Marlene (34 page)

We had to be repatriated when the war in Europe came to an end. A large-scale organization was created for this purpose: Thousands of planes came to return thousands of soldiers to their homes, an air armada to bring back equipment, documents, etc.

We waited until it was our turn.

We listened to the radio—news from the Pacific—and spoke about our gloomy future. We stuck it out. The fact that we had to rely on ourselves was difficult to endure. No joking could banish our uneasiness. It was May, but our quarters in Chatou were ice cold. We were aware of our insignificance and didn't expect “orders” from anybody.

“Fall in, by twos!” Familiar sounds, then, finally: “Destination: LaGuardia Airport, New York. Group number so and so, get ready.” God knows, we
were
ready.

We didn't say a word in the plane that brought us back to the United States. These men had won the war, but they couldn't celebrate it. The war in the Pacific lurked in the back of their minds. The plane was jam-packed; we hardly had room for our legs and feet. Nothing to eat. No laughter, none of the usual joking. We were all together for the last time, but already far from each other, like civilians.

The return flight was longer and more quiet than we thought it would be. The victors were returning to their homes, and, how ridiculous, our biggest worry was that nothing should go wrong on the flight. Yet, deep within, the men were happy, only they couldn't show it. They were thinking of the buddies they had left behind in simple graves; they were bitter. Americans are a naive people. They have not experienced war on their own soil since the
Civil War. They know it only from history books. They react like children when they are in the presence of a real tragedy. Their naiveté makes them almost saintly.

We landed at LaGuardia. It was raining—of course! Nobody was there to welcome us. We dragged our baggage along, were searched from top to toe, and had to give up our precious war souvenirs. Then we found ourselves penniless at the taxi stand and didn't know where to go.

Anybody in the United States who has no money is really a nobody. The scum of the earth. We explained that we had just come back from the war—in vain. People didn't care. Nobody wanted to listen to us. “We're too busy, ask somebody else.”

Finally, I talked a taxi driver into helping us, with the promise of the biggest tip of his life, if he would take us to the St. Regis.

The taxi driver believed me and drove us to the hotel.

“Good day, Miss Dietrich. Good day. Good day.”

“Can you pay the taxi for me? I don't have a cent.”

“Of course. All you have to do is sign a blank check. A big tip for the driver?”

“Yes, a big tip.”

“A nice suite as usual?”

“Yes. And then I need some cash.”

“Of course. Write out the check, and I'll have the money brought to your room.”

There we stood with our dirty field packs at the elegant reception desk of the Hotel St. Regis. The war was not yet over, but here you got the impression that no one had ever heard of it.

Since the hotel employees didn't know my financial situation, they accepted the check I wrote out. I made it out for a hundred dollars. I don't know why I didn't make it out for more. I was really unable to act without someone telling me what to do, and I had been out of America for so long that a hundred dollars seemed like a fortune.

We went upstairs, and my buddies took baths, one after the other. I ordered food. Delicious American food that nourished my guests when they finished their baths. We decided to say
goodbye before sunset, since everybody wanted to get home before dark.

The farewells were very sad, but there were no tears or sighs—we had experienced too much for that.

I remained behind, alone in my suite at the St. Regis and waited for the maid to clean the bathtub, so that I could take a bath, the first in many months. My God, how lonely I felt! Too early to phone California, and an inconvenient hour for the offices in New York.

And what would I tell them anyway? That I was back from the war? Who was interested in the war?

The telephone rang, it was my agent, Charlie Feldman. I had tried to reach him while the others were taking their baths.

“Please,” he said, “don't write any checks. They won't be covered.”

“I couldn't know that,” I answered.

“Hang up, let me give it some thought, I'll call you back.”

I took a bath. I lay in bed, stared at the ceiling and waited—for what? Suddenly I no longer had any roots! Where were they? In the war that had raged in Europe?

I was utterly confused. I had already accustomed myself to being a resident alien and then becoming an American citizen. Now I had to adjust and re-integrate myself all over again. What I mean is that I came back to America, a country that had not suffered in the war, a country that really didn't know what its soldiers had gone through over there on foreign soil. My hatred of “carefree” Americans dates from this time.

It shouldn't be difficult for anyone to imagine that I was not greatly loved in the fall and winter of 1945.

The more soldiers returned from the Pacific, the fewer jobs were available in the United States. We went through the streets, and everything revolted us. We no longer felt a sense of purpose. I'm not speaking of myself but of the sympathy I felt for these men. It was a difficult time for all of us. For us, who were completely with them in mind and heart.

The hospitals (to get to them, you had to travel all over New York as far as the suburbs) were filled with wounded soldiers,
whom we patted and comforted, whom we read to, and once again promised that their wounds would heal. Again the same lies, the same dialogues of the “come dance with me …” kind. The worst cases were the amputees. It was absolutely senseless to say “soon we'll dance again,” but they smiled.

Sad, sad experiences of the postwar period.

I needed a whole year to “re-integrate” myself; I, who had come through it unscathed, except for my frozen feet and hands. A whole year of despair and anger, a year in which I had to take insults, unintentional for the most part, but all the more shocking, because they came from well-fed citizens of the United States who didn't have the slightest notion of what was going on outside their borders. At that time I naively believed that every American had heard of bombs, destruction and death, but I was to discover that this was the case with only a few. Above all, they didn't want to be reminded of the existence of the war.

I'm not talking about the families of the soldiers who had fought at the front, but of people who had never experienced war, whose daily routines had never been shattered by the war, who had always preserved their inner peace.

This expression “inner peace” reminds me of an experience during the war. I was in Italy, in Naples to be exact, at the Hotel Parco.

A friend of mine, the actor Jean-Pierre Aumont, had contacted me through official channels, and I received permission to pay a visit to the French unit to which he belonged.

