Blue Angel (46 page)

The Paris sojourn preceded her first major film role in over five years (since the dreadful
Rancho Notorious,)
and every element for success seemed in place: a glamorous wardrobe (by Jean Louis), a photogenic setting (Monte Carlo) and one of the world’s most respected actors and directors as her leading man (the dashing former matinee idol Vittorio De Sica, whose films
The Bicycle Thief
and
Umberto D
., among others, she much admired).

The Monte Carlo Story
was filmed there during that summer of 1956, but somehow none of the attractive constituents could counterpoise a wooden script, unappealing characters and uninspired direction. De Sica played a minor, faded aristocrat addicted to the gambling tables who decides to marry a rich woman (Dietrich) who turns out to be even poorer than he—an elegant fraud with her own designs on his dwindling fortune. According to the custom of European filmmaking, the dialogue was dubbed after photography, and in the finished film every scene is sufficiently asynchronous to make the actors seem as if they move on command.

Decked out in primary colors, Dietrich moved carefully (sometimes as if sleepwalking, it seems), and only in the relaxed, comic kitchen scene with De Sica did she appear interested or vivacious. The entire production was indeed an unhappy experience, beginning with Dietrich’s irrational and singularly graceless attitude toward a young American starlet cast in the film. Natalie Trundy was a pretty blond fifteen-year-old who, after appearing on the cover of
Paris Match
, incurred Dietrich’s jealous wrath simply because of the attention lavished on a young player by the press. For no good reason (and to the shock of cast and crew), the star slapped the poor girl after a scene one afternoon. The courtly De Sica was furious, referring thereafter to Dietrich as “that witch.” There was more trouble when Dietrich was barred from the Monte Carlo Casino because she attended in trousers. Even a telephone call to Aristotle Onassis (who owned a major share of the place) was of no avail in that instance, and she was shocked to learn that Princess Grace and Prince Rainier were away from the principality and unable to rush to her aid. Her temper finally flared when, in her suite at the Hôtel
de Paris, she hurled abuse at the manager when only a dozen roses decorated her suite: “You call these
flowers?
I want five thousand roses, not a dozen!” Her tantrum had the staff hopping, as her secretary, Bernard Hall, recalled, “and vases upon vases were rushed to her suite.”

*
The circumstances of the Dietrich-Louis collaboration were curious. Not long before, she had agreed to appear in a film version of the musical
Pal Joey
with Frank Sinatra, but when Harry Cohn decided to substitute Jack Lemmon, Dietrich withdrew, claiming Lemmon would not be right as her co-star. Cohn, still furious, at first flatly rejected her subsequent request for Jean Louis’s services, but after Dietrich complained to her Las Vegas management Cohn received cautionary telephone calls from certain underworld figures in Chicago, and Jean Louis was soon permitted to design Dietrich’s dress. (As it happened, Sinatra eventually did play
Pal Joey.)

*
According to Jean Louis, Dietrich agreed to loan one of the three copies of her dress to a starlet scheduled to hand out a prize at a charity ball. She attached two conditions, however: offering the value of the dress as a reason, she insisted that it should not be delivered to the wearer until moments before it was to be worn; it was also stipulated that the young lady wear nothing underneath (as, Dietrich lied to a gullible press, she had worn it). “The poor girl put on the dress hurriedly and as she had agreed,” Jean Louis recalled, “and of course all those sequins and bugles and everything were so heavy it just pulled the dress down, and with no foundation garments or anything sewn in, it just hung on her like wet cement.” Exactly, no doubt, as Dietrich had foreseen.

*
In light of this brief affair, Dietrich could eventually claim that three of her former lovers subsequently married Elizabeth Taylor: in 1957, after divorcing Michael Wilding, Taylor wed Todd. A year later, Todd was killed in a plane crash, and the first to comfort the grieving widow was Fisher, who in 1959 divorced Debbie Reynolds to marry Taylor.

