1,250 per week, for a film to be made in Hollywood that spring—with Josef von Sternberg as her director.“I FEEL AS IF I DIED IN HOLLYWOOD AND HAVE now awakened in heaven,” said director Josef von Sternberg without obvious irony. It was August 16, 1929, and he had just arrived in Berlin to work on the preparations for his new motion picture, a German-American co-production and one of Europe’s first sound films. Greeting the assembled press amid the opulence of the Hotel Esplanade’s grand foyer, von Sternberg—then a thirty-five-year-old of lively intelligence and multiple talents—was looking forward to working in Germany for the first time. He was surrounded that afternoon by producer Erich Pommer; the star of the film, Emil Jannings; writer Carl Zuckmayer; cameramen Günther Rittau and Hans Schneeberger; and composer Friedrich Holländer.
Born in Vienna as Josef Sternberg, he had had a gruellingly destitute life, even after arriving in America in 1901 at the age of seven. Years of severe malnutrition had stunted his growth (his full adult height was only five feet four inches) but not his agile mind. Denied formal education by the need to work, he read widely and in adolescence began to amass an impressive library of books on anthropology, comparative culture studies, psychology, art history, mythology and erotica. By the age of twenty-five he had held a variety of factory jobs and had served in the United States Signal Corps during the World War. He then decided to go to Los Angeles, where an earlier experience in an East Coast film laboratory prepared him for work as an editor, writer and assistant director. Among the pictures he worked on in 1923 was a trifle called By Divine Right, whose producers—impressed by the names of other Europeans in Hollywood (Erich von Stroheim, for example)—added an aristocratic-sounding von to his name—“without my knowledge and without consulting me,” as he later insisted in his autobiography. Unlike von Stroheim, however, he spoke English without any trace of a foreigner’s accent.
His account may be accurate, but over the next several years von Sternberg certainly became the kind of egoist who could have changed his own name. An autocratic and secretive man, he was fond of sporting Oriental dressing gowns, riding boots and even a turban, but he was not simply a flamboyant eccentric. An accomplished painter and photographer, von Sternberg was also an inspired designer of visual effects for motion pictures. By 1929, he had directed seven remarkably original and successful features, one of which (The Last Command) had helped earn Emil Jannings the first Academy Award ever given for best performance by an actor.*
Von Sternberg’s idiosyncratic, often iconoclastic pictures—among them The Salvation Hunters, Underworld, The Docks of New York and The Case of Lena Smith—were characterized by intense rhythms, structural perfectionism and a pitilessly realistic view of human perversity—all combined with a deeply felt and highly personal romanticism. Von Sternberg, the painter, patiently composed each frame so that his films are astonishing in the way they tell stories by the play of light and shadow on the landscape of the human face. In these black and white movies he fully exploited the techniques and props of the trade—diffused light, scrims, gauze, smoke, trees and shrubbery; von Sternberg expertly evoked psychological effects by the uncommon arrangement of common elements.
He was also, like many directors, more concerned with the craft of filmmaking than with the special treatment of actors; much less could he be bothered with turning them into stars. Considering indifference to actors essential for the right final visual effect, he once said, “I regard actors as marionettes, as pieces of color [on] my canvas.” Some puppets can be manipulated more easily than others, however. Jannings refused to be one of von Sternberg’s puppets (they fought constantly during the making of The Last Command), but he acknowledged his director’s genius and insisted that UFA and Paramount engage him for Janning’s first German talkie.
The project finally selected for this was Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel Professor Unrat, about a bourgeois teacher who marries a woman of easy virtue, thereby losing his standing in polite society. He then becomes a gambler and crooked politician, exploiting his wife until their mutual downfall. After some preliminary contributions by writers Carl Zuckmayer and Karl Vollmöller (and by Robert Liebmann, who also wrote the English lyrics for songs by Fredrich Holländer), von Sternberg himself was responsible for the final screenplay and the cinematic form it was to take. He omitted Mann’s social-political diatribe and concentrated entirely on one theme: a man’s self-abasement and ultimate degradation by his fatal obsession for a bawdy cabaret singer. This emphasis was at least partly inspired by Jannings, who had cornered the market on his portraits of pathetically humiliated men—in G. W. Pabst’s The Last Laugh, for example, as well as in von Sternberg’s The Last Command.
