Blue Angel

by Donald Spoto

  Typically, von Sternberg could not dissociate his art from complex feelings about Dietrich; he was in fact drawn to this historical pageant by the situation that recurs in each of their joint pictures: a man rejected. Despotic, sometimes downright unkind and rarely popular with his cast, von Sternberg was more and more frequently described as a dictator on his pictures. In this regard, he painstakingly directed Sam Jaffe in the role of Grand Duke Peter, who emerges as nothing so much as a stencil of the director himself, a smiling, mad dwarf commanding his toy soldiers round a “war set,” an idiot fated to abandonment by a woman whose beauty renders him helpless. Otherwise, The Scarlet Empress is notable only for the casting of Maria in a brief, early scene as the young Sophia.

  When Dietrich returned from Europe, von Sternberg was unsure of their relationship; she spent much of her nonworking time with Mercedes de Acosta and a new circle of acquaintances in Brentwood and Santa Monica—amusing and talented companions like Martin Kosleck and his lover Hans von Twardowsky, German actors who were able to work occasionally in Hollywood films. Feeling distant from her, von Sternberg more than ever played the directorial tyrant at the studio, imprudently expressing his fear of separation by asking her to repeat difficult scenes, as if she would thus realize a kind of pathetic dependence on him. Predictably, this had the contrary effect: the more he tried to psychologically apprehend her, the more she politely withdrew—but never revealed her dismay at work. John Engstead recalled that von Sternberg required her to descend a vast staircase in her elaborate costume forty-five times; she obeyed without a single complaint. “They say von Sternberg is ruining me,” she said with apparent innocence to a journalist. “I say let him ruin me. I would rather have a small part in one of his good pictures than a big part in a bad one made by someone else.”

  Her director was not, of course, ruining his star at all, nor did anyone seriously wager that the brightness of her publicity could be long dimmed by the fiasco of The Scarlet Empress. But there was a new and deep strain between them after filming completed in early 1934. It would be hard not to link some of the disconnection to the influence of Mercedes de Acosta and her friends, for by this time Dietrich was becoming more and more blunt in pursuing actresses she found attractive; among them were Paramount’s Carole Lombard and Frances Dee, whose unregenerate heterosexuality did not dissuade Dietrich from her usual stratagems of flower deliveries and romantic blandishments. Lombard, a beautiful, brash blonde, was unamused: “If you want something,” she told Dietrich after finding one too many sweet notes and posies in her dressing room at Paramount, “you come on down when I’m there. I’m not going to chase you.” As for Dee (who had been directed by von Sternberg in An American Tragedy) she and her husband Joel McCrea recalled Dietrich’s inordinate attentions, asking von Sternberg to treat Dee with especial care because (so said McCrea) Dietrich was in love with her—but in love, as with Lombard, to no avail.

  In addition, Dietrich did not please von Sternberg (or Mercedes, for that matter) by attaching herself to John Gilbert, then thirty-eight, whose alcoholism had rendered him virtually unemployable as a film actor. “He was killing himself,” according to his daughter, “and she would not have it. Marlene simply took over.”

  Applying every tactic of affirmation and encouragement, Dietrich persuaded Gilbert to seek medical help to stop drinking. She asked him to escort her to parties, movie premieres and art galleries; she drove him to the beach, to restaurants and to concerts. Hovering about with maternal concern, she steered him away from liquor, offering (in the felicitous term of playwright Robert Anderson) tea and sympathy—and of course herself. According to every account, her actions were benevolent; yet it was certainly not irrelevant that Gilbert was still a close friend of Greta Garbo’s, who had once briefly been his lover and who also tried to help him. In a way, then, Gilbert, like de Acosta, was a link to the enduring rival Garbo, one whom Dietrich must appropriate unto herself.

  The year was in fact busy with new friendships. In March, returning aboard the Ile de France from a one-week sojourn in Paris, she met Ernest Hemingway, whose fame made him as attractive to her as his burly macho affectations. The circumstances of their introduction were brilliantly Dietrichian. Entering the ship’s dining room in a long, white, tightly beaded gown, she approached a table adjacent to Hemingway’s but then she counted twelve guests already seated. Hesitating to be the unlucky thirteenth, she started to move away—whereupon Hemingway (as she may have expected) gallantly leaped forward to be the fourteenth at her table. She suggested instead a stroll round the decks.

