Marlene Dietrich

 I mean this in the nicest way... she was a piece of work.  Frankly, very few have crafted their image more carefully than Dietrich.  She didn't coincidentally say or do much of anything.  It was all part of her grand design.  Believe it or not, she was a little bit shy, sometimes withdrawn, occasionally easily hurt.  She could also be hurtful, forthright, maddening, haughty, tough, controlling and unsurprisingly frank about who she was and who she wasn't.  Kind, thoughtful, savvy, glittering.

She was right in the middle of that great gathering of Hollywood lesbians in the thirties and forties.  We did an earlier piece on them, Sapphic Traffic.   Dietrich was unlike most of them, to say the least.  She rather flouted her lesbianism where most did not.  She loved wearing men's clothing and did so often in her work particularly.   If you didn't like it, get a refund on your ticket... put down the magazine... get lost.  She didn't much care.

Was she lesbian or bisexual?  As far as I can tell, in matters of the body, she was bisexual.  In matters of the heart, she was lesbian.  She apparently slept with most of her male costars, more because she could than from any great interest.  She also often berated those costars as well.

This leads me to something I always loved about her.  She was bold and she was brave in many ways.  Her hatred of Hitler was legendary and her patriotic work on behalf of America cannot be forgotten.  And she was bold and brave in her lesbianism at a time that she might have been run out of town.  She might have appeared to be like two other lesbians who also dressed like men, Garbo and Hepburn, but they stayed in the closet their entire lives.  Garbo did it by hiding and Hepburn did it by acting offscreen as well as she did onscreen.  Dietrich was always right out there for your consideration.  As someone once said... she was all sex and no gender.  Her dance cards filled up quickly.

Now don't hate me Dietrich lovers... I know there are those who have endowed her with sainthood... but I have never considered her a great actress or a great singer.  I say this along with informing you that one of her acting performances is one of my favorites ever and I practically swoon when I hear her sing Falling in Love Again (which I've just listened to about 10 times to get me in the mood.   Cahn't help it).

But here's the point.  Did Marlene Dietrich have to be the greatest actress or singer or the most beautiful or is it enough to be one of the greatest legends.   To me, in her films, regardless of the characters she played, she was always Dietrich, just Dietrich.  And that was enough.  That voice.  That sound.  Those flashing eyes.  Fits of temperament.  Attractive.  Glacial.  She just needed to be her dazzling self, her own special creation, and my money was well spent.

Once she came to Hollywood and into great fame, from time to time the highest paid female star, she let it be known that she didn't like making movies and she really didn't like Hollywood.  She thought most actors were dreadful bores.  She did it for the money, just the money.  Dietrich's center was about being idolized, worshipped.  In coming years that's what she always wanted.  And that is precisely what her true fans gave her.

She was born in Berlin in 1901.  She would always say she enjoyed her childhood.  Her mother was from an affluent family, her father was a police lieutenant who is credited with giving her a military-like attitude toward life... lots of blacks and whites, few grays.  She had a year-older sister, Elisabeth.  Her father died from injuries suffered from falling off a horse when Dietrich was five.  She said that her entire young life revolved around women.  She completely adored her mother and her maternal grandmother, aunts.  

Most of the girls at school ignored her and some of them didn't.   The ones who ignored her found her just too weird, not like anyone they had known or would want to.  The ones who did like her found her to be the same but interesting enough to want to know her better.  A new life had begun.  Her mother called her Paul.  Mother must have known.  They were so close and Marlene became bold and forthright early on thanks to Mama's urging.

Her mother believed in education wholeheartedly and she was constantly teaching Paul about the love and value of work, of being trustworthy.  The importance of duty was drummed into her little head often and she was taught to care for others whose lives weren't as charmed as hers.  They were lessons she never forgot.

I believe it was in high school that she slept with one of her male professors.  I've seen no sources that delve more into it except to add that he was fired.

By this time Dietrich was playing the violin (she also played piano).  She had dreams of being a great violinist and she was told by some instructors that she could be good enough to realize that dream.  Unfortunately, a  wrist problem that became permanent kept her dream from coming true.  True to her nature, she picked herself up, dusted herself off and got on with her life.  She would become an actress.

