About a month later, on May 22, 1931, she sent a telegram from Los Angeles to Rudi Sieber at the Hotel Eden in Berlin: MY DEAR HOW DO YOU LIKE BERLIN WE ARE THINKING OF YOU LONGINGLY YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST VISIT US I HAVE TO FIND AN OPPORTUNITY THE CHILD IS TOO DIVINE TO ENJOY HER ALONE MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER. Dietrich was “Mutti,” and Maria was “Kater,” so the family called them “Muttikater.” She did not want to be without her child, and she did not care whether that was a smart move. When it came to family, she had no intention of adapting to American customs. “Paramount Studios had strictly forbidden any mention of my maternity. I wasn’t willing to submit to this regulation.”28 She had a transatlantic marriage, and she wanted her child to feel just as much at home in America as she did in Europe. Maybe she was hoping that Riza von Sternberg would finally let up on her if her rival’s role as a mother was emphasized. But maybe Dietrich also wanted to prevent Jo from becoming overly possessive by living with Maria. Von Sternberg could be the director and lover of the mother, acquaintance of the father, and friend of the daughter, but the family was and would remain Rudi, Marlene, and Maria.
While she was in Europe, von Sternberg picked out a new abode, a Spanish-style art deco villa on North Roxbury Drive, for the woman he adored. North Roxbury Drive was the “street of stars.” The interior of the house was quite luxurious, with the standard Hollywood look featuring a great many mirrored walls. The front of this house seemed like a fortress. It was impossible to peer inside. The façade appeared to be hermetically sealed. Dashiell Hammett wrote that it was rumored in Hollywood that von Sternberg and Dietrich were “living in sin.”29 The two of them hid behind the forbidding walls of this fortress and were happy to leave the world outside.
For Dietrich, who was used to the exciting night life and cultural offerings in Berlin, Los Angeles had little to offer. Von Sternberg did not like to socialize and disparaged the “Coconut Grove culture” of Hollywood. In his view, culture was a dirty word in this town. He wanted Dietrich all for himself and did not allow anyone to take up direct contact with her. While he read scripts in the evening, she may have been wondering whether the delectable goulash was on that evening’s menu at Mutzbauer. Maria had quickly grown accustomed to the warm climate, the wonderfully blue sky, the scent of jasmine, the villa, and the fabulous food. She was privately tutored and had a governess, and needed to be at her mother’s beck and call. Several sequences of Dietrich’s colorful home movies show the family life of this threesome on North Roxbury Drive. Dietrich and Maria are romping at the pool, and von Sternberg is posing with Maria in front of the camera, smiling more broadly than usual. In one set of pictures that von Sternberg took of the two of them at the pool, we see what appears to be a cheery six-year-old girl with her happy mother. Maria was not the only one in the family to have left Berlin; Rudi had gone as well. The last time they celebrated Christmas in their apartment was 1930. Never again would they live together as a family. Right after his wife and daughter left Germany, Rudi moved to Paris with his lover. When he returned to Berlin, he would stay at the Hotel Eden.
On November 7, 1931, Josefine sent a telegram to her daughter: RUDI ASKS FOR YOUR CONSENT SOON TO GIVE UP 54 HE SAYS SINCE IS NOT ENOUGH FOR DEFINITIVE RETURN MORE PRACTICAL HOTEL MONTHS FURNISHED PLACE OR HOTEL. Dietrich’s reply to her husband shows that she considered this suggestion unreasonable: I DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY MUTTI DOESN’T TAKE OUR FLAT AND ACTS LIKE OWNER OF ALL OUR THINGS I HATE THE IDEA OF DESTROYING OUR HOME WOULD LIKE THAT EVERYTHING STAY AS IT IS UNTIL I COME BACK AND BUY OR RENT A HOUSE I DON’T INTEND TO LIVE THERE I JUST WANT IT AS A PLACE FOR OUR THINGS. . . . MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER.30 For her, there was still a “we,” which no longer existed for Rudi. She wrote him that for her, closing down the apartment would spell the end of the home they had shared, but that did not seem to interest him, and he did not reply to this comment in his letters.
