by Donald Spoto
feed the legend . . . She thinks out a whole wardrobe in terms of her various appearances. She even sees her social life in terms of star appearances. She goes straight for her needs, bearing in mind what background she will appear against, what other performers she will “top.” Marlene is intelligent, ruthless and . . . knows exactly what she wants.
Indeed, Dietrich could demand a half-dozen fittings if she disapproved a seam in a lining. “First they’ll look at your face,” Spanier cried impatiently at her. “Then they’ll look at your legs. Then maybe they’ll take an interest in the story. If they have time to concentrate on the shadow of a seam in the lining of your dress, the picture must be a flop.”
“You do not understand,” Dietrich replied deliberately. “Everything on the screen is enlarged twenty times. If, in twenty-five years time, my daughter Maria sees the picture and notices the seam all puckered she will say, ‘How could Mother have stood such a thing?’ ” Mother did not, of course, and her requirements often brought Spanier’s sewing staff to the brink of revolution. The directrice then called for a luncheon break, and when Dietrich said gravely that she had nowhere to dine and that she would simply wander about, Spanier insisted she come to her home on the Avenue Marceau. As it happened, that was the birthday of Spanier’s husband, the physician Paul-Emile Seidmann. “Marlene ate all the caviar intended as a birthday treat for my husband, and he was furious. It was an occasion that reflected no credit on either of them.” Notwithstanding this debut as an importunate caviar gourmand, Dietrich was thenceforth frequently the guest of the Seidmanns.
The friendship was not uncomplicated, for from that time on, the two women were ardent lovers whenever Dietrich was in Paris or they could meet in London or New York. But her tactics with Spanier were not always well considered, and betrayed her fundamental jealousy of the Seidmanns’ deep friendship and commitment to each other. When she was required to go on an American tour with Balmain some years later, Ginette—perhaps fearing her husband’s dalliance as well as his loneliness in Paris—asked Dietrich to look after him and to dine occasionally with him. In New York, Ginette received from Dietrich a letter that could not have put her mind at ease:
Darling,
You were so concerned that Paul-Emile would be lonely while you are away, but you must have no fear. I have tried several times to invite him for dinner, but he is never available! He is the toast of Paris, it seems—out every night, God knows where! I asked him to join me and a few friends for a private movie screening—I said he could bring other friends along—but even for that he made some excuse. Imagine! Well, dear Ginette, I hope you are well . . . And to make sure you will receive this letter, I am sending copies of it to every hotel on your itinerary . . .
The end of the Dietrich-Spanier relationship years later was due in fact to Ginette’s independence, which Marlene always resented. Jealous of her friend’s widening fame and international social circle, Dietrich wrote a letter of abject offense, blaming the dissipation of their friendship on Ginette’s indifference.
IN OCTOBER, THE FILMING OF NO HIGHWAY (REleased in America as No Highway in the Sky) began at Denham Studios, north of London. In the part of a film actress named Monica Teasdale, Dietrich was cast opposite James Stewart as an aerophysicist who suspects that the new airplane they travel on is doomed because of a design flaw. Successively, screenwriters R. C. Sherriff, Oscar Millard and Alec Coppel tried to infuse her role with some sparkle, but there were neither songs nor narrative credibility to support them. They did, however, provide dialogue apt for both Monica and Marlene. “My career?” she says plaintively to Stewart while disaster threatens. “A few cans of celluloid in a junk-heap some day. It’s been fun, but that’s about all. I would have stopped working quite a while ago if I could have figured out what to do with myself. I was married three times, but it never came to anything.” Uncomfortable with this kind of nearly autobiographical confession, Dietrich nevertheless managed a performance of casual elegance, her severely chic wardrobe fitted her perfectly—and neither critics nor audiences had anything else to note.
