Blue Angel (41 page)

Dietrich continued to require the endorsement of work as well as its financial rewards, but after Alfred Hitchcock completed filming
Stage Fright
in late summer 1949, she was again without immediate employment prospects, as she had been several times in the previous dozen years. She lingered for about a month in London, shopping, socializing with Noël Coward and attending the theater, and then she went to New York, where Maria was pregnant with her second child. As in everything else, however, Dietrich was not of the garden variety in her roles as mother, grandmother and mother-in-law. She lived luxuriously at the Plaza Hotel, spent considerable sums on restaurants, wardrobe, cosmetics and cash gifts to Rudi, Tamara and a few friends, and altogether affected the style of a fabulously wealthy star. Her financial status, too, was part of the illusion. Dietrich was in fact constantly audited by tax authorities, for she repeatedly deducted her enormous wardrobe bills as professional expenses. She was also strained by her unshakable belief that if she were contracted for a salary of
200,000 she had
200,000 to spend.

On November 16, over Perrier-Jouët brut champagne and a salver of caviar with Ernest Hemingway at the Sherry-Netherland
Hotel, she described her life in Manhattan that season. “I’m the baby-sitter,” she said of a typical day at her daughter’s Third Avenue flat.

As soon as they leave the house, I go around and look in all the corners and straighten the drawers and clean up. I can’t stand a house that isn’t neat and clean. I go around in all the corners with towels I bring with me from the Plaza, and I clean up the whole house. Then . . . I take the dirty towels and some of the baby’s things that need washing, and, with my bundle over my shoulder, I go out and get a taxi, and the driver, he thinks I am this old washerwoman from Third Avenue, and he takes me in the taxi and talks to me with sympathy, so I am afraid to let him take me to the Plaza. I get out a block away from the Plaza and I walk home with my bundle and I wash the baby’s things, and then I go to sleep.

With Dietrich that evening, Ernest and Mary Hemingway also entertained (among others) his publisher Charles Scribner, Sr., athlete George Brown and writer A. E. Hotchner, who recalled that Marlene dominated the conversation. When she was not speaking of herself, her USO work or her plans to make some new recordings, she proselytized on behalf of Carroll Righter. Journalist Lillian Ross was also present, taking notes for an extended profile of Hemingway that would later appear in
The New Yorker
.

“Papa, you look wonderful,” Dietrich said slowly when Hemingway greeted her.

“I sure missed you, daughter,” Hemingway replied, escorting her to the other guests.

Wearing a mink coat, Dietrich sighed loudly, handed the coat to Mary, sighed again, and fell languorously into an overstuffed chair. She took from her purse photographs of her grandson and passed them around, saying magnificently, “Everything you do, you do for the sake of the children”—a sentiment Hemingway boozily echoed as he refilled her glass with champagne. “Thank you, Papa,” Dietrich said, sighing again.

“During the war,” she continued, shifting gears, “everybody was the way people should be all the time. Not mean and afraid but good to each other. It was different in the war. People were not so selfish and they helped each other.” As with everything else in her life, she had already begun the process of glamorizing the past.

J
OHN
P
ETER
R
IVA
, M
ARIA
’
S SECOND CHILD, WAS
born in the spring of 1950, and until late that summer the world’s most glamorous grandmother remained in Manhattan, where she was occasionally seen pushing a baby carriage in Central Park. An offer to appear in another British film then arrived, and that September she went to Paris for wardrobe fittings. Ginette Spanier, directrice of Pierre Balmain, recalled Dietrich’s arrival and her hesitation about approving a particular mink cape. “She looked at me,” according to Spanier, “and, still without a smile or a ‘Good morning,’ said, ‘I find it rather poor.’ ” The longest and most expensive mink stole was then added—“and, still without a smile, she said, ‘I’ll have that.’ ” She knew exactly which outfit would (in Spanier’s words)

feed the legend . . . She thinks out a whole wardrobe in terms of her various appearances. She even sees her social life in terms of star appearances. She goes straight for her needs, bearing in mind what background she will appear against, what other performers she will “top.” Marlene is intelligent, ruthless and . . . knows exactly what she wants.

Indeed, Dietrich could demand a half-dozen fittings if she disapproved a seam in a lining. “First they’ll look at your face,” Spanier cried impatiently at her. “Then they’ll look at your legs. Then maybe they’ll take an interest in the story. If they have time to concentrate on the shadow of a seam in the lining of your dress, the picture must be a flop.”

“You do not understand,” Dietrich replied deliberately. “Everything on the screen is enlarged twenty times. If, in twenty-five years
time, my daughter Maria sees the picture and notices the seam all puckered she will say, ‘How could Mother have stood such a thing?’ ” Mother did not, of course, and her requirements often brought Spanier’s sewing staff to the brink of revolution. The directrice then called for a luncheon break, and when Dietrich said gravely that she had nowhere to dine and that she would simply wander about, Spanier insisted she come to her home on the Avenue Marceau. As it happened, that was the birthday of Spanier’s husband, the physician Paul-Emile Seidmann. “Marlene ate all the caviar intended as a birthday treat for my husband, and he was furious. It was an occasion that reflected no credit on either of them.” Notwithstanding this debut as an importunate caviar gourmand, Dietrich was thenceforth frequently the guest of the Seidmanns.

