Blue Angel (24 page)

“He dreaded the day I would become a star,” she wrote more candidly after his death,

for he loved the creature whose image was reflected on film. Before von Sternberg took me in hand, I was no one . . . The films he made with me speak for themselves. Nothing to come
could surpass them. Filmmakers are forever doomed to imitate them.

That spring, Paramount negotiated a new contract with Dietrich’s agent, Harry Edington, which guaranteed her a total salary of
250,000 for two pictures over the next year, with the right to approve story and director; it was the most lucrative contract in Hollywood history, and it marked the beginning of an entirely new phase of her career and her fame. It was also a triumph of negotiation, for although Edington knew as well as anyone that Dietrich’s popularity was in severe decline, he persuaded Paramount that separation from von Sternberg would reverse all that; Edington added that after all they still required a glamorous European à la Garbo. (“My salary is not large if you consider it is spread over a year,” said Dietrich without irony. “To rent a house with tennis court and swimming pool, I must pay at least
500 a month.” Few were inclined to offer much sympathy, especially after she leased a richly appointed home in Bel-Air, an enclave of lavish estates west of Beverly Hills.)

“I
AM
M
ISS
D
IETRICH
, M
ISS
D
IETRICH IS ME
,” Josef von Sternberg had said. Now at last, with each fantasy revealed—from provocation to passion to revenge—the relationship had run its course. In their art, she was the triumphant character, but in the end the artist had to act in his own interest, and so he paid “a final tribute to the lady I had seen lean against the wings of a Berlin stage,” and then he quietly withdrew.

In every one of their films, an older man had been displaced or replaced in the affections of her character; consecutively, they had been played by Emil Jannings, Adolphe Menjou, Warner Oland, Herbert Marshall, Lionel Atwill, Sam Jaffe and again Lionel Atwill. Just so in real life now, for with much Hollywood hoopla and a lucrative new contract Dietrich not only survived but went on to conquer.

As for Josef von Sternberg, he left both her and Paramount, wandering from studio to project and completing only seven films
over the next thirty-four years; none of them was successful, none had the emotional wholeness of the preceding septet. In a way, he was both Pygmalion and Galatea, the ultimate victim of precisely the mythical creature he had created and promulgated. Restricted and made subordinate by his own fancies, he could really only celebrate her beguilement of him. And Dietrich was both enchanter and enchanted, too—thus also a victim of her own poignant need to please, of her ambition and her longing for professional security, of her dependence on a man she had (without malice) exploited.

After the favorable reactions to
The Blue Angel
and
Morocco
, American audiences continued to find her exotic and alluring, but even they gradually agreed with critics that visual splendor alone was unsatisfying. Sometimes, to be sure, Marlene Dietrich was photographed so magnificently that she seemed to be acting, but that, too, was mostly an illusion. Forever after, the autocratic, benighted lover and his obedient, heedless beloved never spoke of the wounded passion, the shared, secret history behind these seven confessional works, incomparable in the history of film.

*
Among a legion, this group included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willa Cather and Anita Loos (writers); Cheryl Crawford, Elizabeth Marbury, Eva Le Gallienne, Alla Nazimova, Katharine Cornell, Blanche Yurka, Natasha Rambova and Mary Martin (in the theater); Janet Gaynor, Jean Arthur, Kay Francis and Dorothy Arzner (in Hollywood).

*
In America, Friedrich Holländer became Frederick Hollander. He had written “Johnny” as a birthday present for Johnny Soyka, Dietrich’s agent at the time of
The Blue Angel
. Soyka’s wife Mady later had a fateful encounter with her in London.

*
In March 1934, Carl Ousen, president of the Nazi National Film Chamber, claimed that Dietrich sent a
500 check to their welfare fund. This was a neat tactic to discredit Dietrich in America, but it failed: her contribution, it was soon determined, was sent to a nonpolitical winter relief fund for poor children in her home district.

*
Among the most notable: architect Walter Gropius; designer Marcel Breuer; philosophers Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Herbert Marcuse, Erik Erikson and Claude Lévi-Strauss; conductors Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg and Bruno Walter; composers Arnold Schoenberg, Hans Eisler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill, Alfred Newman, Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith; writers Bertolt Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann; scientists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller; filmmakers Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang, Kurt (later Curtis) Bernhardt and Detlef Sierck (later Douglas Sirk).

*
With their usual calm cynicism, French film critics rose to the occasion. “L’Espagne de von Sternberg n’était et n’a jamais été l’Espagne,” proclaimed the editors of
Inteciné
in a typical comment that year. “C’était un pays imaginaire, un pays de conte, une espèce de paradis artificiel et romantique peuplé des fantasmes carnavalesques et d’amours impossibles . . . Pourquoi ce féroce auto-da-fé?”