THAT AUTUMN, WHILE THE SCRIPT WAS POLISHED, the sets designed at UFA’s Neubabelsberg studios and a cast gradually assembled, von Sternberg had one persistent difficulty: finding the right actress to play the tawdry Lola Lola (a name he derived from Wedekind’s deadly Lulu). Jannings and Pommer advocated Lucie Mannheim or Trude Hesterberg for the role, but von Sternberg insisted audiences would find the former too attractive and the latter too familiar. Von Sternberg then decided to see two players he had already contracted for his film (Hans Albers and Rosa Valetti), who were appearing in Zwei Krawatten. From that evening, as he said, the film director’s search for Lola Lola was over; he would have no one else but Dietrich in the role. Looking at her, he saw an image of natural eroticism and bewitching indifference, a woman entirely (if unwittingly) capable of effecting a man’s complete ruin.
The following afternoon, von Sternberg brought Dietrich to meet Jannings and Pommer. The star and the producer asked her to remove her hat and pace the room, the usual procedure to determine that an actor at least had hair and no limp. Dietrich casually complied, strolling, as von Sternberg put it, with “bovine listlessness, a study in apathy, her eyes completely veiled.” Jannings and Pommer promptly rejected her for being both too plump and too casual; with equal alacrity, von Sternberg threatened to renounce the project and return to America unless he was accorded the right to give her a screen test. (In his autobiography, Jannings conveniently claimed to have championed Dietrich from the night he took von Sternberg to see Zwei Krawatten—a fiction denied by everyone else present at the time.)
Presuming that she was being considered for yet another minor role, Dietrich returned so they could hear her singing voice, but she appeared even more bored and unprepared than before, and was without the sheet music they had requested. She admitted that she had doubts as to how well von Sternberg could handle women onstage. And, in addition to all this, she had worn a characterless dress that hung formlessly from her body, but covered about twenty excess pounds. Von Sternberg, undeterred by her indifference, pinned the dress seductively and poured the right lights on her; by such technical wizardry, Dietrich seemed suddenly alive and casually carnal. She then sang, not beautifully but with a kind of defiant allure, a song about the end of an affair. “She came to life and responded to my instructions,” von Sternberg recalled. “Her remarkable vitality had been channeled.” Dietrich’s critics capitulated—Jannings presciently muttering that her sex appeal might threaten his dominance in the film—and at once Lucie Mannheim and the other aspirants were dismissed. From that moment, according to Dietrich, “von Sternberg had only one idea in his head: to take me away from the stage and to make a movie actress out of me, to ‘Pygmalionize’ me.” This was true, but theirs was a complex collaboration, which could not be so easily categorized.
Once she learned she was to play the leading role of a tarty femme fatale, Dietrich was both exhilarated and nervous, afraid she would look and sound inadequate alongside seasoned professionals like Jannings, Albers and Valetti. But she and her director worked brilliantly together, and he quickly allayed her anxiety—while she, eager to please, offered herself to him as Galatea, pupil and lover. “Even while rehearsals were in progress, they seemed to live for each other only,” according to Willi Frischauer, who was present during the making of what was soon called Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), after the cabaret where Lola Lola sings. Indeed the director and star did live for each other; everyone on the film knew von Sternberg and Dietrich met privately in his hotel suite, sometimes in the morning, often after the day’s work. Rudi knew of this at once, for his wife blithely introduced them, telling Jo she hoped one day the Siebers could meet Mrs. von Sternberg, who was in California. As Marlene hoped, the two men became quite friendly; thenceforth—because the Sieber marriage was now only a legality—there was in fact no rivalry between them. “At first,” according to Stefan Lorant, “Rudi was naturally let down: I think he always hoped for some kind of romantic reconciliation between them. But when it became clear she was on her own he settled for a good friendship. After all, he had Tamara, and probably some other partners, too.”
