Authors: C. W. Gortner
Their cheering must have echoed all the way to Berlin.
I launched into “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.” As I sang, I felt them, all of them, leaning hungrily toward me in their seats. That surge of warmth, of raw adulation, was so tangible, so intoxicating, it was unlike anything I’d felt before. After four songs, playing my Viennese saw, and another costume change, I had them shouting and whistling in cacophonous rapture, and my voice was hoarse. Twice, an air-raid siren sent everyone hurtling to the ground, with Danny throwing himself so forcefully on top of me to shield me from the expected blast that I hissed, “Stop protecting me. You’re going to chip my teeth.”
Our mesmerizing act was a mess. The boys kept yelling at me to sing more until I finally went down among them, ignoring Danny’s worried attempt to keep me onstage. Sidling along the jammed aisles and pausing now and then to meet a pair of lustful eyes, I sang “Falling in Love Again,” my voice breaking, my own eyes spilling over with unabashed emotion.
I was falling in love again, for the fourth and most enduring time in my life.
I fell in love with legions I’d never met, flung across trenches and the pillaged cities of Europe, with their courage and strength, their indefatigable resolve to rid us of peril.
And they must fall in love with me.
Hours later, after signing autographs, giving lipstick-smeared kisses, lifting my gown to display my legs while posing with GIs who smothered me in their arms for candid shots, I returned to my lodgings, as limp as a wet rag, every nerve in my body pulsating.
Danny remarked, “I guess that went better than I thought.”
It was the understatement of the year.
The next morning, a general accompanied me to visit the infirmary. On endless rows of cots, I beheld such a horror of missing limbs, blinded eyes, wounds, and putrefaction that I nearly gagged. But the gratitude and feeble joy I found in those pain-twisted faces, the clasping of my hand as I leaned over them to hear them whisper, “Are you the real Marlene
Dietrich?” filled me with equal anguish and resolve. These boys were dying for us. They were our saviors. What I’d endured, what I thought had been hardship—I had no idea.
Then one of them, a cherubic Brit whose left forearm had been blown off, told me, “Go over there, in the back ward. They’re Nazis and you speak German. I bet they’d like to see you.”
I froze for a moment. Then as I looked up at the general, he said, “Prisoners of war and in no better shape. You don’t have to, Miss Dietrich. Your convoy is due to leave in an hour.”
“No,” I said, surprising myself. “I . . . I want to see them.”
What did I expect to find? Monsters with skulls on their caps, leering from black sheets? I couldn’t say, but as I neared the ward separating them from the others, guarded by soldiers with guns, I found more boys—pale, wasted boys with shocking white bandages covering severed arms and legs, masking burnt faces and clutching, scarred hands.
I stopped by a cot. The Nazi looking up at me couldn’t have been older than nineteen.
“What is your name?” I asked, hearing those nearby struggling upright to stare.
“Hans,” he said faintly. The entire right side of his face was mangled; morphine dripped into his arm, but he was coherent, aware of me. I detected fear, as any German soldier must feel, but also his ragged humanity, the bewilderment of a young man ordered to fight for country and honor, without understanding what that fight would entail.
“Hello, Hans.” I touched his hand. “
Ich bin
Marlene.”
“The actress?” piped up a voice from a cot behind me. I turned to him—dark haired, with a rash of pimples on his cheeks, sad green eyes, and both legs amputated above the knees. The long tube dripping blood into his arm was brutally red against his pallor.
I nodded.
All of a sudden, he began to warble. I recognized the lyrics at once, from the first war—a song about a soldier yearning for his lost love:
“Outside the barracks, by the corner light,
I’ll always stand and wait for you at night.
We will create a world for two.
I’ll wait for you, the whole night through,
Lili Marleen. For you, Lili Marleen . . .”
And as the boy’s voice faded, the echo of the lyrics moved through me, and his haunted green eyes met mine as he said, “They told us we couldn’t sing it anymore. After Stalingrad, Goebbels declared it unpatriotic.” He smiled wistfully. “But I always liked it. And the Allies . . . I think they might like it, too, fräulein.”
I managed to whisper, “Yes. I believe they would.”
At our next stop, in Tunis, I sang “Lili Marleen” for the first time.
I would continue to sing it until we were free.
