by Donald Spoto
WITH THESE FIRST RECORDS, MARLENE DIETRICH was about to join an array of German actresses who tried to sing (and singers who tried to act). Many, like her, had distinctive styles, but many were facile mimics of other Europeans or Americans who vocalized with more or less a personal manner. Among the most famous was Lilian Harvey, the British actress raised in Germany (where she became a star), who was perhaps closest to an accomplished operetta artist when she sang onstage or in film (as in her 1926 film Prinzessin Tralala.) Renate Müller, on the other hand, had a slightly nervous vibrato when she sang “Ich bin so glücklich heute—I’m so happy today,” rather as if she were protesting too much (in fact she committed suicide at thirty). They avoided the blunt attack of those like Fita Benkhoff (who liked to flavor her songs with Americanisms like “Oh, baby!”). On the other hand, Trude Hesterberg was certainly one of the most trained voices—almost operatic—and Evelyn Künneke was one of those most influenced by American popular song.
But Zarah Leander and Claire Waldoff were perhaps the most famous, controversial and prominent singers at the time and later—and the most influential on the development of Dietrich’s singing style. Leander had an astonishingly smoky, androgynous baritone, but her delivery was in a strange way strongly, almost severely feminine. When she sang about a pursuit of casual amours (“every night brings me a new stroke of luck”) there was a strain of knowing defeat, of loneliness; just so in a lyric of fatigued waiting (“each night, by the telephone . . .”) or Gallic compromise as she thanked a lover as he (or she) departed (“Merci, mon ami . . .”). Enormously popular, Zarah Leander—with her adult, apparently unemotional but acutely felt trademark of knowing distance—was certainly a model for Marlene Dietrich in the late 1920s. She prepared the way for Dietrich’s delicate balance between eternal romantic optimism and tiresome self-pity.
Much less womanly but equally influential was Dietrich’s co-star in Von Mund zu Mund, the redoubtable Claire Waldoff, a barrel-chested little Valkyrie who—seen in photos and heard on recordings decades later—resembled no one so much as Mickey Rooney in drag. Waldoff’s theatrical songs and recordings, crudely refined in cabaret, were not so much sung as rasped or bleated with an almost painful, choking coarseness that many Berliners loved precisely for its unconventionality. Spitting and punching her way through the measures of “Hannelore” (a paean to a rudely educated peasant girl) or “Willi” (in which she poked fun at the deposed Emperor), Claire Waldoff raged along like a boozy stevedore. An intelligent performer unafraid to offend with her openly gay songs, she also enveloped everything with a self-mocking humor.
In fact—unlikely a pair though they might have seemed—the now occasionally blond Marlene Dietrich and the red-headed Claire Waldoff became lovers (or at least sexual partners) in the autumn of 1926. Geza von Cziffra, Elisabeth Lennartz and Stefan Lorant knew that Dietrich was quite besotted with her new friend, with whom she often dined after midnight, sometimes singing along the Kurfürstendamm or (to the delight of theater patrons) in the alley near the theater. This brand of professional-personal intimacy, however briefly it lasted, was typical throughout Dietrich’s life; it seemed to have its own truth and reward, and when the affair ended Waldoff remained a genial buddy to her. Fritzi Massary, the reigning queen of musicals and operettas at Berlin’s Metropol from 1904 to 1932, later wrote that Dietrich learned from Waldoff to laugh at herself as well as at the pretensions of hypersophisticated audiences.
Dietrich was also (according to Mia May, the leading lady in Tragödie der Liebe) “constantly pursued by people who found her fascinating, [and] she went around with a group of young actresses who adored her. Usually she wore a monocle or a feather boa, sometimes as many as five red foxes on a stole.” Perhaps inevitably, an increasing number of adoring colleagues and theater fans were therefore responsible for Dietrich’s growing self-confidence in Berlin from 1926 to 1930. At a party she gave for friends at home at Christmastime 1926, word circulated that she was going to change her outfit. Käte Haack recalled that Dietrich had ordered an ensemble with seven silver foxes that had just arrived, and she made a second grand entrance, forcing (as she doubtless intended) everyone’s attention on herself. Such tactics often assured that she would be noticed in public, too—at the Cabaret Nelson, for example, a notorious nightspot where high art could be found one moment and low humor the next. On the other hand, she discouraged others from calling attention to themselves. When the actress Lili Darvas admired Dietrich’s fur coat but compared it unfavorably to her own, she was told, “Oh, don’t worry, Lili, dear—no one is ever going to bother to look at you.”
