by Donald Spoto
But the appealing comic nonsense of the completed Golden Earrings did not apply to the rigors of production, for there were bitter feuds. Milland, who had just won an Oscar playing an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s harrowing film The Lost Weekend, disliked Dietrich and feared she would steal the picture (which she handily did). He also found her commitment to realism somewhat revolting—especially in the eating scene, when she repeatedly stuck a fish in her mouth, sucked out the eye, pulled off the head, swallowed it and (after Leisen had shot the scene) promptly stuck her finger in her throat and vomited.
To make matters even more awkward for Paramount as they considered her option, the finished film was condemned by the watchful Legion of Decency, which disdained both Dietrich’s sexually seething characterization (she could not keep her hands off Milland) and this pair of unmarried gypsies romping lustily in the woods. The Legion’s censure was officially an acute embarrassment for the studio, although it was also splendid free publicity: the picture returned three million dollars in the next two years. After filming was completed in mid-October, she scrubbed off the four layers of dark makeup for the last time, tossed aside the greasy black wig, treated herself to an array of new suits and promptly departed for an extended holiday in New York.
On January 4, 1947, Dietrich embarked for Paris and a film deal that never materialized. Reunited with Rudi, she tried to obtain a visa so that he could visit his aged father in Germany. Then, to ease his disappointment when they were unsuccessful, she gave him half the profits on a sale of the Felsing jewelry stores in Berlin, which she inherited that spring when they were finally returned to the family after the liquidation of Nazi control of private businesses. Rudi was able to send his parents a large portion of the share he received from Dietrich, and thanks to her their final years were much more comfortable.
Neither of her parents replied to Maria’s announcement of her plan to marry William Riva that summer, although Dietrich sent a refrigerator to their tiny apartment at 1118 Third Avenue. Only after she realized that the marriage was indeed a happy and apparently permanent one did she (somewhat reluctantly) endorse the union. The birth of John Michael Riva on June 28, 1948, made Marlene Dietrich a grandmother, and by 1951 she was sufficiently resigned to the marriage to take 43,000 from a tax refund and buy the Rivas a town house on East Ninety-fifth Street.
From Paris that summer of 1947, Dietrich wrote to her Paramount hairdresser, Nellie Manley, that she was “living quietly at the Hotel Georges V, cooking whatever can be cooked. The attitude and the feelings of the people are not as good as they were during the war. It is depressing, but not hopeless. We must all see to it that this is changed and things are better.”
Her own fortunes improved that August, when Billy Wilder stopped in Paris to visit her after filming exterior shots for a forthcoming “black comedy” about life in occupied postwar Berlin; he offered Dietrich the role of Erika von Schlütow in the picture, to be called A Foreign Affair. At first she rejected it, hesitating to play the German mistress of an American army officer who loses him to a winsome visiting congresswoman and is then taken away by military police after her Nazi past is revealed. Nor was she persuaded by the Frederick Hollander songs commissioned for her. Dietrich agreed to the job only when the director showed her screen tests made by two American actresses whose performances she considered hilariously bad. By the end of October she was packing for the trip to California.
But there was a good reason to stop in New York, for on November 18 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor (at the time conferred only by the War Department). At a ceremony at the United States Military Academy, West Point, General Maxwell D. Taylor read the somewhat inaccurate (and breathless) citation:
Miss Marlene Dietrich, civilian volunteer with the United States Service Organization Camp Shows, performed meritorious service in support of military operations in North Africa, Sicily and Italy from April 14 to June 16, 1944, and in the North Atlantic Bases in Europe from August 30, 1944 to July 13, 1945, meeting a gruelling schedule of performances under battle conditions, during adverse weather and despite risk to her life. Although her health was failing, Miss Dietrich continued to bring pleasure and cheer to more than five hundred thousand American soldiers. With commendable energy and sincerity she contributed immeasurably to the welfare of the troops in these theatres.
The allegation that the Medal of Freedom was unofficially sponsored by Patton or Gavin has never been confirmed. However, the fact that she deserved the award seems undeniable.
