Blue Angel

by Donald Spoto

  Sets were constructed and casting completed in April and May, while Dietrich quickly accustomed herself to life in California according to the regulations of those responsible to the studio for star-creation. Although the Depression had affected the vast majority of Americans, film actors seemed to live in an ideal world. To secure an image of almost inviolable glamour, studios often provided the stars with expensive cars and lavish wardrobes; von Sternberg insisted that Dietrich be no exception. Paramount issued her a Rolls-Royce convertible and chauffeur, and her one-bedroom apartment on Horn Avenue (just above Sunset Boulevard not far from Beverly Hills) was decorated and furnished with the movie-fan magazines in mind—a leopard skin rug, overstuffed chintz-covered sofas, a wall of mirrors and crystal whiskey decanters. In matters relative to Dietrich, said photographer John Engstead, “von Sternberg controlled everything.” As for the car (which appears in the final scene of Morocco) and driver, Dietrich always had the impression that von Sternberg’s aim was to limit her independence by preventing her from going off on her own.

  Although she posed languorously at home for photographers, there was, in fact, little leisure time. In June Dietrich, Gary Cooper and Adolphe Menjou began work on Morocco. Von Sternberg did not provide his cast with the script he had virtually dictated to Jules Furthman, a writer who had borrowed so much money from Paramount to support his gambling habit that they kept him working at the studio simply to collect the debt. Instead, the actors received pages of dialogue as they proceeded; in any case, as von Sternberg cavalierly insisted, the images told the story. So they did, in a picture astonishing for its narrative simplicity and a psychological complexity that makes it an album of the increasingly poignant von Sternberg-Dietrich symbiosis.

  Paramount, as the director was repeatedly told, wanted Dietrich to be what the press had for years recognized—a more glamorous, more mysterious and alluring version of Greta Garbo, an image Dietrich had actively sought to imitate long before coming to Hollywood. So von Sternberg and cinematographer Lee Garmes presented Dietrich as a Garbo double for her first scene in Morocco. She moves toward the camera, veiled, swathed in black, enveloped in nighttime fog aboard ship. The final scene of the film perfectly reverses all that, as Dietrich moves away from us, without veil or hat, dressed all in white, bathed only by the bright sunlight in the arid desert. Between these two images occurs an almost mythic transformation.

  TAKEN MERELY AS A STORY, MOROCCO IS ELEMENtary indeed, but it advances the director’s peculiar vision of Dietrich as a fateful and fated woman, bound to a code of love that may be exotic but is certainly admirable in its integrity. Whereas in The Blue Angel she had played an unfaithful floozy, in Morocco she is a faithful follower, exactly as he hoped she might be offscreen.

  Amy Jolly, a cabaret performer (Dietrich), comes to work in Morocco and, although pursued by the wealthy, idle artist La Bessière (Menjou), she is drawn to the younger, handsome womanizer Tom Brown (Cooper), a soldier with the foreign legion. She slips him the key to her quarters, but when Brown visits her that night (after he is also propositioned by the wife of the local adjutant) their meeting is tense with mutual wariness. Soon Tom announces that he will give up the Legion for Amy’s sake—a promise he instantly regrets, abandoning her and resuming his wandering life. Amy accepts La Bessière’s offer of marriage, but at their engagement party she learns that Tom may have been wounded on maneuvers, and she leaves her fiancé to find him.

  As it happens, Tom is quite well (and as usual in the arms of a passing fancy), and is soon to depart again on his endless desert trek. At the end Amy, grateful for the devotion and generosity of La Bessière, leaves him forever and follows Tom into the desert: certain to be hurt, she is still bound to the honor of her love. Our last glimpse of her (one of the most famous images in American film) is a long shot as she slowly disappears over the horizon of a windswept desert, the only sound the receding Legion drumbeats and the eternal wind. Her scarf and white chiffon dress blowing wildly, the sirocco against her face, she doffs her high-heeled shoes, hurrying to join the line of wanderering men and their women camp followers.

  THE FIRST DAY’S FILMING THAT SUMMER DID NOT augur well. Recording her first scene, von Sternberg was forced to devote numerous takes to a simple shot with only a single line; on the words “I won’t need any help,” Dietrich had difficulty with the word “help,” as she repeatedly inserted a vowel between the final consonants. There had been considerable difficulty recording the English version of The Blue Angel because of the actors’ thick accents, and Paramount was insistent that Dietrich’s diction be clear. (In fact when The Blue Angel was released the virtually inaudible English version was everywhere supplanted by the more popular German print, with the addition of English subtitles.)

