Blue Angel (28 page)

In 1938, Dietrich could assume that she was only in temporary stasis, awaiting a new director, a first-rate script, a fresh offer from Paramount, a return to favor—or even, as she expressly hoped, an offer to work in France for a director like Jean Renoir; or in England, where, it was rumored, Josef von Sternberg would be welcome despite the collapse of
I, Claudius
. She bided her time, and on American radio programs she read some pallid romances with actors like Don Ameche, or engaged in comic repartee with Edgar Bergen and his wisecracking dummy Charlie McCarthy (who, as some might have observed, also wore a top hat and formal dress suit).

Tax authorities continued to hound her for monies past due, and that spring (acting on a suggestion from Harry Edington) she took a brilliant counteroffensive, claiming that she had not reneged but actually overpaid. Her husband could not work in America because he could not speak English, she said; therefore she wished to refile for each year since 1931, on the basis of community property and a shared loss. The case would continue to be argued for three years.

But her hopes for a new contract to revive her fading career were dealt a severe blow in May 1938. Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theater Owners of America, announced in the trade journals
Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
(and newspapers across the country soon promulgated it) that certain players no
longer pleased moviegoers and were therefore undesirable at the box office. This was not merely a rude display of Brandt’s personal taste, for in the case of Dietrich, for example,
The Garden of Allah, Knight Without Armour
and
Angel
were indeed crashing financial failures in the theaters. Studios were accordingly urged not to make pictures with Mae West, Joan Crawford, Katharine Hepburn, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and a few men like Edward Arnold.

West, munching breakfast in bed at one in the afternoon, took a reporter’s inquiring telephone call: “Well,” she drawled, referring indirectly to one of her classic comedies, “Brandt and his little men have done us wrong. All I know is that whenever the guys in the front office want to pay their mortgage, they call me up with an idea for a picture.”
*

Dietrich’s response to the Brandt manifesto was an icy, wounded silence. But privately her life continued more or less cheerfully. By autumn 1938, the unstable European situation leading to war had brought Maria back to California (Rudi and Tamara were still in Paris). Dietrich enrolled her daughter in a private school and engaged tutors for extra language lessons and trainers for horseback riding. (One of Maria’s best friends and sporting companions at the time was a wistful, nervous fourteen-year-old whose name had recently been changed from Frances Gumm to Judy Garland.)

That same season, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was making a picture in Hollywood, and he and Dietrich virtually lived together, spending nights at his home or in her bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They went out but rarely, and when photographed together at a restaurant or nightclub, Dietrich (as he recalled) “took this in her famous ‘world-weary’ manner, and I took it with a mixture of embarrassment and pride.” Despite her professional crisis, he noted no especial sadness or anxiety in her manner that year, and they went through what he called “the motions of secrecy” about their affair—though he was sometimes “in a fury because Marlene occasionally swam in the buff” at the pool parties she gave on Sunday afternoon
at her rented Santa Monica beach house (some luxuries evidently still being necessities).

“She enjoyed having her beauty appreciated,” said Fairbanks with bemused diplomacy; such had been the opinion, too, of the film crew of
Knight Without Armour
, and of John Engstead, who recalled that she often welcomed photographers and reporters to her Paramount dressing room wearing only a sheer foundation garment or the skimpiest covering. Every performer has to be a kind of exhibitionist; a few can sometimes be defined by the term quite literally. For Marlene Dietrich—always comfortable exhibiting herself—“more” often meant “less.”

On June 9, 1939, however, she dressed like the movie stereotype of a grade-school librarian, wearing a grey serge suit to take her oath of American citizenship—stating on her affidavit that she was born in 1905—not, as she had previously stated on the application, 1904 (much less the truthful 1901). Everyone politely ignored her new birthdate, and that evening, she and Maria left Los Angeles for New York, where Rudi awaited; they were to proceed thence for a European holiday. “I am glad to be a niece of Uncle Sam,” she told reporters as she drew a gold-tipped cigarette from a platinum case after the ceremony.

As it happened, her Uncle Sam immediately decided to extract more than the tribute of gratitude from his new niece. On June 14, the Siebers boarded the
Normandie
for a summer on the Riviera, to be financed by savings Rudi had kept jointly on behalf of himself and his wife. But in addition to the passengers and well-wishers, the ship was bustling with agents of the Internal Revenue Service, who were much more punctilious about details than the Naturalization Office. For six hours, embarkation was delayed as federal officers Bernard Campbell, J. B. McNamara and Steve Ryan presented writs, liens and attachments, arguing with Dietrich and Rudi about a tax debt of
248,000, due on her 1936 British salary for
Knight Without Armour
. Her thirty-four pieces of luggage were at first removed from the
Normandie
, returned to her an hour later, then taken away again and finally restored while Dietrich, her New York lawyer William B. Jaffe and United States attorney John T. Cahill debated whether she should be forbidden to leave the country (and
perhaps even be subject to arrest) with such an array of possessions while so large a tax debt was pending. (Wisely, Sieber—who had no legal responsibility for his wife’s case, since he was not a citizen and had earned no American income—kept a quiet distance.)