FILMING OF THE BLUE ANGEL LASTED FROM NOVEMber 4, 1929, to January 30, 1930, a span necessitated by the filming and recording of each scene in German and English (because post-dubbing was not yet possible). From the first scenes, the picture stresses the teacher’s harsh and humorless moralism with his students, boys who trade postcards of the naughty Lola Lola in top hat, short skirt, bare thighs and a provocative gash of black garters. Professor Rath sets out to scold the theatricals and the shameless woman for her bad influence, but after only one visit to her dressing room his long-repressed libido is hopelessly demolished by her sensuality. Amused and touched by the attentions of a scholar, Lola Lola spends the night with him. He subsequently proposes marriage, she accepts, and he abandons his profession to become a member of her tacky, peripatetic little repertory company.
Eventually, Rath is so degraded by his passion for Lola Lola that he becomes a clown in cheap vaudeville routines; she, true to her bawdy nature, blithely turns to other lovers for excitement. At the conclusion, the professor returns to the town where he taught and they met, only to find that he’s become a laughingstock. Mad with jealousy and rage, he nearly strangles Lola Lola after seeing her once again in the arms of another man. Finally he wanders distractedly back to his old classroom, where he dies clutching the desk that once represented dignity. Lola Lola, however, calmly survives, and at the end we see her provocatively straddling a chair at the Blue Angel, defying her cabaret audience to risk the fate of Professor Rath.
BOTH DIETRICH’S FEARS AND AMBITIONS PARALLELED her desire to please von Sternberg, whom she idolized. “Her behavior,” he recalled,
was a marvel to behold. Her attention was riveted on me . . . She behaved as if she were there as my servant, first to notice that I was looking about for a pencil, first to rush for a chair when I wanted to sit down. Not the slightest resistance to my domination of her performance. Rarely did I have to take a scene with her more than once.
As for Dietrich, she admitted forever after, “I didn’t know what I was doing. I just tried to do what he told me.” Her obedience guaranteed him complete control over every facet of her appearance, from which he drew the character of Lola Lola just as he designed the cabaret and the smallest prop. Everything was subject to his command and approval—her voice, walk, gestures and clothes.
Still embarrassed by what she considered her broad Slavic nose (despite surgery), Dietrich approached von Sternberg. “He pulled out a small vial of silver paint and drew a line right down the middle of my nose. Then he climbed up onto a catwalk and adjusted a tiny spotlight to shine directly on the silver line from above my head. It was like a miracle: he had reduced the width of my nose by nearly a third.” By such simple techniques can an actress’s lifelong gratitude be secured. Over the next six years, his authority and her docility would assure Dietrich’s complete education in the craft of film.
On the other hand, her acquiescence and subservience on the set of The Blue Angel (and her lifelong admission that she owed her entire career to him) was in clear contrast to her loud offstage complaints about the horrific torture to which she was daily subjected on the set. She complained to all who would listen that von Sternberg controlled her every gesture, every word—in German as well as in English—and predicted that the film would be an utter failure. She also broadcast Jannings’s almost pathological jealousy (which in fact led him to perform the attempted strangulation of Lola Lola somewhat too realistically).
But what really caused the actress such profound anxiety was an unforeseen conflict derived from her awareness that von Sternberg was making not so much a film about Lola Lola as about Marlene Dietrich herself. “I did not endow her with a personality that was not her own,” he always insisted. “I gave her nothing that she did not already have. What I did was to dramatize her attributes and make them visible for all to see.” And what he portrayed represents his sly, almost clinical amusement over Dietrich’s backstage life—not only as he knew it from his own affair with her, but also from her dedication to free love, something widely known because she made no secret of it. “The truth of the matter,” according to her good friend Stefan Lorant, “was that she was quite a free agent, although in this regard she was not exceptional. Berlin in the 1920s was a very free and open society, and theater people more than any others were committed to an unpuritanical pursuit of such love affairs as seemed mutually agreeable.”
