by Donald Spoto
* Among a legion, this group included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willa Cather and Anita Loos (writers); Cheryl Crawford, Elizabeth Marbury, Eva Le Gallienne, Alla Nazimova, Katharine Cornell, Blanche Yurka, Natasha Rambova and Mary Martin (in the theater); Janet Gaynor, Jean Arthur, Kay Francis and Dorothy Arzner (in Hollywood).
* In America, Friedrich Holländer became Frederick Hollander. He had written “Johnny” as a birthday present for Johnny Soyka, Dietrich’s agent at the time of The Blue Angel. Soyka’s wife Mady later had a fateful encounter with her in London.
* In March 1934, Carl Ousen, president of the Nazi National Film Chamber, claimed that Dietrich sent a 500 check to their welfare fund. This was a neat tactic to discredit Dietrich in America, but it failed: her contribution, it was soon determined, was sent to a nonpolitical winter relief fund for poor children in her home district.
* Among the most notable: architect Walter Gropius; designer Marcel Breuer; philosophers Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, Herbert Marcuse, Erik Erikson and Claude Lévi-Strauss; conductors Otto Klemperer, Fritz Reiner, George Szell, Erich Leinsdorf, William Steinberg and Bruno Walter; composers Arnold Schoenberg, Hans Eisler, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Kurt Weill, Alfred Newman, Béla Bartók and Paul Hindemith; writers Bertolt Brecht, Thomas and Heinrich Mann; scientists Albert Einstein, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller; filmmakers Fred Zinnemann, Fritz Lang, Kurt (later Curtis) Bernhardt and Detlef Sierck (later Douglas Sirk).
* With their usual calm cynicism, French film critics rose to the occasion. “L’Espagne de von Sternberg n’était et n’a jamais été l’Espagne,” proclaimed the editors of Inteciné in a typical comment that year. “C’était un pays imaginaire, un pays de conte, une espèce de paradis artificiel et romantique peuplé des fantasmes carnavalesques et d’amours impossibles . . . Pourquoi ce féroce auto-da-fé?”
9: 1935–1936
THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1935 WERE A period of pleasant indolence for Marlene Dietrich. Rudolf Sieber visited from Paris with Tamara Matul; he pored over his wife’s accounts, met with her agent and with tax advisers, and together they took Maria for a New York holiday. The friendship between them continued unbroken, if not uncomplicated.
So did Dietrich’s relationship with Mercedes de Acosta, who preferred a virtual oath of fidelity from the ladies with whom she enjoyed concurrent intimacies. Such a guarantee Dietrich was too aboveboard to provide, although she cannily learned not to divulge those details of her life that might estrange de Acosta. That year the two spent several days each week together, motoring to Santa Barbara for lunch, hiking in the canyons near Pacific Palisades or reading quietly at the home of one or the other. Dietrich’s domestic nature shone—she baked and cleaned and rearranged her friend’s closets and planned small dinners for friends.
Basil Rathbone (among others) was invited to these parties more than once with his wife Ouida Bergere, a slightly affected and amusing lady. Many claimed that when she wed the very English Rath-bone she quietly altered for the record her real name (Ida Berger), birthplace (Brooklyn) and accent (also Brooklyn). He recalled Dietrich serving champagne and caviar, then disappearing into the kitchen for an hour, whence she emerged “fragrant and cool and lovely as if she had just stepped out of a perfumed Roman bath” and summoned guests to an elegant dinner she had herself prepared. At such gatherings Dietrich made no effort to conceal the nature of her relationship with de Acosta, nor did she feel compelled to announce the banns.
But it was of course always easier for two women to have social variations on the so-called Boston marriage, which could be interpreted as simply a warm friendship; men, on the other hand, could never be so open, and their careers were jeopardized by even temporal cohabitation. Later, when Janet Gaynor and Mary Martin took a holiday together (leaving behind their homosexual husbands), the public felt it was charming for them to enjoy some time for “girl-talk.” It was widely known that Cary Grant and Randolph Scott—although, like Gaynor and Martin, married—enjoyed more than simply a platonic friendship; in fact, they shared a beach house every weekend for years. But finally they were given an ultimatum by RKO: Grant had to choose either Scott or contract renewal. As so often, professional considerations prevailed.