She auditioned for the famed Max Reinhardt Dramatic School although the great master was no longer teaching.  Apparently the audition was unsuccessful but she accepted work in their four theaters in the Berlin area.  

There soon came an aura of cabaret decadence about her.  Cabaret performances were among her earliest jobs and she liked them.  She didn't appreciate some of the grabbiness and the lewd comments but she liked selling a song and dressing up in the appropriate drag.  Most of her 30s films featured her as a cabaret performer.  She always thought that's what she did best.  Later in life she would return to it in live performances.

It was inevitable that she would become a film actress, a most reluctant one.  Stage acting, she said, appealed to her more but what truly appealed to her more was money... especially the big bucks that came from being a movie star.  She thought her films were mostly dreadful.

Her work in German films, of course, were mainly silents.  During the making of one of them in 1923, she formed a relationship with a crew member, Rudolf Sieber, and they married a few months later.  It doesn't appear that there is a lot of information on him but in her autobiography Dietrich says she loved him very much and always did.  A year after the marriage, Dietrich gave birth to their daughter, Maria,  The actress would only live with Sieber for five years but they were never out of touch and were always loving with one another.  They would remain married until his death in 1976.

Scene from The Blue Angel

Director Josef von Sternberg first saw her when she was performing in one of her cabarets and thought she would make the perfect cabaret star, Lola-Lola, in The Blue Angel (1930).  It was a lot of work  because simultaneous German and English versions were filmed.  It was said she was sensational although she hated making the film.  Germans flocked to it and a lot of Europeans chattered about this new actress.  

Actress and director wanted to do more films together... be partners in film and in bed.  As they were discussing how it all might work out somebody at Paramount put in a call.  The studio wanted both for a film, perhaps a contract and pretty much a guarantee of world-wide fame if the film became a success.  For good measure, they would throw in their top male star, Gary Cooper.  Paramount hoped that Dietrich would be the studio's answer to MGM's Greta Garbo.  As I see it... and never much of a Garbo fan... she more than fulfilled their hopes.

It was all so exciting but Dietrich was most unhappy about leaving Maria behind with her father.  Dietrich, by the way, told Sieber about her affairs with both women and men and he loved hearing the juicy details.  As Maria grew older, it was she who would hear the inappropriate details.

Sex is much better with a woman, she said, but one cannot live with a woman.   She went from one affair with a woman to the next and the next.  She found Hollywood, if not America, a curious place on sexual issues.  She once said in Europe it doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman, we make love with anyone we find attractive.  

Morocco (1930) was her first American film and it would be released in America before The Blue Angel.  She is a cabaret singer who falls in love with a Legionnaire during the Rif War.  Their relationship is complicated by his womanizing and a rich man who has fallen in love with her.  

The result is what Paramount originally promised... worldwide fame for Dietrich and in many respects for von Sternberg, too.  It will always be remembered for the actress being dressed in a tuxedo and kissing another woman on the mouth.  The scene was not originally scripted but she insisted upon its inclusion.  These were pre-Code days.  It would be the only time Dietrich was nominated for an Oscar.

She would dress like a man in all her Von Sternberg films

Though she would work a second time with Cooper she said Gary Cooper was neither intelligent nor cultured.  Just like the other actors he was chosen for his physique which, after all, was more important than an active brain.  Nonetheless it wasn't his brain she sought in their numerous horizontal escapades.   Cooper and von Sternberg didn't get along.  I can't imagine.

Dietrich and von Sternberg were one day discussing what plans he had for her, both as an actress and a personality.  (Dietrich was famous for saying she was never an actress... she was a personality.)  In how he structured some of the things with her, she got the impression that he thought there was a possibility that she might fail and she hated that.  She hated failure with a passion and she always grew up believing she could do anything if she wanted it badly enough.  It created a brief rupture in their relationship.

As I see it he discovered her... he at least brought her the worldwide fame.  But he liked to say he didn't discover her.  He claimed to be one of her teachers, one who shaped her appearance, highlighted her charm, minimized her defects and molded her into an aphrodisiacal enchantress who would become a legend.

von Sternberg

He was going to turn her into a worldwide sensation.  Her own sense of exhibitionism, along with eroticism and some notoriety, would lay the groundwork but he saw her in richly stylized films, both in technique and scenario.   That erotic component was in The Blue Angel and Morocco and he wanted future films to showcase it as well.

