Blue Angel (15 page)

Von Sternberg was a dispassionate man whose emotional detachment from women enabled him to look at them analytically in his art. In this regard, he resembled other important filmmakers who hankered for waxen Galateas and who transferred their images and fantasies about women to the screen. For D. W. Griffith, the favored actress was Lillian Gish; for Erich von Stroheim, Mary Philbin; for Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance; for producer David O. Selznick, Jennifer Jones. Alfred Hitchcock’s inner life was revealed in a series of romantic films starring actresses he fell in love with, among them Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. For Josef von Sternberg, it was Marlene Dietrich. He found, she wrote in her memoirs, that she corresponded perfectly to his own complicated dream-life.

I
N
T
HE
B
LUE
A
NGEL
,
HE HAD PRESENTED THE
triumph of decadence over dignity, establishing her as the unwitting cause of an impassioned man’s destruction by simply being true to her nature; in
Morocco
, however, the wandering cabaret performer Lola Lola becomes the faithful follower Amy Jolly, still singing of the perils of romantic attachment—but now offering faithful love to a man who seems unsure of his attraction to her and may lack any real passion at all. The first time we see her after the shipboard introduction she wears white tie, tails and, like Lola Lola, a black top hat. Full of confidence, puffing a cigarette, indifferent to the café audience’s initial laughter at her cross-dressing, she strides through the crowd, surveying them through a haze of smoke. She sees an attractive woman, stops, removes a flower from the woman’s hair then kisses her full on the lips—and seconds later tosses the flower to Cooper.

The sequence is freighted with significance. “I planned to have her dress like a man,” von Sternberg later claimed, “sing in French and, circulating among the audience, favor another woman with a kiss, [because] I wanted to touch on a lesbian accent”—a motif inspired, as he wrote in his autobiography, by seeing Dietrich wearing full male evening dress at Berlin social events. This outfit had already been part of the hallowed image of “La Garçonne,” the boy-girl androgyne that Paris and Berlin found so alluring in the 1920s and that gay culture sometimes glorified. Females dressed in men’s formal wear were as hallowed a music hall tradition as men in drag. At the turn of the century, entertainer Vesta Tilley (later Lady de Frece) wore men’s clothes and delighted English audiences as she sang, “I’m Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten-thirty, and toddle along to the Strand.” Hetty King and Ella Shields were other women popular when they performed in tuxedos and gentlemen’s suits.

But the cross-dressing—a recurrent motif in the von Sternberg-Dietrich films—was not merely designed to shock American audiences. “Woman is no different from man,” the director said often and with various emphases during his life, “and man does not differ from woman other than [that] the female conceives . . . All my characters are modelled on myself as I would behave under [the same] conditions and circumstances.” In this regard,
momentarily suppressing Dietrich’s femininity not only capitalizes on an aspect of the actress’s own bisexual nature: it also enables women in the audience to love her and simultaneously establishes (however vaguely) an identification with men.

The matter goes deeper still, and beyond any mere postulation of homosexuality, bisexuality or even a kind of hip unisexuality. The von Sternberg-Dietrich films—inspired by his observation and knowledge of Dietrich’s variegated erotic life, do not satirize gender roles, they fuse them (“Woman is no different from man”) by presenting passive men and aggressive women; in this regard, von Sternberg may have been decades ahead of the liberationists. According to Henry Hathaway (who was on the crew of
Morocco
and later became a director), von Sternberg “always felt that a woman, deep down, dominated the man . . . [She] was the one pulling the strings, [and] that reflected in a man’s behavior.”

In
The Blue Angel
, Jannings was the archetypally passive “female” character, undone by Lola Lola, the top-hatted “male” character. Thenceforward, the six Dietrich films offered a ruthless, dreamlike critique of traditional gender roles by making their reversal acceptable. In
Morocco
, Dietrich arrives (as she had in real life) by ship; she respects but does not love a painter (Menjou as surrogate for the painter von Sternberg, complete with mustache), and she captivates Cooper, who is astonishingly passive, almost delicate. When Dietrich tosses him the flower taken from the woman she has just kissed, he places it behind his ear, wearing it even in public—he becomes, in effect, the new “girlfriend” of the “man” Dietrich. This suited Marlene Dietrich perfectly, and she relished the scene: “I would much prefer to be a man” was a constant refrain in her public and private utterances. “I can think of no advantage in being a woman that compensates for the mental superiority of men.” And she was certainly, as her lovers attested, the most aggressive partner any of them had ever known.

Von Sternberg could perhaps execute such a conceit only with players like this pair. Aware of Dietrich’s affairs with men and women (and her sexual life, as she had said, “with anyone we find attractive”) the director did not give her any qualities she did not have; rather he took what she
did
have—her frank conjunction of
male-female roles and her capacity for the oxymorons of aggressive nurturing and passive service. In
Morocco
, men use fancy hand fans, wear earrings, flutter, wear flowers, while Moslem, Spanish and American women energetically proposition men and openly cuck-old their husbands.

Much of this is integrated in Dietrich’s second song—“What Am I Bid for My Apple?”—sung in an aptly provocative short outfit and a feather boa; the other (womanly) nature has at last emerged from the evening suit. But now she is like the temptress Eve, freely selling the forbidden fruit to both men and women with lyrics especially written for (and apparently about) Dietrich:

What am I bid for my apple
,

The fruit that made Adam so wise?

On the historic night when he took a bite
,

They discovered a new paradise
.

