Marlene (40 page)

Dropping my cigarette, I squashed it into the carpet with my heel, grinding it into a mess of scorched tobacco, cinders, and nicotine stains.

I might never know, but I knew this much: I wasn’t finished yet. Dead was dead, and there was nothing to do about it. While I was still alive, I would find some way to prevail.

MY PARISIAN HEADLINES REACHED HOLLYWOOD
. Eddie telephoned me; there was interest from Universal, which had a Western comedy slated for the studio’s male star James Stewart. The producer thought the supporting female role might be right for me. I asked to see the script, even as Eddie warned that it wasn’t my usual fare and the pay was less than a sixth of my usual fee. “But it’s a good project,” he said, “and I think I can get them to offer a contract, if you agree.”

“Then forget the usual,” I replied. “Send it.”

I loved the script. As Frenchy in
Destry Rides Again,
I would play a raucous saloon dame who falls for Stewart’s prim, law-abiding hero. It was an all-American story, which might restore my career, show off my singing and bawdy humor. It certainly wasn’t my usual fare; it parodied everything I’d cultivated—a vulgar woman down on her luck, entertaining riffraff in a dusty outpost. But the pay was indeed abysmal, so I cabled Eddie to negotiate a better salary and took advantage of the time before shooting was scheduled to embark on a holiday to southern France. I wanted to make amends to Rudi; I couldn’t bear us quarreling, and he agreed, for, like me, he disliked it, too. Tamara also needed a respite, her moods having become more erratic. We went to pick up Heidede from her Swiss school; she was slimmer and more content than I’d seen her in years. Then, together with Remarque, who unlike Douglas before him, did not care if I was married, I traveled with my lover and my family and our mountain of luggage to a cliff-side villa in Antibes, which I rented with my customary disregard for the expense. I also sent word to Mutti to join us and, if she could, to bring Liesel with her. My mother returned word by telegram that she would “see,” implying our last visit together remained a bone of contention.

That summer changed me. The British playwright Noël Coward was vacationing nearby and invited me to come see him; his wit and flamboyant flair, coupled with his astonishing talent, had me in awe. He treated us to cocktails at the Hôtel Cap du Roc. I ended up at the piano with him, his nimble fingers stroking the keys as I crooned his music in my smoke-infused voice, including my favorite song of his, “I’ll See You Again.”

“Darling, I had
no
idea you knew my tunes so well,” he said, his beautifully shaped, expressive eyes and jutting ears giving him an elvish air.

I adored him. I knew he must be homosexual, though, like my uncle Willi, unwilling to openly acknowledge it; but he made it clear enough when he leaned to me and whispered, “There is someone here you must meet. A stunning Frenchman and, I believe, an admirer of yours—the actor Jean Gabin.”

Rudi, Tami, and Heidede had gone to bed, tired from sun and frolic, while Remarque had disappeared, no doubt on one of his solitary walks to converse with the shadows in his mind.

“Gabin?” I breathed. I knew the name. His gangster picture
Pépé Le Moko
had been a smash hit in France and been remade in America as
Algiers,
with none other than my friend Charles Boyer. Gabin’s rugged masculinity, unkempt thatch of dark blond hair, and sharp narrow blue eyes had attracted Hollywood notice, but he’d refused all offers and remained in France, collaborating with such distinguished French directors as Jean Renoir, son of the painter.

“I see you admire him, too.” Coward pouted. “But you’re so . . . overbooked,” he said, alluding in his cunning way to Remarque. “However will you manage it?”

“I’ll manage,” I assured him, and with a gleeful clap of his hands, he arranged our introduction at his home, where, after drinks and a Mediterranean repast, he made himself scarce.

Gabin may have admired me, but he did not show it at first. With a hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his thin-lipped mouth—he told me tobacco should only be hand-rolled and set out to teach me how, resulting in a very misshapen lump—and his strong nose and that barrel chest under his striped sailor shirt, he resembled a working-class Parisian as he eyed me, seated with my legs crossed by the pool, before he said in his gravelly voice, “You should make pictures here. You speak excellent French, and the Americans—such expensive
merde
they churn out. You are not the same woman as you look on-screen.”

