Marlene Read online

  Marlene

  Marlene Dietrich

  Translated from the German by

  Salvator Attanasio

  Contents

  A BRIEF NOTE

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE

  A GIRL FROM A GOOD FAMILY

  I

  II

  YOUTH

  YOU ARE SVENGALI—I AM TRILBY

  HOLLYWOOD

  “GLAMOUR STARS”

  ACTORS’ STYLES

  JEALOUSY

  GIANTS

  CHARLIE CHAPLIN

  ALFRED HITCHCOCK

  RAIMU

  RICHARD BURTON

  SIR ALEXANDER FLEMING

  ORSON WELLES

  BILLY WILDER

  STILL ANOTHER GENIUS: JEAN GABIN

  ON FRIENDSHIP

  WRITERS

  HEMINGWAY, OF COURSE

  ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

  NOEL COWARD—A “LOVING FRIENDSHIP”

  PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS

  COMPOSERS

  STRAVINSKY

  HAROLD ARLEN

  ARTISTS

  SINATRA

  NAT KING COLE

  MY FRIEND PIAF

  RUDOLF NUREYEV

  ELISABETH BERGNER

  AFTER THE DEVIL IS A WOMAN

  THE GARDEN OF ALLAH

  COSTUMES

  PHOTOGRAPHERS

  CHANGING STUDIOS

  KISMET

  PART TWO

  THE WAR

  A NEW ADVENTURE

  BURT BACHARACH

  FIRST STEPS IN TELEVISION

  EPILOGUE

  SELECTED CHRONOLOGY

  INDEX

  A BRIEF NOTE

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED to no one in particular.

  There is no “Tom, Dick, or Harry” in my lexicon.

  I have written this book for those who enjoyed seeing me on the screen and on the stage, for those who made it possible for me to work, to earn money, to pay my taxes and to enjoy life’s fleeting pleasures.

  Perhaps they will read this book.

  Perhaps they will laugh a little with me.

  FOREWORD

  I DECIDED TO WRITE this book in order to clear up numerous misunderstandings.

  Too much nonsense has been said about me by persons who wanted to make money by exploiting my name. How could I have stopped them? By the time I learned about their books, it was always too late. Nor did I know that these gentlemen who had the gall to spread slanders, to usurp a person’s private life, were protected by the laws of their own countries. There should be no need for me to emphasize that none of my so-called biographers ever had the courtesy to consult me—which speaks volumes about them.

  These people have neither honor nor dignity, they belong to the breed Ernest Hemingway called “parasites.” My only defense—a sad one admittedly!—against them has always been to ignore their “work.” Whenever, after a stage performance in the United States or abroad, someone handed me one of these books to autograph, I always refused.

  I have no interest in talking about my life. But since my career and the parts I played on screen and stage seem to meet with general interest, after some inner struggle I decided to write these memoirs so that in the future there will be no need to ask what is true and what is false. Facts are unimportant. I would like only not to distort the different segments of my life, primarily for the sake of those who like or remember me. I never kept a diary. I never took myself seriously enough to record the trivia of everyday life, for which I lacked the necessary self-centeredness. Where others might have succumbed to it, I was always indifferent to the glitter of fame. I found it troublesome, crippling and dangerous. I detested it. Unlike most actors and actresses, I hate to behave like a “star” and to be a target of the curious on the street or at an airport. Admiration from unknown persons leaves me cold. The fame that can completely alter the personality of a human being has no power over me. Why? That’s how I am, and I can’t be otherwise.

  I possessed a certain “laisser-aller,” surely rare for so young a girl as I was at the start of my career. In contrast to what my “biographers” assert, I was never concerned about being a celebrity, a topic of conversation, or about having photos of myself on the front pages of newspapers. Nor, despite the disapproval of the studios for which I worked, did I ever concern myself with the photos and articles that appeared about me in the press. When I gave an interview arranged by the studio, it was only to comply with my contract.

