by Donald Spoto
With director Josef von Sternberg, on the set of The Blue Angel: Berlin, December 1929.
As Lola Lola in The Blue Angel.
Departing from Berlin for Hollywood: April 1930.
On the set of Morocco, 1930.
Von Sternberg at home in California, about 1930.
The critics, however, were not entertained. Alfred Kerr, Ludwig Sternaux and Franz Leppmann complained that she did too little, that she was simply showing off her lovely legs instead of any real dramatic ability—an objection again levelled at her in her next job, another Robert Land comedy—Ich Küsse ihre Hand, Madame (I Kiss Your Hand, Madame)—filmed in late 1928. In this romantic comedy she played a rich Parisian divorcée named Laurence Gérard, in love with a headwaiter who turns out to be a Russian count down on his luck. When Laurence’s overly attentive and obese lawyer (played by an actor aptly named Karl Huszar-Puffy) offers to do “anything in the world” for her, she replies, “All right, you can take my dogs for a walk.” The moment—as Dietrich scarcely glances at the hapless fellow through half-closed eyes—is both cruel and comic.
The beginning of 1929 found her still in film studios, this time in Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt (The Woman One Longs For, released in America as Three Loves), cast as a sophisticate who is the mistress of her husband’s murderer and then falls in love with a third man, eventually getting herself killed in the bargain. Director Kurt Bernhardt (later successful in America as Curtis Bernhardt) had seen her in Misalliance and fought, against the producers, to have her play the leading role. This he later regretted, finding her difficult on two counts. First, “Marlene waged intrigues—one man against another” in life as in the story, he recalled. Exploiting the infatuation of her co-star, Fritz Kortner, she fueled petty disagreements between him and Bernhardt, the better to advance her own favor in the eyes of both. “She is an intrigante,” according to the director, who added in plain language that Dietrich “was a real bitch.”
This angry assessment was due to the second difficulty she caused Bernhardt:
She was so aware of her face that she would not let herself be photographed in profile because her nose turned up somewhat. She drove Kortner crazy (although he would have loved to go to bed with her). She never moved her head from the spotlight over the camera, facing forward and refusing to move her head to speak with other actors—she simply looked at them out of the corner of her eye. I wanted her to turn to Kortner, to be natural with him, but she wouldn’t do it. She was completely aware of the lighting and how it hit her nose. Marlene looked fantastic, but as an actress she was the punishment of God.*
Her insistence had an odd payoff, for with her austere languor and apparently affectless gaze there were more comparisons than ever to Greta Garbo. “Directors have to get her out of this Garbo mimicking!” the critic of the Berliner Tageblatt had cried on January 20, 1929 (after the first screening of her preceding film); now, the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (on May 4) said of her latest performance that she was merely “a Garbo double in her somnambulist attitude and heavy-lidded gazes—as if she were exhausted in her playful laziness.” On May 22, Variety’s Berlin correspondent concurred in virtually identical words, and at once the Berlin representatives of at least two Hollywood studios—Paramount and Universal—cabled home to report a new international star. MGM had the real Garbo; would a reasonable facsimile be acceptable? To find and engage such a copy these men were paid handsome salaries. (When the picture was finally released in America that autumn, the New York Times hailed her “rare Garboesque beauty.”)
Two more films followed in rapid succession that spring and summer. In Das Schiff der verlorenen Menschen (The Ship of Lost Men), she was an American aviatrix who is rescued by a shipful of lusty thugs when her plane goes down in the Atlantic. Guided by the French director Maurice Tourneur, Dietrich (plumply attractive even though made up to be windblown and grimy in unflattering male garb) had little to do but rouse fever among the beasts. After this—perhaps because she was still occasionally spending an evening with her old flame Willi Forst—she joined him in Gefahren der Brautzeit (Dangers of the Engagement Period), playing a sweet girl seduced by a friend of her fiancé.
In the sixteen silent films she had made in six years, Marlene Dietrich’s leading roles had been few, and these were in films that caused no great sensation. The same was true of her eleven Berlin stage appearances (and two in Vienna), so that if her name was dropped in acting circles in mid-1929, no great echo resounded.
