Blue Angel (17 page)

Von Sternberg was outraged at Riza, and this led to an imprudent step taken in retribution: he ceased sending her regular alimony payments. This of course further complicated the problem, and as spring warmed to a torrid 1931 summer across America, so did Mrs. von Sternberg’s wrath blaze hotly. She cited him for contempt, he countered by paying only some of the moneys owed, and dates were set for court appearances in Los Angeles and New York. At the request of the cited parties, these were postponed until later that summer, and perhaps because no one involved was eager for the publicity, the case remained unknown to the press until then.

A
S WITH EVERYTHING RELATIVE TO HER PUBLIC LIFE
, Dietrich depended on von Sternberg to manage the matter. In California, he had already rented an elegant, ten-year-old Mediterranean home for her at 822 North Roxbury Drive, on the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The house had a large rear yard with swimming pool, ample space for Gerda and the maid, and a large kitchen. For the first weeks, however, Dietrich religiously avoided that room: von Sternberg had greeted her with mild but firm criticism of the ten to fifteen pounds she had gained in Berlin, and until mid-May she subsisted on a diet of tomato juice and soda biscuits.

Josef von Sternberg was, that spring of 1931, still more than mentor, manager and trainer to Marlene Dietrich. As a nod to the prevalent mores, he maintained a separate address, but soon it was widely known that he was living at Roxbury Drive and sharing the master suite with his star; their matching Rolls-Royce automobiles (hers bullet grey, his midnight blue) could be found parked each night in the crescent-shaped driveway. “Mr. von Sternberg loved good food,” Dietrich said with a wink years later. “So I went to the studio every day and did what he told me, and then I came home and cooked.” Dashiell Hammett, for one, kept his friends informed of industry gossip: von Sternberg and Dietrich, he reported to his mistress Lillian Hellman with typical irony, were “living in sin.”

T
HE SPORADIC CHARACTER OF THE
D
IETRICH-VON
Sternberg relationship can only perhaps be understood as part of the entire complex they maintained between themselves. He performed the cinematic legerdemain securing her advancement from minor performer to international movie star, and this evoked her admiration and affectionate gratitude, of which sex was often Dietrich’s natural expression. She was especially inclined thus to comfort men like von Sternberg who seemed emotionally deprived and somewhat morbid in their aesthetic isolation. His self-imposed mission, she later said, was “to photograph me, make me laugh, dress me up, comfort me, advise me, guide me, coddle me, explain things to me”—and there has perhaps never been a more cooperative apprentice.

Although confident of his talents as director and cameraman, von Sternberg nevertheless bore a deeply rooted inferiority complex, and he sometimes alienated colleagues and friends with the kind of high-toned or egoistic posture that tries to masquerade such feelings. In the anteroom to his office at Paramount, for example, was an enormous diorama with commentary and still photos comprising the history of his films for all to see, as if they were approaching a museum or a great cathedral: “Opus One:
The Salvation Hunters
.” . . . “Opus Two:
The Exquisite Sinner
—Sabotaged by Thalberg,” and so forth.

His relations with men were usually characterized by some degree of jealous rivalry, and directing men was often a trial: “Cooper was very tall and Jo was not, and he couldn’t stand it if I looked up to any man in a movie . . . I didn’t understand that kind of jealousy,” Dietrich recalled. Additionally, women found his intellect formidable but his manner cool and tyrannical, and so he failed to attract precisely the sort of female attention he longed for (especially since his divorce). Von Sternberg also had the logical doubts often felt by the gifted autodidact: he had read widely and could discuss many fields with impressive knowledge, but he was uncomfortable doing so, fearing that his lack of formal education would unavoidably reveal vast gaps. Consequently, he occasionally allowed himself to be overwhelmed by those who spoke more but knew less. This led some who experienced his sergeant-major tactics at the studio to mistake his silence for smug superiority.

