The filming of Morocco began in July. Dietrich’s very first shot seemed doomed to failure when she had trouble pronouncing the simple sentence: “I won’t need any help.” To make matters worse, she was surrounded by a crowd of inquisitive spectators. Somehow she managed to get through the day, but by the evening, in her dressing room, she was drowning in misery. She wanted to get back to Germany as fast as she could, and her director sensed that. “Von Sternberg was standing at my dressing room door; after knocking lightly, he came in. He cheered me up within twenty minutes. ‘Never break off your contract, rule numero uno. Never give up, rule numero due. In other words, stay.’ That’s what he said to me.”15 As always, she followed his advice. On August 18, 1930, the shooting of Morocco was completed. Dietrich had come through just fine.
Before Dietrich appears onscreen as Amy Jolly in Morocco, a foghorn is heard. As she heads to the railing to watch the ship dock, her suitcase opens and dolls fall out. (One of those same dolls had been in the dressing room in The Blue Angel.) A man in a trenchcoat comes to her aid. He is not put off by her standoffish behavior, but seems to take an interest in the beautiful stranger. When he asks a ship’s deck officer whether he knows this woman, the officer replies with a disparaging glance: “A vaudeville actress, probably. Oh, we carry them every day. We call them ‘suicide passengers.’ One way ticket. They never return.” That is the scene that introduced Marlene Dietrich to the American public. Von Sternberg cleverly tied her situation in real life to that of the woman she was playing onscreen. But the first scene of the movie is Gary Cooper’s. Cooper plays the foreign legionnaire Tom Brown, who is returning with his troops to the city of Mogador from battles in the desert. Lee Garmes, von Sternberg’s cinematographer, captured this world as an impenetrable thicket of light and shadow, white garments and headgear against dark skin and uniforms. We meet up with him again in a kind of nightclub that is frequented by natives and foreigners. The gentlemen are wearing burnouses, tailcoats, or uniforms. The man from the ship is in this group as well. He is introduced as a wealthy Frenchman named La Bessière. While Brown finds a seat downstairs, La Bessière joins the table of an adjutant named Caesar and his wife up in the gallery. Madame Caesar, who is obviously bored, also seems to be one of Brown’s playmates. We see the beautiful stranger from the ship in her dressing room, preparing for her performance. She is now wearing a men’s dress shirt, enjoying a cigarette, fanning herself, humming a song, and admiring her reflection in her hand mirror. Then Dietrich emerges from behind the curtain and radiates indifference even to the hooting and the jeering of her disgruntled audience at the sight of her top hat and tails. Dietrich performs her song, “Quand l’amour meurt,” in her inimitable way, neither melodious nor mellifluous, but triumphant. Brown sees her as a kindred spirit. With a somewhat military tip of his cap he salutes her, and she reciprocates with a tip of her top hat.16 The women are annoyed by the intrusion of this strange rival in men’s clothing. Dietrich plucks a flower from behind the ear of a woman who is giggling at her and asks whether she can keep it. When the woman consents, Amy Jolly kisses her on the mouth.17 This oft-cited kiss is a deft display of Amy’s superiority and seductive prowess. She takes the flower and throws it to Brown, who sticks it behind his ear as she prepares for her next number. While she is unreceptive to La Bessière’s overtures, she gives her apartment key to Brown.
On her wall is a set of photographs that could just as easily have come from the life of Dietrich or Lola Lola as Amy Jolly, and on her bed is her collection of dolls. Nothing much happens beyond lingering gazes, a show of legs, kisses, lighting cigarettes, and blowing out matches lasciviously. Amy knows that you never ask why someone has become a Legionnaire, and Brown says he buried his past when he entered the Legion. Now it is her turn to confess: “There’s a foreign legion of women, too, but we have no uniforms, no flags—and no medals when we are brave and no wound stripes when we are hurt.”
Meanwhile, Adjutant Caesar has found out that his wife has been cheating on him with Tom, and sends him off on a suicide mission. Amy appears with La Bessière to say goodbye to him. She is elegantly dressed and evidently planning to marry La Bessière. Brown and his fellow legionnaires are accompanied by a crowd of women. “Who are these women?” Amy asks the man who has stayed with her. “I would call them the rear guard.” She: “Those women must be mad.” He: “I don’t know. You see, they love their men.”
