Erich Maria Remarque, his love of cars, sleek women and his pacifism

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE: THE LAST ROMANTIC

By Hilton Tims

Carroll and Graf, $26, 240 pages

REVIEWED BY TOM O’BRIEN

Erich Maria Remarque wrote “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1929), a classic that inspired the first mass international peace movement; for that alone he is worth remembering. The book caused a sensation. In Germany, over three million copies were sold within 18 months; in America, it led to a film that won the Oscar for Best Picture (1930). Despite its age and historical references, “All Quiet” remains a winning assignment in almost any classroom — even among those students, mostly males, whom TV has immunized against literature.

In “Erich Maria Remarque: The Last Romantic,” British journalist Hilton Tims richly details a fascinating life; the subtitle is courtesy of Remarque’s favorite fraulein, Marlene Dietrich, pictured with Remarque in a dazzling cover photo. Born in Osnabruck, Lower Saxony, in 1898, Remarque survived the horrors of World War I (enduring Paschendaele), enjoyed Berlin’s naughty “cabaret” life in the 1920s and, after the Nazis gained power, fled into political exile.

As Mr. Tims reports, Remarque escaped first to Switzerland, then the Riviera (where he met, among others, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and son John), and then to California, where he romanced (among others) Paulette Goddard, whom he eventually married. He died in 1972.

In Hollywood, Mr. Tims shows, Remarque did not fade away but numbered among the many European exiles to write screenplays (e.g., Billy Wilder) or populate them (e.g.. most of the cast in “Casablanca,” even Maj. Strasser). Indeed, Paul Heinreid (the film’s resistance hero, Victor Laszlo) befriended Remarque again in Hollywood. They were acquainted before in Berlin, where Heinreid — a publisher as well as actor— had printed a deluxe edition of “All Quiet.”

Mr. Tims’ biography abounds with such rich detail. The book is star-studded and glamour-filled, but is less gossip than fascinating cultural and film history. It was Remarque, Mr. Tims says, who got Dietrich back in business again when, after some flops in the early 1930s, she took his advice and grabbed the offer for “Destry Rides Again” (1939). Without Remarque, we might not know “what the boys in the back room will have.”

The book is well researched, but rarely flags (as many biographies often do) under the weight of Mr. Tims’ study. The text reads fast and mostly well. Of course, not every author has this kind of raw material. Just consider the cast around Remarque in 1920s Berlin. He knew so many superstars that, when reading one chapter, I thought I was in a movie: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Leni Reifenstahl (later, Adolf Hitler’s documentary maker), and of course Dietrich, with whom he carried on a life-long, intercontinental affair.

As Mr. Tims acknowledges, Remarque liked his share of schnapps. He liked sleek cats and cars — the more futuristic in design the better — and he liked sleek women. In the letters and diaries that Mr. Tims mines for nuggets of gold, Remarque calls the Lancia that he drove around Switzerland “Puma One”; Dietrich is “Puma Two.”

After their first close encounter, he became “just good friends” with stars such as Dolores del Rio, Lupe Velez, and even Greta Garbo — that one really irked Marlene. Did I neglect to say he had an “open marriage” with a German actress who followed him into exile? Mr. Tims’ book could have used a film subtitle — “The Man Who Loved Women.” Besides his fame and savoir-faire, Oscar-winning actress Luise Rainer said, Remarque knocked actresses silly with his humility — a killer trait in Hollywood, the capital of Ego.

Not that he was happy. As Mr. Tims shows, Remarque had even more sexual problems than his promiscuity and drowned them in liquor. His life both in Hollywood and Berlin’s real “Alexanderplatz” echoes Falstaff about too many nights on the town: “We have heard the chimes at midnight.”

Story Continues →