AFTER THE BRIEF BUT MEMORABLE PRESENTATION OF Von Mund zu Mund, Dietrich supplemented her income from late 1926 through early 1927 by rushing through three films. In Kopf Hoch, Charly! (Heads Up, Charly!), she again assumed the small role of a French coquette; in Der Juxbaron (The Imaginary Baron), she had a major comic role as a young woman whose parents hope to marry her off to a nobleman; and in Sein Grösster Bluff (His Greatest Bluff) she was a high-priced prostitute involved in a jewelry theft. In each of these productions were actors (Michael Bohnen, Trude Hesterberg, Albert Pauling) who recalled Dietrich’s thoroughly professional attitude; indeed, she had a lifetime reputation for punctuality and preparedness. She was also remembered for honoring colleagues’ birthdays with cakes or strudels or trinkets—gestures that were certainly sincere but also perhaps reflected her wish to gratify and to be considered generous and thoughtful.
Dietrich was herself pleased when she won a small role in the European premiere of George Abbott and Philip Dunning’s American play Broadway, a tense romantic melodrama still selling out in New York after a year’s run. The premiere was given at the Vienna Kammerspiele on September 20, 1927, where she made a brief appearance as Ruby, a chorus girl in a spicy jazz-age story about speakeasy gangsters, bootleggers, corrupt police and a vaudevillian’s climb to stardom.
The role was almost negligible, but once again Dietrich managed to attract attention by raising her hemline just a trifle higher than the other chorines’ (although there was no dancing). In the first-night audience was Karl Hartl, then in Vienna as executive producer for a movie with characters similar to those in Broadway; two days later, he invited Dietrich to his office and offered her a part in the film Café Electric. “She showed only a mild enthusiasm,” Hartl said years later,
and I had the feeling her heart wasn’t in film. But she accepted, and she showed up the first day with a red suit and a hat like a pot. Marlene knew how to wear clothes of mediocre quality in a way that seemed elegant; her taste and her choice of colors made up for the cheapness of the material.
She accepted the role not only for the salary but also because it was an opportunity to work with the dynamic and popular Viennese actor Willi Forst. As Erni, Dietrich was to be seduced by a young gigolo named Ferdl (Forst), a denizen of the notorious Café Electric, gathering place of pimps and hookers. In a swift blurring of the distinction between art and life, Dietrich and Forst became the talk of Vienna’s café society within a week. “We had to repeat several love scenes between her and Willi Forst,” said Hard. “Considering their romance, this was no hardship for them, and finally she was outstanding.”
The production had another social advantage for her. Igo Sym, also in Café Electric, was a handsome Bavarian actor and musician who taught Dietrich to play the musical saw, a long strip of thin metal like a toothless saw, played with a thickly waxed bow. With her knees grasping the handle of the saw, she bent the metal—more for higher tones, less for lower—and slowly applied the bow to its edge; the sound could be politely described as a kind of mournful vibrato. For decades, Dietrich had a kind of vaguely comic renown in Germany and America as the first lady of this “singing saw,” although she always regarded this talent with absolute solemnity, as if it authenticated her earlier hopes for a career as a concert violinist.
Not long after the Dietrich-Forst romance became an open secret, Rudi arrived in Vien
na and demanded that Dietrich end the affair. This was never the judicious approach to take, for it had the predictable effect of confirming her on the independent route she always marked for herself; his wife apparently barely reacted to this entreaty. Rudi had hoped that the responsibilities of motherhood would alter her conduct, but this was a hopeless fantasy. When he then countered that he had the chance for his own extramarital romance—with a darkly attractive young woman named Tamara Matul—Dietrich was delighted and encouraged him.*
“I haven’t a strong sense of possession towards a man,” she said somewhat airily not long after her confrontation with Rudi, “perhaps because I am not particularly feminine in my reactions. I never have been.” This was the closest Dietrich ever came to justifying her continuing marriage to Rudolf Sieber, a relationship that was henceforth always cordial. From 1927 to 1930, the Siebers lived together only part of the time in Berlin (and rarely thereafter anywhere). Dietrich never seriously considered divorce, perhaps because even a nominal marriage forestalled another offer and acted as a kind of protection. But that same year, Tamara Matul became Rudi’s constant companion and an attentive surrogate parent to Maria when her mother was absent.
