Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  In most instances we have to rely on Riefenstahl’s accounts of events, but in this case there is a second version of Riefenstahl’s visit to the Goebbels home. Ernst Hanfstaengl reported that one evening, Riefenstahl turned up at the Goebbels’s dinner table. As an engaging and appealing woman, she had little difficulty persuading the Führer to visit her studio. Hitler accepted this invitation, as did Joseph and Magda Goebbels and Hanfstaengl, who were delighted that Hitler was showing interest in a woman. Ever since the recent suicide of his niece, Geli, Hitler’s relationship to women had been making headlines. Geli Raubal, an attractive young woman, had been running Hitler’s household for the past two years. The two often appeared in public together, and there were rumors of some sort of untoward relationship between them. Hanfstaengl recalled that Riefenstahl’s apartment was “full of mirrors and trick interior decorator effects.”53 This was probably his discreet way of pointing out that Riefenstahl knew how to seduce men. While Hanfstaengl played the piano for Herr and Frau Goebbels, Hitler and his hostess were left to their own devices. Peering over at Hitler, Hanfstaengl noticed that Riefenstahl was using every trick of flirtation in the book while “I could see him ostentatiously studying the titles in the bookcases. Riefenstahl was certainly giving him the works.”54 The fact that Hanfstaengl and the Goebbels left Riefenstahl’s studio before Hitler did not seem to have done the trick, however; Hitler remained loyal to his great love: Germany. There is no way of determining how accurate this account is, but Hitler’s visit to Riefenstahl’s studio does underscore their growing bond even before 1933. Most of her fellow artists had no idea how things would develop, but Riefenstahl stuck close to Hitler. She was a guest at the Goebbels home, chatted with Göring about his old war buddy Udet, and read the first edition of Mein Kampf. By the fall of 1932, she was confident that if Hitler emerged victorious, he would not forget her. Riefenstahl had taken the proper precautions. In January 1933, she went on a ski vacation to Davos, where she spent time with her handsome new Swiss lover, Walter Prager. Prager was eight years her junior and an outstanding athlete. She was waiting to finish filming S.O.S. Iceberg. She was eventually told to go to the Lake Bernina area, where Fanck, his people, and the film crew from Hollywood were awaiting her for the location shooting. This was Riefenstahl’s first movie for the American market, and she was elated. In the spring of 1933, she returned to Berlin and prepared to shoot her next film—Victory of Faith—in late August. The film had been commissioned by Adolf Hitler.

  On the morning of August 16, 1929, the American director Josef von Sternberg and his wife arrived at Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin. As always, this short man was clad in extravagant clothing. He loved wide-cut suits in soft, patterned fabrics. A walking stick, gloves, and elegant shoes completed his striking appearance. Von Sternberg had a full head of dark hair, and at times one lock curled onto his forehead. His sad, dark eyes lent his face the melancholy cast he aimed to achieve. He rarely smiled. Posing in the circle of his illustrious reception committee, he seemed more like the European ideal of the artist than a Hollywood director. One figure in the group towered over the others: the burly Emil Jannings, who graciously welcomed his director to Berlin. Jannings and von Sternberg had big plans. In the months ahead, they intended to make a sound film.

  At four in the afternoon that same day, celebrities of the Berlin film world gathered at Hotel Esplanade for a welcome tea with the guests from America. Rumors had been swirling around the city for weeks as to who would be directing Jannings’s sound film. Many names had cropped up, but now people knew it was von Sternberg. Although his name was relatively unfamiliar, his reputation for eccentricity had preceded him. Word also got around that Ufa was planning to invest huge sums of money in this project. For once, von Sternberg poured on the charm. After a few words of introduction in English, he switched to German, assuring the group that he was happy to be filming a movie “in the heart of Europe.” He buttered up his hosts by declaring Germany a “film paradise.” Then he came out with a statement that was calculated to cause a stir: “It’s as if I died in Hollywood and woke up in heaven.”55

  He spent the next few days getting the lay of the land in this heaven. Von Sternberg was staying at a hotel on the Spree River, and here he found the leisure time to mull over the film he was planning. Berlin was quite a change from his hometown of Vienna. Although he had spent only a few short years in Vienna during his childhood, he had strong ties to the city and its culture. Vienna was compact, homogeneous, and tradition-bound, while Berlin was spread out, diverse, and bewildering.

  All around the steel concourse of the Friedrichstrasse train station, neon signs wooed audiences to the local theaters. Only a few minutes away on foot was the Grosses Schauspielhaus, where sumptuously produced revues were enjoying great success. A couple of blocks farther down, Bertolt Brecht had created a theatrical sensation with The Threepenny Opera. However, the revenues of Berlin theaters were steadily declining in 1929, while movie palaces were springing up. With eight large movie theaters, the area around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was no longer considered a quiet residential neighborhood; it was now an entertainment hub. But the attention of the American guest was drawn less to the outer trappings of the city than to its moral decline. He saw Berlin as a precarious and dangerous place. Venturing outdoors, he claimed, was “like shooting the rapids.”56 He was also taken aback by the gender-bending he saw all around him; many a woman with rouge, veil, and beauty spots turned out on closer inspection to be a man. Everyone was on display.

