by Donald Spoto
THE YEAR 1952 BEGAN WITH A NEW ANGLE TO HER career. On Sunday evening, January 6, at nine-fifteen, after several months of negotiations with the American Broadcasting Company affiliate in New York, Dietrich announced the premiere of her own radio show, Café Istanbul. With Dietrich playing the manager of a Turkish haunt for spies and secret agents, the half-hour dramatic series had complicated plots frequently interspersed by her singing or humming a few measures of French, German and English songs associated, of course, with herself—like the name she chose for her character, Mademoiselle Madou, after her surrogate in Remarque’s Arch of Triumph. (The series was written by Murray Burnett, coauthor of “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” the basis for the film Casablanca.)
The weekly recorded series did not materialize easily, as producer Leonard Blair recalled years later. Although the idea for a Dietrich program originated when (through her agents) she contacted radio executives, she affected a certain indifference when Blair was sent to their first meeting. “Her movement and her demeanor were studied, almost calculated. In fact, she was so sparing in her enthusiasm that it wasn’t at all clear she would commit to the series.”
Dietrich hosted this initial conference and the subsequent story meetings at her apartment, where she insisted on cooking breakfast for Blair. Moving from refrigerator to mixing bowl to frying pan, she asked detailed questions about her character, the story line, music, sound effects, supporting roles and setting. “There was no bright green light from Dietrich; we moved step by cautious step, but with each weekly serving of scrambled eggs I could see the slow cementing of her confidence. If I was well prepared and in full command, she was polite and responsive. But if she detected an ill-considered idea or the slightest lack of preparation—or simply idle flattery—she could be pointedly tart.” Self-protective and apprehensive about the series, Dietrich was virtually a one-woman creative enterprise, redrafting scripts, coaching the actors, supervising the music and collaborating on every aspect of production (except in the control booth, from which union rules barred her). The program was heard successfully for two thirteen-week seasons.
After recording several shows in advance, Dietrich departed New York in February for a brief publicity tour on behalf of the opening of Rancho Notorious, stopping first with her co-star Mel Ferrer at a Chicago movie theater. Not content merely to say a few polite words at the launching of a film she detested, Dietrich had arranged a surprise for the moviegoers and the house manager. She stepped onto the darkened stage and, dressed in a full-skirted, strapless gown, sang “Falling in Love Again.” The audience went wild, whistling and cheering as she returned moments later, one spotlight illuminating her bare legs and black bodice as she offered three more songs. At the conclusion, she gathered up bouquets of roses, bowed humbly and slowly departed. It was her first theatrical solo in America—and in fact became the test run for a major one-woman show she was then considering.
Continuing her publicity tour for the film in Los Angeles, Dietrich learned that the actor Kirk Douglas was ill with pneumonia after the dangerous river scenes of his recent film The Big Sky. Although she had met him only once (through their mutual friend Billy Wilder), Dietrich immediately swept down on Douglas, offering (as he later said), “soup [and] affectionate sex. But that was less than the mothering, the closeness. Marlene is an unusual person. She seemed to love you much more if you were not well. When you became strong and healthy, she loved you less.” The liaison was as brief as Douglas’s illness, which kept him bedridden only a few weeks that spring; their later meetings were infrequent, cordial and much less intimate.
“She was always particularly keen on having men in her life who were sick,” confirmed Billy Wilder, with whom Dietrich’s relationship was strictly platonic. “This was the part of her that was wife, mother, Hausfrau. And during her entire life I never knew her to have an affair with a rich man. She would neither ask for nor accept any material compensation.”
Dietrich could not have lingered in California in any case, since her radio show required her presence in New York, and she had also arranged with Mitch Miller (director of popular music for Columbia Records) to revive her recording career. In July, she spent several days in a studio on East Thirtieth Street, singing and resinging “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Lili Marlene,” “Mean to Me” and a half-dozen others—each of them sounding like the complaints of a benighted lover, including a German rendition of “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” She also cut a novelty record with Rosemary Clooney (one of the most popular singers of the 1950s), whom she advised, “I know you’re working, Rosie, but you really should comb your hair!”
