Blue Angel (13 page)

Dietrich sings four numbers in the picture, the lyrics for each composed according to strict instructions from von Sternberg: “Ich bin die fesche Lola—I’m naughty little Lola”; “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt,” rendered in somewhat diluted English as “Falling in Love Again”; and “Nimm dich in Acht vor blonden Frauen—Watch out for blondes, for they have a certain flair for stripping you bare and then leaving you.” But most provocative was her delivery of “Kinder, heut’ abend—A Regular Man.” The song (in a recording taken from the soundtrack) became almost an anthem for the Berlin woman of the 1920s hoping to meet a regular (
richtige
) guy:

Spring has come, the birdies sing
,

All is bright and cheerful
—

Hear the cuckoos in the trees

Givin’ us an earful
.

Funny how this time of year

Always gets you feelin’ queer
—

There’s nothing to it
,

I gotta get a man that’s a man
—

That’s a
regular
man!

If I can’t find one

there’s not a girl who can
—

that’s a man—that’s a
regular
man!

Say, if I find one I’ll sure teach him a few
—

That’s a man, that’s a
regular
man!

Men there are both thin and fat
,

Large and small and stocky
—

Rich and poor and nice at that
,

Bashful and quite shocking
.

How he looks I care a lot
,

I can pick him like a shot
.

There’s nothing to it
—
I
gotta
get a man
—

that’s a man, that’s a
regular
man
.

And so, contrary to the housekeeper’s remark, there is indeed more singing, most notably at the wedding of Lola Lola and Rath, where he crows for joy—an overgrown rooster animated by passion for his little chickadee. “Me?
Marry?”
she had cried when he proposed, almost hysterical with laughter. Does he not
know
better? From the discovery of the dead canary we had moved earlier to his disgust over his breakfast eggs, then to his imitation of a lovebird at his wedding meal. Finally, he is plastered with rotten eggs as a stage clown, and then, in the throes of madness, the crowing becomes an uncontrollable, manic shriek.

The Blue Angel
is suffused with images of willing enslavement: cufflinks become handcuffs, a professor’s gown becomes a strait-jacket; and Rath assumes the role of the company clown, with a wide collar resembling a slave’s neckband. (In our first view of Rath, he is teaching from his desk, tyrannically taking his students through Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” The tragic resolution of the soliloquy is realized at the film’s conclusion, when he dies clutching that same desk.)

In concrete terms, then,
The Blue Angel
and its tale of a man destroyed by his own illusions is drenched in decadence, saturated with images of voyeurism (by the schoolboys, by Rath himself, by the slavering cabaret audiences), fetishism (the cherished relics of Lola Lola’s underwear, her stockings, her hat) and sadomasochism; everything is dark and perilous in this twilight world of semifurtive eroticism. No wonder that the officials at UFA (now led by the tycoon Alfred Hugenberg, later a member of Hitler’s cabinet) did not take up Dietrich’s option. They felt
The Blue Angel
was un-German; it was, after all, directed by an Austro-American, it offended the strict ideals of the German academic system, and it outraged traditional morals in the bargain. In 1933, the film was banned in Germany by Nazi decree.

As von Sternberg recalled, Dietrich had a kind of brilliant tactical reaction to UFA’s lack of enthusiasm. She claimed the film would ruin her (she would be typecast as a whore) whether it became successful or not. She also resented the publicity released prior to the premiere, complaining that Jannings and the director were
being emphasized while she was being ignored—and this, she stoutly maintained, at least partially explained why UFA was not offering her additional work. As von Sternberg noted, “Regardless of her conviction that the film just being assembled [edited] would ruin her forever, she wanted that ruin to be properly publicized.” Dietrich also realized that what von Sternberg had promised would soon be true: her name would be known everywhere.

Clearly, then, Dietrich’s lifelong assertion that she “simply wasn’t ambitious, nor have I ever been” cannot be taken seriously. She wanted success most desperately, hence her earnest cooperation with a man whose abilities and intelligence she greatly respected. She was not, in other words, a woman who since 1923 had masochistically sustained deprivations, rejections and uncertainties without any hope, conviction or desire that perseverance would ultimately show a profit. If she had not been ambitious all this time, if she had really preferred being a simple
Hausfrau
, then (one might ask) why had she been dashing from rehearsal hall to studio, auditioning for roles she says she did not want?

Quite the contrary. That February she wrote to critic Herman Weinberg, who had sent her reviews of her film performances prior to
The Blue Angel
, asking him to send her three copies of each original newspaper that mentioned her. When he complied, she sent an autographed studio photograph—hardly the style of a woman indifferent to her career and her future. Dietrich’s indifference had always been a wily affectation; by 1930, the pretense was refined to a social art that she could turn to her professional advantage. Soon the insolent pose of indifference would make her one of the most rapturously photographed women in history with a career three times as long as Garbo’s.

