Megan Ellison to Develop TV Show about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo

The planned showrunners are "True Blood" writer Angela Robinson and "The L Word" scribe Alex Kondracke.

Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo

In news that's almost too good to be true, Megan Ellison's Annapurna Pictures announced that it would develop a TV series about Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo. 

Both stars were widely rumored to be bisexual, which adds another potentially interesting layer to the as-yet untitled project. Set during Hollywood's Golden Age, the show would explore Dietrich and Garbo's relationships with topliners like John Gilbert, Mercedes de Acosta, Tallulah Bankhead, Alla Nazimova, Barbara Stanwyck, Cary Grant and John Wayne.

The would-be showrunners are Angela Robinson (True Blood, Hung) and Alex Kondrake (The L Word, Hung). 

Marlene Dietrich and how 2 photographs came about

Once upon a time in the winter of 1961 a reporter friend of mine and I, feeling that our school's students and staff needed to get a more complete view of life, decided to bring some "culture" to our school, the Boston Latin School, by written and visual articles to be published in the school's literary (and general!) magazine called "The Reporter".

We decided to interview prominent artists performing at one of Boston's more important theaters. It so happened that one day Marlene Dietrich performed along with her troupe of Spanish dancers. We thought this would be "perfect".

After the performance (which we did not attend because we could not afford it (!) we went to the backstage entrance (a pretty dingy place!) and asked the guard there if he would make out presence known to Ms. Dietrich and relay a message from this duo from Boston Latin School who asked to spend a few minutes with her for an interview. The guard dutifully went and disappeared into the bowels of the theater and returned shortly thereafter with bad news. She said she was too busy to see us.

We were, of course, crest-fallen but not totally discouraged. It was like we almost expected to be turned down. Then we decided that we could not let this opportunity pass and decided to gamble on a positive outcome. We pooled out money and went across the street to a flower shop and spent $30 on a dozen long stem roses and returned to the guard. We asked him to return to Ms. Dietrich with the flowers and reiterate our request. He returned a few moments later and said: Ms. Dietrich will see you.

Success!! Great!! She was still on stage and wrapping up things there when I met her. I had a 2 1/4 x 2 1/4 Mamiya twin lens reflex with probably Kodacolor film and a Braun handle-mount electronic flash. I took one photograph of her with it. No back up, no 2nd shot. What was I thinking?! Anyway, that is the photograph that you can see here.

Then she and my fellow reporter went on to her dressing room and she spent a good 45 minutes chatting with him. In the meantime I went to photograph members of the troupe of dancers in their dressing room.

Then ... story continues below photograph.


Once the interview was over we spent a few more minutes with the dancers and other members of the cast and finally we went to leave by the backstage door through which we had arrived.

As we got there I noticed Ms. Dietrich on the phone sitting on a rickety crate and apparently talking to her daughter (not sure). She looked so out of place and character yet totally in command of the space she occupied.

I did not want to make a fuss about photographing her then but made two quick exposures with my "back up" 35 mmm camera which was a Leica IIIg equipped with a 50 mm f/2 Summitar lens. I believe (guess I could look it up!) film was Tri-X. Don't remember much more about settings, etc. 2 "grab" shots so to speak is what I made.

Once the article was prepared and we were ready to assemble the magazine I decided that the black and white environmental photograph was a more interesting representation of the actress and performer than the color photograph. This was OK but nowhere as interesting as the B&W photograph in my opinion.

Anyway, being the co-editor of the magazine, my decision "stuck" and what you see is the result of the collaboration between Ms. Dietrich, Gunnars and myself.

Perseverance, ingenuity and creativity all combined to make this interview and photographs possible. Fond memories to boot!

Marlene, With Sian Phillips as Dietrich, To Reach Bway April 11

Producers have wasted no time booking the Cort Theatre for springtime, after its smash run of David Hare's The Blue Room. General manager Albert Poland's office confirmed that producers Ric Wanetik and Frederic Vogel are bringing in a new play, Marlene, for an opening April 11, 1999.

Producers have wasted no time booking the Cort Theatre for springtime, after its smash run of David Hare's The Blue Room. General manager Albert Poland's office confirmed that producers Ric Wanetik and Frederic Vogel are bringing in a new play, Marlene, for an opening April 11, 1999.

Production spokespersons for Marlene were out of the office for the Christmas holiday, but according to a source close to the show's casting office, Sian Phillips, notable for her London credits, has been cast as the lead: Marlene Dietrich. Phillips took over for Rosemary Harris in the Broadway run of An Inspector Calls.

Two other roles are still being sought: Vivian, Dietrich's personal assistant and fan, and Mutti, a concentration camp survivor and friend to the teutonic actress-diva.

Sean Mathias will direct Marlene, which starts rehearsals March 8, 1999. Mathias' last Broadway assignment was the Kathleen Turner starrer, Indiscretions, in 1995.

Dietrich's film credits include "The Blue Angel," "Witness For The Prosecution," "Touch of Evil" and "Judgment At Nuremberg."

Those seeking personal reminiscences, good and bad, of Dietrich can catch producer Alexander H. Cohen's solo, Star Billing, Off-Broadway through Jan.

Bombshells

Travelling from Germany to the Paris International Exposition, in the summer of 1937, Leni Riefenstahl went under an assumed name. She had no desire to confront reporters. In Paris, she won the fair’s gold medal for a film she had directed, a documentary-style celebration of the Nazi Party congress three years earlier. Yet she was also forced to defend herself, in interviews, not against her Nazi ties but against the swirling rumors that she had fallen into disgrace with the leaders of the Reich. Was it true that Goebbels had repudiated her? Were some upper-echelon Nazis unhappy that a woman wielded so much power? On her way back to Berlin, exhausted, she stopped off in Berchtesgaden, where she was escorted to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, so that she could describe her trip to the one man whose support for her was absolute.

Hitler had bypassed all the sanctioned Party hacks to hire Riefenstahl to direct her first official Nazi film, in 1933, and he had provided the title for the second, “Triumph of the Will,” so recently triumphant in Paris. He was deeply interested in movies, and screened them often in his home. Riefenstahl, ushered into an entrance hall, found herself watching a film in progress; she recognized Marlene Dietrich’s face before the Führer appeared and took her off for coffee on the terrace. Hitler’s choice of a Dietrich film might have seemed curious, since his ministers had long campaigned to destroy her reputation. Although she was the greatest movie star that Germany had ever produced, Dietrich refused to work in Germany. And it was no longer possible to pretend that her choices were not political. A few months before Riefenstahl’s visit, Dietrich announced that she had applied for American citizenship, posing for reporters outside the federal building in Los Angeles with one leg propped on the running board of her chauffeured Cadillac, and saying things like “America has been good to me.” The Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer informed its readers that Dietrich’s years among “the film Jews of Hollywood” had rendered her “wholly un-German”—which did not keep Hitler from very much wanting her back.

Two beautiful and ambitious Berliners, born just eight months apart—Marie Magdalene Dietrich, on December 27, 1901; Bertha Helene Amalie Riefenstahl, on August 22, 1902—both bound to shape the fantasies and touch the histories of their time. Two girls growing up amid the fear and chaos of the Great War, two artists committed to impossible ideals of physical beauty, two women who became embodiments not only of the opposing sides of the next war but, for many, of opposing forces in the human soul. They scarcely knew each other, although during the late twenties they were such close neighbors that Riefenstahl claimed she could see into Dietrich’s apartment windows.

It is unlikely that Dietrich would have looked back. There are a few photographs showing the two of them at the Berlin Press Ball in early 1930: Dietrich, on the brink of the huge success of “The Blue Angel,” smiles and clowns with ease, a jaunty cigarette holder clamped between her lips, the broad planes of her face soaking up the camera’s light and affection; Riefenstahl, then a well-known film actress, too, stands by shy and awkward, self-consciously eclipsed. Decades later, Riefenstahl recorded several anecdotes about Dietrich in her memoirs. Dietrich, in a sketchier memoir of her own, had nothing to say about Riefenstahl. Dietrich’s daughter, however, wrote of hearing a conversation in the mid-thirties about Jewish actors who had been thrown out of Germany. “Soon they won’t have any talent left for their big ‘cultural Reich,’ ” Dietrich said, “except, of course, that terrible Riefenstahl and Emil Jannings. They will stay, and those two ‘well-poisoners’—the Nazis deserve!”