  Once the problem of “help” was solved, however (after more than forty takes), others arose. Not yet fluent in English, she was meticulously prepared for each shot by von Sternberg, who (much to the annoyance of Gary Cooper) spoke with her in German, a practice star and director continued long after she learned English, and one that enabled them to maintain a certain intimacy among their colleagues. Not as maniacally jealous or fearful of Dietrich’s star power as Jannings had been, Cooper (exactly her age) was almost preternaturally handsome, yet wary of Dietrich’s emerging primacy in the picture. This led to several unpleasant exchanges between him and von Sternberg. “Cooper was neither intelligent nor cultured,” Dietrich said rather ungallantly in 1991. “Just like the other actors, he was chosen for his physique, which, after all, was more important than an active brain.”

  But her inclination that season was quite different, for 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 (as who was not) 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. This affair coincided with the Cooper romance. Several evenings each week there was a game of musical automobiles for the limited parking spaces near Dietrich’s apartment, where the situation was one of first come, first served.

  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 than with the pursuit of her own pleasure—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). None of these
affairs seems to have been characterized by any aim of permanence.

  Hence, Marlene Dietrich entered on them according to her usual lights: to please others, to win confidence and to secure a place in someone’s life. She was also a healthy and beautiful twenty-nine-year-old woman, alone in a new country and responsive to ardent attention. In this case, the pair she romanced aligned her with the new Hollywood glamour (Cooper) and the old European charm (Chevalier). They represented, in other words, the two realms she wished to combine in herself. At the same time, the quiet intrigues made her the focus of considerable attention. Since she comported herself with dignity and discretion, however, and because she was so thoroughly cooperative in her work, she easily deflected Hollywood’s usual high-toned and hypocritical accusations of moral turpitude.

  WHATEVER HIS FEELINGS OF ROMANTIC ABNEGATION (and they were clear to everyone working on the project, including Cooper and Lee Garmes), Josef von Sternberg was a calm and creative center for Marlene Dietrich, and she knew it.

  In 1924, he had written “The Waxen Galatea,” published in The Director the following year. This short story tells of a shy man who becomes obsessed with a plaster mannequin in a dress shop. He gazes each day on the lovely image until he sees a real woman breathtakingly like the figure in the window. He follows her, but she meets a man who, at the woman’s request, then humiliates the silent pursuer, now an annoying intruder on her rendezvous. Shattered, he vows never to love anything other than a wax figure.

  “The Waxen Galatea” is an important clue to the character of its author, a secretive and obsessive romantic known to very few. Von Sternberg was enormously successful in keeping his private life from scrutiny, although as with many men with intensely creative instincts there seems not to have been much exterior drama. Reticent and often alone, he indulged a preference for painting and study instead of a Hollywood social life. (His first two marriages ended in divorce, but his third wife—also a painter, whom he wed after World War II—gave him a rewarding stability and his only child.)

  Von Sternberg was a dispassionate man whose emotional detachment from women enabled him to look at them analytically in his art. In this regard, he resembled other important filmmakers who hankered for waxen Galateas and who transferred their images and fantasies about women to the screen. For D. W. Griffith, the favored actress was Lillian Gish; for Erich von Stroheim, Mary Philbin; for Charles Chaplin, Edna Purviance; for producer David O. Selznick, Jennifer Jones. Alfred Hitchcock’s inner life was revealed in a series of romantic films starring actresses he fell in love with, among them Madeleine Carroll, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. For Josef von Sternberg, it was Marlene Dietrich. He found, she wrote in her memoirs, that she corresponded perfectly to his own complicated dream-life.

  IN THE BLUE ANGEL, HE HAD PRESENTED THE triumph of decadence over dignity, establishing her as the unwitting cause of an impassioned man’s destruction by simply being true to her nature; in Morocco, however, the wandering cabaret performer Lola Lola becomes the faithful follower Amy Jolly, still singing of the perils of romantic attachment—but now offering faithful love to a man who seems unsure of his attraction to her and may lack any real passion at all. The first time we see her after the shipboard introduction she wears white tie, tails and, like Lola Lola, a black top hat. Full of confidence, puffing a cigarette, indifferent to the café audience’s initial laughter at her cross-dressing, she strides through the crowd, surveying them through a haze of smoke. She sees an attractive woman, stops, removes a flower from the woman’s hair then kisses her full on the lips—and seconds later tosses the flower to Cooper.

