by Donald Spoto
In her published memoirs, Here Lies the Heart (1960), de Acosta acknowledged that the most ardent relationships of her life were with Le Gallienne (who starred in her plays Sandro Botticelli and Jeanne d’Arc), Garbo and Dietrich, although she was indeed as busy as the notorious Natalie Barney, the doyenne of Parisian gay women. De Acosta’s accounts of her intimacies are fragrant with details not only of flower deliveries but also of candlelit evenings, long, late bedroom conversations and lovers’ quarrels. Friends who resented her frankness tried to deny the most torrid romantic revelations, often referring to her book as “Here the Heart Lies.” But there is the concomitant witness of many third parties, among them the men in Dietrich’s life; the basic truth of de Acosta’s book (if not the accuracy of every detail) is indeed unassailable.
According to the custom of that time and the requirements of law, Mercedes de Acosta employed meaningful circumlocutions: Marbury (nicknamed Granny Pop) “seemed such a man to me”; Nazimova acted “like a naughty little boy”; John Barrymore’s wife Michael Strange (an apt monicker if ever there was one) looked “like a healthy young Arab boy”; Garbo (“more beautiful than I ever dreamed she could be”) overwhelmed her so much that on first meeting her, de Acosta removed a bracelet and slipped it on her wrist. Two days later she managed to accelerate their mutual attraction.
Their common friend Salka Viertel (wife of writer-director Berthold Viertel and screenwriter of several Garbo pictures) arranged for them to meet privately in an unoccupied house near her own on Mabery Road in Santa Monica Canyon, where Garbo and de Acosta “put records on the phonograph, pushed back the rug and danced ‘Daisy, You’re Driving Me Crazy’ over and over again.” The scene ends on a closed door, behind which the relationship became more intimate (“I was moving in a dream within a dream,” de Acosta wrote tremulously).
When Garbo returned to Sweden for a holiday in 1933, Dietrich, now her rival offscreen as well as on, was quick to replace her, delivering roses and violets to de Acosta’s home—“sometimes twice a day,” the recipient recalled, “ten dozen roses or twelve dozen carnations [and] many Lalique vases.” Dietrich, grandly overstating, told de Acosta, “You are the first person here to whom I have felt drawn. I want to ask if you will let me cook for you.” She then suggested they go swimming together at the beach, and next evening the affair began. “You have exceptional skin texture that makes me think of moonlight,” de Acosta whispered as if reciting from her current screenplay assignment (Rasputin). “You should not ruin your face by putting color on it.” Thenceforth Dietrich never again wore rouge in her friend’s presence.
Mercedes de Acosta and Marlene Dietrich, almost unique among women in Hollywood, carried on their affair quite openly throughout the 1930s—despite the fact that, then as later, homosexuals were subjected to the fearful suppressions of a hypocritical movie industry. But Dietrich was not to be restricted by the norms of polite expectations any more than by the annual shifts in female fashions. With de Acosta, as with other women and men, it was often important for her to gratify someone she respected. Cooking for them, offering gifts, cleaning their homes, even doing their laundry—no gesture was too humble to demonstrate her desire to ingratiate herself and thus be included in their society. Trained by her grandmother in the arts of feminine attraction and by her mother in the crafts of domesticity, she effectively linked the Victorian model of the loyal and dutiful woman with the Prussian ideal of the tireless, attentive companion and the Berlin prototype of an unfettered, worldly maverick.
It would be tempting, in this regard, to postulate that the men in her life represented a continuing search for a father-figure, and that the women were surrogate mothers she wished to please. But human affects do not conform so tidily to the rudiments of textbook psychology. It is perhaps more accurate to argue that Marlene Dietrich was attracted to those whose styles she admired, whose intellects she respected and whose social influence she wished to share. Sex could be a useful component in a relationship—a bevel with which she could achieve emotional balance—but none of her affairs had even the temporary exclusivity that betokens a desire for loving attachment, much less permanence. Not one of her paramours, men or women, ever reported that she gave herself up to a truly grand passion; always she was remarkably self-aware and in control of the directions her relationships took.