If UFA did not want her, she then asked von Sternberg, what about Paramount Studios in Hollywood, his home base? His reply came in the person of B. P. Schulberg (the studio’s chief production executive), who in late January visited Berlin, where von Sternberg showed him Dietrich’s test and some excerpts from the film still being edited. Schulberg made Dietrich an offer she thought absurdly low and forthwith rejected. Von Sternberg then departed for America
in early February 1930, after completing the final cut of
The Blue Angel
. Apparently Dietrich’s mood altered in his absence, because before the month was out, she went to the office of Ike Blumenthal, Paramount’s Berlin representative. He offered her a new one-picture deal at
1,250 per week, for a film to be made in Hollywood that spring—with Josef von Sternberg as her director.

This contract she signed, informing Rudi that she would be leaving him and Maria for only a few months, and that she would return with handsome savings for them all (Tamara included). The prospect of American employment was enormously attractive, especially because life in Germany was growing more perilous daily. She would embark on a kind of reconnaissance mission, she told her husband, to determine how her life and career might be eventually pursued in the United States.

Eager to depart, she did so within hours of the premiere of
The Blue Angel
at the Gloria Palace on the evening of March 31. But first she made her obligatory appearance at the gala, dressed in a full-length white fur coat and carrying a spray of red roses. Cameras clicked and people applauded, but when she put the coat and flowers aside, there was a ripple of knowing laughter from the press and public: “She had pinned a bunch of violets in a place where no woman ever wears flowers—just where the legs part,” as an eyewitness recalled. Afterwards, according to the
Berliner Zeitung
, “Young people rushed her and begged for autographs. She had to be rescued by police so she could get to her car.” Rudi was working in Munich as a production assistant on a film, so it was Willi Forst who escorted Dietrich to the boat train from Berlin to Bremerhaven.

Leaving so quickly, she missed the superb reviews. “Marlene Dietrich is the event,” reported Berlin’s respected critic Herbert Jhering, in the
Börsen-Courier
on April 2. “She sings and performs almost phlegmatically, but this she does in an exciting way. She is common without being common, and altogether extraordinary.” The
Licht Bild Bühne
, in but one of dozens of typical raves, called her “fascinating, like no other woman before on film, [with] the silent, narcotic play of her face and limbs and her dark, exciting voice.”

Among the other passengers bound for New York on the
Bremen
were James Stroock—owner of Brooks, the New York theatrical
costume company—and his wife, Bianca. Common professional interests created a friendly rapport with Dietrich, and at first Bianca (unaware of the connotation) was simply flattered when a bunch of fresh violets was delivered to her each morning. The meaning of these little posies became clear, however, when Dietrich invited the pretty, stylish Bianca to her cabin, offered her a glass of champagne and showed her a book on the techniques of lesbian lovemaking. Surprised at what was by now an obvious proposition, Bianca declined; Dietrich, amazed by the rebuff, simply said, “In Europe it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive.” And not only in Europe, as it turned out: her remark to Bianca Stroock would neatly summarize her conduct even in Hollywood, becoming a kind of lifetime motto in the coming decades.
*

But in New York there was no opportunity for Dietrich to devise such provocative scenes. Arriving April 9, she was met by Paramount’s East Coast publicity team and a squad of reporters they had dragooned, and over four days she was put on intensive display. Because the studio hoped to present her as their version of Greta Garbo, Dietrich was instructed to imitate her reticence and to deflect all questions about her private life; hence Paramount’s executives were not at all pleased when she told the press that yes, she was married and had a child. In Hollywood’s so-called golden age, such an admission quickly threatened the studio’s carefully placed veil of mystery. (Dietrich was also shrewd enough to know that this forthrightness about her family could lower any raised American eyebrows about her freewheeling sexual life.)

The interviews peaked on the evening of April 12, when Marlene Dietrich was introduced to the American public on the ABC radio network’s “Paramount-Publix Hour,” broadcast to the entire nation. Her English, tolerable in Germany, now sounded unsteady and heavily accented, and she spoke slowly, translating everything before she spoke. But the press (and thousands of listeners, judging by the subsequent enthusiastic mail) found her intriguing.
†

Typically, the Hollywood welcome was more elaborate. When Dietrich arrived by train in Los Angeles, she was met not only by von Sternberg and photographers from the city’s eight newspapers but also by a five-piece German band in full regimental regalia playing Viennese waltzes and Silesian polkas; her reaction to these inept selections was not documented.

Within days, Paramount arranged for a formal reception at the Ambassador Hotel to introduce Dietrich to the press. According to photographer John Engstead, who later created some of her most alluring images, she arrived in a blue chiffon dress that was unflattering to her rather opulent figure. Next day, on mandate from von Sternberg, she began a strict regimen and after three weeks of diet and exercise had lost fifteen pounds. When she began her first American movie that spring, she weighed 130, but von Sternberg considered even that too much for a woman who, at five feet five, was an inch taller than he.

*
Jannings received the Oscar for his combined work in that film and in
The Way of All Flesh
.

*
Geraldine Brooks (as she called herself professionally), daughter of James and Bianca Stroock, later married Budd Schulberg, who was the son of Paramount’s B. P. Schulberg.

†
Among many other Continental imports over the years: Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman (from Sweden); Simone Simon and Leslie Caron (from France); Vilma Banky (from Hungary); Pola Negri (from Poland); Alla Nazimova and Anna Sten (from Russia); Luise Rainer and Hedy Lamarr (from Austria); Alida Valli, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida (from Italy); Melina Mercouri (from Greece).