The two women never saw each other again after 1930, when Dietrich left Germany, nor did they write or speak or maintain more than a few acquaintances in common. Karin Wieland’s dual biography “Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives” (Liveright), translated from the German by Shelley Frisch, gets around these problems largely by ignoring them. The book’s alternating sections keep their subjects separate, except on a few inevitable occasions—say, when Riefenstahl received a phone call informing her that Dietrich had won the role that Riefenstahl coveted in “The Blue Angel,” and was so upset that she sent her dinner guest home without his promised goulash. This isn’t the first time the story has been told; it originates in Steven Bach’s 1992 biography of Dietrich. Bach, who interviewed Riefenstahl’s dinner guest, a film-magazine editor, observes that Riefenstahl generally did not audition but, rather, dined.

One could gain more detail about both women by reading two full-scale biographies: Bach has also written an excellent book on Riefenstahl, as has Jürgen Trimborn. Wieland is shrewd, though, about her subjects and has done serious work in German archives, producing documents—a reassuring letter from Riefenstahl to Albert Speer, in 1944, predicting a “great turning point in this war”; an unpublished memoir by Riefenstahl’s inconveniently Jewish early lover-financier; several Dietrich letters—that give her book credibility, texture, and unending interest. This is the story of two glamorous women whose achievements in another time might have been no more substantial than the images on a screen but who assumed real-life roles with the highest historical stakes. However inscrutable human conduct, it is difficult not to search these lives for insight into some of the modern era’s most difficult questions, about illusion and mass intoxication, art and truth, courage and capitulation.

Could their very different childhoods tell us something about the choices they ultimately made? Consider what it meant to be the product of a Prussian military family, a girl whose father died before she was old enough to remember him beyond the vague impressions she listed later on as “tall, imposing stature, leather smell, shining boots, a riding whip, horses”—a father whose absence prompted her need for a “masculine model,” as she saw it, and whose mother raised her like “a kindly general,” providing every sort of lesson (violin, piano, English) on a widow’s meagre earnings. It would be easy to see here someone who came to welcome Hitler’s leather-costumed militarism, yet this is an outline of Dietrich’s childhood and the forces that she felt had made her who she was. Riefenstahl grew up in a working-class family on the rise; her mother was a seamstress, her father was a plumber who built up a successful business and was the dominating figure of her early life. Dietrich had an older sister, Riefenstahl a younger brother, both of whom were the “obedient” children in the family and pleased their parents by following conventional paths. Neither the bourgeois widow nor the ambitious plumber could accept the notion that a well-brought-up German girl would ever appear on the stage.

It seemed a particularly far-fetched dream in wartime. The war had begun just as the girls were entering adolescence—as Marie Magdalene decided she would be called by the more stage-worthy Marlene. In her diary, she wrote about attending a “real cinema” but also about the death of her uncle Otto at the front: “Shot in the neck on the fourth of December. Everybody’s crying.” Her mother remarried, and her stepfather, too, was killed at the front; by sixteen, she was mourning her “golden youth.” Later, Dietrich recalled the meals made entirely of turnips, the cold of those years without fuel, and the continuing sacrifice of men she knew that brought her “face-to-face with the war.”

No such events or feelings seem to have touched Riefenstahl, who was not from a military family and suffered no personal losses. She lived in a “cloud of unknowing,” or so she claimed in her memoirs, which were set on projecting the image of an artist too immersed in her work to notice her surroundings. “My mind was turned in on a tiny exclusive world,” she wrote, referring to the long hours of dance lessons that she had begun to take without her father’s knowledge. Her determination was formidable. But, at her own best evaluation, she was a woman who never came face to face with anything, because the only face she saw was her own.

By the early twenties, both young women were on the stage, having overcome parental objections by sidestepping the floozy connotations of such a career. Dietrich took lessons at the illustrious Max Reinhardt School, and performed in tiny roles in Reinhardt’s classic repertoire. Riefenstahl took to the elevated styles of modern dance then popular in Berlin, cultivating the aura of a barefoot priestess, even when costumed in a silver lamé leotard under transparent (but ethereally floating) chiffon. She also found a backer: the young Romanian-born Jewish banker Harry Sokal, who wanted to marry her but agreed instead to rent large theatres for her solo concerts, hire musicians, and take out ads. She made her professional début in 1923 and was well received, but in less than a year a knee injury brought her career to a halt. She was on her way to a doctor, utterly depressed, when she saw a poster for a film titled “Mountain of Destiny,” featuring a man poised between steep walls of mountain rock. She skipped her appointment and went to see the movie. It proved to be one of the two great epiphanies of her life.

“Mountain films” were a genre exclusive to Germany. Flourishing in the twenties and thirties, they began as sports documentaries and turned into quasi-mystical adventures played out on icy peaks by supremely heroic skiers or mountain climbers. The pioneer director of these films was Arnold Fanck, a geologist who’d taught himself to use a movie camera, a technical innovator with no studio connections. Riefenstahl was enthralled by “Mountain of Destiny,” and was determined to be part of Fanck’s next venture, even though the only mountains she’d ever seen were on postcards. Fanck responded to her overture by quickly writing a screenplay just for her; it may have helped that Harry Sokal had agreed to pay a quarter of the film’s costs.

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“The Holy Mountain” opened with a closeup of Riefenstahl’s face and continued with a sequence of her dancing on a shelf of rock above the sea: she was a joyous nymph, a child of nature, and a brand-new movie star. The film, which centered on the rivalry between two mountaineering friends for the dancer’s favor, was Fanck’s biggest success so far. Riefenstahl later revealed that Hitler had admired her “dance on the sea,” but even at the time of the film’s release, in 1926, it was interpreted politically, by critics on both the disapproving left (“Obtrusive propaganda for noble-blond, high-altitude humanity”) and the welcoming right (“This way, German film, to the holy mountain of your rebirth and that of the German people!”).

Riefenstahl went on to make several more mountain films with Fanck. She became adept at skiing and climbing, and did all her own stunts, often in freezing weather. She was hauled up on ropes through a real avalanche; she crossed a treacherous chasm on a wobbly ladder laid end to end. She was an early action heroine. But she wanted something more—to make a film with an esteemed director, with a real studio, indoors. In August, 1929, the renowned Josef von Sternberg took a few months off from Hollywood to make a movie in Berlin, and word went out that he needed a young female star. Riefenstahl did some assiduous dining with Sternberg; later on, to save face, she claimed that it was she who had told him all about Marlene Dietrich.

“The Blue Angel” was meant to be a vehicle for the German silent-film star Emil Jannings, who had also had a big success in Hollywood—he had just won the first Academy Award for Best Actor—but, with limited English, was returning to Berlin to make his first official talkie. Produced by the biggest German studio, Ufa, with Paramount’s coöperation, the film was to be shot in both a German and an English version. Sternberg first saw Dietrich that September, in a musical, and was struck by her “cold disdain” for the buffoonery around her. Neither Jannings nor the producer wanted her: at twenty-seven, she had long since traded the classics for a string of stage and film roles as a glamour girl, and she seemed already somewhat past her prime: early comparisons to Garbo had become criticism of her “slavish imitation” of Hollywood’s reigning star.

Sternberg’s film, based on the novel “Professor Unrat,” by Heinrich Mann, was the story of an old and priggish teacher who falls for a small-time cabaret singer. The professor was the central role, the girl merely the agent of his destruction. But Sternberg had changed the title to the name of the cabaret—and, by intimation, to the girl—in the hope of turning the emphasis around. When Dietrich stepped onstage, he knew the idea would work.

At ease with her sexual powers, wryly funny, unflinchingly amoral, Lola Lola, the cabaret singer of “The Blue Angel,” was also a new sort of woman on the screen. Dietrich wasn’t yet the goddess she would become: she’s rough around the edges, a bit thick in the waist, less polished and more natural than she ever was again. But in her white satin top hat and her exposed garters, flashing her legs while singing “Falling in Love Again”—“What’s a girl to do? I can’t help it”—she was the essence of Weimar sexual sophistication, the imperturbable center of the night world that Sternberg built around her. Seedy but vital, that world was filled with magical detail: a chorus of chubby overage showgirls, a live bear led calmly through Lola Lola’s dressing room, a mysteriously sad and silent clown overlooking all. Nothing could be further from Riefenstahl’s mountain films. Even Sternberg’s city alleyways are painted scenery; only the psychology of the main characters seems entirely real. The Nazi Party condemned “The Blue Angel,” if to little effect. But Dietrich was gone by then, in any case. She read the first German reviews (“Fascinating as no woman has ever been before in film”) on shipboard, on her way to Hollywood, where Sternberg waited to complete her transformation.