  At once Dietrich took him as something of a counselor and father-figure, calling him (as did others) her “Papa.” She was most of all one of his buddies, and in this regard the relationship was perhaps unique in his life. By a kind of tacit common consent, they were never lovers—a situation that might have aborted friendship with this man who simultaneously revered and feared women. His domineering mother, frequently dressing him as a little girl, certainly helped prepare a lifelong pattern of sexual confusion, and his subsequent relations with women always bore the twin hues of fierce resentment and fantastic idealization. His “loveliest dreams,” as he said, were often of Dietrich, who was “awfully nice in dreams”—a sentiment worthy of von Sternberg. With Dietrich, Hemingway could simultaneously enjoy the nurturing adulation of a beautiful and famous woman and the matey fellowship of someone who never threatened him by demanding sex; in this way, Marlene Dietrich was the ideal Hemingway heroine. He called her The Kraut.

  Their correspondence flourished over the next twenty-five years, Hemingway retaining about two dozen of her letters, and she preserving his in a vault. Mostly they concerned shifts in her career, for Dietrich often turned to him for advice. “I never ask Ernest for advice as such but he is always there to talk to, to get letters from,” she once said, “and I find the things I can use for whatever problems I may have.” Uncertain over whether to accept a certain job, she received terse advice: “Don’t do what you sincerely don’t want to do. Never confuse movement with action.” In those last five words, she said, “he gave me a whole philosophy.” For her part, she countered by trying to introduce him to astrology, which in 1934 had recently struck her fancy and which would often occupy her for the next five decades. This he rejected, however, saying (probably unaware of the double meaning) that he did not want his life “run by the stars.”

  Nor, it seems, did Josef von Sternberg. The commercial failure of The Scarlet Empress conspired with his own gradual but ineluctable distance from Marlene Dietrich, and that autumn of 1934 he and Paramount’s executives discussed terminating the six-year collaboration between them. To his relief, she agreed that they would part company after one final picture he was preparing. “She is a complete artist,” he told the press, “and another director will be better for her now. We have gone as far as we can together, and now there is the inevitable mold or groove that is dangerous for us both.” For the time being, he had nothing more to say, and Dietrich herself was silent.

  BY AUTUMN 1934, B. P. SCHULBERG HAD LEFT Paramount and was succeeded as production chief by director Ernst Lubitsch. In 1920, the studio had realized considerable success with a silent film version of Pierre Louÿs’s novel La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet), and to this literary source von Sternberg turned as the basis for a new picture he intended as a Spanish fancy—indeed, he wanted to title it Caprice Espagnole (after the musical theme to be inserted into the film). But Lubitsch, after reading the outline and first draft prepared by von Sternberg and John Dos Passos, decided on the more provocative designation The Devil Is a Woman. The narrative concerns a cigarette-factory tart named Concha Perez (Dietrich) who seduces, ridicules and finally destroys a middle-aged officer of the Civil Guard (Lionel Atwill). He tries to dissuade a younger man (Cesar Romero) from dallying with “the most dangerous woman you’ll ever meet,” and their rivalry over her leads to a duel in which the older man allows himself to be wounded. Although Conc
ha at first seems on the verge of leaving for Paris with the younger man, she returns to the muddled affair with the injured, bereft officer, a man virtually diseased by his own fatal passion for a devil of a woman.

  In its final form, of course, the picture harmonized closely with the contours of von Sternberg’s own tangled affective life. And so, after the veiled and historicized presentation of his star as an ambitious empress with a regiment of lovers, von Sternberg began what would be the most personal, most dazzlingly exquisite of their films—“because I was most beautiful in that,” Dietrich said bluntly. (Since he had at last been formally admitted to membership in the American Society of Cinematographers, the director proudly thus affiliated himself with this craft union in the credits of the finished film—“directed and photographed by Josef von Sternberg, A.S.C.”)

  The recognizable, usually mundane and often tawdry settings of The Blue Angel, Morocco, Dishonored and Blonde Venus had borne the stamp of expressionist flamboyance in The Scarlet Empress: here, however, every visual detail is drenched in the hyperbole of madcap carnival, hysterical with the atmosphere of a romantically daffy jubilee. The picture opens with a six-minute scene of carnival revelry in Spain, circa 1890, amid a dizzy, serpentine panoply of confetti and ultrachic costumes. And then there is an odd reprisal of the situation in Rouben Mamoulian’s Song of Songs, as if von Sternberg wished to appropriate that picture for himself by creating a narrative with the same players. Just as in the earlier film, von Sternberg’s surrogate (Lionel Atwill, made up and lit almost as a twin, complete with moustache) buys Marlene Dietrich from Alison Skipworth.

  “I told her mother that I loved Concha,” he says to Romero in words that precisely echo the relationship between director and actress, “and although there were certain ties I could not form [that is, marriage], I wished to provide for her, take charge of her education, in other words make myself her protector.”