  Von Sternberg was in an unenviable position in this chaotic city, unable to tell the difference between men and women, and baffled as to what he would be filming. His friend Jannings had called him, and he followed the call. Jannings was an international star and one of the first German actors to have gone to Hollywood. Perhaps he went because his father was an American, but it is more likely that the high pay (he was rumored to be getting $1,000 a day) was the lure. Jannings felt he needed to live in the lap of luxury. The ascent of the German cinema is intimately linked with his name. Ernst Lubitsch had been his director, as had Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, for whom he played the lead role in The Last Laugh in 1924 and the role of Mephisto in Faust in 1926. Von Sternberg knew that Jannings liked to work with directors who cultivated their own styles and led their actors with a firm hand. He considered Jannings’s acting brilliant but was unnerved by his tyrannical nature. Once they had finished making their final film, The Last Command, he thanked Jannings, then assured him that he would never make a movie with him again, even if he were the last living actor on earth. Jannings said a polite goodbye to his director. He made three more movies in Hollywood, then returned to Europe in 1929 after becoming the first person ever to win an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performances in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. Although he was famous in America, he wanted to go back to Germany, presumably because his heavy German accent made him unsuitable for Hollywood roles in the new sound films. By making one of the first sound films at Ufa in Berlin, his risk of producing a flop would be minimized. The name Jannings guaranteed high art and box-office success.

  One morning, Jannings came to von Sternberg’s hotel in a state of great excitement and, “with a show of enviable enthusiasm,” he handed von Sternberg a copy of Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel Professor Unrat. Von Sternberg read the book and thought something could be made of it. Seven days after von Sternberg’s arrival—on August 23—Ufa bought the film rights to the novel. Mann received the exorbitant sum of 25,000 reichsmarks, with an additional 10,000 reichsmarks promised to him once the English-language version opened in the United States. Time was running short, because von Sternberg’s vacation lasted only until December 31, 1929. Beyond this date, he would be able to work for Ufa only with Paramount’s consent, and even then only until January 14, 1930. The first task at hand was to transform the novel into a screenplay.57

  For The Blue Angel, as the movie was eventually called, four au
thors are named: Heinrich Mann, Karl Vollmoeller, Carl Zuckmayer, and Robert Liebmann. The competing claims about how the screenplay was written reveal a great deal about the male egos that the only important woman in the movie—Marlene Dietrich—would have to cope with. Von Sternberg asserted that he wrote the screenplay all by himself. Supposedly he met with Mann and asked whether Mann had anything against changes that might be made, but was given the green light. According to von Sternberg, Zuckmayer was listed only to avoid upsetting the Germans, since, von Sternberg claimed rather unconvincingly, he feared trouble if such radical changes to a German novel were made by an American. He respected Vollmoeller, but found him useful primarily as a “valuable guide to the Berlin of that day,” and supposedly wanted to help Vollmoeller out by listing his name.58 Von Sternberg confirmed Liebmann’s role in making the film. Liebmann was the only professional screenwriter in the group, and also the only one who would stay above the fray in the wrangling about the screenplay. Vollmoeller’s contribution was to pare down the script. He soberly noted that the main advantage of the sound film was to express silence, and steered the film from the background. Mann’s memoirs were remarkably restrained in passages pertaining to The Blue Angel. “A jumping jack with my head and the legs of an actress was in high demand. The film material by me brought fame to all three, the talent of the woman and her two charming limbs.”59 Perhaps he was miffed that the film had become more famous than his book.

  Zuckmayer’s contribution to the screenplay is not entirely clear even today, but in his autobiography he claimed sole credit for the setting and dialogues in The Blue Angel. In an article published in March 1930, he went into great detail about the difficult collaboration among the authors of the screenplay. Jannings, von Sternberg, Vollmoeller, Mann, and Zuckmayer, and producer Erich Pommer had their initial meeting in Berlin. A photograph of this meeting shows six vain, elderly gentlemen with striking faces and suits sitting on a sofa. It is evident that each of them is out to impress the others. According to Zuckmayer, their “show of politeness was duplicitous and highly suspect.” They came to an agreement to focus on the fate of the teacher and to play down the issues surrounding his pupils. Zuckmayer was asked to come up with a first draft.60 Eventually their work came to a happy end in an office on Kochstrasse in Berlin. When Zuckmayer was asked, “To what extent did you have a free hand in putting together the scenario?” he replied brusquely, “Only until von Sternberg took over the direction and contributed key ideas.” Von Sternberg did not let anyone tell him what to do, and he alone determined the form the movie would take. No matter what anyone had written, he did whatever he liked with the screenplay.