A week later she stepped from the train at Union Station and accepted a bouquet of flowers from her new director. Wilder, who had known her in Berlin even before The Blue Angel, had co-authored screenplays in Germany, France and America (among them Garbo’s Ninotchka, written with Charles Brackett) and had begun directing in 1942. By 1947, Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend were praised as remarkable excursions to the frontiers of human perversity; Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and many more were yet to come. With his patented brand of acerbic moral cynicism, Wilder had prepared A Foreign Affair as a satiric criticism of widespread military corruption amid the ruins of Berlin, of the Allied involvement in a shameful black market, and of the self-righteous abuse of German civilians by occupying American soldiers. When filming began in December, Dietrich’s co-star as the prissy, investigating congresswoman was Jean Arthur; the leading man was John Lund; and the pianist in the cabaret was none other than Hollander himself, invited in tribute to his long association as Dietrich’s composer.
Like Pasternak, Wilder understood the value of deglamorizing Dietrich. Her first appearance in A Foreign Affair goes beyond anything in Golden Earrings: her hair is unbrushed, her face smirched with toothpaste, water trickles from her mouth as she brushes and gargles. This character is no Amy Jolly, no Concha Perez. As the story proceeds, it becomes clear that Erika can manipulate American officers as easily as she did Nazis, one of whom was her lover and all of whom she easily attended as a fashionable companion. But she has suffered privately, socially and by postwar deprivation for her guilty past; her act at the Lorelei cabaret, singing “Black Market” and “The Ruins of Berlin,” expresses her cool cynicism, her distrust of any nation’s claim to moral supremacy and her necessary, fearful suspicion of everyone. The role was perfect for Dietrich, for she had been long confirmed by Hollywood as von Sternberg’s icon of the tarnished woman masked with pain and capable of the sudden acknowledgment of her own need for tenderness and forgiveness—indeed, for redemption from the past. “I knew,” Wilder said years later, “that whatever obsession she had with her appearance, she was also a thorough professional. From the time she met von Sternberg she had always been very interested in his magic tricks with the camera—tricks she tried to teach every cameraman in later pictures.”
The film, her role in it and indeed her entire public image up to 1947 were synthesized not only by Wilder, but by Frederick Hollander, who was through long association certainly one to understand the swirling patterns of Dietrich’s complex emotional history. Her singing of his touching, bittersweet “Illusions” remains certainly one of the least affected, most deeply felt recordings of her entire career, unmatched even by any of the versions of it she recorded later. In the recording studio and on the set next day—with only Hollander for her accompanist—she somehow cut through every one of her usual tendencies to make a song just a little bit more theatrical, just a bit more perfect, too right. As we hear “Illusions” in the finished film and see her face as she seems to sing to and of herself and her character without affectation, we feel the sting as the words become a summary of her own life:
Want to buy some illusions,
Slightly used, second-hand?
They were lovely illusions,
Reaching high, built on sand.
They had a touch of Paradise,
A spell you can’t explain:
For in this crazy Paradise,
You ar
e in love with pain.
Want to buy some illusions,
Slightly used, just like new?
Such romantic illusions—
And they’re all about you.
I sell them all for a penny,
They make pretty souvenirs.
Take my lovely illusions—
Some for laughs, some for tears.
Later, Marlene Dietrich spent decades cutting her way through hundreds of renditions of (among many other concert pieces) “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “I Wish You Love” and endlessly repeated choruses of “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.” From 1953, and for twenty years thereafter, her one-woman nightclub and theater performances would be meticulously planned, artful presentations of herself as she wanted to be known—a woman triumphant who, quite on her own, had successfully stopped the march of time. She would be a creature forever desirable because she perpetually withholds something promised; she is a person whose cool mastery of all she surveys—swathed in sequins and ermine and bathed in pink light—places her in a position of emotional supremacy over all those who dare to draw near. Her many recorded theater songs thus often convey the universal experience of romantic loss. But somehow they remain overrehearsed exercises in technique, and so they rarely communicated the spontaneous, humbling, personal, acute distress of the first recording of “Illusions” for A Foreign Affair, in which she so eloquently sang a woman’s painful confession.
Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Dietrich herself, the woman of so many private affairs and such assertive, prodigal professional and erotic energy, was indeed represented in the polished theatrical stance, in her attitude of controlled distance and detachment. But just as she was amusingly seductive, almost girlishly playful while singing “You Little So and So” and “I Couldn’t Be Annoyed” (in Blonde Venus), nervously desirous during “Johnny” (in Song of Songs) and confidently alluring for “Awake In a Dream” (in Desire), both her voice and her sentiment were deeper for “Illusions.” She was by this time, as Billy Wilder said, “a strange combination of the femme fatale, the German Hausfrau and Florence Nightingale.”
It is not surprising that Marlene Dietrich should have access in early 1948 to such feelings about artifice, and the means to communicate her sentiments. The death of her mother, the end of her affair with Jean Gabin and the permanent departure of James Gavin, the news of her daughter’s pregnancy, her difficulty in finding the contours of a future career, her compulsion to have a face-lift that year (at the age of forty-six)—she was certainly not unmindful of the inevitable encroachment of time. Only one who in a quiet corner of herself had assessed the meaning of her depressions and solitude could have brought to “Illusions” the muted remorse, the confessional simplicity and the unadorned wistfulness. She was in the business of selling illusions, and she knew it. The cabaretist knew whereof she sang; Lola Lola had grown up.
A FOREIGN AFFAIR WRAPPED PRODUCTION IN FEBruary, and Dietrich sped to New York. “I’m doing the chores while Maria’s pregnant,” she said. “The daily woman’s no good—American women have no idea of how to keep house.” The birth of her first grandson that June prompted Life magazine to put her photograph on its August 9 cover, with the caption “Grandmother Dietrich,” and so began the designation of her as “the world’s most glamorous grandmother.” In this real-life role she in fact excelled, doting on Maria’s baby and, later on, his brothers. Her only professional assignment for the rest of the year was in Fletcher Markle’s film Jigsaw (made in New York that summer), in which Dietrich is glimpsed for only a few seconds as she leaves New York’s Blue Angel nightclub. “No, no, no—I’m not interested. Some time later, perhaps,” she says to her escort (Markle). To what she refers we are given no hint, although it is tempting—because Markle was a television producer—to assume they were discussing his real-life offers for her to appear in the new medium; this offer she repeatedly rejected because, as she said, she could not control the key light needed to present her to best advantage.
But she was very much interested, in 1949, in assuming a major role in an Alfred Hitchcock picture, to be made that summer in England. Dietrich would have second billing to the recent Oscar winner Jane Wyman, but the featured part would provide her with an aptly enigmatic personality à la von Sternberg, a Christian Dior wardrobe, sojourns in London and Paris, two songs (one written for her by Cole Porter) and a weekly salary of £7,000 for ten weeks. As usual, she consulted with her astrologist, Carroll Righter, for approval of her transportation and departure day, and by mid-April was in Paris for fittings at Dior.* In France, she resumed her friendship with Maurice Chevalier, although now the relationship was strictly platonic.
Dietrich also met the legendary French singer Edith Piaf, whose life had been wretchedly unhappy since childhood, and whose history of destructive love affairs and addictions were much the stuff of her plangent songs and raw delivery. Their relationship began when Dietrich heard Piaf’s signature tune “La Vie en Rose” and asked Hitchcock to secure the rights to it for her in the forthcoming film. Piaf, in the midst of one of her many near-suicidal depressions, welcomed both Dietrich’s admiration and her strong emotional support: “She made it her duty to help and encourage me, taking care never to leave me alone with my thoughts,” she wrote in her memoirs. Dietrich also, it seems, coveted the role of care-giver to this forlorn singer, often visiting her backstage after a performance and bringing along Chevalier as her escort. Just barely opening the door of Piaf’s dressing room when journalist Robert Bré knocked, Dietrich asked, “What can I do for you, monsieur? I am Madame Piaf’s secretary.” But he was not to be fooled: “Ah, I didn’t know! And I suppose she has engaged Maurice Chevalier as chauffeur!”
