by Donald Spoto
Born February 20, 1897 in Aussig, Rudolf Emilian Sieber was a dapper twenty-five-year-old who found Marlene Dietrich winsome, pretty and sensual. When Sieber called at her apartment a month later, Wilhelmina flatly said she disapproved of her daughter’s busy social life when the duties of work should prevail. “This is too boring for me,” Sieber told Dietrich soon afterwards. “I can’t come to your home because of your mother. Why? I can have any of the most beautiful Russian girls in Berlin—any of them I please. We need to stop this, it just doesn’t please me anymore.”
But it was not just her mother’s Victorian propriety that Sieber resented. According to Stefan Lorant, who saw them both socially at the time, Rudi was not quite so freewheeling sexually, and he seemed to disapprove of Dietrich’s rendezvous with women, which she made no attempt to conceal. If indeed that was his objection, he perhaps harbored the common notion that all she needed was the love of a good man to normalize her preference. Rudi was earnest, conventional and obviously taken with this spirited, energetic woman who was most affectionate and responsive when he was tired or worried. At such times she hovered with concern, nurtured and encouraged him, acted as she had been trained—to gratify a man—and then more than ever willingly applied the soothing unguent of sex. But he was impatient with Wilhelmina and her snobbism.
THE FILMING OF TRAGÖDIE DER LIEBE PROCEEDED smoothly, and Dietrich’s brief appearance as Lucie delighted the other players and then audiences. Although the film is silent, no dialogue intertitles are needed to appreciate Lucie’s coy manipulation. Dietrich’s eyelids flutter, her shoulders seem almost to project her request, her lips to promise a rewarding kiss. But in the courtroom finale she steals the scene from a hundred other players, exchanging her monocle for opera glasses—her idea, and it must have exhilarated Joe May, for he intercut close-ups of her comic reactions to the tense legal proceedings as she fluttered, laughed and yawned, everything in counterpoint to the solemnity of the situation. This remains the earliest documented evidence of a sly theatrical wit and a sense of how best to direct a director’s attention to herself.
September 1922 was triply busy, as Dietrich travelled to the studio in early morning, rehearsed in her drama classes in the late afternoons and was onstage several evenings each week in her first roles. Beginning September 7, she had a small, four-line role in Wedekind’s Die Büchse der Pandora (Pandora’s Box) at the Kammerspiele, which she played nine times until March 3, 1923; her friend Grete Mosheim was also in the cast. The director was an amusing man named Friedrich Holländer, who was also a musician and composer; he occasionally coached Dietrich in singing, for her voice lay uncertainly between soprano and (perhaps because she had been smoking heavily for five years) a rather gauzy baritone.
She also appeared forty-two times, from October 2 to April 22, in a German translation of The Taming of the Shrew at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. The popular star Elisabeth Bergner played Kate, and Dietrich the Widow, a small part made smaller by the director’s generous cuts of the text. She was, however, so frankly awestruck by Bergner’s beauty and poise that she diluted what little character the Widow had and made no impression on colleagues or audiences. Not much more promotion was given to her career by her appearance (again with Mosheim) in two small roles in a forgettable play by Hennequin and Veber called Timotheus in flagranti (which was permanently removed from the repertory after only twelve days). This she immediately followed by twenty-three performances (from January 24 to March 5, 1923) at the Kammerspiele in yet another small, colorless role, Anna Shenstone in a translation of Maugham’s The Circle—again with Elisabeth Bergner in the lead. Looking like a refugee from a road tour of Die Walküre, she also appeared nine times as an almost comically overdressed Amazon warrior in Kleist’s epic tragedy Penthesilea.
Her relationship with Sieber, which proceeded thornily, was also very nearly as tragic as the play. “The realization that he might marry another girl just about drove her to suicide,” according to Grete Mosheim. “Finally she stole some coal and food from her mother and one winter night she went through the snow to his house. She gained access to his quarters, laid on a hot meal and waited for him to return.” From that night the affair flourished, and next day Rudi gave her the money to take a small flat on her own—Wilhelmina to the contrary notwithstanding.
