Natalie Portman is being sought to play the Virginia-born Nazi mistress and Soviet spy Martha Dodd in “In the Garden of Beasts,” which, reports Deadline, “The Artist”s director Michel Hazanavicius will likely make for Tom Hanks’s company Playtone and Universal. The script is to be adapted from Eric Larson’s 2011 non-fiction book.
It’s tempting to think that Alfred Hitchcock fan Hazanavicius is drawn to Martha Dodd as a character because of her resemblance to the unstable, promiscuous Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) in “Notorious.”
Hanks, who will produce “In the Garden of Beasts” with his Playtone partner Gary Goetzmann, will supposedly play Martha’s father, William Dodd (1869-1940), a Chicago professor and the American ambassador in Berlin from 1933 to 1937. Apparently swayed by anti-Semitism among American State Department officials and holding suspect views himself, Dodd recognized the extent of Hitler’s plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews too late, though even when he began to denounce their persecution, as well as the Nazis’ totalitarian rule and aggressive expansionist policy, he was consistently rebuffed in Washington.
Martha (1908-90), naively attracted by the sense of ferment in mid-thirties Berlin, was, as she later wrote, “temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on" who was excited by the "glowing and inspiring faith in Hitler, the good that was being done for the unemployed."
She enjoyed a spectacular sexual career. Among her many lovers were Ernst Udet, a World I flying ace who was a senior officer in the Luftwaffe; the French diplomat Armand Berad; Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo; Louis Ferdinand, the grandson of the Kaiser; and the businessman Ernst Hanfstaengl, who encouraged her, in vain, to sleep with the Führer, whom she found “excessively modest and gentle in his manners.”
After the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, both Dodds became disillusioned with Nazism. A newly avowed Communist, Martha began an affair with the NKVD agent Boris Winogradov, a Soviet attaché in Berlin, that probably lasted until his execution in the 1938 Great Purge. Winogradov, whom she hoped to marry, hired her as a Soviet spy and she leaked American Embassy and State Department Secrets to her masters.
In 1938, she married the American millionaire Alfred Stern, recruiting him as a Soviet spy four years later. It wasn’t until around 1948 that the FBI had her under surveillance, but despite the attention of Senator Eugene McCarthy she was never brought to justice, living out her life in Mexico, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, settling in Prague with Stern for the last three decades of her life.
She wrote several books. According to her obituary in the New York Times, “In 1941, after her father's death and nine months before the United States entered World War II, Mrs. Stern and her brother, William E. Dodd Jr., published the Ambassador's diaries. Critics said that by failing to edit the comments of Germans who were opposed to Hitler they endangered the anti-Nazi underground.
“In the last days of the war Mrs. Stern published ‘Sowing the Wind,’ a novel that dealt with the moral degradation of Germans under the Nazi hierarchy.”