“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
—Edward R. Murrow
“It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.”
—Marlene Dietrich
Edward R. Murrow had a voice as rich as mahogany. A wartime friend of his once said, “There was no honey or wine or cigars about Ed’s voice. It punched through. It was the voice of doom, but not the end. A voice of dire tidings.”
His flair, his erudition, and his baritone were irresistible to Marlene Dietrich, the German actress and anti-Nazi activist known around the world for her Berlin-cabaret glamour and her husky voice, smoky as a plate of krainerwurst.
Murrow and Dietrich met in 1955 through David Ben-Gurion’s aide (and a future mayor of Jerusalem), Teddy Kollek, as they were both supporters of Israel. However, according to Maria Riva, Dietrich’s daughter and biographer, the pair first crossed paths “at a cocktail party [Dietrich] attended with Adlai Stevenson. By the 18th of February, they were lovers.”
“I was shocked,” Riva wrote, “but that reaction lasted only a second. Brilliant men infatuated with Dietrich were, after all, nothing new.” Like Lola Lola, the seductive cabaret performer she played in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel, “Dietrich made bumbling adolescents out of many worldly respected men.”
Confronting “Tail Gunner Joe”
“Good night and good luck” was Murrow’s signature sign-off in his dispatches from London during World War II. It’s the title of the 2005 film directed by George Clooney, which featured David Strathairn as the CBS broadcaster and Clooney as Fred Friendly, Murrow’s ally and producer. Last week, Clooney made his Broadway debut as Murrow in a stage production of the film.
Directed by David Comer, the play concerns itself mostly with Murrow and Friendly’s historic takedown of Joseph McCarthy, the pugnacious, Communist-hunting senator from Wisconsin. A thuggish and powerful demagogue who made his claims based on invented or nonexistent “evidence,” McCarthy ruined countless careers in academia, Hollywood, and elsewhere during his reign of terror in the Senate.
The fear of confronting “Tail Gunner Joe” (a nickname McCarthy promoted, based on a bogus war record) ran high at CBS, even though its founder, William S. Paley, would eventually give his blessing to Murrow’s February 1954 program, “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.”
Rather than piece together a conventional documentary, Murrow let McCarthy condemn himself. Just nine months after the See It Now broadcast, McCarthy would find himself disgraced by a rare vote of censure in the Senate. Falling ever deeper into alcoholism, he died three years later, at the age of 48.
The previous year, in the fall of 1953, Murrow had launched a new weekly program on CBS called Person to Person, in which Murrow, comfortably seated at the CBS studios in New York, remotely visited the homes of John and Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Liberace, and Broadway star Mary Martin, among others. As Murrow toggled between See It Now and Person to Person, Don Hewitt, the longtime producer of 60 Minutes, took to referring to “high Murrow” and “low Murrow.”
Berlin Stories
One of the best descriptions of Dietrich comes from her friend Kenneth Tynan, the critic and dramaturge of London’s National Theatre. He described her as having “sex but no particular gender.”
Dietrich dazzled on the Berlin stage in the 1920s “with her sharp wit and bisexuality, wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity,” Riva wrote. Dietrich’s conquests were legion: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Ernest Hemingway, John F. Kennedy, Maurice Chevalier, Jean Gabin, Marlon Brando, James Stewart, Adlai Stevenson, Erich Maria Remarque, as well as Edith Piaf and Barbara Stanwyck.
Her role in The Blue Angel made her a star. Witness for the Prosecution, Touch of Evil, and Judgment at Nuremberg followed. The smoldering, world-weary femme fatale was her stock-in-trade, a bracing antidote to the era’s plucky American girl next door.
At the same time, Dietrich was raising morale and money during the Second World War, entertaining the troops, heading food drives, and making anti-Nazi broadcasts. Hitler wanted Dietrich to return, and tried luring her with big paydays, but she refused. They ended up banning her movies in the fatherland, to which Marlene responded, “The Germans and I no longer speak the same language.” Standing up to the Nazis and rousing American troops with her signature song, “Lily Marlene,” earned Dietrich the Congressional Medal of Freedom and the gratitude of American Jews.