I returned his stare. He reminded me of von Sternberg, telling me how terrible I was in my Berlin pictures, and how he could make me a star; but other than that, they were nothing alike. My director had been like a perverse housecat, eccentric and vicious with his claw swipes. Gabin was a lion, feral and blunt.

“Better? Or worse?” I asked him, peering at him from under my eyelashes.

He growled, “Don’t play the coquette with me. What do you
think
?”

I took it as a compliment. “I think you’re right. I’m not the woman that Hollywood pretends I am. I make bad pictures there for the money.”

“Ah.” He grunted. “Money. The scourge of the world
.
”

He did not touch me until I was preparing to leave, already late to get back to my villa and my family. Mutti had sent word that she and Liesel would arrive the following week; I had to prepare their rooms and move Remarque into a hotel. He was drinking too much, obsessing over his languishing novel, and I’d rather not endure my mother’s disapproval at finding my lover, my child, my husband, and his mistress all under the same roof.

Then, at the door, as Noël chuckled from wherever he was lurking, Gabin seized my waist in his hands, but did not yank me to him as I’d expected and hoped.

“
Vous êtes grande,
Marlene,” he said, rolling the
r
in my name like a pebble.

“So are you,” I replied. I meant it: He was grand, in every way a man could be, and so unmistakably French I could imagine the taste of the grime and allure of Paris on his tanned skin. “Shall we see each other again?”

He put his mouth closer to mine and murmured, “I think we must.”

And so we did. I finagled afternoon escapes in the sweltering heat to take long drives along the coast, picnicking on liver pâté and smoked salmon sandwiches I made for us. He told me about growing up in a village north of Paris, the son of cabaret entertainers whose drunk of a father beat him. He attended a
lycée
but left his studies early to work as a laborer, until at nineteen, he entered show business with a bit part at the Folies-Bergère.

“I kept performing before I gave up and went into the military,” he said. “I hated the Folies. But after my military service, I needed money and went back, taking whatever I could get in music halls and operettas, imitating Chevalier—though unlike you”—he grinned—“I have no musical talent. I eventually found work in pictures.” He shrugged. “I started getting noticed. Then came
Maria Chapdelaine,
La Grande Illusion,
and
Pépé Le Moko.
And voilà! Monsieur nobody was suddenly somebody. Ridiculous, yes?”

It echoed my rise in Berlin; in fact, we were the same age. But he spoke of filmmaking as if it were beneath him—“Not really work, is it?”—and he was deeply troubled by the growing political unrest. “You tell your mother and sister,” he said, stabbing his finger at me, “to get out of Germany now. Hitler is a monster.”

“You don’t know my mother,” I sighed, and he never did. He returned to Paris a few days before my family’s arrival, without sleeping with me, as much as I tried. “You are married. I consider it a sacred vow,” he said, with a shrug. “If you weren’t . . .” Even though I assured him I did not think the same about marriage, at least not in that way, he did not change his mind.

After he left, I found myself thinking about him. He was rough-edged, unsure about being an actor, but I knew that feeling well; and he’d advised me to do the Western role when I described it to him. “Risk, Grande,” he said, using his nickname for me. “Why not? The world could explode tomorrow.”

The world at large did not explode, not yet, but mine did. Mutti arrived with Liesel, and I found my sister subdued, scarcely uttering a word, though I was happy to see her. Her husband, Georg Wills, on the other hand, was voluble, very pleased with himself, stout and rubicund, proclaiming he’d taken a job overseeing a chain of government-approved cinemas, as the Nazis had closed the Theater des Westens along with every other locale that reeked of decadence.

I was outraged when my sister’s husband also conveyed another invitation from Goebbels. “He believes you were mistaken before,” he said. “You’ll be very welcome.”

We sat at the dinner table. Delighted to see her aunt Liesel and Oma again, Heidede chattered away with them in German. As Rudi looked at me in warning and Tami kneaded her napkin, Mutti pretended to be deaf as I informed Georg tersely, “He is the one who is mistaken. I told his last envoy in London that I am not interested.”

“That was then,” said Georg. “You don’t have a studio contract now.”