Divorced from a beautiful, dark-haired, doe-eyed actress, von Sternberg had eccentricities of dress, manner and speech that did not put him in great demand socially. Despising polite small talk, he preferred silence, or withdrawal to his studio for painting. Artist and dreamer, Josef von Sternberg was a touching combination of both the intellectual analyst and the aching romantic.

Because she was emotionally sympathetic to him, Dietrich was quick to fill his loneliness. “Marlene worshipped my father with a tremendous respect,” Nicholas von Sternberg said years later. “She loved his intelligence and abilities. He saw her as paint on his canvas—and she agreed wholeheartedly with this.”

Essentially a woman of clear preferences and antipathies, Dietrich concealed none of them. She disliked most modern art (von Sternberg’s occasional tutorials notwithstanding), noodles, horse races, evangelism, fish, after-dinner speeches, politics, American sandwiches, opera and slang; she favored Punch and Judy shows, apple strudel, circus performers, speeding in an open roadster, pickles, perfumes, romantic novels by Sudermann and doleful poetry by Heine.

There was, however, nothing about her of the Byronic heroine, and her attitude toward intimacy (as toward most things in life) was a great deal simpler than von Sternberg’s, and without much reflection. “I had nothing to do with my birth,” she said around this time, “and I most likely will have nothing to do with my future. My philosophy of life is simply one of resignation.” Entirely a woman of the moment, she readily admitted that year, “I never think about the future. I am not religious. I never think about anything there is no good in thinking about.” And von Sternberg knew this: “She attached no value to anything so far as I could ascertain, with the exception of her baby daughter, a musical saw and some recordings by a singer called Whispering Jack Smith.”

Her convictions, accordingly, were based simply on experience, and this had unequivocally taught her that Josef von Sternberg was certainly good for her. While he saw her as a beautiful woman who could wreak emotional havoc by simply being, he was at the same time one of the moths drawn ineluctably to her flame. Dietrich was an exciting woman whose eroticism was, to those she liked, neither
cheaply accessible nor teasingly withheld. For von Sternberg, she also seemed to promise more than she at any one time delivered—not only more sensual satisfaction but also more artistic possibilities for her exploitation as an actress. Thus he continued to work with her and to present new facets of the jewel. She listened, learned, complimented, frankly depended on him; in other words, she nourished his need to be important and necessary to a woman. She did not tire of him, as she could of Cooper or Chevalier, who were charming and handsome but, she implied, intellectually limited.

However, intimacy revealed to von Sternberg another part of her nature: that there was perhaps nothing in her emotional life reserved for only one or even a dozen people she liked. And this realization prompted von Sternberg to withdraw. The coolly detached seducer of the self-destructive man, she was an earthy woman who simply cavorted according to her nature (thus
The Blue Angel
). But the tarnished performer could also be a faithful follower (
Morocco
), a hooker with a curious higher morality (
Dishonored
), a weary traveler living by wit and charm (
Shanghai Express
), a mother devoted to her child (
Blonde Venus
). Although she always insisted her roles had nothing to do with her true character, the truth was just the opposite: they were in fact coded chapters in a kind of tribute-biography von Sternberg made of her, a series of essays that could have been called “All the Things You Are.” It was, then, precisely when he filmed her that this director attempted to justify her.

But he also saw her, in everyday life, as capricious, even sometimes shallow; his fantasy about her was therefore being chastened and his goddess revealed as thoroughly human, frail and fallible. Therefore, when he needed to draw on the reserves of dream and imagination for a new picture, he began to withdraw from intimacy. The Dietrich he was to offer to the camera could not be the one he had just known privately. There had to be veils left in place, shadows and mists still separating the seeker from the object of desire: von Sternberg needed always to imagine her as the leading character of one of her own silent films,
die Frau nach der man sich sehnt
—the woman one ever longs for.

