Still, for most of his life, this role was a sham. He remained loyal to his wife by refusing to provide the world any glimpses into their unusual marriage. Dietrich could not and would not deny that she loved him when she was a young woman: “He was nice, he was gentle; he gave me the feeling I could trust him, and this feeling was sustained during all the years of our marriage.” Moreover, he was a man with connections to the film industry. Dietrich met Sieber when May-Film had him cast actresses in minor roles for the film Tragedy of Love. “Rudolf Sieber told us he was looking for ‘demimonde ladies’ of distinction. He decided that my friend Grete Mosheim looked ‘too serious’ for the role. I, however, was told to show up for work the very next day—that’s how he thought of me.”21 Dietrich married the man who got her her first real film role. It is no wonder that her mother was not pleased, given her distaste for the world of cinema. Dietrich’s mother most likely had no idea how to situate this kind of son-in-law in her hierarchical universe, to which he was an outsider. On May 17, 1923, Dietrich and Sieber were married at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The wedding photograph shows the young couple emerging from the church, with Dietrich, all in white, dashing on ahead, while Sieber, sporting a top hat and a white breast pocket handkerchief, lags slightly behind. Dietrich looks defiant, proud, and determined. She had gotten what she wanted.
This marriage made her a citizen of Czechoslovakia, and she was subject to the police department in charge of aliens and its bureaucratic requirements. Her new husband, whom everyone called “Rudi,” wrote, “My stay in Berlin had to be reauthorized once a year. As a foreigner, I also had no right to get my own apartment, but instead had to live with my family as a tenant.”22 In 1924 Sieber submitted an application for Prussian citizenship, which was granted in 1926. As long as he was a Czech citizen, it applied to his whole family, including his daughter Maria.23
During the first few years of her marriage, Dietrich must often have felt lonely. The cover of Sieber’s passport was falling apart, and many of its pages were full of notations in a variety of languages. The official stamps were from Italy, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Slovenia, Serbia, and Croatia. It is easy to imagine how this life from one residence permit to the next put the two of them to a difficult test. But Sieber had gained her trust. She did not have to put on an act for him. He got to know her as a flirtatious girl who did not hesitate to flaunt her charms. Sieber put up with it, and she was grateful to him. “He had no way of knowing that at home I was not the same girl as at the studio, the girl with the monocle in her eye playing the most depraved prostitute. Still, he did know that that was only a role, or else he wouldn’t have courted me the way he did. He could see I was bluffing.”24
Sieber must have been surprised to meet Dietrich’s archconservative family. During their engagement, a chaperone prevented the young couple from meeting alone. Dietrich’s uncle was the well-known German National member of the Reichstag, estate owner, and Privy Judicial Counselor Hermann Dietrich. He was a close friend of Alfred Hugenberg’s, whose corporation also owned the Ufa Film Company, although it is difficult to determine whether this connection proved useful for her career. It appears unlikely, because Hermann Dietrich was too conservative to approve of his niece taking up acting. A photograph shows them spending time together at a summer resort. Hermann is lying on a lounge chair dressed in a suit, while Rudolf, Marlene, and her mother are posing in their bathing outfits in front of a canopied wicker beach chair.
On December 13, 1924, shortly before her twenty-third birthday, Dietrich became a mother. Photographs of her with her little daughter, Maria Elisabeth, show the fulfillment this child brought her. She looks tender and gentle, yet sad. There is also a remarkable series of photographs that Emil Orlik took of Dietrich not long before this.25 We see her sitting in a dressing room in her lovely kimono, which was yellow, black, pink, and orange on the outside and bright blue on the reverse. The only way to wear this soft kimono, which was light as a feather, would be naked. In Orlik’s pictures the kimono is open near the top, and we see a good deal of skin and cleavage, which Dietrich rarely showed. She is wearing elaborate makeup, with full lips and finely arched eyebrows. The actress Ressel Orla is leaning against her. Dietrich is clearly a woman who wants much more out of life. She is languorously sensual and beguilingly erotic.
