Dietrich Lived Here

Apartment 12E at 993 Park Avenue has remained virtually untouched since Marlene Dietrich left it in 1978. As her Louis XV-style chairs, grand piano, and gold-tipped Brigg cane, among other items, go to auction at Sotheby's, MATT TYRNAUER gets an exclusive tour of the sanctuary where the legendary star made pot-au-feu for friends such as Noël Coward and Orson Welles and lovers including Yul Brynner, Kirk Douglas, and Edward R. Murrow

MATT TYRNAUER

'My mother never wanted to see her reflection during the course of the day," says Maria Riva, the daughter of Marlene Dietrich. "That is why all of the mirrored walls in her apartment were smoked. They were intended to open up the rooms, but they were darkened to make it impossible to see one's pure reflection." When Dietrich, a woman who usually insisted that her preferences be respected, did relent and accept the presence of a clear mirror—one still hangs over the fireplace—she made certain that it was placed high enough not to reflect her face from a less-than-perfect angle. "And she always put a big vase of cut flowers in front of it," according to Riva, "lilies, cabbage roses—whatever sprayed out."

Dietrich, the immortal screen goddess, starred in countless films, including Josef von Sternberg's classics The Blue Angel, Blonde Venus (with Cary Grant), and Shanghai Express, Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair, and other memorable films, such as Destry Rides Again (in which she sang "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have" and co-starred with Jimmy Stewart), Seven Sinners (in which she sang "The Man's in the Navy" to John Wayne), and Judgment at Nuremberg. She was an icon of limitless elegance and mysterious androgyny, whose unmistakable Mitteleuropa voice and hauteur were internationally recognized. Yet she was private, obsessively engaged in the scrupulous maintenance of her face and figure. Dietrich blurred gritty realities with wisps of smoke, golden-blond wigs, and, later in life, artfully concealed strips of Scotch tape to shore up her shifting profile. "Dietrich," says a candid observer, "had a way of ignoring realities that didn't suit her." These realities included her personal history, her age, her relationships with friends and lovers. She was among the greatest of revisionists, and her homes were both stylized settings created to correspond with the image she wished to convey and sweatshops where she slaved long and often painfully to perpetuate her ageless beauty.

No one knows more of the truth about Dietrich than Maria Riva—her one child, her biographer, and the heir to the only real estate that Marlene ever owned, a two-bedroom apartment on the 12 th floor of 993 Park Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a modest—she liked to say "cozy"—retreat where a woman in swansdown might recline unencumbered with a bottle of Dom Perignon by her side.

Although Dietrich died in Paris (at the age of 90 in 1992), her New York home was her official residence. She purchased it in 1959 and lived there at the height of her spectacular second career as a live performer—the era when she graced the stages of the world in shimmering Jean Louis gowns, breathed her way through countless renditions of "Falling in Love Again," and bowed (quite carefully—even the slightest motions were rehearsed) after triumphant encores at venues including London's Cafe de Paris. "This was her base when she was not giving concerts on every continent, living in hotels in Japan, Italy, Mexico, South Africa, Holland, Israel, and Australia," explains Riva, who is putting the contents of her mother's apartment—everything from the works by Corot to Marlene's gold-tipped Brigg cane—up for auction at Sotheby's in November.

'After Yul Brynner bad left, she would call me to come over.... She so loved to show of j her disheveled bed.

Recently, Riva opened Dietrich's lair, which, quite remarkably, has remained unchanged since the star abandoned it for her Paris quarters in 1978. Today, Apartment 12E is filled with a macabre stillness and the musty smell of mothballs mixed with old perfume. This is a place which appears to have been left behind in another time, an era when Western Union came to your door, telephones were dialed with special utensils made to protect carefully enameled fingernails, and phone exchanges began not with numbers but with letters: YUkon 8-0012, in this case.

Lili Marlene was accustomed to Baccarat and Louis Comfort Tiffany glassware wherever she went, but in her own New York apartment she mixed and matched fine things with a massive collection of pilfered ashtrays (she smoked Luckies) from the very best hotels (the Hassler in Rome, the Lancaster in Paris, the Grand Hotel in Stockholm, and the Intercontinental in Geneva). Other telling objects still in the apartment include Dietrich's little Rohm pistol, hidden in a Cartier box, and many other treasures scattered about the generously proportioned rooms: Louis XV-style chairs in the living room, fur wraps and a Chanel suit in the closets, scads of old publicity stills, and a worn notebook from Hermes. Perhaps the greatest pearls are the documents, including letters to Dietrich from her friends and a handwritten copy of Noel Coward's famous 1954 introduction to her show at the Cafe de Paris. ("We know God made trees, and the birds and the bees, / and the sea for the fishes to swim in. / We are also aware that He has quite a flair / for creating exceptional women. / When Eve said to Adam, 'Stop calling me Madame' / the world became far more exciting / which turns to confusion, the modern delusion / that sex is a question of lighting.")