Sieber had found a job as production manager of the European branch of Paramount in Paris, most likely on von Sternberg’s recommendation. The advantage of this was that he was on the scene for the synchronization of the Dietrich and von Sternberg movies. Sieber, who was fluent in French, enjoyed residing in Paris.31 He could live with Tamara openly and dispense with all the sneaking around. This was probably also why he was so eager to get rid of the apartment in Berlin. Sieber had discovered his fondness for the good life. Even decades later, he still knew where to buy the best caviar and cognac in Paris. He was happy to give up Berlin, while Dietrich was homesick in her villa in Beverly Hills.
In the same year that Dietrich was born, seven-year-old Jonas Sternberg (Josef von Sternberg’s birth name) crossed the Atlantic for the first time with his mother and his two siblings to live with his father, who had emigrated several years earlier. After three years the family returned to Vienna, where Jonas gravitated to the Prater, which featured a flea circus, performers of all kinds, women who were sawed in half, sword swallowers, and elephants on tightropes. Time and again, his movies would reenact scenes from the Prater. The boy developed a fine sense of the erotic enticements that surrounded him: he kept a close eye on the maids who were on the lookout for dashing officers and was left speechless at the sight of a girl sitting upside-down on the swing in some Vienna basement, showing the boys what was under her dress. When he was fourteen, he went back to New York, taking his memories of eroticism, performance art and artificiality, dark secrets, and mind-boggling spectacles with him to the New World. A year in high school brought his formal education to an end, after which time he found a job as an errand boy in a lace warehouse on Fifth Avenue and learned the differences between rose point and lace from Brussels, Chantilly, and Venice. These were his years as an apprentice in eroticism, because lace and women’s skin went together. His coworkers entertained him with stories of brothels and the resultant quests for medical help. He left the apparel industry with quite a bit of knowledge about matters pertaining to lace and syphilis.
When his mother turned her back on the family, he also ran away from home. At the age of sixteen, he was alone and abandoned in the big city. He eked out a living with odd jobs and eventually wound up at the movie business. Jonas Sternberg began at the very bottom; he became a gofer for a man who cleaned and coated films in his basement. There followed jobs as projectionist, film repairer, and finally as personal assistant to a film producer. During the war, he made films for the U.S. Army that trained soldiers in the use of weapons, and when the war ended he continued to learn everything he could about film, working as an author, editor, and assistant to various directors. Eventually he was hired as an assistant director in Hollywood, and in the credits for the movie By Divine Right, his name was lengthened to Josef von Sternberg, much to his own surprise. In 1924, he directed his first movie, Salvation Hunters, for which he had also written the screenplay. Overnight, he was famous.
Photographs of von Sternberg and Dietrich together in Berlin show not two separate individuals, but a symbiosis. Although they are not touching, they appear to blend. Photographs, letters, telegrams, gifts from von Sternberg, and Dietrich’s memoirs attest to their love. She later wrote:
He didn’t want me to talk about him. Well, since he’s dead now, I’m free to do so. He created me. . . . The eye behind the camera, the eye that loves the creature whose image will be captured on the film, is the creator of the wondrous effect that emanates from this being and evokes praise and enthusiasm from moviegoers all over the world. All that is precisely calculated and not by chance. It is a combination of technical and psychological knowledge, and pure love.32
Von Sternberg sent her a monogrammed vanity case. He loved the way she transformed herself in front of the mirror, the eccentric finery, and the ways she augmented her beauty. In the photographs she handed out of herself in 1929 in Berlin, she had been made to look like a female impersonator. Aside from her daughter, her musical saw, and a few recordings, she did not seem to attach any lasting value to things. “As I came to know more about her I also became fa
miliar with the conditions that had produced her, her family, and the circle around her. Her energy to survive and to rise above her environment must have been fantastic. She was subject to severe depressions, though these were balanced by periods of unbelievable vigor.”33
Von Sternberg sensed that Dietrich was prepared to do anything, even transform herself into his work of art. “Josef von Sternberg was the only person I allowed to patronize, instruct, and control me.”34 He made her into the woman that he aimed to identify with. “I am Marlene,” he declared, thus recalling Flaubert’s equation of himself and the heroine of his novel.35 On the photograph she sent him in May 1931, she wrote: “To my creator, from his creation.” He sent her a photo of himself on which he wrote: “For Marlene—what am I, really, without you?”
In contrast to Flaubert, von Sternberg was dealing with a flesh-and-blood woman. MY DEAR I AM TERRIBLY LONELY AND DON’T KNOW HOW I WILL STAND THIS LONG TIME YOU ARE MY WHOLE WORLD AND ONLY YOUR TELEGRAMS GIVE ME STRENGTH TO BREATHE . . . MY LONGING IS ENDLESS DON’T CRY AND DON’T STAY AWAY TOO LONG I ADORE YOU JO.36 He was closest to her when they were making films together. During these periods, he was her creator and her lover all at the same time.