THE FILMING OF SONG OF SONGS LASTED FROM MID-January to early April, a protraction required by the almost daily arrival of new writers to tackle the script’s problems. Dietrich was cast as Lily, a devout provincial girl with an impossible ideal of romantic love, sent to Berlin after her father’s death. There she takes refuge from a boozy aunt (Alison Skipworth) in the studio of a sculptor (Brian Aherne) who convinces her to pose nude for a statue based on the faithful lover of the biblical Song of Solomon. (With more alacrity than Lily, Dietrich did model nude especially for the movie—for sculptor S. C. Scarpitta, whose statue was provocatively exploited throughout Song of Songs.) Fearing that marriage will compromise his career, the artist abandons her; and Lily’s aunt marries her off to a lecherous old baron (Lionel Atwill). Marital misery leads to accidental infidelity and the predictable descent to the demimonde before a happy reunion with the fickle sculptor.
Mamoulian remembered her as a disciplined worker but one whose performance was entirely calculated and lacking the spontaneity that derives from intuition. This may have been partly because she was working for another director for the first time and was fearful of her appearance in the picture.
Paramount makeup artist Wally Westmore recalled that Dietrich at the time was fully aware of her own special requirements—especially a key light about eight feet above her and a little to the right. “This created the hollows under the eyebrows and cheekbones which gave her that sculptured look. She never worked without that key light hitting her from above.” Dietrich continued to refer to a large mirror just off-camera to assure that this light was properly positioned for the best presentation of her face—a moment that occurred when she saw a small butterfly-shaped shadow under her nose. “If you look carefully,” Westmore pointed out, “you can see that little butterfly shadow in every movie and still picture she made.”
Cinematographer Lucien Ballard recalled that Dietrich became so skillful that she could simply lick her finger and hold it toward the key light, determining from the heat if it was exactly the proper distance from her face. As for the mirror, it was becoming a kind of totem: the reflection she saw, harbinger of the image on the screen, became her only permanent partner. Just as she was ever confident and controlling in her intimacies, so was Marlene Dietrich the epitome of the Hollywood Narcissus. Gazing at her own reflection, she became transfixed with what she saw and dedicated herself inexhaustibly to its refinement and perfection. But like the figure in the Greek myth, her self-involvement, indeed self-obsession, would lead at last to an isolating and loveless solitude. Perhaps no star was ever more trapped by her own image.
Predictably, Dietrich’s directorial tactics on the set annoyed Mamoulian, who was certainly not placated by her impolitic action each day before the first shot. “I had the sound man lower the boom mike,” she admitted years later, “and I said into it, ‘Oh, Jo—why hast thou forsaken me?’ ” Rightly, von Sternberg ignored her pleas to be present as photographic counselor—until Dietrich, on March 28, carefully but deliberately fell from her horse during a scene and, in a performance better than any she had ever given onscreen, wept for his assistance. He sped to her side and took her home, where she rested for three days. Perhaps the only memorable moment in the finished film was Dietrich’s singing of Frederick Hollander’s “Johnny,” which gave her the opportunity to convey elegant raciness even as she wandered about trying to find the right key (“We’ll disconnect the phone, and when we’re all alone, we’ll have a lot to do-o-o-o . . . I need a kiss or two—or maybe more”).*
PARAMOUNT ALLOWED HER A EUROPEAN HOLIDAY before her next assignment. Although she had spoken for almost a year of return
ing to Germany, she was now receiving bad press there. “One would like to see so famous a German artist show some German spirit and work in German productions,” proclaimed the Berlin trade journal Lichtbildbühne in May 1933.
It is inconsistent with our national revolution that our most famous movie star should be playing foreign roles in a foreign country under foreign directors, speaking English instead of her mother tongue. As long as she opts for the dollar and has shaken the dust of her fatherland from her feet, can the new Germany place any value on the importance of her movies?