“I have an offer.” My voice rang out, despite my attempt to control it. I
was suddenly trembling. “Even if I didn’t, I’d rather wash floors in America than do anything for the Nazis.”

The table went silent. Then Liesel ventured, “Lena, really. Georg is only doing what—”

“What Goebbels told him to,” I said, cutting her off with an irate look. “No. And you obviously cannot stay there much longer, if they’re asking you to bring me these invitations. It’s not safe. I can arrange visas, I’m sure I can, for you and—”

“That is enough.” Mutti’s voice sliced through the tension. “Georg, please respect my daughter’s decision,” she said, glancing pointedly at him. “She does not want to return to Germany. That is her right.” Before I could express my gratitude for her unexpected support, she went on: “But we, too, have the right to stay where we are. I will not hear another word about leaving,” she said, looking directly at me. “We are Germans. We belong in our country.”

The visit did not improve from there. We went to the beach and the casino, Rudi using his portable camera to take home movies of us, laughing and sharing family moments, but I refused to say more than absolutely necessary to Georg, and Liesel wilted, so dominated by him that she avoided any private time with me. Mutti ignored it all, devoting herself to Heidede. She left with Liesel and her husband just as she had arrived—without concessions.

After returning with Tamara and Rudi to Paris, I sought out Gabin. He was shooting a picture; we had only one evening to have dinner. When he pecked my cheek good-bye, wishing me
bonne chance
with the new film, I invited him to my hotel suite. Again, I was rebuffed—he said he was too tired—and I wondered at my persistence. For the first time since I’d met Rudi, I wanted a man more than he seemed to want me, and I found his refusal unsettling.

Heidede did not want to return to America and was sullen during the trip back on the
Queen Mary.
Remarque came with us. I enrolled her in high school, saw him settled into an adjoining hotel bungalow to write—our affair was practically over, if it could even be called that, but I believed in
his talent and he had nowhere else to go—and then I signed my contract with Universal for the Western.

Only days before I began shooting
Destry Rides Again,
the news came that Hitler had invaded Poland. Rudi telephoned the studio switchboard in a panic. He feared the war would reach France and wanted to leave. I sent urgent word to the U.S. embassy in Paris, along with boat fare. My petition to claim him and Tamara as dependents was expedited; they took a ship from Calais to London and then on to New York, where I rented an apartment for them with my new salary. My subsequent telegrams to Berlin went unanswered until I eventually reached Uncle Willi at his store. He told me Mutti was still housekeeping, as unbelievable as it seemed; everyone was safe, he kept saying, but I detected a new wariness through the line.

“Let me help,” I said. “I told Mutti I can claim you as dependents. Rudi and Tamara are here now, in New York. You can come, too.”

“No.” He lowered his voice until I barely heard him. “Please, Lena. Don’t call again.”

He hung up on me. I couldn’t fault him for it, after I’d refused Goebbels twice, but I was upset. Getting my family to safety now, even if they were willing, would not be so easy with war breaking out, much as I wanted to demand their immediate evacuation on the next ship.

When
Destry Rides Again
premiered, it was a success, even against
The Grapes of Wrath
and
Gone with the Wind
. I had wonderful songs like “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have,” in which I swaggered about in shoulder-baring feathers and disintegrating sequins.

Critics rhapsodized over my performance, exulting in my willingness to roll about in the muck. I gained a raise in my salary and another picture with Universal: the South Seas riot
Seven Sinners,
where I played the female lead, Bijou, opposite strapping John Wayne. I liked him almost as much as I liked Gary. Six feet of solid American beefcake, he was gorgeous, though, unlike Gary, disinclined to wit, though as ambitious and with as avid an eye for the ladies, despite his sulking backstage wife.

I invited him to my dressing room after our first week of shooting, greeting him in a sheer black peignoir. When I asked him the time and he
mumbled that he had no idea, I lifted my hem to reveal a watch dangling from my garter. Setting my red-nailed fingers on his shoulders, which were broad enough to wrestle bulls, I said, “It’s early. We have plenty of time.”

He grinned and began tugging off his clothes.

But time was the one thing the world no longer had.

SCENE SEVEN

THE GOLDEN PANTHER

1942–1946