This photograph must have been taken soon after her marriage, because she is still wearing her wedding ring. Two years later, she would take it off for good.26 Sieber was not providing her what she had hoped for. Up to the time of her marriage, Dietrich had lived with her mother, who had experienced so much disappointment in life, and her dutiful sister. Her expectations for the man who would liberate her from the clutches of these two women were enormous. It is no wonder that Sieber did not fulfill them. Both were careful to uphold tradition and show their relatives that they were a good family, as is plain to see in the photographs taken every year during their vacation at the sea. In 1925, we see a happily smiling Dietrich in a stylish bathing suit with her daughter in a canopied wicker beach chair in Sylt; two years later comes a picture of the beach in Swinemünde in which Sieber looks self-conscious, with his arm draped around his wife’s waist. He is proud of his lovely wife, while she is clearly straining to maintain a physical distance from him. And one year after that, all three are sitting together on a blanket amidst canopied wicker beach chairs and seem to be enjoying the sun and one another’s company. To the outside world, the Siebers were a happy couple. The photographs of sand castles were pasted into the family album, but back home in Berlin, the two of them went their separate ways.
The reviews of the first movie in which Dietrich had a minor role found that the plot was shallow, but the film’s technical refinement was dazzling. This kind of assessment would be repeated often in connection with her early productions. In The Little Napoleon Dietrich played a maid; the movie pandered to the public with pretty images, a modest degree of humor, and a sparkling portrayal of the military. Tragedy of Love was an improvement by comparison, and Kurt Tucholsky found parts of it captivating: “You can object to the genre, but if you don’t, then it must be said that this is where the best German naturalist detective film has been created. Three men made it a success: Emil Jannings, Joe May, and Paul Leni.”27 Dietrich had found her way into a circle of true professionals. The memoirs of the set designer Erich Kettelhut give ample evidence of director and producer Joe May’s astonishing speed, improvisational skills, and enthusiasm, but also of his jumpy disposition and quick temper. Sieber needed nerves of steel to work with this man. Dietrich played Lucy, the lover of an attorney. Her face looks plump and distorted in a set of grimaces, and her acting is painfully overwrought. Even her coquettish monocle did not help matters much.
Six months after the birth of her daughter, she played the role of Micheline, a fashionable prostitute known as a “cocotte,” in the Ufa production of Manon Lescaut; Arthur Robison was the director and Theodor Sparkuhl the cinematographer. Hers was not a major role, but it was the second most important female role in the movie after the one played by Lya de Putti. Manon Lescaut was the last film de Putti made in Germany before going to Hollywood. The critics crowed that the historical film was not dead and praised the movie’s splendid photography, picturesque scenes, and magnificent set designs. These so-called costume films enjoyed great popularity among Germans who were nostalgic for imperial pomp and circumstance.28 This time, Dietrich’s name appeared in the newspaper advertisements and reviews: “Playing alongside Putti, Marlene Dietrich, a strikingly talented young woman, has carried off her first major film role with great skill. We will want to keep an eye out for her, because she appears to be a star in the making.”29
Alexander Korda, with whom she made her two next films, cared first and foremost about entertainment and lavish design.30 In Madame Doesn’t Want Children, Dietrich had a bit part in scene-stealing outfits. Sieber was the production manager. The film is notable because of its message and because its screenplay was
written by Béla Balázs. Balázs was a Hungarian communist writer who had published an essay on “The Revolutionary Film” in communist party journal Die Rote Fahne in the fall of 1922, promoting the cause of proletarian, impassioned, and visionary cinema. Madame Doesn’t Want Children was the diametric opposite. While this movie did not look kindly on bourgeois women who lived in the lap of luxury, it also poked fun at the New Woman on the quest for autonomy and pleasure. “This flimsy comedy with the flippant title ends with a paean to the blessing of children. It begins with a short skirt, extraordinarily low-cut blouses, and a sense of curiosity, but ends on a moralistic note, with childbirth.”31 The movie was shot in the record time of thirteen days because the Kordas were expected in Hollywood. The reviews were devastating; only the left-wing press saw it in a positive light, and it ran for months at movie theaters in Moscow.
