Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  In Hollywood, the story ran its course. Riza got a substantial settlement from the divorce, and Dietrich filmed her next movie with von Sternberg. Major advertising campaigns and two movies in three years made the pair well-known to the American moviegoer. She immersed herself in dubbing her films, with an eye to her career in Europe. Sieber at Paramount Studios in Paris helped her behind the scenes. On September 12, she sent him this transatlantic order: PLEASE IMMEDIATELY LISTEN TO FRENCH VERSION OF MOROCCO WITH MY EARS AND CABLE HOW YOU LIKED IT KISSES MUTTIKATER. She wanted him to tell her every detail of what was being said about her in Europe. However, Rudi did not write to her often. Her telegrams in the period before Christmas of 1931 grew briefer and briefer. Sometimes she sent him a million kisses, other times she wrote that she was working night and day, and still other times, she asked only why he was not replying, even though she was paying for the telegrams. She could travel to Europe and earn money, she wrote him, because her next shoot in Hollywood was not scheduled to begin until March. He did not reply. A few days later, she sent him a telegram with the message that she would not be coming to Paris, which meant that she had no source of income until mid-February. When her mother also asked her in early December to invest money in Berlin, she asked Rudi to take care of that. A SUM LIKE THAT NOT EASY TO EARN NO ONE NOW INVESTS MONEY IN EUROPE IF I DO THAN ONLY FOR MUTTI CERTAINLY NOT GOOD PLACE FOR MY MONEY.46 Until the next time she got paid, she borrowed money from von Sternberg. He, in turn, had to sell securities in order to stay solvent. When she had money, she spent it. Dietrich could not work with a budget; Rudi saw to these unpleasant matters.

  On October 9, Morocco premiered at the Gloria Palace in Berlin. Her old friend, the screenwriter Walter Reisch, wrote to her: “My dear and admired lady! . . . The press and intelligentsia really liked your ‘Morocco movie.’ The masses were thrown off by the dialogue and bold theme. . . . Incidentally, congratulations are in order for you, now that you really don’t have to live here. A beautiful woman is out of place here these days. You belong in the land of the sun!”47 Dietrich was sure to have appreciated her friend’s compliments, but his description of the situation in Berlin sounded alarming: “The situation here is still so unsettled that it is almost pointless to draw up a schedule for anything past five in the afternoon. Every half hour brings a new change to the program. Exchange embargo, emergency decree, production cuts—catchwords that are governing the moment.”48 The political situation had everyone on tenterhooks, and the personal sphere diminished in importance. Young people regarded uniforms as the promise of a better future. Assets kept declining as unemployment rose; corruption and depravity continued under Brüning. The name “Hitler” came up with increasing frequency. When Dietrich recalled the newspaper photographs of this bumbling man in garish clothing with bulbous facial features and a thick dog whip, she knew why Reisch said that a beautiful woman was out of place in Berlin.

  Should she go to Europe at all?

  TELL ME DEAR WHETHER I OUGHT TO STAY HERE IN VIEW OF SITUATION GERMANY . . . GET IDEA THAT VACATION BERLIN CANNOT BE ENJOYABLE AND I COULD NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR LOSS OF MONEY YOU HAVE BETTER OVERVIEW OF SITUATION FROM THERE AND CAN GIVE ADVICE KISSES MUTTIKATER.49

  Sieber knew from Tamara, who visited her family in Berlin from time to time, how depressing the situation was there. She wrote, “It is quite miserable in Berlin . . . everyone has left and those who have stayed are in a bad mood. After Paris, Berlin is so dead. . . . There is nothing to do here (as far as business goes). No film. Everything dead. . . . It is very bad.”50 Sieber advised Dietrich not to come. He wanted to spare her this gloomy atmosphere in Berlin.

  Some of the telegrams and letters that went back and forth between Paris and Los Angeles were about Dietrich’s need to replenish her supply of stockings, gloves, literature, suntan lotion, medicine, and children’s books. Sieber knew everything about her clothing preferences and measurements, right down to her lingerie, and he whizzed through Paris to locate the items she needed.

