Dietrich, Marlene

Marlene Dietrich

Film star Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) was one of the twentieth century's most enduring style icons. The German–born actress made several notable movies with director Josef von Sternberg in the 1930s, beginning with what was perhaps her most memorable work, The Blue Angel, and her films remain cinema classics thanks in part to a cool, ethereal beauty that the era's black–and–white film stock only maximized. She was, noted People 's Marjorie Rosen, a "woman whose screen image bespoke glamour so dazzling and mystery so provocative that no other compared. Her face, with the arched brows and world–weary blue eyes, could exude spoiled insolence, frosty indifference or smoldering lust."

Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901, in a suburb of Berlin, Germany, called Schöneberg that later became part of Berlin proper. She was named Marie Magdalene Dietrich, and followed an older sister in a household headed by their father, Louis, a former Prussian cavalry officer who was serving as a police lieutenant in Berlin by the time she arrived. She and her sister were raised by their mother, Josephine, after the death of their father when "Lene," as she was known, was nine years old.

Berlin Chorus Girl

As a youngster, Dietrich emerged as a talented violinist. She attended the Augusta Victoria School in Berlin, and during World War I the family moved to Dessau when the Dietrich girls' future stepfather, an army officer, was mobilized into military service. After the end of the war in 1918, Berlin became a politically unstable place to live, and Dietrich finished her education at a boarding school in Weimar. It is known she was back in Berlin by late 1921, where she found work playing the violin at a movie theater. Her dreams of a concert career ended with a wrist injury, and she became a chorus girl in Berlin's heady nightclub scene. Deciding to try her luck at acting, she began studying at Berlin's Deutsche Theaterschule in 1922, which was affiliated with one of German theater's greatest names of the era, Max Reinhardt, a director and producer.

After debuting in a September 1922 stage production of Pandora's Box, Dietrich went on to appear in a number of other plays while also landing small roles in the nascent German film industry. Her screen debut came in a 1922 movie, So sind die Männer (Men Are Like This), and her first lead came six years later in Prinzessin Olala (Princess Olala). Stardom eluded her, however, and she remained a relative unknown until von Sternberg cast her in Der blaue Engel, also known by its English–version title, The Blue Angel. It was the first full–length German "talking" film, utilizing the new medium of synchronized sound, and Dietrich caused a sensation with her portrayal of the voluptuous, heartless cabaret singer Lola Frohlich. She appeared opposite Emil Jannings, a Swiss–born actor who was a silent–screen star at the time in both Europe and Hollywood; he had even won the first Academy Award for best actor in 1927. Jannings played the rotund, prudish schoolteacher determined to keep his pupils from frequenting Lola's stage show, but when he pays a call on her to voice his objections, he is instantly smitten. Lola proves his undoing, and he loses his job and becomes a comic prop in her act as his final humiliation.

Dietrich delivered a pitch–perfect performance of a femme fatale in The Blue Angel that was said to have been not far off the mark; rumors swirled that her own teachers had been smitten with her, and she seemed to have been suddenly removed from the Weimar school by her mother at one point. Dietrich sang in the film, in her smoky, innuendo–laden voice, while Sternberg's camera lingered often on her famously long legs. The director himself was said to have been enchanted by her, and she soon followed him to Hollywood after extricating herself from her contract with UFA (Universum Film AG), the leading German movie studio.

"Glowed Like a Full Moon"

By the time of The Blue Angel 's Berlin premier in April of 1930, Dietrich had began to heed Sternberg's makeover advice, and had noticeably slimmed down from her "Lola" portrayal. The noted director also provided tips on makeup and how she might best highlight the unusual symmetry of her face, and his camera would depict her in the most flattering and ethereal light over the course of their collaboration. These films are considered the high point of Dietrich's career, and include Morocco in 1930, followed by Dishonored, 1932's Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus, a turn as Russia's Catherine II in The Scarlet Empress in 1934, and The Devil Is a Woman, a 1935 work that was allegedly her personal career favorite. Cinema historians consider them classics, though they were mostly box–office flops. Michael Atkinson, writing for London's Guardian newspaper, called the seven films "masterpieces of vapour, shadow and lust, and in them Dietrich glows like a full moon."

Headstrong and opinionated, Dietrich ran into problems with her Paramount bosses as early as the making of Blonde Venus, and her career in Hollywood failed to fulfill its early promise. Her stardom and blonde beauty did attract attention back in Germany, and she was reportedly contacted by agents for the government of the country's Nazi Party leader and new chancellor, Adolf Hitler, who offered her a posh berth back home in exchange for her return. She loathed the fascist Nazis, however, and spurned their offer. She even went so far as to become a naturalized American citizen in the fall of 1937, which launched a torrent of hateful editorials in the government–controlled Nazi press and caused her films to be banned for a time.