  Everyone knows how difficult it is to recall the early years of your life. We all have impressions, memories that do not always match reality, or that have blurred with time. My mother, who could have told me many things, is no longer alive. She died shortly after the war. We crafted her coffin out of school desks and stood outside in the rain for the ceremony because the chapel had been bombed. That was in 1945, and I was still in the American army. My superiors allowed me to take care of all the formalities of my mother’s death. I took a plane, during the flight we ran into a violent thunderstorm, and the landing in Berlin was a near mishap. But finally I could bury my mother. This event severed the last bond that tied me to my homeland. We all lose our mothers, friends, children, we are repeatedly torn from those we love. How can we escape our fate, our sorrow, our own extinction? Perhaps by thinking that—for our children and our families—our lives have not been entirely useless, that we have been able to ease their sorrows and their pains.

  My name really is Marlene Dietrich. My schoolmates could easily attest to that. Tough luck for my “biographers” who claim that it is a stage name. As a child I was thin and pale, I had long red-blond hair and a translucent complexion, the white skin characteristic of the redhead, and a sickly look thanks to this long, red-blond hair. My parents were quite well-to-do, and I received the best education imaginable. I had governesses and private tutors who taught me High German, that pure language unspoiled by any dialect. I have remained loyal to High German, and I am shaken by the mutilation it constantly undergoes today, by the indolence with which most contemporary writers handle it. This loyalty is also a way of not forgetting my childhood.

  PART ONE

  A GIRL FROM A GOOD FAMILY

  I

  EVERYBODY SAID THAT I was still too young to go to school. In the winter, early in the morning, I would squeeze my eyes tightly and tiny tears would change the pale street lamps into long, slim, glittering beams of light. I played this game every morning, and my tears would flow easily. Actually, I didn’t have to cry at all. The wind and cold did the trick well enough if not better. I knew all the closed shutters of the stores, all the jutting stones that I could jump over on one leg—with closed or crossed legs—or slide on if it had snowed during the night. My feelings were just as familiar to me: the certainty of having lost my precious freedom, fear of the teachers and of their punishments, fear of loneliness.

  The school gate was heavy. I had to push against it with all my might to open it. A leather band muffled the loud clang of iron on iron, and again I was trapped as every morning. I had been prematurely enrolled in school a year earlier than usual, and since I could already read, write, and count, I went directly into the second school year. I was younger than my classmates and even younger than the little girls who were in the first grade. That’s why I was so lonely.

  Later also, even though not a few of my schoolmates cribbed from my French compositions, I remained lonely and was still excluded from their whispered secrets, their intimacies, and their fits of laughter. Yet I had no desire to know what they were keeping secret from me. Thus, the prison of school contained an additional bar expressly for me because I was too young. I didn’t doubt for a second that age is of decisive importance. All grownups first ask a child what its name is, then, its age. Yet
it’s not the name but the age that always elicits approving nods. Since the obvious satisfaction of grown-ups seemed to correspond to the number of years, I liked to make myself older.

  My fate in the school was peculiar and, I thought, undeserved. I knew that no matter how many years went by I would always be too young. I had to find someone who would stand by me, an intelligent person to whom my age would be of no importance. Then Mlle. Breguand, Marguerite Breguand, came into my life.

  She had dark brown eyes, tied her black hair together in a loose knot, and always wore a white blouse, a black skirt, and a narrow soft leather belt around her waist. She was the only native French teacher in the school, the other teachers of French or English had learned these languages in Germany Mlle. Breguand spoke fluent German with a French accent. She taught the advanced classes, pupils who had already mastered the ground rules of French grammar.

  One day, during lunch break, she addressed me as I was trying to devour my sandwich. I was standing all alone at one of the high windows in the school corridor and was sadder than the rain falling outside. She stopped in front of the window, looked out, and asked me: “Do you have a real reason to be sad?” I pressed my lips over the almost indigestible piece of bread and shook my head. “Because it’s a sin to be sad.” (She spoke German but said the word “sin” in French.) At this moment the bell rang, the recess was over, and she walked off.