  The United States was mired in an economic crisis and a crisis of confidence, which many regarded as an acute threat to their existence. After criss-crossing the country, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic candidate for president, reported that he had looked into the faces of thousands of Americans: “They have the frightened look of lost children.” He promised people a return to normality with the campaign slogan: “Happy days are here again.” Hollywood eagerly echoed this sentiment. In the presidential election year, and against the backdrop of the Great Depression, Dietrich and von Sternberg made a movie that differed strikingly from her others. Blonde Venus is set in the United States and highlights the atmosphere of this period in history. Dietrich plays the role of a mother.51 A great many conflicts flared up in the ensuing months about the various screenplay versions, the director, the star, and the artistic direction of Paramount Studios. By the end of 1931, Paramount was experiencing serious difficulties in the turbulence of the Great Depression and could not afford a flop. The studio pinned its hopes on Dietrich and von Sternberg. Letters, telegrams, and telephone calls went back and forth between the film bosses, with frantic deliberations as to how one could bring about a success of the Dietrich and von Sternberg duo, and they ultimately came up with the idea of a story of a mother. B. P. Schulberg, the production chief at Paramount, liked the idea of presenting Dietrich as a loving mother, as he stated in a telegram to his colleague Emanuel Cohen:

  THIS STORY COMBINES EVERY ELEMENT OF DRAMATIC INTEREST THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE CROWDED INTO A DIETRICH SUBJECT GIVING HER A STRONG EMOTIONAL SYMPATHETIC ROLE THAT IS FAR REMOVED FROM ANYTHING SHE HAS YET DONE AND SHOULD THEREFORE BE WELCOME RELIEF AT SAME TIME GIVING HER OPPORTUNITY TO SING DRESS SMARTLY AND BE GLITTERING STAGE PERSONALITY WITH WHICH SHE CAPTURED PUBLIC IN BOTH MOROCCO AND BLUE ANGEL.52

  However, it was not easy to implement this plan. Power struggles within Paramount, strict censorship regulations, and profit seeking stood in the way of a unified approach. Schulberg himself had to leave in the course of the year, and von Sternberg also tried to walk away from Paramount before the shooting even began. He did not want to film the script that had been presented to him in revised form. Von Sternberg provided this terse summary of a war of nerves that dragged on for months: “Miss Dietrich also left, refusing to work with anyone else, and I was forced to return, as we were both under contract.”53

  On May 26, filming of Blonde Venus began at long last, with Dietrich playing a German woman named Helen who has married an American chemist, Edward Faraday. Faraday has lost his job in the Depression and is seriously ill as well. They live in New York with their five-year-old son, Johnny. Helen, a former cabaret singer, goes back to her profession against her husband’s wishes. In her search for employment, she has to present herself in multiple guises and under several different names, and has to outshine innumerable competitors. Everyone is on the quest for a job. Von Sternberg again portrayed Dietrich as a nightclub singer. The men are after her, and she chooses the best of them, Nick Townsend (played by Cary Grant), to be a lover. He gives her money to finance a cure for her husband’s medical condition. When her husband finds out about the affair, a battle for the child ensues. Helen flees, and Faraday has the police chase her around the country. The people Helen meets are tough and pitiless. While on the run through America, she goes to rack and ruin and winds up as a homeless boozer with tattered clothing and crude manners. Many Americans feared ending up that way. When she has hit rock bottom, she gives up. She stays behind at some godforsaken train station in shabby clothes, while her husband leaves with their son. After experiencing a meteoric rise as a singer in Paris, Helen returns to New York and asks her husband to take her back.

  In 1932, when it had become clear that the big party in the United States was over, Dietrich’s European approach to motherhood went quite well with the new domesticity. People no longer headed out to clubs, bars, or restaurants for entertainment, but instead discovered the joys of parlor games th
ey could play at home. Puzzles, bridge, and checkers gained in popularity. Dietrich played the role of mother both lovingly and matter-of-factly. When Helen leaves for her first performance and gives Edward, who is standing around helplessly, quick instructions for making dinner and putting their son to bed while she is memorizing her role and packing her bags, she is portraying a situation that working mothers everywhere have faced. Dietrich’s fierce commitment to motherhood is strikingly absent from the public’s perception of her. She played Helen Faraday as a mother who has remained a desirable woman. At that time only she could do that. As a housewife, she wore white blouses, white aprons, and black skirts, but also form-fitting, fur-trimmed coats. As a singer and a lover, she is draped in flowing, seductive robes, or she makes her appearance in a white tailcoat and a top hat. Once again, Dietrich plays the woman who is passionately in love, but here the object of her love is neither the offended husband nor the debonair lover; it is her son. Posing as an androgynous femme fatale serves only to mask her disappointment in love. Besides a mother, wife, lover, and singer, Dietrich in this movie is also a German. She has to tell Johnny again and again how she and his father first met: “It was springtime in Germany . . .” In the evening, she sings him German songs, such as “Leise zieht durch mein Gemüt” and “Ein Männlein steht im Walde.” In this movie, made in 1932, Germany is the country in which American men can fall in love with beautiful German nymphs on warm spring evenings and in which live famous researchers who can cure what ails you.

