Blue Angel (34 page)

At the time, Goodman’s friends (among them the actress Lillian Fontaine, mother of Joan and Olivia de Havilland) urged him to reconsider what was becoming a rush to the altar with Maria. “But Maria was convinced she was in love with me,” according to Goodman, “
and I thought I was in love with her. Right up to the wedding—because I didn’t want to seem like an opportunist or a star-struck fan—I didn’t insist on meeting Marlene, she had no desire to meet me, Rudi simply wasn’t around, and Maria wasn’t eager for me to meet either one! It was a very strange and swift courtship.” A wedding date was set for late August.

Dietrich, meanwhile, swung into action with every stratagem to prevent the marriage. First, she investigated Goodman’s credit and character but could turn up only favorable reports; furthermore, to supplement his acting income and support his future wife, he had taken a part-time job as a warehouse clerk. Then Dietrich made a more desperate attack, as Maria told Dean: she asked her daughter if she had considered what it would be like to have Jewish children? This surprising objection was repeated in a meeting called by Dietrich’s lawyer, to whom Goodman simply replied that if he were Jewish he would not be ashamed. But even the fact of his gentile family background did not affect his worthiness, for Dietrich then flatly asserted that Dean Goodman was a fortune hunter (something she herself told him in a brief telephone conversation).

Neither of the Sieber parents attended the wedding on August 23, 1943, at the Hollywood Congregational Church; only a few friends were present. The newlyweds moved into a small apartment, to which Dietrich one day shipped pieces of furniture from her own collection in storage. And one evening the Goodmans returned home to find it scrubbed and cleaned, new curtains hung, the windows washed and the place banked with fresh flowers. “Marlene had done it all herself,” Goodman recalled. “The building manager and our neighbors had thought the woman in bandana and work clothes was a hired domestic.”

N
O ONE MADE THAT MISTAKE IN HER ONLY TWO FILM
appearances late in 1943. Wilhelm Dieterle, who had directed her in Berlin two decades earlier in the silent picture
Der Mensch am Wege
, had also emigrated and was directing in Hollywood as William Dieterle. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had given him that old chestnut of an Arabian Nights fantasy
Kismet
to enliven, with Ronald Colman,
Technicolor, the full resources of the studio’s costume and set departments and a budget of over
3,000,000—surprising for those years of wartime restrictions. Again, Marlene Dietrich’s name appeared after the leading man’s and after the title, a small difference for audiences but, in the carefully negotiated scheme of things in ego-conscious Hollywood, a matter of considerable significance. She was seen briefly as Jamilla, the harem queen in the castle of the Grand Vizier in old Baghdad, romancing a beggar disguised as a prince (Colman).

Slinking none too voluptuously with layers of chiffon and veils, hairpieces carefully looped, braided and wired a yard above her head, Dietrich had the opportunity to do her first dance onscreen. In the only one of her four scenes lasting more than a minute, Dietrich attempted a five-minute wriggle, her legs sprayed with four layers of gold paint as she ambled, glided, swooned, waved her arms and tried (mostly with the help of judicious editing and the use of a double in long shots whenever there is dancing) to suggest something like a dance. Surely nothing like this—or much in the picture, for that matter—was ever seen in the Levant, for this is after all MGM’s Arabia, a salad of Balinese dancers in Chinese costumes left over from science fiction serials, a studio fantasy combining what seems to be Brazilian high fashion with the latest accessories from Bullock’s on Wilshire Boulevard.

From her arrival that autumn, she was in bad humor.

“Do you have a side of your face?” she asked Ronald Colman breathlessly. “A left side or a right side that’s better on camera?”

“Well—yes,” he replied.

“Darling, you are so lucky. I have none! I have to face the camera!”

This was really a warning, as Colman soon learned and later recalled: “She played every single scene looking straight ahead,” effectively ignoring her co-star and stealing the audience’s attention. This did not, however, effect a particularly flattering image, for (quite apart from the ridiculous wardrobe, hairstyles and sets) Technicolor was not kind to Marlene Dietrich. In
The Garden of Allah, Kismet
(and later in Fritz Lang’s
Rancho Notorious)
, she looks glossy and garish, her face flat, masklike, without affect, nuance or subtlety.
Like a number of actors, she needed cinematic chiaroscuro, the infinite black and white shadings of a master like von Sternberg to evoke and highlight her expression.

That same season, Dietrich was outfitted just as hilariously for her cameo appearance in an all-star Hollywood revue produced by Universal and starring mostly its own studio talent. The picture, at first called
Three Cheers for the Boys
, was an orgy of self-praise with songs, dances and skits featuring actors and dancers who had spent time entertaining troops at home-training camps and near the action abroad—among them George Raft, Sophie Tucker, Jeanette MacDonald, Dinah Shore and W. C. Fields. (The film’s considerable profits went not to servicemen or for wartime aid, but to Universal Pictures.) One of the scenes was to feature a portion of Orson Welles’s famous Mercury Wonder Show, a magic act he was staging that year in a tent on Cahuenga Boulevard. When Rita Hayworth, the actress soon to be Mrs. Welles, was enjoined by Columbia Studios’ Harry Cohn from appearing in Welles’s show, Dietrich stepped in and then agreed to do the brief film scene, in which (with the sloppiest special photographic effects in history) she was to be sawed in half.

