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.