Some time in the 1930s, on one of his frequent visits to New York, Cecil Beaton found himself on Park Avenue with its wide double lanes of traffic hurtling precipitously uptown and down. It was thrilling and exhausting, the age of modernity at its most dazzling. Gazing up at the soaring apartment blocks of the Upper East Side, he marvelled that they ‘end only in sky’, while lamenting that New Yorkers ‘who have such a love for celebrities, do not know the names of their most brilliant architects’.
Years later, he would be an occasional visitor to one such block, to a high-ceilinged, 12th-floor penthouse apartment at 993 Park Avenue on the southeast corner of 84th Street, a smart Italianate building of 13 storeys. It belonged to a celebrity who may or may not have cared that its architect was the celebrated Robert T. Lyons and that it was built in 1915. Apartment 12e was the only piece of real estate Marlene Dietrich would ever own. She acquired it – two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an eat-in kitchen and a generous living area – in 1959 at the height of her late-stage comeback as a cabaret star.
She regarded it as her primary residence, her retreat from punishing world tours, but by 1975, when she fell off stage breaking a thigh bone, she had more or less abandoned it for her Paris apartment. Here she became the recluse of legend, and it was in the Avenue Montaigne that she died in 1992 aged 90, alcoholic, bedridden and, according to her daughter Maria Riva, screaming invectives to the last. She never returned to 12e after the late 1970s and, astonishingly, it was left barely touched. Vanity Fair’s Matt Tyrnauer, who visited it in its newly exhumed state, wrote of a ‘macabre stillness and the musty smell of mothballs mixed with old perfume’.
In 1997, Sotheby’s sold its contents at auction, touchingly humble bibelots of little worth, but, as is ever the case, of colossal significance by association: the famous gold-tipped cane by Swaine Adeney Brigg, a vital part of her top-hat-and-tails turn (it had been Noël Coward’s); a film projector – broken – given to her by Ernst Lubitsch; a silver cigar tube, once belonging to Orson Welles; a Van Cleef & Arpels cigarette case, the gift of Charles Boyer; ashtrays filched from the great hotels of the world; a faded red Hermès notebook listing in her own hand those supper-club standards: ‘Lili Marlene’, ‘Lola’, ‘Falling in Love Again’, ‘La Vie en Rose’; magazines, press clippings, publicity stills and a framed ET film poster inscribed by Steven Spielberg, ‘Dear Marlena [sic], they don’t make them like you anymore.’
The most expensive item on offer was a Corot painting, a gift from Erich Maria Remarque, which doubled its estimate to sell at $140,000. However, her miniature Röhm pistol, an original ‘Saturday night special’ housed in a Cartier box, did not make it to auction. Beaton never left us his impressions of the apartment, only a disobliging character study of its inhabitant, now past her prime, he reckoned, and on the slide, ‘quite a remarkable piece of artifice’. But another sharp-eyed diarist did. Writer Leo Lerman, a friend since the war years, recorded his thoughts in 1986 when 12e had been long abandoned – ‘it’s like Great Expectations… the curtains in shreds, the big looking glass over the bed crashing down. Yes, the lipsticks are still there in the bathroom, but – oh – falling apart, falling apart.’
Once, though, this modest set of rooms had been the fulcrum around which cocktail parties swung, and a merry-go-round of lovers entered and quit (her considerate husband lived on a smallholding in California). She was indefatigable. ‘Men cluster to me like moths around a flame,’ she famously sang, ‘and if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame.’ At 12e, she juggled Yul Brynner, Harold Arlen, Frank Sinatra, Edith Piaf, Kirk Douglas, Edward Murrow and Michael Wilding, among others. Some left their calling cards: Arlen gave her a wind-up portable phonograph, Murrow a fruitwood bureau plat of indeterminate period, Brynner a symbolic uncut key, presumably to his heart. The last of these, the attractive, sullen star of The King and I, 19 years her junior, was the great love of her late mid-life (she was a grandmother when they met).
In her faintly Orientalist bedroom, she would show off dishevelled sheets smeared with the actor’s King of Siam body paint, proud evidence of post-matinée assignations. Behind one smoked-glass mirrored wall was a jib door on a deadbolt, a quick exit to the fire escape. Here among the faux-Neoclassical chairs and GermanRococo marble tables, the famous beauty, defying the scourges of time, might serve up her famous pot-au-feu – her recipes were up for sale too – perhaps on the Louis XV provincial cherrywood dining table, a gift from Ernest Hemingway, who was, he told her, tired of eating off cardboard boxes. Alexander Liberman, then art director of Vogue, described the mix as one half professional seductress to one half contented hausfrau.
‘Ich bin ein praktischer mensch,’ she would say as she cooked simple dishes. Late on, Lerman recalled glimpsing in the kitchen a wig block with Dietrich’s hair upon it, which he said, unappetisingly, ‘led an active life of its own’. At the black-lacquered Blüthner grand in the living room, acquired as payment for performances behind the Iron Curtain, might be found her musical arranger and conductor Burt Bacharach hammering out the finer points of her repertoire.
Or Noël Coward, her confidant when things went awry, rehearsing his introductions to her London appearances. The star really preferred to live in hotels (hence, presumably, the souvenir ashtrays), so it was an uncharacteristic Diet rich who, it was found out later, had acquired a second apartment, the one across the hall. To store her luggage. Maria Riva recalled that her mother rarely travelled from engagement to engagement with fewer than 70 pieces. The man who made these photographs of 12e shortly before its dispersal deserves mention.
David Seidner, who died young barely two years later, was a photographer of great pictorial learning, a devotee of classic ideals. This informed his best work – painterly fashion and portrait sittings for all the editions of Vogue, taken from Sargent, Velázquez and Ingres, fastidiously crafted miniature artworks, the process exhaustively labour-intensive for the ephemeral medium of the magazine. But there is a joy in ephemera, as there is in fastidious preparation, as Dietrich knew too. Numerous notes dotted about her apartment testify that, when it came to her flamboyant late-life career, nothing was left to chance, every ad lib, every gesture, every nuance of lighting, every bow to the wings, all meticulously, repetitively, tirelessly rehearsed.
A version of this article appeared in the February 2022 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
