Who the Hell's in It

by Peter Bogdanovich

  “I dream about your legs and I wake up screaming,” said Ryan.

  “Me too,” she said.

  I asked her if she’d been upset about Sternberg’s acerbic autobiography, Fun in a Chinese Laundry (first published in 1965), in which he’d said that he had created her, and implied that she would have been nothing without him. (He had once said to me, “I am Miss Dietrich—Miss Dietrich is me.”)

  She pursed her lips, lifted her eyebrows slightly. “No—because it was true. I didn’t know what I was doing—I just tried to do what he told me. I remember in Morocco, I had a scene with [Gary] Cooper—and I was supposed to go to the door, turn and say a line like, ‘Wait for me,’ and then leave. And Sternberg said, ‘Walk to the door, turn, count to ten, say your line and leave.’ So I did and he got very angry. ‘If you’re so stupid that you can’t count slowly, then count to twenty-five.’ And we did it again. I think we did it forty times, until finally I was counting probably to fifty. And I didn’t know why. I was annoyed. But at the premiere of Morocco—at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre”—she said the original name of the L.A. movie palace with just the lightest of mockery—“when this moment came and I paused and then said, ‘Wait for me …’ the audience burst into applause. Sternberg knew they were waiting for this—and he made them wait and they loved it.”

  I asked if Jo had gotten along with Cooper. “No—they didn’t like each other. You know, he couldn’t stand it if I looked up at any man in a movie—he always staged it so that they were looking up at me. It would infuriate him—and Cooper was very tall—and you know, Jo was not. I was stupid—I didn’t understand it then—that kind of jealousy.” She shook her head lightly, but at her own folly. (She did not mention that during the picture—as I heard some time later—she’d had an affair with Cooper.)

  Marlene Dietrich with Gary Cooper in her initial Hollywood-made feature, Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930), shot after The Blue Angel but released in America first. Much to Svengali Sternberg’s misery, Dietrich and Cooper had a torrid romance during shooting.

  Which of her seven films with Sternberg was her favorite? “The Devil Is a Woman [1935] was the best—he photographed it himself—wasn’t it beautiful? It was not successful and it was the last one we did together—I love it.”

  Ryan said, “I hear you’re a good cook.”

  “I’m a great cook.”

  “When’d you have time to learn?”

  “Well, when I came to America, they told me the food was awful—and it was true. Whenever you hear someone in America say they had a great meal, it turns out they had a steak. So I learned. Mr. Sternberg loved good food, and you know … So I would go to the studio every day and do what he told me, and then I’d come home and cook for him.”

  I mentioned Song of Songs (1933)—the first American picture she had done without Sternberg—and said I didn’t like it very much. She agreed. “That was when Paramount was trying to break us up. So they insisted I do a picture with another director. Jo picked him—[Rouben] Mamoulian—because he’d made Applause (1929), which was quite good. But this one was lousy. Every day, before each shot, I had the soundman lower the boom mike and I said into it so the Paramount brass could hear me when they saw the rushes, I said, ‘Oh, Jo—why hast thou forsaken me?’”

  What a remarkably dedicated Old World artist she was! The only German superstar, the one European with the longest international appeal—and this despite two World Wars that made Germany not exactly the most popular country to be from. In a brand-new medium for which no one really knew the rules of the game, Dietrich—which means “passkey” in German—had to make them up for herself. There was no way to predict the price she would have to pay: her last ten-plus years in seclusion so as not to destroy the legend she had created, the myth that was a part of her art, both of which—though pretending otherwise—she took very seriously. Her unique qualities and upbringing, and fate, gave her the remarkable ability and opportunity to express—through the first six decades of women’s official emancipation (the right to vote)—the many faces of Woman: sacred to profane, victim and killer combined, nurse, bohemian artist, siren, vamp or love goddess to Great Earth Mother.

  Marlene’s German-born mother—“the good General,” she called her—had told daughter Dietrich repeatedly: “Do something.” And to her European sensibility, implicit in that injunction was: “Do something well.” Marlene did everything extremely well, made it all look so easy that many people eventually took her for granted. Many still do: separating her always from the “serious” actors of the time, as opposed to “personalities.” But personality-actors were those star-players whose actual personae were uniquely appropriate to the closely analytic eye of a camera: the character and actor merge into one—a seminal difference about this new performing-art form.

  Growing up as a would-be artist in the Weimar Republic, first a violinist, Marlene (a contraction of her own making, from her given names, Maria and Magdalene) had her first affair when she was sixteen, with her (considerably older) violin teacher. She had affairs from then on—kind of a one-woman freedom brigade—with both men and women, long before and long after her one official marriage in the twenties to an early mentor-stage director (Rudolph Seiber). In Berlin, in that same roaring decade, Dietrich used to explain: “In Europe it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive.” She used to say—this was, remember, also only the first period of female emancipation in several millennia—“Women are better, but you can’t live with a woman.” For living together, she preferred men.