Entertained Allied Troops at the Front

Dietrich threw herself wholeheartedly into her new mission—to discredit the Nazi regime that attempted to discredit her. She traveled overseas to entertain American troops near the frontlines during World War II—reportedly amidst terrible conditions—took part in Hollywood–publicized war–bond drives, and even delivered anti–Nazi broadcasts in German that aired overseas. True to form, she was said to have become romantically involved with the famous American general, George Patton. Her film career, meanwhile, had stalled. She made a Western with Jimmy Stewart, Destry Rides Again, and worked with noted director Billy Wilder in A Foreign Affair, set in Berlin during the war. Her later films of merit include Stage Fright, a 1950 Alfred Hitchcock work, Orson Welles's 1958 noir classic Touch of Evil, and Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961, an account of the Nazi war–crimes tribunals.

In the late 1940s, Dietrich began a recording career, and began playing the haute–nightclub circuit. She earned top dollar for performing her signature song from The Blue Angel, "Falling in Love Again," and others, and continued well into the 1970s. By then, however, the stage had been considerably darkened to camouflage her age, and she resorted to a number of painful tricks to maintain her glamorous image. These included braiding her hair tightly before donning a wig, and wearing a tight, allover girdle under her elaborate costumes and gowns. The ironclad garment restricted her movement, however, and she once fell into the orchestra pit and broke her hip at a Washington performance. Reportedly debilitated by arthritis, she was said to drink heavily in her later years to quell the pain.

Grew Increasingly Reclusive

Dietrich lived mainly in Paris after 1968. She had married in 1923 or 1924, to Rudolf Sieber, a casting director, with whom she had a daughter in 1924. The marriage was short–lived, but she and Sieber remained friends, and he served as her business manager for many years. In his old age, she often visited him on his California chicken ranch and spent days cooking meals for him. The rest of her real–life romances rivaled any on–screen saga: only in later years were rumors of her bisexuality openly discussed in the media, and she was said to have had a long relationship with writer Mercedes de Acosta, who was also the lover of Dietrich's archrival, Greta Garbo. Other dalliances included men as well as women, and her conquests reportedly included the writers Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway, and even President John F. Kennedy. In 1967, her much–younger lover, a Polish actor, came to see her off at a train station, and tripped and fell onto the track, where he was crushed by a train. The following year, another lover, an Australian journalist, was decapitated in a helicopter on his way to see one of her concert performances. Told of his death, Dietrich went onstage anyway that night.

Dietrich's last film appearance was in 1979's Schöner Gigolo—armer Gigolo (Just a Gigolo), which starred her opposite a new generation's androgyne, David Bowie. The onetime screen siren was "filmed through gauze, croaking her way through a parody of her Blue Angel persona," noted Sunday Times journalist James Dalrymple. "The results were appalling and she wept as she saw how the fragile erotic image she had created had become a monstrous piece of burlesque."

Dietrich emerged as an icon long before her 1992 death. Maximilian Schell pestered her for his 1984 documentary Marlene, and she finally agreed to participate only if she was not filmed; her words appear only in audio interviews overlaid over the rest of the film's footage. She delivers generally caustic comments, and derides her numerous biographers. She was a recluse in her final years, bedridden at her Avenue Montaigne apartment. A paparazzo once paid a tree–cutting crane operator to help him take photographs through her window, and the images sold for a small fortune. "They showed a small, defenceless figure in a crumpled bed in a shabby room," wrote Dalrymple in the Sunday Times. "Nearly 90, there was only one recognisable feature of the classic beauty that had haunted the 20th century[:] the eyes. Once they had been steely, mocking and defiant. Now they were filled only with fear, bewilderment and hopelessness."

Circus–Like Funeral

Dietrich died on May 6, 1992, in Paris, but controversy over her legacy swirled for some time after her death. She allegedly wanted to be buried in France, while others claimed she had hoped to be laid to rest next to her mother in a Berlin cemetery. The German side won, and her funeral there became a circus. The Berlin homecoming was all the more bittersweet for the fact that she had remained a pariah in Germany long after the end of World War II and the Nazi defeat. The conservative press regularly vilified her, and protesters turned up outside one series of concert engagements. Even after her death, a debate whether to name a Berlin street in her honor raged for months.

The final indignity, for a woman who had guarded her private life so valiantly, came a year after Dietrich's death, when her daughter Maria Riva wrote a scathing memoir that excoriated the star's longest role, that of mother. Nevertheless, Dietrich was close to Riva and to her grandchildren, and spoke to them on a near–daily basis in the years before her death. Riva's reasons for writing her tell–all book, in which Dietrich comes across as callous and demanding, might be summarized by one of her mother's many famous pronouncements: "We all regret our youth," she said, according to People, "once we have lost it."

Books

Bach, Steven, Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, Morrow, 1992.

Periodicals

Guardian (London, England), June 30, 2000.

Independent Sunday (London, England), November 18, 2001; December 23, 2001.

New York Times, September 21, 1986; December 23, 2001.

People, June 1, 1992; March 8, 1993.

Sunday Times (London, England), May 10, 1992.

Times (London, England), October 8, 1937; November 23, 1964; December 21, 1992.