600,000.FROM CHRISTMAS 1930 TO MID-APRIL 1931, Marlene Dietrich was on holiday. Her family reunion by all accounts was happy, lively and uncomplicated, as Dietrich gave time and gifts to her daughter and shared her Hollywood income with Rudi and Tamara. According to Dietrich’s friend and colleague Stefan Lorant, one of the binding elements in the lifelong Dietrich-Sieber friendship was precisely the amicable financial arrangement between them. Sieber was working as an associate producer and assistant director for Paramount, usually at the UFA studios. Six-year-old Maria, meanwhile, although tended mostly by Tamara, seemed to lack the neuroses one might have expected in a child to whom her mother was a virtual stranger.
Unaware of budgets and indifferent to the concept of saving for the future, Dietrich had learned in Hollywood to be a free spender; much, after all, had been provided by the doting von Sternberg or the indulgent studio. By early 1931 she had accumulated the handsome after-tax sum of ten thousand dollars, much of which she began to spend prodigally.
Away from the demands of moviemaking, Dietrich enjoyed the usual social whirl, and in the first weeks of 1931 she resumed a romantic liaison with the composer Peter Kreuder, for whom she had commissioned a song called “Peter,” which she recorded. Kreuder was intelligent and attractive, but sometimes there seemed something vaguely disconsolate about him that no one could quite decipher. The combination of wit, sex appeal and wistful ennui was a federation of charms she found irresistible. Together they frequented the theater, concerts and opera.
Ever mindful of maintaining her controversial new eminence, however, she attended some events without escort. Learning that Charles Chaplin was visiting Berlin but was constantly protected from adoring hosts by ranks of police and bodyguards, she used the sheer force of her personality and a striking, mannish ensemble (grey serge suit, matching hat and shoes and a dark red tie) and forced her way past a security convoy into the Hotel Adlon. There she corralled a strolling photographer to take pictures of her strategically seated beside Chaplin, who stood by smiling but somewhat uncertain of her purpose. The photo makes it appear as though Chaplin is offering her a huge bouquet. She sent copies of the snapshot by the score to friends near and far, but mostly to her Hollywood secretary for distribution to the American press. In the film world she had quickly learned much more than technical matters.
That April, Dietrich attracted her own mob of admirers. At half past midnight, she and Maria boarded the boat train at the Lehrter Bahnhof, with Paramount’s Berlin staff and representatives of the Lloyd steamship line assembled. The press had been duly alerted for the ceremony of her return to California with her daughter. Kreuder, weeping unashamedly, led a brass band, and a medley of sentimental farewell songs filled the night air. Wearing a leopard coat and a green felt hat, Dietrich waved, smiling one moment and solemn the next, perhaps to synthesize her mixed emotions. Rudi would not be leaving Berlin, she explained, because of professional commitments, but the correspondent for the New York Times added the widely known accessory fact—that Sieber did not want to go to Hollywood merely “to be Mr. Dietrich.”
Mother and daughter had two other attendants: Gerda Huber had turned up again in Marlene’s life, and she was coming to America as private secretary and companion; and there was a nanny for Maria who also served as Dietrich’s maid. Whether the relationship between her and Gerda was still passionate cannot be determined; but with a few exceptions, Dietrich’s affairs with both men and women usually ran a swift, exhilarating carnal course before settling on the surer terrain of undemanding friendship.
AFTER A SERENE TRANSATLANTIC CROSSING, THE foursome could not have been prepared for the crush of reporters and photographers in New York—nor for the unexpected greeting by a lawyer who leapt forward, nervously asked Dietrich’s identity and then pressed a thick envelope into her hand. Not until she reached the hotel did she read the enclosed documents, and then at once she cabled von Sternberg in Hollywood. His former wife, Riza Marks (known in her few minor screen appearances as Riza Royce, and by then living in New York State), was about to file suit retroactively against Marlene Dietrich for alienation of her ex-husband’s earlier affection, a charge newly made in light of an interview Dietrich had supposedly given to an Austrian journalist. Thus a libel charge was added to the so-called heart balm suit. The damages sought for these offenses would be a total of 600,000.
