Marlene (22 page)

In 1946, I returned to France to make a film,
Martin Roumagnac,
with Gabin. It wasn't a very good film, although we had all been enchanted with the script. It dealt with the immediate postwar period: Electricity, fuel and groceries were rationed. Nothing
new to us. Since I played the role of a provincial beauty, I had a permanent wave and wore ridiculous, supposedly fashionable, clothes.

Gabin taught me to contract my words, since I was not allowed to speak cultivated French. He sat near the camera and corrected me with infinite patience. Since Georges Lacombe, the director, expressed himself only in incomprehensible sounds, Cabin took over the job of telling me what I had to do. He took on an enormous responsibility.

It should have been an easy task to be a much-desired woman, “to live on air and love,” and to be envied by all other women because I had drawn the first prize—Jean Gabin. But it wasn't so at all. Nobody believed in my sincerity, no doubt because of my own fault or the fault of the “image” people had of me.

Jacques Prévert (he had written “Dead Leaves,” a song I was supposed to sing in another film, and was furious when I declined to play the role) wrote a very bad, disparaging review of the film.

Martin Roumagnac
was a disaster. The names Jean Gabin and Marlene Dietrich were not enough to lure moviegoers. I was crushed as always when I felt I had failed to come up to expectations. Gabin remained calm: “Let's wait awhile,” he said. But I couldn't do that. My financial problems forced me to return to Hollywood to make a film under Mitchell Leisen's direction,
Golden Earrings.
The money I was paid was half of what it had been before the war. That, too, was a bad film, but when you need money, you're ready to do anything.

Nobody knowingly decides to make a bad film. At the beginning everything was going along fine. Even the dressing room attendants who fixed my clothes and whose fingers could hardly hold the needle because of the cold, believed that
Martin Roumagnac
would be a good film.

In retrospect, I find that Gabin and I had a rather easy life in the United States. It was a miracle, but I don't know how it was wrought. The fact is that things seemed very easy. The house I had found for him with its garden and fence looked like a small rectory Gabin felt well there, loved every tree and every shrub,
strolled around and regaled me with stories about France. However, he never said that France was better than America.

Besides, he loved America. That's amazing for a Frenchman. Gabin judged simply, intelligently, and directly as only few foreigners do. He accepted America and Hollywood in his own way. And he decided to love them without analyzing them, without putting them under a microscope. This in no way means that he found everything commendable. He liked to joke with me about some of his reservations.

I was there to protect him. He did not notice. He considered me his peer. He had never experienced anything of this kind. I loved him as my child—indeed, for a certain period of time he took the place of my daughter who was no longer a child. He was gentle, tender, and had all the traits a woman looks for in a man.

An ideal being, the kind that appears in our dreams.

I lost him as you lose all your ideals, but only very much later. By the time he was again living in France, I had become to him merely a companion whom you lovingly take in your arms for the last time. My love for him has remained strong, unfading. He never asked me to prove it. Gabin was that way.

Very few understand the meaning of this word. Hemingway understood it; Fleming understood it, and Robert Oppenheimer, to cite a few names.

Friendship is related to maternal love, sibling love, eternal love, the love that is pure, dreamed of and yearned for. It is not love under the pretext of love, but, rather, a pure feeling, never demanding and therefore eternal.

Friendship has united more people than love. It is precious and it is sacred. It unites soldiers in combat, strengthens resistance, it encompasses us all even when our intentions are obscure.

For me, friendship is the most precious possession.

Anyone who renounces a friendship sees himself or herself excluded, forgotten, forever pushed out of the circle of friends.
That's how simple it is. Friends who deceive each other are condemned to death, if I may say so, and they will always wonder why they no longer find any acceptance. I despise them. They are the lowest of the low. The moment you experience the blessing of a friendship you have the sacred duty to obey its laws. Regardless of the consequences that may ensue. The rules of friendship must always be observed in silence or in words.

