Authors: C. W. Gortner
I regarded him in horrified amazement. I remembered Rudi, what he’d said that night in Berlin:
He’s unlike any filmmaker we’ve ever known. But I also think he must be quite mad.
“Better roles playing a Nazi fräulein?” I said. “Never.”
Yet deep within, I felt myself hesitate. He had roused an unnerving doubt, stoking my anxiety that the longer I stayed in Hollywood, accepting roles that cast me in a certain light, the more captive I would become. I’d heard plenty of stories of stars who’d overstayed their welcome and found themselves relegated to bit parts or no parts at all. Not working didn’t frighten me. Becoming obsolete did. I wanted to stay or go on my own terms.
Von Sternberg sensed it. He knew me too well. “Never, because you’re too proud?” he asked. “Or never because you can’t refuse Paramount’s salary?”
“You know money doesn’t mean a thing to me. I take what they give and I spend it.”
“Perhaps. But fame means something.” He lowered his voice, but not his scathing insight. “You’re not a devoted wife or mother. You might be one day, but right now you’re too busy being Dietrich. I saw that passion in you when we met. You represent the Zeitgeist: the spirit of our age. And you can’t leave it behind. No matter what, you want all of it.”
“Didn’t you just tell me I could have the same in Germany?” I retorted, resisting the horrid truth in his words, which made me feel callous and soiled.
“Yes, but here you’re overpaid for it. The UFA cannot match your salary. So. Money does mean something, after all.”
“Damn you. You are supposed to be my friend.”
“Your friend? I am not your friend. I am your mentor. Your creator. Your slave.” His face hardened. Without warning, he pulled me to him. “How do you think it makes me feel knowing that everything you are, everything you give, is because of me? Do you think it’s been easy for me, letting you take over my existence and knowing you’ll never fuck me like Gary Cooper? Do you think I
enjoy
it, being made a cuckold, like that worm you call a husband? Or don’t you think about me at all?”
His eyes had turned to slits, his breath rank from tobacco and drink. Looking down at his fingers pinching my arm, I said, “Let me go,” and when he did, furious now, understanding, perhaps for the first time, that I didn’t think about him that way, I never had and never would, he snarled, “You’d step over Heidede’s dead body for a part.”
I whipped out my hand, cracking him across the face. “Never say that again.
Never.
”
He suddenly laughed—a harsh, scornful caw. “Devoted mother and wife, indeed.
This
is who you are.
This
is the woman the studio pays for and the public demands. Dietrich the strong, the capable, the ruthless. The sultry trollop with a heart of stone.”
“Go.” I was trembling. “Get out of my house.”
He smiled. “Am I to be exiled?” Swiftly, before I could stop him, he seized my chin and kissed me, his mustache scraping my lips. “I’ll get you your role,” he whispered. “I’ll sell it to Schulberg if I have to suck him off myself. You’ll have your chance to play the mother, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Because you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”
He left. As I heard his automobile roar out of the driveway and I realized he was drunk and could have an accident, I stood frozen, more aware of the danger he posed to me than the danger he might be to himself.
He had seen inside me, to that dark place where corruption had started to take root.
For he was right. I did want it. All of it. No matter what.
A
s soon as I saw Rudi onto the train back to New York and his ship for Paris, I was summoned to the studio. Von Sternberg had submitted a sketchy treatment for our next picture.
“Helen Faraday,” said Schulberg as we sat in his white-paneled office, his permanent cigar smoldering in the ashtray on his desk, turning the air acrid. “A foreign ex-chanteuse married to an American chemist, with a son, who must return to the stage when her husband is diagnosed with radium poisoning and needs money to go abroad for a cure.” He looked up from the paper he held. “That’s it. One paragraph. Is this really your idea?”
I wore my tweed suit, a tie, and a beret, with almost no makeup. I’d dressed like a man on purpose, to meet him as an equal. I understood now how ludicrous it was. Clothes were not going to sway a studio executive with absolute control over my career.
“It is, but he’ll flesh it out more,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my cigarettes. I’d been taken unawares but wouldn’t let him see it. “There’ll be songs. Costumes and the rest.”
His brow furrowed. “Marlene, this concerns me.