Preparing diligently for an important shift in her career—to become the solo star of her own nightclub act—Marlene Dietrich, true to character, proceeded systematically. First she had to assure the maintenance of a positive image nationwide, and to that end she convinced a friend at Life magazine to schedule a lead story on her enduring fame and endearing friendships. The article, by Winthrop Sargeant, ran on August 18, with Marlene and Maria on the cover.
But Dietrich also knew she required more than publicity: she needed a serious education in all the details and mechanics of a solo stage performance if, in her fifties, this new venture were to succeed. She began by attending Judy Garland’s rehearsals for her one-woman show, and then her performance at the Palace Theater on October 16—after which she heaped praise on Garland before prying crucial information from her. Several weeks later, Dietrich arranged to be invited to a dinner party for Garland at the Waldorf Towers suite of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. To this soirée she brought several of her own phonograph recordings from live performances during the war, corralling everyone to hear each number, pointing out the long and gratifying applause for each song. (“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could sing, too?” she later wrote across a photo of herself in the Jean Louis gown.)
The opening night of the Ringling Brothers–Barnum & Bailey Circus in April 1953 at New York’s Madison Square Garden was a charity benefit. A number of stars had agreed to appear, and it was Maria’s idea that her mother’s fervor for publicity would be well served by her presence, too. But one among many was not Dietrich’s goal, and so she managed to land the role of mistress of ceremonies. Of the outfit she designed to show off her legs, she said, “I invented the short pants later known as ‘hot pants.’ I looked wonderful, with my boots and my whip.” And thus attired as a combination of Lola Lola and a Berlin dominatrix, she stepped out with only a single spotlight on her red coat, diamond studs, shining boots and silk hat rakishly tipped. “Hel-loooo,” she purred into a microphone. “Are you having any fun?” While Dynamite, billed as the only horse in the world able to gallop backwards, did so, thousands of spectators and thirty photographers concentrated solely on the lure of Marlene Dietrich.
Many other actresses, given so many disappointing professional developments, would—voluntarily or not—have retired. Not so Dietrich. That night at Madison Square Garden, the vagaries of the last sixteen years were forgotten—that she had appeared in only two or three memorable films, made but a short list of recordings and aged to over fifty without yet demonstrating any great gift for singing or acting, much less any newly discovered talent. Yet the third (and, as it happened, the longest) resurgence of a long career had now begun, and it owed only to the skillful marketing of herself as an ikon of perpetual glamour and feminine allure.
Actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Katharine Hepburn sustained long careers by abandoning claims to youth and beauty and developing new facets for themselves within a wide range of roles for mature women. Marlene Dietrich, however, had to rely only on a cultivated sex appeal that was provocative but never coarse, slightly naughty but never sordid. She pleased men and women in her audience by incarnating in her roles and expressing in her songs a cynicism without acrimony—by representing the ordinary adult experience of failed romance, lost love, diminished expectations. She represented what she was—the eternal lo
ver, tenacious, proud, destined for the cycles of fierce romance and eventual disappointment, hovering too closely, nurturing too much, rejected but unbitter, ever eager for restoration to favor. But most of all, she simply endured, and all the world loves a survivor.
15: 1953–1956
“KLONDIKE IN THE DESERT,” A REPORTER CALLED Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1953. That year, seven million tourists flocked to its legal gambling tables, and a major expansion of the city’s many hotels and resorts was in progress. At the Desert Inn, the Flamingo, the Sahara and the Sands, guests passed through garish foyers to reach vast casinos filled with the cries of croupiers, the endless chiming of slot machines, the snap of cards and the clatter of chips.
