by Donald Spoto
THE SPORADIC CHARACTER OF THE DIETRICH-VON Sternberg relationship can only perhaps be understood as part of the entire complex they maintained between themselves. He performed the cinematic legerdemain securing her advancement from minor performer to international movie star, and this evoked her admiration and affectionate gratitude, of which sex was often Dietrich’s natural expression. She was especially inclined thus to comfort men like von Sternberg who seemed emotionally deprived and somewhat morbid in their aesthetic isolation. His self-imposed mission, she later said, was “to photograph me, make me laugh, dress me up, comfort me, advise me, guide me, coddle me, explain things to me”—and there has perhaps never been a more cooperative apprentice.
Although confident of his talents as director and cameraman, von Sternberg nevertheless bore a deeply rooted inferiority complex, and he sometimes alienated colleagues and friends with the kind of high-toned or egoistic posture that tries to masquerade such feelings. In the anteroom to his office at Paramount, for example, was an enormous diorama with commentary and still photos comprising the history of his films for all to see, as if they were approaching a museum or a great cathedral: “Opus One: The Salvation Hunters.” . . . “Opus Two: The Exquisite Sinner—Sabotaged by Thalberg,” and so forth.
His relations with men were usually characterized by some degree of jealous rivalry, and directing men was often a trial: “Cooper was very tall and Jo was not, and he couldn’t stand it if I looked up to any man in a movie . . . I didn’t understand that kind of jealousy,” Dietrich recalled. Additionally, women found his intellect formidable but his manner cool and tyrannical, and so he failed to attract precisely the sort of female attention he longed for (especially since his divorce). Von Sternberg also had the logical doubts often felt by the gifted autodidact: he had read widely and could discuss many fields with impressive knowledge, but he was uncomfortable doing so, fearing that his lack of formal education would unavoidably reveal vast gaps. Consequently, he occasionally allowed himself to be overwhelmed by those who spoke more but knew less. This led some who experienced his sergeant-major tactics at the studio to mistake his silence for smug superiority.
Divorced from a beautiful, dark-haired, doe-eyed actress, von Sternberg had eccentricities of dress, manner and speech that did not put him in great demand socially. Despising polite small talk, he preferred silence, or withdrawal to his studio for painting. Artist and dreamer, Josef von Sternberg was a touching combination of both the intellectual analyst and the aching romantic.
Because she was emotionally sympathetic to him, Dietrich was quick to fill his loneliness. “Marlene worshipped my father with a tremendous respect,” Nicholas von Sternberg said years later. “She loved his intelligence and abilities. He saw her as paint on his canvas—and she agreed wholeheartedly with this.”
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 (as toward most things in life) 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.” Entirely a woman of the moment, she readily admitted that year, “I never think about the future. I am not religious. I never think about anything there is no good in thinking about.” And von Sternberg knew this: “She attached no value to anything so far as I could ascertain, with the exception of her baby daughter, a musical saw and some recordings by a singer called Whispering Jack Smith.”
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. Thus he continued to work with her and to present new facets of the jewel. She listened, learned, complimented, frankly depended on him; in other words, she nourished his need to be important and necessary to a woman. She did not tire of him, as she could of Cooper or Chevalier, who were charming and handsome but, she implied, intellectually limited.
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.” It was, then, precisely when he filmed her that this director attempted to justify her.
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. Therefore, when he needed to draw on the reserves of dream and imagination for a new picture, he began to withdraw from intimacy. The Dietrich he was to offer to the camera could not be the one he had just known privately. There had to be veils left in place, shadows and mists still separating the seeker from the object of desire: von Sternberg needed always to imagine her as the leading character of one of her own silent films, die Frau nach der man sich sehnt—the woman one ever longs for.
But they were not Svengali and Trilby—a designation attached to them from their earliest days in Hollywood. “People have said he casts a spell over me,” Dietrich said. “That is ridiculous. I am devoted, but I made the devotion myself because my brain told me to. It is only common sense to me. Can you think of anyone casting a spell over me?” In an odd way, the situation was effectively reversed: Marlene Dietrich cast the spell, Josef von Sternberg was enthralled.