He had come to pick me up in his jeep on the previous day. He gave off a peculiar odor.

“I slept under a tank next to a dead Senegalese soldier,” he explained to me. “You must excuse me.”

We heated some water and brought it to my “room with bath” so he could take his first bath in weeks.

Jean-Pierre Aumont was a well brought up young man, very educated, with an extraordinary sense of humor.

We set out before dawn. He's a Capricorn, like myself, so we knew what we were doing. At least we thought we knew—Jean Pierre Aumont didn't have a map at hand. Soon, after a few hours,
we were stuck in the mud. The jeep wouldn't move forward or backward.

As the genuine Frenchman and soldier that he was, he said, “Let's leave it here.” From the distance we could hear the rumble of guns.

So we left our bemired jeep and trudged in the direction of the river, which we had to cross to arrive at our destination. Before us stretched a long strip of land. White ribbons fluttered in the wind. Detached from their poles, they swayed like clothes on a line. We knew that this was a mine field and the only way to the river. As far as we could see, all the bridges were blown up. How were we to get across to the other bank?

“Listen, Jean-Pierre,” I said to him. “You've got your whole life ahead of you. So, I'll go in front of you, as best I can, and you follow right in my footsteps. Then I'll be blown to bits before you set foot on these filthy contraptions.”

You should have seen how we argued with each other in this no-man's land. For Jean-Pierre, of course, loved to argue. He said, “I'll go first, and
you
follow in
my
tracks.” No sooner said than done. He showed me how to do it.

Looking back, the scene strikes me as very funny: a German and a Frenchman lost in Italy, who outdo each other in politeness in order to decide who will be the first to be blown to bits.

Naturally, he led the way. We crossed the mine field and then the river, leaping from rock to rock. We were soaked through and through when we got to the other bank. Artillery fire, a fantastic spectacle. We didn't know where we were. Still out of breath, we looked around us, and I said, “Stay behind me. If anyone comes I'll take care of him, friend or foe. Just leave it to me.”

Dusk. The sudden sound of a motor. “Stay behind me,” I said to Jean-Pierre, but he didn't listen.

To our left behind the curve of the road, the sound of the motor continued. It was impossible to identify who it was. We waited.

Suddenly we saw the signs on the jeep coming toward us. We waved and it came to a stop. Two GIs: “What do you want? Who are you?” And, turning to me, “Are you a nurse, or what?”

“I'm Marlene Dietrich,” I said. “We're lost. Can you show us the way to Naples?”

“If you're Marlene Dietrich, then I'm General Eisenhower. Let's go, get in.”

So we returned to Naples, and Jean-Pierre returned empty-handed to his unit.

We said no more about this incident. Since we both have a sense of humor, we can both laugh about it today. But many tragedies have soured our laughter.

Jean-Pierre is a man before he's an actor. If only all living actors were as good as he is! The actor's calling is not suitable for a man. Yet Jean-Pierre has ennobled it, now that the greats, Raimu and Gabin, are no more. Except for Jean-Pierre Aumont, I met no other great actors during the war.

Some American actors volunteered for service, we called them “Ninety-Day Wonders” because they immediately received officer's rank, without any training.

Most actors did not fight. Some did, but not very many. We often wondered what they would tell their children. Then we stopped wondering about it. Like everything else, it, too, went down the drain. Everything ended in the bitter disappointment of the warriors. No triumphal marches to welcome them home.

But the names of some men—George Patton, Anthony McAuliffe, Maxwell Taylor, James Gavin (the “fighting generals”), and Omar Bradley (the brain who directed the war)—are now in the history books.

America wanted to champion peace and, so, made winning the war its goal in order to achieve this aim. No one can contest their success on this score. America lost its best men, but it defeated the Nazis. Americans fought them without really understanding why they were fighting, they simply did their duty It mustn't be forgotten that most of them were drafted; therefore, they didn't want to fight but had to fight. And they were forcibly drawn into a war about which they knew nothing.

We traveled through countless German towns and villages. At the end of the war we ended up in Pilsen, in Czechoslovakia.

Everywhere we heard the same stories, the same suffering on
both sides, everywhere. And no prospect of salvation except through the “end of the war,” for which everyone was waiting.

The war ended in general mourning. At the end of the First World War, I was still too young to be able to remember it. But I imagine it wasn't much different. The same despair, the same depression, the same dirge: “Tell me, oh tell me, why I marched off to war?”

The same tumult in the minds of all soldiers. The same fear of the future, the fear of returning home and discovering that wife and children have become strangers. The fear of being alone again, as before, of having no buddies, as before, of being unable to share the worries and tears of others. Becoming a head of a family again and being exposed to the harsh criticism of the women who resented their husbands but who had done everything—in this country that for so long had been spared the horrors of war—to “trap” the husband, whom they now reproach daily when the refrigerator or the heating system doesn't work.

How can the soldier, returning from war, speak to his wife and children when they are spending the whole day in front of the radio or TV?

So many marriages and engagements broke up as a result of the war. Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. To the contrary.

Many soldiers with whom I've spoken explained that they had married the first girl they could find, so that in case they were killed someone would get the government pension. So it's understandable that the relationship between the married couple ceased to exist on the husbands return. And no sadness. This kind of marriage had no future, no hope.

That is all I have to say about the war. Nothing very important, in view of what has already been written. An ant's-eye view, as it were.

After my repatriation to the United States (I have already mentioned the painful circumstances of this return), I performed again in order to earn money. I was not the only one who suffered
from postwar depression. But somehow, one way or another, I managed to get through it, thanks to the help of Mitchell Leisen (
Golden Earrings
), and Billy Wilder (
A Foreign Affair
). I recovered financially, and made some films—I hope they were not too bad. As always, I did what was expected of me. And even more, it seemed to me at the time.