Marlene Dietrich Photographs and Memories compiled by Jean-Jacques Naudet, edited by Maria Riva Knopf, 288 pp., $40 JUST SHORT of fifty and in the throes of an affair with Yul Brynner, Marlene Dietrich tried to get pregnant. She didn’t succeed, but in the decades ahead, she reshaped her body to fit an image of eternal youth: a nylon foundation, a blonde wig, a sheer harness. The day came, though, when even she knew that no makeup or underwear or lighting could breath life into what was now a shell of that mythic figure, the aloof seductress of old. “Ich bin ein praktischer Mensch,” she said, and as a practical person, she assembled inside her Paris apartment all the essentials for her last years. Beside her bed ran two low tables, where she stored liquor and a chamber pot fashioned from a Limoges pitcher. Dietrich, that self-constructed image of beauty, disregarded time and denied much of her history. She maintained that she was an unknown drama student when Josef von Sternberg cast her in “The Blue Angel” (1930) as Lola-Lola, the fraulein who reduced men to degradation and worse. She was, in fact, a veteran of seven years and seventeen films, not to mention the walk-on parts as far back as 1919. She claimed, too, to be an only child. There was actually a sister, disavowed by Dietrich because of her work for the Nazis at Bergen-Belsen. Even for a woman who routinely reshaped facts to satisfy the myth, truths emerged here and there. When her “Judgment at Nuremberg” co-star, Maximilian Schell, came to her Paris apartment in 1982 to do a documentary about her, he described the “Dietrich persona” as “erotic.” Dietrich, now a cranky old woman who refused to go on camera out of vanity, balked, “I wasn’t erotic at all. I was snotty.” Her laser-sharp self-assessment was lost on the critics, who saw it as disingenuous modesty. But what many mistake for the erotic is really a stance of cold contempt. Of arrogance, Dietrich once said, “On some people it looks good.” She was thinking of herself, no doubt. An American couldn’t have gotten away with it. Just as Americans want to believe that every whore has a heart of gold, so they imagined that beneath this German expatriate’s cold exterior was a sultry woman. In reality, she was nothing more than an aristocrat who won over a generous but naive public. Her co-conspirator was von Sternberg. (As did fellow Austrian Erich von Stroheim, he added “von” to lend hauteur to his name.) Dietrich was thoroughly divorced from sentiment. Shortly after her death in 1992, her daughter, Maria Riva, wrote a massive tome in which she divulged, among other things, that her mother loathed sex, but when admirers asked for “it,” she gave freely, knowing that that was the price to pay to keep her bevy of followers faithful. You can see some of her lover’s letters, and other artifacts, including stills and costumes, in Riva’s latest book, “Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories.” Even by celebrity standards, Dietrich’s personal life was bizarre. Wildly promiscuous, she remained married throughout her life to Rudolf Sieber, an assistant director from Czechoslovakia whom she met before the onslaught of fame. During their fifty-year marriage, Sieber was Dietrich’s kept-man; he guarded the image of fidelity, while she paid for his Russian mistress’s frequent abortions. In 1953, as she kicked off her world tour, he became a chicken farmer in California. The daughter of a Prussian officer who died in World War I, Dietrich’s noble roots directed her every step. As a teen, she was already skilled in English and French, the violin and piano, when she shortened her name, Maria Magdalene to Marlene. She eyed a career as a musician, but at eighteen, a hand injury forced her to change direction, and despite her family’s disapproval, she turned to acting. Her big break came when von Sternberg chose her for the part of Lola-Lola after seeing her on stage. In “The Blue Angel,” Dietrich is unpolished, her body pudgy, her acting stiff. But Paramount–eager to compete against MGM’s Greta Garbo–thought she had the makings of a star. She shed thirty pounds, and in six more von Sternberg movies the director and his star shaped the legend. They learned the right lighting to transform her rather flat face into an angular map of mystery that would lure American audiences hungry for a glimpse of European sophistication. She was consistently lit from above to lighten the hair and make the cheekbones and nose appear patrician. Von Sternberg’s productions showcased the actress in lavish costumes. The most successful was the 1932 “Shanghai Express,” where, as Shanghai Lily, she is a woman with a past who sacrifices herself to a Chinese warlord to save the man she loves. Along the way, she woos the audience with the smooth French she injects into the dialogue. In the film “Morocco,” she dons a top hat, white tie, and tails. There’s often something mechanical about Dietrich’s performance; even in “Blonde Venus,” when she emerges from a huge, hairy gorilla suit and puts on a fuzzy wig, it’s the visual spectacle that grabs you more than Dietrich herself. Her only likable performance is in “Destry Rides Again.” But that’s only because she’s under the direction of a truly American director, the corn-pone George Marshall, not an migr with a “von” in his name. Free not to be a German artiste, she becomes Frenchy, the battling, boisterous “saloon tart” who sports “Shirley Temple curls,” falls for Jimmy Stewart, and claws her way through a wildcat fight. Along the way, she sings the song that would become a Dietrich classic, “See What The Boys in the Backroom Will Have.” The myth was most evocative during World War II, when she emerged as a concert performer who entertained Allied troops between April 1944 and July 1945. She crooned, “Lili Marlene,” played a musical saw between her famous legs (she learned to play the instrument back in 1927), and strutted across the stage with comedian Danny Thomas. The USO tours and the ensuing accolades–the Medal of Freedom and the French Legion of Honor, the distinction she prized the most–paved the way for the postwar career to come. In 1953, with her fame cemented by Hollywood, she began the series of concerts that took her around the world. As both actress and singer, Dietrich had little depth. The role that was said to show her dramatic skills, that of the cockney hag in “Witness for the Prosecution,” is wildly overrated. As a singer, she was self-conscious about her lack of vocal range and swallowed cortisone religiously after hearing it opened the cords. The audiences didn’t see the flaws, though. Every night, a glamorous, lone figure, adorned in a seductive “nude” dress, took center stage, flouting the inroads of time as she wooed all with her sophistication. This was, after all, not just any movie star but royalty who counted Noel Coward, Ernest Hemingway, Sir Alexander Fleming, and Erich Maria Remarque among her friends. (Dietrich largely shunned the friendship of actors.) She made records, too. There was the 1965 “Marlene: Songs in German,” which included her purr-growl voice attempting “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “In the Barracks.” The album jacket includes praise for her “bolstering the spirits of American fighting men during World War II–far beyond the call of duty for a new citizen, . . . the woman who has risen above intense dedication to her art, to feel so deeply about the world around her.” Dietrich, though, never cherished America. “Those terrible Puritans,” she would tell her daughter, “America is full of them.” Perhaps that explains why, on that day in June 1939 when she became an American citizen, she looked so bored. The famous photo that circulated around the world showed Dietrich, eyes downcast, leaning against the magistrate’s desk as he administered the Pledge of Allegiance. A patrician to the core, she merely accepted America as an alternative to a country that had embraced a leader of bourgeois stock. In later years, during that talk with Maximilian Schell, she bemoaned what she saw as a Germa
n trait. “All Germans want a leader,” she said, “but with Hitler that was too much for me.” True to her roots, she shunned complexity and approached life as if all were simple. “I don’t have kitsch feelings,” she told Schell. For Dietrich, religion and feeling were foolish. Unfaithful to men and women alike, she believed in lust, not love. Now, seventy years after she shot to fame, Dietrich and her persona linger in the public mind. There’s nothing real or genuine there, nothing sultry or erotic beneath the supercilious armor that she brought to virtually every role on camera and off. But we can’t help but think otherwise. Lisa Singh is a writer in Richmond, Virginia.