FOR THE PRESENT, MARIA WAS UNAFFECTED BY HER mother’s fame and the occasional controversies. Enrolled at a private school with other celebrity children, she had an amiable personality, although she was necessarily somewhat reserved until she became proficient in English. Dietrich, perhaps with more blithe imagination than prudence, ordered Maria’s wardrobe—dresses, pajamas, robes, shoes—in exact replicas of her own fashions and styles (but without the gentlemen’s suits Dietrich came to favor more and more in Hollywood). This might have initially pleased the girl, but she was left with the distinct impression that she was little more than an awkward adjunct in her mother’s life. Dietrich shuttled her to stores, purchased expensive gifts for her (even miniature rings and bracelets) and frequently took her to the beach and to riding lessons. But an easy rapport never seems to have been established. “I felt that she wanted to be with other people,” Maria said later of her Hollywood childhood.
I remember how I used to cry at night. I remember a whiff of perfume, and my mother in furs standing there in my room, looking so beautiful. I was so jealous when she went out—I knew she wanted to see someone else rather than me . . . She would tuck me
in, kiss me, and hurry, hurry . . . I wasn’t left alone. But I knew the servants and bodyguards were simply hired to take care of me, and I disliked them. I never told mother that I was unhappy.
With a curious irony, the pleasantest time of Maria’s first year in America paralleled the intensification of the Riza Marks–von Sternberg debacle. Rudi’s presence was required in California as a sign that the Sieber marriage was stable, and this, at least for a month that summer of 1931, created the facsimile of a traditional family unit. Riza’s deposition had been taken in a Los Angeles court, where she had told Judge Lester W. Roth that her husband (before their June 1930 divorce) had “furnished an apartment for [Dietrich], and she charged clothing to his accounts.” She then added a comment that caused some amusement: “He never let me charge clothing to his accounts.” With such remarks the case was beginning not to be taken seriously.
As attorneys for the injured party continued to complain more publicly, the press naturally swung into action at the Pasadena railway station when Rudi arrived on July 19. From then on, at restaurants and at sporting events the Siebers frequented during the following four weeks, photographers leaped from behind trees, bushes and taxis to document father, mother and daughter—a happy trio, embracing, smiling, unconcerned for the mills of rumor. The better to confirm their innocence, Marlene and Rudi widened the family circle to include von Sternberg, who moved temporarily into quarters at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I am here,” Rudi told a reporter about his wife that summer,
to testify by my presence and any other way that I can testify, that I know that these charges against her are utterly unfounded. I have known and agreed with her attitude that rather than avoid the publicity of these suits she should welcome and face these charges . . . Both of us, as good and moral friends of Mr. von Sternberg, sympathize with him in the attack that is being made against him by his former wife.
Sieber had constructed a brilliant riposte, one possible only because the complex logic of his marriage defied American comprehension. Several months later, after the editor of the Neues Wiener Journal admitted that the interviewer had fabricated Dietrich’s remarks concerning the von Sternbergs, Riza dropped all charges.
But there was one sour note. Rudi Sieber resented not so much his wife’s flagrant adulteries (such, after all, virtually defined her private life) as he did the potential effect of her conduct on Maria; he considered her, in this regard, something of a bad influence. Only when von Sternberg agreed not to return to live quite so openly with his wife and daughter did Sieber drop his threat to take Maria back with him to Germany—an ultimatum that caused Dietrich real panic (and a situation that directly inspired the plot development of the Dietrich-von Sternberg film Blonde Venus). Finally, Rudi departed Los Angeles in August to work at Paramount’s Joinville studio near Paris, a job facilitated through the intercession of none other than von Sternberg himself.
THEIR NEW PROJECT, WHICH BEGAN FILMING IN AUtumn 1931, was set in the most exotic of the four locales so far chosen for the von Sternberg-Dietrich pictures; Berlin, Morocco and Eastern Europe now seemed overshadowed by the ersatz China of Shanghai Express. As Madeleine (a slight variation on her own uncontracted name, after all), Dietrich was—to quote the script—“the notorious woman who lives by her wits along the Chinese coast,” and for whom “it took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Aboard the eponymous train she meets a former lover (Clive Brook, as a British medical officer), whose life she saves when Chinese revolutionaries waylay the train.
Von Sternberg (taking his inspiration from parts of a story by Harry Hervey) dictated his outline and script to Jules Furthman and finally had something reminiscent of Tosca. Dietrich was never more alluringly rendered, photographed through an endless series of veils, scrims and smoky filters—all of it apposite for the latest version of von Sternberg’s tarnished woman. As before, she is a character capable of a deeper fidelity and a higher morality than what anyone might expect—higher even than that of the minister who advises her to pray and is himself converted by her subsequent genuine piety. This happens in a single moment that transcends the film’s simplistic story, when von Sternberg illuminates only Dietrich’s cool white hands, as she slowly joins them in prayer for the safety of her former lover against a bloodthirsty Oriental brigand. (Her hands are constantly emphasized in this picture; her legs are never exposed.) Shanghai Lily, who has abandoned her name (as Marlene abandoned Maria Magdalene, the original form of hers), now risks her life precisely because she can only be true to her onetime love: thus Shanghai Express carries forward motifs from Morocco and Dishonored. The train takes these principals on a kind of journey toward integration—thus the final scenes, in which the former lovers tentatively rediscover the love that once bound them. And once again, the roles are reversed: Dietrich wears the officer’s cap, brandishes his whip, takes control. She is, in fact, more active, more passionate here than in any prior film.
