Marlene Dietrich: exhibit on LACMA, Donald Spoto's biography

"It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily." —Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express" (1932)

LACMA is currently hosting a fabulous new exhibit on Hollywood costume design called Hollywood Costume, running until March 2, 2015, at the Wilshire May Company building. Concurrently the LACMA Tuesday senior matinee has scheduled its monthly films built around a famed designer. October is devoted to Paramount's Travis Banton, who with Adrian (MGM), Orry-Kelly (Warner Brothers) and Edith Head (Paramount) helped create the gorgeous movie costumes of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Banton created the great Marlene Dietrich gowns that she wore through her '30s Paramount career.

Dietrich's first American film, Morocco, screened this week, and it was a revelation—not so much for the Dietrich costumes but for how the actress was first presented to American films audiences in 1930. Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo were icons and eternal symbols of glamour from the very beginning of their careers. Both actresses were foreign born stars (Germany and Sweden) whose status and popularity was more rarefied than home-grown product. Critics and big city audiences appreciated these beauties, but most Americans wanted Jean Harlow and Myrna Loy. Garbo was considered the actress, Dietrich the symbol of foreign mystery and allure.

Josef Von Sternberg had made Marlene Dietrich a star with the classic The Blue Angel. Watching this film today, it is hard to figure out how she became a legend. She was plump and not particularly alluring. Van Sternberg brought her to Hollywood, and together they made six films together that are revered today as classics. Von Sternberg convinced Dietrich to lose weight, and her glamorous image—created by striking camera work and inventive direction—was responsible for the icon known as Marlene Dietrich. Watching Morocco the other day was fascinating in that you could see Dietrich move from amateur to star as the film progresses. In the beginning Dietrich looks plump and unsure of herself in her two musical numbers. Later, as her obsession with legionnaire Gary Cooper increases, you see the transformation from minor actress to assured star. Morocco is a terrible movie but pretty campy, especially at the end when Marlene kicks off her high heals and staggers into the desert with the other female camp followers to stay with her man. Ironically, Dietrich received her only Oscar nomination for this kitschy role.

In just two short years, "Marlene Dietrich, icon extraordinaire" was born in Shanghai Express—probably the best of the Von Sternberg films. The baby fat is gone, the hair is longer and more lustrous, and her face has a sculpted look backed by feathers and luminous photography. As visually striking as the Von Sternberg films were, they threatened to destroy Dietrich the actress. By the end of the '30s she was called box-office poison and in dire need of a career change. She found it playing Frenchie in the great western/comedy Destry Rides Again with James Stewart. Dietrich was still glamorous, but she was alive and funny for the first time on-screen.

During the war years, Marlene Dietrich devoted herself to supporting the U.S. war effort against her homeland. She had famously turned down Adolf Hitler's offer to return to Germany as a superstar. Touring war zones and giving all her support to defeating Germany made her a legend in the United States and a pariah in her native land. Dietrich was given the Medal of Freedom by the U.S. in 1945. Marlene Dietrich became truly interesting as an actress after the the war. She may be the only actress from that era to actually look better as she got older.

In 1948, Dietrich gave her greatest performance in Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair. At age 46 she looked better than she had in Morocco back in 1930. And her performance was staggering. Yet there was no Oscar nomination, and the film was so controversial that it vanished quickly. Loretta Young won the 1947 Best Actress award for The Farmer's Daughter. Dietrich should have romped home with this award for her spectacular performance. In 1950 she stole Alfred Hitchcock's Stagefright from a pallid Jane Wyman, and in 1957 gave another magnificent performance as Christine Vole in Billy Wilder's courtroom thriller Witness for the Prosecution. Playing the German wife of accused murderer Tyrone Power, Dietrich was amazing, still the glamour icon deep into her 50s.

One last great role came with her hysterical cameo in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil. Looking like she was doing retakes from her 1947 camp classic Golden Earrings, Dietrich had a field day as the all-knowing Tanya. Dietrich continued her career as a singer and sex symbol for the next 20 years. After a disastrous stage fall, she retreated to her Paris apartment and was a total recluse for the last 11 years of her life. Academy Award-winner Max Shell made a documentary about the fabulous star. Released in 1984, Marlene was extravagantly reviewed even though only Dietrich's voice was used as she refused to be photographed. As Norma Desmond exclaimed in Sunset Boulevard, "Great stars are ageless," but great stars like Dietrich were smart enough to retreat behind the legend. Marlene Dietrich is a gay icon not only because of her fabulous film career—her bisexual lifestyle is filled with enough famous lovers of both sexes to stagger the imagination.