In August 1931, they began shooting Shanghai Express. The action begins at a train station in Beijing. Von Sternberg leads his audience right into an alien and bewildering world, just as he had done in Morocco. Dietrich’s character casually steps out of a taxi, shows her ticket, and heads to the train, although her manner of dress is anything but casual. She is in black, but this black shimmers in the sun and seems ablaze with color. She has wrapped a feather boa around her shoulders, and her hair is covered with a tight-fitting cap. She is a rare black bird amidst the brightly clad travelers. One of them claims that she has already wrecked the lives of a dozen men. She is met with mistrust and fear and winds up sharing her compartment with the only Chinese woman, Hui Fei, a reserved, stern-looking, allegedly disreputable woman. Shanghai Lily, as Dietrich is called, reacts to the contempt others show with a jaded, amused sense of irony, which she retains even when she runs into a former lover, Donald Harvey, a British officer and military doctor. “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily,” is her now-famous remark, delivered not as a confession but as a simple statement of fact. Harvey is offended, yet he must admit that she is more beautiful than ever.
A civil war is raging in China, and the train is taken over by rebels. When the passengers are summoned to the commander of the revolutionary army, they realize that he is one of their fellow passengers. Mister Chang has exchanged his white suit for a uniform. He needs a hostage, and to find the right one, he subjects the passengers to an interrogation. These seemingly honorable travelers all have something to hide. Under interrogation, Shanghai Lily states that she has been living in China for eight years. When Chang tries to seduce her, Harvey, who has overheard everything, breaks down the door and knocks Chang to the floor. After this proof of Harvey’s love, Lily’s irony turns dead serious. To protect Harvey, she is willing to sacrifice herself for him and become Chang’s lover. In a final dramatic sequence of shots in the train, Dietrich shows what she has learned. During the night, she leaves her cabin wearing a black lace negligee adorned with feathers. The narrow corridor of the clattering train is her catwalk. The camera follows her until she gets to Harvey’s door. Before she knocks, von Sternberg shows his lover in all her splendor. In this moment, she seems to belong to him alone. He desires her with his camera gaze. Love conquers all in Shanghai Express, and Donald Harvey and Shanghai Lily are reunited as a couple.
The exotic milieu that von Sternberg constructed in the California desert highlights Dietrich’s beauty and distinctiveness. She glides through the movie like an aristocratic black swan. Dietrich knows how to show her feather boas, lace panties, veils, gloves, furs, and silk to their best advantage and comes off as one unending enticement, even though she reveals neither leg nor bosom. Shanghai Lily is a beautiful, cynical plaything who plays with the men—not the other way around. However, her lovely façade is the masquerade of a dead woman. In Shanghai Express, von Sternberg shows a new variant of the story of the demimondaine with a big heart.
The men of honor in uniform turn out to be con artists, cowards, or sadists. The supposedly disreputable woman, by contrast, proves to be big-hearted and brave. Dietrich remained true to the role of the brave adventuress and lover: Amy Jolly follows her lover into the desert, Marie Kolverer is shot for saving a man she may have loved, and Shanghai Lily is willing to sacrifice herself for a man who is oblivious to her love.
