Authors: Marlene Dietrich
Marlene
Marlene Dietrich
Translated from the German by
Salvator Attanasio
YOU ARE SVENGALIâI AM TRILBY
STILL ANOTHER GENIUS: JEAN GABIN
NOEL COWARDâA “LOVING FRIENDSHIP”
T
HIS 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.
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 meâwhich speaks volumes about them.
These people have neither honor nor dignity, they belong to the breed Ernest Hemingway called “parasites.” My only defenseâa sad one admittedly!âagainst 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 thatâfor our children and our familiesâour 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.
A GIRL FROM A GOOD FAMILY
I
E
VERYBODY 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 legâwith closed or crossed legsâor 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.