He
concerns me. He mentioned a UFA offer, told me you’re both unhappy. I hope I don’t need
to remind you that you’re under contract to us. Negotiations with another studio are cause for immediate suspension.”
I paused, my lighter at my cigarette. Von Sternberg had wielded the UFA as ammunition, to push the studio into yielding to us. I had to admire his gall.
“You did say you’d consider a role like this for me next. You had the studio photograph me with my daughter and husband to show the public I have a family. It’s not such a risk. Is it?”
He gave a troubled sigh. “Not in theory. Adoptions are up nationwide since we announced you have a daughter. Everyone wants a little girl of their own now, with the matching outfit of course. You’ve done the improbable: a woman of mystery, a sophisticated lady, and now a devoted mother.”
“Then what is there to object to? Not even Garbo has managed to play a mother, a singer, and a sophisticated lady at the same time.”
He narrowed his gaze. “She hasn’t, but if she wanted to, MGM would still need more than a paragraph to sell it to corporate.”
“I’ll get more. Jo has it all figured out in his head. You know how he is.”
“Unfortunately, we both do.” Schulberg hesitated, his fingertips tapping the paper. “But I trust you. Nevertheless,” he said as I rose to my feet to shake his hand, “I need a script. Or something that at least reads like one.”
I went straight to von Sternberg’s studio bungalow. In his habitual manner of disdaining what he no longer deemed relevant, he behaved as if he’d forgotten about our confrontation, handing me a sheaf of paper. “Here it is
. Blonde Venus
. It’s your story idea; you’ll sing and suffer your way into America’s heart as a heroic woman who’ll do anything for her family.”
“I am going to read it,” I warned. “If I don’t like it, neither will Schulberg.”
“Whatever you don’t like, we’ll change. Go. Take it to him. I want to start as soon as possible. I’ve had enough of sitting around. We’re here to make pictures, so let’s make one.”
The script wasn’t complete, but it contained enough to assuage Schulberg. My character becomes an overnight sensation, providing me with the
picture’s signature number. Courted by a millionaire sophisticate, Helen falls into an affair. When her husband returns from his cure abroad, he threatens to take their son because of her adultery and she flees with the boy across Depression-riddled America until she has to surrender her child. Then she disappears only to reemerge in Paris, where she’s found fame at the Moulin Rouge—another opportunity for me to flaunt my white tie. After her sophisticate sees her there, he takes her back to New York to visit her son. Her husband forgives her. She sacrifices fame and fortune for domestic bliss.
I was determined to show I could do more than spout witticisms or display my legs. The studio cast a contract player named Cary Grant as the sophisticate, his wavy black hair and matinee chin marking him as a star on the rise. He was charming, but I felt no attraction to him, which troubled me until Anna May told me that Mr. Grant was a man who suckled, sharing a home with the actor Randolph Scott. Von Sternberg filled the film with lingering shots of trains and squalid shantytowns, shot in his visionary black and white.
It all made me squirm in my seat when I attended the studio preview.
To my dismay, when the camera wasn’t peering up my nostrils, I kept my face averted as if I feared someone might throw stones at me. I almost laughed aloud, my performance was so wooden, my scenes with Cary Grant sodden and unconvincing. Only in my three songs did I come alive, especially in “Hot Voodoo,” where Helen emerges from a sweltering gorilla disguise clad in a bugle-beaded short dress and donning a blond Afro wig, throws aside her destitution to embody the very persona I’d sought to escape. I’d seen none of this in the rushes; I thought I was playing a completely different character. Von Sternberg had assured me of as much. Instead, when the lights flickered on in the screening room, Schulberg met my gaze and shook his head.
“It won’t work,” he said, as his invited executives—the head of publicity and sales, the other menials whose only job at the studio was to please him—hurried out.
I stood, looking around for von Sternberg before I remembered that he
never attended these screenings, considering them a demeaning pandering to the studio might. “He must still be editing it,” I said. “It’s obviously not finished yet.”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Schulberg. “It’ll never make it through the Hays Office codes as it is. She sleeps with another man while her husband is away. She abducts her own child and sells—well, we both know what she sells to support them.”
“Yes, but she has no other choice.” Despite my effort to stay calm, my voice rose defensively. “She’s protecting her child. She can’t sing for their food.”
