by Donald Spoto
From the beginning of the project (based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson), Hitchcock, his wife Alma Reville (always closely involved in story construction) and screenwriter Whitfield Cook had Dietrich in mind for the story’s most colorful character. Hitchcock added that “the aspect that intrigued me is that it was a story about the theater.” The structure of the finished film everywhere supports that. The asbestos safety curtain of an English theater slowly rises under the credits, revealing not a stage set but real-life London in full motion; when the curtain is fully raised, the action of the story begins.
Immediately, the distinctions between appearance and reality, between theater life and street life, begin to blur. Everything that follows is an interconnected series of ruses, costumes, lies and artifices, and everyone in the story plays a variety of real-life roles (a recurring Hitchcockian motif since his 1930 talkie Murder!). As in the director’s darker romances, appearances and identities slip and slide. Nothing is certain in the world of disguises, performances, matinées and theatrical garden parties. And at the center of the swirling patterns of deception is Dietrich—abused and abuser, victim and victimizer. “When I give all my love and devotion and receive only treachery and hatred,” she says in a final line added by herself with Hitchcock’s approval, “it’s as if my own mother had slapped me in the face.” The event in her mind may have been her mother’s slap when, in adolescence, Marlene had refused to dance with a boy she did not like. As for the “treachery and hatred” (ostensibly referring to Charlotte’s husband), this was always, for Dietrich, associated with the end of any love affair.
The opening scene of flight from the police (in Wyman’s open roadster) establishes the film’s tripartite structure, a series of ever slower journeys until the finale. In this regard, the film is built like a geared rallentando, a gradual slowdown from that first car chase, to the midpoint of the more leisurely ride in a taxi (the love scene between Wyman and Wilding), to the final immobilization of Eve and Jonathan in the unused eighteenth-century stage-prop carriage. Within this framework, Wyman, a young novice actress in the story, is disabused of her belief that the theater is a glamorous life and—precisely by her success at playing multiple roles offstage—endangers herself and her family before confronting the shifting and specious nature of her own romantic illusions about art and men. And Dietrich, as the singing actress, stands at the center of that theme—virtually, as Hitchcock insisted, playing herself.
Aptly, at the end Wyman must go under the stage, to confront a more paralyzing fear than one could know onstage in a role. And there beneath the boards she invents an ingenious acting ploy whereby she disarms a pathological killer and saves herself. Real stage fright, in other words, is something deeper than mere onstage panic, demanding an improvised courage. Thus the melodramatic play Wyman is first seen rehearsing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (and in which she seems to be egregiously incompetent indeed) at last becomes a “thriller” from which she must extricate herself by a superlative performance.
Besides Wyman, Dietrich and her demented lover are professional performers, and everyone in the story plays roles. “You’re an actress. You’re playing a part. No nerves when you’re on,” Todd tells Dietrich (although this exchange occurs in his mendacious flashback), just after she begs him to “draw the curtains, Johnny!” The scene points forward to the final horrific moment, when a stagehand is asked to “lower the iron curtain,” effectively cutting off Todd’s escape (and by implication his head). But Wyman’s witty father (Alistair Sim) is also a role-player. “You’re just dying to get into a part in this, and you know you are,” Wyman tells him.
“A part in this melodramatic play, you mean,” he replies, in the triumphant comic scene in his cottage. “That’s the way you’re treating it, Eve—as if it were a play you were acting in at the Academy. Everything seems a fine acting role when you’re stagestruck, doesn’t it, my dear? Here you have a plot, an interesting cast, even a costume [a blood-soaked dress]. Unfortunately, Eve, in this real and earnest life we must face the situation in all its bearings . . . [or else] you’ll spend a few years in Holloway prison, meditating on the folly of transmuting melodrama into real life.”