Another note to Marlene, from Orson Welles, is framed and rests on the living-room mantel. In it he attempts to persuade the star to appear in his film Touch of Evil (he was, ultimately, successful):

"Dietrich bad a way of ignoring realities that didn't suit her."

Dearest Marlene:

—Of course it will be a real CHARACTER and not a "personal appearance" . . .

I know we can make it something entirely new and really worth while—and I can't tell you how excited I am at the prospect ... 'v' Orson

According to Riva, when Dietrich was at home between concert tours, she frequently entertained. Chums such as Coward and Burt Bacharach (who was her musical arranger) could often be found at the keyboard of the Bluthner grand piano in the living room, and Riva says "she could slide very easily into hausfrau mode," preparing elaborate meals (pot-au-feu, crawfish, filet mignon, and kidneys were her specialties) in her little I Love Lucy-style kitchen.

When she wasn't cooking at the stove, says Riva, Dietrich was most likely to be found heating up the bedroom, where an endless all-star cast of lovers paid homage to her lithe (though somewhat faded) form. Her amorous encounters included trysts with Yul Brynner, Edward R. Murrow, Kirk Douglas, Adlai Stevenson, Harold Arlen, Edith Piaf, Sam Spiegel, Michael Wilding, and Harry Cohn. (Not bad for a grandmother of four who suffered from chronic circulation problems.)

Of those listed, Dietrich spent by far the most time with Brynner, and, as Riva writes in her book, Marlene Dietrich, "gloried in Yul's seemingly inexhaustible virility. On matinee days [of The King and /], after he had left [the apartment] for the evening performance, she would call me to come over and see 'the bed.' . . . She so loved to show off her disheveled bed, particularly proud of her once-white sheets now smeared with Yul Brynner's body paint that he had been 'too aroused' to take the time to wash off."

With E.M., as she referred to Murrow, there was apparently more smoking than sex. "He smokes even during— you know what I mean," Riva says her mother told her. "But he is so brilliant—you just have to listen to what he is saying and try not to look down at those thin legs of his sticking out of those funny bloomers."

Dietrich, known for her pronouncements and quirky poems jotted at odd hours ("Isn't it strange: / The legs that made / My rise to glory / Easy, no? Became my downfall / Into misery. Queesy, no?—3 A.M."), once proclaimed the diaphragm to be "the greatest invention since Pan-Cake makeup." She stocked the latter, and perhaps at one time the former, in bulk— along with a shelf of medications, prescribed and otherwise, worthy of a pharmacy. The mirrored nightstand was once crowded with bottles of Butazolidin, phenobarbital, codeine, belladonna, Nembutal, Seconal, Librium, cortisone, and Darvon, as well as a holistic medication called slippery elm. (She liked to wash down her pills with Dom Perignon, which she believed was an aid to circulation.)

The veteran doormen at 993 say they recall lugging "Miss Dietrich's" baggage upstairs, where she would then spend hours unpacking it herself, carefully replacing the fur-lined suits and Balenciaga dresses in her closets, and laying out her bugle-beaded dresses on a bed in the back room, because they were too heavy to hang. "At one time she owned both apartments on the 12th floor," Riva explains, "but the place across the hall was for her trunks and the other was for her. She was always, always packing and unpacking, and she traveled with 70 pieces of luggage at least!"

"My mother always liked living in hotels," says Riva, who suffered a mild heart attack shortly after my visit. She long ago reconciled herself to being the child of a creature far too complicated to be considered maternal.

Her mother, who adored private entrances and quick exits, never really cared much for homes. (In her early days in Hollywood, Josef von Sternberg picked her rented houses.) "This was a very masculine quality that she had," Riva says. "She never felt the need to put down roots. She loved staying in the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles and the Plaza in New York, so I always found it very uncharacteristic of her—very un -Dietrich of her—to buy an apartment in New York.

"We had always been gypsies anyway."