Finding Marlene Dietrich: An Object Lesson

Abstract

Finding Marlene Dietrich: An Object Lesson Sandra Spanier From the outset of our work on Volume 5 of the Cambridge Edition of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway (spanning 1932-May 1934), there was one image I knew we had to include among our illustrations: the Ernest Hemingway paper doll. The full-page color illustration by Constantin Alajálov appeared in the March 1934 issue of Vanity Fair, captioned “Ernest Hemingway, America’s own literary cave man; hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-loving--all for art’s sake.” The central figure of Hemingway sporting a leopard-skin loincloth (“ERNIE, THE NEANDERTHAL MAN”) is flanked by costumes capturing his various public personae: wounded veteran of war, wine-guzzling writer of the “Lost Generation,” big game fisherman, and bull-fight aficionado. The caricature of Hemingway and his wardrobe of guises perfectly captures his multi-faceted nature—these facets and many others are revealed in his letters of this period. What I had not fully realized before poring through its pages is how perfectly the magazine itself emblematizes Hemingway’s prominent place in the context of his times. The March 1934 Vanity Fair presents a freeze-frame view of twentieth-century history and culture in the making. As I noted in my General Editor’s Introduction to Volume 5 of the Letters, the issue also features articles about Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first presidential term, the lifting of the U.S. ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses, a color reproduction of a painting by Pablo Picasso (No. 10 in Vanity Fair’s Series of Modern Painters), and photo portraits by Edward Steichen of such celebrated figures as Sinclair Lewis (who in 1930 became the first U.S. Nobel Laureate in Literature), journalist Dorothy Thompson, actress Mary Pickford, and German-born singer and screen star Marlene Dietrich (“the Teuton siren”). The web of connections to Hemingway is striking. He knew Joyce, Picasso, and Lewis, and would famously become a close friend of Dietrich. In fact, I wrote: [End Page 93] Shortly after the issue of Vanity Fair with his paper doll caricature appeared on newsstands, Hemingway would meet Marlene Dietrich aboard the S.S. Paris as he returned from an African safari, marking the start of what would become a platonic but passionate lifelong friendship and correspondence. Although Dietrich eluded the press when the ship docked in New York on 3 April 1934, Hemingway’s return was chronicled in the New York papers. The news photos show him grinning broadly, leaning against the ship’s rail, his wife, Pauline, at his side. That Hemingway and Dietrich would meet aboard a luxury liner crossing the Atlantic at the same time they were featured in the same issue of Vanity Fair is a wonderful story. Except it is not true. I discovered this, to my great chagrin, in the month after Volume 5 was published in June 2020. The 19th Biennial International Hemingway Conference, to be held in Wyoming and Montana in July 2020, was to have featured a plenary session focusing on the latest volume of the Letters. The session would be moderated by Hemingway Letters Project Associate Editor Verna Kale with presentations by Miriam B. Mandel and me as Volume 5 co-editors, and by graduate research assistant Katie Warczak, a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State. Then came Covid-19, and the conference had to be postponed. We were invited to present a Letters webinar as one of three in the Hemingway Society’s first-ever webinar series, “Houseguest: Hemingway.” On 21 July, Hemingway’s birthday, I received an email query from a scholar who had watched our webinar three days earlier. He was polishing a paper he planned to submit for publication about the Hemingway-Dietrich relationship, and one detail in my presentation had stood out. His own research indicated that the two met in 1934 aboard the Ile de France, not the Paris. He cited his sources for the Ile de France: Hemingway biographers Carlos Baker and Bernice Kert, friend A.E. Hotchner, and Dietrich biographer Steven Bach. Only James R. Mellow, in Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, identified the passenger liner as the Paris, he said. (One could also...