Quite apart from her open relationship to de Acosta, Dietrich blazed a fashion trail around town, making a tuxedo and fedora the ne plus ultra of chic women’s formalwear and enabling women to challenge another level of sexual stereotype. In this regard, rightly popularizing those freedoms long enjoyed exclusively by unconventional women, she brought a refreshing candor and dignity to life in Hollywood.
IN SEPTEMBER 1935, DIETRICH BEGAN FILMING THE comedy Desire, directed by Frank Borzage and produced by Ernst Lubitsch, whose Trouble in Paradise (made three years earlier) it much resembled. As a glamorous and sophisticated Parisian jewel thief who makes the American naïf Gary Cooper her unwitting accomplice in the heisting of a pearl necklace, Dietrich was at last allowed a chance to do more than pose statuesquely. “Permitted to walk, breathe, smile and shrug as a human being instead of a canvas for the Louvre,” ran a typical review, “[she] recaptures some of the freshness of The Blue Angel . . . Miss Dietrich is not dependent upon stylized photography and direction but has a proper talent of her own.” Her half-smiles hinted at a wily subterfuge, she sang Hollander’s “Awake in a Dream” with wry self-mockery and thus Dietrich effectively created a modern, credible character from an array of charmingly improbable situations.
No longer simply an excuse for von Sternberg’s fantasies, Dietrich demonstrated in Desire a flair for comic timing and supple expressiveness and, having learned every technical detail, she readily suggested to cinematographer Victor Milner the best camera angle and lighting configuration for herself (and sometimes for Cooper as well). “She was a perfectionist,” according to designer Edith Head, then working with chief costume designer Travis Banton. Early during the shooting of Desire, Dietrich kept Head working thirty-six uninterrupted hours at Paramount, pausing only for three hours sleep as she anguished over the choice of the right hat for one scene.
We sat up for hours trying on dozens of different hats, changing them, tilting them, taking the feathers off this one and trying them on that one, snipping off a veil or a brim, switching ribbons and bows. Finally we got what she wanted. I was amazed at her stamina and determination.
Similarly, photographer John Engstead recalled that weeks later, after trying forty hats submitted by New York designers, Dietrich selected a dramatic black one Lubitsch and Borzage at once realized would excessively shade her face. She tried others, wearing each one at a deliberately wrong angle until the men yielded and allowed her to wear the black. When she saw the film’s rushes next day, however, she had to admit that they had been right. Persistent she may have been, but always thoroughly professional.
Her studio education filtered into her home life, as visiting photographers and journalists often learned. Arriving there, they were taken to the living room, whose major light source was a single pinpoint spot focussed above the fireplace. Eventually Dietrich glided in and moved silently into place, leaning against the mantel and raising her head until the illumination of her cheekbones was dramatically presented to her visitors. “Falling into exciting and sinuous poses is second nature to Marlene,” commented Engstead.
BUT HER CONCERNS THAT YEAR WENT BEYOND THE contours of her own glamorous image. Privately, the autumn and early winter were laced with the anxiety of a real-life drama and its tragic dénouement. Still encouraging her occasional sweetheart John Gilbert (then separated from Virginia Bruce), Dietrich insisted that Lubitsch and Borzage consider him for a supporting role—that of her suave ally in crime. Despite the ravages of Gilbert’s drinking and the fact that he looked much older than his thirty-six years, the test was successful and he was engaged for the film. But just before production began, while he and Dietrich were swimming in his pool at Tower Road, Gilbert suffered a mild heart attack and had to be replaced by John Halliday. Even as she worked da
ily at Paramount through the final months of the year, Dietrich hovered consolingly round Gilbert, and after another more serious attack in December she became virtually the night and weekend nurse. She also decorated his home for Christmas, ornamenting a tree, filling the rooms with candlelight and performing holiday chores, food and gift shopping for him and his young daughter. When she had to honor a radio commitment that month (reading scenes from Desire on the “Hollywood Hotel” promotional series), Dietrich paid for a trained medic to replace her for two hours.