W
hile waiting to cross into Italy, a detachment of tanks run by the Free French rumbled onto the dock. I heard men talking in French and bounded from my jeep, wildly searching the stolid iron monsters around me. “Gabin?” I asked every man I saw. “Is the actor Jean Gabin here?”
Finally, one of them pointed. “Over there, mademoiselle,” and I saw him, clambering out of his tank. I ran toward him. As I neared, he called out, “
What
are you doing here?”
“I’m going to war like you,” I cried back. “I want to kiss you.”
He laughed as I plunged into his arms. “
Ma
Grande,” he murmured, stroking my matted hair under my cap. “You are insane. Where are my paintings and my accordion?”
“In storage.” I drew back, staring into his eyes. He looked exhausted, battle worn, but he looked like himself again, too. “If you ever want to see them again, you must kiss me first.”
He hesitated, until the men surrounding us started to cheer, and then he did kiss me—a quick, hard kiss on the lips.
“I think we must,” he said, and I caressed his face. “Yes, we must.”
We had an hour together before he departed. He held my hand and we sat quietly by his tank, the coalescing of our fingers enough to keep his cu
rious comrades from approaching, although throughout my tour, soldiers had delighted in showing me photographs of their sweethearts back home, tattered shots of pretty girls that they carried around like shields. When we said good-bye, Gabin embraced me, still without a word. As I watched the huge landing ship swallow up his tanks like a whale and churn out to sea, I whispered a prayer for his safety.
I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. But somehow, it no longer mattered.
We had both found a cause more important than ourselves.
IT WAS MUD SWAMPED
or arid, freezing cold and blazing hot, bloody and harsh, cruel and remorseless. It was not limousines or red carpets or shrieking fans. It was not anything any human being or animal should ever endure. I determined to never complain.
I had to abandon my luggage and makeup case, leaving them behind as our struggle to traverse Italy crammed us into ever-smaller trucks. I tore one of my gowns during a performance and left it hanging, like a flag, on an ashen tree. I caught dysentery from putrid water and found lice crawling in my pubic hair; a GI gave me a stinging antiseptic lotion and advised me to shave.
In Naples, we had a brief respite. On the balcony of a house commandeered for me, I reclined naked to sunbathe. I was later told that soldiers raced to every available rooftop in the area, braving sniper fire to catch a glimpse of me. Had I known, I would have stood up.
Near the medieval city of Cassino, we got separated from our convoy. We drove around for hours, lost in a scorched landscape punctured by back roads and dead livestock. As night fell over a nectarine sky torched by the Allied onslaught against the Nazis holed up in a monastic enclosure, refusing to surrender, we camped. Huddled together for warmth and scraping our tins for whatever we could ingest, afterward we went in pairs behind the thornbushes to empty our watery bowels. In the distance, we could
hear the booming of a 240-millimeter howitzer mobile gun pulverizing the monastery and most of the adjoining city.
“The most effective diet I’ve been on,” I told Danny as he groaned, crouching beside me. “I’ll be a sylph for my next picture.”
“God, Marlene.” He winced. “How can you joke at a time like this?”
“What else is there to do? If I start crying, I might never stop.”
A detachment of French soldiers found us the next morning. As they rattled up in their battered truck and surrounded us, guns at the ready, I called out, “
Je suis Marlene Dietrich
.”
One of the soldiers chortled, “If you’re Marlene Dietrich, I’m General Eisenhower.”
Striding to him with a flashlight, I shone it under my chin, sucking in my cheekbones and arching my eyebrow. The effect must have been skeletal, as I’d lost so much weight, but he turned white. “
Mon Dieu, c’est vrai
.”
“Of course it’s true,” I retorted. “And you stink.”
“
Ah. Excusez-moi
.” He swept into a clumsy bow. “Last night I slept beside the corpse of a Senegalese soldier. I wish I’d been at the Ritz, instead—with you.”
I burst out laughing.
They helped us locate our American convoy, which was most displeased by our night-long absence. The major in charge scolded us. I shrugged. “I’m a major, too. You can’t put me in lockup.” That very night, without a microphone or a gown, illuminated only by flashlights held by the soldiers and dressed in my soiled fatigues, I sang as Cassino fell to the Allies. I figured if they didn’t like my performance, they just had to turn off their lights.
They demanded an encore.