The situation was somewhat bizarre from every viewpoint. For one thing, the von Sternbergs had been divorced since June 1930 and so he was evidently free to pursue his own life, with Dietrich or anyone else. But Mrs. von Sternberg’s attorneys claimed that she had a major case in light of the article in the Neues Wiener Journal, in which Dietrich had, a year earlier, slandered her: “Mr. von Sternberg would have obtained a divorce even if he had never met me,” Dietrich was quoted as saying. “Between him and his wife serious differences have arisen. I may tell you that I value in him not only the artist but the man.” Dietrich stoutly denied ever uttering such indelicate and inflammatory remarks.
Von Sternberg was outraged at Riza, and this led to an imprudent step taken in retribution: he ceased sending her regular alimony payments. This of course further complicated the problem, and as spring warmed to a torrid 1931 summer across America, so did Mrs. von Sternberg’s wrath blaze hotly. She cited him for contempt, he countered by paying only some of the moneys owed, and dates were set for court appearances in Los Angeles and New York. At the request of the cited parties, these were postponed until later that summer, and perhaps because no one involved was eager for the publicity, the case remained unknown to the press until then.
AS WITH EVERYTHING RELATIVE TO HER PUBLIC LIFE, Dietrich depended on von Sternberg to manage the matter. In California, he had already rented an elegant, ten-year-old Mediterranean home for her at 822 North Roxbury Drive, on the northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. The house had a large rear yard with swimming pool, ample space for Gerda and the maid, and a large kitchen. For the first weeks, however, Dietrich religiously avoided that room: von Sternberg had greeted her with mild but firm criticism of the ten to fifteen pounds she had gained in Berlin, and until mid-May she subsisted on a diet of tomato juice and soda biscuits.
Josef von Sternberg was, that spring of 1931, still more than mentor, manager and trainer to Marlene Dietrich. As a nod to the prevalent mores, he maintained a separate address, but soon it was widely known that he was living at Roxbury Drive and sharing the master suite with his star; their matching Rolls-Royce automobiles (hers bullet grey, his midnight blue) could be found parked each night in the crescent-shaped driveway. “Mr. von Sternberg loved good food,” Dietrich said with a wink years later. “So I went to the studio every day and did what he told me, and then I came home and cooked.” Dashiell Hammett, for one, kept his friends informed of industry gossip: von Sternberg and Dietrich, he reported to his mistress Lillian Hellman with typical irony, were “living in sin.”
THE SPORADIC CHARACTER OF THE DIETRICH-VON Sternberg relationship can only perhaps be understood as part of the entire complex they maintained between themselves. He performed the cinematic legerdemain securing her advancement from minor performer to international movie star, and this evoked her admiration and affectionate gratitude, of which sex was often Dietrich’s natural expression. She was especially inclined thus to comfort men like von Sternberg who seemed emotionally deprived and somewhat morbid in their aesthetic isolation. His self-imposed mission, she later said, was “to photograph me, make me laugh, dress me up, comfort me, advise me, guide me, coddle me, explain things to me”—and there has perhaps never been a more cooperative apprentice.
Although confident of his talents as director and cameraman, von Sternberg nevertheless bore a deeply rooted inferiority complex, and he sometimes alienated colleagues and friends with the kind of high-toned or egoistic posture that tries to masquerade such feelings. In the anteroom to his office at Paramount, for example, was an enormous diorama with commentary and still photos comprising the history of his films for all to see, as if they were approaching a museum or a great cathedral: “Opus One: The Salvation Hunters.” . . . “Opus Two: The Exquisite Sinner—Sabotaged by Thalberg,” and so forth.
His relations with men were usually characterized by some degree of jealous rivalry, and directing men was often a trial: “Cooper was very tall and Jo was not, and he couldn’t stand it if I looked up to any man in a movie . . . I didn’t understand that kind of jealousy,” Dietrich recalled. Additionally, women found his intellect formidable but his manner cool and tyrannical, and so he failed to attract precisely the sort of female attention he longed for (especially since his divorce). Von Sternberg also had the logical doubts often felt by the gifted autodidact: he had read widely and could discuss many fields with impressive knowledge, but he was uncomfortable doing so, fearing that his lack of formal education would unavoidably reveal vast gaps. Consequently, he occasionally allowed himself to be overwhelmed by those who spoke more but knew less. This led some who experienced his sergeant-major tactics at the studio to mistake his silence for smug superiority.