AFTER MORE THAN A MONTH IN PARIS, DIETRICH arrived on June 27 at London Airport, where she denied the waiting photographers a shot of her legs: “I am not a chorus girl,” she said with a tight smile. “I have nothing to show.” This was not typical of her, journalists noted—and indeed Hitchcock had a stipulation in her contract that throughout the term of her employment with him she was to be presented to the press only as he approved. She was not pleased, but this approach was consistent with the mysterious woman he wanted to create and not the glamorous grandmother easily lifting her skirt. But here, in the realm of the artist-fantasist, any comparison between Hitchcock and von Sternberg ceased, for her new director certainly entertained no romantic notions about himself and Marlene Dietrich, nor was he personally obsessed with her. His concern was the character of Charlotte Inwood in Stage Fright—not Lola Lola or Amy or Frenchy but an extremely sophisticated, astonishingly self-possessed actress of a certain age now doing musical star-turns and able to goad a young admirer into killing for her.
There was no formal introduction to the press (this was deferred to a luncheon at the Savoy several days later); instead, Dietrich was at once whisked off to Elstree Studios for meetings with her director, crew and fellow players. “Everything is fine,” Hitchcock told a reporter two days later with bemused irony. “Miss Dietrich has arranged the whole thing. She has told them exactly where to place the lights and how to photograph her.”
Hitchcock, who suffered no rivals for absolute authority on his productions, was at first considerably dismayed over Dietrich’s presumption, for after studying the dialogue, production designs and scene requirements, she met cinematographer Wilkie Cooper early each morning and simply dictated where she would stand, how she would be lighted and framed, how she or the camera would move. She also designed her own makeup and chose her own costumes from the Dior outfits paid for by the production company. “Marlene was a professional star,” Hitchcock said later, as usual selecting his words with utmost caution but elaborating her considerable influence. “She was also a professional cameraman, art director, editor, costume designer, hairdresser, makeup woman, composer, producer and director.”
Such autonomy—rare in any case—was completely unprecedented on a Hitchcock set. For several d
ays Dietrich’s sovereignty caused raised eyebrows and shocked glances among the crew, and many nervous glances toward the director. But Hitchcock wanted her complete cooperation—indeed, her concrete contributions—for in fact the “Sternbergian image” of Marlene Dietrich was very much Hitchcock’s intention for the role of Charlotte Inwood.
For many years, Stage Fright was regarded as a mediocre work by Hitchcock and a negligible moment in Dietrich’s career. Few judgments about a film could be more shortsighted, for this film—although highly complex, full of demanding verbal nuances and with the multiple layers of a complicated plot—is certainly nothing less than a masterwork. As for Dietrich’s acting, it remains (with Witness for the Prosecution eight years later) one of her two finest late performances, perhaps because it struck so close to her own emotional experience as a performer enduring the shifting fortunes of success. And insofar as it was conceived, directed and released as a kind of encoded tribute to her image, it deserves as careful an assessment as The Blue Angel or Morocco.
STAGE FRIGHT CONCERNS A YOUNG DRAMA STUDENT named Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) who pretends to be a theatrical dresser to the stage star Charlotte Inwood (Dietrich) in order to clear her friend Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) of the charge that he murdered Charlotte’s husband. Eve finally learns, however, that Jonathan (for whom she harbors a secret love) is indeed guilty, and that he lied in saying that Charlotte killed her husband in a jealous rage. In the process of her discovery, Eve also falls in love with Detective Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding), the inspector on the case. Charlotte, as it turns out, had been cruelly abused by her husband and had exploited Jonathan’s lunatic impulses by goading him to murder. In the end, Jonathan is captured and accidentally killed, while Charlotte will stand trial for obstructing justice by not revealing her knowledge of Cooper’s murder of her husband.