Von Sternberg, alternately delighted and (he felt) abandoned by Dietrich, spun a tale in which she is faithful in her infidelity while the hero remains loveless in his disjointed memories. According to cinematographer Lee Garmes (who won an Oscar for the film), “Clive Brook wanted to be Clive Brook [but] von Sternberg wanted him to be von Sternberg.” The character Jannings/von Sternberg (in The Blue Angel) was ruined by this woman; Menjou/von Sternberg (in Morocco) was abandoned; Oland/von Sternberg (in Dishonored) was betrayed; but Brook/von Sternberg (perhaps because of the recent history of Dietrich and von Sternberg) has another chance.
In this regard, the laces and veils through which we glimpse Dietrich in Shanghai Express are more than just sexy peekaboo: on the contrary, the shot of her folded hands is central to von Sternberg’s point, for it italicizes the fundamental mystery of the woman he perceived in Marlene Dietrich. “When I needed your faith, you withheld it,” she says to Brook. “Now when I don’t need it and don’t deserve it, you give it to me.” In the romantically complicated world of von Sternberg, love is of course never a matter of balance sheets, and needs and compensations rarely equalize.
After the filming was complete, Paramount arranged almost daily sessions for still photographs with cameramen like Eugene Robert Richee and John Engstead. Over these von Sternberg exerted his usual control, insisting that a high spotlight be used to bring out the shadows under her cheekbones. Often, according to Engstead, von Sternberg asked Dietrich to assume the most uncomfortable positions—to lean over a chair, for example, in an awkward contortion without support. Such a pose she held without complaint while he studied the situation and spoke to her only in German. When the stance was suitable, he began to work on her face, and at his command her head rose and fell, her lids lowered, her mouth opened slightly and his dream took shape. If Dietrich’s expression did not suit von Sternberg, he lapsed into angry English: “Think of something—think of anything! Count the bricks on the wall!” Only when he was satisfied did he then nudge Richee or Engstead, and at last the shutter clicked.
Because of this meticulous attention to her image and the enormous publicity machine operated by Paramount, Marlene Dietrich was, by the end of 1931, simply the most famous actress working in America, and the most chronicled worldwide. Vanity Fair gushed its wonder over the “genuine and tremendous hold she has on the public today,” and the London Times hailed her “careful elimination of all emphasis; the more seemingly careless and inconsequent her gestures, the more surely do they reveal the particular shades and movements of her mind.”
Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier were still in Dietrich’s life, escorting her (sometimes together, by her arrangement) to night-clubs and restaurants. Paramount’s press department tried to finesse the openness of these rendezvous by claiming their meetings were really about business—that she might appear in a new film with Cooper or Chevalier, but not even the fan magazines took this subterfuge very seriously. Von Sternberg, ever accommodating, sometimes agreed to further confound the press by being the third diner at a
restaurant table.
The bewilderment multiplied when Dietrich donned a man’s tweed suit, knotted a four-in-hand and danced the tango at a dimly lit Hollywood club frequented by gay women in cross-dress but not, ordinarily, by image-conscious stars. Her partner on at least two such occasions was Imperio Argentina, the popular female dancer, singer and star of Spanish films, whom Dietrich courted with the usual bouquets of violets. Their evenings together were soon quieter and more intimate—at least until Argentina’s husband, director Florian Rey, revived the ancient marital rights of an Iberian male. He appeared at Roxbury Drive late one evening with a pair of steamship tickets and ordered his wife to pack for an imminent departure—thus Imperio had danced her last tango in Hollywood.
BY SPRING 1932, DIETRICH’S GAZE WAS ALSO DIrected toward Europe, and she startled the press and the public (not to say the studio) by announcing her intention to return to Germany. “I have enjoyed myself in Hollywood,” she told journalist Whitney Williams, “but the urge to be among my own people is stronger than the desire to remain here. Germany is not satisfied with me. It wants to hear me in German-speaking roles.”