Von Sternberg wanted her to learn everything about making movies, particularly behind the scenes.  He would have her stand behind the camera so that she would see things as the cinematographer did.  She was most keen on learning about lighting and how she photographed most favorably and the things she learned she never forgot.  In time she would add to those items a great concern over her costumes, makeup, and hair and a mirror was always on or near her while acting.

In 1932 she brought Maria to live with her.  It pained her to be away from her daughter.  She missed her terribly and thought it was time to get her daughter out of Germany.

In her fourth collaboration with her director-lover, Dietrich is languorous and fearless as a courtesan aboard the Shanghai Express (1932).   As Shanghai Lily, she is on a train during China's civil war and surprisingly finds a former lover, a British soldier, also onboard.  The excitement picks up when Chinese guerrillas take command of the train.  It turned into a strong feminist film because of Dietrich, of course, but also due to Anna May Wong.  

What kept folks talking for some time afterwards were the sumptuous visuals... ornate costumes, beautiful sets (particularly the train) and all in gorgeous black and white photography.  It turned out to be the highest-grossing film of 1932.

Blonde Venus (1932) has Dietrich as a wife and mother who takes up a secret life as a cabaret singer to make enough money to cover her husband's illness.  She meets a rich patron (Cary Grant) whom she expects to help but their romance doesn't help especially when the husband (Herbert Marshall) recovers and finds out, threatening to keep her beloved son from her.  It was not the success that was hoped for.  She was quite the Grant fan.

The public wasn't used to seeing Dietrich as a loving and devoted mother but she won them over.   In 1932, a month or so after the Lindbergh baby's kidnapping and murder, Dietrich was beside herself with worry because she received a threat that Maria was going to be next.  It never panned out for the kidnappers but Dietrich, Sieter (whom she summoned from Germany), von Sternberg, of course, and good pal Maurice Chevalier stood guard and were godsends to the actress and daughter. 

An American poet, playwright and novelist, Mercedes de Acosta, a former lover of actress and famed Garden of Allah proprietor, Alla Nazimova, and dancer Isadora Duncan, rounded up the mainly closeted Hollywood lesbians and formed a group known as The Sewing Circle.  Among its many members were Greta Garbo, Tallulah Bankhead, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Myrna Loy, Marjorie Main, Janet Gaynor, Elsa Lanchester, Agnes Moorehead and Judith Anderson.  Most were deeply closeted, many were in lavender marriages and most preferred to sleep with one another or other members rather than risk exposure by being careless with strangers.

Dietrich became a member with great joy and anticipation.  What a feast it would be.  She became a special favorite of de Acosta's who was also involved in a turbulent relationship with Garbo.   The closeted Swede, who thought of herself as a boy offscreen, may have been a little put off by Dietrich's openness.  Dietrich may not have screamed her sexual preference from the top of the Hollywood sign but she famously said I do not change my face for the public.

Hitler, what an idiot, she cried out.   She hated him with all the passion she could muster and didn't care who knew it.  Though she was in America most times she said it, she knew the world press would pick it up and Hitler would know.  She didn't care.  She was in Paris in 1933 mainly to collect some private papers she'd left behind in 1930.  Hitler got in touch with her and said he wanted her to return to Germany where he would make her the queen of German cinema.  

When Hitler sent his Nazi minions to ask her to reconsider, she told them truthfully that she was under contract to Von Sternberg and it's up to him to say.  She added that maybe he would agree if he were the director of picture.  You know, of course, he's Jewish, she said.  The Nazi who appeared in charge said to her You are infected by American propaganda, Miss Dietrich.  There is no anti-Semitism in Germany.  She was so disgusted she left the room.  She was later detained at the Paris train station for violating the ban about women wearing trousers.  Ultimately, her American films were banned in Germany.

She claimed the oft-told story that she had her back molars removed to give the appearance of higher cheekbones is a figment of some Hollywood press agent's imagination.  She did, however, suck on lemon wedges between takes of a film to keep her mouth muscles tight.   Early in her career she instructed Max Factor to add a half ounce of real gold dust in her wigs for a glittered look.  As she grew older she gave herself instant face lifts, as she called them, whereby she pulled her facial skin tight with surgical tape which she hid behind her hair.  