In The Blue Angel, Dietrich/Lola Lola is like a force of nature, as the film’s most famous song says—“from head to toe primed, geared for love . . . and that is my world.” She is indeed a saucy little strudel, but her impact is not so much calculated as inevitable, like the doom of certain men at her mercy. She simply is, without premeditation and certainly without malice, although not without tragic effects on the unwary.
In the melding of von Sternberg’s Lola Lola with Dietrich, her life fused with his romantic-realist fantasies, creating a coalition of motifs that came to dominate each of the succeeding Dietrich-von Sternberg films. Thus the director’s frequent statement—“I am Miss Dietrich, Miss Dietrich is me”—has great significance. His personal supervision of every detail in his films made von Sternberg’s work remarkably confessional and accounts for his reluctance to discuss any aspect of his pictures except matters technical. This dominion over a product (justifying the designation of what the French critics call a movie auteur) depended on a kind of creative freedom and control rarely found in the business of filmmaking then or later. This unusual prerogative, independent of pressure from studio executives, was exerted only by von Sternberg and a few other great filmmakers—perhaps most notably Alfred Hitchcock, whose work is everywhere as emotionally and spiritually self-revealing as von Sternberg’s. Hitchcock, too, resolutely refused to discuss anything except technical matters, lest he make explicit the self-disclosure he had already presented onscreen. This unusual degree of control was permitted by studio executives only because their films, completed on time and within budget, were financially successful.
THE OVERARCHING MOOD OF THE BLUE ANGEL IS one of careless cruelty in a Berlin of dangerously loosened instincts. The film opens as a woman throws a bucketful of water against a window, behind which stands a defiantly risqué poster advertising the appearance of Lola Lola in cabaret. Moments later, Professor Rath discovers his canary dead in its cage: “No more singing,” his housekeeper sighs, calmly tossing the bird in the stove. This seemingly negligible opening actually announces the major linking device of the picture, for Lola Lola is soon singing to the staid professor—thus becoming his little birdie, as he becomes her strutting, crowing and ultimately dead mate.
Dietrich sings four numbers in the picture, the lyrics for each composed according to strict instructions from von Sternberg: “Ich bin die fesche Lola—I’m naughty little Lola”; “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt,” rendered in somewhat diluted English as “Falling in Love Again”; and “Nimm dich in Acht vor blonden Frauen—Watch out for blondes, for they have a certain flair for stripping you bare and then leaving you.” But most provocative was her delivery of “Kinder, heut’ abend—A Regular Man.” The song (in a recording taken from the soundtrack) became almost an anthem for the Berlin woman of the 1920s hoping to meet a regular (richtige) guy:
Spring has come, the birdies sing,
All is bright and cheerful—
Hear the cuckoos in the trees
Givin’ us an earful.
Funny how this time of year
Always gets you feelin’ queer—
There’s nothing to it,
I gotta get a man that’s a man—
That’s a regular man!
If I can’t find one
there’s not a girl who can—
that’s a man—that’s a regular man!
Say, if I find one I’ll sure teach him a few—
That’s a man, that’s a regular man!
Men there are both thin and fat,
Large and small and stocky—
Rich and poor and nice at that,
Bashful and quite shocking.
How he looks I care a lot,
I can pick him like a shot.
There’s nothing to it—I gotta get a man—
that’s a man, that’s a regular man.
And so, contrary to the housekeeper’s remark, there is indeed more singing, most notably at the wedding of Lola Lola and Rath, where he crows for joy—an overgrown rooster animated by passion for his little chickadee. “Me? Marry?” she had cried when he proposed, almost hysterical with laughter. Does he not know better? From the discovery of the dead canary we had moved earlier to his disgust over his breakfast eggs, then to his imitation of a lovebird at his wedding meal. Finally, he is plastered with rotten eggs as a stage clown, and then, in the throes of madness, the crowing becomes an uncontrollable, manic shriek.
The Blue Angel is suffused with images of willing enslavement: cufflinks become handcuffs, a professor’s gown becomes a strait-jacket; and Rath assumes the role of the company clown, with a wide collar resembling a slave’s neckband. (In our first view of Rath, he is teaching from his desk, tyrannically taking his students through Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” The tragic resolution of the soliloquy is realized at the film’s conclusion, when he dies clutching that same desk.)
