Blue Angel (44 page)

The notorious dress (which appeared in magazines and newspapers internationally) cost just over
6,000 and weighed about fourteen pounds. It was a masterpiece of the couturier’s artifice, creating the illusion that—after Dietrich tossed aside her white fox stole—there was a firm and youthful body, nude from neck to waist but for a few scattered sequins, rhinestones and pearls. “Jean Louis’s creations metamorphosed me into a perfect, ethereal being,” Dietrich said, “the most seductive there was.” Not even patrons in the first
row could tell she was tightly enveloped in astutely dyed layers of rubber foundation covered with a body-stocking and then chiffon. “Well,” Dietrich sighed to a journalist, “this is Las Vegas. If not here, then where?”

Her act—in the Sahara’s Congo Room—was a model of Teutonic detail, from her coiffure to the position of a light, from the tempo of each song to the few moments of gesture. Her recent experiences in film (with Fritz Lang especially) had been so dreadful that she had taken the idea of her wartime one-woman show a decade earlier and raised it to a precise art. At last she needed no one but herself and her audience. “Technique and control,” she said, “they are all that matter. In every single bar of my music, every single light that hits me—I know it and control it. In films, [there are] too many people, too many intangibles . . . [but in my solo act] nobody cuts or dubs or edits me afterwards.”
*

Several nights, from one to four in the morning, Dietrich stood and sat for still photographs with John Engstead, who rushed them to a laboratory and then raced back to Dietrich with the proofs for her to approve at seven o’clock. She slept only after she had supervised every detail and Engstead and his assistant had departed for Los Angeles to do the retouching and the final printing, so that her publicist would have copies for the press that afternoon. Dietrich wanted every detail correct, Engstead recalled, and every detail was elaborated in her contract with him as it had been with her night-club hosts. According to Engstead, she loved her own face more than any other; she was her own creation for an audience, and she required that he help her maintain that creation. George Hurrell, who also photographed Dietrich that year, remembered that she returned a number of shots with multiple marks indicating which facial lines were to be removed by the retoucher. “You don’t take pictures like you did fifteen years ago, George,” she said sadly. “But
Marlene,” Hurrell replied with consummate diplomacy, “I’m fifteen years older!”

The occasional photographic disappointment notwithstanding, Dietrich’s time in Las Vegas was triumphantly happy, for almost everyone who knew her personally came to see her show during the holidays; she was, she wrote to friends in Europe, exceedingly pleased, making lots of money and in control of her own destiny at last.

Unfortunately, her return trip, just as the new year 1954 began, broke the spell. Dorothy, Countess di Frasso, an American millionairess who had married an Italian aristocrat, had come for Dietrich’s final performance and, with their mutual friend Clifton Webb, had booked sleeping compartments on the train journey back to New York. A somewhat madcap member of café society, an international party-giver and a pursuer of the Hollywood elite, di Frasso also had some doubtful (if only transiently romantic) relations with the underworld. En route from Las Vegas, Webb found her in her roomette, dead of a heart attack at sixty-six, lying fully clothed in her expensive mink coat and wearing a diamond necklace worth almost
200,000; her luggage contained as much in additional precious stones and jewelry. The event troubled Dietrich very much: Dorothy di Frasso was not an intimate, but she was nearly a contemporary, and they intersected the same social circles. Age Dietrich could try to ignore; death was unspeakable, and the death of a rich, buoyant, elegant, life-loving woman like Dorothy must have reminded her of her own mortality as nothing else had. (Mentioning a seamstress who worked for her in Las Vegas and died later of natural causes, Dietrich said flatly that her death was “unjust.”)

Still more unhappiness awaited in New York, where Rudi told Dietrich that Tamara, who had suffered from vaguely defined and intermittent emotional ailments for several years, had finally been diagnosed as severely manic-depressive with occasional frankly psychotic episodes. Doctors recommended that Matul enter an asylum for several months, but because Sieber was virtually without work by this time that was not feasible. Without hesitation, Dietrich suggested that they both return to California at her expense. Before the end of that year, Rudi and the frail Tamara had gone West, where
Dietrich’s money set him up in the rustic life of a chicken farmer, an idea very much his own. This he preferred to the vagaries of working as a minor film company employee, and for a time Tamara, too, seemed to respond favorably to their new environment in the heart of the San Fernando Valley.

For Dietrich, the first months of 1954 were otherwise quiet. Stefan Lorant arrived early at her Park Avenue apartment one Sunday afternoon to take her to dinner, but Dietrich was in the midst of a major housecleaning, scrubbing the floors in each room. She then excused herself and returned from her bedroom and bath “transformed into a major star” (thus Lorant). After finding the doors of several East Side restaurants closed on Sunday evening, they finally located a quiet venue, but when the host said, “Of course, Miss Garbo, I have a lovely table for you,” Dietrich turned to Lorant and said, “This is not my evening.” They left at once and settled for pastrami sandwiches at Reuben’s Delicatessen.

She also turned up regularly at the Riva house, where Maria interpreted her mother’s frequent housecleaning as an implicit criticism. Dietrich fussed over her grandchildren, bought them clothes, and insisted on doing the same for Maria, for whom she bought what she considered to be the proper shoes and accessories.

