by Donald Spoto
This was a typical Dietrich ploy; in fact she was quite aware that in 1932 few Germans abroad were going home and hundreds of thousands were emigrating. The reason for her announcement (which Paramount took as a threat if she did not like her next assignment) was to force an issue relating to von Sternberg. Before the release of Shanghai Express he had decided that his career (and possibly hers) would be best served if he no longer directed Dietrich. But he had not foreseen her reaction. First she accused him of simple sexual jealousy; additionally, von Sternberg said,
She accused me of being determined to demonstrate that she was worthless [and] to aggrandize myself by letting her stand on her own feet; she was nothing and could do nothing without me [she insisted], and all I had done with her was to show how great I was.
Dietrich then went further, informing the studio that she simply would not work under another director—a threat she reinforced by her public statements about returning home. As she doubtless expected, there was panic on Marathon Street before economic considerations, as so often, resolved the dilemma: Paramount offered von Sternberg—then inundated with alimony obligations and attorneys’ fees—a substantial increase in salary for his new contract if he would prepare one last picture with Miss Dietrich. He capitulated, and she spoke no more about Germany.
And so, by April 1932, von Sternberg had drafted Blonde Venus (with the usual assistance on some dialogue from Jules Furthman)—yet another story of an entertainer, this time a wife and mother named Helen Faraday who returns to the stage to earn money for her mortally ill husband, Ned (Herbert Marshall). While he is abroad undergoing an expensive cure, she adds to her professional success a glamorous life as mistress of Nick Townsend, a wealthy politician (Cary Grant). Her husband, returning cured, learns about her life and claims that her immoral conduct denies her the right to keep their little boy, Johnnie (Dickie Moore). She flees with the child, is reduced to prostitution to support him, and is forced to give the boy up to her husband. Her sacrifices are duly rewarded, however, when she is later restored triumphantly to international fame and (against von Sternberg’s wishes but on the insistence of Hollywood’s moral watchdogs) to her family.
The screenplay was not completed without considerable friction between von Sternberg and Dietrich on one side and B. P. Schulberg, Paramount’s production chief, on the other. Director and star were told that her character was unsympathetic to the point of depravity, and that von Sternberg would have to tone down the episodes of the woman’s descent into prostitution. (Particular objection was made to a scene in which the child is hidden under a table while his mother flirts with a prospective customer.) Von Sternberg refused to submit to the required changes, blithely departing for a New York holiday after Schulberg brought in another writer (S. K. Lauren).
To no one’s surprise, Paramount then suspended von Sternberg, discontinuing his weekly salary when he failed to report for the first day’s shooting on Monday, April 25, 1932. But Schulberg and company did not adequately assess Dietrich’s devotion to her mentor, for she was also absent that day, announcing through her attorney Ralph Blum that she would certainly not appear in Blonde Venus with the newly assigned director, Richard Wallace. They had no choice but to suspend her as well, and a threat of lawsuits was announced on April 28. Some script compromises were hastily drafted, and on May 26 shooting began with scenes requiring Dietrich to act the doting mama, bathing and fussing over her little boy. By an odd coincidence, Dietrich felt her real-life motherhood threatened at the same time.
That March, the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped, but the baby was found murdered before the abductors specified how the 50,000 ransom was to be delivered. Throughout America, wealthy and famous parents panicked, and locksmiths, bodyguards and providers of security gates were kept busy round the clock in Hollywood. The children of movie stars (those of Harold Lloyd, Ann Harding and Bebe Daniels among them) were constantly attended, and Dietrich supervised the installation of iron bars over the windows of Maria’s room. Dietrich’s chauffeur, an austere ex-prizefighter named Briggs, escorted the child to school, and she was not permitted to wander undefended even in the enclosed yard at Roxbury Drive.
Perhaps predictably, the widespread promulgation of these security tactics provoked the very threats they were meant to forestall. In mid-May, extortion letters were received by Dietrich and by one Mrs. Egon Muller, wife of a German linen importer: if money was not delivered according to specific instructions, their children’s lives would be in danger. After Dietrich obeyed police advice to ignore the threat while they tried to trace the letter, a second was received, doubling the extorted sum to 10,000. This was to be left in a package on the rear bumper of an automobile at a particular location. Meantime, Mrs. Muller (also acting under police counsel), placed 17—instead of the 500 demanded—under a designated downtown palm tree.
