Blue Angel (22 page)

On the town with Maurice Chevalier and Gary Cooper: Hollywood, 1932.

Welcoming an ardent cadre of the Hollywood press to her home, 1933.

On the set of
Song of Songs
, 1933.

At a Hollywood polo match with Rudolf Sieber, Josef von Sternberg, Tamara Matul and Maria (1934).

In Hollywood, 1935.

With Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., at a London theater, 1936.

With Sieber in Salzburg, 1937.

With von Sternberg and Erich Maria Remarque, at the Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc, Antibes: July 1939.

As Frenchy in
Destry Rides Again
, 1939.

With John Wayne in
Seven Sinners
, 1940.

At the Hollywood Canteen, 1943.

With Jean Gabin, 1943.

Ornate and vexatious,
The Scarlet Empress
was nothing like Alexander Korda’s
Catherine the Great
, released the same year and starring Dietrich’s old acquaintance Elisabeth Bergner; it also had none of that film’s ultimate success. So grotesque that it never bores, von Sternberg’s film is hilariously improbable in the love scenes between Dietrich and John Lodge, who played Alexei, field marshal of the Russian Army. Reasons other than his role and his performance doubtless contributed to his decision, but soon after this picture he left films and entered real-life politics, becoming in turn a congressman, governor of Connecticut and ambassador to Spain and Argentina.

Typically, von Sternberg could not dissociate his art from complex feelings about Dietrich; he was in fact drawn to this historical pageant by the situation that recurs in each of their joint pictures: a man rejected. Despotic, sometimes downright unkind and rarely popular with his cast, von Sternberg was more and more frequently described as a dictator on his pictures. In this regard, he painstakingly directed Sam Jaffe in the role of Grand Duke Peter, who emerges as nothing so much as a stencil of the director himself, a smiling, mad dwarf commanding his toy soldiers round a “war set,” an idiot fated to abandonment by a woman whose beauty renders him helpless. Otherwise,
The Scarlet Empress
is notable only for the casting of Maria in a brief, early scene as the young Sophia.

When Dietrich returned from Europe, von Sternberg was unsure of their relationship; she spent much of her nonworking time with Mercedes de Acosta and a new circle of acquaintances in Brentwood and Santa Monica—amusing and talented companions like Martin Kosleck and his lover Hans von Twardowsky, German actors who were able to work occasionally in Hollywood films.
Feeling distant from her, von Sternberg more than ever played the directorial tyrant at the studio, imprudently expressing his fear of separation by asking her to repeat difficult scenes, as if she would thus realize a kind of pathetic dependence on him. Predictably, this had the contrary effect: the more he tried to psychologically apprehend her, the more she politely withdrew—but never revealed her dismay at work. John Engstead recalled that von Sternberg required her to descend a vast staircase in her elaborate costume forty-five times; she obeyed without a single complaint. “They say von Sternberg is ruining me,” she said with apparent innocence to a journalist. “I say let him ruin me. I would rather have a small part in one of his good pictures than a big part in a bad one made by someone else.”