There was also the usual round of theater-going with visiting friends like Noël Coward or Orson Welles, dining with literati like Hemingway when he passed through the city, and attending a United Nations reception at the special invitation of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, whom she did not know. Dietrich also repeated her benefit appearance at the circus that April, and over the course of several transatlantic telephone calls, finalized the details for the transfer to London of her Las Vegas act. Although England could afford to pay only about half her American fee, this was prestigious new territory to conquer.

And so on June 16, Noël Coward, a crimson carnation in his blue suit and carrying a bouquet of the same mixed with sweetpeas, met her at London Airport. Wearing a grey beret, a tightly fitted grey suit with its skirt two inches higher than the year’s fashion, Dietrich smiled demurely, stopped to sign a few autographs and, ignoring reporters’ questions, was summarily whisked off to the
Dorchester Hotel. There she was installed in the very grand seventh-floor suite decorated by Oliver Messel (complete with a grand piano and a gold bed in a gold bedroom) and prepared, as secretly as if her task were atomic research, for her debut at the Café de Paris, Leicester Square. On Monday morning, June 21, crowds began to gather outside the dinner club on Coventry Street; the five hundred available tickets had been sold weeks earlier, but fans jockeyed for the best positions to see the elite arrive that night, and perhaps the star, too.

While the patrons dined on salmon, sole, broiled chicken and strawberry ice cream, Dietrich slipped quietly into her dressing room at ten o’clock that evening. Precisely on schedule, at a quarter past midnight, Noël Coward stepped to the microphone:

Though we all might enjoy

Seeing Helen of Troy

As a gay cabaret entertainer
,

I doubt that she could

Be one quarter as good

As our legendary, lovely Marlene
.

A single spotlight found her, at the top of a staircase, wearing the notorious Las Vegas gown and a floor-length white fox coat. The hush throughout the Café was followed by a collective inhalation of breath, then a rapturous sigh, then clamorous applause as she glided down to the stage. With another face-lift, she looked perhaps too perfect, her features almost unnaturally smooth, her expression daringly impersonal. With eyes almost closed and lips tentatively parted, she barely acknowledged the presence of her audience, and by this calculated aura of something perilously close to apathy, she announced—substituting authority for warmth and domination for intimacy—“a few songs I have sung in pictures, on records and during the war.” There was absolute silence, not the lightest clink of dinnerware, not a cough in the room; had she called “Attention!” the crowd would have leaped to their feet.

Dietrich pointed an index finger at the orchestra leader and then stood almost motionless for a half-hour, hands on hips, occasionally
raising an arm defiantly, crooning with amiable disdain in a voice that no one criticized for its narrow range or its vacillation somewhere between harmony and hoarseness. As usual, she asked what the boys in the back room would have; she fell in love again, never wanting to; she was the laziest gal in town and not the marrying kind. Her inflections were alternately subtle, racy, forlorn; she did not ask to be loved or admired. She defied anyone to reject her, and that night no one did. She was simply there, a memorial to discipline, a statue of Eternity.

In the final analysis, that is what people came to see—a monument made famous by transcending time; a woman representing sex, yet implying that she was beyond it; an insolent, iconoclastic grandmother; a beautiful, overpowering and utterly unapproachable being whose manner on- and offstage said at once “Come hither” and “Keep your distance.” Everything about her expressed what she had recently told the press:

It is a woman’s job to sense the hungers in men and to satisfy them without, at the same time, giving so much of herself that men become bored with her. It is the same with acting. Each man or woman should be able to find in the actress the thing he or she most desires and still be left with the promise that they will find something new and exciting every time they see her again.

And so it was for six weeks, in the most successful cabaret show in postwar London. By being in complete control, never granting an encore no matter how insistent the applause, she impressed every patron of the Café de Paris and had London at her command. It did not matter that she had become an institution, almost a spectacle, a Snow Queen trapped, as Noël Coward said privately, in her own legend.

T
YPICALLY, SHE ENTERTAINED AFTER HER SHOW UN
til four or five in the morning, then slept until late afternoon. To the Dorchester came old friends and new acquaintances, who cheerfully
listened to recordings of her opening night. Among others was Jean Howard (the wife of Charles Feldman, producer of two Dietrich pictures at Universal), who years later recalled a meeting one afternoon. “Van Johnson and I arrived at her suite, and she put on a record. It was nothing but excerpts of the applause to her numbers! For her it was wonderful, but it hardly seemed the thing to do for guests.”

There were also charity excursions—beneficial publicity, she was assured—an occasional garden party benefit for blind babies or old age pensioners. When she heard that composer Harold Arlen was hospitalized with ulcers, she kept several days’ vigil at his bedside, occasionally soothing him by humming his tunes “Stormy Weather” and “That Old Black Magic.” As Billy Wilder recalled, “Arlen was on his deathbed when she took care of him—just as she had cared for Kirk Douglas, and for [actor-director] Gregory Ratoff when he was sick.” Her compensation was the act of mothering itself.

Dietrich then dashed to the Café, where each night a different celebrity introduced her (Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness and David Niven, for example); the patrons at the final performance included Princess Margaret and the Duchess of Kent.