Wyman/Eve, we should note, is different things to different people. To Cooper she is a patient and helpful friend whose love for him he conveniently exploits, while to her father she is an apprentice actress: “You’re my audience, Father! I wish you’d give me a little applause now and then”—which he later does, after she unmasks Charlotte. To Detective Wilfred Smith, Eve is an innocent actress, to Charlotte’s regular maid Nellie Goode (Kay Walsh), she is a newspaper reporter eager to disguise herself to gain access to Charlotte. And to Charlotte she is Nellie’s cousin Doris—whose name Charlotte simply cannot remember (she calls her Phyllis, Mavis and Elsie).
But Dietrich’s Charlotte is a performer on a deeper level still; her widowhood, especially, becomes her most pointed attempt at self-glamorizing. (“Couldn’t we work in a little color?” she asks about the funereal black dress. “Or let it plunge just a little in front?”) And she orders others about, directs them (Eve especially) in their forms of address, their tones of voice and their wardrobes. Strangers and police inspectors are addressed as “darling.” Everything, in other words, is done for effect.
Quite early, we are told (but tend to reject) the truth about Jonathan—that he is a mad killer; this Charlotte tells the police and Eve overhears. Charlotte then tries to extricate herself from involvement in the crime, but what she says of her younger lover Cooper is absolutely true (and disbelieved by the romantic Eve):
I suppose I shouldn’t have seen him as often as I did, but I didn’t realize how madly infatuated he was with me. I just didn’t realize. You’ll never know how much I blame myself for all this. When my husband came back from New York last week and I told Johnny I couldn’t see him, he kept on phoning me. He wouldn’t let me alone. Oh, maybe if I’d agreed to see him he wouldn’t have done this dreadful thing.
Much of her dialogue, it must be stressed, was both expanded and fine-tuned by Dietrich herself, with Hitchcock’s approval.
Dietrich’s focussed rendition of the Cole Porter song “The Laziest Gal in Town” is the film’s clearest tip-off to the resolution of the plot: “It’s not that I shouldn’t, it’s not that I wouldn’t, and you know it’s not that I couldn’t—it’s simply because I’m the laziest gal in town,” she sings in a triumphant proclamation with multiple meanings. Our first thought about the lyrics is the obvious sexual reference, but later we realize they are also a clue to what she did with her young lover, exploiting his fanatical devotion to the extent that he killed her husband. She was just too lazy to do it herself. (Her rendition of “La Vie en Rose,” on the other hand, was simply her appropriation of Piaf’s signature for herself.)
Wyman’s refusal to believe the guilt of the man she loves (despite overwhelming evidence) is highlighted when her affections begin to shift from Todd to Wilding, and this happens when Todd embraces her. Convinced of (what she thinks is) the ineradicable bond between Todd and Dietrich, she gazes at the piano and we (with her, from her viewpoint) remember the romantic piano melody played by Wilfred. It is additionally important, therefore, that this sequence is at once followed by Wyman’s taxi ride with Wilding, accompanied by the same music; this is one of the most funny-tender love scenes in the Hitchcock canon. This ride is also psychologically acute, although audiences decades later find it a little arch and coy. Wilfred and Eve are more interested in one another than in the logic of their own remarks, and finally they are so locked in the collusion of their romantic gaze that their words meld and become senseless interphrases. Hitchcock is, at this point, one up on the sophisticates, for this is the gentlest puncture of the romantic fallacy. It is the director’s quiet, compassionate little joke, a grace note to the richness of this undeservedly neglected comic masterpiece.
On its most serious level, Stage Fright is a typically Hitchcockian reflection on roma
ntic illusion, with the popular ikon of Marlene Dietrich at the center—and to this she herself made important contributions as the screenplay was polished even during shooting. Central to the picture’s richness is her presence, her complete blending into the role as both star-image and mysterious mover of events, for finally Stage Fright is about the tragic wisdom of the older performer (Charlotte/Dietrich), the concomitant cynicism, the superior experience and the ability to exploit her image to her own best advantage. Dietrich has not a false moment in this picture. Breathless with anxiety and with a cunning invented from moment to moment, Charlotte Inwood was a kind of totem of Dietrich’s dark side, encapsulating the entire range of her image. She suggested her frantic first words—“Johnny, you do love me, don’t you? Say that you love me!”—and we hear her voice before we see her (a great tease, Dietrich thought).