Murrow, born in Polecat Creek, North Carolina, was making his name as a radio correspondent for CBS in 1935, covering Hitler’s invasion of Austria. In London during the Blitz, with the sounds of bombs falling, he chronicled the war in real time. Murrow wanted American listeners to hear what was happening. In his program London After Dark, he stood at St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square and placed his microphone on the ground, to record the sounds of people rushing for shelter from German bombs. It would fall to other CBS correspondents, called “Murrow’s Boys,” to cover the end of the Third Reich, because Murrow was so devastated at what he saw when the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated.
When he came back from the war, now dressed by Savile Row in pin-striped trousers and houndstooth jackets, the 33-year-old wartime reporter found himself honored in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria as “the foremost broadcast correspondent in America.”
Young Man in a Hurry
Dietrich wrote ardent love letters to Murrow when he was not visiting her bed between taping his television shows. At one point, she tried to enlist her daughter to secretly deliver them. After all, Murrow, the American hero, was married, as was Dietrich—at least on paper—since the age of 22, to a German citizen named Rudolf Sieber.
Riva felt that her mother’s need to “prove to herself and others that she was more than just a movie star was so all-consuming. Men of intellectual as well as international stature were vitally important to capture and hold.” Dietrich once confessed to Tynan that she “likes powerful men and enjoys hanging their scalps on her belt.”
But no man is a hero to his mistress, for it apparently took more than being the most acclaimed broadcast journalist in America to impress Dietrich. “He smokes even during—you know what I mean,” she confided to her daughter. “But he is so brilliant.”
For 20 years, Paley had given Murrow “unparalleled freedom” at CBS, and it was Paley, after all, who had held the philistines at bay when Murrow and Friendly went after Joe McCarthy. But television and broadcast journalism were changing, and Paley had simply grown tired of Murrow’s muckraking. Viewers were looking for entertainment, not a civics lesson, and so, after a tense meeting in Paley’s office, it was decided: See It Now’s final episode would air on July 7, 1958. Murrow’s relationship with Paley would never recover.
In 1962, a year after Murrow’s appointment to head the U.S.I.A., Dietrich found herself in Washington, D.C., scheduled to perform at a cabaret and to attend a dinner in her honor at the Statler Hotel, given by grateful Jewish war veterans. It was during that trip that Dietrich had her infamous tryst with the president.
She arrived at the White House and was ushered into Kennedy’s inner sanctum. The president poured her a glass of German wine and escorted her out to the balcony. “I hope you aren’t in a hurry,” he said. Dietrich explained that 2,000 Jews were waiting to give her a plaque at 7:00 P.M. and it was now 6:30 P.M.
“That doesn’t give us much time, does it?,” Kennedy said.
“No, Jack, I guess it doesn’t.”
Kennedy led her into the presidential bedroom.
“It was all over sweetly and very soon,” Dietrich later told Tynan. As she was getting into the elevator to leave the White House, Kennedy said, “There’s just one thing I’d like to know. Did you ever make it with my father?”
“No, Jack,” she answered.
“Well, that’s one place I’m in first.” The elevator door closed, and, as Dietrich recalled, “I never saw him again.”
If Murrow knew about the affair, it didn’t seem to matter. By then he and Dietrich had drifted apart.
Murrow died of lung cancer in 1965, days after his 57th birthday. Dietrich outlived him by 27 years, dying in 1992 at the age of 90, in Paris, with her daughter, Riva, at her bedside. Well before her death she decided she’d had enough of life and took to her bed, refusing to get up or go out, handling her affairs and conducting her friendships by phone.
She would have long four a.m. phone conversations with old friends and new—Noël Coward, Mikhail Baryshnikov—pretending she was calling from Switzerland or New York or Los Angeles. Her famously beautiful legs, once insured by Lloyds of London, eventually shriveled and blackened from desuetude. She didn’t care. She had already done it all and seen it all.
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