Nazi Germany’s resentment of her was sealed when Song of Songs was submitted for German release soon after. It was, of course, banned, for it was based on a novel by a Jew, was financed by “Jewish Hollywood money” and, added the codifiers of the Licht-spielgesetz (which specified the requirements for a play or film to conform to Nazi ideology), it used a German actress to impugn the moral purity of the German people by claiming that adultery could go unpunished in their own country, where the story was set.
Still, Dietrich longed for a summer in Europe, and so with Maria—and luggage containing twenty-five suits of male clothes, dozens of men’s shirts, neckties and socks—she boarded the Europa in New York and arrived in Paris on May 19. Within hours the Parisian newspapers were detailing her shocking outfit: a chocolate-colored polo coat, a pearl grey suit, white shirt and tie—and aviator’s goggles perched saucily atop a felt hat. One Paris magistrate suggested next day that she be threatened with arrest for impersonating a man, and in fact the police seriously considered a warrant. This idea collapsed when (of all people) Maurice Chevalier told a journalist that Dietrich was a friend to all Frenchmen who loved freedom.
That week she recorded German melodies in a Paris studio and began a week’s work dubbing the French version of Song of Songs; then she, Maria, Rudi and Tamara toured France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and the Riviera. But it was Paris most of all that she thenceforth regarded as a refuge. “I am very happy here,” she told the press. “My daughter can play in the gardens of the hotel or in the park without fear [of publicity or abduction].”
On September 26, she and Maria left Paris for New York, her garb and makeup as controversial as ever—a black and silver suit over a Chinese red blouse, matching red and black gloves and snakeskin bag, red heels on black patent pumps and her lips and fingernails painted a blazing scarlet. Hours before her departure, she was visited by German film distributors authorized to solicit her to return home to make films. But Dietrich condemned to their faces the recent dismissal from Germany of prominent intellectuals (most of them Jewish) and expressed her outrage at the May book-burnings on the Opernplatz, in which the works of Heine, Marx, Freud, Mann, Brecht and Remarque were especially targeted. Contemptuous not only of her own recent press but also of everything that the Nazis stood for, she coldly rejected their offer—as she did at least two later invitations before she sealed her loyalties by swearing American citizenship.*
WHEN MARLENE DIETRICH RETURNED TO THE States in the autumn of 1933, she was (although not a refugee) one of almost two hundred thousand Germans who settled in the United States in that decade.* Quite apart from their fierce rejection of Nazi ideology there was a subtle but well-documented self-loathing among many of these immigrants. Once champions of German culture—as Dietrich often referred to herself from 1930 to 1933—they now almost denounced their roots. Bertolt Brecht, who also settled in California, proclaimed that “everything bad in me” was of German origin, and Thomas Mann, speaking for many, lamented, “We poor Germans! We are fundamentally lonely, even when we are famous! No one really likes us.”
Marlene Dietrich could not say with any truth that she was disliked. By the same token, she seemed to exhibit the common schizoid pattern of the German émigré, rejecting her Teutonic past and refusing to conform entirely to American behavior, particularly with regard to gender roles. Simultaneously, she loved the California climate as much as her huge salary and the freedom to enjoy it—yet she complained about almost everything, and almost constantly. Hollywood was impressive in its technical efficiency; Hollywood was dreadful, and she never felt at home there. She appreciated her many American friends; she decried the informality of their lives. She enjoyed the abundance and variety of food and the opulence of restaurants; she criticized American cuisine and said she preferred to cook German-style at home. She disliked the social arrogance of many Germans in Hollywood; she dined at least once weekly at the Blue Danube restaurant, where old friends like Joe May kept the Old World alive in High German conversations. Of such contradictions was the immigrant temperament comprised before 1941—by which time American citizenship had bonded most of them forever to their adopted countrymen, whom they fervently joined against Hitler.