BLURRING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ART AND LIFE again, Dietrich took a younger lover (not Richard Todd) quite soon after filming began, just as in Stage Fright itself. Michael Wilding—handsome, gentle, sophisticated and artistic—was eleven years her junior and had scarcely been introduced to her when she offered herself to him, as if the way for her to feel young was to prove to herself that she could keep a young man. “I am too old for you,” she said bluntly. Gallantly, Wilding tried to recall an appropriate response from lines in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and when he faltered, Dietrich interrupted: “Why not just settle for kissing me?”
“From that moment,” according to Wilding, “we became inseparable. In fact she would not move a step without me. She insisted that I accompany her everywhere, and she took as much interest in my appearance as she did in her own.” As Hitchcock and members of his crew remembered, the lovemaking was not always discreet, sometimes conducted even in their dressing rooms on the soundstage. “But close as we became,” Wilding added, “there was an unfathomable quality about Marlene, a part of her that remained aloof. Sadly, our relationship came to an abrupt end.” Dietrich was again surprised at the temerity of an ex-lover when Wilding’s engagement to Elizabeth Taylor was announced a few years later: “What’s Liz Taylor got that I haven’t got?” she asked a friend, who added that the news made her “very sad.” As she had said, “When I devote myself to someone, no one can undo it”—not even, she thought, the former beloved.*
* Over the next two decades, Dietrich would continue her regular offer to have Carroll Righter draw up her colleagues’ astrological charts. Typical of many such attestations was that of Richard Todd (who appeared in her next film, Stage Fright): “When she heard that I was engaged to be married, she asked me for details of my birth date and also Kitty’s, saying she would send for a horoscope for us. It was just as well I did not share her obsession, because when the horoscope reached us, it was a terrible one, forecasting no good at all for Kitty and me.”
* At precisely this time, Dietrich’s friendship with Ernest Hemingway was perhaps her great support. When she wrote to him of her romantic solitude he replied, on July 13, 1950, that after all they were two of the most forlorn people in the world; that he loved her not as a screen goddess but as a friend—the woman he first knew in a military uniform now discarded, when she reeked of all the smells of war. The exchange of letters—none of them anything like passionate communiqués—continued for years, most of them addressing one or another of Dietrich’s problems with lovers. On August 12, 1952, for example (in response to her complaints about problems with her lover Yul Brynner), Hemingway invited her to come to his home in Cuba. The Dietrich-Hemingway letters are full of news, mutual affection, recipes, memories and matey advice; they remain crucial evidence that the two were indeed not lovers.
14: 1949–1953
FROM THE BEGINNING OF HER CAREER IN AMERica, Marlene Dietrich depended on the movies to present her as an embodiment of both feminine allure and subtly masculine aggressiveness. Never cast as a blushing ingenue or a shy, virginal rose, there was, on the contrary, something tarnished and tested about the strong characters she represented; she was the shrewd, resourceful, cynical woman of the world. As for her beauty, Dietrich up to her midthirties had been meticulously photographed and always rendered as someone provocative but enigmatic, desirable but mysterious—even remote and implacable. And always, it was implied, uniquely androgynous.
But from 1939, beginning with the release of Destry Rides Again, both public familiarity and the shift in photographic styles had conspired to present her as earthier, more accessible, even gently satiric of her previous image. Then, when her film career stagnated dangerously in the early 1940s, she assumed a wartime role as a kind of Joan of Arc in travelling cabaret—a self-designed and self-maintained persona that effectively gave her some of the best publicity of her life and helped to clarify her future plans as a solo performer.
In 1949, at forty-eight, Dietrich found herself in the common situation of many middle-aged actresses, too old for leading romantic roles and too young for eccentric character parts. This situation clashed dramatically with what had become almost a life’s work—the carefully cultivated semblance of agelessness. No wonder, then, that she simultaneously deplored her designation as “the world’s most glamorous grandmother” and often and insistently rewrote history to conform to the desired illusion. “I had my daughter when I was seventeen,” she said, altering the truth by six years; and speaking of Maria, who had her first child at twenty-three, she added “and my daughter waited until she was eighteen to marry and have a child. Does that make me ancient?” No, but it did not earn her points as a truth-teller. There were, after all, alternatives to claiming either perpetual youth or premature decline; one could reply (taking a cue from Auntie Mame) that there was a reality between forty and death.
