by Sue Corbett
Her work was always hard to describe. She herself called it a process of arriving at psychological truth by means of tonal accuracy. Externally it was made up of innumerable small details of gesture and facial expression; but what she was clearly mattered more than what she did, with the result that any attempt to express it in words was liable to turn into gush. Colleagues habitually summed her up by contrasts: “English containment and wild passion”, “fearlessness and vulnerability”, “ferocity and tenderness.” Anthony Quayle put it more simply: “She’s a crusader, she’s Pilgrim’s Progress to the end.”
Besides Komisarjevsky, she was married to Sir Rupert Hart-Davis and to Jeremy Hutchinson (now Lord Hutchinson of Lullington), by whom she leaves a son and a daughter.
Dame Peggy Ashcroft, DBE, actress, was born on December 22, 1907. She died on June 14, 1991, aged 83
MARLENE DIETRICH
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MESMERISINGLY EROTIC, HUSKY-VOICED HOLLYWOOD FILM STAR AND CABARET SINGER
MAY 7, 1992
“Though we all might enjoy/ Seeing Helen of Troy/As a gay cabaret entertainer/ I doubt that she could/ Be one quarter as good/ As our legendary, lovely/ Marlene.”
Thus Noël Coward, introducing Dietrich to a London nightclub audience at the Café de Paris in 1954 by which time the star was well into her fifties and a second career. In her first career she had conquered the screens, first as Lola in The Blue Angel. Others have taken the role of Heinrich Mann’s temptress, on screen — and on stage a version is about to open on Shaftesbury Avenue. But none could match Dietrich. Hollywood seized her and Paramount turned her into a star. She became synonymous with the erotic: no one could light a cigarette more sensuously than she or tell, in the huskiest of voices, the boys in the backroom what they should have. Unlike most actresses who are compelled to evolve with age the image of Dietrich, once established, was amplified rather than altered as time went on. The insolent, ironic style of her youth did at one point mellow into approachability, but it re-emerged in maturer form to haunt her later performances on the screen and in cabaret. But the soul of the Dietrich secret, a quality which kept crowds queuing for her one-woman shows at an age when such a thing came to seem almost preposterous, was something, perhaps, more fundamental.
Reduced to its simplest terms, Dietrich’s appeal was, indeed, sex appeal. But it was a sex appeal which involved not merely the face, the million dollar legs and the air of Do Not Touch, which were all part of the armoury. Essentially, it embodied the idea of the eternal woman and like Garbo it began with beauty of an order calculated to overwhelm the senses, suspending criticism of the roles (frequently in Dietrich’s case tawdry ones) represented by the actress. The crowds who later flocked to see and hear the septuagenarian Dietrich came not to judge the performance but simply to be part of the ambience it created.
The biggest mystery about Dietrich was, for a long time, her date of birth. This was carefully concealed and suggestions for the date ranged from 1894 through to 1912. Then the secret came out when an East German clerk located in his registry and somewhat tactlessly published the entry relating to the birth of one Maria Magdalene (hence the contraction Marlene) Dietrich on December 27, 1901, in the suburb of Schöneberg.
Marlene Dietrich was born Maria Magdalene, the second daughter of an officer in the Prussian police and a mother who came from a well-known family of Berlin jewellers. She grew up against a background of clenched social and financial respectability. A year or two after her birth Dietrich’s father died and her mother married another military man, Edouard von Losch, who was killed on the Russian front in the closing weeks of the first world war, leaving his widow and her daughters in severely straitened circumstances. But her mother strenuously supported her daughter’s intense desire to be a performer and she in turn remained proud of her Prussian ancestry.
By 1919 Dietrich was enrolled in the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, since it was thought she had a future as a violinist. Damage to her wrist put an end to that idea, and she soon afterwards auditioned for Max Reinhardt. But he gravely doubted her acting ability and her first attempt was not successful. For some time after that she worked as a chorus girl in a touring company before he eventually gave her small roles at the Deutsches Theater.
