Marlene Dietrich Goes To War

soldiers that never wavered. I hope you enjoy hearing her story, which I recorded for the audio version of my Mobituaries book. Marlena Dietrich was one hundred percent. In nine two, the German borns Green legend and internationally known cabaret artist, was in London rehearsing for a concert. She was seventy years old. As with everything related to her image, Dietrich knew exactly

how she wanted to be lighted. Her trusted longtime lighting designer, Joe Davis, was on hand to make sure her expectations were met. Dietrich's twenty two year old grandson, Peter Reeva was also there. He remembers the scene vividly. I'm standing next to her on the London stage with Joe Davis and way up in the clouds at the top of the theater. There's a guy pointing a spotlight on her face. She kept telling him, waving a hand where to move the light. The man called down. I think that's perfect,

Miss Dietrich. Joe Davis called up. Do exactly as Miss Dietrich says. Marlena gestured again a few times and then turned to Joe and said that's fine. So I asked Joe how she knew it was fine. His reply, when it begins to burn her eyes, she knows it is a dead center. Like Elizabeth Taylor, Marlena Dietrich is today remembered by many for her beauty, but Dietrich's persona cool,

husky voiced at times androgynous, was always more daring. As the theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote, her masculinity appeals to women and her sexuality to men. In the Western destri Rides again, Dietrich gets into a bar fight, a real knockdown drag out with another woman rolling around the floor before Jimmy Stewart dumps a bucket of water on both of them, then Dietrich attacks him with a bottle, a chair,

and her fists. Incidentally, this is the movie where she sings Boys in the back Room brilliantly parodied by Madeleine Khan as I'm Tired in Blazing Saddles. Turns out Dietrich wasn't afraid of a good fight in real life. Destric came out in ninety nine, the year Hitler's Germany invaded Poland, commencing World War Two, and Dietrich stepped right into the breach to help her new beloved homeland, the United States

of America, defeat the country of her birth. I don't think she was ever happier, more fulfilled than when she was serving the Allied troops, Peter Reeva told me. Perhaps that's because she knew well what was at stake. Born in Berlin as Marie Magdalena Dietrich, Dietrich lost her father when she was just five. While still a girl, she came up with the name Marlena by fusing her first and second names. It was her first act of self creation.

She embarked on a career in entertainment as a chorus girl in Berlin reviews, and then as an actress in the city's vibrant cinema scene. Her breakout performance came as a cabaret singer in Joseph von Sternberg's Blue Angel. Immediately, Paramount Studios came calling, and Dietrich moved to Hollywood to star in a series of six films in the early nineteen thirties, all directed by Sternberg. She was usually cast in the role of a vamp or femme fatale, but

fast won a reputation for breaking the rules. In n three, while sailing from New York to France, she received a warning from Paris's chief of police that should she arrive in the city wearing men's trousers, she would be arrested, and so naturally, she made sure to wear a white pant suit when she disembarked. The Paris papers hailed it as a revolution in fashion, and the next day the chief of police showed up with a bracelet inscribed with

an apology. During the same years that Dietrich was conquering Hollywood, Adolf Hitler was coming to power back in Germany. Dietrich watched political developments in her home country warily. Although the German government had banned Blue Angel in ninety three, Sternberg was Jewish. Hitler loved the film. He wanted Dietrich to return to Germany to continue her career. As her grandson Peter Riva told me more, Lena was staunchly opposed to

autocrats and fascists. When she got to that position of security and fame, she took every opportunity she could to oppose the Nazis. German foreign minister von Ribbentroff came to visit her in seven at the Lancaster Hotel in Paris, bearing a mother's cross to woo Marlena back to Germany. It would have essentially made her Queen of Germany with the promise of a care free life. She said no then and many other times. Hitler never asked again, just

labeled her a traitor to the fatherland. Instead, Dietrich worked

with Jewish emigrade director Billy Wilder. Jews had been leaving Germany since the Nazis came to power in three, but in eight, with Crystal Knocked a nationwide program against Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues and schools, the refugee problem became a crisis, Dietrich and Wilder started a fund to spawn her refugees, and Dietrich s grote her entire salary from Seven's Night Without Armor at four hundred and fifty thousand dollars per film.

She was one of Hollywood's highest paid stars to support the cause. And then in ninety nine, this woman, who was culturally German to the core, publicly renounced her home country and became an American citizen. She made sure the cameras were there when she was sworn in. She wanted the oath of American citizenship to be captured on film, says Riva, in order to send a message to the Third Reich and good Germans for them to know she was taking that stand. This didn't go over well back home.