“I am Marlene,” he said later, and she agreed. She inscribed a photograph that she gave him, a year after her arrival, “To my creator, from his creation.” He was in love with her, but even more in love with the image of her that he projected on the screen. She was not in love with him; after an initial romance, he made love to her only through the camera, a fact that may have contributed to the allure that his lens discovered in her. Both were married, but it didn’t matter. Sternberg’s wife, in a rage over his obsession, sued for divorce. Dietrich had left her husband and small daughter in Berlin; she later collected the daughter, and although she never divorced her husband—he remained a friend, an adviser, and a dependent for decades—he did not interfere with her numberless affairs.

Sternberg was small and dark and Jewish; the “von” in his name was a Hollywood affectation. He had grown up dirt poor and hungry in Vienna (except for a few years when he was dirt poor and hungry in New York). His salvation was his proximity to Vienna’s Prater, the great amusement park, where he immersed himself in “pirouetting fleas, sword swallowers, tumbling midgets and men on stilts,” to abbreviate the long and fond list in his memoirs. The working inhabitants of “The Blue Angel,” bear and all, naturally leap to mind. But Sternberg created a realm of adamant illusion in all the six films he went on to make with Dietrich, until his love began to feel more like entrapment and to look more like revenge.

She became slimmer, blonder, sleeker, her cheekbones carved by shadow, a golden nimbus haloing her hair. The melancholic weariness of her opening scene in “Morocco” (1930), their first Hollywood film, betrays an overly close study of Garbo, but once she dons a tux, kisses a woman, and seduces Gary Cooper, all in the next scene, she’s nobody but Dietrich (unless she’s Sternberg). Nowhere this side of female impersonation has such evident pleasure been taken in the artifice of womanhood: playing an errant spy in their next film, “Dishonored,” set in the Vienna of the First World War, she refreshes her lipstick and straightens a stocking while awaiting a firing squad. Veils, lace, feathers, and furs make her almost as elaborate a construct as the teeming Chinese railroad station that was created for the opening of “Shanghai Express”—their best film together. Both “Morocco” and “Shanghai Express” were hits in Germany, and a Nazi ban on the spies and traitors of “Dishonored,” in January, 1932, was again without effect, since the Party was still a year from power. But, in a new turn, the film’s Berlin première was disrupted by a band of belligerents, whom an informant of Dietrich’s perhaps too casually dismissed as “rowdies.”

A month later, Riefenstahl experienced her second epiphany, in a stadium packed with cheering rowdies at a Hitler rally in Berlin. She seems to have been as inspired to become part of Hitler’s enterprise as she had been with Fanck and his mountain films, and the possibilities for advancement now were much greater. She had recently directed a film of her own, “The Blue Light,” which brought into the open the mysticism of the mountain genre: Riefenstahl played an otherworldly girl, spiritually tied to the beauty of a crystal-lined cave on a mountaintop, who dies when greedy villagers hack out the crystal. Riefenstahl had surely not intended the political intimations later discerned in the film. But, according to Harry Sokal, who left Germany in 1933, the negative reviews by several Berlin critics, some or all of whom were Jews, prompted an outpouring of anti-Semitism from the outraged director, who at about this time, with notable obtuseness, urged Sokal to read “Mein Kampf.”

Riefenstahl met Hitler shortly after the Berlin rally, when an admiring letter she sent brought a surprisingly quick response. She was soon appearing in the Goebbelses’ opera box, or dancing at a soirée at their home, charming everyone at the sort of social events that she was able to disavow until Goebbels’s diaries were discovered, in 1992. (June 12, 1933: “She is the only one of all the stars who understands us.”) There were widespread rumors of an affair with Hitler, evidently false. But Hitler believed so firmly in her artistry that he contracted her to film the Party rally in the summer of 1933. “Victory of Faith” was well received as propaganda, but it was a rush job, carried out with modest means. Riefenstahl assured him that she could do better. When he entrusted her with the much bigger rally to be held the following year, he demanded only that she render it “artistically meaningful.”

“Triumph of the Will” met the demands of the man who commissioned and financed it. Sixteen cameramen with sixteen assistants, nine aerial photographers, a sound crew, a lighting crew, drivers, guards: some hundred and seventy men reported to a director who had become the most important woman and the most important artist in the Reich. Plans for the six-day rally, which brought more than half a million people into the medieval city of Nuremberg, were made side by side with plans for the film. Albert Speer, the “chief decorator” of the event, was responsible for the visual drama: the obliterating seas of flags, the towering eagle behind the speakers’ platform, the “cathedral of light” made up of anti-aircraft searchlights beaming upward in Valhallan splendor. And all of it not only captured by Riefenstahl’s cameras but magnified and mythologized, so that the film itself has become a part of the history it documents.

It begins amid the clouds, from whence the Führer descends in his plane to spread joy among his people and to oversee a furiously rehearsed Nazi machine. Cranking up the sort of ingenuity she’d learned from Fanck, who mounted cameras on downhill skiers, Riefenstahl set her cameras gliding along tracks, soaring high in a specially built elevator, whizzing along with a crew on roller skates: every scene is in motion. Speeches by Party leaders were reduced to a few pithy lines (Julius Streicher: “A nation that does not protect its racial purity will perish!”) and reshot when necessary on a studio set. Hitler, in countless closeups, is viewed worshipfully from below, his face against the sky, his every word provoking an electric response. This is the leader, still consolidating power, whom the German people came to know. As much as any Hollywood director, Riefenstahl turned a human being into a god and urged a nation to fall hopelessly in love.

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She completed one more major film before the start of the war, “Olympia,” a two-part record of the 1936 summer Olympics, in Berlin, which was used as a showcase for the ostensibly peaceful new regime. Even more ambitious as filmmaking, involving further innovations—powerful telephoto lenses, underwater cameras—“Olympia” was no more a straightforward record of events than “Triumph of the Will.” Practice sessions were spliced in, winners replicated their feats, film segments of the diving sequence were reversed to suggest the exhilaration of flight: this was a tribute to human strength, striving, and beauty. The surprisingly close attention that Riefenstahl’s cameras paid to Jesse Owens, the African-American star of the games, was meant to assuage the world’s fears about German policies, as were the many images of a smiling, chatting, unprecedentedly “human” Hitler. And yet Riefenstahl’s shots of Owens have an undeniable warmth. It’s an insoluble paradox that she demonstrates real devotion to the achievements of both men.

The enormous expenses of “Olympia” got Riefenstahl into funding fights with Goebbels, leading to the rumors in the Paris papers that only slightly marred her reception at the Exposition there in 1937. But “Olympia” was her greatest success yet. It had its première as the climax of Hitler’s birthday festivities, in April, 1938; Goebbels awarded her the German Film Prize. Intended for an international audience, the film was shown to prolonged applause through much of Europe before Riefenstahl set off for Hollywood to obtain American distribution. She reached New York in early November, just days before Kristallnacht, which she claimed was a slanderous falsehood perpetrated by the American press. Arriving in Hollywood some two weeks later, she found that no major figure except Walt Disney was willing to see her.

Dietrich was not in Hollywood at the time. Her last three films with Sternberg had been commercial disasters, as exotic fantasy gave way to hysterical extravaganza. She still believed she needed him as a director, but he had grown sick—to judge by the films, very sick—of being needed only in that way. There’s little love in the camera’s eye for anything but the Byzanto-crazy sets and costumes of “The Scarlet Empress” (Dietrich as Catherine the Great), and there’s a definite cruelty in its regard for her in their final film, “The Devil Is a Woman”: harshly made up—her semicircular eyebrows suggest permanent shock—and wearing a fringed lampshade on her head, she’s a parody of the woman she used to be. Paramount soon let her contract expire. During the late thirties, she travelled in Europe, failed to persuade her mother and sister to leave Germany, and made a few films that were less interesting than her list of lovers, which included Erich Maria Remarque and the French actor Jean Gabin. It was Gabin’s decision to join the Free French in North Africa that made Dietrich realize she could not “let the war pass me by.” At the end of 1943, she joined the U.S.O. and took on the greatest role of her life.

It’s hard to say whether her true uniform was the Eisenhower jacket, which she made appear the height of chic, or the sequinned gowns she wore onstage in front of the troops, singing and sometimes playing a musical saw—a ridiculous instrument that she used to tremendous effect, hoisting her skirt and placing it between her legs to sound a tune. She started out in Algiers and travelled the length of Italy, following the boys, often giving two shows a day in primitive conditions: Naples, Anzio, Rome, eventually Belgium, and finally into Germany. She put in more time at the front than any other performer. She sang on the radio, too, broadcasting not only to Allied troops but behind German military lines: her specialty was “Lili Marlene,” a soldier’s love song so sad that Goebbels banned it as demoralizing. (Dietrich’s friend Ernest Hemingway wrote that “if she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it.”) Shortly after V-E Day, she travelled to the camp at Belsen, where she’d heard that her sister had been found, only to discover that she was not a prisoner but had been helping her husband run a movie theatre for Nazi personnel, living comfortably amid the horror. The Americans hushed up the story to spare their tireless warrior the headlines. Dietrich took care of her sister, quietly, for many years, but never spoke of her again.