The production schedule left her with little time for social life, but she was so eager to meet Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, that she prevailed on a studio executive to arrange a meeting. She had seen the miraculous effects of the drug on wounded soldiers and was cured by it herself when she had pneumonia during the war tour. And so Fleming and his wife found themselves, that autumn, the dinner guests of Marlene Dietrich, who prepared a tasty goulash and fussed over the Flemings like an efficient Bavarian waitress. Next day, Fleming sent her a section of the original mold from which penicillin had been cultivated; she responded with a signed photograph, a horoscope prepared by Carroll Righter and a dozen eggs (a precious commodity in 1950 England) with accompanying recipes. The acquaintance, flattering to both, continued sporadically whenever Dietrich was in London, up to the time of Fleming’s death in 1955.
She also attended a more formal dinner party on November 6 with Noël Coward, at which Tyrone Power, Montgomery Clift, Gloria Swanson and Clifton Webb observed her affecting indifference to the presence of Michael Wilding, whom someone had thoughtlessly invited. Webb, elegant and puckish, asked her if she intended to be married one day soon. “Married?” she asked wide-eyed. “But I am married!” (Webb and the other guests could not be blamed if by this time Rudolf Sieber was, in their eyes, a forgotten spouse.)
Dietrich might have felt some nervous irritability in Wilding’s presence because of the abrupt end of their affair the previous year, but she steered the discussion to the news that had just broken. Three days earlier, the government of France had proclaimed her a chevalier of the Legion of Honor—a distinction formalized a year later at a Washington ceremony (on October 9, 1951), when Ambassador Henri Bonnet pinned on her a decoration and presented a scroll detailing his country’s gratitude for her wartime service entertaining troops in Africa and France.
That evening in London, she was as usual adept at centering conversation on herself, and next day those who knew her must have been amused (and some women offended) when she generalized to a reporter, “Women talk when they have nothing to say. They chatter about a lot of nonsense that interests no one but themselves. They should keep quiet and not open their mouths just because they like the sound of their voices.” By a curious irony, the very same woman who had broken sexual stereotypes in fashion and conduct and always insisted on her autonomy and independence later denounced the very idea of what was called women’s liberation: “It’s ridiculous. I think a woman wants to be dominated by a man. Men are much cleverer than women. A dominating woman cannot be happy.”
However, she was heard angrily and often in the spring of 1951, when she sued the publishers of the Paris weekly France-Dimanche for an unauthorized series of half-fictitious articles printed under her name and boldly marketed as “My Life”; four years later the litigation was quietly settled in her favor. Her mood did not improve much back in Hollywood that same season, when she went before the camera (for a fee of 110,000) in a disastrous film that would mark yet another clear turning point in her career. Rancho Notorious, as it was called, was her first American film in over three years.
Best known for a series of dark thrillers with ominous implications about society on the brink of anarchy (Dr. Mabuse, Spies, M, Fury), the respected German-American director Fritz Lang had for years wanted to create a film for Dietrich. With writer Daniel Taradash, he fashioned a western morality tale (originally called Chuck-a-Luck, after the game of vertical roulette) about a cowboy who sets out to find the outlaw killer of his fiancée. Dietrich’s role was Altar Keane, a notorious, aging dance-hall queen who provides bandits with a safe house in return for a cut of their profits and who eventually falls in love with the vengeful cowboy. In a deliberate theft from Destry Rides Again (which it mimicked in several aspects), she is struck down by a bullet intended for another.
“Every year is a threat to a woman,” Dietrich says
in character in Rancho Notorious. Bored with herself and everyone around her, Altar should have been the perfect role for her. But the script was a tedious affair, and the collaboration with Lang was disappointing and difficult from the first day that March. “I had the foolish idea,” Lang said years later, “of wanting to give Marlene a new screen image. In the script I’d described the character she played as an ‘elderly dance-hall girl,’ [but] . . . Marlene resented going gracefully into a little older category. She came onto the set looking younger and younger in each scene until finally it was hopeless.”