But by April 1923, Dietrich was professionally bored. Her several stage roles were minuscule and unrewarding, and she had just spent four days dressed as a peasant girl in a pious trifle called Der Mensch am Wege (Man by the Roadside), a film starring, written and directed by Wilhelm Dieterle. “One had the impression that she came from a milieu where one had to go through the kitchen to get to the living room,” Dieterle said years later, describing her directness and simplicity. “Despite this, she could seem very much the grande dame.”
The affectation of sophistication may have been assumed for the sake of Dietrich’s escort, for by this time Rudi was virtually her constant companion and accompanied her to the suburban studio where the film was made. To make herself more attractive, she also joined Grete Mosheim in an exercise regimen under the direction of a powerful Swedish gymnast named Ingrid Menzendick, who had a studio in the Lützowplatz.
Then, on Thursday, May 17, 1923, at the town hall of Berlin-Friedenau—as if on a whim—Marlene Dietrich (then twenty-one) married Rudolf Sieber (twenty-six). The newlyweds moved into her apartment on the Kaiserallee.
The marriage, according to friends like Stefan Lorant, Grete Mosheim and Lotte Andor, had its own capricious logic. For Rudi’s part, he was beguiled by her sensuality and wished to settle into a conventional marriage and raise a family. At the time of the wedding, Dietrich did not object to this plan; besides, she appreciated his influence at the film studios and his professional recommendations on her behalf. He was also handsome, polite and articulate—and a man to care for and attend, which was very much part of her training. In this regard, she eagerly assumed the role of Hausfrau, cooking and housekeeping for her husband.
But two weeks after the wedding, it was clear that Marlene Dietrich was not to be confined by matrimony. She made no secret of her infatuation with a girl she had met at an audition for a Bjornstern Bjornson play about budding romance (aptly titled Wenn der junge Wein blutt/When the Young Vine Blooms), and Rudi, as she might have predicted, was suitably concerned. Once the play began regular performances (as Dietrich’s fellow cast member Lotte Andor recalled), Sieber delivered his wife to the theater each evening and waited backstage to escort her home. The object of his wife’s attention was quickly discouraged.
Dietrich’s career was not much advanced by the Bjornson play—nor by either her two-minute bit part in the movie Der Sprung ins Leben (The Leap into Life), filmed in July, or her stage appearance as Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Theater in der Königgrätzer Strasse in February 1924. For the remainder of 1923 and 1924 she was essentially unoccupied, and so it was not surprising to friends when she told them she was pregnant. On December 12, 1924, after a difficult delivery, Dietrich gave birth to Maria Sieber.
There must have been complications and perhaps even some danger attending the event, for Dietrich was confined to a long recuperation; as she wrote in a card of thanks to her former violin teacher, Julius Levin, in May, she was still resting at home and unable to look for work. But she was in no hurry, for the role of doting mother eminently suited her. She would not accept a servant to help care for the baby, she nursed her lovingly for eight months, and when friends invited the Siebers to a vacation in Westerland on the North Sea during the summer of 1925, she accepted on condition that Heidede was welcome too.
This holiday immediately preceded Dietrich’s return to the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg, where she was hired to play the coquette Micheline in Arthur Robison’s sumptuous production of Manon Lescaut. In a half-dozen scenes with the stars Lya de Putti and Fritz Greiner, Dietrich had the most screen time of her career thus far.* Flirting at a sidewalk café by merely lowering her hea
d and affecting weary insouciance that would soon become a virtual trademark, she impressed at least two critics with a provocative kind of repose—as if she might seduce by merely waiting in a kind of languid indifference. While many other performances of the silent screen era (and later) were almost theatrically overripe, Dietrich knew how to do nothing brilliantly. And this quickly became a way to attract attention by a sort of inversion: while everyone round her seemed almost hysterically fussy, she claimed a scene by appearing detached, liberated from the action.