  The sequence is freighted with significance. “I planned to have her dress like a man,” von Sternberg later claimed, “sing in French and, circulating among the audience, favor another woman with a kiss, [because] I wanted to touch on a lesbian accent”—a motif inspired, as he wrote in his autobiography, by seeing Dietrich wearing full male evening dress at Berlin social events. This outfit had already been part of the hallowed image of “La Garçonne,” the boy-girl androgyne that Paris and Berlin found so alluring in the 1920s and that gay culture sometimes glorified. Females dressed in men’s formal wear were as hallowed a music hall tradition as men in drag. At the turn of the century, entertainer Vesta Tilley (later Lady de Frece) wore men’s clothes and delighted English audiences as she sang, “I’m Burlington Bertie, I rise at ten-thirty, and toddle along to the Strand.” Hetty King and Ella Shields were other women popular when they performed in tuxedos and gentlemen’s suits.

  But the cross-dressing—a recurrent motif in the von Sternberg-Dietrich films—was not merely designed to shock American audiences. “Woman is no different from man,” the director said often and with various emphases during his life, “and man does not differ from woman other than [that] the female conceives . . . All my characters are modelled on myself as I would behave under [the same] conditions and circumstances.” In this regard, momentarily suppressing Dietrich’s femininity not only capitalizes on an aspect of the actress’s own bisexual nature: it also enables women in the audience to love her and simultaneously establishes (however vaguely) an identification with men.

  The matter goes deeper still, and beyond any mere postulation of homosexuality, bisexuality or even a kind of hip unisexuality. The von Sternberg-Dietrich films—inspired by his observation and knowledge of Dietrich’s variegated erotic life, do not satirize gender roles, they fuse them (“Woman is no different from man”) by presenting passive men and aggressive women; in this regard, von Sternberg may have been decades ahead of the liberationists. According to Henry Hathaway (who was on the crew of Morocco and later became a director), von Sternberg “always felt that a woman, deep down, dominated the man . . . [She] was the one pulling the strings, [and] that reflected in a man’s behavior.”

  In The Blue Angel, Jannings was the archetypally passive “female” character, undone by Lola Lola, the top-hatted “male” character. Thenceforward, the six Dietrich films offered a ruthless, dreamlike critique of traditional gender roles by making their reversal acceptable. In Morocco, Dietrich arrives (as she had in real life) by ship; she respects but does not love a painter (Menjou as surrogate for the painter von Sternberg, complete with mustache), and she captivates Cooper, who is astonishingly passive, almost delicate. When Dietrich tosses him the flower taken from the woman she has just kissed, he places it behind his ear, wearing it even in public—he becomes, in effect, the new “girlfriend” of the “man” Dietrich. This suited Marlene Dietrich perfectly, and she relished the scene: “I would much prefer to be a man” was a constant refrain in her public and private utterances. “I can think of no advantage in being a woman that compensates for the mental superiority of men.” And she was certainly, as her lovers attested, the most aggressive partner any of them had ever known.

  Von Sternberg could perhaps execute such a conceit only with players like this pair. Aware of Dietrich’s affairs with men and women (and her sexual life, as she had said, “with anyone we find attractive”) the director did not give her any qualities she did not have; rather he took what she did have—her frank conjunction of male-female roles and her capacity for the oxymorons of aggressive nurturing and passive service. In Morocco, men use fancy hand fans, wear earrings, flutter, wear flowers, while Moslem, Spanish and American women energetically proposition men and openly cuck-old their husbands.

  Much of this is integrated in Dietrich’s second song—“What Am I Bid for My Apple?”—sung in an aptly provocative short outfit and a feather boa; the other (womanly) nature has at last emerged from the evening suit. But now she is like the temptress Eve, freely selling the forbidden fruit to both men and women with lyrics especially written for (and apparently about) Dietrich:

  What am I bid for my apple,

  The fruit that made Adam so wise?

  On the historic night when he took a bite,

  They discovered a new paradise.

  An apple, they say, keeps the d
octor away,

  While his pretty young wife

  Has the time of her life,

  With the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker!

  Oh, what am I bid for my apple?

  “There’s a foreign legion of women, too,” she tells Cooper privately, moments later. “But we have no uniforms, no flags, and no medals when we are brave. No wound stripes when we are hurt.” Later, seeing the women camp followers, she asks Menjou just who they are. “I would call them the rear guard,” he replies.

  “How can they keep pace with their men?”

  “Sometimes they catch up with them and sometimes they don’t—and very often when they do they find their men dead.”

  “Those women must be mad.”

  “I don’t know—you see, they love their men,” he concludes.

  Menjou was clearly the director’s deputy, the protective mentor and artist, externally calm but deeply in love and doomed to rejection. “You see,” Menjou says again to his guests, when Dietrich leaves him to find Cooper, “I love her. I’ll do anything to make her happy.” Just so von Sternberg, who gladly responded to Dietrich’s every wish and whim during production and after hours, squiring her (to his wife’s dismay) to Hollywood restaurants, offering her luxuries at work and at home and contenting himself with being a devoted Pygmalion whose Galatea fancied other men.