Shanghai Express was Dietrich’s third Hollywood motion picture. Little by little, she was learning how the movie business worked. When she was filming, she was “like a soldier going into battle.”37 She was ready to leave for the studio before five in the morning, with her daughter Maria in tow. They drove through the cold streets of the desert town in silence. Dietrich always brought a large number of lemons with her to fight her queasiness. She made the driver stop several times along the way so that she could vomit at the side of the road. Once they had passed through the Paramount gate, the preparations for the shoot followed a prescribed path. Dietrich was the first to enter her dressing room, followed by Maria and a group of assistants. She switched on the lights, still silent and utterly focused on the transformation ahead. She took off her clothes, and Maria handed her the makeup smock. Dietrich tied the cloth belt tightly around her waist, then her men’s oxfords were untied for her and she put on her open-back slippers. Maria placed “the green tin of Lucky Strikes with the gold Dunhill lighter by the large glass ashtray, next to the dish with the marabou powder puffs.”38 The coffee was served with cream in a Meissen cup. Dietrich’s hair was styled and makeup applied to her weary face. Then she took a last puff of her cigarette before her lipstick was added. The hairpieces, which were perfectly coordinated to her hair color, were secured in place with the “Westmore twist—a sort of half-hitch with a straight hairpin that just missed penetrating the skull.”39 By this point she was presumably completely awake, just in time for the arrival of the wardrobe girls to put on the costume she needed for that day. Dietrich waited until everything was assembled. When she called out “Let’s go!” the lights were turned off, the door was locked, and they went off to the set. She brought along five thermoses filled with homemade soups and German coffee. She was ready to work with her creator.40
Her costumes for Shanghai Express were more extravagant than for any of her previous movies. Travis Banton, her costume designer from Texas, created true masterpieces of visual eroticism for her.41 Banton, who was always exquisitely dressed, had an athletic build and a peasant face. Once a year he made a shopping trip to Paris. He had the gloves, suitcases, and handbags for Shanghai Express fashioned by Hermès. His studio was furnished with a lavish array of antiques and paintings. Dietrich spent many hours there standing in front of the mirror. Every studio came equipped with a small room with a couch for the exhausted stars to take a rest, but Dietrich had the stamina and discipline to hold out without using it. Since she was always on a diet, there was no need for meal breaks.
When Dietrich arrived in Hollywood, there was a set of procedures in place designed to turn a roly-poly girl from Berlin into a Hollywood goddess. Hair dying; plastic surgery; calisthenics; employing cosmetic tricks such as “opening up” the eyes by shifting the eyebrows; and taking instruction in speech, dance, walking, and singing were standard practice for every woman who aspired to stardom. Dietrich’s transformation was extraordinarily successful. She worked on her makeover with determination and discipline.
However, Hollywood also made demands that were not easy to live up to even for Dietrich, specifically those pertaining to manners and morality. Riza von Sternberg, who had no intention of resigning herself to the fact that her husband was in love with another actress, made Dietrich’s life difficult. Riza knew, of course, that her accusation of Dietrich’s immoral conduct was the best means t
o get her out of the way and to impede any future work with von Sternberg. A scandal could be deadly. Studio bosses were not pleased when their stars violated the stipulated moral principles. The so-called Hays Code specified how long a kiss could last, how long a skirt could be, and what expressions could be used.42 The stars’ personal lives were not spared from this puritanical zeal, and there were plenty of newspapers just waiting to exploit an affair and ruin a career. Dietrich was well aware of this. Shortly after her return from Europe, she sent a cable to Rudi in Paris:
SINCE YOUR PRESENCE HERE WOULD GREATLY HELP ME IN MATTERS OF PUBLICITY WITH TRIAL OF FRAU STERNBERG AGAINST ME CABLE ME EARLIEST TIME YOU ARE FREE THERE IF THEY DENY YOU VACATION I DEMAND VACATION TIME FROM LASKY AS SOON AS I HAVE ASSIGNMENT FROM YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE DETAILS ANSWER SOON YOUR MUTTI.43
He does not seem to have been very enthusiastic about the prospect of playing the role of the husband; her next cable made her seem peeved:
YOUR COMING EARLY AUGUST HAS LITTLE PURPOSE I AM WORKING THEN AND THE PRESS SCANDAL IS OVER YOUR VISIT DELIGHTS US ANY TIME BUT IF YOU WANT TO HELP ME YOU HAVE TO COME NOW ANSWER IMMEDIATELY IF THAT IS POSSIBLE AND HOW MUCH MONEY YOU NEED MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER.44
Now Rudi seems to have noticed that the situation was dire. Marlene had already given him travel instructions in an earlier letter: “You fly to Cherbourg, take 4 days to cross the ocean, then 4 days by train, and you’ll be with us.”45
Dietrich waited for him in Pasadena, along with Maria and von Sternberg. Rudi must have been amazed at the villa, the pool, the blue sky, the Rolls Royce, and the sun that shone every day. A photograph shows the expanded nuclear family, Dietrich wearing a tie, hat, and sports jacket; Maria with her arms around her parents’ shoulders; Rudi; and next to him von Sternberg, who has linked arms with Rudi. The men are wearing white suits, the child a white dress, and Dietrich a white skirt. They are gazing expectantly into their future. A few weeks later, Sieber returned to Europe. He had done his duty; everyone saw that Dietrich, true to her claim, really did have a husband.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 20