As the long black limousine pulled up unannounced outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, the guardsmen were surprised to see one of the most famous and beautiful women of the day reclining elegantly in the back seat.
Marlene Dietrich, then the world’s highest-paid film star, was the epitome of husky-voiced sexual allure.
At the height of her fame, she seduced many of Hollywood’s best-known actors, including John Wayne and James Stewart. But on that summer’s evening in 1936 she had a very different conquest in mind.
Dietrich was in England to make a film called Knight Without Armour at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire.
Her boyfriend, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, was friendly with the Royal Family and through him she had learned of King Edward VIII’s plans to abdicate so he could marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Shocked at the idea he might renounce everything for what she described as ‘that homely, flat-chested woman,’ the 35-year-old screen goddess had decided to intervene.
‘She was prepared to seduce him and show him that Wallis wasn’t the only woman in the world,’ Fairbanks said.
Dietrich’s audacious plan was concocted in her suite at Claridge’s, he claimed. ‘She said, “I’ll make him forget her. I must have a bath and the right perfume.”
‘She began taking her clothes off as she went.’
Since they were in the midst of their own affair, Fairbanks — not surprisingly — expressed his reservations about the scheme.
‘Oh darling, don’t be so old-fashioned,’ she replied.
‘We’re doing it for England, which we both love. Some sacrifices must be made.’
As the long black limousine pulled up unannounced outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, the guardsmen were surprised to see one of the most famous and beautiful women of the day reclining elegantly in the back seat.
Marlene Dietrich, then the world’s highest-paid film star, was the epitome of husky-voiced sexual allure.
At the height of her fame, she seduced many of Hollywood’s best-known actors, including John Wayne and James Stewart. But on that summer’s evening in 1936 she had a very different conquest in mind.
Dietrich was in England to make a film called Knight Without Armour at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire.
Her boyfriend, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, was friendly with the Royal Family and through him she had learned of King Edward VIII’s plans to abdicate so he could marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Shocked at the idea he might renounce everything for what she described as ‘that homely, flat-chested woman,’ the 35-year-old screen goddess had decided to intervene.
‘She was prepared to seduce him and show him that Wallis wasn’t the only woman in the world,’ Fairbanks said.
Dietrich’s audacious plan was concocted in her suite at Claridge’s, he claimed. ‘She told me: “I’ll make him forget her. I must have a bath and the right perfume.”
‘She began taking her clothes off as she went.’
Since they were in the midst of their own affair, Fairbanks — not surprisingly — expressed his reservations about the scheme.
‘Oh darling, don’t be so old-fashioned,’ she replied.
‘We’re doing it for England, which we both love. Some sacrifices must be made.’
Born in Berlin in 1901, she was the daughter of Louis Dietrich, a lieutenant in the Royal Prussian Police, and his wife Josephine, whose family ran one of the city’s best-known department stores.
Among the first people to fall for Dietrich’s allure was an older girl at her school.
‘I was allowed to overnight with her and she was the initiator,’ she remembered.
‘She didn’t seem to know much about what she was doing, but she seemed to enjoy her fumbling.’
Working as a stage and film actress in decadent Twenties Berlin, she went on to conduct affairs with both sexes. But her strangest and most enduring relationship was with a man, a handsome assistant director named Rudi Sieber.
She would later describe him as ‘the love of my life, my soul mate’.
Yet after they married in May 1923, and she gave birth to their daughter Maria the following year, they agreed to enjoy an open relationship and Dietrich gave her stamp of approval to Sieber’s affair with Russian actress Tamara Matul.
In part, this was a practical arrangement. In 1930, her success in the film The Blue Angel took the new international sex symbol to
Hollywood and she left her daughter in the care of her husband and Tamara — an agreement that was repeated throughout her career.
Although they continued to live apart in the coming years, Dietrich wrote to Rudi whenever she had an affair and told him the details.
‘I never loved anyone else the way I loved Rudi, so Rudi didn’t need to be jealous,’ she explained.
There must have been many such letters. Her Hollywood romances included affairs with two of Greta Garbo’s former lovers.
One was a dalliance with Mercedes de Acosta, a society lesbian renowned for her habit of wearing mannish trousers, along with a naval-style tricorn hat and cape. The other was with actor John Gilbert, known as ‘the great lover’ of the silent screen.
Her two-year relationship with Gilbert ended when he died of a heart attack in January 1936, but she quickly moved on, meeting Douglas Fairbanks Jr at a party in London, shortly before her abortive role in the abdication crisis.
That night, she asked him to give her a lift back to Claridge’s and invited him in for a nightcap.
‘It’s very nice of you to have me up for a drink,’ he said as he settled on the sofa in her suite.
‘That wasn’t what I had in mind,’ she replied.
Dietrich was eight years older than Fairbanks, but he recalled: ‘She was unconventional in her lovemaking as she was unconventional in everything.
‘She was totally uninhibited about her nudity which was easy to understand when you gazed upon that body.’
Their relationship coincided with Dietrich’s growing concerns about the rise of Nazism in her homeland. She was deemed a traitor for refusing to return to Germany and make films at the state-run UFA studios, which would have been great propaganda for the Third Reich.
