“If she had nothing more than her voice she could
break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and the timeless
loveliness of her face. It makes no difference how she breaks your heart if she
is there to mend it.”—Ernest Hemingway, “A Tribute to Mamma,” Life Magazine, Aug, 18, 1952
Marlene Dietrich died 25 years ago today in Paris at age 91 of renal
failure. For the last decade, bedridden and progressively isolated from
longtime friends, she had spent more and more of her time in her apartment reading.
Approximately 2,000 of her books were carted out when the by-now-reclusive
movie star finally passed away.
But it is a good bet that none of the authors in her
library had the personal relationship with her that Ernest Hemingway did. The German “Blonde Venus” met the American on
a luxury liner in 1934, and hit it off with him immediately.
They met
again under considerably more difficult circumstances a decade later, when he was
serving as a war correspondent and she was entertaining American troops in the
European theater of WWII. He kiddingly called her “The Kraut” and “Daughter,”
while she, despite the fact that he was only two years her senior, called him
“Papa.”
The tone of their correspondence went beyond the
affectionate to the intensely flirtatious. Surprisingly, however, the
relationship never became physical. In his later years, the novelist explained
that they had experienced “unsynchronized passion,” as she would be involved
with someone else while he was temporarily free, and vice versa. ("I fall
in love with you bad and you're always in love with some jerk," he wrote
in 1950.)
Almost a year to the day after Hemingway’s tribute appeared in Life, he wrote Dietrich: “Please know that I love you always and I forget you sometimes as I forget
my heart beats. But it beats always.” That letter was due to be auctioned by
Swann Galleries earlier this week, with an asking price between $20,000 and
$30,000.
Besides Dietrich’s beauty, it may have been her
fierce loyalty that appealed most to Hemingway. That quality was clearest in
1961, when, hearing that he was being treated in the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota,
she dashed off a handwritten note: "Papa, what is it? Whatever it is -- I
don't like it."
She was right to be distressed. Hemingway was in the
clinic for an increasingly smothering depression, and in no condition to
respond. Three months later, he killed himself.
After hearing the terrible
news, Dietrich must surely have recalled what he had advised her in one of
their other 30 letters to each other: “Nothing is worth being depressed about.”
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