In the restaurant-nightclub spaces of these hotels, cabaret performers could earn astonishing salaries, although they often had to compete with animals, circus and novelty acts and a distracted audience. “A wayfarer arriving in Las Vegas during any given week has a wider choice of top banana talent than the average New Yorker,” reported the New York Times that year. But some artists agreed with Lena Horne that “the audience is a captive one, but the thing that has captured them is the gambling. They really only come to see you in order to take a rest from the crap tables.” Nevertheless, a diverse roster of celebrities was regularly billed—Jimmy Durante, Bert Lahr, Georgia Gibbs, Ray Bolger, Ezio Pinza, Jeanette MacDonald, all of them lured by fees of 20,000 a week for less than an hour’s work nightly. Some performers were contracted to movie producers or television networks, but in a town controlled by organized crime, all manner of means were found to secure the services of a big name.
Marlene Dietrich, free of studio interference, needed no doubtful company for permission to work here. Arriving in Las Vegas in 1953 to negotiate for her debut that December, she surveyed the sound and lighting facilities, gauged the effects of this position and that gesture, assessed the sightlines and inspected the dressing rooms. She also listened to other performers—among them the twenty-five-year-old singer Eddie Fisher. A smooth tenor with a shy personality, he was carefully piloted by managers and billed as one of America’s most adorable teenage heartthrobs. Fisher’s boyish charm also made him the darling of the grandparents, and so for agents and record producers he was that rare find, a singer popular with both audiences.
Dietrich invited Fisher to her table after his performance one night and explained her plans, but he thought of her as an actress, not a nightclub star. “Eddie,” she replied, “I was singing in cabarets before you were born.” That age difference (twenty-seven years) apparently made no difference to their reunion a few weeks later in Dietrich’s New York apartment, to which she invited him for a home-cooked supper. Greeting Fisher in a revealing, low-cut beige gown, she served a candlelit meal and, as he recalled years later, completely took charge of the situation: “I was both excited and a little scared. But Marlene knew how to make me feel like a man. The ceiling of her bedroom was mirrored.”
Predictably, the affair (conducted mostly in New York during the summer and autumn of 1953) was intense but brief. On the one hand, it was flattering to an eager young singer from Philadelphia who appreciated every personal, social and professional endorsement offered by this “remarkable woman who knew how to enjoy life, the most stimulating woman I had ever met.” But as in the case of Michael Wilding, Fisher was really more important to Dietrich than she to him. Although the charms of a handsome young lover were certainly not to be disregarded, she was, as usual, attracted by the situation of nurturing as much as by sex. More vital still, she needed to know that she was attractive to and could please a new generation of admirers. What she longed for in public—the attention and love of thousands—required a private supplement. Once again, a transitory affair signalled her need to be worshipped rather than loved, although by the paradox often engendered by sex, it was perhaps simultaneously a plea for affection. But if, as she always contended, work was her cardinal value, she did not (at least past the age of forty) select lovers who would threaten that primacy; each affair had within it the seeds of its own demise.
FOR THREE WEEKS BEGINNING DECEMBER 16, 1953, Marlene Dietrich sang a half-dozen songs each night at the Sahara in Las Vegas; for this she was paid 90,000, which again made her the highest-paid entertainer in America (and very likely in the world). Half-singing, half-speaking with a strategic mutter, a purr, a wink and a flutter of her half-closed eyelids, she was more a diseuse—a husky, gauzy lady baritone blithely unconcerned for accuracy of tone yet somehow communicating the sly, world-weary sagacity of what the French call une femme d’un certain âge. Her audience clapped, whistled, stomped the floor and banged their tables after she sang “The Boys in the Back Room,” “Falling in Love Again,” “Lili Marlene,” “The Laziest Gal in Town,” “Johnny” and “La Vie en Rose,” and she closed her thirty-minute set in her scanty ringmaster’s outfit from the circus; she was, after all, the owner of legendary legs. In a way, she had come full circle, revising for modern audiences certain key aspects of earlier Berlin entertainments—and always teasing her audiences, inviting them yet maintaining a cool distance.