Marlene Dietrich was the eternal symbol of beauty and glamor for almost 50 years. But if you have to pick just one Dietrich film to watch, get Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair. It is all there—the voice, the face, great songs, gorgeous cinematography, brilliant Wilder dialog and the greatest performance the legend known as Marlene Dietrich ever gave. Source: www.frontiersla.com

Dietrich smoothly engineered an evening à deux at Horn Avenue, and soon there flourished an affair that was (at least for Cooper) as hot as Morocco itself. This was no real challenge for Dietrich, since Cooper, although married, readily succumbed to the offer; he had also been involved with Clara Bow and, even more seriously, with Lupe Velez. Of course, von Sternberg was not at all pleased with this new development, but he knew better than to complain. Some people can evoke from their lovers an attention that is frankly deferential. This ability Dietrich seems to have raised to the level of a fine art, for remarkably often in her life her lovers were not only grateful admirers but somehow felt bound to her.

Men were especially vulnerable to this, Cooper among them: for the remainder of Morocco, he was her devoted ally, far more ardent to please and attend her in life than in the story they were filming. Von Sternberg, though firmly out of this romantic running of the bulls, quietly raged with jealousy and resentment, according to both Dietrich (“They didn’t like each other . . . [it was] jealousy”) and actor Joel McCrea, a friend of Cooper’s (“Jo was jealous . . . and Cooper hated him”). But to make things more complicated still, Cooper soon had his own reasons for jealousy when he learned that Maurice Chevalier had briefly become a rival. Chevalier’s autobiography claims the friendship was “simply camaraderie,” but his wife used it as the basis for a successful divorce petition. It would be easy to regard Marlene Dietrich’s vigorous sexual life as irresponsible, frankly hedonistic or even symptomatic of an almost obsessive carnality. But her affairs, no matter how brief or nonexclusive, were always focussed and intense, never merely casual, anonymous trysts. Lavish in bestowing amatory favors, Dietrich in fact equated sex more with the offering of comfort —or perhaps more accurately, the complex, benevolent control she exerted in romances was her gratification. Sex was something nurturing she offered those she respected (like von Sternberg), those she thought were lonely (like Chevalier) or those she thought to be in need (like Cooper, who complained, poor man, that he was being nagged by both his wife and by Lupe Velez).

Essentially a woman of clear preferences and antipathies, Dietrich concealed none of them. She disliked most modern art (von Sternberg’s occasional tutorials notwithstanding), noodles, horse races, evangelism, fish, after-dinner speeches, politics, American sandwiches, opera and slang; she favored Punch and Judy shows, apple strudel, circus performers, speeding in an open roadster, pickles, perfumes, romantic novels by Sudermann and doleful poetry by Heine. There was, however, nothing about her of the Byronic heroine, and her attitude toward intimacy was a great deal simpler than von Sternberg’s, and without much reflection. “I had nothing to do with my birth,” she said around this time, “and I most likely will have nothing to do with my future. My philosophy of life is simply one of resignation.”

Her convictions, accordingly, were based simply on experience, and this had unequivocally taught her that Josef von Sternberg was certainly good for her. While he saw her as a beautiful woman who could wreak emotional havoc by simply being, he was at the same time one of the moths drawn ineluctably to her flame. Dietrich was an exciting woman whose eroticism was, to those she liked, neither cheaply accessible nor teasingly withheld. For von Sternberg, she also seemed to promise more than she at any one time delivered—not only more sensual satisfaction but also more artistic possibilities for her exploitation as an actress. However, intimacy revealed to von Sternberg another part of her nature: that there was perhaps nothing in her emotional life reserved for only one or even a dozen people she liked. And this realization prompted von Sternberg to withdraw.

The coolly detached seducer of the self-destructive man, she was an earthy woman who simply cavorted according to her nature (thus The Blue Angel). But the tarnished performer could also be a faithful follower (Morocco), a hooker with a curious higher morality (Dishonored), a weary traveler living by wit and charm (Shanghai Express), a mother devoted to her child (Blonde Venus). Although she always insisted her roles had nothing to do with her true character, the truth was just the opposite: they were in fact coded chapters in a kind of tribute-biography von Sternberg made of her, a series of essays that could have been called “All the Things You Are.” But he also saw her, in everyday life, as capricious, even sometimes shallow; his fantasy about her was therefore being chastened and his goddess revealed as thoroughly human, frail and fallible.

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.”

Dietrich took Hemingway 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 “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'.