“I wish she would. I wish she’d do anything but what I’ve seen.” He sighed. “Have you forgotten the Lindberghs, whose baby was recently kidnapped and found dead? How can I submit a picture to the Hays Office that features an abduction, the very thing that’s become a national tragedy?”
I hadn’t forgotten. Or rather, I hadn’t paid attention, so preoccupied with the work that I’d failed to mark the coincidence. But von Sternberg must have. Belatedly, I realized my mentor, creator, and slave had fulfilled his promise. He’d given me what I wanted, and, as he’d warned, I had no one to blame but myself.
“I’ll speak to him,” I said. “We’ll reshoot anything that needs it, I promise.”
“Don’t promise. Do it,” replied Schulberg. “He went over budget again with that ‘Hot Voodoo’ number. Two chorus girls weren’t enough. I’ll let him fix it—
if
he does it right this time. Otherwise, I’m pulling it. And if I do, I’ll assign your next picture myself. Without von Sternberg.”
I reached for my cashmere coat, adjusting my hat when his secretary arrived. She whispered to him. I watched his face change, his disappointment over the picture turning into something more serious. He looked up at me. My stomach plummeted.
“We’ve had a call from your assistant, Miss Huber. There’s a car ready to take you home at once. Pack your bags; we’re booking you into a hotel. Forget the picture and von Sternberg for now. Someone has threatened your daughter.”
I ARRIVED AT MY
HOUSE
in a panic to find police milling outside. One came toward me, a notepad in hand. He started to say, “Miss Dietrich. Not to worry. Your daughter is fine—” But I pushed him aside and ran shouting into the house, “Gerda! Heidede!”
They were in the drawing room, with more policemen surrounding them. Heidede looked terrified. As I swept her into my arms, I met Gerda’s stunned stare and then looked past her to the ransacked desk, papers strewn everywhere as a detective sorted through them, sheet by sheet.
“What—what happened?” I was gripping Heidede so tightly that she whimpered.
Gerda murmured, “Not in front of her,” and I reluctantly called for one of our maids to take Heidede up to her room. “Pack her suitcase,” I ordered, and I heard my daughter ask as she was led out, “What’s wrong? Where are we going?”
I yanked out my cigarettes, lit one with a trembling hand as the detectives finished their work and the one with the notepad, whom I’d shoved aside, showed me a note, enclosed in cellophane. The envelope had no reply address, the note written in crude block letters:
YOU MARLENE DIETRICH. IF YOU WANT TO SAVE MARIA WAIT FOR INFORMATION. PAY $10,000 OR BE SORRY. DON’T CALL POLICE.
“It says to not notify the police.” I whirled to Gerda. “Why did you call them?”
Before she could respond, the detective said, “She did the right thing. Since the Lindbergh case, we’ve had a rash of these copycat threats. Nothing to worry about.”
“Nothing to worry about? They threatened to take my child!”
“No,” he said, to my aghast disbelief. “They’re saying they’ll contact you for money. I suggest installing bars on the windows, changing the
locks, and hiring a full-time security detail, Miss Dietrich. The studio can provide it. We’ll trace the note through the postal service but these people know how to cover their tracks. They’ll send one or two more notes to see if you cave in, and when you don’t, they’ll stop. They want easy money, not a federal charge of kidnapping.”
“They can send whatever they want. After this, we are
not
staying here.”
He jutted out his lower lip. “Suit yourself. But we’ll assign extra patrols to the area. Your house will be closely watched. I assure you, your daughter is safe.”
“Tell that to the Lindberghs,” I retorted, and with an uncomfortable nod, he reviewed the remaining papers, sifting through my fan mail, and then departed with his men, carrying a box full of letters from strangers who wanted my photograph.
All of a sudden, Gerda and I were alone, though the maids were still here, tiptoeing about the house, and the studio chauffeur, an ex-prizefighter named Briggs, waited outside with the car.
“You shouldn’t have called them,” I said to her.
“I did what I thought best.” Her voice was subdued. I could see she’d suffered a terrible fright; she was colorless, her eyes like bruises. “It’s been all over the newspapers and the wireless, that horrible kidnapping of the aviator’s baby. When I opened the envelope and saw the note—what was I supposed to do? I telephoned you at the studio, but whoever answered at the switchboard said you were in a screening with Schulberg and couldn’t be disturbed.”