Divorced from a beautiful, dark-haired, doe-eyed actress, von Sternberg had eccentricities of dress, manner and speech that did not put him in great demand socially. Despising polite small talk, he preferred silence, or withdrawal to his studio for painting. Artist and dreamer, Josef von Sternberg was a touching combination of both the intellectual analyst and the aching romantic.
Because she was emotionally sympathetic to him, Dietrich was quick to fill his loneliness. “Marlene worshipped my father with a tremendous respect,” Nicholas von Sternberg said years later. “She loved his intelligence and abilities. He saw her as paint on his canvas—and she agreed wholeheartedly with this.”
Essentially a woman of clear preferences and antipathies, Dietrich concealed none of them. She disliked most modern art (von Sternberg’s occasional tutorials notwithstanding), noodles, horse races, evangelism, fish, after-dinner speeches, politics, American sandwiches, opera and slang; she favored Punch and Judy shows, apple strudel, circus performers, speeding in an open roadster, pickles, perfumes, romantic novels by Sudermann and doleful poetry by Heine.
There was, however, nothing about her of the Byronic heroine, and her attitude toward intimacy (as toward most things in life) was a great deal simpler than von Sternberg’s, and without much reflection. “I had nothing to do with my birth,” she said around this time, “and I most likely will have nothing to do with my future. My philosophy of life is simply one of resignation.” Entirely a woman of the moment, she readily admitted that year, “I never think about the future. I am not religious. I never think about anything there is no good in thinking about.” And von Sternberg knew this: “She attached no value to anything so far as I could ascertain, with the exception of her baby daughter, a musical saw and some recordings by a singer called Whispering Jack Smith.”
Her convictions, accordingly, were based simply on experience, and this had unequivocally taught her that Josef von Sternberg was certainly good for her. While he saw her as a beautiful woman who could wreak emotional havoc by simply being, he was at the same time one of the moths drawn ineluctably to her flame. Dietrich was an exciting woman whose eroticism was, to those she liked, neither cheaply accessible nor teasingly withheld. For von Sternberg, she also seemed to promise more than she at any one time delivered—not only more sensual satisfaction but also more artistic possibilities for her exploitation as an actress. Thus he continued to work with her and to present new facets of the jewel. She listened, learned, complimented, frankly depended on him; in other words, she nourished his need to be important and necessary to a woman. She did not tire of him, as she could of Cooper or Chevalier, who were charming and handsome but, she implied, intellectually limited.
However, intimacy revealed to von Sternberg another part of her nature: that there was perhaps nothing in her emotional life reserved for only one or even a dozen people she liked. And this realization prompted von Sternberg to withdraw. The coolly detached seducer of the self-destructive man, she was an earthy woman who simply cavorted according to her nature (thus The Blue Angel). But the tarnished performer could also be a faithful follower (Morocco), a hooker with a curious higher morality (Dishonored), a weary traveler living by wit and charm (Shanghai Express), a mother devoted to her child (Blonde Venus). Although she always insisted her roles had nothing to do with her true character, the truth was just the opposite: they were in fact coded chapters in a kind of tribute-biography von Sternberg made of her, a series of essays that could have been called “All the Things You Are.” It was, then, precisely when he filmed her that this director attempted to justify her.
But he also saw her, in everyday life, as capricious, even sometimes shallow; his fantasy about her was therefore being chastened and his goddess revealed as thoroughly human, frail and fallible. Therefore, when he needed to draw on the reserves of dream and imagination for a new picture, he began to withdraw from intimacy. The Dietrich he was to offer to the camera could not be the one he had just known privately. There had to be veils left in place, shadows and mists still separating the seeker from the object of desire: von Sternberg needed always to imagine her as the leading character of one of her own silent films, die Frau nach der man sich sehnt—the woman one ever longs for.