  Of course, Marlene Dietrich did grow up in probably the most open city of the world in that era—Berlin being the home of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, of Lubitsch, Lang and George Grosz—with its burst of creative artistry, and its uninhibited social mores. Marlene’s first job was as a violinist in a small combo playing for silent movies. She was fired because her legs kept distracting the other musicians, all of them male. As various Berliners and Viennese quickly began to point out, Dietrich had “Those Legs,” also “That Face,” and on top of everything else, “That Voice.” Long before she did The Blue Angel (1930), Marlene became very well known in prewar Berlin as “the girl from the Kurfurstendamm,” the name of that city’s main drag.

  Starting out in small stage roles, working her way up, studying at the Max Reinhardt school, playing more than thirty parts in the theater; she had also acted in nearly twenty German movies—seven of them leads—before her European “debut” in The Blue Angel. Her introduction to general U.S. audiences came with Morocco, shot after The Blue Angel but released before it in America. She was even a singing star in Berlin (with numerous recordings) before Sternberg “discovered” her for the Lola-Lola part in Der Blaue Engel—a supposed vehicle for the great German star Emil Jannings, which Dietrich stole with a vengeance. After that, she stole nearly every movie she was ever in—there were thirty-seven of them—often with material and collaborators of infinitely lesser quality.

  The first Sternberg-Dietrich collaboration, a classic drama of passion and betrayal, The Blue Angel was photographed in German with sections in English—a not uncommon practice in the early sound era—though the English-language version was lost for years. Most recent generations (including mine), therefore, have seen only the subtitled version, which was universally considered better because the cast of German actors were naturally more comfortable in their mother tongue. Jannings, among the most distinguished and popular of German actors, and an international silent star, had been the first ever to win a Best Actor Oscar (for the 1928 Sternberg silent masterpiece, The Last Command). Because of this, Jannings specifically asked for Sternberg to come to Germany to direct the star’s first talking film, never suspecting that his little-known co-star and ultra-sexy nemesis in The Blue Angel would shortly eclipse him in stardom and popularity, or that the film would be his last success in America.

  The infamous couple: Josef von Sternberg with his most famous �
�creation” in the early thirties, when their romance created a scandal and broke up his marriage. Dietrich would break his heart, too.

  However, The Blue Angel instantly set Dietrich among the immortals. Her chair-straddling portrayal of cabaret singer Lola-Lola defined her essential image in certain irrevocable ways. She would forever sing the song she is doing (in German) the first time we see her: “Falling in love again … never wanted to—What am I to do? Can’t help it …” She too, then, was a fool for love, like all the men who fell for her. Talking with Sternberg one time, I said that among the pictures he made with Dietrich, The Blue Angel was actually the only time she really destroyed a man, to which he replied: “She did not destroy him—he destroyed himself. It was his mistake—he should never have taken up with her. That’s what the story is.” Was he speaking of himself a bit or only of the prudish boys’-school teacher Jannings played, who fell madly in love with a loose, bawdy, compulsively unfaithful performer? The strain breaks him down to ultimate degradation. Like that line in Jacques Brel’s masochistic love chant, “Ne me quitte pas,” Jannings becomes content to be to Dietrich “the shadow of your dog …” The moment when Marlene humiliates Jannings by making him crow for her like a rooster is one of the most chilling in picture history. It was a scene Sternberg added.

  That Dietrich (married by then, already a mother of a little girl) and Sternberg (also married) were “an item” was a big issue in its day and the cause given for Sternberg’s divorce from another actress. Of course, Dietrich broke his heart long before they made their last picture together. Indeed, Sternberg’s career never recovered from the initial success (of the first four) and then the fairly dismal failure (of the last three) of his Dietrich pictures. Marlene had a lengthy professional life, while Sternberg’s never really caught on again. His “creation” long outlived him, but Dietrich always spoke of her Jo with the kind of reverence one generally reserves only for God.

  According to her biographers, Marlene was not faithful to any of her lovers, not even the one with whom she seems most to have been in love, French working-class star Jean Gabin—the only one who wouldn’t forgive her for straying. When Gabin died, shortly after her own husband, Dietrich said: “Now I am a widow for a second time.” The man she most wanted to please, however, was still Sternberg—who seems to have withheld his total approval to the end of his days—as she withheld from him the constancy he no doubt hoped for from her. But he had to understand—as he did in some of his films with her—the need Marlene had for freedom at all times to be herself.

  Certainly she always dressed as she pleased, was in fact the most famous cross-dresser of all time: white tie, top hat and tails, and (apparently) see-through dresses, were an equal portion of her legendary concerts. And this in-person aspect of Dietrich was perhaps the most amazing—though, sadly, the least available to experience: only one (barely adequate) TV special and a few live record albums to give evidence of one of the few truly electrifying theater experiences. Dietrich’s command of her ethos, her style and technique, and her personal magic—everything merged for those mystical times Marlene not only took over the whole stage, but owned the people out front as well.

  • • •

  The day after our plane flight—in my Hays, Kansas, motel room—the phone rang. It was Marlene. “I found you.” She said it silkily and low. It was lovely and a little unnerving. We hadn’t told her where we were going so she must have done some tracing. “I got to my hotel last night,” she said, “and I missed you.”

  “Me too. How’re you doing?”