On the other hand, despite her appearances as a calmly detached supporting player, she had a reputation among actors who knew her as a woman of untamed energies who led a tempestuous love life unfettered by her married state. Friends could not quite keep up with her romantic escapades, for she quite openly had serial (and sometimes simultaneous) liaisons with colleagues like Willi Forst and Claire Waldoff.
FROM HER NEXT ROLE, HOWEVER, WOULD COME AN association that would forever change her life and destiny as well as the history of twentieth-century film.
On September 5, 1929, a nine-scene music and dance revue called Zwei Krawatten (Two Neckties) opened at the Berliner Theater, with text by Georg Kaiser and music by Mischa Spoliansky. In this comic satire about a waiter (Hans Albers) who changes his black tie for white tie and tails (and becomes a gentleman) Dietrich was cast in the minor role of an American millionairess named Mabel who had but one line of dialogue: “May I invite you all to dine with me this evening?” Otherwise she stood with a composed but sensual allure (“plump but agile, with a smoky voice and droopy eyelids,” reported one critic).
During the first week of performances that September, there was an especially observant spectator in the audience. He was scouring Berlin’s theaters looking for a singing actress for a film he was preparing. Zwei Krawatten was a logical stop, for it featured two players he had already signed for smaller roles. On hearing Dietrich’s one line and watching her lean against the scenery “with a cold disdain for the buffoonery,” he stood up and left the auditorium—but not until he had found her name on the program. “Here was the face I had sought,” he later wrote, “and, so far as I could tell, a figure that did justice to it. Moreover, there was something else I had not sought, something that told me that my search was over.”
The director was Josef von Sternberg. Marlene Dietrich never worked again as a stage actress.
* During all this, Dietrich was rumored to be romantically linked with Igo Sym and with the actor-playwright Hans Jaray. Although there is no evidence to support the talk of these affairs, her complicated (and well-documented) love life at the height of her international fame suggests that the delicate management of simultaneous liaisons was well within her competence.
* One young flame, the architect Max Perl, later recalled that during the summer of 1929 she finally decided to correct the shape of her nose and submitted to the discomfort of cosmetic surgery; in this she was something of a hardy trailblazer, for such procedures were not the commonplace they later became.
5: 1929–1930
“I FEEL AS IF I DIED IN HOLLYWOOD AND HAVE now awakened in heaven,” said director Josef von Sternberg without obvious irony. It was August 16, 1929, and he had just arrived in Berlin to work on the preparations for his new motion picture, a German-American co-production and one of Europe’s first sound films. Greeting the assembled press amid the opulence of the Hotel Esplanade’s grand foyer, von Sternberg—then a thirty-five-year-old of lively intelligence and multiple talents—was looking forward to working in Germany for the first time. He was surrounded that afternoon by producer Erich Pommer; the star of the film, Emil Jannings; writer Carl Zuckmayer; cameramen Günther Rittau and Hans Schneeberger; and composer Friedrich Holländer.
Born in Vienna as Josef Sternberg, he had had a gruellingly destitute life, even after arriving in America in 1901 at the age of seven. Years of severe malnutrition had stunted his growth (his full adult height was only five feet four inches) but not his agile mind. Denied f
ormal education by the need to work, he read widely and in adolescence began to amass an impressive library of books on anthropology, comparative culture studies, psychology, art history, mythology and erotica. By the age of twenty-five he had held a variety of factory jobs and had served in the United States Signal Corps during the World War. He then decided to go to Los Angeles, where an earlier experience in an East Coast film laboratory prepared him for work as an editor, writer and assistant director. Among the pictures he worked on in 1923 was a trifle called By Divine Right, whose producers—impressed by the names of other Europeans in Hollywood (Erich von Stroheim, for example)—added an aristocratic-sounding von to his name—“without my knowledge and without consulting me,” as he later insisted in his autobiography. Unlike von Stroheim, however, he spoke English without any trace of a foreigner’s accent.