But they were not Svengali and Trilby—a designation attached to them from their earliest days in Hollywood. “People have said he
casts a spell over me,” Dietrich said. “That is ridiculous. I am devoted, but I made the devotion myself because my brain told me to. It is only common sense to me. Can you think of anyone casting a spell over me?” In an odd way, the situation was effectively reversed: Marlene Dietrich cast the spell, Josef von Sternberg was enthralled.

F
OR THE PRESENT
, M
ARIA WAS UNAFFECTED BY HER
mother’s fame and the occasional controversies. Enrolled at a private school with other celebrity children, she had an amiable personality, although she was necessarily somewhat reserved until she became proficient in English. Dietrich, perhaps with more blithe imagination than prudence, ordered Maria’s wardrobe—dresses, pajamas, robes, shoes—in exact replicas of her own fashions and styles (but without the gentlemen’s suits Dietrich came to favor more and more in Hollywood). This might have initially pleased the girl, but she was left with the distinct impression that she was little more than an awkward adjunct in her mother’s life. Dietrich shuttled her to stores, purchased expensive gifts for her (even miniature rings and bracelets) and frequently took her to the beach and to riding lessons. But an easy rapport never seems to have been established. “I felt that she wanted to be with other people,” Maria said later of her Hollywood childhood.

I remember how I used to cry at night. I remember a whiff of perfume, and my mother in furs standing there in my room, looking so beautiful. I was so jealous when she went out—I knew she wanted to see someone else rather than me . . . She would tuck me in, kiss me, and
hurry, hurry
 . . . I wasn’t left alone. But I knew the servants and bodyguards were simply hired to take care of me, and I disliked them. I never told mother that I was unhappy.

With a curious irony, the pleasantest time of Maria’s first year in America paralleled the intensification of the Riza Marks–von Sternberg debacle. Rudi’s presence was required in California as a sign that the Sieber marriage was stable, and this, at least for a month that
summer of 1931, created the facsimile of a traditional family unit. Riza’s deposition had been taken in a Los Angeles court, where she had told Judge Lester W. Roth that her husband (before their June 1930 divorce) had “furnished an apartment for [Dietrich], and she charged clothing to his accounts.” She then added a comment that caused some amusement: “He never let
me
charge clothing to his accounts.” With such remarks the case was beginning not to be taken seriously.

As attorneys for the injured party continued to complain more publicly, the press naturally swung into action at the Pasadena railway station when Rudi arrived on July 19. From then on, at restaurants and at sporting events the Siebers frequented during the following four weeks, photographers leaped from behind trees, bushes and taxis to document father, mother and daughter—a happy trio, embracing, smiling, unconcerned for the mills of rumor. The better to confirm their innocence, Marlene and Rudi widened the family circle to include von Sternberg, who moved temporarily into quarters at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I am here,” Rudi told a reporter about his wife that summer,

to testify by my presence and any other way that I can testify, that I know that these charges against her are utterly unfounded. I have known and agreed with her attitude that rather than avoid the publicity of these suits she should welcome and face these charges . . . Both of us, as good and moral friends of Mr. von Sternberg, sympathize with him in the attack that is being made against him by his former wife.

Sieber had constructed a brilliant riposte, one possible only because the complex logic of his marriage defied American comprehension. Several months later, after the editor of the
Neues Wiener Journal
admitted that the interviewer had fabricated Dietrich’s remarks concerning the von Sternbergs, Riza dropped all charges.

But there was one sour note. Rudi Sieber resented not so much his wife’s flagrant adulteries (such, after all, virtually defined her private life) as he did the potential effect of her conduct on Maria; he considered her, in this regard, something of a bad influence. Only
when von Sternberg agreed not to return to live quite so openly with his wife and daughter did Sieber drop his threat to take Maria back with him to Germany—an ultimatum that caused Dietrich real panic (and a situation that directly inspired the plot development of the Dietrich-von Sternberg film
Blonde Venus
). Finally, Rudi departed Los Angeles in August to work at Paramount’s Joinville studio near Paris, a job facilitated through the intercession of none other than von Sternberg himself.