In October, Dietrich was back at Paramount with von Sternberg, then completing the scenario for what would be one of the most curious movies in history. First called Her Regiment of Lovers, this was a wildly imaginative account of Sophia Frederica, the Prussian princess brought to Russia in the eighteenth century by the Empress Elizabeth to marry her halfwit son Peter. Learning every political and sexual tactic of ambition and exploitation at the Russian court, Sophia—renamed Catherine (and later “the Great”)—accedes to the throne after the death of Elizabeth and the murder of Peter. Soon retitled The Scarlet Empress, the design of the production proceeded under von Sternberg’s complete control—each tiny detail of scenery, paintings, sculptures, costumes, story, photography and acting gesture. The film became, as he said, a relentless excursion into style. The credits claim the story is based on the diary of Catherine II, “arranged by Manuel Komroff”; in fact it emerged whole from von Sternberg’s most ardent inventiveness.
No matter that the narrative only vaguely nods at historical accuracy, the director’s goal was a presentation of something unique in the annals of film: the twisted world of nightmare, a tissue of almost pathological fantasies. Inspired by German expressionism and its use of distorted perspective to suggest mental derangement, The Scarlet Empress and its lacerating, perverse wit totter so often on the edge of satire that the appropriate response to almost every scene is problematical. Hyperbolic in design, the sets and props impede the players, Dietrich herself included (not to say the thousands of extras employed for crowd scenes), and von Sternberg’s vision emphasized an astonishing collection of brooding, expressionist statues and vast ikons that everywhere dwarf the characters. Equally grotesque were explicit scenes of torture, rape and pillage (production just preceded the application of the newly drafted Motion Picture Production Code that set standards for acceptable language and behavior for the first time in Hollywood’s history).
This florid production featured everything beyond human scale, from the vast oversize palace corridors to doorhandles twelve feet off the ground, requiring half a dozen characters to manipulate them. Amid a delirium that could have come from Edvard Munch, Dietrich as Catherine was swathed in ermine, white fox and sable, wrapped in fog and smoke, a creature looming from a demented social miasma and finally transformed into a half-mad sybarite. For the first half of the film, she had little to do but affect a wide-eyed naïveté; then, as the images of sadomasochism accumulate, she was presented as a woman whose unleashed sensuality makes her a monster of ambition (“I think I have weapons that are far more powerful than any political machine”). Amid a swirl of gargoyles with twisted bodies and images of emaciated martyrs bearing vast candelabra, no exoticism was left untried, and the picture became a procession of mobile tableaux.
As Amy Jolly in Morocco, 1930, with von Sternberg’s radiant key lighting.
At the premiere of Morocco, with friend Dimitri Buchowetzki and Rudolf Sieber.
Exploiting a photo opportunity with Charles Chaplin in Berlin, 1931.
Filming Dishonored in 1931: an obvious rival to Garbo.
Posing on the set in 1931 as Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express, wearing one of Travis Banton’s fantastic creations.
With her
daughter, Maria, in Hollywood, 1932.
With actresses Suzy Vernon and Imperio Argentina at a Ladies’ Night in Hollywood, 1932.
On the town with Maurice Chevalier and Gary Cooper: Hollywood, 1932.
Welcoming an ardent cadre of the Hollywood press to her home, 1933.
On the set of Song of Songs, 1933.
At a Hollywood polo match with Rudolf Sieber, Josef von Sternberg, Tamara Matul and Maria (1934).
In Hollywood, 1935.
With Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., at a London theater, 1936.
With Sieber in Salzburg, 1937.
With von Sternberg and Erich Maria Remarque, at the Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc, Antibes: July 1939.
As Frenchy in Destry Rides Again, 1939.
With John Wayne in Seven Sinners, 1940.
At the Hollywood Canteen, 1943.
With Jean Gabin, 1943.
Ornate and vexatious, The Scarlet Empress was nothing like Alexander Korda’s Catherine the Great, released the same year and starring Dietrich’s old acquaintance Elisabeth Bergner; it also had none of that film’s ultimate success. So grotesque that it never bores, von Sternberg’s film is hilariously improbable in the love scenes between Dietrich and John Lodge, who played Alexei, field marshal of the Russian Army. Reasons other than his role and his performance doubtless contributed to his decision, but soon after this picture he left films and entered real-life politics, becoming in turn a congressman, governor of Connecticut and ambassador to Spain and Argentina.