People lie, and so do images. Early in the war, after witnessing a pogrom by German soldiers, Riefenstahl backed out of a film she’d begun making about Hitler’s victories at the Polish front. If her conscience troubled her further, though, she hid it well: the same month, she was on the dais at the victory celebration for the taking of Warsaw. She made no more official Nazi films, but the inverted mountain movie that she worked on during the war, titled “Lowlands,” was lavishly financed by the Reich. Starting in 1948, she was put on trial four times; in the end, she was judged to be nothing worse than a “fellow-traveller.” As for Dietrich, no one else would have been asked to play the Nazi-collaborating cabaret singer in “A Foreign Affair” (1948), a Hollywood film set in bombed-out Berlin. The Vienna-reared director, Billy Wilder—a Jew whose mother was murdered by the Nazis—confounded every expectation by favoring Dietrich’s morally ambiguous temptress over Jean Arthur’s shrilly all-American ingénue. Dietrich, glittering and gorgeous, sang her darkly cynical numbers (“Want to buy some illusions, slightly used?”) accompanied at the piano by the composer Friedrich Hollaender, who had written the songs for “The Blue Angel,” eighteen years earlier, shortly before he, too, fled to Hollywood. In these two films, Dietrich embodies the bold beginning and the tragic end of the same German story.

Dietrich’s real-life heroism allowed her to play women who had shown none of her moral courage and invest them with human dimension. In 1948, when the publication of the fraudulent diaries of Eva Braun “revealed” salacious stories about Riefenstahl, newspapers gleefully predicted “Marlene to play Leni” in the movie version. She might have lent even this role some sympathy. She is said to have based the exquisitely cultured and willfully unknowing Nazi she played in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” in 1961, on her mother.

Riefenstahl’s redemption, beyond the military courts, was a subject of fierce argument for the rest of her very long life—she died in 2003, a decade after Dietrich, at the age of a hundred and one. She never saw the need to offer an apology, and her memoirs, which appeared in Germany in 1987, were filled with self-justifying fabrications. But the fact that the two major films Riefenstahl made for the Nazis remain so powerful has meant that the real argument is about art. We do not expect artists to be heroes, but we have come to accept that the art of totalitarian regimes is, by a kind of moral corollary, bound to be bathetic kitsch. It is deeply unsteadying to ponder the possibility that Riefenstahl might have been both a considerable artist and a considerable Nazi. Critics have long pressed for resolution, one way or the other.

As early as 1955, a group of American film directors—many of whom had refused to see Riefenstahl when she came to Hollywood in 1938—named “Olympia” one of the ten best films ever made, alongside “Battleship Potemkin” and “Citizen Kane.” Just a decade after the war, one could presumably tell the artist from the art. In 1965, Susan Sontag wrote that both “Olympia” and “Triumph of the Will” transcended “the categories of propaganda or even reportage,” but she changed her mind when, nine years later, her position no longer seemed a daring stand for formal values but a dangerous commonplace, with the two films becoming festival favorites and the director approaching the status of a pop star.

In 1973, Riefenstahl launched a new career as a photographer, with a lauded book of color images of the Nuba, a majestic tribe in remote central Sudan. The subject, as far from her past as possible, supported the increasingly widespread contention that the only constant in her work was a devotion to physical beauty, without regard to race. Sontag, in an essay that seems to have made Riefenstahl angrier than anything Hitler had done, countered that the only constant in Riefenstahl’s work was its inherent Fascism, evident precisely in this devotion to physical beauty, among other things, and in its exclusion of human complexity. It’s a strong argument about intention: a refusal to separate the artist from the art. The photographs, however, remain indistinguishable in any moral or political sense from those taken of the Nuba by George Rodger, the English war photographer whose work inspired Riefenstahl, and whose perspective was anything but Fascist: Rodger, accompanying the British Army in 1945, had been among the first to photograph the corpses at Belsen.

The dedication to beauty had its dangers for Dietrich, too. She spent much of the last two decades of her professional life on the concert stage and on the move, from Paris to Las Vegas, stirring memories and breaking hearts—she sang “Lili Marlene” again in Germany, and in Israel—and punishing her body beyond endurance to maintain the glamour of years past. From the late seventies, when the glamour seemed beyond recall, she sequestered herself in her Paris apartment. Her “Judgment at Nuremberg” co-star, Maximilian Schell, made a documentary film about her when she was eighty-one, without being allowed to photograph her. Billy Wilder promised that he’d blindfold himself if only she’d let him visit her, but she declined.

One might have expected Riefenstahl to be the isolated one, but freedom from shame proved a great advantage. She shared her later years with a devoted camera assistant four decades her junior. She took up scuba diving in her seventies, and continued straight through her nineties, posing in her bathing gear and publishing books of underwater photographs, practically daring anyone to talk about Fascist images of fish. Yet the old questions continued to vex her. “So what am I guilty of?” she asked an interviewer in the final moments of a three-hour documentary about her life, released in 1993. “I didn’t drop any atomic bombs. I didn’t denounce anyone. So where does my guilt lie?”

Near the end of “Judgment at Nuremberg,” Dietrich, the widow of a convicted Nazi general, waits expectantly for the verdict in the American military trial of four German judges. Like her husband, these men were not blatant monsters but influential figures who went along with the monstrous plans. The movie, directed by Stanley Kramer, is a document of its time: the late fifties, when people were just beginning to come to terms with the Holocaust. One of the trial scenes contained actual footage from the liberation of the camps, the first such images that many people had seen. Dietrich’s role—written with her in mind—is the aggrieved persona of German innocence. “Do you think we knew of those things?” she asks the American judge, offended in her dignity. “We did not know. We did not know.” The verdict, nevertheless, is guilty. In the aftermath, the judge calls her to say goodbye, and Dietrich has one of her finest moments, with no lines to say at all: there is just her magnificent face, half in shadow, suddenly aged and blanched of life, as she sits silently and lets the telephone ring. ♦

It Happened at the Hôtel du Cap

Robert, Joe senior, Teddy, and Jean Kennedy, Cap d’Antibes, summer of 1939.

August 1938, the Riviera: Joseph P. Kennedy meets Marlene Dietrich. Their liaison, conducted under the noses of spouses and other lovers, brought two families together—and, as detailed by the author of a new biography, Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, led to the star’s 1963 tryst with J.F.K.

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In August of 1938, Joseph P. Kennedy was 49 years old and had been serving as America’s ambassador to England for six months. War clouds were hovering over Britain, but that summer in Europe the entire Kennedy family gathered together for the first time in several years. Joe junior, 23, had just graduated from Harvard, Jack, 21, was a Harvard sophomore, and Rosemary, 19, Kathleen, 18, Eunice, 17, Pat, 14, Robert, 12, Jean, 10, and Teddy, 6, were on vacation from their various schools. No matter how complicated his life was, Kennedy believed in taking time for serious relaxation, preferably in a sumptuous location—and in Europe that meant the French Riviera. He leased a villa several miles east of Cannes, abutting the Hôtel du Cap, already one of the world’s great luxury hotels. Enshrined on more than 20 landscaped acres on the tip of a peninsula, the du Cap featured an exquisite expanse of grounds, including a huge saltwater pool built into the rocks at the edge of the Mediterranean. A series of private cabanas ribboned the cliffs, and a sign soon graced the largest one: j. p. kennedy’s family.

Marlene Dietrich, husband Rudolf Sieber, and daughter Maria, circa 1931. From Photofest.

The exclusivity of the Hôtel du Cap assured visitors that they were all members of rarefied society, and so the Kennedys quickly found themselves mingling with select other guests, including the ménage of Marlene Dietrich. A high-profile beauty always turned Joe’s head, and Marlene was no exception. As she later recalled, “He was old then already, but sweet,” and when he started “following me around,” they began an affair that sparked a decades-long relationship between the two families.