But the image of cool independence was not entirely simulated. By early 1926, Rudi was again (as often) unemployed: he kept house and cared for Maria while Dietrich went to auditions and casting calls and effectively supported the family. As he might have anticipated, this arrangement had serious risks, for marriage and motherhood were no hindrances to his wife’s autonomy.
* Some recent chroniclers of Marlene Dietrich’s career (among them Cadden, Higham and Kobal) have insisted she appears as an unbilled extra in a crowd scene of G. W. Pabst’s classic Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street). But no archival materials or subsequent cast list support this, and she is nowhere recognizable. Because no complete version of the original film exists, it is remotely possible she fell to the cutting room floor; even this explanation, however (advanced by Dickens), seems unlikely, for the crowd scenes were shot in February 1925, when Dietrich was still resting at home after her daughter’s birth.
4: 1926–1929
ON FEBRUARY 1926, MARLENE DIETRICH ASsumed the role of Lou Carrère in Hans Rehfisch’s social satire Duell am Lido. Cast as an amoral girl tottering on the brink of the demimonde, she arrived at the first rehearsal and was told by director Leopold Jessner that she looked just right in her own outfit—silk trousers, a dark jacket and a startling monocle—and that she should wear all these in the performances. He may not have known that she had come directly from an all-night frolic at a transvestite bar called Always Faithful, whose patrons were certainly not. Dietrich may have taken her performance cue from that place, too, for she played Lou as frantically decadent. “The role should have been acted by Marlene Dietrich not in a demonic revelry but icy-cold,” remarked critic Fritz Engel.
From that season on, she was a well-known public presence, and not at all because of her professional accomplishments. Known in seedy Kurfürstendamm bars as well as at elegant dances sponsored by producers and musicians, Dietrich was typical of many Berlin actresses —freewheeling and unconventional in her conduct and eager to meet those who could advance her career; they were often more approachable at night, after they’d had several whiskeys and some cocaine. At such times, however, she always kept a clear head.
Often, as actress Elisabeth Lennartz recalled, Dietrich got attention at restaurants and cafés by “wearing neither bra nor panties, which was very modern and daring.” Dancer and actress Tilly Losch, a leading doyenne of the Berlin lesbian bar scene, recalled that Dietrich was no stranger to such places. “It was chic for girls not to be feminine. I knew Dietrich in those days and she was a tough little nut. But unlike the others, she somehow looked glamorous.” A photograph of the time shows Dietrich as glamorous indeed in a gentleman’s smoking jacket at a ladies’ supper club, flanked by Leni Riefenstahl (soon to be Hitler’s documentarian with her films Triumph of the Will and Olympiad) and the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong.
In lounges, cabarets and jazz clubs, however (as Gerda Huber and Grete Mosheim, among others, confirmed), Dietrich had a reputation for combining the most outrageous dances, jokes and sexual capers with unbending opposition to drugs and excessive drinking. She was, in other words, a curious combination of her mother’s Prussian upright moralism and her own sturdy, antic individualism. Käte Haack recalled a formal ball in the mansion of Eugen Robert, director of the Tribune Theater, attended by Reinhardt, playwright Ferenc Molnár, the actors Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt, and Carola Neher (soon to star in the original production of The Threepenny Opera).
Only one woman stood out: Dietrich, who appeared and took the hand of Carola Neher, who was also a great beauty. And then the two of them danced a tango. It was an unforgettable sight, and the entire crowd, astonished, made room and watched.
The tango was of course a dance of considerable style, and it drew attention by its controlled, almost stoic eroticism. Dietrich and Neher glided, swooped and dipped without ever unlocking a breathless embrace. The bystanders cheered.
But there were other ways of attracting attention. Elli Marcus, known for her celebrity photographs, was approached by Dietrich with the blunt request, “Take some pictures of me that will make me a star.” Warily, Marcus complied and Dietrich sat obediently for three days of photography; despite the pleasing results, fame still eluded her.