With charcoal from the campfires, the men drafted leggy sketches of me on roadsides and tree trunks, pointing the way for those behind as we straggled toward Rome. Halfway there, I developed a persistent fever and a gurgle in my chest. Within hours, I was delirious. Five days later, I awoke disorientated in a camp infirmary to find Danny at my side. He hadn’t left
me for a moment; I was suffering from pneumonia and severe dehydration. The doctor had injected me with a few precious doses of a new drug called penicillin, reserved for soldiers.
Without it, I would have died.
“Did the boys miss me?” I croaked.
Danny chortled. “They did. And you’ve a lot more to entertain, my golden panther. The forces ahead of us have broken into Rome. And we’ve just received word that a combined Allied force of over a hundred and fifty thousand is landing in Normandy.”
I cried then. I cried until I had no more tears left.
IN ROME, THE NAZIS WERE STILL ENTRENCHED
, bolstered by Italian sympathizers. There was brutal fighting near the Forum and Trajan’s Column. With the rattle of gunfire and bombs exploding overhead, we helped ferry the injured on stretchers into a vacant palazzo. Amid peeling frescoes and looted tapestries, I sang for those who weren’t dead or undergoing surgery, threading back and forth among the makeshift cots and ignoring a resurgence of my fever.
Danny finally brought a halt to it. “Our ten weeks are up. We have to go home.”
“No.” In bed with a compress on my throat and another dose of penicillin in my veins, I was in no position to defy anyone. “I want to stay. They need us. And I—”
“I know.” He squeezed my hand. “You need them. But you’re going to die if you keep this up. You need to rest and recover. We’re returning to New York. Don’t even think of trying to stop me. I’ll carry you onto the airplane if I have to.”
He ended up carrying me anyway, as I was too weak to stand.
WHEN WE ARRIVED IN AMERICA
, reporters and photographers clamored. I’d performed more shows in more war-torn areas than any USO
performer before me. After granting several interviews, swaying against Danny’s shoulder, I took to my bed in Rudi’s apartment, where Tamara fussed over me. When I felt better, I phoned my agent.
Hollywood had ignored me. My last picture, the Arabian fiasco
Kismet,
had tanked in national previews. While MGM insisted that I must attend the official premiere and still held the option on my contract, the studio had no current plan to feature me in anything.
“You should come anyway,” Eddie said. “You’re getting amazing coverage for your USO tour. I’m sure they’ll reconsider once they know you’re back and ready to work.”
“Let me think about it,” I replied, and as soon as I hung up, I telephoned Danny, who sighed. “I adore you, Marlene. But I can’t go back. I have a family to feed.”
So did I, but mine was eating well enough without me. Ignoring the studio mandate since Carole Lombard’s death that stars under contract could not travel by airplane, I flew to Hollywood. After attending the premiere, I spent a few nights at the canteen with Bette, who kissed me fervently and roused the entire assembly to a “Lili Marleen” serenade. Eddie wanted to schedule rounds for me at the studio, saying I looked incredible.
“Eating nothing but wieners does wonders for the figure,” I said, adding that I couldn’t stay. I had to return to New York to spend time with my daughter but would call him soon.
The moment I landed in Manhattan, I filed for another USO tour of duty.
In late August, soon after the joyous liberation of Paris, I headed out to entertain troops in Labrador, Greenland, and Iceland before visiting England and France.
Unbeknownst to me, the worst lay ahead.
G
uts and Bones” his men called him, but I felt it wasn’t a fair description. Oh, he was impressive—a harsh-featured raptor of a man in polished cavalry boots, with old-fashioned pistols at his belt. Yet he also had a big laugh, a bigger appetite, and a surprisingly delicate touch.
I was presented to General George S. Patton at 50 Grosvenor Square during a reception hosted by the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Forces, a branch of which oversaw high-brass requests for entertainers on tour. I was actively courting them in the hope of obtaining engagement at the front. To my frustration, the USO was no longer willing to risk sending its contracted entertainers into active war zones. With Germany cornered but defiant, the fight to capture Hitler and destroy the last vestiges of his power had turned the front into a charnel ground. Losing Paris had struck a fatal blow to the Reich; enraged, Hitler had ordered all of the city’s bridges packed with explosives and detonated, only his commander had hesitated, allowing the Americans enough time to cede liberation of the city to General de Gaulle. Now, the Nazis vowed to fight to the death in their own rubble and the USO warned me via their London office that I’d been declared a wanted enemy of the Reich. There was a price on my head; the USO could not be responsible for any danger befalling me.