At this point, frightening though the situation seemed, an atmosphere of comic unreality prevailed, for the swindlers were stupid and incompetent—straight from an episode of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. On May 30, Dietrich was puzzled when she opened her morning mail demanding “the 483 you forgott to leave!” That same day, Mrs. Muller received a letter:
You Marlene Dietrich, if you want to save Maria to be a screen star, pay, and if you don’t she’ll be but a loving memory to you. Don’t dare to call detectives again. Keep this to yourself. Say, what’s the big idea! Attention! Is the future of your girl worth it? Wait for new information. 10,000 or pay heavily later on. You’ll be sorry. Don’t call for police or detectives again.
District Attorney Buron Fitts and Chief of Detectives Blaney Matthews revealed nothing when they ceremoniously called a press conference: “The people clipping and sending these letters are just a bunch of cheap chiselers. They are probably inexperienced, too, and the threats are more or less idle.” And so they were. The Sieber and Muller children were never threatened again, the clumsy extortionists were not apprehended, and by midsummer (although Dietrich kept her bodyguards on full-time alert for several months) the matter was no longer a prime concern to anyone.
THROUGHOUT THE ORDEAL, VON STERNBERG WAS the most anxious and vigilant protector, and in fact the danger of losing Maria that spring directly inspired the revised plot of Blonde Venus—wherein, despite her maternal devotion, Dietrich must forfeit her child. Perhaps because of his own childhood poverty and the enormous sacrifices lovingly made by his mother, Blonde Venus began as a paean to motherhood, as von Sternberg’s son later recalled: “When I was young, my father showed the film to me as an example of what he thought about motherhood, which he regarded with an almost maudlin sentimentality. Blonde Venus shows his great attachment and gratitude to his own mother for holding the family together in hard times.”
But the picture also contains the usual network of references to Josef von Sternberg’s relationship with Marlene Dietrich, and the plot synthesizes every love triangle in their previous quartet of films. Like von Sternberg, both the husband Ned and the lover Nick fall in love with the cabaret performer Dietrich when they see her onstage (shades of Zwei Krawatten); like von Sternberg, Nick then becomes her lover while the husband (Sieber) is in Germany, and the latter returns with threats to take her child away. There follows Helen’s half-willed descent to the life of the demimondaine—von Sternberg’s continual fascination for Dietrich’s prodigal erotic life (as also in The Blue Angel, Morocco, Dishonored and Shanghai Express)—and her final victory as a performer, dressed triumphantly in white top hat, tie and tails, a manly woman boasting she neither loves nor is loved.
By the finale Dietrich has, then, revealed the significance of her justly famous first song in Blonde Venus; whereas she had not sung at all in Dishonored or Shanghai Express, she is here given three important numbers. The first, “Hot Voodoo,” she sexily croons after emerging from a gorilla costume—her beauty latent even within the beast; the sequence directly recalls Dietrich in a woman’s sexy outfit after changing from a m
an’s evening suit in Morocco. This is followed by “You Little So-and-So,” in which the crooning Dietrich (smiling, winking, pointing a gentle accusatory finger at men in the audience) is teasingly photographed through potted palms and past rows of spectators. Finally, she sings—in her victorious male garb—“I Couldn’t Be Annoyed”; any crazy inversion of the so-called natural order is acceptable to her (“if bulls gave milk . . . if everyone stood on his head and on his hands he wore shoes . . . if we ate soup with a fork, and if babies brought the stork”).
BECAUSE OF THE DANGER TO MARIA, THE ATMOsphere during filming was tense, but throughout the summer Dietrich worked bravely and without evident anxiety. According to lyricist Sam Coslow she was “a joy to be with . . . a good trouper and nothing at all like the secretive, Garbo-like woman of mystery the Paramount press agents and fan magazine writers were selling to the public.” She was also affectionate and reassuring toward child actor Dickie Moore, whose parents also feared kidnappers, and who recalled that she was “obviously on close terms with [von Sternberg]. They yelled at one another constantly in German, but always ended up laughing and embracing.”