  Concha was never, to the dismay of the officer, a faithful, loving companion, and when he finally confronts her treachery—“You’re not going to play with me anymore!”—she screams: “This is superb! He threatens me! What right have you to tell me what to do? Are you my father? No! Are you my husband? No! Are you my lover? No! Well, I must say you’re content with very little!” To which he cries, “Am I?” and lunges at her, attacking and nearly strangling her. An uneasy reconciliation scene is later followed by his suggestion, “Let’s leave this miserable place,” and her reply, “But I can’t—my contract!”

  “That woman has ice where others have a heart. She wrecked my life—there were others as well,” Atwill tells Romero. (In Blonde Venus, it is said of Dietrich’s character, “She’s the proverbial iceberg who used one man after another.”) The inevitable destroyer Lola Lola has now come full circle, and all the intervening variations of the tarnished woman come together in Concha Perez.

  Never had the dialogue of a Dietrich-von Sternberg film so clearly matched real life, or so closely resembled von Sternberg’s ultimate resentment of the fact that their relationship had not been one of Marlene the puppet and Jo the manipulator. It had, in fact, been the reverse in von Sternberg’s perception, she had been the cruel woman—la femme et le pantin—toying with her plaything. (The inspiration for the image is a small painting by Goya in the Prado, of four girls tossing a male puppet into the air.) The fickle woman of the film finally drains her protector of life, and just as before with Menjou/von Sternberg in Morocco, so for Atwill/von Sternberg here: to love Dietrich is to be condemned to a fatal melancholy.

  Five years later, the man’s passion is beyond patience, expressed only through humiliation and rage. The Devil Is a Woman is in every sense the most moving portrait von Sternberg offered of his perceptions of his sometime mistress—here an intelligent and sensitive man is helpless to free himself from the narcotic effect of her allure, ever tragically aware of what is happening to him as he pursues a woman who will never give him anything to compensate for what he is losing.

  As might have been expected, there were tensions during filming. “Von Sternberg made everyone’s life miserable,” recalled Cesar Romero years later,

  but he was especially mean to Dietrich. He bawled her out in front of everyone, made her repeat difficult scenes endlessly and needlessly until she just cried and cried.

  “Do it again!” he shouted. “Faster! . . . Slower! . . .” Well, he had been mad about her, after all, and now that their relationship was ending he took it out on her and everybody else.

  Nevertheless, Dietrich remained, publicly, the consummate professional, obeying each command and agonizing over every detail of her role, wardrobe and makeup. John Engstead remembered that Paramount’s wardrobe chief Travis Banton designed an elaborate Spanish comb for her, and hairdresser Nellie Manley fashioned braids from Dietrich’s own locks, wiring these to the comb. Each evening, Manley snipped the bands and released the comb with heavy wire cutters as Dietrich fell forward, arms and head resting on her dressing table, tears streaming down her face, exhausted from the pain of this intricate device.

  Soon studio accountants were in anguish, too. Not only was the film a resounding critical and commercial failure in its American release, but there was virtually no foreign exhibition. This was due to a curious intervention by the Spanish government, which objected to the portrayal of an official mocked by an immoral woman. On October 31, 1935 , Gil Robles (Spain’s war minister) announced that henceforth all Paramount films would be banned in Spain unless The Devil Is a Woman were withdrawn at once from worldwide circulation. By November 12, the U.S. State Department entered the fray, ordering Paramount to recall and destroy all prints of the picture, which the Spanish ambassador had called “an insult to Spain and the Spaniards,” and to burn the negative (happily, it was not destroyed; it simply “disappeared” for forty years). At the time, it was rumored that a commercial treaty then being drafted between America and Spain effected the studio’s quick capitulation, which amounted to little more than blackmail, but the truth was even more reprehensible. A wealthy Spanish industrialist loyal to Franco had promised to back the foundation of a major film studio in Madrid if he could be guaranteed minimum foreign competition. A quiet, quick series of diplomatic maneuvers answered his request.*

  BY MARCH 1935, THE COLLABORATION WAS History. But unlike their proxies at the end of The Devil Is a Woman, the von Sternberg-Dietrich collaboration ended not because she walked out on her man but because in real life he walked out on her. “I am no longer Mr. von Sternberg’s protégée,” Dietrich told the press that month in an astonishingly pointed revelation.

  It is Mr. von Sternberg’s own wish that we should be separated professionally—not my wish. I would prefer to go on as in the past. It is so wonderful to have someone look after your interests. He wants a rest, and he feels that this is the time for me to go my way alone. At all times he has been very courageous. He prefers to create pictures as he feels, and it is not I who wished this association to be broken, but he.

  “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 Dietri
ch 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 MISS DIETRICH, MISS DIETRICH 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.