16: 1957–1960

O
N
F
EBRUARY
14, 1957,
SIX WEEKS AFTER
her fifty-fifth birthday, Marlene Dietrich opened her annual Las Vegas engagement, this time at the Sands Hotel. She began her midnight act with a husky, almost bleated rendition of “Look Me Over Closely”—an apt tune in light of her outfit, a floor-length, skintight gown with thousands of tiny handsewn beads and a white, twelve-by-eight-foot wrap fashioned from five million swan feathers (which weighed less than four pounds). Dietrich had undergone yet another face-lift earlier that winter, and with expert makeup and a hairpiece designed to her meticulous specifications, there was inevitably something too studied, too exaggeratedly artful about her appearance. At odd moments when she regarded herself in a mirror, she saw (as she told photographer John Engstead) a grotesque female impersonator. One evening backstage in Las Vegas, a seam split, several dozen dress-beads clattered to the floor, and she was anxious
that all of them might fall off and scatter. She could have seen the moment as metaphoric, a marker of the unravelling of that part of herself that was entirely false.

Yet to the maintenance of this fundamentally unreal personality, of a strictly created and annually recreated illusion, she dedicated herself with canny zealotry. Her avidity for this was based on a fierce professionalism and a tenacious will to succeed, but she was also imprisoned within a persona for which there was simply no replacement: in thirty years there had been only minor variations to her image as a
femme fatale
.

Although Marlene Dietrich was associated with a kind of enduring, timeless beauty and the triumph of wily, feminine allure, it was equally clear from her image (as from her life) that much of her victory was Pyrrhic, that it had left her with fame and a bank account, social access anywhere, and an often unacknowledged loneliness everywhere. She told many people some facts of her life, but no one was privy to her deepest feelings; indeed, many who knew her well (her publicist Rupert Allen, for one) felt that perhaps she had no deep feelings at all, that by middle age she had successfully inured herself against grief, loss and the demands of authentic love—that there was, in other words, no frame of reference outside herself.

In any case, there certainly seems to have been no one in whom she ever confided in a deeply affectionate way. Neither lovers nor platonic friends like Noël Coward (whose gift for true camaraderie has been much documented) ever described her with any of the empathy that characterizes mature friendship. Dietrich was thus, perhaps unwittingly, severely limited by her devotion to an exhausted, manufactured personality to which she had no alternative because she considered no choices.
*

Some of this was perhaps inevitable for a woman who had not acted on the stage since 1929, and whose international fame depended on an audience’s familiarity with how she had once looked; she was, in other words, something of a museum piece. But actresses were presented very differently in 1957 from the way they had been in the 1930s—and not only in hemlines, cosmetics and lighting. Of
those women who had made films in the 1930s, few had careers that survived into the new world of movie entertainment, threatened by television, but saved by Technicolor, wide screens and gradually more latitude in content and treatment. The public now preferred the fey charm of Audrey Hepburn, the sheer luxuriance of Marilyn Monroe, the sensuous youth of Elizabeth Taylor, the perky audacity of Shirley MacLaine and the muted passion of Deborah Kerr. Dietrich had only a past iconography to tap, and only a present reputation for appearing on the lists of Best Dressed Women: she gave no indication of having grown into a new era or a fresh perception. It was of course fine to be the carrier of a grand history, but there was a consequent danger, and Dietrich seemed in a strange way mummified. In that regard, she was victimized by one of the most fantastic aberrations in contemporary culture, one to which she herself contributed: the futile quest for perpetual youth and the concomitant obsession with forestalling death.

A
T THE CONCLUSION OF HER
L
AS
V
EGAS ASSIGN
ment, Dietrich hastened to Los Angeles, where in 1957 she appeared in two of her last four film roles. For Orson Welles, the star and director of
Touch of Evil
, she agreed—on two days’ notice—to work one afternoon and evening, impersonating a cigar-chomping, fortune-telling bordello madam. “There was no talk about reading the script or what the part was at all,” according to Welles. “She said, ‘What should I look like?’ I said, ‘You should be
dark
.’ ” And that gave Dietrich her clue: tearing through cartons of her own costume remnants and scouring thrift shops, she came up with a stringy black wig, spangled shoes and a variety of tacky odds and ends that were perfect for the role and delighted her old friend the director.