  The next day, at the same hour, she came back to me, I answered all her questions. Now she would come every day at the same hour to the same spot. My age seemed to be of no concern to her. What was important, obviously, was that I was there and that we spoke to one another. She was so happy to be able to speak French with me. When the bell rang, I would follow her and carry her books. She would turn her head around to speak to me, and sometimes she came to a halt with a mild exclamation of surprise over my extensive vocabulary. Finally she would enter her classroom, turn around to look at me, and close the door. Then, radiant with joy I would run through the empty corridors to my classroom before the last ring of the bell.

  She banished my loneliness, my childish worries, my sadness. She embodied both my wishes and their fulfillment. I spent all my free time thinking up gifts for her: blue-red-white ribbons that my mother had once worn at a French ball, French landscapes I had cut out of magazines, a bouquet of lilies of the valley on the First of May, a cornflower, a daisy and a poppy on the Fourteenth of July. I bought Christmas and New Year cards made in France and even thought of giving her a French perfume, but my mother suggested that so expensive a gift might embarrass Mlle. Breguand and that I should wait patiently until I grew a little older. Mlle. Breguand often waited with me in front of the school if my governess was late, and sometimes she would accompany us for a stretch, but only up to the point where she had come to the end of the story she had begun.

  On the last day of school, before the vacation season, she would never fail to give me her address, which she wrote down on a page torn from her notebook. She had divined my secret hopes and knew how to soothe my sorrows.

  Finally came the day on which I became one of her pupils. At last I was in her class! Yet she didn’t give me more attention than the other children got. At times she would cast a glance in my direction as if she wanted to make sure of my attention. Our familiarity floated like a pale blue ribbon in the motionless air of the class and filled my heart with the ecstatic happiness praised by poets, but which leaves others untouched. After school I would run home quickly to work on my French compositions, to find splendid expressions that would astound her and to draw out the best from a language whose richness she always praised. Her comments in her beautiful handwriting, composed in telegram style, contained moderate praise that earned me tender looks from my mother. Thanks to Mlle. Breguand the school was no longer a prison, but a big city of sorts in which I knew how to find my secret love. Every morning, throughout that winter and spring, I went to school with a light heart at the thought that another happy day lay before me.

  But when classes resumed in the autumn of 1914, all the pupils and teachers were ordered to gather in the auditorium.

  Thunderous speeches were delivered, of which we didn’t understand a word. I tried to find Mlle. Breguand’s face. I didn’t see it. The English and French teachers were seated next to the Latin and Greek teachers. She wasn’t there. I then combed the rows of the science and mathematics teachers. Neither was she there. She surely must have heard the big school bell that summoned us. Where was she? Then slowly the terrible truth dawned on me with a chill. Marguerite Breguand! France! French! You are a Frenchwoman! You, Marguerite Breguand, you are a French-woman! Germany is at war with France! That’s why you’re not here. We are enemies. These thoughts actually made me faint.

  I was made to drink some water, and they said the air in the auditorium was too stuffy. The speeches came to an end, and we returned to our classrooms chattering like magpies. Now we had to knit for the soldiers during school hours. The youngest of us made mittens, the older ones sweaters. Scarves, too, a simple task. Wool was stored in the gym. The dead languages were still being taught, but what was going to happen with English and French? New teachers would replace the old ones now fighting at the front. If we were lucky, they’d be old and drowsy. And we were lucky. The school rules were made less rigid. Every morning in all classrooms, from eight to nine o’clock, from the fourth grade through the fifth form and from the seventh through the eleventh, academic instruction was replaced by knitting lessons.

  The soldiers marched through the streets with flowers clasped to their rifles, they laughed, they sang, kissed the women. Flags hung from windows as people celebrated the war against France. The festival of the war. The barbarians were celebrating the declaration of war with a flower clasped to a rifle.