One day, according to Fairbanks, she asked for his help in an extraordinary plan. She would agree to make one film in Germany, on condition that she could be alone with the Fuhrer.
This would give her an opportunity to kill him.
She told Fairbank,: ‘I would gush over how I feel about him, intimating that I am desperately in love with him. I’ve heard Hitler likes me and I’m certain he would agree.’
Realising she would be searched, she was prepared to go into Hitler’s bedroom naked if necessary, but the only detail she could not resolve was how to smuggle in a murder weapon.
She considered a poisoned hairpin, but asked for Fairbanks’ suggestions, too.
‘I never thought of anything,’ he said.
‘Fortunately, her idea didn’t go any further because she didn’t figure out how to complete the assassination, but she was a very brave girl and I know she would have gambled her life if she thought she had a chance of success.’
When Dietrich ended her affair with Fairbanks in 1938, he suspected she had simply tired of him.
The following year she began an affair with James Stewart, her co-star in the Western film Destry Rides Again. She revealed a very different side to ‘Gentleman Jimmy’, as he was known to fans.
‘He never said “I love you” or anything like that,’ she recalled.
‘One rather expects that kind of thing, those words, even if delivered in perfect insincerity.
‘Then I discovered I was pregnant. It was his baby too, so I told him. He looked shocked.
‘He said: “Jeez, what are you gonna do about it?” I noticed he said “you”, not “we”.’
Some accounts suggest Dietrich had an abortion with Stewart’s endorsement, while others say she claimed it turned out to be a phantom pregnancy.
Whatever the truth, their relationship did not survive the end of filming, and Dietrich was soon in pursuit of Joseph Kennedy, father of the famous brothers John, Robert and Edward.
Kennedy was then the U.S. ambassador to Britain and he and Dietrich met in the summer of 1939 when both were holidaying at Cap d’Antibes in the South of France.
She was there with Rudi, Tamara and Maria, while Kennedy was accompanied by his wife and children, but this did not deter them from a dalliance which proved disappointing in several respects.
‘He was a very rich man but he never gave me even a simple token, like a scarf,’ said Dietrich.
‘I think he wanted to be sure you really liked him, just for himself alone. He wasn’t very comfortable when it came to women.’
Their fling ended that summer, but it appeared she had made a lasting impression on the young John F. Kennedy, then only 21.
In later years her popularity as a film star began to wane and she turned to a career as a cabaret artist.
Touring the country with such memorable songs as Falling In Love Again and Lili Marleen, she arrived in Washington in the early Sixties and invited President John F. Kennedy to her show.
Word came back the president could not accept but would like her to visit him at the White House.
She was escorted to his private quarters where they were left alone together.
‘He clearly remembered those days in the South of France,’ she said.
‘Most of him was relaxed, but not all of him and he didn’t leave any doubt as to what he had in mind.
‘I can’t say I was caught completely by surprise. He was, after all, his father’s son and I wanted to see if he made love like his father.
‘I don’t remember most of what happened because it was all so quick. Afterwards I remembered saying: “Please don’t muss my hair.” I kept my professional focus and I knew I had a show to do later that night.
‘I think he was even faster than his father. He had an even busier schedule I suppose. They both kept their watches on.’
Before she left, Kennedy asked if she had really gone to bed with his father. She said: ‘I hesitated a moment and thought about what he wanted to hear. “No, your father tried but I didn’t agree,” I told him.
‘The president smiled, so I suppose what I said was right for him. “The old fox,” he said. “I knew he was lying”.’
Dietrich was then in her early 60s and admitted to feeling relieved that Kennedy, some 16 years her junior, had found her attractive.
‘I felt too old for the young president,’ she said.
‘I wished I could have been younger and more beautiful for the occasion.’
Ageing came hard for a woman whose sex appeal had once enabled her to pick and choose which of her leading men she would invite into her bed, and choosy she could be.
She had been enamoured of John Wayne, her co-star in The Spoilers, filmed in 1942. When she first saw him, she was struck by his ‘broad shoulders and flat behind’, but what most appealed to her was that he wasn’t vain or arrogant.
‘Far from it, he was insecure as an actor,’ she said.
‘I don’t think it’s what a man his size would like to have said about him but he brought out the maternal side in me.’
Aware she could not depend on her looks for ever, she had long had a pact with her husband Rudi that they would spend their old age together.
In this, there was never any question in Dietrich’s mind that he would ultimately choose her over long-term mistress Tamara.
‘She could never be the love of his life because that place had been taken by me,’ she said.
Dietrich believed this realisation may have contributed to Tamara’s increasingly fragile mental health.
In 1965, she was committed to a lunatic asylum, where she was later stabbed to death by another inmate.
The path was clear for her and Rudi to enter their twilight years together — but the great tragedy of her life was that he died in 1976, leaving her to live out her last years on her own in a Paris apartment.
When she died in May 1992, it was as a virtual recluse.
There was a simple reason for her refusal to leave her flat. The woman who had once entranced millions was terrified photographers might take snaps of her, revealing the beauty which could have changed the course of world events was itself now part of history.
by Professor P.T. Brown