At home, Sieber at first took his wife’s eccentric liberties calmly, as if they were an actress’s transient fancies or a phase from which she might emerge. Indeed, Dietrich openly discussed her casual amours, which included men from film studios with whom she spent an occasional night, actors from the theater who she thought required a little attention, and those like Anna May Wong and Tilly Losch, who were clever, amusing and exotic companions. She did not proffer sex as barter, to win a role or a favor; it was simply an acceptable form of flattery and a way of being appreciated. From men she was perhaps winning the approval she had been denied by her father and stepfather, while intimacy with women was always natural and easy for her.
IN LATE SPRING 1926, DIRECTOR ALEXANDER KORDA cast Dietrich in the role of a pretty, sophisticated society girl in a film showcasing his wife Maria. In Eine Du Barry von Heute (A Modern Du Barry), billed oddly as Marlaine Dietrich, she had only three brief scenes as a nameless coquette—but she nevertheless revealed a real flair for comedy. After ordering a new dress that requires time for alterations, she sees the shopgirl wearing it at an elegant restaurant that very evening. Furious, she demands that her escort take her away at once, and her quick shift from surprise to annoyance to prissy outrage is comically acute. Next morning, languishing in bed, she telephones the dress shop to demand the clerk’s discharge, only to be told the girl has already resigned (and become an overnight social sensation). Her understated fury—conveyed by simply narrowing her gaze and slowly pursing her lips—is a model of discerning adult acting in silent film.
Despite the small role and modest income—Dietrich was paid only three hundred marks, which was one percent of the star’s salary—she agreed that August to appear for Korda as a mere dress extra for the party scenes of a comedy called Madame wünscht keine Kinder (Madame Wants No Children.) This she accepted on condition that Rudi be hired as a production assistant, a courtesy won through the intercession of cinematographer Karl Freund, who years later in America was the cameraman for the television series I Love Lucy.
But there was no time—nor did she have the inclination—to be despondent over a negligible film career. In late August, Dietrich was busy rehearsing daily at the Grosses Schauspielhaus when an ailing actress (Erika Glässner) withdrew from Eric Charell’s eighteen-scene musical revue Von Mund zu Mund (From Mouth to Mouth.) This show, which opened September i, was important for several reasons.
First, this was Marlene Dietrich’s initial appearance in a singing role—an assignment for which she did not believe herself well suited and a skill she had hardly refined. Nevertheless, on short notice she worked with Charell (a noted choreographer and director of operettas, revues and folk musicals) and with composer Hermann Darewski. By opening night, Dietrich had learned three songs that were inserted into her spoken material as the show’s mistress of ceremonies. Wearing a bright yellow dress with a long train and rose-colored ruffles at the neck and wrists, she stood—quite still, as she insisted to Charell at dress rehearsal—and sang the undistinguished melodies, barely acknowledging the grandeur of her surroundings or the vast audience. Her apparent detachment created, as she must have suspected, an atmosphere of intrigue about herself and what experience might have been
behind the lyrics of the song; she barely regarded her audience, half-closing her eyes and never smiling until she walked, slowly and with a kind of muted eroticism, along the extended ramp over the orchestra pit. With one glance and a hushed word, as actor Hubert von Meyerinck recalled, she communicated more than any performer who cavorted wildly in the show.
It was with the delivery of her second song in Von Mund zu Mund that Dietrich brought the audience to a standing ovation. Altering her stance and tone to present a slightly tense, perky sexiness, she revealed a voice not of great beauty or warmth, but one with unusual spirit, range and subtlety. A recording released the following year was a minor sensation among private collectors in Berlin, along with her renditions of “Wenn ich mir was wünsche” (patently modeled on American blues singers) and “Leben ohne Liebe,” sung in a disarmingly innocent style, rather like a sad, distracted nightclub performer offering a weary conviction that “You can’t live without love,” and that an abandoned woman knows this better than anyone.