy back to the monastewy. She is a
vewy clever
woman, Garbo! She has the pwimitive instincts—peasants have, you know. Look me in the eye and tell me the twuth, now. It’s twash, isn’t it? You’re a tasteful New Yorker. Admit it. It’s twash.”

When Logan protested that the picture would finally look better than it read (it did not), Dietrich applied another kind of pressure when the company was shooting in Yuma, Arizona. She invited him to her hotel room, where Joseph Schildkraut awaited a prearranged evening assignation with her. Dismissing him, she spoke elaborately and frankly to Logan of her love for John Gilbert, pointing to the pictures of him that filled her room, and to the votive candles that burned before each of them. She then poured him a drink, sat on her bed and beckoned him.

“You don’t weally like Boleslawski, do you? . . . He’s a tewwible man. He’s Wussian. No sensitivity. He can’t diwect women. Wouldn’t you like to see him wesign?”

“Resign? Good God, no. I think it would be dangerous for the whole project if he left now.”

“Call up Selznick wight now,” Dietrich persisted. “There’s the phone. Tell him Boleslawski is not the wight man . . . If he left, we could get a good diwector—like Josef von Sternberg, who just happens to be available. He’s exactly wight for this, and for me.”

She poured more Scotch into Logan’s glass “and kept getting closer and seemingly more affectionate” until he bolted. Despite her wiles,
Boleslawski remained on
The Garden of Allah
which (although it won the Oscar for cinematography) fully justified Dietrich’s anxiety.

As the horrors continued to forecast the picture’s critical and popular disaster, Dietrich pressured Boyer and other players to beg for a change of script if not of director. “
I AM GETTING TO THE END OF THE ROPE OF PATIENCE
,” ran a telegrammatic howl to Boleslawski from the now financially strapped Selznick on April 28. “
WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR HAVING A FRANK HEART-TO-HEART WITH MARLENE AND WITH BOYER . . . I AM NOT GOING TO FACE SIX OR SEVEN WEEKS OF THIS NONSENSE . . . I WILL HAVE A LOT MORE RESPECT FOR YOU IF YOU TURN INTO A VON STERNBERG WHO TOLERATES NO INTERFERENCE
.”

Dietrich was also tampering with basic realism, as she colored, lacquered and coiffed her hair and then summoned her hairdresser between takes to reposition each strand so that even when the desert wind blew she looked unruffled. This Selznick called “so nonsensical, when you can see the palms blowing. Surely a
little
reality can’t do a great beauty any harm.”

But in fact nature in all its torrid reality could do just that. On May 2, Dietrich collapsed in the 138 degree desert heat and work was suspended for two days. When she returned, she was no doubt cheered by the news that Paramount had not yet found a vehicle for her next picture and so, according to an unprecedented clause in her contract, the studio had to pay her
250,000 for nothing.