Before returning to Berlin, Dietrich—acceding to Willi Forst’s fervent request to prolong her Austrian sojourn—took a small role in the satiric play Die Schule von Uznach by Carl Sternheim, Germany’s reigning comic dramatist. After the November 28 premiere at Reinhardt’s Theater in der Josefstadt, critic Felix Salten (author of Bambi) wrote, “Among the girls, Marlene Dietrich was the most refreshing as a beautiful, sensual young woman who rambles on without thinking.”
DIETRICH RETURNED TO BERLIN IN EARLY 1928, arms full of belated Christmas gifts and toys for Maria; she then devoted two weeks to the child’s amusement, taking her to the zoo, parks and children’s pageants. Then she was back in rehearsals for the Berlin opening of Broadway on March 9, and for a celebration in honor of her old boss Guido Thielscher, whose fifty years in show business were marked by a midnight cabaret at the Lustspielhaus on March 27. These two events, following the Berlin premiere of Café Electric (retitled for Germany as Wenn ein Weib den Weg verliert/When a Woman Loses Her Way) and linked to her increasing prominence as a colorful doyenne of theatrical social life, gave Dietrich the widest press exposure she had so far enjoyed.
She still tended to a portliness all too evident on her short frame, and she worried that her nose (which turned up slightly at the tip) made her less photogenic than she would have liked. But her legs were ideal—perhaps because she was now exercising daily with a prizefighter’s trainer who forced her to lie on the floor for hours, pedalling an imaginary bicycle. Casting directors, not to mention most men and many women, were quick to notice the elegant, sensual line of her legs; she could, therefore, risk an even higher hemline than that dictated by mere fashion.
In addition, Dietrich’s partiality for an onstage pose of profound unconcern continued to work wonders for her image. To receive an almost rapt attention Dietrich had only to lean against the scenery, lower her eyes and light a cigarette with utter indifference to everyone round her. In a comic role, this gave her a deadpan appearance and seemed somehow all the funnier; in a serious part, she seemed more than ever a mysterious, eternally ineffable presence. By such tactics, she effectively stole scenes and was immune to criticism from other players. She was, in other words, refining the theatrical counterpoint of creative indolence to a highly successful technique.
IT WAS PRECISELY DIETRICH’S IMPRESSION OF VARIous inner moods and mysteries that inspired writer Marcellus Schiffer and composer Mischa Spoliansky to cast her in their fantastic musical revue Es Liegt in der Luft (It’s in the Air) at the Komödie Theater that spring of 1928. Set in a department store, the show was a series of twenty-four episodes about those who visit and work among an array of luxurious, useless items; most notably, it offered a series of short sketches about those who became lost in the crazy array of goods, died and remained there as wandering spirits.
Dietrich appeared in seven of the twenty-four scenes, and one of them caused a sensation. Schiffer’s wife, the tall, boyish French actress Margo Lion, was already known to be openly bisexual, and a number was prepared for her and Dietrich called “Sisters.” Ostensibly a parody of the sort of friendly girls’ duet offered by the Dolly Sisters, the song deliberately pointed to the bond between two women, happily buying underwear for one another while temporarily released from the company of their boyfriends.
Audiences and critics loved the frank but elegant sexual inferences of the number. Then, after the first week, Dietrich—protesting that their dark outfits needed a touch of color—naughtily capitalized on one of the most notorious sexual symbols of the day and pinned bunches of violets on herself and Lion. These flowers were a widely understood token, since the popular German poet Stefan Georg (and those he inspired, called the Georgists) had taken the color lavender as an emblem of homosexual love and violets as markers of its erotic expression. The play La Prisonnière by Edouard Bourdet, a compassionate assessment of modern lesbianism, had recently been successful in Paris and Berlin and one of its most daring visual motifs was violets shared by women in love. That edible flower, prized by French gourmets, also had a long Gallic association with sexual pleasure.