On the evening of their engagement party, she hears the trumpets and drums of the returning legion. Out of her mind with excitement, she jumps up, her string of pearls rips apart, and she hurries out onto the street. She finds Brown in a bar having a good time with women, music, and liquor. When she discovers that he has carved her name and a heart in the table, she thinks she finally has proof of his love. The next morning, she comes to the edge of town with her fiancé. The two men and the woman say goodbye in a polite and distant manner. The wind is gusting; one step through the city gate and the desert begins. The Legionnaires report for duty, and the women with goats lug their belongings. Amy looks desperate. Legionnaire Brown turns to her with his charming smile and uses his fingers to indicate their familiar greeting; she returns the gesture. He marches off. Leaning on the gate, she watches the Legionnaires and their women. Amy goes back to the car, embraces La Bessière, gives him a kiss on the hand (as an expression of gratitude, not love), then strides through the gate, her clothes fluttering in the wind and her feet sinking into the sand up to her ankles. She sheds her elegant shoes, leaves them lying in the sand, and does not look back. The wind blows away any traces of her, and La Bessière and the movie audience stare into the void. In the end, all we hear is the whistling of the wind.
Brown, the rogue, stays true to his company, which is why he forsakes the love of the beautiful stranger. La Bessière, by contrast, vacillates between feelings and conventions. The special relationship between La Bessière and Amy is reflected in the similarity of their clothing, from their tailcoats to the light trenchcoats they both have on when they are looking for Brown.18 Von Sternberg staged this film like a silent movie, but he advanced the plot adroitly by means of sounds and music. The trumpets and drums signal not only the arrival and departure of the Legion, but also Amy’s fate.
On the evening of the premiere, in the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, Dietrich got a preview of her impending fame. Banners bearing her name were hanging out in front, and the red carpet was rolled out. She was surprised and asked von Sternberg in a whisper whether this event would also be covered in the Berliner Zeitung back in Germany. All of Hollywood turned out on this evening: Charlie Chaplin; Adolphe Zukor, the president of Paramount Pictures; Douglas Fairbanks; Mary Pickford; and Irving Thalberg and his wife, Norma Shearer. Dietrich wore a black chiffon dress and a cape adorned with silver fox tails. She looked elegant and European—just the way her lover liked to see her.
Dietrich as Amy Jolly was neither the great sophisticate nor the emancipated flapper nor the bisexual temptress. Quite the opposite: Amy Jolly is a marked woman who wants to be saved by the love of a man. In forsaking herself in order to find herself, she realizes that her life as she knows it will cease to exist. The deck officer’s prediction comes true: she will never return. She goes off barefoot into the desert. The ending of this movie is one of the most famous in the history of the cinema.
To Dietrich’s astonished delight, her performance in Morocco pleased both viewers and critics. Sergei Eisenstein cabled von Sternberg: OF ALL YOUR GREAT WORKS, MOROCCO IS THE MOST BEAUTIFUL. ADMIRATION AND LOVE TO YOU AND MARLENE.19 After this success, Paramount offered her a new contract: $125,000 per movie, with two movies a year. Paramount was hoping that Dietrich would be its answer to Greta Garbo. In Hollywood, she had to show that she was on par with Garbo’s star quality, yet entirely different. She accomplished this by letting the public in on her life. Garbo did not grant interviews or give the public glimpses into her personal life. She never wrote memoirs or appeared on television
. At the height of her fame, she would retire from the world of film and insist on staying out of sight and maintaining her silence. Dietrich, by contrast, kept her public informed about her affairs, her recipes, her parenting, and her furniture. She did not withdraw from the public eye until the final years of her life, at which point she—like Garbo—retreated into the anonymity of a big city. But in 1930 in Hollywood, Dietrich was anchored in the real world, with Garbo up in the sphere of the divine. Garbo’s appeal came from her aloofness from the social realm, which is where Dietrich sparkled. Dietrich worked with her body; Garbo’s face left her body behind. Dietrich always kept pace with the times, while Garbo radiated classic immutable beauty: “She is always herself, and carries without pretense, under her crown or her wide-brimmed hats, the same snowy solitary face.”20 The derisive pleasure and the self-mockery of a Dietrich were alien to her. But both of them were European women who played roles that were not intended for Americans.