The friendship was not uncomplicated, for from that time on, the two women were ardent lovers whenever Dietrich was in Paris or they could meet in London or New York. But her tactics with Spanier were not always well considered, and betrayed her fundamental jealousy of the Seidmanns’ deep friendship and commitment to each other. When she was required to go on an American tour with Balmain some years later, Ginette—perhaps fearing her husband’s dalliance as well as his loneliness in Paris—asked Dietrich to look after him and to dine occasionally with him. In New York, Ginette received from Dietrich a letter that could not have put her mind at ease:

Darling,
You were so concerned that Paul-Emile would be lonely while you are away, but you must have no fear. I have tried several times to invite him for dinner, but he is
never
available! He is the toast of Paris, it seems—out every night, God knows where! I asked him to join me and a few friends for a private movie screening—I said he could bring other friends along—but even for that he made some excuse. Imagine! Well, dear Ginette, I hope you are well . . . And to make sure you will receive this letter, I am sending copies of it to every hotel on your itinerary . . .

The end of the Dietrich-Spanier relationship years later was due in fact to Ginette’s independence, which Marlene always resented. Jealous of her friend’s widening fame and international social circle, Dietrich wrote a letter of abject offense, blaming the dissipation of their friendship on Ginette’s indifference.

I
N
O
CTOBER, THE FILMING OF
N
O
H
IGHWAY
(
RE
leased in America as
No Highway in the Sky
) began at Denham Studios, north of London. In the part of a film actress named Monica Teasdale, Dietrich was cast opposite James Stewart as an aerophysicist who suspects that the new airplane they travel on is doomed because of a design flaw. Successively, screenwriters R. C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard and Alec Coppel tried to infuse her role with some sparkle, but there were neither songs nor narrative credibility to support them. They did, however, provide dialogue apt for both Monica and Marlene. “My career?” she says plaintively to Stewart while disaster threatens. “A few cans of celluloid in a junk-heap some day. It’s been fun, but that’s about all. I would have stopped working quite a while ago if I could have figured out what to do with myself. I was married three times, but it never came to anything.” Uncomfortable with this kind of nearly autobiographical confession, Dietrich nevertheless managed a performance of casual elegance, her severely chic wardrobe fitted her perfectly—and neither critics nor audiences had anything else to note.

The production schedule left her with little time for social life, but she was so eager to meet Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, that she prevailed on a studio executive to arrange a meeting. She had seen the miraculous effects of the drug on wounded soldiers and was cured by it herself when she had pneumonia during the war tour. And so Fleming and his wife found themselves, that autumn, the dinner guests of Marlene Dietrich, who prepared a tasty goulash and fussed over the Flemings like an efficient Bavarian waitress. Next day, Fleming sent her a section of the original mold from which penicillin had been cultivated; she responded with a signed photograph, a horoscope prepared by Carroll
Righter and a dozen eggs (a precious commodity in 1950 England) with accompanying recipes. The acquaintance, flattering to both, continued sporadically whenever Dietrich was in London, up to the time of Fleming’s death in 1955.

She also attended a more formal dinner party on November 6 with Noël Coward, at which Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Gloria Swanson and Clifton Webb observed her affecting indifference to the presence of Michael Wilding, whom someone had thoughtlessly invited. Webb, elegant and puckish, asked her if she intended to be married one day soon. “Married?” she asked wide-eyed. “But I
am
married!” (Webb and the other guests could not be blamed if by this time Rudolf Sieber was, in their eyes, a forgotten spouse.)

Dietrich might have felt some nervous irritability in Wilding’s presence because of the abrupt end of their affair the previous year, but she steered the discussion to the news that had just broken. Three days earlier, the government of France had proclaimed her a chevalier of the Legion of Honor—a distinction formalized a year later at a Washington ceremony (on October 9, 1951), when Ambassador Henri Bonnet pinned on her a decoration and presented a scroll detailing his country’s gratitude for her wartime service entertaining troops in Africa and France.

That evening in London, she was as usual adept at centering conversation on herself, and next day those who knew her must have been amused (and some women offended) when she generalized to a reporter, “Women talk when they have nothing to say. They chatter about a lot of nonsense that interests no one but themselves. They should keep quiet and not open their mouths just because they like the sound of their voices.” By a curious irony, the very same woman who had broken sexual stereotypes in fashion and conduct and always insisted on her autonomy and independence later denounced the very idea of what was called women’s liberation: “It’s ridiculous. I think a woman wants to be dominated by a man. Men are much cleverer than women. A dominating woman cannot be happy.”

However, she was heard angrily and often in the spring of 1951,
when she sued the publishers of the Paris weekly
France-Dimanche
for an unauthorized series of half-fictitious articles printed under her name and boldly marketed as “My Life”; four years later the litigation was quietly settled in her favor. Her mood did not improve much back in Hollywood that same season, when she went before the camera (for a fee of
110,000) in a disastrous film that would mark yet another clear turning point in her career.
Rancho Notorious
, as it was called, was her first American film in over three years.