“Women Are Better”
By 1938, Dietrich had been an international star for nearly a decade, a role she had dreamed of since her childhood in Berlin. Her career had begun on the stage and in a string of appearances in German films; it was the acclaimed director Josef von Sternberg who transformed her life in 1929 by casting her as the tawdry cabaret singer who starts Emil Jannings on his descent into madness in The Blue Angel. Paramount grabbed her and introduced her to American audiences in the Sternberg-directed Morocco, with Dietrich playing a wayward chanteuse who sings her first number in gender-bending top hat and tails and then kisses a woman full on the lips. “Sex without gender” is how Kenneth Tynan later described Marlene, and from the start her sexuality was at the core of her stardom.
Her teenage diaries bear witness to her bisexuality emerging at an early age, and she would later conclude that “women are better, but you can’t live with a woman.” So she had sought out a doting husband and in 1922 had found him in Rudolf Sieber, an assistant director who picked the then-unknown Dietrich out of a long line of aspiring actresses. A blond, good-looking young man-about-town who could have passed for her brother, Rudi held the power to cast her in films, which he did, and within months of their first meeting, Marlene became his 21-year-old bride. Their daughter, Maria, was born in December of 1924, but marriage and motherhood hardly put a dent in Marlene’s social life.

Filming Morocco in Hollywood, Marlene sizzled in front of the cameras with Gary Cooper—and began a pattern of conducting what were often very public affairs with her co-stars. Rudi had stayed behind in Europe, and while he visited California occasionally and Maria was usually in residence, Marlene’s lovers were an accepted part of the household. Not daring to totally test the limits of American tolerance, Rudi’s own live-in lover, Tamara Matul, usually remained in Paris, where he had moved in 1932 and was working for Paramount.

In between her Hollywood films, Marlene returned to Europe, where she considered it the norm to have her current lover, her husband, and her husband’s lover out and about as a foursome. Some of her devotees, such as Maurice Chevalier, took this in stride, sending white lilacs to Marlene and cornflowers to Rudi (Rudi’s preference for his lapel). Others, like the British-born charmer Brian Aherne, her co-star in The Song of Songs, objected to the arrangement. “Sweetheart—you must be joking!” responded a baffled Dietrich. “All this soul-searching about poor Rudi. He is my husband! What has that to do with it? You can’t be that bourgeois.” With that, Aherne joined the growing list of those who left her bed but remained lifelong friends.

In Marlene’s worldview, Rudi and Maria were the constants in her life, and most other relationships were, eventually, transitory. According to her daughter, Marlene never slept with Rudi again after becoming pregnant, yet nothing was hidden from him. In fact, he was given most of the love letters she received, to bear witness to the ardor she provoked and then to be archived. And what passion that woman could inspire! Her volumes of correspondence, saved by herself or Rudi, testify to the emotional havoc she played on both men and women. She is variously addressed as “Perfect one,” “Dearest only one,” and “My blessed dearest beloved.” One female supplicant insisted that “I want to kiss you so hard that it makes my head spin” and beseeched her, “Don’t ever love anyone more than you love me.” A male enthused, “Your love—in any form—is my happiness,” and decried their parting because it meant “my body will be 7,000 miles from my soul.” On-screen and off, Dietrich was a chameleon who became whatever her lover or director wanted her to be.

A Vigorous and Bifurcated Love Life
When Dietrich met Kennedy, in the summer of 1938, she was 37 years old and still gorgeous. Her career, however, was at a low ebb. The year before, she had joined Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo in being declared “box office poison” by an American theater owners’ organization.
Paramount let her go, and while she received a nice severance, she didn’t know if she would work again. Still, she refused to return to Berlin while Hitler was in power—she loathed the Nazis—and flatly turned down his offer to become the leading lady of U.F.A., the German film studio. Instead, she ultimately exiled herself to the South of France with her extended family: Maria, her now 13-year-old daughter; Rudi and Tami; and Marlene’s latest lover, the renowned author of All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque. If her style of group travel bothered others, it didn’t concern her. More eyebrows had to be raised when Sternberg, a former lover, joined their group at the du Cap while Remarque busied himself with writing the novel that would become Arch of Triumph.
The Kennedys, too, had a unique lifestyle. Joe had always had a vigorous and bifurcated love life: occasionally at home with his wife, Rose, and often on the road with showgirls and ingénues. Between 1926 and 1930 he had been based in Hollywood, ultimately running three studios simultaneously before spearheading mergers and sell-offs that increased his wealth tenfold and provided the foundation of his fortune. His marriage had been threatened by his serious and long-term affair with the glamorous actress Gloria Swanson, but that had ended with his departure from Hollywood in 1930. Rose had chosen to look the other way, willing herself to believe that other women didn’t exist.

At the du Cap, Joe kept in touch with London and Washington, assisted by a lovely young French girl who took his dictation, while Rose and the children had their own, separate routines. Their paths soon crossed with Maria’s, and as each day passed, Dietrich’s very isolated teenage daughter became more and more infatuated with all of the Kennedys, particularly Jack.

Today, Maria is an attractive, vital widow and grandmother, graced with brutal honesty and sparkling humor, yet her attitude and outlook were hard-won. She spent her early years sporadically tutored at home, but more often serving as her mother’s handmaiden, dresser, and miniature aide-de-camp, with a long list of duties that included signing Marlene’s name to fan photographs. Maria had her first formal taste of academia at the age of 11, when she was sent to a Swiss boarding school, but that lasted for only a few months before her mother decided she was needed at her side once again. Maria had no real friends her own age and was closest to Tami, who was the same age as Marlene. Maria learned early on that it was easiest to keep the peace by staying quiet and doing what was expected of her. As she wrestled with early adolescence, she knew she was different from other children but didn’t understand why.

Marlene Dietrich at the Hôtel du Cap. From Central Press/Getty Images.

Maria had never experienced being around a family as full of confidence and spark as the Kennedys, and while she says she felt “gawky” around them, she longed to be their friend. She joined them every chance she got, yet often found herself spending time with the slower, intellectually disabled Rosemary, whose sallow skin was so distinct from that of the other Kennedy children, with their healthy glows and “smiles that never ended.” While the others swam and played, Maria and Rosemary would sit in the shade of the Kennedy cabana looking out at the sea. Rosemary was six years older than Maria, but, Maria says, “we were both shadow children” who somehow knew they didn’t belong with the others. Still, when the older Kennedy children joined their parents at the famous society hostess Elsa Maxwell’s summer ball, Maria was allowed to attend as well. “My mother even bought me my very own first evening dress, stiffened white net with a wide, inset cummerbund encrusted with chips of multicolored glass. I looked like a mosquito tent with sparkle.” As awkward as she felt, the evening was burned into her memory when Jack, handsome in his white tuxedo, crossed the long ballroom to ask her to dance. “A breathtaking dream who, at the age of just 21, has the kindness to ask a net tent to dance, you must admit is truly wonderful!”

Maria Sieber flanked by Pat and Eunice Kennedy at the Hôtel du Cap, 1939. From the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

Jack would always remember that evening, too, but for a very different reason. He danced with Marlene to “Begin the Beguine” and she was “holding me so tight and then she slipped her hand down my trousers.” Years later, recounting the story to Frank Sinatra’s valet, George Jacobs (who described the scene in his memoir), Jack wondered if his father had put Marlene up to it, but grinned when he remembered her “terrific perfume.”

Rose Kennedy may have felt a new security in her marriage with her husband close at hand after years of separations, but proximity had little impact on Joe’s behavior. As the Kennedys were growing ever more important to her, Maria noticed the ambassador becoming a frequent visitor to her mother’s cabana. She was embarrassed and feared her new friends would ostracize her as a result, but Rose continued to show Maria kindnesses, inviting her to join the family for lunch and acting as if everything could not have been more normal. Maria concluded that the Kennedys must be “as used to their father disappearing as I was my mother.”

Marlene and Joe were both extraordinarily disciplined in their professional lives yet also shared a hedonistic streak. Each would have an impressive tally of lovers over the course of their lifetimes, though years of practice did not seem to help Kennedy’s technique, for Gloria Swanson reported that he was an unimaginative, if enthusiastic, lover. As she recounted in her autobiography, “He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free,” yet within minutes, his lovemaking was over with “a hasty climax.”

Dietrich, on the other hand, was an intrepid and pliant lover. When her daughter asked her later in life why she had had so many sexual partners, Marlene responded with a shrug and said, “They asked.” She clearly thrived on pleasing her partners and didn’t believe in condoms, finding men “so grateful when you tell them they don’t have to wear it.” Once she discovered diaphragms, she called them “the greatest invention since Pan-Cake makeup.” Until then, she had sworn by her secret weapon against pregnancy: douching with ice-cold water and wine vinegar, which she carried with her by the case everywhere she went. (Decades later another of her co-stars and grand amours, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., warmly recalled their “lovely liaison,” adding, “You know, sometimes when I am in a restaurant and a waiter walks by with a salad vinaigrette, I’ll find myself thinking fond thoughts of Marlene.”)