Dietrich’s cavalier independence and the role of lover primus inter pares was finally too much for Jean Gabin; he married the French actress Maria Mauban. This was a devastating blow to Dietrich, who could never understand why a man she still loved (or ever had loved) would commit to another woman. When Robert Kennedy asked her, at a Washington luncheon in 1963, why she said she left Jean Gabin, she replied, “Because he wanted to marry me. I hate marriage. It is an immoral institution. But he still loves me.” The Gabin affair ended in 1946. Dietrich now had no prospects of European film work and therefore accepted an offer from Hollywood to appear in a film called Golden Earrings. Because she had been absent from Hollywood three full years (and had not starred in a successful film since 1939), Leisen had to convince Paramount that Dietrich was the right choice to play Lydia, a vulgar but seductive Middle European gypsy who helps a British intelligence officer smuggle a poison gas formula out of Nazi Germany just before the war by disguising him as her peasant husband. When she was first offered the role, Dietrich was still in Europe and visited gypsy camps to see how the women looked, dressed and behaved.

Now at the studio for wardrobe and makeup tests, she assured Leisen she would play Lydia with complete fidelity to realism—to European neorealism, in fact, which flinched at nothing. This she did stonishingly well, for although Dietrich could not of course completely abandon her pretension to youthful beauty (nor would the studio have desired it), she dispatched the role of a greasy, sloppy gypsy with the kind of fresh comic panache not seen since her Frenchy in Destry Rides Again.

As a sex-starved wench, she swoops down on the stuffy hero played by Ray Milland, supervising his transformation into a Hungarian peasant. Munching bread, gnawing on a fish-head supper, spitting for good luck, diving for Milland’s lips and chest, she is the complete, manhungry virago—at once crude, funny and sensuous throughout the aridly incredible narrative. “You look like a wild bull!” she whispers to Milland after she has finished with his disguising makeup, pierced his ears and clipped on the golden earrings; then she nearly growls, “The girls—will—go—mad—for you!” Often resembling the seductive young Gloria Swanson, Dietrich does not simply breathe in this picture; she seems to exhale fire.

But the appealing comic nonsense of the completed Golden Earrings did not apply to the rigors of production, for there were bitter feuds. Milland, who had just won an Oscar playing an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s harrowing film The Lost Weekend, disliked Dietrich and feared she would steal the picture (which she handily did). He also found her commitment to realism somewhat revolting—especially in the eating scene, when she repeatedly stuck a fish in her mouth, sucked out the eye, pulled off the head, swallowed it and (after Leisen had shot the scene) promptly stuck her finger in her throat and vomited. The Legion of Decency’s censure (she could not keep her hands off Milland) was officially an acute embarrassment for the studio, although it was also splendid free publicity: the picture returned three million dollars in the next two years.

From Paris that summer of 1947, Dietrich wrote to her Paramount hairdresser, Nellie Manley, that she was “living quietly at the Hotel Georges V, cooking whatever can be cooked. The attitude and the feelings of the people are not as good as they were during the war. It is depressing, but not hopeless.” Her fortunes improved that August, when Billy Wilder stopped in Paris to visit her after filming exterior shots for a forthcoming “black comedy” about life in occupied postwar Berlin; he offered Dietrich the role of Erika von Schlütow in the picture, to be called A Foreign Affair. At first she rejected it, hesitating to play the German mistress of an American army officer who loses him to a winsome visiting congresswoman and is then taken away by military police after her Nazi past is revealed.

With his patented brand of acerbic moral cynicism, Wilder had prepared A Foreign Affair as a satiric criticism of widespread military corruption amid the ruins of Berlin, of the Allied involvement in a shameful black market, and of the self-righteous abuse of German civilians by occupying American soldiers. When filming began in December, Dietrich’s co-star as the prissy, investigating congresswoman was Jean Arthur; the leading man was John Lund; and the pianist in the cabaret was none other than Hollander himself, invited in tribute to his long association as Dietrich’s composer.

Like Pasternak, Wilder understood the value of deglamorizing Dietrich. Her first appearance in A Foreign Affair goes beyond anything in Golden Earrings: her hair is unbrushed, her face smirched with toothpaste, water trickles from her mouth as she brushes and gargles. This character is no Amy Jolly, no Concha Perez. As the story proceeds, it becomes clear that Erika can manipulate American officers as easily as she did Nazis, one of whom was her attended as a fashionable companion. But she has suffered privately, socially and by postwar deprivation for her guilty past; her act at the Lorelei cabaret, singing “Black Market” and “The Ruins of Berlin,” expresses her cool cynicism, her distrust of any nation’s claim to moral supremacy and her necessary, fearful suspicion of everyone.

The role was perfect for Dietrich, for she had been long confirmed by Hollywood as von Sternberg’s icon of the tarnished woman masked with pain and capable of love and all of whom she easily the sudden acknowledgment of her own need for tenderness and forgiveness— indeed, for redemption from the past. “I knew,” Wilder said years later, “that whatever obsession she had with her appearance, she was also a thorough professional. From the time she met von Sternberg she had always been very interested in his magic tricks with the camera—tricks she tried to teach every cameraman in later pictures.” -"Blue Angel: the Life of Marlene Dietrich" (2000) by Donald Spoto