The Devil Is a Woman (1935)  is about a middle-aged man making a fool of himself over the love for a woman who treats him shabbily.  Joel McCrea left the cast after one day over a disagreement with von Sternberg and Cesar Romero stepped in to replace him.  This was the end of the von Sternberg-Dietrich working relationship.  The actress considered this her favorite of all her films.  It's probably because she thought she never looked more beautiful.

Their films together were some of the most stylish of the thirties.  Before the start of The Devil Is a Woman, Paramount told the pair it would be their last together.  Von Sternberg annoyed the hell out of the studio execs and they fired him.

Her next four films did poorly at the box office and she was labeled box office poison along with a number of others.  Most were lesbian or bisexual actresses such as Garbo, Crawford, Hepburn, Kay Francis and Dolores Del Rio.  But Mae West was poison, too, along with Norma Shearer, Edward Arnold and Fred Astaire.  Fred Astaire was poison?

She worked for the great Ernst Lubitsch in Angel (1937), a romantic comedy about a couple (Dietrich, Herbert Marshall) who take separate vacations and she falls in love with Melvyn Douglas.  It was a popular film and as far as I was concerned, she was wonderful in comedies.  It did poorly at the box office, however, and Paramount bought out the remainder of her contract.  

She became a U.S. citizen in 1939 and renounced her German citizenship.  She said it was the proudest moment of her life.  She was wildly pro-American.  Screw you, Führer.

In the late 30s she and director Billy Wilder and several other exiles created a fund to help Jews and other dissidents escape from Germany.  

She put her entire salary from one of her films in escrow to help finance the operation.

She signed on with Universal.  By 1939, deciding to soften her image and take on lighter fare, she signed for the comedy western Destry Rides Again.  She even got a hit song out of it... See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have.  The film would change the direction of her career although most would say it would never regain the luster it previously had in the early thirties.  Personally, I preferred most of the films that were yet to come.

She had an affair with the unmarried James Stewart throughout the filming, became pregnant and had an abortion.  She claimed he never knew about any of it at the time.

Dietrich met John Wayne on the set of Seven Sinners (1940).  She said he was not too bright, had little money and peppered her with questions about the future of his career.  She also knew his right-wing politics were not for her so she kept him at arm's length on that score.  She said she didn't find the married actor very exciting.  He said he didn't care to be added to her long list of conquests.  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  If that was the case on their first film, did it change on the next two?

With Rita Hayworth at the Hollywood Canteen

In 1941 she became one of the first celebrities to sell war bonds.  During the following two years she toured the U.S. selling bonds and entertaining troops.  It's been said that on the Pacific Coast leg of the tour she entertained a quarter of a million troops.  When the Hollywood Canteen (offering free food, dancing and entertainment to servicemen) opened in 1942, Dietrich was right there.  She served food, did some singing and a lot of dancing with the boys.  Bette Davis, who founded the place, said Dietrich had an indominable energy and was one of the actresses who showed up the most.

One of my favorite Dietrich flicks was the rousing The Spoilers (1942).  In Alaska a saloon owner (Dietrich) helps a gold miner (Wayne) save his claim from a crooked politician (Randolph Scott).  The two men have one of filmdom's best fight scenes.  The movie certainly captures her unique style of performance.... she is, as usual, a little bawdy and no-nonsense while physically being a knockout.  Here's one of those rainy Sunday recommendations.  Or do you not do John Wayne?   

Scott, Dietrich, a gussied-up Wayne in The Spoilers

Pittsburgh (1942) concerns an ambitious Pennsylvanian (Wayne) who rides roughshod over everyone in his quest to become king of the steel industry.  Scott is back as well, this time as Wayne's good pal but things get a little testy when you-know-who gets between them.  It was Universal's answer to MGM's very successful Boom Town (1940) with Gable and Tracy in the oil business.

Singing the praises of America and helping her new country was at the forefront of all Dietrich did.  She toured military camps in Europe... singing, doing sketches, sitting on soldier's laps, visiting hospitals and listening to stories from the wounded, licking stamps on envelopes... anything she could.  She loved to help.  She needed to be needed.  It would be hard to believe she didn't do some spying or at least nosing around.  