His and hers Time covers. FromTime agazine, © 2009 Time Inc.

Kennedy and Dietrich’s connection wasn’t only physical. They were stars on the world’s stage, sharing a level of celebrity few others had achieved; each, for instance, had graced the cover of Time magazine. They were highly individualistic, both strongly convinced of the rightness of their beliefs and caring little what others thought of their private lives. Strong, feisty, and self-absorbed, these two titans spent their time together at the du Cap trading Hollywood gossip as well as views on the international landscape. Marlene had worked actively on behalf of refugees fleeing her homeland, and in 1937 had applied for American citizenship, for which she was slurred in the German press as well as by Hearst newspapers, which condemned her with the headline deserts her native land. She tried to convince Kennedy of the fallacy of his isolationism regarding Germany, for she had no doubts that Hitler was inherently evil. But as Joe would write in his unpublished memoir, he believed it was mere “economic maladjustment” that was at the heart of “the world’s unrest.” He saw Hitler as the C.E.O. of an adversarial corporation and maintained faith in the power of negotiation.

Kennedy and Dietrich didn’t change each other’s opinions, but continued to relish each other’s company. He found her enchanting, smart, and irreverent, while Marlene was impressed with the obvious joy Joe took in his children. She would later recall in a letter to Ted Kennedy that what she remembered best was Joe’s genuine laughter, which “would echo from the rocks” overlooking the sea.

“Mad Desire”
After an idyllic month of relaxation, Joe returned to England, where tin hats and gas masks were being distributed throughout the embassy. As Hitler’s army gathered along the Czechoslovakian border, Londoners began digging trenches in public parks for shelter from the bombs they assumed were coming. Then came the announcement, on September 30, that peace was at hand, with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, France’s Édouard Daladier, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Hitler all shaking hands on an agreement that ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Germany in exchange for peace. Across the rest of Europe there was a collective, if short-lived, sigh of relief.

Kennedy’s ultimate goal was to keep America out of what he saw as a European conflict, yet when he advocated “trying to work out something with the totalitarian States,” a round of criticism from the British and American press followed. Joe was sure he was right and everyone else, including his latest lover, Clare Boothe Luce, was wrong, but the next spring the Nazis entered Prague, and war looked ever more imminent.

The Dietrich clan had moved on to Paris for the winter, and when Marlene sailed for America to finalize her citizenship, Maria was sent back to her Swiss boarding school for a few months. Then it was summer again and time to re-unite and depart for the Hôtel du Cap.

Diplomatic complications were not going to keep the Kennedy family from returning to the Riviera in August of 1939. Maria was ecstatic because “for the first time in my life I had friends to greet.” Joe, however, was less than thrilled because this time he had competition for Marlene’s affections not only from Erich Remarque but also from Jo Carstairs, the cross-dressing Standard Oil heiress. Carstairs held the world record as the fastest female speedboat racer, but she made a dramatic arrival at the du Cap on her three-masted schooner. Jo told Marlene she made her “seethe with a mad desire,” according to one of the letters Marlene preserved, but nothing prevented Dietrich from picking up where she had left off with Kennedy the year before. Their families swam and dined together often, and Marlene took to calling the ambassador “Papa Joe” to differentiate him from all the other “Joe”s in her life: his eldest son, Jo Carstairs, and Josef von Sternberg.

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No longer concerned about the camera, Marlene let herself go bronze; home movies taken that summer reveal that she was more striking than ever in her white two-piece bathing suit and flowing beach robes. Remarque ensconced himself in his room during the day to write, giving her uninterrupted time each day for both an après-lunch rendezvous with the ambassador and an afternoon outing with Jo on her boat. In contrast to the often jealous Remarque and the besotted Carstairs, Kennedy must have been refreshing. Emotionless in his lovemaking, he was able to cordon off satisfying his sexual appetite as a necessary part of his day. And his Hollywood experience came in handy that second summer.

Dietrich had been off the screen for two years when the producer Joseph Pasternak, who had known her when they were both beginning their careers in Berlin and was now a growing Hollywood power, tracked her down at the du Cap and called her with an offer for a role in a Western he was planning. She was intrigued, but couldn’t imagine herself playing a dance-hall girl and turned to “Papa Joe” for advice. Kennedy jumped into the negotiations and, as if he had never left the business, placed transatlantic calls to Universal, where Pasternak assured him he wanted Marlene so much that there were also job offers for both Rudi and Remarque. Later that evening, Joe proclaimed that the deal was too good to refuse, and so Marlene accepted the offer to play opposite Jimmy Stewart in Destry Rides Again.

Eunice, Robert, Jack, and Patricia Kennedy, Cap d’Antibes, 1939. From the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

But before she was willing to report to work in California, Dietrich wanted one more assurance. Along with much of the rest of the world she was worried that Hitler was about to move into Poland and ignite a war with England and France. She needed to know her family would be safe, and Joe promised he would care for them as he would for his own. In mid-August, Marlene left for Hollywood on the French ocean liner Normandie while her ménage stayed on at the du Cap. The next week, the Kennedys returned to London, and within days, Maria, Rudi, Tami, and Erich were on their way to Cherbourg, on the English Channel. Somehow, between Joe and Marlene, enough strings had been pulled to assure coveted berths on the Queen Mary, which departed for New York on September 2—the day after Hitler’s troops marched into Poland and the day before England and France declared war on Germany.

Kennedy’s ambassadorial tenure would end with a metaphorical bang a year later, after headlines in The Boston Globe—kennedy says democracy all done in britain, maybe here—referenced his assertion in an interview that “democracy is finished in England.” He had gone on to say that it wasn’t Hitler as much as “national socialism” that was going to finish the Brits, but the nuance, such as it was, was lost, and he had become a liability to President Franklin Roosevelt, who had just been elected to an unprecedented third term. Joe returned to the U.S., moving to Palm Beach. (Florida levied no state taxes.) He continued to oppose any American involvement in the war until Pearl Harbor, and by then the chasm between him and the president was too wide to bridge. Kennedy’s public life was over, and his reputation never recovered. While he continued to invest in real estate, his liquor-importing business, and a variety of other ventures, he turned his attention to his older sons’ careers. Joe junior was being groomed to enter politics, but after he was killed in 1944 while flying a bomber mission to Germany, “the burden,” as the then 27-year-old Jack Kennedy put it, “falls to me.”

Marlene stayed in touch with Joe over the years, keeping tabs on mutual friends and occasionally asking for favors such as help for Rudi’s lover, Tami, who was still traveling on a useless White Russian passport. Joe had told Marlene to look up the agent Charlie Feldman, and he became her trusted, lifelong adviser. Destry Rides Again had indeed re-ignited her film career, and with America’s entry into the war, no one was more supportive of “my boys” than Dietrich. She toured with the U.S.O. for almost a year without a break, appearing in North Africa, Italy, and France and along the way picking up new lovers, including French actor Jean Gabin and American general James Gavin. (Over the next decade, she would add to her truly incredible and diverse list Yul Brynner, Adlai Stevenson, Edith Piaf, Frank Sinatra, William Saroyan, Edward R. Murrow, Michael Wilding, and Harold Arlen.) After years as witness, Maria could offer in explanation only that her mother’s inimitable combination of beauty, brains, and sophistication “made bumbling adolescents out of many worldly, respected men.”

Following the Allied victory, Marlene returned to the screen, most notably in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright in 1950 and Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution in 1957. She was, as she had always been, a brand as much as an actress. She understood the power of her uniqueness and worked hard to keep the fascination alive with such tricks as tightly braiding the hair near her ears to pin into her scalp for a self-made face-lift. Some of her most memorable appearances were in character parts in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), and Stanley Kramer’s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). In the early 1950s, she had also found a second career as a spectacularly costumed Las Vegas chanteuse, and when she later acquired a young Burt Bacharach as her accompanist and musical director, they took her one-woman show on a world tour. Just as she had always convinced her lovers they were all that mattered to her at the moment, time stood still as she entranced her audience night after night.

Maria had grown into a captivating beauty herself and found success as an actress on Broadway and in the new world of live television, on programs such as Studio One, Alcoa Hour, and Robert Montgomery Presents. After conquering teenage alcoholism and a brief disaster of a first marriage, she was happily wed to the production designer William Riva and, by 1960, was the mother of three sons. During that year’s presidential campaign, at a time when few performers made their political views public, both Marlene and Maria proudly wore their kennedy for president buttons and were thrilled when Jack was elected that November.