But it was not Marlene Dietrich’s talent as a vocal artist that was earning her headlines, feature photographs and the greatest press coverage of her career thus far. In fact, her singing was ignored by the critics; her success was in what she wore and how she was lighted—in other words it was all style. “Her voice deficiencies were neatly offset by her rather radical costume,” read a typical press report, “the most revealing gown” anyone could recall on an entertaining figure anywhere.
“My outward appearance was extremely important, since I had no illusions about my voice,” Dietrich later admitted. For that reason, she had a few Las Vegas entrepreneurs pressure the reluctant Harry Cohn, chief executive at Columbia Studios, to loan her his chief wardrobe designer, Jean Louis.* He had designed a seductive trompe l’oeil costume for Rita Hayworth’s film Salome which consisted of a thickly padded, girdlelike “living foundation” covered with a body stocking of flesh-colored chiffon. This was then overlaid with beads to hide the seams, and with the right lighting and camera angles Hayworth upset the censors. Dietrich had seen the film the previous spring and had been impressed. Jean Louis then drew up the basic blueprint for Dietrich—furs, spangles and diamonds, she insisted—and then, all during the autumn, fifteen seamstresses worked on three versions of the gown, sewing and resewing the sequins, glass brilliants, six hundred rhinestones and yards of chiffon, tearing and refashioning according to Dietrich’s alterations. According to Jean Louis, Dietrich had “almost a mania for everything to be just right. She flew to Hollywood from New York maybe six times until everything was perfect. And then she would move one more bead the size of a pinhead—just an eighth of an inch to the right or the left and back again until she was satisfied. I have never seen such patience—and such tenacity to get just the effect she wanted!”
The notorious dress (which appeared in magazines and newspapers internationally) cost just over 6,000 and weighed about fourteen pounds. It was a masterpiece of the couturier’s artifice, creating the illusion that—after Dietrich tossed aside her white fox stole—there was a firm and youthful body, nude from neck to waist but for a few scattered sequins, rhinestones and pearls. “Jean Louis’s creations metamorphosed me into a perfect, ethereal being,” Dietrich said, “the most seductive there was.” Not even patrons in the first row could tell she was tightly enveloped in astutely dyed layers of rubber foundation covered with a body-stocking and then chiffon. “Well,” Dietrich sighed to a journalist, “this is Las Vegas. If not here, then where?”
Her act—in the Sahara’s Congo Room—was a model of Teutonic detail, from her coiffure to the position of a light, from the tempo of each song to the few moments of gesture. Her recent experiences in film (with Fritz Lang especially) had been so dreadful that she had taken the idea of her wartime one-woman show a decade earlier and raised it to a precise art. At last she needed no one but herself and her audien
ce. “Technique and control,” she said, “they are all that matter. In every single bar of my music, every single light that hits me—I know it and control it. In films, [there are] too many people, too many intangibles . . . [but in my solo act] nobody cuts or dubs or edits me afterwards.”*
Several nights, from one to four in the morning, Dietrich stood and sat for still photographs with John Engstead, who rushed them to a laboratory and then raced back to Dietrich with the proofs for her to approve at seven o’clock. She slept only after she had supervised every detail and Engstead and his assistant had departed for Los Angeles to do the retouching and the final printing, so that her publicist would have copies for the press that afternoon. Dietrich wanted every detail correct, Engstead recalled, and every detail was elaborated in her contract with him as it had been with her night-club hosts. According to Engstead, she loved her own face more than any other; she was her own creation for an audience, and she required that he help her maintain that creation. George Hurrell, who also photographed Dietrich that year, remembered that she returned a number of shots with multiple marks indicating which facial lines were to be removed by the retoucher. “You don’t take pictures like you did fifteen years ago, George,” she said sadly. “But Marlene,” Hurrell replied with consummate diplomacy, “I’m fifteen years older!”