  While von Sternberg and his team were working on the script, Marlene Dietrich was rehearsing her next performance in the revue Two Neckties. The director was Robert Forster-Larrinaga, and Mischa Spoliansky composed the music. Dietrich was delighted about this revue, hoping that she would be able to follow up on the success of It’s in the Air. She would soon be reaching the ripe old age of thirty and had not been willing or able to work in revues for a long time. She did manage to draw attention to herself as a “German Garbo,” but she had yet to be acknowledged as a full-fledged actress with talent. She was not deluding herself; she knew that she had gotten most of her roles on account of her looks rather than her talent. Her personal life was similarly uninspiring: she had been married to the same man, Rudi Sieber, for six full years. She was well aware that he had no objections to her being the breadwinner. Sieber tried, but never made it into the big leagues. They continued to sleep in separate beds. He showed no inclination to get involved with any lovers other than Tamara Matul. Dietrich had no desire to change this state of affairs, because it also kept this illegitimate part of the family under control. She realized that she and Rudi had simply fallen out of love, but she had no intention of separating from her husband. She had a child and a sense of honor, so she would make the best of the situation, which was quite easy to do with Sieber.

  When von Sternberg went to see Two Neckties, he actually intended to have a look at Rosa Valetti and Hans Albers, both of whom were in the cast and had already signed on for his movie, but as soon as he saw Marlene Dietrich, he lost any interest in everyone else. “She leaned against the wings with a cold disdain for the buffoonery, in sharp contrast to the effervescence of the others, who had been informed that I was to be treated to a sample of the greatness of the German stage. She had heard that I was in the audience, but as she did not consider herself involved, she was indifferent to my presence.”61 Many of the actresses in Berlin who were suggested to him for the role of Lola Lola had simply been too fat for his liking, but “Fräulein Dietrich” was voluptuous in all the right places. On the day after the show in Kreuzberg, von Sternberg complained that his crew had not pointed him in Marlene Dietrich’s direction.62 He was told that this lady was not actually an actress, but he was not put off and insisted that the Fräulein from Berlin be brought to his office.

  Later that afternoon, Dietrich sat on his sofa looking bored. She was dressed in a ladylike two-piece suit with matching gloves, hat, and fur. Once again she made no effort to hold his attention. “And that is what interested von Sternberg—the fact that I was not interested,” she told Maximilian Schell when she was eighty years old.63 She just sat there looking unperturbed and giving him flippant replies. When Jannings and Pommer arrived, she obediently followed their instructions. She knew what their awkward silence meant, and did not appear to have expected any other reception. But Sternberg did not give up so easily. The next day, he had a look at her last three movies. “In them she was an awkward, unattractive woman, left to her own devices, and presented in an embarrassing exhibition of drivel,” he concluded harshly.64

  Dietrich presented a challenge, and von Sternberg decided to take it on. He knew the film business inside and out and realized that for his first German sound film, he needed a discovery—ideally, of course, a woman. Von Sternberg was well aware that only a new and exciting woman could preclude the expected outcome of an “Emil Jannings sound film.” That is precisely what he did not want. He intended to put his own stamp on the film and not be reduced to the role of facilitating Jannings’s ambition. Dietrich was invited to Babelsberg for a screen test.

  Also quite accidental was von Sternberg’s discovery of Friedrich Hollaender, who went on to compose Lola Lola’s world-famous songs. One cold September morning, Lucie Mannheim and Hollaender, who had worked in revues and composed music for a play by Else Lasker-Schüler together, had gone out to Babelsberg. Hollaender had no trouble recognizing von Sternberg. “He was wearing a bilious green winter coat, an elegantly gnarled walking stick, and a droopy mustache, which gave him a slightly coquettish hint of pessimism. He spoke a very American German, although he was born in Austria, and every now and then struggled to come up with a German word that he couldn’t recall at the moment.”65 He used his walking stick to point to the piano and adjusted a chair for himself. The two of them got going, and von Sternberg listened attentively, then sent them off with a nonchalant “We’ll call you.” Mannheim would never see the man from America again, but he did hire Hollaender.

  The other contenders tried to give their all, but not Dietrich; she barely moved a muscle. “All the actresses were falling all over themselves . . . to get the role. And there’s that brash kid from the acting school sitting over there, saying she won’t get the role anyway. That intrigued him, didn’t it?”66 She said she was not prepared. Von Sternberg sent her to the dressing room to change. She came back in a sparkling but unbecoming outfit. Von Sternberg asked her to sing one German and one English song. She had heard the hit “You’re the Cream in My Coffee” a hundred times before, and now sang it for him. “She came to life and responded to my instructions with an ease that I had never before encountered. She seemed pleased at the trouble I took with her.”67 After this prelude, von Sternberg knew that Dietrich was willing to be transformed by him. She herself described this prelude as a humili
ating process. “And they had sewn me into some sort of dress and frizzed my hair, and the air was full of smoke. And then von Sternberg told me I should go up there and sit down on the piano.”68

  The screen test displayed a pudgy Dietrich grimacing horribly while she sang. She fluttered her eyelashes, rolled her eyes, and tilted her head. She wore a peculiar-looking sequined dress, and her hairdo looked like a scrub brush. From one moment to the next, she could interrupt her affected recitation to bawl out the pianist like a streetwalker for the way he was playing. Her acting was skillful, although not everyone saw it that way the next morning. The nearly unanimous opinion was that Mannheim ought to get the role. But von Sternberg insisted on his discovery. Producer Pommer gave in, and Dietrich was cast in the lead role.