Each night there were several curtain calls after Dietrich and Lion strolled back and forth across the stage in an expressionless daze of mutual obsession, clasping hands and singing—Lion in a high falsetto, Dietrich in a smoky, low register that Spoliansky had found to be just right for her. “Marlene Dietrich,” reported that dean of critics, Herbert Jhering, “sings with delicacy and tired elegance. The number [“Sisters”] goes beyond anything so cultivatedly daring we’ve ever seen.”
The success of It’s in the Air led film writer and director Robert Land to Dietrich’s dressing room, where he offered her a handsome salary to appear in a romantic comedy as a Parisian courtesan famous for her lessons in lovemaking. The film was quickly produced that summer with Dietrich in the title role of Prinzessin Olala—an obvious satire of Lilian Harvey’s chaster story of Princess Tralala, who won hearts by song rather than sex. When the picture was released in September, critics took notice of Dietrich’s resemblance to another European star: “When Dietrich mimes her coquette role,” gushed the critic of Film-Kurier, “here’s another Garbo! It seems the director had all he could do to tone down her deliberate Garbo imitation.”
The reviewer was on the mark, for by this time Marlene Dietrich was well on the way to modelling herself on the mysterious and alluring Swedish actress. She had the same coloring as Garbo, and she mimicked the expression of cool diffidence that was meant to imply fires within. Dietrich had seen Garbo in several films, The Saga of Gösta Berling, The Torrent and The Temptress, which was already released in Berlin. She spoke with Mosheim and Andor (among others) of her passionate admiration. Garbo, then working in Hollywood at MGM, had quickly become one of the world’s biggest stars, and Dietrich was much taken with her remote, sphinx-like beauty.
By late summer, Dietrich was rehearsing back at the Kömodie for her role in Shaw’s Misalliance (presented as Eltern und Kinder/Parents and Children.) Windy and meandering, this is not usually rated a Shaw masterpiece: “It never stops—talk, talk, talk,” whined Dietrich (as Hypatia Tarleton), describing the Tarleton family; she might have been reviewing the play. The author’s stage directions describe Hypatia as living in “a waiting stillness, [with] boundless energy and audacity held in leash,” and from this stillness Dietrich, Garbo-like, took her cue. As a woman eager to marry only for adventure (“Who should risk marrying a man for love? I shouldn’t . . . it would make a perfect slave of you”), she played Hypatia with an almost stoic self-confidence—but the character’s sentiments were not, after all, so different from her own. Her co-star, Lili Darvas, later recalled how Dietrich made Hypatia’s independence even more arresting by speaking in a low, sultry voice, scarcely moving. “She simply sat down on the stag
e and smoked—very slowly and sexily—and everyone forgot the other actors were present!” Dietrich’s pose seemed so natural, her gestures so economical, that she already seemed to have the tranquil energy of a Modigliani female.
Wilhelmina Felsing after her marriage to Police Lieutenant Louis Erich Otto Dietrich.
Maria Magdalene Dietrich at the age of five (1906).
Elisabeth (left) with Maria, about 1909.
Maria Dietrich (front row, second from right, with black hair bow) at the Auguste Victoria Academy: Charlottenburg, 1914.
As a gypsy violinist in a school production, 1916.
Portrait of Maria from a family album, 1918.
Modelling in Berlin, 1922.
Flanked by two drama classmates in front of the Kammerspiele: Berlin, 1922.
Dietrich (left) as a chorus girl, dancing with the Thielscher Girls: Berlin, 1922.
On the day of her marriage to Rudolf Sieber: Berlin, May 17, 1923.
Margo Lion and Claire Waldoff.
Beginning a lifetime of entertaining on the musical saw: Vienna, 1927.
With Igo Sym (left) and Willi Forst during the filming of Café Electric: Vienna, 1927.
With Margo Lion, singing “Sisters” in Es Liegt in der Luft: Kömodie Theater, Berlin, 1928.
Publicity photo, 1928.
The last of Dietrich’s sixteen silent films: Gefahren der Brautzeit, with Willi Forst, 1929.
As an American millionairess, with Hans Albers in Zwei Krawatten: Berlin, 1929.