An apple, they say, keeps the doctor away
,

While his pretty young wife

Has the time of her life
,

With the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker!

Oh, what am I bid for my apple?

“There’s a foreign legion of women, too,” she tells Cooper privately, moments later. “But we have no uniforms, no flags, and no medals when we are brave. No wound stripes when we are hurt.” Later, seeing the women camp followers, she asks Menjou just who they are. “I would call them the rear guard,” he replies.

“How can they keep pace with their men?”

“Sometimes they catch up with them and sometimes they don’t—and very often when they do they find their men dead.”

“Those women must be mad.”

“I don’t know—you see, they love their men,” he concludes.

Menjou was clearly the director’s deputy, the protective mentor and artist, externally calm but deeply in love and doomed to rejection. “You see,” Menjou says again to his guests, when Dietrich leaves him to find Cooper, “I love her. I’ll do anything to make her
happy.” Just so von Sternberg, who gladly responded to Dietrich’s every wish and whim during production and after hours, squiring her (to his wife’s dismay) to Hollywood restaurants, offering her luxuries at work and at home and contenting himself with being a devoted Pygmalion whose Galatea fancied other men.

He also presented her to Paramount and to the world as a sublime but recognizably human creature—a new Garbo, but warmer, somehow more complex. Completely faithful to her own emotional logic, Dietrich/Amy has a tenderly radiant resignation throughout the film. And so carefully did von Sternberg set up every shot of her, so meticulously were the lights arranged that he could not often allow the more diffuse illumination of travelling shots. “The light source,” Dietrich commented later, “created my mysterious-looking face with hollow cheeks, effected by putting the key light near the face and very high over it.” This technique seemed to isolate her in the film, to detach her from the surroundings—until the great final retreat into the desert, where she is absorbed by the geography. She seems, until then, to inhabit her own continuum of time and space.

F
ROM HER
A
PRIL ARRIVAL THROUGH THE SUMMER
’
S
shooting, Dietrich had maintained constant contact with Rudi and Maria, sending gifts every few weeks, with brief notes describing her life at home and at the studio (with discretionary exclusions). Her time with gentleman escorts had to be carefully scheduled to allow for press interviews, publicity and photo sessions, and enough rest to face von Sternberg’s camera six mornings each week. By the time production concluded in late August, she had seen none of California outside Los Angeles County. Her life, however rapidly her fame was spreading, was restricted to the precincts determined by work.

The premiere of
Morocco
was held at Grauman’s Chinese Theater on November 24, 1930; just as Paramount’s executives had predicted during preview screenings, it was an instant and enormous success, and soon there were four Oscar nominations (none of them final winners): for von Sternberg, Dietrich, cinematographer Lee Garmes
and art director Hans Dreier. This was the closest Dietrich ever came to an Academy Award.

With a rapidity only a high-powered promoter could appreciate, things began to happen quickly. Paramount bought advertising and billboard space across the country heralding the arrival of a new Garbo, and as rave reviews poured in from critics and platoons of new fans, the studio was forced to send Dietrich two secretaries to cope with the avalanche of letters and requests for signed photos. Garbo, asked her opinion of this apparent counterpart, is supposed to have replied airily, “And who is this Miss Dietrich?” But actors, producers and directors jockeyed for a position near this Miss Dietrich’s table at the Coconut Grove, the Hollywood Roosevelt or the Club New Yorker. She was also mobbed at places like the Frisky Pom Pom Club, where she frequently went to see the lineup of female dancers in its revue called “Glorifying Hollywood’s Most Beautiful Girls.” At these venues the studio cannily arranged for her to be photographed—usually with von Sternberg or another escort, for the faint implication of scandal was very much part of the glamour. At the same time, Dietrich received letters proposing marriage or concubinage with unknown men, and offers of a lifetime of devotion from smitten women.

All this adulation was in the starkest contrast to daily life at Paramount, where Dietrich worked hard to please her director—not only because she greatly respected him but also because she and Paramount needed him for the maintenance of her career. During
Morocco
as during the film they undertook immediately thereafter, she was tirelessly pursuing the demands of a difficult and exhausting craft. At work, instead of being rushed for autographs she was hurried from makeup to wardrobe at Marathon Street; in place of adulation from strangers at restaurants, she heard brusque orders from her director on the set: “Turn your shoulders away from me and straighten out . . . Drop your voice an octave and don’t lisp . . . Count to six and look at that lamp as if you could no longer live without it . . . Stand where you are and don’t move—the lights are being adjusted.” She was neither the first nor the last movie actor to sense a profound divergence in what life presented, a confusion of realms effected by brilliant celebrity and public adoration on one
side, and on the other a fragile but arduous employment she knew could be terminated at the public’s or producers’ whims.

To these separate signals Dietrich responded shrewdly, adding a touch of the heroic. She told the press she was Greta Garbo’s greatest fan and that no
arriviste
like herself could compete with so accomplished an actress. She then took the approach of the humble servant, repeatedly acknowledging her total reliance on von Sternberg’s genius with the subtle implication that she was a dutiful girl at the mercy of a ruthless sadist. For the final scene of
Morocco
(she told the press), he had forced her to walk barefoot in the desert, and when she fainted from the heat von Sternberg was so relentless that he corrected her pronunciation of the dialogue as soon as she was revived, and then asked for another take. By such methods she stressed her valorous, abject nature. Surely Hollywood had never seen her equal in this kind of self-promotion; even Garbo had limitations.