Nor was her generosity at holiday time limited to intimates. Paramount employees who served her or were in special need because of erratic employment or personal hardship received gifts with notes of gratitude. To her makeup assistant, Dot Ponedel, she gave a pair of crystal lamps, and Jessmer Brown (her studio maid), Arthur Camp (the property master on Desire) and others all received presents she knew they needed or fancied. When an elderly couple who had retired from the studio fell ill with influenza that winter, Dietrich twice drove to North Hollywood to prepare hot meals and clean their home. Such gestures may have had an element of noblesse oblige (and somehow Paramount’s publicity department was always informed of them); but the recipients were touched by her sentiments.
But Dietrich’s kindly vigilance did not entirely obliterate less admirable traits that could have serious consequences. One evening she and Gilbert saw that the car pulling into his driveway belonged to Greta Garbo; it was the closest the two women had come to meeting thus far. Gilbert rushed out for a brief chat with Garbo while her enduring rival remained in the house, misinterpreting the meeting as a grand reconciliation scene that would revive the embers of an old romance. When Garbo departed and he returned inside, Dietrich flew into a rage and left at once. Her refuge was Gary Cooper, only too eager to comfort her for what she described as Gilbert’s “rejection.” Imprudently miscalculating the effect of her actions on poor John Gilbert, Dietrich ensured that he knew of her resumed affair with Cooper. Gilbert then fell into a black depression at Christmas, drank himself into a stupor and sustained an even graver heart attack early in the new year. On the morning of January 10, despite the efforts of the physician she dispatched to his bedside, Gilbert suffocated to death in an alcoholic convulsion.
Crushed with remorse, Dietrich cancelled Desire’s postproduction still photography and confided her guilt to friends. More than that, she affected the role of Gilbert’s widow, collapsing at the funeral on the arm of Gary Cooper. A week later, Gilbert’s twelve-year-old daughter received a bouquet with a note attached: “I adored your father. Let me adore you.” This turned out to be a hyperbolic and impossible request, for the girl had her own mother, and in any case Dietrich scarcely found time even for Maria.
The Cooper affair survived until June 1, when she and Clark Gable read scenes from Morocco on a radio broadcast. Dietrich did not ask for Cooper to reprise his original role and he, annoyed at her courting of Gable even professionally, imitated her conduct vis-à-vis the hapless John Gilbert and stormed out of her house.
As IT HAPPENED, THE SAD EPISODE WITH GILBERT paralleled a time of professional unpleasantness owing to Dietrich’s demand for absolute authority. Her next Paramount picture was to be a tangled romance first called Invitation to Happiness and then renamed I Loved a Soldier, with recent French émigré Charles Boyer. But producer Benjamin Glazer left the project in January, complaining that Dietrich’s right of script approval and her insistence on instructing the cameraman were sabotaging his own creative contributions. Anxious when Ernst Lubitsch departed for an extended winter holiday, Dietrich was no more cooperative with the new studio production chief William Le Baron, nor was she satisfied when seasoned screenwriters tried to whip the scenario into shape. By February 11, 1936, more than a million dollars had been lost on a film two months delayed, for which only a few scenes had been shot. On March 4, she simply abandoned the production, and because by this time neither Le Baron, director Henry Hathaway nor writers Grover Jones and John van Druten had much enthusiasm for it, Paramount cut their losses.*
Because of this (and perhaps also because the Gilbert affair had caused some unwelcome local talk), the studio readily allowed Dietrich to work on a loan-out deal for independent producer David O. Selznick; he paid her 200,000 for the privilege of starring her in one of the first Technicolor movies.
On March 26, Selznick announced Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer in his forthcoming production of The Garden of Allah, based on a turgid Robert Hichens novel about a sultry socialite who goes to the Moroccan desert seeking peace of soul. There she meets and marries a nervous, priggish Frenchman, a renegade Trappist monk who now tends to stagger uneasily backward at the sight of a crucifix. Predictably, neither finds heavenly solace, and on his honeymoon he virtually swoons with guilt until she delivers him back to the monastery gates. This ending was not so much spiritually edifying as it was dimwitted (and to some offensive), not least of all because it implied that God can throw a jealous snit and command a rivalry worthy of a Hollywood star.