In addition to this diffusion of her character for the sake of her own appearance, Dietrich constantly corrected Lang, implying that certain techniques would have been exploited otherwise by von Sternberg. Such a tactic would not have pleased any director, and Fritz Lang—a stern, severe taskmaster even in the best circumstances—was not one to be manipulated. “I am Lang, not von Sternberg,” he told her bluntly, adding later that the atmosphere all through production was “very, very disagreeable . . . By the end of the picture, [Dietrich and I] didn’t speak to each other any more.”
As it happened, both director and star were right. The western was not an apt genre for Lang, the script was monumentally ungripping, the exterior/interior sets and painted backdrops for the western desert looked just plain silly, and Dietrich’s role made little sense in her reglamorized appearance. Like the songs she was given, Dietrich’s performance was listless and detached, and as she saw the daily rushes she became more and more depressed. As in The Garden of Allah and Kismet, so now in her third Technicolor film: Dietrich was not flattered by color film, nor was her appearance improved by cosmeticized youthfulness; to make matters worse, there was no budget for substantial laboratory color correction. Never before had Dietrich so bitterly resented, and with good reason, her own image onscreen.
At the same time—perhaps partly driven by the disappointment of Rancho Notorious—she took special pains over her appearance when asked to present the Oscar for best foreign film at the Academy Awards, held March 29 at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Although this annual rite of spring was not yet televised, she was told there would be 2,800 people in the auditorium and so, weeks before, she swung into action.
First, Dietrich learned that the stage sets for the show would be red, white and blue. Then she made dozens of telephone calls to agents, producers, columnists and friends, who collectively informed her that most of the women giving and receiving prizes would dress according to the current fashion—most of them in white or pastel formal gowns, some with beads and sequins, others with vast bouffant skirts. Weeks before her appearance, therefore, Dietrich decided on something radically different. She would appear with the plainest makeup and without jewelry, wearing a simple but dramatic Christian Dior black sheath, unadorned and tight from neck to toe. There would be one touch, however: a high slit up the side of the dress. “Watch Mama make the front page of every newspaper in town,” she had said when about to meet the press, her ankle taped after the accident during The Lady Is Willing. Now, this provocative black dress would have the same publicity effect. (Dior of course needed to know which side of the sheath was to be cut open, but Dietrich could not reply until she learned from which side of the stage she would enter.)
According to her publicist Russell Birdwell, Dietrich prepared for the Academy Awards ceremony (during which she was to present an Oscar) just as she prepared for a dramatic entrance to a restaurant on any ordinary evening. She checked the Pantages lighting configuration on the afternoon of March 29, rehearsed her walk and, when introduced that evening, slithered across the stage, her famous legs revealed to the audience peek-a-boo style with every calculated step. As Variety’s headline story reported next day, “GRANDMA DIETRICH STEALS SHOW: She gave every woman there a lift by her startling denial of the fifties . . . She sauntered out with her sheath skirt slit to one knee and held 2,800 people in her instep.”
Similarly, the following winter she attended the pre-Broadway tryout of Christopher Fry’s play Venus Observed in Philadelphia, making her entrance in a simple black suit seconds before the house lights dimmed. Again, the audience was stunned, and then there was clamorous applause. By the sheer force of her personality and never promoting her wardrobe above herself, Dietrich capitalized on her legend and italicized it by a carefully studied presentation. She also used to her advantage every means of publicity—like the press luncheon she quietly suggested to honor the twenty-first anniversary of her arrival in America. The Colonial Room of the Ambassador Hotel was jammed with reporters and photographers on May 4, film clips were shown, Maria entered with her mother, and after lunch Dietrich carved an enormous cake. Except for finely rendered portraits in very few films, there had been nothing remarkable in her career for years, and so Dietrich turned herself into the object of critical acclaim, creating the image that art did not. She became, in other words, her own self-generated product.
