Marlene Dietrich's "Confidential" File

 Hot off the scanner, I present to you what is--to the best of my knowledge--the first English-language exposé on Marlene Dietrich's lesbian affairs, "The Untold Story of Marlene Dietrich" by Kenneth G. McLain, from the July 1955 issue of Confidential magazine.

Within that Mondrian abortion of a cover, McLain name-drops Claire Waldoff, Mercedes de Acosta, Frederique "Frede" Baule, and Jo Carstairs. Long before The National Enquirer and Perez Hilton, Confidential's Lavender Scare-era gossip threatened to tarnish the careers of "closeted" celebs, but not Marlene's! Those silly McCarthyists must not have known that Dietrich looked good in any color and that men's clothes were especially becoming on her. Nevertheless, it is dreadfully discomforting to recognize that the homophobic sport of outing is something of an American pastime.

If you were to tell me that another Mc--Diana McLellan--listed this article in the references of The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood with ten pages of "Ibid." after it, I would have believed you. I have to give McLellan some credit, though. It appears that she only cited this rag a few times.

Below I have transcribed the article (not the photo captions, though--sorry!) for you as well as uploaded image files of the article. As you'll see, there are no photos of Marlene with any of these alleged lovers, but the Confidential staff more than made up for it with shots of the most burly babes in Marlene's harem and of lovers Gabin and Remarque making perplexed faces. Also, notice that only Frede squawked. Who are the unnamed others who sold out Marlene? Any guesses?
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THE UNTOLD STORY OF MARLENE DIETRICH

Her very first success on the stage was singing a strange love song--from one girl to another. But her boy friends really flipped when she actually started living up to the lyrics!

By Kenneth G. McLain

Marlene and men are an old story. She's been decorating picture pages with them for more than a quarter of a century--dozens of them, from John Gilbert to Ernest Hemingway.

And although she's been married to the same man since she was 21, Dietrich's never bothered to deny or hush the gossip about herself and her guys. It's more likely she wanted it that way--to cover up some sprightlier capers that would have lifted the nations eyebrows all the way up its forehead. Because in the millions of words that have been written about Dietrich's dalliances you've never, until now, read that some of them were not with men!

Tip-Off Appeared in Her First Stage Success

Dietrich going for dolls? Her adoring fans the world over will shriek, "Impossible!" It's the truth, though. In the game of amour, she's not only played both sides of the street, but done it on more than one occasion.

Ironically, her first stage success carried a prediction of such unusual hankerings. When the musical comedy "It's In The Air" opened in Berlin back in 1927, it featured a husky-voiced and unknown Miss Dietrich who stopped the show every night when she warbled a frankly Lesbian song to the leading lady, a flashing-eyed wench named Margo Lion.

"My Best Girl Friend" was the title of the ditty and, in time, all of Berlin turned out to hear Marlene sing, with gestures, about how Margo's charms lit a flame of desire in her heart.

Deviates singing of their strange love in public was the kind of thing that could only happen in Berlin after World War I. All through the roaring twenties, the German capital was a global headquarters for the most shameless perversions. Its streets were crammed with nighteries for the odd and their owners were so strict that a normal person was denied admission. Girls making like boys was of such little concern that the gossip columns regularly noted such cavortings as nonchalantly as they recorded the more usual affairs.

Whether Marlene and Margo carried their "Best Girl" bit beyond the footlights isn't known, but the fact that Dietrich would succumb to a dame became common knowledge in Berlin a year later, when Marlene happened to catch the eyes of Claire Waldoff, a blonde Amazon, who had become the toast of Germany's supper clubs for her skill with a risque song and a naughty story.

Claire Waldoff was notorious for her preference in playmates. It was her view that it was nuts to have a man around the house and she made no secret of it.

What was more of a mystery was why she chose Dietrich. For in those days Marlene was far from the glamorous creature who wowed 'em in Las Vegas with that transparent bodice. "It's In The Air" had closed and Dietrich was barely earning eating money as a hefty, 150-pound chorus hoofer with frizzy blonde hair and so little talent that she used to kick her own ankles black and blue.

Claire was old enough to be Dietrich's mother, but had different ideas. The pair became inseparables about the time that Marlene also met and enchanted a bushy-haired movie director with a handle-bar mustache named Josef von Sternberg. Under his direction, she made the film classic, "Blue Angel," and was hustled off to America to make another movie, "Morocco."

Absence Never Bothered Marlene

Von Sternberg's iron rule was tough enough to make Dietrich shed 30 pounds--but not Claire. She and Marlene were still such an item that when "Morocco" was premiered in Berlin and Dietrich went to the opening night, a sassy tabloid, the Berlin Herald, publicly lamented that Waldoff was out of town, thus depriving the girls of a chance to get together for a reunion clambake.

Such absences never have bothered Marlene, however, and didn't then. She just crossed the street--back to the boys. This time it was Igo Sym, the German comedian who incidentally taught her to play the musical saw, an act with which Marlene entertained our GIs during World War II. His course of instructions must have covered other grounds as well, because Dietrich permanently dropped Claire Waldoff and stuck to playing with the boys until well into the middle thirties. But von Sternberg, John Gilbert, Doug Fairbanks Jr., and half a dozen other assorted dandies fully realized that Marlene was an uninhibited product of a sophisticated post-war Europe. For instance, she'd been in Hollywood only two or three years when she picked up with Mercedes d'Acosta, a writer who favored clothes that seemed to be tailored by Brooks Brothers.