The technical elements of Dietrich’s earliest films were lauded, but the shallow plots, cheap effects, and kitsch came under critical fire. She did not have any other offers. She was hired because of her good looks. Louise Brooks, who was five years younger than Dietrich, claimed that Dietrich had tried out for the role of Lulu in Pandora’s Box, but director G. W. Pabst emphatically denied that later on, explaining that “Dietrich was too old and too obvious—one sexy look and the picture would become a burlesque.” Brooks added, “She was the Dietrich of I Kiss Your Hand, Madame, a film in which, caparisoned variously in beads, brocade, ostrich feathers, chiffon ruffles, and white rabbit fur, she galloped from one lascivious stare to another.”32 Dietrich simply did not know any better—nor, apparently, did her husband. They offered slapstick, which could earn money but not fame. The world of film turned out to be a comedown for Dietrich, especially in light of the fact that she was originally aiming for a career as a classical artist. As a musician, she would have salvaged some remnant of nobility in her mother’s eyes, because even in the Weimar Republic an artist was considered special. But as of now, she had become no more than a minor actress. On October 18, 1926, she wrote in her diary, “I play in the theater and in films and earn money. I have just reread this diary—oh god, where is all that wonderful exuberance, that being carried away by feelings? All gone!”33
Dietrich was in Vienna at the time, acting alongside Willi Forst in a movie called Café Electric, directed by Gustav Ucicky, son of the painter Gustav Klimt. This movie signaled a turning point in her career. Café Electric offered not only a heavy dose of morality, but also a realistic portrayal of the world of pimps, petty crooks, and floozies. It is a sad film in which Forst plays a pickpocket and Dietrich plays Erni, the daughter of a millionaire who has fallen for him. The relationship between the two is marked by violence and sexual subjection. The film runs counter to the spirit of the age: Marital fidelity is trumpeted as the highest value, while sexual freedom invariably leads to ruin. The Viennese newspapers praised her acting: “Marlene Dietrich’s Erni, the daughter of a contractor, is simply a gem of the most impressive incarnation of a wretched girl whose upbringing is luxurious but far from good.”34 At this time, she struck up a friendship with fellow cast member Igo Sym and was fascinated by the way he played the “musical saw.” When he left, he made her a gift of the instrument as a memento of their time together in Vienna. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Sym, as a “citizen of the German Reich,” helped set up the Polish theater. He promoted the Nazi propaganda film Homecoming, which was also directed by Ucicky. Once Sym’s contacts to the Gestapo had been confirmed, he was liquidated by order of the Polish underground government in March 1941. When Dietrich returned to Europe in 1944, her suitcase contained the musical saw she would use from then on to entertain the American troops.
Dietrich proved to be an able match for Forst in her portrayal of the pampered yet neglected girl. Forst was an elegant bon vivant whose role of a lifetime is rightly considered to be Bel Ami (1939). He had come to Berlin back in 1925. When they were shooting the film Café Electric, he and Dietrich entered into an affair. Like Sieber, Forst radiated sunny optimism and had a compact, powerful physique. Forst’s despairing letters to Dietrich spoke of his everlasting love for her. In the early 1930s, he wrote:
I am right at the brink, tottering around in this city and not knowing what I’m doing here. . . . Darling, you must come to me soon, and you can never leave me alone again. I am boundlessly unhappy! This old Europe is cracking apart at the seams on the left and the right, and it affects everyone except me, because I have no feeling other than longing and no thought other than “you.”35
His letters reveal a side of “Bel Ami” that differs substantially from the charming seducer. Forst was a harried, extremely unhappy man. He was always short of money, doubtful of his talent, and unsuited for any job other than acting. He hid his bitter melancholia under a sugarcoating of Viennese charm. Forst kept Dietrich up to date about the latest developments in the film industry; he admired her acting talent and tried to find suitable screenplays for her. We can only assume that the affair with Forst provided a substantial boost to further Dietrich’s career in film. In his boundless infatuation, he also boosted her self-confidence about her acting skills. Forst was in a better position to support Dietrich than Sieber was; with Rudi, she produced nothing but flops. Dietrich appears to have helped Forst out financially on many occasions and suggested remedies for his hair loss, while he pined away for her, listening to her records, watching her movies, and wallowing in his suffering.
The only performance on a Berlin stage of lasting importance to Dietrich was at the Komödie Theater on Kurfürstendamm, a small neo-Rococo theater. She enjoyed the modern-minded, sophisticated audiences on the Kurfürstendamm. Dietrich had grown up in a part of Berlin that set great store by tradition, and time seemed to stand still. The Kurfürstendamm, by contrast, with its bars, movie theaters, and late-night revelers, was the embodiment of the big-city attitude toward life.