This is not an easy task, and at times it requires superhuman effort. But friendship is the most important human relationship, of far greater importance than love. Love is inconstant. Love, save for maternal love, is unfaithful and always finds good reasons for it. Friendship is genuine, or it's simply not present, and it's easy to make the distinction.

As soon as friendship has you in its grip, it carries you along at full sail. You can't go wrong about the person. A promise among friends, sealed with a handshake, is an inextinguishable vow.

There is a group of people who never experience what friendship can be—the escapists. They steer clear of difficulties, theirs and those of others, they don't want to relate. Woody Allen has defined them: “They close their eyes before all problems—go shopping instead.” I agree 100 percent with that definition. I'm surrounded by them, and I wage a futile battle to restore them to reality. They try not only to run away but also to shift the blame onto others. A pitiful lot.

All efforts are in vain. They escape.

O
UR FRIENDSHIP NATURALLY GAVE
rise to much gossip and gabble. It's about time the truth was told. I was aboard a ship sailing from Europe to America. When? I've forgotten. At any rate, I'm sure it was after the Spanish Civil War. Ann Warner, the wife of the all-powerful Jack Warner, gave a dinner on board to which I was invited. When I came, I immediately noticed that twelve guests were seated around the table.

“Please excuse me,” I said, “but I can't sit here, we'll be thirteen, and I'm superstitious.” (I was standing at that moment.) Nobody made an attempt to get up, so I remained standing. Suddenly a giant leaned over me. “Sit down,” he said. “I'll be the fourteenth.” I looked up at the giant, saw Hemingway, and asked, “Who are you?” This shows how ignorant I was.

Order was restored. We were now fourteen around the table aboard this ship bound for New York. The dinner—just as at Maxim's—began, and my gigantic table companion took me by the arm each time he wanted to make a point. At the close, he escorted me back to my cabin.

I loved him from that very first evening.

I have never stopped loving him.

It was a Platonic love.

I say this because the love that Ernest Hemingway and I felt for each other—pure, absolute—was a most extraordinary love in the world in which we lived. Beyond all doubt, this was a boundless love beyond death—even though I know very well that it doesn't exist. At any rate our “amorous feelings” lasted many years when no hope, no longing, no wish for fulfillment remained to either of us—a period during which Hemingway felt only a deep despair, just as I did when I thought of him. We never lived together, but perhaps that might have solved certain problems. I respected Mary, his wife, the only one of his wives whom I knew. Like her, I was jealous of his former wives. I was only his friend and remained that in the years that followed. I have preserved all his letters, and I'm not willing to entrust them to a museum or to a collector. Not because, I think I can take them with me in the Beyond, but because I don't want a stranger to lay his hands on them. They belong to me. He wrote them for me, and nobody will earn a penny from them. I shall do everything possible to prevent this.

He was my “Rock of Gibraltar”—a nickname he loved. The years without him have gone, one more painful than the other. “Time heals all wounds,” it is said. A very optimistic but, unfortunately, false maxim, which I very much deplore. The void Hemingway has left in us and in the world will never close again. He was a writer but also a man who—without weighing the consequences of his action—decided to leave us. But after all, that was his decision.

We regularly wrote to each other when he was in Cuba. He would answer me “by return mail,” as he put it. We talked on the phone for hours, during which time he gave me good advice, and never once told me to hang up and stop bothering him. He sent me his manuscripts, and once he said the following about me: “She loves literature and is an intelligent and conscientious critic. When I have written something that I find good, she reads it and tells me that it pleases her, then I am perfectly happy. Since she is
well versed in things I write about—people, countries, life and death, questions of honor and conduct—I pay more attention to her judgment than to that of the professors. Since I believe that she understands more about love than anybody else.” An extremely generous judgment, as was typical of him.

I shall never understand why he loved me “so intensely” as he said. The fact is our love even survived the war. Occasionally, I would meet him during this period—he always beamed with pride, had a thousand plans in his head, whereas I would be pale and sick, but I would pull myself together to cut a good figure. He had written a poem about the war that he made me read aloud. “Take this whore death as your lawful wife …” “Read further,” he said, when I faltered. He actually called me “kraut,” a word used by GI's to designate Germans. To me it seemed ridiculous to call him “Papa” as did many of his friends. I believe I called him “You.” “Tell me, You,” I would interpose, since this was the only expression I could find—“tell, tell me,” like the little lost girl that I was in his and my own eyes.