Appearing in three scenes of
Touch of Evil
for a total of less than four minutes, Dietrich—perilously close to unintentional parody—advised the pathetic, vicious character played by the obese Welles to “lay off the candy bars,” and then sadly informed him, “You have no future—it’s all used up.” For the rest of her life, she often said this brief role was “the best thing I have ever done in films . . . I
think I never said a line as well as the last line in that movie, ‘What does it matter what you say about people?’ ”

In June, Dietrich received an urgent cable from the writer and director Preston Sturges, then residing in Paris, asking her to replace Ingrid Bergman in the French production of Robert Anderson’s play
Tea and Sympathy
so that Bergman could appear in a Sturges production. But she could not, for she had accepted Billy Wilder’s offer to play the apparently duplicitous but actually faithful wife who is the
Witness for the Prosecution
.

In this screen adaptation of the successful play, Dietrich was Christine Vole, a former cabaret star brought from Germany to England after the war by her husband (Tyrone Power). He is accused of murdering a wealthy widow, and during a complicated trial she schemes to prove that she is untrustworthy as a witness against him. Her ploy works, and the jury pronounces her husband innocent, framed by his faithless wife; but once he is free, she reveals to his attorney (Charles Laughton) that her husband was indeed guilty of the crime, and that she has risked everything and perjured herself to free him. Greeting her husband after his release, she then learns that he is eagerly awaited by another woman; scorned, she stabs him to death, immediately earning the advocacy of the same attorney.

As a woman who plots, lies and kills for love, Dietrich put aside every bangle and bauble of her nightclub image and worked to exhaustion on a role that could have been written for her. “She was like nothing I’ve ever seen,” according to Billy Wilder. “Marlene was always a worker, always the good trouper, but on this picture she was tireless—it almost seemed as if she thought her career depended on it.” She worked daily with Wilder and into the evenings with Laughton to perfect the cockney accent she needed for her disguised character-within-the-role.

Seconds before her entrance, Laughton warns a colleague about her character: “Bear in mind she’s a foreigner, so be prepared for hysterics or even a fainting spell. Have smelling salts ready.” At once her voice is heard off-camera: “I don’t think that will be necessary.” Only then do we see her, framed in a doorway, a somewhat remote figure in a tailored suit, cloche hat and gloves. In utter simplicity,
photographed full-face in black and white, Dietrich appears as nothing like a screen goddess; her beauty is in fact severe. “I never faint, because I’m not sure that I will fall gracefully,” she says unblinkingly to Laughton, “and I never use smelling salts because they puff up the eyes.” Alert with pretense and passion, her mouth defiant, Dietrich’s Christine was from the first moment a woman of steely self-confidence—a fascinating role played without fussy technique.

There was one concession to the legend, however—an early flashback devised for the film so that Dietrich could belt out “I May Never Go Home Anymore” at a German cabaret called The Red Devil, a neat inversion of her most famous venue. For this sequence, as homage to moments in several earlier movies, Dietrich causes a riot, soldiers rush the stage and her trouser leg is conveniently torn; it was the last glimpse, in film history, of this Prussian cheesecake.

“It is not easy to teach Cockney to a German glamour-puss who can’t pronounce her Rs, but she did astonishingly well,” noted Noël Coward in his diary on August 4 after visiting Los Angeles and adding his own suggestions to Laughton’s diction lessons. As she worked on her accent and created garish makeup for the scene in which Christine disguises herself, Dietrich had the idea that her performance might win her what she thought was a long overdue Academy Award. She had been nominated only once (for
Morocco)
. “She was desperately disappointed when she was not even nominated for the award,” according to Billy Wilder. And the veteran Hollywood reporter Radie Harris remembered “too well how much [Dietrich] wanted an Oscar. She even went so far as to call me from Las Vegas and asked me to please hint in my column that she deserved [it].”
*
Dietrich also complained to Rupert Allen that the publicists engaged for
Witness for the Prosecution
were not giving her the attention she merited, nor advancing her for the Oscar sufficiently. But none of her self-promotion availed.

During production she and Wilder were, as always, the best of friends. He and his wife included Dietrich at a dinner party that season, and years later he recalled