Mercedes had been the companion of other Hollywood double-standard dollies and fitted neatly into Marlene's pattern. But this was the U.S.A., where publicity on such capers would have raised a storm, so the girls discreetly limited themselves to quiet get-togethers at each other's house. At parties, they were the acme of propriety.

She Still Talks about That Night

In fact, Dietrich wasn't really flamboyant in the girl-meets-girl department again until the fall of 1936, when she made a trip to Paris to attend the opening of a new Maurice Chevalier musical at the Casino de Paris.

Men were clustering around her like flies around a honey pot at the time. Chevalier himself was vowing life wouldn't be worth the candle unless she'd be his--exclusively, that is. Still another swain was Erich Maria Remarque, the author of "All Quiet on the Western Front."

Ironically, Remarque upset the apple cart with his own hand by bringing to the Chevalier show a slim, brown-eyed girl, 20 years old and yearning to learn all about life. Frede was her name and she was destined to become the queen of Paris' Lesbians. She still talks of that opening night.

"It was wonderful to see so many well-known people," she says. "After the show we went to a reception for the star and there it happened--the time of my life."

By that she meant Dietrich. Until that night, the gals in Marlene's life had always been older--and the aggressors as well. It was time, though, for a new switch. Now in her middle thirties--a good 15 years older than Frede--she hypnotized the younger girl with her sophistication and her breath-taking clothes.

Over a skin-tight evening gown, Marlene wore a fur coat made of 32 white foxes that night. On her wrist was a curious bracelet, a snake-like gold band which twisted around the back of her hand and ended in a raised head, coiled on her forefinger. Dietrich confided to the younger girl that she wore it to discourage the number of men who wanted to kiss her hand.

The binge lasted for hours and--when it was over--Remarque got the shock of his life. He watched open-mouthed, as Marlene--his old girl--took Frede--his new date--home with her to the swank Lancaster Hotel on the Rue de Berri.

Off and on, the two women were to spend most of the next two and a half years together and their friendship was the talk of Paris. As her career demanded, Marlene would make flying trips to the United States, but she always returned to the French capital--and Frede. The younger woman was captivated. "Marlene was a marvelous woman," Frede unabashedly recalls, "I was just a kid and she could make me do anything she wanted. But she was always kind and generous. She was incomparable."

Even Frede may never have known that Marlene was also a two-timer. Not with men. In Frede's book, that sort of side-winding was permissible in a girl friend. She knew, for example, that Dietrich had continued a sizzling friendship with the French movie idol Jean Gabin during the same period.

What used to baffle Frede, however, was that Marlene would suddenly leave town for quick trips for fashionable resorts in the little villages strung out along Cap d'Antibes, near glamorous Cannes. Invariably, Marlene would insist on making the journey alone. What had happened on these occasions was that Marlene had gotten word that still another mannish maiden, Jo Carstairs, was available for diversion.

For the uninitiated, Jo is a Queen in more ways than one. A millionairess many times over, she owns a sun-splattered island in the Bahamas, Whale Cay, where she rules some 750 natives with an iron hand. Her favorite garb is a pair of dungarees and a man's shirt. She's been known to take strong measures against men who make advances toward her, since she prefers to make the overtures herself--and not to males.

Before the outbreak of World War II, Queen Jo used to enjoy loading her ocean-going yacht with steaks and champagne and setting off for Europe. The No. 1 stop on the continent was a little known bay, the harbor of Villefranche, near Cap d'Antibes.

Notified by cable, Marlene would be on hand and would be driven in a private limousine to the dock at Villefranche, where she would be rowed out for cozy weekends on Jo's yacht.

These naughty nautical adventures may come as a painful shock to Frede. On the other hand, she had nothing to complain about. Back in '38, while Marlene was alternating between Jo and Frede, the latter bashfully suggested that she'd like to go into business. Frede and Marlene put their heads together and decided the best venture would be a nightclub, catering to dolls as uninhibited as they were.

Dietrich was the behind-the-scenes backer when Frede opened a rollicking spot known as "La Silhouette." It did so well that, after World War II, Frede was able to buy an even flossier place, "Carroll's." On opening night, Marlene was resplendently present and contributed to the gayety. Remarque was there, too. So was Jean Gabin. Aslo Chevalier.

They were a worldly-wise trio, but had they started comparing notes on Marlene, even they might have been confused. For sharing their friendship with her was Frede, their hostess of the evening, Jo Carstairs, lurking off Cap d'Antibes, Claire Waldoff in Berlin. Back in Hollywood, too, there was Mercedes d'Acosta, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper. All these--and a husband, too!

What had the boys mumbling in their cognac was the big jackpot question: How does Dietrich do it?

There can be only one answer. The very contradictions which add up to Marlene Dietrich are best summed up in Frede's own words: Marlene is "incomparable!"