Unknown to many perhaps, she was in her heart a hausfrau.  Her attire usually consisted of blue jeans and often a man's shirt, perhaps her hair covered with a bandana.  She loved to cook, clean and fuss.  When pals were in need, she was there with homemade chicken soup or perhaps her checkbook.  She helped many a friend and also their children. 

In 1947 Dietrich was awarded the Medal of Freedom award for entertaining American troops and her strong stand against Naziism.  She said it was her proudest accomplishment.  She also received the Légion d'honneur from the French government.

While serving in the U.S. Army in Germany during WWII, Billy Wilder was promised assistance if he one day made a film there about Allied-occupied Germany.  A Foreign Affair (1948) became that film.  It concerns a U.S. congresswoman (Jean Arthur) who is sent to Berlin to investigate G.I. morals.  She enlists a captain (John Lund), to investigate a cafe singer (Dietrich) said to have been a mistress of a wanted war criminal, not knowing the captain is the woman's current lover.

Mainly (but not entirely) played for laughs, all are at the top of their games.  Dietrich was reluctant to return to Berlin and was even more certain she didn't want to play a Nazi sympathizer.  But Wilder, her longtime friend, was most persuasive.  She and Arthur did not get along on or off the screen.  Dietrich was miffed that she took second billing to another actress.

Pic conveys how she really felt about Arthur

Though not known by the general public, the film's three top stars were all gay.  Dietrich would go on to make another film where she would be one of four gay stars.  Lund said about her that she was a mixture of siren and homebody... gracious, unfailingly professional and funny.  She said about him... that piece of petrified wood.  About Arthur she sniped about that ugly, ugly woman with that terrible American twang.  Fascinating that this loving, caring, generous woman could speak with such venom.

She would spend most of the 50s through the 70s touring the world as a cabaret performer and she never had so much fun.  Still there were the  occasional films.  In 1953 she appeared in Vegas.  Much attention was called about the Jean Louis-designed gown that made her look as if she were nude.

Around the same time she hired Burt Bacharach as her musical arranger.  Together they designed the act to look like a one-woman show.  She sang songs from her films along with many popular songs of the day.  Bacharach arrangements helped disguise Dietrich's limited vocal range.  They would make four albums and several popular singles.  When he broke up the act because he wanted to spread his wings, she was devastated.

Stage Fright (1950), directed by Hitchcock and filmed in London, has Jane Wyman as a struggling actress who helps her friend (Richard Todd) prove his innocence in a murder.  Wyman goes undercover as a maid in the home of Dietrich, an actress who is Todd's lover and whom Todd says is the real murderer.   Again Dietrich took second billing to another actress and again there was press that Dietrich didn't get on with her costar.  Wyman said nonsense and claimed Dietrich was the most fascinating creature I've ever met.  

While I have said I liked Dietrich in a western I reviewed earlier, Rancho Notorious (1952) and I liked the film, as well, I have always thought she looked out-of-place in the genre.  She detested director Fritz Lang but buddied up to costar Mel Ferrer.  

With Ty Power in the early Witness scenes.  

Dietrich hadn't been in a truly top film in years but all that changed when Wilder asked her to join him in Agatha Christie's thrilling courtroom drama, Witness for the Prosecution (1957).  She would costar with three other closeted gay people... Tyrone Power and husband and wife thespians Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester.  Why Power would make a play for Dietrich was anyone's guess but he made the moves a few times.  She was not amused but determined they both would turn it on for the cameras.

She spent most of her time with Wilder and Laughton, sometimes one-on-one and a few times as a trio.  These three got into one another's heads on a level that they couldn't do without.  They all were emboldened by the intimacy.    

For my money, that was pure magic up there on that screen when it was shared by Laughton and Dietrich.  They are adversaries in a courtroom and I almost tremble watching them fuss and feud when he screams at her at the top of his mighty lungs because you are a LIAR.  He is the prosecutor and she is the devoted wife of a man on trial for killing a rich old woman acquaintance.  Even without corpses everywhere, I honor it as Christie at her best.