Blonde Venus was a surprise hit for Paramount when it opened that autumn, earning three million dollars in its first release. But most critics were as unenthusiastic as they had been about the previous von Sternberg films: by this time there was a consensus that her director rendered Dietrich enchanting to behold, but that as an actress she had little range. As for her own estimation of her talents, she was remarkably self-aware and candid: “I do not care,” she said at the time. “I am not an actress, no . . . I don’t like making pictures, and I haven’t got to act to be happy. Perhaps that is the secret.”
The criticism of her talents was in a way justified; no one ever accused Marlene Dietrich of being one of the great actresses of the century, convincing in a variety of roles. Subsequently, as if by sheer repetition and increasing confidence, she would display an occasional flair for comedy. But in a sense analysis of her movie acting fails to acknowledge that the primary requirement of the job is a mysterious connection between face and camera—and, as well, the careful presentation of a presence by studios and directors able to exploit appearances.
Marlene Dietrich brought to the roles, after all, precisely what was required by von Sternberg’s variations on a theme. The deeply muted passion, the affectless gaze, the slow and moody reactions, the grey envelope of suspicion that ever surrounded her character—everything had been calculated by him and realized by her for a specific effect. The public seemed to realize what reviewers and essayists in Depression America did not: that Lola Lola, Amy Jolly, X-27, Shanghai Lily and Helen Faraday were not women who begged for admiration or endorsement. Much less did they, according to the tradition of movie romance, plead for the counterfeit salvation of romantic love. Wounded and cautious, tainted by experience, wise, sometimes diffident but always accessible to the astonishment of living, they were at once all women von Sternberg imagined and the one woman Marlene Dietrich was.
NONE OF THIS HELD ANY INTEREST FOR HER. “IT IS behind the cameras I should like to be,” she admitted that year, “as Mr. von Sternberg’s assistant director. But he will not let me.” He did, however, offer her the kind of complete education in filmmaking technique directors rarely offer actors. D. W. Griffith was virtually a professor to his actresses, and Alfred Hitchcock often gave leading ladies extensive training in everything from story development to the final cut, but such tutelage is the exception in the swift, ordinarily impersonal business of moviemaking.
Von Sternberg taught Dietrich the fine points of cinema magic, especially as it pertained to the exhibition of herself. In addition to the positioning of lights and props there was of course a meticulous approach to makeup, and by 1933 (the fourth year under his guidance) she knew more about transforming the face, as John Engstead recalled, than makeup artists Elizabeth Arden, Max Factor and the Westmores combined. She knew that if she held a saucer over a candle a black carbon smudge would form on the underside, and that if a few drops of lanolin or mineral oil were warmed and mixed with the soot, this could be effectively applied to the eyelids. Painstakingly, she learned to use this concoction throughout the 1930s, heavier at the lash line, then fading up toward the eyebrow. (The entire procedure is detailed as Dietrich/Helen prepares backstage for her first cabaret number in Blonde Venus.)
But it was the camera’s potential for artifice that Dietrich learned most about from her mentor. The photographer George Hurrell recalled Dietrich pausing on a staircase between setups of a von Sternberg film, casually surveying the technicians and knowing, by this time, what each man was doing and why. For a session of still photos afterward, she assumed a pose, checked herself in a mirror and called, “All right, George—shoot!” The full-length mirror positioned near her, just to the side of the camera, was in fact Dietrich’s invariable requirement and she could be (as Hurrell recalled) quite angry if it had been forgotten.
But as 1932 drew to a close, there were other reasons for her to be annoyed. Von Sternberg’s conflict with Paramount over the development of Dietrich’s role in Blonde Venus had precipitated a number of private meetings with Schulberg and with vice-president Emanuel Cohen, and they agreed with von Sternberg that star and mentor might be well served if her next film—her last under her current Paramount contract—could be created with another filmmaker. The project chosen was Song of Songs, based on Edward Sheldon’s dramatization of the famous Hermann Sudermann novel; for it von Sternberg suggested Rouben Mamoulian, who had successfully directed Applause and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—and who, as everyone in Hollywood knew, had already been selected by Greta Garbo for Queen Christina later in 1933.