Dietrich with J.F.K. aide Dave Powers during her 1963 White House visit. From the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

A “Clumsy Pass”
Jack Kennedy had always remembered the glamorous woman in the South of France who had massaged him seductively when she wasn’t off in her bungalow with his father. Dietrich was a grandmother and past 60 when she brought her sold-out one-woman show to Washington, D.C., in September of 1963 and was flattered by Jack’s phone call inviting her to the White House. She was given directions for arrival at the south entrance and was shown upstairs to the family living quarters, where she found the president alone and expecting her. She later regaled friends such as Kenneth Tynan and Gore Vidal with her tales of that early-evening visit, saying the tour consisted of the West Sitting Room and a bedroom where Jack made a “clumsy pass.”

In Vidal’s recounting, her initial protest of “You know, Mr. President, I am not very young” soon gave way to “Don’t muss my hair. I’m performing.” After an “ecstatic three to six minutes,” Jack fell asleep. Marlene pulled herself together and, already running late and not wanting to just wander the halls, woke Jack. He rang for his valet, who was clearly “used to this sort of thing.” With a towel around his waist, the president led her to the small elevator across the hall from the bedroom and “shook her hand as if she were the Mayor of San Antonio,” but something else was on his mind.

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“If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?” he inquired, according to Vidal. Marlene did not promise anything, but nodded in acquiescence.

“Did you ever go to bed with my old man?”

Knowing exactly what he wanted to hear, Marlene demurred. “He tried,” she responded after a brief pause, “but I never did.”

Jack was triumphant, exclaiming, “I always knew the son of a bitch was lying.”

Marlene couldn’t resist a little bragging of her own. When she returned to her New York apartment, she was greeted by Maria’s husband, who was visiting. Before even saying hello, Marlene smiled victoriously, opened her bag, pulled out a pair of pink panties, and waved them at his nose. “Smell! It is him! The president of the United States! He … was … wonderful!” As Maria tells the story, she is quick to note that her husband immediately removed himself to a hotel.

Two months later, the president was assassinated in Dallas, and Dietrich mournfully sent notes and flowers to the family. Maria was crushed, remembering Jack’s long-ago kindnesses to her and “the youth he wore so well.” In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, she recalls, “my mother donned simple widow’s black, her face a white mask of personal sorrow, sat erect, her voice hushed and reverent as she repeatedly told of their last romantic encounter.”

Six years later, on November 18, 1969, was on the short list of friends who received cables from Ted Kennedy, telling her of Joe’s passing at the age of 81, eight years after he had suffered a debilitating stroke. By this time, Marlene had endured a variety of ailments herself, and after her final film appearance, wearing a thick black veil in Just a Gigolo in 1978, she took to living behind closed doors in her Paris apartment, staying hidden even from her closest friends, keeping alive her unique brand of allure long past her death, in 1992.

Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich’s recording career extended over half a century for singing was always part of her acting career. Her first songs, for the German movie Es liegt in der Luft, (There’s Something in the Air), were recorded in 1928 and the soundtrack of her last film Just a Gigolo, which included her last musical offerings, was released in 1978. Although she first became famous as an actress, this fame made it easy for Marlene Dietrich to start a second career as chanteuse while she was in her fifties and film offers were becoming scarce. Capitalizing on her image as femme fatale, she performed in night clubs and theaters around the world for over two decades, and her musical work was documented in numerous recordings.

Dietrich’s voice, with a range of a mere one-and-a-half-octaves, was not that of a great singer. However, she made up for her technical limitations through inventive phrasing and by avoiding sustained notes. She dramatized her shows with theatrical elements such as extraordinary costumes, lighting and movement. “Her dusky, accented vocals complemented the heavy-lidded character she assumed on stage,” wrote Colin Escott in the liner notes to My Greatest Songs. She flirted with “the limits of on-stage eroticism,… hinting at a strangely androgynous sexuality,” wrote Escott. With her mixture of intelligence and eroticism, Dietrich created a modern female prototype with a good deal more independence than the traditional stereotype. And she was versatile. One of her less well known musical skills was her ability to play various songs on a saw with a violin bow.

Born in Berlin in 1901 as Marie Magdalene Dietrich into a well-to-do family, Dietrich received a good education. At the young age of 13, Dietrich merged her two names into Marlene and created her stage name. Her father Louis, an officer in the Royal Prussian Police, died while Dietrich was still in school. Her mother Wilhelmina remarried, but her new husband, Colonel Eduard von Losch, died from wounds received in World War I when Dietrich was 17.

In 1919, Dietrich enrolled at the Weimar Konservatorium and began studying violin. She loved the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and eagerly practiced his solo sonatas. Was it because of a wrist injury, or because she was not accepted for further study at the Weimar Academy, or was it an offer to join the chorus line in a burlesque revue? Whatever the reason, Dietrich moved back to Berlin and dived into the Berlin theater scene where she encountered Claire Waldoff, a lesbian entertainer who performed in men’s clothes. When she was 21, Dietrich married Rudolph Sieber, the casting director for a German movie in which she played a bit part. A year later, she gave birth to her daughter Maria.

For the Record…

Born Maria Magdalene Dietrich December 27, 1901, in Berlin, Germany; died May 6, 1992, in Paris, France; daughter of Louis Erich Otto (police officer) and Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing; second of two daughters; married Rudolf Sieber (casting director), 1923; daughter Maria (born 1924); became American citizen in 1939; Education: attended Auguste Victoria School for Girls, 1906-18; studied violin at the Weimar Konservatorium, 1919; attended Max Reinhard Drama School beginning in 1922; studied violin at the Weimar Konservatorium, 1919; returned to Berlin and studied acting under innovative director Max Reinhard in Berlin.

Joined Reinhard’s theater company and played minor roles in 17 German movies, 1922-29; cut her first record, 1926; got her first starring role in Ship of Lost Men, directed by Maurice Tourneur, 1927; became an international star as nightclub singer Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel, directed by Josef von Sternberg, 1930; Academy Award nomination for her acting in Morocco, 1930; moved to Hollywood with von Sternberg and worked with him in six more movies 1931-1935; acted in numerous movies under various directors for Paramount, Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and other production firms, 1936-43; performed in war bond tours and worked on radio broadcasts for war effort, 1943; first performed “Lili Marlene” during North Africa U.S.O. tour, 1943; performed over 500 times before Allied troops, 1943-46; appeared in various movies, 1946-1961, including A Foreign Affair, 1948, Stage Fright, 1950, Witness for the Prosecution, 1957, Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961; performed first show as night club singer at Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, 1953; toured as a concert and cabaret singer until 1975: toured Germany and Israel, 1960; Russia in 1964; Broadway in 1967; and the World Exposition in Montreal June, 1967; oother activities during the 1960s and 1970s included: narrator in Hitler-documentary The Black Fox, 1962; first TV special I Wish You Love directed by Alexander Cohen, 1972; withdrew from public life after a stage accident in Sydney, Australia, 1975; last appearance in the movie Just a Gigolo, 1978; Dietrich’s autobiography published in Germany, 1987; English version Marlene published in the United States, 1989.

Awards: Legion d’Honneur, France; Medal of Freedom, American Defense Department; honored on a German postage stamp in 1997.

Dietrich had minor roles in 17 movies before film director Josef von Sternberg choose her to co-star with Emil Jannings in the American/German co-production The Blue Angel. That role as seductive nightclub singer Lola Lola lures a conservative schoolteacher to ruin, panted the seed for her future image as an actress—and as a person. One of Lola’s songs, “Falling in Love Again” composed by Frederick Hollander, was Dietrich’s first and most legendary song.

Dietrich the Hollywood Star

Sternberg could see Dietrich’s potential as a new type of sex symbol and, after Paramount offered her a two-movie deal based only on a screen test, he persuaded her to go to Hollywood with him. From von Sternberg Dietrich learned about moviemaking and the importance of her image. She was an instant hit in America. She continued to wear men’s clothing occasionally as she had done in Berlin. At first it was considered scandalous, but before long it became fashionable among American women. Dietrich was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Morocco, another von Sternberg production, but did not win the coveted Oscar. Dietrich acted in six more von Sternberg movies until 1935. The last few flopped. In 1937, Paramount canceled Dietrich’s contract and, before a year was out, she had been labeled “box-office poison.” Marlene Dietrich’s Hollywood career seemed to be over.