He was an anchor, a sage, the decisionmaker, the best adviser, the pope of my personal church. How did I survive his death? To this question I have no answer. Whoever has lost a father or a brother, will understand me. You deny the fact quite simply, until the dreadful pain disappears from the heart. Then you keep on living as though you might meet the one who no longer exists any time of the day or night. You continue along your way despite your awareness of the fact that he will never come back. You get used to the sorrow.

Here I would like to cite some excerpts from his letters, some of Hemingway's sentences so that one can better understand the intensity of the feelings that united me with this great man, and also his sense of humor which so delighted me:

“Prudence is fatal for the imprudent—you and me.”

“This letter is sadder than Switzerland and Liechtenstein put together.”

“It [life] was easier in the Hürtgen Forest.”

“Sometimes I forget you, the way I forget my heartbeats.”

Grief does not diminish, it just becomes a habit.

For me habit is a good thing. Most people consider it something bad. But in regard to grief I find it really desirable. Hemingway also was of this opinion. He explained it to me at a point in time when, compared to his, my problems were trifling. He taught me everything about life. I knew only maternal love (which made him laugh—his characteristic bittersweet laugh) and normal, everyday love. He didn't teach me anything new, but his approval confirmed my most secret thoughts, converted them into powerful truths, and gave them the appearance of something new.

He taught me writing and warned me against using too many adjectives. At that time I was writing articles for
The Ladies Home Journal,
and he would call me twice a day and ask: “Have you defrosted your ice box?” And he knew all the little weaknesses of aspiring writers, also the classic pretext “Maybe, it would be better if I were doing something else.”

I miss him terribly. If there were a life after death, he would speak with me in my long sleepless nights, but there is no life after death. He has left us forever, no grief can bring him back again, and my yearning will remain forever unfulfilled. With time you learn “to carry on,” to make the best of things, that is, you accept what before you couldn't endure—a kind of “diminished” life Hemingway always detested (as I do) throughout the time he was among us and could talk about it.

Anger is not a good antidote against grief. The anger you feel when you have been abandoned is like a demand for alimony (both are futile). Nevertheless, I was angry—against whom, I don't know. But how could I prevent it? So beautiful a life extinguished forever for so stupid a reason.

On the day after his death I was in a rage, which was my way of fighting grief. Hemingway had sworn that he would never leave me—but what was I compared to all those whom he had left behind, his children, his wife, to those who needed him? I was the fifth wheel on the wagon. He didn't think of that. Like all of us, he lived with the conviction that his days were not numbered. Nevertheless, he put an end to his life long before his appointed time. That's how he wanted it. I respect his decision. But I still weep.

I never go to funerals. So I didn't attend Hemingway's burial.
“She wasn't there,” the newspapers wrote. I haven't participated in any funeral ceremony since my mother's burial. That day was more than enough for me. I don't feel the slightest desire to experience anything of this kind again. I love the living and do what I can to mitigate their distress and suffering. But I don't feel affected by their burial. I am powerless against the frightful destructive power that transforms us into dust again, that rises triumphant and walks off with the mortal remains of those we have loved.

When Hemingway took his life, he had no wish to hurt anyone of us. He loved Mary. He loved his sons. And he loved me intensely, very intensely. He loved me with all his enormous strength, and I was never able to do the same for him. Can such a love ever be reciprocated? I tried to—within the extent of my capacities. He knew it. Since we were physically separated, the telephone and letters were our only means of contact. Every day he would tell me about his blood pressure, as though that were of decisive importance. But he believed it was, and I would conscientiously write down the numbers he passed on to me. One morning he told me that he was staying “in the most fantastic place in the world, the Mayo Clinic.” He trusted the diagnosis of his doctors. I didn't. But who was I to contradict him?