Laughton and Dietrich are who I especially remember but Power was at his personal best and Lanchester and John Williams were a total delight.  It was Power's last (completed) film and it was Dietrich's last starring role.  She was in her mid 50s and still the femme fatale.  I don't mean just acting the femme fatale... she was the real deal, never better.

For the rest of her film career the parts were brief.  Orson Welles called her the night before he wanted to film a cameo in his Touch of Evil (1958).  She cherished her platonic friendship with him and regarded him as one of the few  geniuses she knew (Hemingway was another).  Of course she would show up.  It was a part he probably also wrote about an hour before calling her.  It was insignificant to the main story.  Her four brief scenes were filmed in one night.  She knew it was for her name value.  That was okay.  He probably told her that.  She would have played any part he asked her to.  

What a great pic with Tracy

 

When producer-director Stanley Kramer wanted her for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), she jumped.   When he added that her only scenes would be with Spencer Tracy but Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift would also have roles, she had her people tell Vegas to postpone the next gig.  Making this particular film must have stirred up some emotions in her although her character is not part of the trial.  It would be the last time she was on a movie sound stage.

Even though her health was declining and she survived a cancer scare in 1965, throughout all of the eye-popping sixties and into half of the 70s, Dietrich played venues all over the world.  Whether she was dazzling audiences with that nude gown or dressed in a white tux, tails, top hat and singing I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face, audiences were enraptured.  It was said of her by someone... what she does is neither difficult nor diverting but the fact that she does it at all fills onlookers with wonder.

In Sydney, Australia in 1975 she fell during a concert and broke her leg.  The mishap ended her stage appearances.  It was a sad time for her.  

I was walking into a Los Angeles theater by myself in 1978.  I passed a friend who was leaving the theater and he asked me what I was seeing.  When I said Just a Gigolo, he implored me to not bother.  I followed his advice and apparently critics agreed the silly story of a man who goes through life as just a gigolo was a dog.  David Bowie has the title role, David Hemmings (who also directed) and Curt Jurgens are along as are a trio of blondes, Kim Novak, Maria Schell and Dietrich.  All she did was sing the title song and she was bombed when she did it.  Apparently she scrawled on a still of herself when did I get so ugly?

She moved to her beloved Paris apartment shortly after the accident.  A year after Just a Gigolo, she stayed put in that apartment for the last 13 years of her life.   In 1982 her longtime friend and costar in Judgment at Nuremberg,  Maximilian Schell, produced a much-awarded documentary called Marlene.  She would speak her many truths and likely some non-truths but she would not be seen on camera.  It was a great success, especially with her legions of fans, most of them gay men.

She had her writing, her painting and drawing, and reading, being especially fond of poetry which went back to her times as a young girl.  She loved flirting on the phone.   She might have said otherwise but she loved her stuff.   It's good that she did because it was all she would see.  She quietly let go of most of her relationships and of course a lot of her contemporaries had passed.  She saw Maria when she was in Paris and she saw the grandchildren.  She would talk with a few friends on the phone.  She had some staff.   In time she drank and took pills in excess and let herself go and allowed the apartment to sink into decay and become squalid.

She died in 1992 at age 90 of kidney failure.  There were 1,500 mourners in the Paris church and thousands more outside.  She had long ago made her peace with Germany and with Berlin and she chose to be buried in the city, near her mother's grave.  Just to satisfy, one assumes, the decadent streak that always ran through her was in full view at her funeral she had all the men and women she had slept with wear red carnations and those who didn't wore white ones.

Long as this is (omg), I have intentionally left some things out.  I suppose I wanted to establish a certain tone.  I have long been aware of an interview daughter Maria Riva gave to Diane Sawyer some years back.  Maria spoke her truth and I believe her.  I never regarded what she said as a hatchet job but I've simply elected not to include it here... that tone, you see.  But the interview is on YouTube should you want to include it as a companion piece to this.

There was a radiance in her that I found irresistible.  There was that earthy sexuality and that unmistakable voice.  No matter who was in scene with her I could never take my eyes off her.  Even when she was not speaking, her facial business was not to be missed.  To her everlasting credit, the woman always remained fascinating in her work.  

When she was feeling upbeat about herself, she liked to say... I am at heart a gentleman.

Next posting:

a movie biography