While there Dietrich, like many of her contemporaries, also began to play small roles at the UFA studios.
It was in 1922, though she often denied it, that she made her debut at the age of 21 as a maid in The Little Napoleon. For the next seven years she divided her time more or less equally between the theatres of Berlin and its film studios: on stage, guided by Reinhardt, she worked in Shaw’s Misalliance and Back to Methuselah, establishing a local reputation second only to that of Elisabeth Bergner who once remarked: “If I were as beautiful as Marlene, I wouldn’t know what to do with my talent.”
“Calculatingly lit and evocatively dressed”: Marlene Dietrich at the Queen’s Theatre in London in 1964
But on screen Dietrich’s talents were confined to rather less demanding or rewarding scripts until in 1929 the Austrian director who was to become her guide, mentor and guardian, Josef von Sternberg, while searching for a Lola to play opposite Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, saw her on stage one night. He was later to write: “There was a woman whose face promised everything. I took a beautiful woman, instructed her, presented her carefully, edited her charms, disguised her imperfections and led her to crystallise a pictorial aphrodisiac.”
The success of The Blue Angel in Berlin confirmed rather than created Dietrich as a star in Germany: a year earlier she had already been sharing German movie-magazine covers with Garbo. But internationally it was the film in which she was born, and which was to characterise her forever. “What happened to you before Blue Angel?” she was once asked at a Hollywood press conference. Dietrich, who was never renowned for courtesy when dealing with the press, replied curtly and none too accurately, “Nothing”.
Paramount immediately signed her to a two-picture deal and she moved to California with von Sternberg, sending only some months later for the husband and daughter with whom she had started her family in Berlin during the late 1920s.
Her first American picture was Morocco (1930) for which Paramount made her lose 33 pounds in weight. Thereafter she appeared in films ranging from such von Sternberg classics as Blonde Venus (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934) through the considerably less impressive Garden of Allah (1936) to George Marshall’s great western Destry Rides Again (1939). But it became increasingly clear that with von Sternberg’s determination to end their partnership in the middle 1930s the focus of Marlene’s interest in cinema became blurred. Her last film with von Sternberg was Devil is a Woman (1935).
So when the war came, it was with a kind of relief that she went off around the world on extended army concert tours, beginning to work as a singer with live audiences that were to occupy more and more of her time in the second half of her career. She had rejected an offer by Hitler — the only person she ever “hated” she said in her 1979 memoirs — to return to Germany and become a star of the Nazi-controlled film company UFA, and in 1937 she took United States citizenship.
During the second world war she participated in the US war effort by keeping the troops’ morale high as a singer in benefit performances for the US army’s welfare services in North Africa, Italy and other European war theatres. This first work as a singer with the live audiences was to occupy more and more of her time in the second half of her career. Quite extraordinarily it was her version of a German first world war soldiers’ song, “Lili Marlene”, that propelled it to fame, in spite of the initial attempts of both British and American army authorities to have it suppressed as subversive. Her version of the song eventually made it popular on both sides of the fighting lines. “Falling in Love Again” was another huge wartime success, as popular with German PoWs as it had been with American GIs.
After the war, an affair with Jean Gabin led her back to the cinema for Martin Roumagnac, but fro
m now on her films were to get fewer and further apart. Her next venture was Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair (1948), a hard-edged comedy of post-war Berlin. In 1950 she starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Stage Fright and Henry Koster’s No Highway (1951).
But between the films she had begun to develop a cabaret talent second to none. Cocteau once said that her beauty was its own praise, and Hemingway, a lover of blondes in general and Dietrich in particular, noted: “her voice alone could break your heart”. Beyond the heartbreak was the expression of an immensely theatrical talent for going out alone on stage and holding an audience with all the power of a great dramatic actress that many of her songs, from “Lili Marlene” of the second world war to “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” of the Vietnam conflict, required.