With the rowdy western Destry Rides Again from 1939, produced by Universal’s Joe Pasternak, Dietrich’s image took a radical turn. Once the stylish super-mannequin image Sternberg had created for her was no longer in demand, Dietrich made her comeback as a comedienne. In her role as a bartender, she earned less than twenty percent of what she had earned just two years earlier and sang several of her later most successful songs, such as “See What the Boys in the Back Room will Have.” After her revival as a comedienne, Dietrich played various film roles until 1942.

Entertained the Troops

The same year Hitler started World War II, Dietrich became an American citizen. After Allied troops began fighting the Nazis in World War II, Dietrich, starting in 1943, went on tours organized by the United Service Organizations (U.S.O.), dedicated to providing entertainment and recreation for American servicemen in the field. On her North African tour in 1943, she introduced one of her most famous songs. “Lili Marlene” was originally a German marching song which the British Eighth Army had adopted as their own, for which Dietrich later wrote new lyrics. Dietrich found creative ways to boost the morale of the troops she was entertaining. For example, she would judge who had the best legs of the soldiers she was performing for, or she would play the “musical saw.” Dietrich also helped in base hospitals and soldiers’ mess halls. She also participated in radio broadcasts aimed against Germany.

In February of 1945, “at battle lines, with the Ninth Army, … she ignored every discomfort, insisted on the common soldier’s diet and clothes, and was a source of endless comfort and pride to the troops,” wrote Donald Spoto in Falling in Love Again. Dietrich entered Germany with the Allied troops and eventually met her mother again in Berlin. Despite Dietrich’s packages of food and medicine, her mother died of heart failure in November of 1945. For her unprecedented work during the war, Dietrich was honored with the French medal Légion d’Honneur and with the Medal of Freedom, the highest award a civilian could receive from the American Defense Department.

The Chanteuse

After World War II, Dietrich acted again, more or less successfully, in various movies. She made A Foreign Affair with Billy Wilder in 1948, a film which included some unvarnished scenes of the post-war black market. The film also produced some of Dietrich’s most famous songs such as “Black Market,” and “Illusions.” Like many of her songs since the 1930s, they were composed and accompanied by Frederick Hollander. In 1950, Dietrich worked with Alfred Hitchcock in his comic thriller Stage Fright. As a singing actress with an international reputation, she interpreted the Cole Porter song “The Laziest Gal in Town” and Edit Piaf’s “La Vie an Rose.” Finally, after playing a nightclub singer many times, Dietrich became one herself. Her work entertaining the soldiers had proven her ability to perform live on stage. In 1953, after Dietrich served as Master of Ceremonies in one of her daughter’s charity galas at Madison Square Garden, she received an offer to perform at the Las Vegas Hotel Sahara. In 1954, she played the Café de Paris in London, where doctor Alexander Fleming, the inventor of penicillin, watched her show. In 1957, she made her second movie with Billy Wilder, Witness for the Prosecution, which was a great success. After that, she returned to stage for a tour of South America.

Dietrich soon expanded her night-club act into a complete one-woman revue. In the first half of her shows Dietrich often performed in a sexy outfit that would appeal to the men, while in the second half she wore a tuxedo, bow tie, top hat and either slacks or tights. “She caressed the microphone as if she were making love to it, and she did a sexy high-kicking dance with a chorus line,” described Bill Davidson in McCalls.

In August of 1959, Dietrich in Rio was recorded on Columbia Records at a Rio de Janeiro performance. Thousands welcomed Dietrich at the Paris airport when she arrived in November of 1959. As she was coming off the airplane, Dietrich carried a box as small as a jewel case which she later explained held the costume for her show, a remark covered by every Paris newspaper, according Bill Davidson in McCalls. A male observer called Dietrich’s dress “a flesh-colored nothing studded with gold specks and diamonds,” reported Newsweek. After three weeks of performing a show every night in Paris, Dietrich returned to the United States to perform once again in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Her $30,000 a week salary made Dietrich “the highest paid nightclub entertainer in the world,” according to Davidson.

In the following years, Dietrich performed on stages all over the world, in Scandinavia, France, Netherlands, Spain, North Africa, Australia, and Japan. In May of 1960, Dietrich went to Berlin for three shows at Berlin’s Titania Palast, her first public appearance in Germany since 1930. Surprised by the unfriendly reception given her by some Berliners and some Berlin newspapers, Dietrich told Newsweek “They knew I was there in uniform with the American Army during the push through Germany. If that means I’m a traitor, then let them call me a traitor. I became an American citizen because of Hitler… But I’m going there as a singer and entertainer—not as a politician.” Nonetheless, Dietrich signed Berlin’s Golden Book for Mayor Willy Brandt. Four years later, Time reported that Dietrich was celebrated by the Russian press as a “fighter against Fascism” when she performed in a sold-out variety theater in Moscow. “The reason I love you is because you have no lukewarm emotions—you are either very sad or very happy,” told Dietrich the 1,350 Russians in the audience according to Time, adding “I am proud to say I think that l have a Russian soul myself.”
Dietrich’ s “in concert” shows were directed until 1964 by young composer Burt Bacharach, who helped her assemble her repertoire, arranged her songs, conducted her shows and was at the same time her friend and advisor. “I’ve never been very self-confident, either in films or on the stage,” wrote Dietrich in her memoirs. “On the stage, Burt Bacharach’s praise gave me a much needed feeling of security.” In 1967, she debuted her one-woman show on Broadway in the Nine O’Clock Theater at the Lunt-Fontanne, for which she wore a new dress worth about $30,000. She continued to perform throughout the world, although less frequently, in part because the frequent deaths of many of her loved ones made her unhappy, in part because of several stage accidents she suffered. On September 29, 1975, Dietrich broke her leg on stage in Sydney, Australia. After a long period of medical treatment the seventy-four year old recovered, but she never returned to stage nor to public life. In June of 1976, Dietrich’s husband died at age 79.

In 1986, a documentary about Dietrich’s life by renowned film director Maximilian Schell—one of her admirers—was released. Although Dietrich refused to talk to journalists after her complete withdrawal from public life at the end of the 1970s, Schell managed to interview Dietrich several times in her Paris apartment, but the star—already in her mid-80s—refused to appear on camera. The interviews were used as voice-over in the documentary which consisted of clippings from Dietrich’s movies, shows, and other public appearances. Dietrich’s autobiography written in German and titled Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin —” I am, Thank God, a Berliner”—was first published in Germany in 1987. Two years later, the English translation came out in the United States as Marlene. Dietrich lived alone in Paris until her death in 1992. She is buried in Berlin.

Selected films

The Blue Angel, 1930.
Morocco, 1930.
Blonde Venus, 1932.
Shanghai Express, 1932.
The Devil is a Woman, 1935.
Desire, 1936.
Destiny Rides Again, 1939.
A Foreign Affair, 1948.
The Monte Carlo Story, 1956.
Witness for the Prosecution, 1957.
Touch of Evil, 1958.
Judgment at Nuremberg, 1961.
Just a Gigolo, 1978.
Marlene, (documentary about Dietrich’s life and career by Maximilian Schell), 1986.

Selected discography

Marlene Dietrich, Decca, 1949.
Marlene Dietrich at the Café de Paris, (accompanied by George Smith), PHILIPS, Great Britain, 1954.
Marlene Dietrich in Rio, CBS, Brazil, 1959.
Wiedersehen mit MARLENE, Capitol, 1960.
My Greatest Songs, MCA, 1991.
1928-1933 Marlene Dietrich, Asv Living Era, 1992.
The Cosmopolitan Marlene Dietrich, Sony Music, 1993.
Falling In Love Again, MCA, 1998.
Marlene Dietrich, Lili Marlene, MCA.
Wiedersehen Mit Marlene, (Marlene Dietrich in Germany), EMI/Electrola, Germany.
The Legendary Marlene Dietrich, (songs from classic films), MFP/EMI, Great Britain.
Marlene Dietrich in London, (recorded at the Queen’s Theatre), Columbia.
Marlene Dietrich singt Alt-Berliner Lieder, AMIGA, Germany.

Selected Writings

Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin (autobiography in German), Ullstein Verlag, 1987.
Marlene (translation of autobiography), Grove Press, 1989.

Sources

Books

Dietrich, Marlene, Marlene (translated from German by Salvator Attanasio), Grove Press, 1989.
Higham, Charles, Marlene: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, W.W. Norton & Company, 1977.
Spoto, Donald, Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, Doubleday & Co., 1992.
Spoto, Donald, Falling in Love Again, Marlene Dietrich, Little, Brown and Company, 1985.
Walker, Alexander, Dietrich, Harper & Row, 1984.

Periodicals

Biography, June 1998.
Look, October 24, 1961.
McCalls, March 1960.
Newsweek, May 2, 1960.
Time, May 29, 1964.