At last they reached an agreement, much to the relief of impatient passengers, of weary baggage handlers and of the
Normandie
’s officers, who were more concerned with tides than taxes. Dietrich, perched atop her largest trunk, dipped into a large handbag and withdrew
108,000 worth of diamonds, emeralds and gold. These she offered for an escrow account held by the IRS and by her attorney Jaffe against the final disposition of the government’s claims; the shipboard brouhaha was the lead story in every New York newspaper the next day. (Remarkably, the government decided in Dietrich’s favor, and all the gems were returned to her in May 1941—along with more than
23,000 she duly claimed to have overpaid for 1936.)

B
UT THIS ANNOYING DELAY DID NOT FORESTALL THE
gaiety of the six-day crossing. With the Siebers for the summer holiday was von Sternberg, whom they invited at the last minute. Recovering from his breakdown, he was carefully attended by Dietrich throughout the journey—but not as the recipient of her amorous adoration. That was reserved for another addition to their party, a famous German writer in exile whom the Siebers had just met that week in New York.

Born in Westphalia in 1898, Erich Maria Remarque had served in the German army during the first World War and was seriously wounded five times. Discharged after the armistice was signed, he worked as a teacher, cemetery stonemason, race-car driver and advertising copywriter, and then he began to compose articles on automobiles and sports. Throughout the 1920s, he worked diligently on his first novel,
Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front)
, a powerful denunciation of war which, published in 1929, brought him permanent fame and considerable wealth, inaugurating as well a serious if uneven literary career. The film version of that book, made in 1930, earned him a small fortune and ensured the
future movie sale of several less impressive novels. In 1938, Germany officially deprived him of citizenship on the basis that
All Quiet
offended his country’s soldiers.

A quiet, soft-spoken man who wore a monocle and drank too much, Remarque had arrived in America in early 1939 with his wife, Ilsa Jeanne Zamboui, whom he had divorced in 1932 but remarried in 1938 (somewhat diffidently and, it seems, only to provide her with egress from Germany and entry to America). By June 1939, Zamboui was in Mexico seeking a second divorce.
*
Shunning literary fame and the adulation of strangers, Remarque’s taste for fine food and wine nonetheless made him a regular patron of those restaurants frequented by celebrities. Certainly no womanizer, he was also, at forty, not immune to the importunate charm of someone like Dietrich.

At New York’s “21” Club that June, he was therefore not unresponsive when introduced to Dietrich. She shared Remarque’s interest in nineteenth-century art (although she was far less knowledgeable), and he told her of his growing collection of works by van Gogh, Cézanne, Renoir and Degas. At once she was taken with this handsome, articulate man; and he with her, as he later told their mutual friend Stefan Lorant. That first evening, Dietrich invented an affectionate pet-name for Remarque: “Boni,” an old Berlin schoolgirl’s version of the Latin substantive meaning “good man” or “good guy.”

But Remarque was attractive to Dietrich for reasons other than cultural: he had a somewhat dispirited, rueful demeanor when discussing the rise of Nazism and the world’s apparently headlong rush toward another hideous conflagration. This combination of good looks, talent, sensitivity and a kind of general sadness was again irresistible to Dietrich (as they had been part of her attraction to Kreuder, von Sternberg and Gilbert, among others). “His melancholy and sensitivity bordered on the pathological,” Dietrich wrote after his death. “I was deeply moved by this trait of his personality. Our special relationship all too often, unfortunately, gave me an opportunity to witness his despair.”

That first evening, she offered her usual brand of consolation—herself. After spending the night with Dietrich in his suite at the Sherry Netherland Hotel (where, concidentally, she and Rudi were also booked), he immediately accepted the offer to join her little retinue for a summer in France. Romantic and visionary he may have been, but Remarque was after all a European, and he did not find Dietrich’s domestic arrangement indecorous; for the next two years he was her most constant and frequent lover.

During the summer, the group’s social circle widened in Paris and on the Riviera, and at various times the Siebers, Tamara, von Sternberg and Remarque dined and toured the countryside with the French actor Jean Gabin, whom they met in Paris. They also gave a cocktail party for the American ambassador to Britain, Joseph P. Kennedy, vacationing with his son John; and they attached themselves to a circle round the multitalented Noël Coward, whose stylish wit enchanted Dietrich. Without ever being introduced, she had telephoned him in May 1935 from Hollywood to congratulate him on his film appearance in
The Scoundrel
. Now, pursuing his friendship as she did that of Hemingway and Remarque, she began to learn Coward’s songs.

This motley group assembled for much of July at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden Roc in Antibes, where in the evenings Dietrich held court with Coward as she crooned his songs and those of Hollander in her now smoky, swooping baritone. For European society and the social press, Marlene Dietrich was, at thirty-seven, a film actress on extended holiday and the star of a small but glittering cast of worshipful international luminaries. She led her friends a merry chase, wining and dining from Paris to Cannes and back again, to the gambling casino at Monte Carlo, to bistros in Juan-les-Pins. (“Nobody knows to what extent Marlene was seen with some of her men primarily for the publicity value,” as playwright Moss Hart said.)