  Nobody could have forced me to participate in the war against France. I loved Marguerite Breguand, and I loved France. I loved the soft and familiar French language. I was the first to wear mourning. I had lost Mlle. Breguand, I had lost the French language, I had lost a promise that was not kept, an honorable, pure promise that my teachers had made to me—they who had been telling us: “A promise is a promise.”

  We had been promised a peaceful childhood: school, holidays and picnics, summer vacations with hammocks, beach, pail, shovel, and a starfish that we could take home with us. We had been promised plans, plans to be forged, carried out, actualized, dreams to be dreamed and made to come true. A secure future—and it was up to us to take advantage of it. And now? No more plans, no secure future, and no knowledge that could be of any use to the war. Since we couldn’t form a military unit, we knitted. We sat in the classroom barely lit by the daylight and knitted to warm the soldiers digging trenches far from home. They made us knit to make us feel useful, to fill the gaping void caused by the war. The wool was “field gray,” rough and constantly tangled. Field gray. For me the fields were not gray, but wherever the fighting was going on, they probably were.

  Life in school sank back into a gray monotony, becoming again what it had been before Mlle. Breguand’s guest performance: a prison. But I didn’t forget her. Each time I was punished for speaking French (the language of our enemy) and had to drop ten pfennigs into the glass till, this donation was made in her name.

  My passionate love for France overcame the first shock: It went underground and survived all the prohibitions. I didn’t tell a soul about it. With head held high, I bore my secret in the depths of my heart.

  The first members of my family who fell in combat were distant cousins and an uncle. Their deaths left no void in our small family circle. My mother showed no grief. Her great concern was, and had always been, her childrens’ health. My father was on maneuvers when the war broke out. He went to the front without returning home to bid us good-bye. It seemed to me as if he spent all his time writing to us, his letters seemed to have kept him out of the fighting. He never related anything about the war, but instead described the various countrysides, the villages,
and the woods through which he trudged, and the seasons that he saw come and go.

  Summer vacation was drawing closer, and with it the mountains and the scent of the pines at sunset. Some teachers had stayed put and had organized summer courses to which I was sent. I loved the lessons outdoors, the feeling of freedom, the cheerful and sunburnt teachers. Nobody talked about the war. Yet not too far away was a POW camp, off limits to us.

  One day I was sitting on the veranda busy with my homework. The last sunbeams cast a yellowish light on my paper. Suddenly I noticed that I had written the date of July 14 in my notebook. The Bastille! France’s famous day! The holiday of holidays! “Allons enfants de la patrie.” By the time it was twilight, I had gathered as many white roses in the garden as I could carry. I ran to the edge of the woods. The thorns pierced my summer dress. I cried in pain and fear. But I was firmly determined to go through with my adventure, come what may.

  I stood still right in front of the barbed wire.

  Some figures were discernible behind the fence. Too late to make a retreat. They had seen me. I was small, but I was wearing a white dress and carrying a bouquet of roses of the same color. The men had black beards, black eyes, they didn’t stir. Bells were pealing in the village. Peace, suppertime—and again the fear of being discovered, of not being able to transmit my message to them. For a long time I just stood there, motionless. The bells ceased to peal.

  “Let’s go,” I thought, “let’s go! After all you’re a soldier’s daughter.”

  I drew a rose from my bouquet and held it up to them. I couldn’t notice any movement on the other side. They just stood there, rigid and stiff like tin soldiers. Then I drew a little closer to them, and in my childish voice and in my best French, I said: “Today is the Fourteenth of July. I thought the roses would make you happy.” I pushed a rose through a hole in the barbed wire fence, a hand suddenly moved, grabbed, then other hands also dared to reach out. Breathlessly, I quickly handed over all my roses, as though accomplishing a glorious and forbidden feat. No other word was spoken.