MARIA RIVA, MEANWHILE, HAD SLIMMED TO A STARlet’s weight and, while her husband worked and taught scenic design at Fordham University, she was working under the terms of a contract with CBS-TV. During the so-called Golden Age of Television (generally the decade beginning about 1949), Maria had the leading role in over a dozen live television plays and was one of three performers seen most often (the others were Charlton Heston and Mary Sinclair). For much of the second half of 1951, Dietrich shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, furnishing a four-room apartment she took at 993 Park Avenue and frequently watching Maria at work at the studio. When completed, her living room had bookshelves lined with titles by William James, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Hemingway, and the walls were adorned with original art by Cézanne, Delacroix, Utrillo and Corot. Also strategically positioned were personally inscribed photographs of General Patton, Jean Cocteau, Alexander Fleming, Maria Callas, Noël Coward, Hemingway and others.
During this time, Dietrich also successfully pursued the thirty-year-old actor Yul Brynner, then achieving spectacular fame on Broadway in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical The King and I. His sexual relationship with Dietrich indicates how successfully she managed both her own obsession with youth and the power of her legendary status.
This affair was certainly not a case of Dietrich landing an innocent in the net of her own wiles. Brynner, born in Vladivostok, had created a fanciful autobiography and, although married at the time to the actress Virginia Gilmore, was as much a libertine as Dietrich. Throughout the 1950s they met irregularly in New York, finding one another’s company physically gratifying and intellectually stimulating. Brynner was an impressive autodidact fluent in several languages, and together they spoke French, wandered into Manhattan art galleries and antiquarian bookshops, discussed the post-Impressionists and read the classics aloud to one another. Often seen publicly with Brynner, Dietrich was also invited to late suppers with him. He encouraged her return to the stage, and that year it was announced that she would appear with him in Jacques Deval’s musical play Samarkand, a project she soon abandoned, still fearing the acting demands of nightly stage performance.
With her career now stalled, Dietrich foresaw the possible loss of her own celebrity, and neatly employed her association with Brynner to keep herself before the press; because their relationship was controversial, it could only augment her status as the ultimately unpredictable and romantic iconoclast. She would indeed be all things to as many men as possible, and simultaneously a challenge, a threat and a rebuttal to the women of her day. Advancing by her appearance and appeal the myth that women do not (indeed, must not) age, she publicly challenged the taboo of the older woman with a younger man.
Very much a person of her time, she had been raised and confirmed in the cultural presumptions that women were essentially inferior to men. As witness of this, she had for years been scornful of what she called the feminine mind and will and had even expressed regret that she had not been born a man—a fact she had unconsciously tried to counter by proxy
during her USO tours. (“I admire men’s minds,” she insisted throughout her life. “They are not like women. They think things through.”) But, as always, herein lies a central contradiction in Dietrich’s character, for at the same time she needed to demonstrate her own superiority to men: thus her lifelong special attraction to the morose, brooding, weak or confused man (or one simply sick with a cold) who was—or who she thought was—in need of a gently controlling take-over.
Together, according to Brynner’s son, “they could almost overlook the fact that Marlene was twenty years older; at least, Marlene could. She was also the most determined, passionate and possessive lover he had ever known, not in the least concerned about discretion.” Just so did Dietrich dally with Frank Sinatra, with whom she had an occasional, stormy affair for two years beginning in 1955. Toward its conclusion, she noted in her diary (on September 4, 1957) that they spent an hour and a half together in bed, while she soothed his fears that he had been sexually out of practice. “But everything was fine,” she concluded—although not, perhaps, in the honesty of one or the other of them.
In addition, Dietrich commandeered friends and relatives in catering to him. Among these were Rudi and Tamara, who were also in New York that year, staying several months at a hotel while Tamara consulted neurologists and psychologists for a worsening but still undefined nervous condition (for which Dietrich paid the bills). Stefan Lorant, whose friendship with Dietrich had resumed when he, too, relocated to Manhattan after the war, recalled several occasions when she blithely rang Tamara and sent her—as if she were a servant—on a mission to a local delicatessen for a particular kind of bagel favored by Brynner.