Dietrich continued to require the endorsement of work as well as its financial rewards, but after Alfred Hitchcock completed filming Stage Fright in late summer 1949, she was again without immediate employment prospects, as she had been several times in the previous dozen years. She lingered for about a month in London, shopping, socializing with Noël Coward and attending the theater, and then she went to New York, where Maria was pregnant with her second child. As in everything else, however, Dietrich was not of the garden variety in her roles as mother, grandmother and mother-in-law. She lived luxuriously at the Plaza Hotel, spent considerable sums on restaurants, wardrobe, cosmetics and cash gifts to Rudi, Tamara and a few friends, and altogether affected the style of a fabulously wealthy star. Her financial status, too, was part of the illusion. Dietrich was in fact constantly audited by tax authorities, for she repeatedly deducted her enormous wardrobe bills as professional expenses. She was also strained by her unshakable belief that if she were contracted for a salary of 200,000 she had 200,000 to spend.
On November 16, over Perrier-Jouët brut champagne and a salver of caviar with Ernest Hemingway at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, she described her life in Manhattan that season. “I’m the baby-sitter,” she said of a typical day at her daughter’s Third Avenue flat.
As soon as they leave the house, I go around and look in all the corners and straighten the drawers and clean up. I can’t stand a house that isn’t neat and clean. I go around in all the corners with towels I bring with me from the Plaza, and I clean up the whole house. Then . . . I take the dirty towels and some of the baby’s things that need washing, and, with my bundle over my shoulder, I go out and get a taxi, and the driver, he thinks I am this old washerwoman from Third Avenue, and he takes me in the taxi and talks to me with sympathy, so I am afraid to let him take me to the Plaza. I get out a block away from the Plaza and I walk home with my bundle and I wash the baby’s things, and then I go to sleep.
With Dietrich that evening, Ernest and Mary Hemingway also entertained (among others) his publisher Charles Scribner, Sr., athlete George Brown and writer A. E. Hotchner, who recalled that Marlene dominated the conversation. When she was not speaking of herself, her USO work or her plans to make some new recordings, she proselytized on behalf of Carroll
Righter. Journalist Lillian Ross was also present, taking notes for an extended profile of Hemingway that would later appear in The New Yorker.
“Papa, you look wonderful,” Dietrich said slowly when Hemingway greeted her.
“I sure missed you, daughter,” Hemingway replied, escorting her to the other guests.
Wearing a mink coat, Dietrich sighed loudly, handed the coat to Mary, sighed again, and fell languorously into an overstuffed chair. She took from her purse photographs of her grandson and passed them around, saying magnificently, “Everything you do, you do for the sake of the children”—a sentiment Hemingway boozily echoed as he refilled her glass with champagne. “Thank you, Papa,” Dietrich said, sighing again.
“During the war,” she continued, shifting gears, “everybody was the way people should be all the time. Not mean and afraid but good to each other. It was different in the war. People were not so selfish and they helped each other.” As with everything else in her life, she had already begun the process of glamorizing the past.
JOHN PETER RIVA, MARIA’S SECOND CHILD, WAS born in the spring of 1950, and until late that summer the world’s most glamorous grandmother remained in Manhattan, where she was occasionally seen pushing a baby carriage in Central Park. An offer to appear in another British film then arrived, and that September she went to Paris for wardrobe fittings. Ginette Spanier, directrice of Pierre Balmain, recalled Dietrich’s arrival and her hesitation about approving a particular mink cape. “She looked at me,” according to Spanier, “and, still without a smile or a ‘Good morning,’ said, ‘I find it rather poor.’ ” The longest and most expensive mink stole was then added—“and, still without a smile, she said, ‘I’ll have that.’ ” She knew exactly which outfit would (in Spanier’s words)