Although she worked once with Hitchcock, once with Kramer and most memorably with Orson Welles in A Touch of Evil (1958), few directors were able to follow in the footsteps of “Svengali Jo” von Sternberg. So she took to travelling more and more alone on solo cabaret. Her last cameo role was in Just a Gigolo in 1976. The “Marlene” of the 1930s, a German-American creation of von Sternberg and some excellent lighting cameramen, was gradually translated into “Dietrich”, a somewhat tougher and lonelier figure who, around the world, learnt the greatest of all theatrical lessons: waste nothing. Money, time and herself were all exquisitely preserved against need, and, although sometimes cold to frosty and distant before the footlights, she passed again and again that final test of stardom — the ability not just to do something, but to stand there.
Her war activities tarnished her reputation in Germany, where she was regarded as a traitor long after hostilities ceased. When she returned to West Germany in 1960 for a series of performances, she found that the image of her wearing an American uniform was still vivid in the minds of many Germans. Her homecoming was marred by bomb threats, pickets carrying signs in English that read “Marlene Go Home” and editorials calling her a “traitor”. Despite a unanimously acclaimed performance with two encores and 11 curtain calls, she said she would never return.
Towards the end of her career, in concert seasons for the West End and New York and Australia through the middle 1970s, she would take centre stage, an elderly German lady with a slight limp swathed in acres of white fur. She was Dietrich, a constant reminder of the survival of the human spirit and of endurance. She was a theatrical Mother Courage without Brecht, belonging with Lotte Lenya and Edith Piaf and precious few others to a band of dramatic singers who had spanned much of the century. Having her sing to you was not unlike being entertained by the Statue of Liberty. Her greatest achievement was perhaps to evoke memories and the past and then to transcend them.
As the years went on her one-woman show with its battery of the old, irresistible songs, “Lili Marlene”, “Falling in Love Again” and “Honeysuckle Rose”, established her beyond the reach of any criticism that might have accrued to her films. Audiences that included large numbers of women to whom she had an appeal as electrifying as she did to men packed in to see her wherever she appeared. In a way, her image regained its pristine Sternbergian remoteness (although, owing to her creator’s lack of charity to her in his autobiography, she did for a while stop alluding to his contribution to her early success).
As she passed 60 and then 70, an older generation went to see her out of nostalgia for an age of elegant and beautiful women that seemed to have departed, while their children were fascinated anew by the timeless distillation of the experience of being a woman she communicated. In the end, perhaps, the act was more and more in the nature of a carefully planned assault on the emotions, meticulously orchestrated, calculatingly lit and evocatively dressed. But nobody minded. The idea of the woman who had been a close friend of Cocteau and Remarque, of whom Hemingway had characteristically remarked: “The Kraut’s the best thing that ever came into the ring”, had long outlived its physical embodiment.
By the time the famous legs did fail and Marlene Dietrich fell on stage and broke a thigh bone in Sydney on September 29, 1975, she had passed unassailably into the legends which it is Hollywood’s peculiar power to create. She retired to her home on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris. Like Callas and Garbo before her, she shunned publicity and declined interviews, especially from those trying to chronicle her life in one or other of the media. “No one will ever trespass on my private world,” she said and she kept to her word.
The Dietrich image was well preserved elsewhere. In 1947 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest US decoration for civilians, for her contributions to the American war effort, and made French Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 1951 and Officier of the Légion d’honneur in 1972.
Dietrich leaves her only child, a daughter Maria born in 1925 to the husband, Rudolph Sieber, whom she had married a year earlier and to whom she remained distantly married until his death a decade ago in California.