At the same time, Dean Goodman returned home from acting in John Carradine’s Shakespeare tour, only to be told by Maria that she considered their life together a mistake and that she was leaving after four months of marriage. “But my parents never divorced,” she said airily, explaining her refusal to grant Goodman’s obvious request, “and like them we can have our freedom and the respectability of the contract.” (Three years later, when she wished to remarry, Maria changed her mind on the matter of divorce.) Of this brief and clearly miscalculated union, Dean Goodman said, “I liked and admired Maria—her talent, her energy, her perseverance, her cheerful personality despite the unhappiness and the difficulties she’d overcome.” Maria, on the same subject, was forever after more guarded: “I don’t want to talk about that. It never existed.”

Predictably, Dietrich was pleased at the news of Maria’s separation and urged her to get on with her career. But there was no time for maternal fussing. After nearly four straight years of professional disappointments and a long period of depression, Marlene Dietrich
knew that she would have to take drastic steps to alter her destiny. Films were failing her; lovers had departed; age was an unavoidable fact.

During her bond tour, Dietrich had learned more about an important venture involving actors in the war effort, and to this she now turned her full attention. The United Service Organization—always referred to simply as the USO—had been founded in 1941 to provide off-duty recreational, social, welfare and spiritual facilities for the American military at home and abroad. Originally a consortium of social services (the YMCA and YWCA, the National Catholic Community Service, the National Jewish Welfare Board, the Salvation Army and the National Travelers Aid Association), the USO became a war agency after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that precipitated America’s entry into World War II. In towns near military posts as well as near battle lines in Europe and the Pacific, volunteers offered servicemen entertainment, meals and often dances. Its New York branch, the Stage Door Canteen, attracted Broadway actors to such volunteer work, and the Hollywood chapter (under Bette Davis, Orson Welles and many others) did likewise.

By 1945 there were over twenty-five hundred USO Clubs, and the USO Camp Shows were an important feature: supported by voluntary contributions, more than four thousand Americans went to posts and hospitals round the world and served more than a billion persons. Among the Camp Show entertainers were many celebrity performers popular in the 1940s who gave time and talent to appear for the armed forces (often at considerable personal risk near battle lines); their number included Jack Benny, Joe E. Brown, Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, Frances Langford, George Jessel, Jo Stafford—and Bob Hope, whose officer jokes and risqué wit made him a particular favorite, and who subsequently made troop entertainment a primary adjunct of his career.

The only pleasant interval in Dietrich’s life recently had been one day’s filming of Welles’s magic act, before a live audience of servicemen. That picture’s name had just been changed to
Follow the Boys
, and as the bells rang in the New Year 1944, that was precisely what she decided to do.

*
This was a problem from 1933 to 1945. Dietrich was a Russian in
The Scarlet Empress
and
Knight Without Armour
, Spanish in
The Devil Is a Woman
, vaguely Middle European in
The Garden of Allah
, English in
Angel
, and French in
Desire, Destry Rides Again, Seven Sinners, The Flame of New Orleans
and
Manpower
. In
The Lady Is Willing, The Spoilers
and
Pittsburgh
the characters’ national origin was simply not specified, and she was, of all things, an Iraqi in
Kismet
.

*
Such period films were popular escapist fare during the 1940s, since the narrative could blithely omit any mention of the war. Also, the roles “masked” popular stars whose accents indicated nationalities unpopular at the moment. From 1939, the German Dietrich was conveniently hidden in the American West, the South Seas, New Orleans, Alaska, Pittsburgh and Baghdad.

*
Earlier, Maria had been engaged very briefly to the actor Richard Hayden, a bachelor almost twenty years older.

12: 1944–1945

O
N
M
ARCH
20, 1944, M
ARLENE
D
IETRICH
entertained more than twelve hundred soldiers based at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Wearing an elegant long-sleeved, flesh-colored net gown with gold sequins, she was every inch the elegantly sultry Hollywood star the men in uniform recognized. She sang “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” (from her 1939 film
Destry Rides Again)
and her signature tune, “Falling in Love Again” (from
The Blue Angel)
. She then played “Pagan Love Song” on the musical saw. After that, Marlene Dietrich’s accompanist, a thirty-year-old nightclub entertainer from Michigan named Danny Thomas, assisted her in a mental telepathy act she had learned in Hollywood from Orson Welles. She recruited soldiers from the audience, engaging them in the trick and exchanging racy anecdotes. The crowd went wild, and her tumultuous reception confirmed Dietrich’s resolve to go abroad to the front lines, to entertain as many young men as she could.

From Fort Meade, Dietrich proceeded to New York, where
final papers were put in order for her to entertain troops in Europe; accordingly, she spent the last of her savings on a chic tan hat from John-Frederics and, from Franklin Simon, a fashionable olive gabardine suit with beige scarf. The colors may have been military, but the outfit was strictly Beverly Hills/Park Avenue. Dietrich had no intention of disappointing the boys she was following to camp. She also learned at this time that she would have the simulated rank of major in the United States Army: USO entertainers were routinely given rank so that, if captured, they might hope to be treated like officers. (Danny Thomas was merely captain.)

While in New York, she also learned a great deal about live performances from Thomas, an expert showman who taught her the fine points of phrasing and breath control for singing and the right comic timing for her repartee. All this was new to her. “He taught me everything,” Dietrich said later of Thomas; “how to deal with an audience, how to answer if they shout, how to play them, how to make them laugh. Above all, he taught me how to
talk
to them.” Together the pair continued to refine and rehearse what quickly became her one-woman show: Dietrich at the microphone singing, Dietrich playing the saw, Dietrich trading jokes, Dietrich telling stories, Dietrich encouraging the troops, Dietrich hosting a telepathy act.

At this point in her wartime service, her wardrobe, her array of cosmetics, her musical preparations—everything in her possession and attitude, in fact—indicated that she was indeed preparing to establish herself as a solo entertainer, to disprove those who claimed that her string of movie failures from 1940 to 1943 spelled the end of a career.