9: 1935–1936

T
HE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1935 WERE A
period of pleasant indolence for Marlene Dietrich. Rudolf Sieber visited from Paris with Tamara Matul; he pored over his wife’s accounts, met with her agent and with tax advisers, and together they took Maria for a New York holiday. The friendship between them continued unbroken, if not uncomplicated.

So did Dietrich’s relationship with Mercedes de Acosta, who preferred a virtual oath of fidelity from the ladies with whom she enjoyed concurrent intimacies. Such a guarantee Dietrich was too aboveboard to provide, although she cannily learned not to divulge those details of her life that might estrange de Acosta. That year the two spent several days each week together, motoring to Santa Barbara for lunch, hiking in the canyons near Pacific Palisades or reading quietly at the home of one or the other. Dietrich’s domestic nature shone—she baked and cleaned and rearranged her friend’s closets and planned small dinners for friends.

Basil Rathbone (among others) was invited to these parties more
than once with his wife Ouida Bergere, a slightly affected and amusing lady. Many claimed that when she wed the very English Rath-bone she quietly altered for the record her real name (Ida Berger), birthplace (Brooklyn) and accent (also Brooklyn). He recalled Dietrich serving champagne and caviar, then disappearing into the kitchen for an hour, whence she emerged “fragrant and cool and lovely as if she had just stepped out of a perfumed Roman bath” and summoned guests to an elegant dinner she had herself prepared. At such gatherings Dietrich made no effort to conceal the nature of her relationship with de Acosta, nor did she feel compelled to announce the banns.

But it was of course always easier for two women to have social variations on the so-called Boston marriage, which could be interpreted as simply a warm friendship; men, on the other hand, could never be so open, and their careers were jeopardized by even temporal cohabitation. Later, when Janet Gaynor and Mary Martin took a holiday together (leaving behind their homosexual husbands), the public felt it was charming for them to enjoy some time for “girl-talk.” It was widely known that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott—although, like Gaynor and Martin, married—enjoyed more than simply a platonic friendship; in fact, they shared a beach house every weekend for years. But finally they were given an ultimatum by RKO: Grant had to choose either Scott or contract renewal. As so often, professional considerations prevailed.

Quite apart from her open relationship to de Acosta, Dietrich blazed a fashion trail around town, making a tuxedo and fedora the
ne plus ultra
of chic women’s formalwear and enabling women to challenge another level of sexual stereotype. In this regard, rightly popularizing those freedoms long enjoyed exclusively by unconventional women, she brought a refreshing candor and dignity to life in Hollywood.

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
1935, D
IETRICH BEGAN FILMING THE
comedy
Desire
, directed by Frank Borzage and produced by Ernst Lubitsch, whose
Trouble in Paradise
(made three years earlier) it much resembled. As a glamorous and sophisticated Parisian jewel thief who
makes the American naïf Gary Cooper her unwitting accomplice in the heisting of a pearl necklace, Dietrich was at last allowed a chance to do more than pose statuesquely. “Permitted to walk, breathe, smile and shrug as a human being instead of a canvas for the Louvre,” ran a typical review, “[she] recaptures some of the freshness of
The Blue Angel
 . . . Miss Dietrich is not dependent upon stylized photography and direction but has a proper talent of her own.” Her half-smiles hinted at a wily subterfuge, she sang Hollander’s “Awake in a Dream” with wry self-mockery and thus Dietrich effectively created a modern, credible character from an array of charmingly improbable situations.

No longer simply an excuse for von Sternberg’s fantasies, Dietrich demonstrated in
Desire
a flair for comic timing and supple expressiveness and, having learned every technical detail, she readily suggested to cinematographer Victor Milner the best camera angle and lighting configuration for herself (and sometimes for Cooper as well). “She was a perfectionist,” according to designer Edith Head, then working with chief costume designer Travis Banton. Early during the shooting of
Desire
, Dietrich kept Head working thirty-six uninterrupted hours at Paramount, pausing only for three hours sleep as she anguished over the choice of the right hat for one scene.

We sat up for hours trying on dozens of different hats, changing them, tilting them, taking the feathers off this one and trying them on that one, snipping off a veil or a brim, switching ribbons and bows. Finally we got what she wanted. I was amazed at her stamina and determination.

Similarly, photographer John Engstead recalled that weeks later, after trying forty hats submitted by New York designers, Dietrich selected a dramatic black one Lubitsch and Borzage at once realized would excessively shade her face. She tried others, wearing each one at a deliberately wrong angle until the men yielded and allowed her to wear the black. When she saw the film’s rushes next day, however, she had to admit that they had been right. Persistent she may have been, but always thoroughly professional.

Her studio education filtered into her home life, as visiting photographers and journalists often learned. Arriving there, they were taken to the living room, whose major light source was a single pinpoint spot focussed above the fireplace. Eventually Dietrich glided in and moved silently into place, leaning against the mantel and raising her head until the illumination of her cheekbones was dramatically presented to her visitors. “Falling into exciting and sinuous poses is second nature to Marlene,” commented Engstead.