  However, the news Dietrich was hearing from Berlin at the beginning of the new year did not bode well. The showing of Dishonored in Berlin had been disrupted. Walter Reisch did not ascribe much value to these actions.

  Wonderful Marlene! I have just come from your film X 27. Unfortunately—or should I say thank goodness—I did not get tickets for the premiere, because I would surely have had to tussle with a good many rowdies. To get right to the point: I find the movie splendid! The ruckus and scandals are surely the work of some rowdies who see any premiere around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church as an opportunity to attract attention. . . . Apart from them, everyone is unanimous: Marlene’s best performance as an actress. Von Sternberg’s sparkling, lush, colorful, dramatic, stirring production. By the way, it has been sold out every time so far. . . . Moving on to another subject: many sincere thanks for your lovely letter; I was triply delighted by every single line, I am quite upset about your complaining that you don’t like it over there anymore! Your yearning for Europe is totally incomprehensible for us over here! Anyone here who knows about politics, economic and social collapse, etc. has no understanding whatsoever for a yearning for Europe.54

  In the same month, Dietrich got a request from Rudi and Josefine to grant them power of attorney over her assets. They feared economic decline and wanted to ensure that they had enough to live on. The letters and telegrams that went back and forth over the next few months between Paris, Berlin, and Los Angeles show how woefully incapable each side was of understanding the other. In 1932, Dietrich had no secure source of income and was feeling uneasy among the sharks of Hollywood, although Rudi and Josefine figured she was rich and carefree. In November 1931, she had been nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actress for her role as Amy Jolly in Morocco, and von Sternberg had been nominated as Best Director. Neither had won. This would be Dietrich’s only Oscar nomination.

  Then a new crisis drove her to the brink of insanity. On March 1, the twenty-month-old baby of the aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped from his parents’ home. The Hollywood stars feared for the safety of their children. Dietrich received an extortion letter with a threat to kidnap Maria. She was partway through filming Blonde Venus and was utterly incapable of thinking clearly. Every morning she took Maria to the studio with her, and at night, Maria was protected by her mother’s male friends. One night, Maria recalled, “I found von Sternberg on the floor by my bed, revolver ready, fast asleep. Another night, Chevalier, equally armed and ready, snoring musically.55 When Rudi Sieber came, Dietrich arranged for him to be guarded by two FBI officers, and bars were installed on all the doors and windows of her house. She threatened to leave the United States, but that went against everyone else’s interests. Von Sternberg wanted to keep Dietrich by his side, and Sieber was quite content to live in Paris without his wife. In the end, everything stayed as it was, and Dietrich remained in Hollywood. Where else could she go, anyway?

  Paramount was considered the American film studio in Europe. European stars such as Emil Jannings, Ernst Lubitsch, Marlene Dietrich, Sergei Eisenstein, and Maurice Chevalier were under contract with Paramount. In her relationship with Chevalier, Dietrich tried to keep her memory of Europe alive and to fight off her homesickness. He was thirteen years older than Dietrich, had been a street urchin in Paris, then became a revue star after the war. His elegant clothing—suit, straw hat, and bow tie—was his trademark. Even in his love letters to Dietrich, he could not stop playing the charming Frenchman. Chevalier called Dietrich “ma grande aimée, ma femme, ma grande.” He gave no evidence of originality in his communication with her, but rather wallowed in platitudes about love. JE PENSE A TOI SANS CESSE ET TU ES ENCORE DANS MES BRAS.56 By the fourth letter, this kind of talk had become wearying. Chevalier was too guileless to hold Dietrich’s interest. It is easy to picture the two enjoying a good laugh about the Americans, singing together, or rhapsodizing about Paris. Chevalier met up with Sieber in Paris, and as usual, Sieber got along famously with his wife’s lover. Their topic of conversation was, of course, Dietrich. These encounters with Forst, Chevalier, von Sternberg, and the rest kept Sieber well informed as to the state of Dietrich’s relationships with her current lovers. Not only did he have a complete picture of her finances, but he also knew his way around her love life. He retained a vestige of power over her. Almost every second telegram—the longer she was away, the fewer letters they exchanged—contained his request for money. PLEASE MUTTI SEND MONEY I NEED IT MILLION KISSES FOREVER PAPA.57