Dietrich was asked to try out at the Komödie, also run by Reinhardt, for a musical in a very new style. She would be accompanied on the piano by the composer of the revue, Mischa Spoliansky. Spoliansky, whom critics regarded as the composer on the Kurfürstendamm, went on to write the tune for her first hit, and the two of them would remain friends throughout their lives. Dietrich soon realized that she was now part of a Bohemian clique with a casual attitude toward marital fidelity. Their artistic inspiration came from the lyricist Marcellus Schiffer. He was a prematurely aged man who sported a monocle and knickerbockers, and took great pride in his erotic sketches. He had gone through a political phase but then discovered cabaret and targeted the snobbish, upper-class bourgeoisie, whose weaknesses he revealed bluntly and humorously with wicked charm.
The Schiffer and Spoliansky revue, which premiered in May 1928, was called It’s in the Air. It was set in a department store. Dietrich’s castmates were Margo Lion, Oskar Karlweis, Willy Prager, Hubert von Meyerinck, Otto Wallburg, and Ida Wüst. She found the rehearsals both exhausting and instructive, and gravitated to the star of the show, Margo Lion, Schiffer’s lover and an unrivaled cabaret artist who satirized the era.36 In addition to her professional elocution skills, Lion owed her success to her physical appearance: she was extraordinarily elegant and thin as a rail. Working with Lion brought Dietrich into the spotlight. Once the revue became a success, Dietrich was known throughout Berlin.
The reviews, which Schiffer neatly clipped and saved, confirm that It’s in the Air was hailed in every major newspaper, and in many small ones, in Germany and abroad; it was called “a sterling achievement” (Vorwärts) that won over audiences with “wit rather than a big budget” (Berliner Morgenzeitung). Schiffer attacked the two tools of debasement: sex and money. It’s in the Air was an elegant satire of the era. As a librettist, Schiffer did not overwhelm his audiences with ideology; this was quick-witted, amusing entertainment. The troupe played to a full house every evening for three months. On June 28, 1928, Lion and Schiffer were married. The wedding photograph that was printed in many newspapers was the best a
dvertisement for their current production, since Lion also played a bride in the revue. But a duet by Lion and Dietrich also made headlines. In the “Sisters” scene, the two women, clad in black, sing this song:
When the best girlfriend and the best girlfriend traipse through the streets, to go shopping, to go shopping, to shoot the breeze, the best girlfriend says to the best girlfriend: My best girlfriend! . . . Once there were gallants, but they dwindled away! Today, instead of gallants, there are girlfriends!
Then Oskar Karlweis comes up to the two women and asks, “How about we get along again?” and the women purr in response, “Oh yes, let’s get along again.”37 They end the scene as a trio. Biographers can hardly resist the temptation to interpret the women’s duet as an expression of sexual promiscuity, but Spoliansky intended it as a parody of the inseparable Dolly Sisters, who were quite successful at the time. With this text, Schiffer was making fun of the city’s so-called high society and its many speculators and racketeers whose wealth had come from the war and inflation. In these circles, people enjoyed flouting social conventions and indulging in extramarital affairs, including same-sex affairs. The reviews emphasized Dietrich’s acting prowess, youthful freshness, and lovely figure, while her sexual preferences went unmentioned. The sexual aspect was tacked on later by biographers, and may have arisen from the need to adhere as closely as possible to clichés about bisexual or lesbian woman of the 1920s. “Those twenties” came to be equated with sexual anarchy, also in reference to Dietrich.38 Schiffer, himself a man without clearly discernible sexual preferences, was poking fun at modern liaisons with the now-standard bisexual backdrop. Pairing two such contrasting women for the duet heightened its appeal, with Lion embodying the parody of the modern androgynous creature (more intellectual than sensual, downright sarcastic, devoid of bosom and buttocks) while Dietrich evoked “old-fashioned sensuality . . . slim and cuddlesome, brimming with vigor and a zest for life.”39 Lion’s odd appearance made Dietrich look positively radiant by contrast. Newspaper advertisements highlighted this study in contrasts, which became the hallmark of the revue, and created a media sensation. The Berliner Börsen-Courier reported, “These two very different women . . . are catapulting Berlin cabaret to international heights. We hear that even George Gershwin could not pass up the chance to see this revue.”40
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 7