Studio filming began in April, and at first there was some trouble with Dietrich, who was insisting more and more on controlling every detail of her appearance. But The Garden of Allah involved the more complicated business of color, and here she was not in her Sternbergian element. “I told her about the tales around town [concerning her interference],” Selznick informed the director of Allah, Richard Boleslawski, in one of his notoriously protracted memos,
and she told me this was all nonsense and that she never indulged in such carryings on and certainly would not on this picture . . . I told her that my one other worry was about her performance—that she had demonstrated to the world that she was a beautiful woman, but that she had failed to demonstrate, undoubtedly through lack of opportunity, that she was an emotional actress . . . She said she had been wanting to prove this for years . . . [Since our conversation] Marlene has been working extremely hard, never leaving the studio until twelve or one in the morning. I think she has done a magnificent job on the costumes—better than could have been done without her supervision.
But the harmony was shattered within two weeks. By April 28, Dietrich was convinced that the script was dreadful and the film would therefore be a downright clinker. As it happened, she was right on both counts. Peppered with pseudopiety (“In knowing you and your beauty, I have known God!”) and crowded with characters who speak only Latter-day Apocalyptic (“This is the land of fire—and you are a woman of fire!”), The Garden of Allah offered not even an occasional oasis of sense or feeling.
Because no one would listen to her complaints or suggestions, Dietrich thought only of the impact on her own career. A telephone call from von Sternberg confirmed that yes, he would come to her rescue, and so she launched a campaign to replace Boleslawski (a Russian actor-director from the Moscow Art Theater). This she tried to engineer by attempting the seduction of twenty-seven-year-old Joshua Logan, the dialogue coach and rehearsal assistant on the film (later an important stage and screen director). In his memoirs he artfully reconstructed an awkward comic scene that reproduced the effect of Dietrich’s lifelong difficulty with the letter R:
“It’s twash, isn’t it?” said Dietrich of the script. “Garbo wouldn’t play this part. They offered it to Garbo and she didn’t believe the girl would send the boy back to the monastewy. She is a vewy clever woman, Garbo! She has the pwimitive instincts—peasants have, you know. Look me in the eye and tell me the twuth, now. It’s twash, isn’t it? You’re a tasteful New Yorker. Admit it. It’s twash.”
When Logan protested that the picture would finally look better than it read (it did not), Dietrich applied another kind of pressure when the company was shooting in Yuma, Arizona. She invited him to her hotel room, where Joseph Schildkraut awaited a prearranged evening assignation with her. Dismissing him, she spoke elaborately and frankly to Logan of her love for John Gilbert, pointing to the pictures of him that filled her room, and to the votive candles that burned before eac
h of them. She then poured him a drink, sat on her bed and beckoned him.
“You don’t weally like Boleslawski, do you? . . . He’s a tewwible man. He’s Wussian. No sensitivity. He can’t diwect women. Wouldn’t you like to see him wesign?”
“Resign? Good God, no. I think it would be dangerous for the whole project if he left now.”
“Call up Selznick wight now,” Dietrich persisted. “There’s the phone. Tell him Boleslawski is not the wight man . . . If he left, we could get a good diwector—like Josef von Sternberg, who just happens to be available. He’s exactly wight for this, and for me.”
She poured more Scotch into Logan’s glass “and kept getting closer and seemingly more affectionate” until he bolted. Despite her wiles, Boleslawski remained on The Garden of Allah which (although it won the Oscar for cinematography) fully justified Dietrich’s anxiety.
As the horrors continued to forecast the picture’s critical and popular disaster, Dietrich pressured Boyer and other players to beg for a change of script if not of director. “I AM GETTING TO THE END OF THE ROPE OF PATIENCE,” ran a telegrammatic howl to Boleslawski from the now financially strapped Selznick on April 28. “WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR HAVING A FRANK HEART-TO-HEART WITH MARLENE AND WITH BOYER . . . I AM NOT GOING TO FACE SIX OR SEVEN WEEKS OF THIS NONSENSE . . . I WILL HAVE A LOT MORE RESPECT FOR YOU IF YOU TURN INTO A VON STERNBERG WHO TOLERATES NO INTERFERENCE.”