His account may be accurate, but over the next several years von Sternberg certainly became the kind of egoist who could have changed his own name. An autocratic and secretive man, he was fond of sporting Oriental dressing gowns, riding boots and even a turban, but he was not simply a flamboyant eccentric. An accomplished painter and photographer, von Sternberg was also an inspired designer of visual effects for motion pictures. By 1929, he had directed seven remarkably original and successful features, one of which (The Last Command) had helped earn Emil Jannings the first Academy Award ever given for best performance by an actor.*
Von Sternberg’s idiosyncratic, often iconoclastic pictures—among them The Salvation Hunters, Underworld, The Docks of New York and The Case of Lena Smith—were characterized by intense rhythms, structural perfectionism and a pitilessly realistic view of human perversity—all combined with a deeply felt and highly personal romanticism. Von Sternberg, the painter, patiently composed each frame so that his films are astonishing in the way they tell stories by the play of light and shadow on the landscape of the human face. In these black and white movies he fully exploited the techniques and props of the trade—diffused light, scrims, gauze, smoke, trees and shrubbery; von Sternberg expertly evoked psychological effects by the uncommon arrangement of common elements.
He was also, like many directors, more concerned with the craft of filmmaking than with the special treatment of actors; much less could he be bothered with turning them into stars. Considering indifference to actors essential for the right final visual effect, he once said, “I regard actors as marionettes, as pieces of color [on] my canvas.” Some puppets can be manipulated more easily than others, however. Jannings refused to be one of von Sternberg’s puppets (they fought constantly during the making of The Last Command), but he acknowledged his director’s genius and insisted that UFA and Paramount engage him for Janning’s first German talkie.
The project finally selected for this was Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel Professor Unrat, about a bourgeois teacher who marries a woman of easy virtue, thereby losing his standing in polite society. He then becomes a gambler and crooked politician, exploiting his wife until their mutual downfall. After some preliminary contributions by writers Carl Zuckmayer and Karl Vollmöller (and by Robert Liebmann, who also wrote the English lyrics for songs by Fredrich Holländer), von Sternberg himself was responsible for the final screenplay and the cinematic form it was to take. He omitted Mann’s social-political diatribe and concentrated entirely on one theme: a man’s self-abasement and ultimate degradation by his fatal obsession for a bawdy cabaret singer. This emphasis was at least partly inspired by Jannings, who had cornered the market on his portraits of pathetically humiliated men—in G. W. Pabst’s The Last Laugh, for example, as well as in von Sternberg’s The Last Command.
THAT AUTUMN, WHILE THE SCRIPT WAS POLISHED, the sets designed at UFA’s Neubabelsberg studios and a cast gradually assembled, von Sternberg had one persistent difficulty: finding the right actress to play the tawdry Lola Lola (a name he derived from Wedekind’s deadly Lulu). Jannings and Pommer advocated Lucie Mannheim or Trude Hesterberg for the role, but von Sternberg insisted audiences would find the former too attractive and the latter too familiar. Von Sternberg then decided to see two players he had already contracted for his film (Hans Albers and Rosa Valetti), who were appearing in Zwei Krawatten. From that evening, as he said, the film director’s search for Lola Lola was over; he would have no one else but Dietrich in the role. Looking at her, he saw an image of natural eroticism and bewitching indifference, a woman entirely (if unwittingly) capable of effecting a man’s complete ruin.
The following afternoon, von Sternberg brought Dietrich to meet Jannings and Pommer. The star and the producer asked her to remove her hat and pace the room, the usual procedure to determine that an actor at least had hair and no limp. Dietrich casually complied, strolling, as von Sternberg put it, with “bovine listlessness, a study in apathy, her eyes completely veiled.” Jannings and Pommer promptly rejected her for being both too plump and too casual; with equal alacrity, von Sternberg threatened to renounce the project and return to America unless he was accorded the right to give her a screen test. (In his autobiography, Jannings conveniently claimed to have championed Dietrich from the night he took von Sternberg to see Zwei Krawatten—a fiction denied by everyone else present at the time.)