Marlene Dietrich, actress and cabaret entertainer, was born on December 27, 1901. She died on May 6, 1992, aged 90
ELIZABETH DAVID
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INFLUENTIAL COOKERY WRITER WITH A POWER TO AMUSE AS WELL AS INSTRUCT
MAY 23, 1992
Elizabeth David was the doyenne of English cookery writers. She influenced the generations who came after her, whether they, too, were intending to be culinary experts or merely taking a well-thumbed Elizabeth David Penguin from the kitchen shelf for the next day’s dinner party. “Elizabeth David says…” was the regular way of resolving how much spice and which spices should be added to a stew and how much garlic should be put in a dressing.
At its best, her prose was as precise as her instructions, unlike that of some of her predecessors who sometimes wrapped up advice on what to do in the kitchen with impenetrable sentences. She was a pleasure to read, a stylist of true distinction. Perhaps only in Britain would she have been classified as a “food writer”, too often rather a damning phrase. Elizabeth David combined a scholar’s feeling for history with the traveller-aesthete’s gift of conveying a sense of place.
Elizabeth David’s father was the Conservative Member of Parliament for Eastbourne; her mother the daughter of the 1st Viscount Ridley. At the impressionable age of 16 she was sent from her English boarding school to study French literature and history at the Sorbonne, living for 18 months with a family in Passy. It was then that she first became aware of food, the daily fare of the French bourgeoisie coming as a startling contrast to the bland food to which she had been accustomed.
On her return to London she worked briefly as an actress, then as a vendeuse for Worth, where her striking looks stood her in good stead. She was living in Greece at the outbreak of war and was evacuated to Egypt, where she lived first in Alexandria and later in Cairo. There she worked as a librarian for the ministry of information. In 1944 she married an English officer, Anthony David, and went to live in India, where he was stationed. The marriage was not a success, and she rarely referred to it. There were no children.
In the winter of 1946 she returned to England alone and went to live in a small hotel in Ross-on-Wye. Here, amid the gloom and deprivation of post-war England, she began to write about the food of the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1950 A Book of Mediterranean Food was published by John Lehmann, with drawings by John Minton, another expert on the eastern reaches of that sea. Its impact was colossal, both on those who were too young to remember the pre-war years, and on an older generation. Other books followed in rapid succession: French Country Cooking (1951), Italian Food (1954) and Summer Cooking (1955). The following year she started writing regularly for The Sunday Times, Vogue and House & Garden. In 1960 French Provincial Cooking was published, based on a series commissioned by Vogue. The next year she gave up working for Condé Nast and The Sunday Times, and began writing for The Spectator, which freed her from the chore of writing recipes.
In 1965 she opened her kitchenware shop in Elizabeth Street in Belgravia. This involved her in annual trips to France searching for merchandise, a d
istinct pleasure and rarely a chore. Over the next years she published a series of pamphlets for sale in the shop, one of which was the basis for her next book: Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, which came out in 1970. Three years later she fell out with her partners and severed all connection with the shop, although it continued to trade under her name. In 1976 she was appointed OBE, in 1986 CBE, and in 1977 English Bread and Yeast Cookery had been published, destined to be her last original work.
The same year she was made Chevalier du Mérite Agricole, and two years later she received an honorary degree from Essex University. In 1982 she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, but despite repeated efforts on the part of her friends and colleagues she was never given the accolade she merited. Her last published work, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, came out in 1984.
As the years passed she became more and more obsessed with research, and the joie de vivre, which had filled so much of her earlier writing, became muted. Her very first books shared an infectious enthusiasm for the joys of eating and living well, while the recipes were often sketchy, probably written from memory. With Italian Food, however, the first book written in situ, her tone became more scholarly, the recipes more precise. After a return to her former style in a short book, Summer Cooking, she resumed her research with French Provincial Cooking, probably her greatest book and the one no amateur or professional chef is likely to be without. Ten years passed before her next book, originally intended as the first in a series on English food. The title alone of Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen shows the change in attitude, as it defines with typical accuracy its range of contents. This interesting book proved a watershed in her career, for after it her passion for research seemed to get out of control.