  In September, Dietrich repeatedly asked Rudi how the situation was in Germany, and whether he would advise her to come. I UNDERSTAND YOU SO WELL BUT IF I SHALL ADVISE YOU SHOULDN’T GO TO GERMANY NOW POLITICAL SITUATION TERRIBLE NEW ELECTIONS DANGER OF CITIZEN WAR.58 Her friends did not appear to be faring well, and she heard that Marcellus Schiffer had taken his own life. Margo Lion had left Berlin and moved to Paris.

  Dietrich took Rudi’s advice and stayed in Hollywood with Maria. Blonde Venus came to movie theaters in late September. The American critics felt that the time had come to lash out at von Sternberg and his star. “His latest movie, The Blonde Venus, is perhaps the worst ever made. In it all Sternberg’s gifts have turned sour. The photography is definitely ‘arty’—a nauseating blend of hazy light, soft focus, over-blacks and over-whites, with each shot so obviously ‘composed’ as to be painful.”59 None of the participants had really wanted to make this movie in the first place, and no one was surprised when it flopped. Dietrich and von Sternberg were no longer regarded as an artistic couple who stood for success. With all the external pressure they were facing, the intervals between their spats became briefer and briefer. He was considered difficult because he felt superior to everyone else, and she supposedly always obeyed him. They had to give careful thought to any future collaboration. Von Sternberg wrote matter-of-factly that after their fifth movie together, he had finally persuaded her to work with a different director.

  Von Sternberg traveled to the West Indies to film a hurricane. He and Dietrich were taking a break from each other. Marlene asked Rudi how Blonde Venus was received in Berlin, and he told her that even in the third week it was still completely sold out. VENUS BERLIN BIG SUCCESS ALL CRITICS FANTASTIC FOR YOU ALSO MARVELOUS FOR JO.60 However, this positive reception does not seem to have inspired her to continue making movies. In early December she asked Rudi impatiently when he would finally come to them, and she contemplated going back to Europe with him: HOPE TO GET AWAY WITHOUT MAKING PICTURE CABLE A
T ONCE MILLION KISSES MUTTIKATER.61

  The year 1933 began on a note of trouble. Dietrich did not show up for work, and Paramount sued her for breach of contract. She was finally pressured into meeting her new director. A photograph of Dietrich with Rouben Mamoulian shows how very different they were. He looked as though he cared only about philosophical issues, while she had donned a glamorous get-up to gain attention. However, the two of them got along. She liked the fact that he accepted her as she was. The film they would be working on together for Paramount had been adapted from Hermann Sudermann’s novel Song of Songs. Dietrich recited her little piece about how she, like every German girl, loved and cherished this novel. A telegram from von Sternberg, who was back in Berlin in late January 1933, shows that she was quite happy to have gained Mamoulian as an admirer. DEAREST JUST GOT YOUR FIRST LETTER THANKS A MILLION NOW YOUR TELEGRAMS FROM WHICH I GATHER THAT YOU ARE HAPPY AGAIN AND DELIGHTED BECAUSE OF ROUBEN WHOSE ENTHUSIASM IS LIKE MINE BACK THEN . . . AM DELIGHTED THAT YOU ARE NOT SUFFERING. . . .62

  Nine days later Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany, and the National Socialists felt as though they were “in a fairy tale,” as Joseph Goebbels declared.63 Dietrich’s correspondence with both her American lover and her husband barely mentioned Hitler at first. Von Sternberg found Berlin unchanged in the three years that had passed since The Blue Angel. He stopped off there to have dinner with Alfred Hugenberg. When he went on to Vienna the next morning, the cab that drove him to the airport was delayed in front of the burning Reichstag. In Paris he met with Sieber, who telegraphed to Dietrich that he and von Sternberg talked over their problems, most likely in regard to her staying in the United States. (In February 1932, she had stated in an interview with an American newspaper that she was thinking of returning to Germany, but nothing came of that idea.) By the time von Sternberg was sitting in the taxi watching the Reichstag burn, he must have realized that the National Socialist takeover would also impinge on their plans, but in late March, Rudi was still lighthearted: HAPPY NOTHING SERIOUS HAPPENED ARE YOU WELL AGAIN . . . MILLION KISSES LOVE YOU PAPA.64