The Nazi newspaper Dark Stormer wrote that she had been corrupted from her years spent among the Jews of Hollywood, calling her decision a betrayal of the fatherland. Dietrich didn't care, but the bombing of Pearl Harbor she went further. In two she traveled throughout the United States to promote the purchase of war bonds. Some estimates credit her with raising a million dollars in sales. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to help my country in any way I can,

she told The New York Times that year. I consider it a privilege, not a duty. She also supported the government's wartime propaganda, which used German language radio to demoralize the Nazi troops, but Dietrich's greatest efforts were for the USO. In ninety four and nineteen forty five, she volunteered for multiple tours entertaining troops and prisoners of war in Algeria, Italy, France, and Germany for eighteen straight months, with more time at

the front, Billy Wilder said, than General Eisenhower. She earned a reputation for abiding the rough conditions a lack of electricity, sleeping in tents, and for being willing to tour near enemy lines. The closer the better, as far as a Dietrich was concerned. Riva recalls Danny Thomas, who was a young comic at the time touring with Dietrich, once said to me, your grandmother, laughing and shaking his head. She tried to get us killed. We were performing our act

for five guys in a foxhole with Howard Sirs. Firing overhead. She performed for as many as half a million troops, singing and even playing the saw, which she bowed like a violin. As a teenager, she had aspired to be a concert violinist, until a severe wrist injury dashed her hopes. She did some comic bits too. In one act, she purported to be a mind reader. She would call a serviceman up on stage and state that she would tell the audience his thoughts. After a sly look at the

young man, she'd quip, oh, think of something else. I can't talk about that. Actually, I think Dietrich wanted to be a soldier, and you couldn't very well be a soldier, so she fought her way, said her daughter, Maria Riva, mother of Peter, in British documentary re Maria Riva's acclaimed two memoir described Dietrich as not so much a mother as a queen with her family as court. But on Dietrich's contributions to the war effort, Maria Riva is unstinting.

She did a magnificent job. Certainly when she was finally overseas, she practically was a soldier. She never said I was with the U. S O. She was in the army. One of Dietrich's more famous paramours, the actor Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Claimed that she entertained the idea of helping the Allied

cause in an even grander way by killing Hitler. Dietrich biographer Charlotte Chandler quotes Fairbanks is saying that Dietrich toyed with plans to seduce and then assassinate the German leader back in the thirties, when Hitler still held out hopes that Dietrich would return to Germany more. Lena suggested to Fairbanks that she might accept the offer on the condition that she be granted a private audience with the few her Her plan was to gush about Hitler, soften him up,

and then strike the fatal blow. When Fairbanks expressed skepticism about the plan, surely she would be searched before being allowed to meet privately with Hitler, she countered that she would subject herself to a strip search and use a poisoned hairpin as the lethal weapon. She always felt a responsibility to do one percent, says Peter Riva. If you detest Hitler enough, you're going to give that one percent of your effort. After the war, the United States honored

its adopted citizen with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In Ye, France named her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor Belgium a Knight of the Order of Leopold. In nine sixty five, she became the first German and the first woman to receive the Medallion of Valor from the State of Israel. She was also honored by the Jewish veterans

of World War Two, but not everyone honored her. When she returned to Germany in nine sixty she encountered threats, protests, and chance of Marlena go home from those who still felt she had betrayed the nation. For the rest of her life, she shared a bond with the young men alongside whom she'd served. They were her boys, says Peter Va. She felt responsible for them, She felt grateful to them. When she sang in Vegas the first time in Ninette

at the Sahara, many of her boys wore uniforms. She called us the next morning, crying, happy that her boys remembered and that she was able to thank them once more. Every time I saw her perform London, Switzerland, Paris, New York, Jersey, it was always the same. She'd ask if any of her boys were in the audience. They'd whoop and holler. She'd smile, flash a leg and sing provocatively. They were hers and she was theirs. She knew their sacrifice, never forgot.

She loved this country, says Peter Riva. She did loved the spirit of can do. When the first space shuttle flew in nineteen eight one, she called everyone she knew to turn on the TV and watch. It wasn't about space travel, it was about the American ability to reach out, explore, improve try. She loved that Americans built their lives on trying, persevering the real immigrant spirit, and she was an immigrant. This special episode of the Mobituaries podcast is also included

in the audio book edition of Mobituaries. While you just heard the surprising history of Marlena Dietrich, the Mobituaries audio book is filled with stories you won't hear on the podcast. You'll get profiles of presidents who aren't on Mount Rushmore, tributes to cars now consigned to the scrap heap of history, tales of long gone sports teams, and dragons, Yes, dragons, you see, people believed in dragons until well anyway. You can download the audiobook edition of Mobituaries wherever you get

your audio books. Thanks for listening.