(Above: A bonus Dietrich in a black turtleneck looking joyous before the invention of Google.)
Sorry I have been remiss in posting at SES/SUMS IT UP while I was away in Cap d’Antibes for a few days but, as I explain in my LETTER FROM ANTIBES going up later today, I had a very spotty internet connection that made it very difficult to get work done on top of the difficulty any idea of work is in such a paradisiacal place.
So I thought I’d post both a RUBRICS and a LETTER today that connect both to each other and to Antibes. This RUBRICS column is about Marlene Dietrich who loved Antibes and the Cannes Film Festival down the road and especially Hotel du Cap. She even began an affair with Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, there at the hotel in the late 1930s when JFK was still a boy but already sussing out sex himself. Dietrich might have been the only woman that he and his dad had in common.
Here’s is an explanation from an excerpt from a Vanity Fair article by Cari Beauchamp, who is the former Press Secretary for California Governor Jerry Brown and currently the resident scholar of the Mary Pickford Foundation, about Hotel du Cap and the Dietrich/Kennedy Père et Fils dalliances:
…the du Cap featured an exquisite expanse of grounds, including a huge saltwater pool built into the rocks at the edge of the Mediterranean. A series of private cabanas ribboned the cliffs, and a sign soon graced the largest one: j. p. kennedy’s family.
The exclusivity of the Hôtel du Cap assured visitors that they were all members of rarefied society, and so the Kennedys quickly found themselves mingling with select other guests, including the ménage of Marlene Dietrich. A high-profile beauty always turned Joe’s head, and Marlene was no exception. As she later recalled, “He was old then already, but sweet,” and when he started “following me around,” they began an affair that sparked a decades-long relationship between the two families. …
When Dietrich met Kennedy, in the summer of 1938, she was 37 years old and still gorgeous. Her career, however, was at a low ebb. The year before, she had joined Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo in being declared “box office poison” by an American theater owners’ organization. Paramount let her go, and while she received a nice severance, she didn’t know if she would work again. Still, she refused to return to Berlin while Hitler was in power—she loathed the Nazis—and flatly turned down his offer to become the leading lady of U.F.A., the German film studio. Instead, she ultimately exiled herself to the South of France with her extended family …
The Kennedys, too, had a unique lifestyle. Joe had always had a vigorous and bifurcated love life: occasionally at home with his wife, Rose, and often on the road with showgirls and ingénues. Between 1926 and 1930 he had been based in Hollywood, ultimately running three studios simultaneously before spearheading mergers and sell-offs that increased his wealth tenfold and provided the foundation of his fortune. His marriage had been threatened by his serious and long-term affair with the glamorous actress Gloria Swanson, but that had ended with his departure from Hollywood in 1930. Rose had chosen to look the other way, willing herself to believe that other women didn’t exist. …
Marlene and Joe were both extraordinarily disciplined in their professional lives yet also shared a hedonistic streak. Each would have an impressive tally of lovers over the course of their lifetimes, though years of practice did not seem to help Kennedy’s technique, for Gloria Swanson reported that he was an unimaginative, if enthusiastic, lover. As she recounted in her autobiography, “He was like a roped horse, rough, arduous, racing to be free,” yet within minutes, his lovemaking was over with “a hasty climax.”
Dietrich, on the other hand, was an intrepid and pliant lover. When her daughter asked her later in life why she had had so many sexual partners, Marlene responded with a shrug and said, “They asked.” She clearly thrived on pleasing her partners and didn’t believe in condoms, finding men “so grateful when you tell them they don’t have to wear it.” Once she discovered diaphragms, she called them “the greatest invention since Pan-Cake makeup.” Until then, she had sworn by her secret weapon against pregnancy: douching with ice-cold water and wine vinegar, which she carried with her by the case everywhere she went. (Decades later another of her co-stars and grand amours, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., warmly recalled their “lovely liaison,” adding, “You know, sometimes when I am in a restaurant and a waiter walks by with a salad vinaigrette, I’ll find myself thinking fond thoughts of Marlene.”)
… Jack Kennedy had always remembered the glamorous woman in the South of France who had massaged him seductively when she wasn’t off in her bungalow with his father. Dietrich was a grandmother and past 60 when she brought her sold-out one-woman show to Washington, D.C., in September of 1963 and was flattered by Jack’s phone call inviting her to the White House. She was given directions for arrival at the south entrance and was shown upstairs to the family living quarters, where she found the president alone and expecting her. She later regaled friends such as Kenneth Tynan and Gore Vidal with her tales of that early-evening visit, saying the tour consisted of the West Sitting Room and a bedroom where Jack made a “clumsy pass.”
In Vidal’s recounting, her initial protest of “You know, Mr. President, I am not very young” soon gave way to “Don’t muss my hair. I’m performing.” After an “ecstatic three to six minutes,” Jack fell asleep. Marlene pulled herself together and, already running late and not wanting to just wander the halls, woke Jack. He rang for his valet, who was clearly “used to this sort of thing.” With a towel around his waist, the president led her to the small elevator across the hall from the bedroom and “shook her hand as if she were the Mayor of San Antonio,” but something else was on his mind. …
“If I ask you a question, will you tell me the truth?” he inquired, according to Vidal. Marlene did not promise anything, but nodded in acquiescence.
“Did you ever go to bed with my old man?”
Knowing exactly what he wanted to hear, Marlene demurred. “He tried,” she responded after a brief pause, “but I never did.”
Jack was triumphant, exclaiming, “I always knew the son of a bitch was lying.”
Marlene couldn’t resist a little bragging of her own. When she returned to her New York apartment, she was greeted by [her daughter] Maria’s husband, who was visiting. Before even saying hello, Marlene smiled victoriously, opened her bag, pulled out a pair of pink panties, and waved them at his nose. “Smell! It is him! The president of the United States! He … was … wonderful!” As Maria tells the story, she is quick to note that her husband immediately removed himself to a hotel.
Two months later, the president was assassinated in Dallas, and Dietrich mournfully sent notes and flowers to the family. Maria was crushed, remembering Jack’s long-ago kindnesses to her and “the youth he wore so well.” In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, she recalls, “my mother donned simple widow’s black, her face a white mask of personal sorrow, sat erect, her voice hushed and reverent as she repeatedly told of their last romantic encounter.”
Six years later, on November 18, 1969, was on the short list of friends who received cables from Ted Kennedy, telling her of Joe’s passing at the age of 81, eight years after he had suffered a debilitating stroke. By this time, Marlene had endured a variety of ailments herself, and after her final film appearance, wearing a thick black veil in Just a Gigolo in 1978, she took to living behind closed doors in her Paris apartment, staying hidden even from her closest friends, keeping alive her unique brand of allure long past her death, in 1992.
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