A bawdy, humor-filled letter from Ernest Hemingway to Marlene Dietrich, in which the author imagines performing a surreal sex act onstage with “The Blue Angel” vixen, is going up for auction.
Hemingway’s letter, dated Aug. 28, 1955, to the German-born Hollywood star begins, “Dearest Kraut.” Hemingway then writes about an imagined theater project for her — after, it seems, she’d asked him to collaborate on one in a previous letter at a time when she was retooling a Las Vegas stage act.
“It would probably have something novel like having you shot onto the stage, drunk, from a self-propelled minnenwerfer [sic] which would advance in from the street rolling over the customers,” Hemingway imagined. “As you landed on the stage drunk and naked, I would advance from the rear, or your rear, wearing evening clothes and would hurriedly strip . . . to cover you revealing the physique of Burt Lancaster.”
Ernest Hemingway’s sex letter to Marlene Dietrich
The letter — being put on the block for an opening bid of $54,000 through Gary Zimet’s Moments in Time — gets more bizarre as Hemingway, who signs his name, “Papa,” imagines bombshell Dietrich onstage, “foaming at the mouth,” while they “break into the Abortion Scene from [the French opera] ‘Lakmé’ ” and he brings a “giant rubber whale” into the mix. Then, “we bottle the foam and sell it to any surviving customers.”
In a serious shift, Hemingway writes, “Marlene, darling, I write stories but I have no grace for [bleeping] them up for other mediums,” and, “I love you very much and I never wanted to get mixed in any business with you . . . neither of us has enough whore blood for that.”
The duo reportedly met aboard a ship in 1934 and shared 30 flirty letters over the years, which were made public in 2007, and most are at the JFK Library in Boston. But the passionate relationship was never consummated because, Hemingway had said before his 1961 suicide, that the starry duo had “unsynchronized passion.”
Dietrich began performing in Vegas in 1953, then ambitiously expanded the act in the mid-1950s with Burt Bacharach.