In Berlin it would never have occurred to Dietrich to go on a diet, but in Hollywood she felt fat. Von Sternberg loved women “full of life, with thighs, breasts, and sex appeal,” yet Dietrich wanted to be as slender as the American women.21 She did not especially like the women in Hollywood, whom she described as bossy and grasping, but she was impressed by the looks and lifestyle of American women. Working women were not a rarity in the United States, for far longer than had been the case in Germany. Women were expected to look sophisticated and dress in the latest styles. In the 1930s, it became fashionable for women to polish their fingernails, go to the hairdresser, show off their figures, and wear sheer stockings and subtle makeup. Dietrich was drawn to the pragmatic modernity of America, which she found lacking in Europe.
A few weeks after the filming of Morocco wrapped up, the shooting began for Dishonored, her third movie with von Sternberg. Gary Cooper was the first choice for the male leading role, but he turned it down. He did not want to subject himself to von Sternberg’s transformations one more time. Of course rumors were swirling about an affair between Dietrich and Cooper, but Dietrich later provided a matter-of-fact explanation for von Sternberg’s jealousy: “You know, he couldn’t stand it if I looked up at any man in a movie. . . . It would infuriate him—and Cooper was very tall—and you know, Jo was not.”22 Victor McLaglen, a British swashbuckler and former professional boxer, took the role instead. And it is easy to see that Dietrich was not pleased with her tough counterpart. There is no singing in this movie, but there are several awkward piano interludes by the leading actress.
In the opening scene, we see a pair of nice-looking women’s legs up to the knee. They are standing in high-heeled shoes in the rain. The woman straightens out one of her stockings, then wheels around. The camera travels up to the face of Marlene Dietrich, which is alluringly concealed behind the veil of her little hat. She is a prostitute who is dressed like a lady as she waits for johns. The man she takes home with her is the head of the Austrian secret service. After she gives a sample of her patriotism, he tries to recruit her as a spy, attempting to sweeten the deal with the prospect of travel and beautiful clothing, but she cuts him off by saying, “What appeals to me is the chance to serve my country.” He had not counted on a woman who sold her body being unwilling to sell out. X-27 (her spy name) is a widow named Kolverer whose husband died in the war. Her mission is to turn in two high-ranking officers who are suspected of working for the Russian enemy. She quickly hunts down the first of them, but she falls in love with the second one, Lieutenant Kranau. The initial showdown between the two takes place in her boudoir. He defends his actions by attacking her: “I’m a soldier, but you bring something into war that doesn’t belong in it. You trick men into death with your body.” He fails to grasp the fact that she also regards herself as a soldier who is trying to restore her lost honor by serving her country. After many adventures, they see each other once again at the Austrian headquarters. The Russian prisoners of war, including Kranau, are brought out. X-27, clad in a leather uniform, asks for permission to interrogate him. She enables him to escape and is court-martialed for her actions. The presiding judge asks her why she has betrayed her country for the sake of a passing affection. “Maybe I loved him” is her terse reply. The execution is set for the following morning. Her last wish is to die in the uniform in which she served her fellow countrymen, by which she means the suit with the fur trim. She saunters up to the site of her execution in a ladylike manner. Young men with rifles are awaiting her. She uses the sword of the captain in command as a mirror to freshen her lipstick. The young man who has been assigned the task of overseeing the execution shouts that he refuses to do so. She straightens her stockings while he delivers his passionate plea. Widow Kolverer evidently considers his behavior unseemly, and is shot instead by the lieutenant who is next in line. The lovely corpse lies in the courtyard, and the young soldiers march off. The old head of the secret service salutes X-27 as he leaves.