In concrete terms, then, The Blue Angel and its tale of a man destroyed by his own illusions is drenched in decadence, saturated with images of voyeurism (by the schoolboys, by Rath himself, by the slavering cabaret audiences), fetishism (the cherished relics of Lola Lola’s underwear, her stockings, her hat) and sadomasochism; everything is dark and perilous in this twilight world of semifurtive eroticism. No wonder that the officials at UFA (now led by the tycoon Alfred Hugenberg, later a member of Hitler’s cabinet) did not take up Dietrich’s option. They felt The Blue Angel was un-German; it was, after all, directed by an Austro-American, it offended the strict ideals of the German academic system, and it outraged traditional morals in the bargain. In 1933, the film was banned in Germany by Nazi decree.
As von Sternberg recalled, Dietrich had a kind of brilliant tactical reaction to UFA’s lack of enthusiasm. She claimed the film would ruin her (she would be typecast as a whore) whether it became successful or not. She also resented the publicity released prior to the premiere, complaining that Jannings and the director were being emphasized while she was being ignored—and this, she stoutly maintained, at least partially explained why UFA was not offering her additional work. As von Sternberg noted, “Regardless of her conviction that the film just being assembled [edited] would ruin her forever, she wanted that ruin to be properly publicized.” Dietrich also realized that what von Sternberg had promised would soon be true: her name would be known everywhere.
Clearly, then, Dietrich’s lifelong assertion that she “simply wasn’t ambitious, nor have I ever been” cannot be taken seriously. She wanted success most desperately, hence her earnest cooperation with a man whose abilities and intelligence she greatly respected. She was not, in other words, a woman who since 1923 had masochistically sustained deprivations, rejections and uncertainties without any hope, conviction or desire that perseverance would ultimately show a profit. If she had not been ambitious all this time, if she had really preferred being a simple Hausfrau, then (one might ask) why had she been dashing from rehearsal hall to studio, auditioning for roles she says she did not want?
Quite the contrary. That February she wrote to critic Herman Weinberg, who had sent her reviews of her film performances prior to The Blue Angel, asking him to send her three copies of each original newspaper that mentioned her. When he complied, she sent an autographed studio photograph—hardly the style of a woman indifferent to her career and her future. Dietrich’s indifference had always been a wily affectation; by 1930, the pretense was refined to a social art that she could turn to her professional advantage. Soon the insolent pose of indifference would make her one of the most rapturously photographed women in history with a career three times as long as Garbo’s.
If UFA did not want her, she then asked von Sternberg, what about Paramount Studios in Hollywood, his home base? His reply came in the person of B. P. Schulberg (the studio’s chief production executive), who in late January visited Berlin, where von Sternberg showed him Dietrich’s test and some excerpts from the film still being edited. Schulberg made Dietrich an offer she thought absurdly low and forthwith rejected. Von Sternberg then departed for America in early February 1930, after completing the final cut of The Blue Angel. Apparently Dietrich’s mood altered in his absence, because before the month was out, she went to the office of Ike Blumenthal, Paramount’s Berlin representative. He offered her a new one-picture deal at 1,250 per week, for a film to be made in Hollywood that spring—with Josef von Sternberg as her director.
This contract she signed, informing Rudi that she would be leaving him and Maria for only a few months, and that she would return with handsome savings for them all (Tamara included). The prospect of American employment was enormously attractive, especially because life in Germany was growing more perilous daily. She would embark on a kind of reconnaissance mission, she told her husband, to determine how her life and career might be eventually pursued in the United States.
Eager to depart, she did so within hours of the premiere of The Blue Angel at the Gloria Palace on the evening of March 31. But first she made her obligatory appearance at the gala, dressed in a full-length white fur coat and carrying a spray of red roses. Cameras clicked and people applauded, but when she put the coat and flowers aside, there was a ripple of knowing laughter from the press and public: “She had pinned a bunch of violets in a place where no woman ever wears flowers—just where the legs part,” as an eyewitness recalled. Afterwards, according to the Berliner Zeitung, “Young people rushed her and begged for autographs. She had to be rescued by police so she could get to her car.” Rudi was working in Munich as a production assistant on a film, so it was Willi Forst who escorted Dietrich to the boat train from Berlin to Bremerhaven.