Song of Songs, tightly scheduled for an eight-week shoot that winter, required Dietrich to be on the set the morning of December 20, 1932; her attorney announced a few hours later that she would, in fact, not appear at all. Ignoring the possible legal and financial consequences of her actions, she would not submit to direction from Mamoulian (or any director other than von Sternberg) and renewed her threat that when her contract expired in February she would simply embark for Germany.
8: 1933–1935
ON JANUARY 2, 1933, EXECUTIVES AT PARamount filed a breach of contract suit against Marlene Dietrich, asking the courts for 182,850.06—the precise amount the studio insisted they had lost since her failure to report for work on Song of Songs. Fearing her departure from the country, they also appealed to Judge Harry Holzer for an arrest warrant. This he denied, but he did issue a temporary restraining order against her employment by another studio, and he demanded her appearance in court the following week. Relaxing over the weekend with Maurice Chevalier at her Santa Monica beach house on Ocean Front Boulevard (later Pacific Coast Highway), Dietrich affected an airy unconcern worthy of Lola Lola or Shanghai Lily. Ralph Blum, her attorney, repeatedly telephoned her about the obvious professional (not to say monetary) ramifications of her recalcitrance, but she was inflexible. She would not work until von Sternberg promised to return to her for one more picture before the year was over.
And so on January 5 her secretary, Eleanor McGeary, telephoned the studio to say Dietrich would be at Marathon Street prepared to work the following week. Paramount immediately cancelled all legal action and simultaneously offered her a new five-year contract, starting with (and ultimately advancing beyond) 4,500 per week—almost four times her original starting pay and a royal emolument in that worst year of the Great Depression. (The studio was not simply acting magnanimously. On his return from a European trip, director Ernst Lubitsch reported to Paramount that abroad the most popular movie stars were Dietrich, Garbo and Jeanette MacDonald.) This deal she wisely signed, and on January 9, wearing a man’s tweed suit, tie and beret, she joined Mamoulian for lunch in the studio commissary to discuss the first scenes of Song of Songs. “Like every German girl, I regard this as one of the great works of fiction,” she told the press. Her outfit, however (which she claimed was
simply for the sake of comfort, economy and simplicity) accentuated the difference between the actress and the pious, shy peasant girl she was about to portray, and this the press gleefully noticed.
That year, Marlene Dietrich was rarely seen in public wearing women’s clothes; in fact some said she was the best-dressed man in Hollywood. Chevalier—who objected more to her unconventional wardrobe than to the press prying around her rented beach house—demanded that she wear more traditional clothes, at least when they dined out or went dancing.
“Her adoption of trousers and wearing of tuxedos,” commented the Los Angeles Times on January 24, “[was] extreme showmanship, but on the other hand it may also prove a hit.” Her apparel was indeed widely remarked—and this greatly displeased Chevalier, who perhaps thought journalists would look for even more scabrous details if he were regularly seen with a mistress wearing only high-fashion drag. In this matter she was implacable, and the affair (but not the friendship) ceased.
The reason for the end of the Dietrich-Chevalier liaison was not simply her wardrobe, but the woman for whom she was now wearing it almost exclusively. Early in 1933, she became deeply involved in an affair with the stylish Spanish immigrant Mercedes de Acosta, a playwright, screenwriter and feminist who was also a charter member of America’s creative lesbian community.* A dominating personality in any situation, de Acosta was, as actress and writer-photographer Jean Howard described her, “a little blackbird of a woman, strange and mysterious, and to many irresistible.”
De Acosta (who was forty in 1933) moved easily in the aesthetic worlds of Eleanora Duse, Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky, and among her friends she counted at various times Mrs. Patrick Campbell, Sarah Bernhardt, Jeanne Eagels, Laurette Taylor and Helen Hayes. During and after World War I she knew well the dancer Isadora Duncan, and her own career as poet and screenwriter was firm after 1930. Although she was married to the artist Abram Poole from 1920 to 1935, the relationship was never anything but a warm friendship.