Dishonored is a flawed film that was slapped together far too hastily. Von Sternberg makes the viewer the accomplice of his longings as the camera rests on Dietrich’s legs, breasts, hips, and ankles. A combination of a diet, sheer determination to succeed, homesickness, work, and love had made Dietrich lose quite a bit of weight, and she could now show off her figure in clingy outfits and uniforms. The theme of the movie is loyalty and betrayal. Kolverer no longer offers her body for money, but for her country. As a captain’s widow, prostitute, spy, and traitor, she embodies both honor and dishonor. The focal point of the movie is Dietrich’s body, and the plot a mere extension of her physicality. She remains true to herself, not pretending to be anything other than a woman who sells herself. The men need to don uniforms to carry out their treachery; she relies on intelligence and sex. Like Morocco before it, Dishonored portrays the self-destruction of a woman who falls victim to love. The film’s flaws notwithstanding, the historian Carlo Ginzburg has called Dishonored the “most beautiful movie in the history of the cinema.”23
And then Dietrich was back at Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin. Once the filming was complete, there was nothing to keep her in Hollywood. She longed to go home and be with her child, her friends, Rudi, and the city of Berlin. It was only when she got back that she realized how much had happened over the past few months. Only a year had passed since von Sternberg came into her life, yet everything had changed. She was famous. She was still self-conscious of what she thought of as her ducklike nose, but she was getting better at hiding these kinds of feelings. When she heard the familiar diction of Berlin, she realized how much she had missed all of this while she was under the palm trees. Dietrich was happy “to be in this Berlin, which I will never flush from my blood,” as she confided to Franz Hessel.24 Christmas was a few short weeks away, and she was looking forward to celebrating Maria’s birthday with her. Of course she did not check into a hotel, but instead stayed at her old apartment on Kaiserallee. She knew that the love affair between Rudi and Tamara was still going on, and although she had no actual objections, she wanted to be the one to set the tone. The role she defended more than any other in her life was that of wife and mother. Her daughter needed a moment to grasp the fact that the slender woman who never stopped talking, filled the hall with her huge wardrobe trunks, and was constantly being called to the telephone was her own mother. Maria described her mother’s return home in terms that suggested that her life was being taken over by a stranger.25 That year the Christmas tree was gigantic, and Maria was given a gift of a grocery-store replica that would have been the envy of her friends, had she known any other children; instead, she had to play alone or with Tamara.26
Dietrich may have sensed that she had come home only to say goodbye. As Stephen Spender wrote, Germany had become so politicized that it was now divided against itself. “Berlin was the tension, the poverty, the anger, the prostitution, the hope and despair thrown out onto the streets. It was the blatant rich at the smart restaurants, the prostitutes in army top boots at corners, the grim, submerged-looking Communists
in processions, and the violent youths who suddenly emerged from nowhere into the Wittenbergplatz and shouted: ‘Deutschland Erwache!’ ”27 Dietrich wanted to make as much of an impression on Berlin as possible in a short time. Quite likely she was hoping for a follow-up career in Europe. In March 1931, she made disc recordings at the Ultraphon studio. The songs she sang included “Peter,” Hollaender’s “Johnny wenn du Geburtstag hast,” and the film hit “Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht”; her friend Mischa Spoliansky had written the music for this song, and he accompanied her on the piano at the studio as well. “Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht” was one of her mother’s favorite songs, which indicates that this severe woman must have had a very sentimental side as well. Peter Kreuder conducted the orchestra. Back in February 1930, Dietrich had recorded all the songs from The Blue Angel, and the vocal numbers from Morocco were already for sale as records. Her records sold well and provided a solid source of revenue for the rest of her life. Dietrich’s songs were sung and whistled by teenagers, housewives, attorneys, and factory workers, and appealed to people from every walk of life. The photographs from the recording studio show a self-assured, cheerful Dietrich wearing a two-piece men’s suit with a tie, shirt, cuff links, and breast-pocket handkerchief.
She did not want to go back to America alone, so she took Maria with her. She was indifferent to what the Hollywood bosses might think when their femme fatale turned out to be a loving mother. The only one who mattered was Jo, and he liked Maria. The day before Dietrich left Berlin, her mother threw a party for her. Her friends and admirers gathered on Kaiserallee to say goodbye. They all waited for Dietrich to put in an appearance. Her cousin, Hasso Felsing, who was among the guests at this party, realized how quickly she had learned to act like a star. Dietrich could afford to keep the others waiting. Finally she turned up. Leaning against the doorway in a decorative pose, she declared to the group: “Darlings, here I am.” Everyone erupted in cheers.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 19