  She told me about a press conference she had been through at the airport after we left. “I don’t think I made them very happy—but they ask such stupid questions. One old woman there—old—older than me—asked, ‘What do you plan to do with the rest of your life?’ I said to her, ‘What do you plan to do with the rest of yours?’”

  We talked several times during the week, and she sent me a couple of warm and funny notes thanking me for the opening-night telegram and flowers, and supplying anecdotes about the Denver performances: “I sang fine last night,” she wrote, “but I don’t think it was necessary…. Lights are bad! They have no equipment. Poor country, you know!”

  “How were the reviews?” I asked her on the phone.

  “Oh, the usual—‘the legend’ and all that—you know—fine.”

  On Saturday, Ryan and I and six others from our company flew to Denver for the night to see her show. I have never seen as mesmerizing a solo performance. She sang twenty songs and each was like a one-act play, a different story with a different character telling it, each phrased uniquely and done with the most extraordinary command. No one has ever teased and controlled an audience better. “I’m an optimist,” she told them, “that’s why I’m here in Denver.” They loved her. How could they not? How could anyone not? Here was a woman of seventy-one, looking forty, by turns sexy in all ways, and witty about it, maternal, cool, fragile, dominating, stoic, intimate, inspiring.

  Everything she did was done completely—there were no half-gestures or unfinished thoughts in her performance. When she said Sternberg’s name, you knew she was really thinking of him. And she never repeated an effect, didn’t move much, just stood there and sang for you. Though meticulously rehearsed, everything appeared spontaneous, as though it were the first time she had done it; a great showman—very theatrical—yet subtle beyond praise.

  She always transcended her material. Whether it was a reliable old standard like “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” or “My Blue Heaven,” a schmaltzy German love song, “Das Lied ist Aus,” or a French one, “La Vie en Rose,” she lent each an air of the aristocrat, yet she was never patronizing. She transformed Charles Trenet’s “I Wish You Love” by calling it “a love song sung to a child” and then sang it that way. No one else could sing Cole Porter’s “The Laziest Gal in Town” (which she had done in the 1950 Hitchcock thriller, Stage Fright)—it belonged to her by now, as much as The Blue Angel’s “Lola” and “Falling in Love Again” always have. She kidded “The Boys in the Back Room” from the Western Destry Rides Again (1939), but with great charm.

  For Dietrich, Destry had been a huge change of image—done with that end clearly in mind. Despite her numerous successes with Sternberg, several failures followed, and toward the end of the thirties Marlene had become “box-office poison” to exhibitors—the exotic pedestal on which Sternberg had put her obviously having lost its allure with Depression audiences. Destry ripped her right off any sort of pedestal and, significantly, it was Sternberg himself who convinced her to take the role of a tough, brawling, saloon chanteuse/woman of easy virtue. The extended catfight between her and Una Merkel is justly famous, and the novelty song she sang, “… Oh, see what the boys in the back room will have, And give them the poison they name …” became a popular Dietrich standard throughout the rest of her career. Marlene told me that she and co-star Jimmy Stewart had quite an affair during the making of the film (see Stewart chapter), and the heat is apparent.

  At the Denver concert we saw, Marlene sang more than one song in German; in her rendition, “Jonny” became quite frankly erotic, including the way she handled the mike. A folk song, “Go ‘Way from My Window,” never had been done with such passion, and in her hands, the famous American song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” became not just an antiwar lament, but a sort of tragic accusation against all of us in the audience, sitting there doing nothing. Another pacifist song, written by an Australian, had within it a recurring lyric—“The war’s over—seems we won”—and each time she sang this line a deeper ironic nuance was revealed.

  Of course, she saw World War II at close range, entertaining the troops for three years with “benefits”—more than any other star performer ever did, for which she was awarded America’s highest civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, as well as France’s most valued order of distinction, the Légion d’honneur. And the experience was all brought back through her touching
introduction to “Lili Marlene”—an old German song, forbidden by Hitler in her own country—which was comprised mainly of a recitation of the names of all the countries in which she had sung “Lili Marlene” during the war. It called to mind what Hemingway had written in his World War I novel, A Farewell to Arms:

  Marlene Dietrich among GIs near the front lines during World War II, where she performed tirelessly and in many countries.

  … There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates …

  And that was what Marlene conveyed; as she said, “Africa, Sicily, Italy, Greenland, Iceland, France, Belgium and Holland”—here she paused—“Germany, and Czechoslovakia,” her inflection carried with each a different untold story of what she had seen, what the 500,000 soldiers she sang for had seen. It was all there, too, in the way she then did “Lili Marlene”—and terribly moving. Suddenly you understood another thing Hemingway had written—this time about her (in Life magazine)—and you knew that the soldiers must have understood it as well when she sang to them over the course of three very long years:

  If she has nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and that timeless loveliness of her face. It makes no difference how she breaks your heart if she is there to mend it.

  Privately, Dietrich would tell friends, she felt somehow guilty about World War II. Hitler had wanted to sleep with her, and she had refused him. Later, Marlene often said that if she had slept with him, she might have altered his views on life, and history would have been different.