Presuming that she was being considered for yet another minor role, Dietrich returned so they could hear her singing voice, but she appeared even more bored and unprepared than before, and was without the sheet music they had requested. She admitted that she had doubts as to how well von Sternberg could handle women onstage. And, in addition to all this, she had worn a characterless dress that hung formlessly from her body, but covered about twenty excess pounds. Von Sternberg, undeterred by her indifference, pinned the dress seductively and poured the right lights on her; by such technical wizardry, Dietrich seemed suddenly alive and casually carnal. She then sang, not beautifully but with a kind of defiant allure, a song about the end of an affair. “She came to life and responded to my instructions,” von Sternberg recalled. “Her remarkable vitality had been channeled.” Dietrich’s critics capitulated—Jannings presciently muttering that her sex appeal might threaten his dominance in the film—and at once Lucie Mannheim and the other aspirants were dismissed. From that moment, according to Dietrich, “von Sternberg had only one idea in his head: to take me away from the stage and to make a movie actress out of me, to ‘Pygmalionize’ me.” This was true, but theirs was a complex collaboration, which could not be so easily categorized.
Once she learned she was to play the leading role of a tarty femme fatale, Dietrich was both exhilarated and nervous, afraid she would look and sound inadequate alongside seasoned professionals like Jannings, Albers and Valetti. But she and her director worked brilliantly together, and he quickly allayed her anxiety—while she, eager to please, offered herself to him as Galatea, pupil and lover. “Even while rehearsals were in progress, they seemed to live for each other only,” according to Willi Frischauer, who was present during the making of what was soon called Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), after the cabaret where Lola Lola sings. Indeed the director and star did live for each other; everyone on the film knew von Sternberg and Dietrich met privately in his hotel suite, sometimes in the morning, often after the day’s work. Rudi knew of this at once, for his wife blithely introduced them, telling Jo she hoped one day the Siebers could meet Mrs. von Sternberg, who was in California. As Marlene hoped, the two men became quite friendly; thenceforth—because the Sieber marriage was now only a legality—there was in fact no rivalry between them. “At first,” according to Stefan Lorant, “Rudi was naturally let down: I think he always hoped for some kind of romantic reconciliation between them. But when it became clear she was on her own he settled for a good friendship. After all, he had Tamara, and probably some other partners, too.”
FILMING OF THE BLUE ANGEL LASTED FROM NOVEMber 4, 1929, to January 30, 1930, a span necessitated by the filming and recording of each scene in German and English (because post-dubbing was not yet possible). From the first scenes, the pictur
e stresses the teacher’s harsh and humorless moralism with his students, boys who trade postcards of the naughty Lola Lola in top hat, short skirt, bare thighs and a provocative gash of black garters. Professor Rath sets out to scold the theatricals and the shameless woman for her bad influence, but after only one visit to her dressing room his long-repressed libido is hopelessly demolished by her sensuality. Amused and touched by the attentions of a scholar, Lola Lola spends the night with him. He subsequently proposes marriage, she accepts, and he abandons his profession to become a member of her tacky, peripatetic little repertory company.
Eventually, Rath is so degraded by his passion for Lola Lola that he becomes a clown in cheap vaudeville routines; she, true to her bawdy nature, blithely turns to other lovers for excitement. At the conclusion, the professor returns to the town where he taught and they met, only to find that he’s become a laughingstock. Mad with jealousy and rage, he nearly strangles Lola Lola after seeing her once again in the arms of another man. Finally he wanders distractedly back to his old classroom, where he dies clutching the desk that once represented dignity. Lola Lola, however, calmly survives, and at the end we see her provocatively straddling a chair at the Blue Angel, defying her cabaret audience to risk the fate of Professor Rath.
BOTH DIETRICH’S FEARS AND AMBITIONS PARALLELED her desire to please von Sternberg, whom she idolized. “Her behavior,” he recalled,
was a marvel to behold. Her attention was riveted on me . . . She behaved as if she were there as my servant, first to notice that I was looking about for a pencil, first to rush for a chair when I wanted to sit down. Not the slightest resistance to my domination of her performance. Rarely did I have to take a scene with her more than once.