Leaving so quickly, she missed the superb reviews. “Marlene Dietrich is the event,” reported Berlin’s respected critic Herbert Jhering, in the Börsen-Courier on April 2. “She sings and performs almost phlegmatically, but this she does in an exciting way. She is common without being common, and altogether extraordinary.” The Licht Bild Bühne, in but one of dozens of typical raves, called her “fascinating, like no other woman before on film, [with] the silent, narcotic play of her face and limbs and her dark, exciting voice.”
Among the other passengers bound for New York on the Bremen were James Stroock—owner of Brooks, the New York theatrical costume company—and his wife, Bianca. Common professional interests created a friendly rapport with Dietrich, and at first Bianca (unaware of the connotation) was simply flattered when a bunch of fresh violets was delivered to her each morning. The meaning of these little posies became clear, however, when Dietrich invited the pretty, stylish Bianca to her cabin, offered her a glass of champagne and showed her a book on the techniques of lesbian lovemaking. Surprised at what was by now an obvious proposition, Bianca declined; Dietrich, amazed by the rebuff, simply said, “In Europe it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive.” And not only in Europe, as it turned out: her remark to Bianca Stroock would neatly summarize her conduct even in Hollywood, becoming a kind of lifetime motto in the coming decades.*
But in New York there was no opportunity for Dietrich to devise such provocative scenes. Arriving April 9, she was met by Paramount’s East Coast publicity team and a squad of reporters they had dragooned, and over four days she was put on intensive display. Because the studio hoped to present her as their version of Greta Garbo, Dietrich was instructed to imitate her reticence and to deflect all questions about her private life; hence Paramount’s executives were not at all pleased when she told the press that yes, she was married and had a child. In Hollywood’s so-called golden age, such an admission quickly threatened the studio’s carefully placed veil of mystery. (Dietrich was also shrewd enough to know that this forthrightness about her family could lower any raised American eyebrows about her freewheeling sexual life.)
The interviews peaked on the evening of April 12, when Marlene Dietrich was introduced to the American public on the ABC radio network’s “Paramount-Publix Hour,” broadcast to the entire nation. Her English, tolerable in Germany, now sounded unsteady and heavily accented, and she spoke slowly, translating everything before she spoke. But the press (and thousands of listeners, judging by the subsequent enthusiastic mail) found her intriguing.†
Typically, the Hollywood welcome was more elaborate. When Dietrich arrived by train in Los Angeles, she was met not only by von Sternberg and photographers from the city’s eight newspapers but also by a five-piece German band in full regimental regalia playing Viennese waltzes and Silesian polkas; her reaction to these inept selections was not documented.
Within days, Paramount arranged for a formal reception at the Ambassador Hotel to introduce Dietrich to the press. According to photographer John Engstead, who later created some of her most alluring images, she arrived in a blue chiffon dress that was unflattering to her rather opulent figure. Next day, on mandate from von Sternberg, she began a strict regimen and after three weeks of diet and exercise had lost fifteen pounds. When she began her first American movie that spring, she weighed 130, but von Sternberg considered even that too much for a woman who, at five feet five, was an inch taller than he.
* Jannings received the Oscar for his combined work in that film and in The Way of All Flesh.
* Geraldine Brooks (as she called herself professionally), daughter of James and Bianca Stroock, later married Budd Schulberg, who was the son of Paramount’s B. P. Schulberg.
† Among many other Continental imports over the years: Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman (from Sweden); Simone Simon and Leslie Caron (from France); Vilma Banky (from Hungary); Pola Negri (from Poland); Alla Nazimova and Anna Sten (from Russia); Luise Rainer and Hedy Lamarr (from Austria); Alida Valli, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida (from Italy); Melina Mercouri (from Greece).