But they were not Svengali and Trilby—a designation attached to them from their earliest days in Hollywood. “People have said he casts a spell over me,” Dietrich said. “That is ridiculous. I am devoted, but I made the devotion myself because my brain told me to. It is only common sense to me. Can you think of anyone casting a spell over me?” In an odd way, the situation was effectively reversed: Marlene Dietrich cast the spell, Josef von Sternberg was enthralled.
FOR THE PRESENT, MARIA WAS UNAFFECTED BY HER mother’s fame and the occasional controversies. Enrolled at a private school with other celebrity children, she had an amiable personality, although she was necessarily somewhat reserved until she became proficient in English. Dietrich, perhaps with more blithe imagination than prudence, ordered Maria’s wardrobe—dresses, pajamas, robes, shoes—in exact replicas of her own fashions and styles (but without the gentlemen’s suits Dietrich came to favor more and more in Hollywood). This might have initially pleased the girl, but she was left with the distinct impression that she was little more than an awkward adjunct in her mother’s life. Dietrich shuttled her to stores, purchased expensive gifts for her (even miniature rings and bracelets) and frequently took her to the beach and to riding lessons. But an easy rapport never seems to have been established. “I felt that she wanted to be with other people,” Maria said later of her Hollywood childhood.
I remember how I used to cry at night. I remember a whiff of perfume, and my mother in furs standing there in my room, looking so beautiful. I was so jealous when she went out—I knew she wanted to see someone else rather than me . . . She would tuck me in, kiss me, and hurry, hurry . . . I wasn’t left alone. But I knew the servants and bodyguards were simply hired to take care of me, and I disliked them. I never told mother that I was unhappy.
With a curious irony, the pleasantest time of Maria’s first year in America paralleled the intensification of the Riza Marks–von Sternberg debacle. Rudi’s presence was required in California as a sign that the Sieber marriage was stable, and this, at least for a month that summer of 1931, created the facsimile of a traditional family unit. Riza’s deposition had been taken in a Los Angeles court, where she had told Judge Lester W. Roth that her husband (before their June 1930 divorce) had “furnished an apartment for [Dietrich], and she charged clothing to his accounts.” She then added a comment that caused some amusement: “He never let me charge clothing to his accounts.” With such remarks the case was beginning not to be taken seriously.
As attorneys for the injured party continued to complain more publicly, the press naturally swung into action at the Pasadena railway station when Rudi arrived on July 19. From then on, at restaurants and at sporting events the Siebers frequented during the following four weeks, photographers leaped from behind trees, bushes and taxis to document father, mother and daughter—a happy trio, embracing, smiling, unconcerned for the mills of rumor. The better to confirm their innocence, Marlene and Rudi widened the family circle to include von Sternberg, who moved temporarily into quarters at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I am here,” Rudi told a reporter about his wife that summer,
to testify by my presence and any other way that I can testify, that I know that these charges against her are utterly unfounded. I have known and agreed with her attitude that rather than avoid the publicity of these suits she should welcome and face these charges . . . Both of us, as good and moral friends of Mr. von Sternberg, sympathize with him in the attack that is being made against him by his former wife.
Sieber had constructed a brilliant riposte, one possible only because the complex logic of his marriage defied American comprehension. Several months later, after the editor of the Neues Wiener Journal admitted that the interviewer had fabricated Dietrich’s remarks concerning the von Sternbergs, Riza dropped all charges.
But there was one sour note. Rudi Sieber resented not so much his wife’s flagrant adulteries (such, after all, virtually defined her private life) as he did the potential effect of her conduct on Maria; he considered her, in this regard, something of a bad influence. Only when von Sternberg agreed not to return to live quite so openly with his wife and daughter did Sieber drop his threat to take Maria back with him to Germany—an ultimatum that caused Dietrich real panic (and a situation that directly inspired the plot development of the Dietrich-von Sternberg film Blonde Venus). Finally, Rudi departed Los Angeles in August to work at Paramount’s Joinville studio near Paris, a job facilitated through the intercession of none other than von Sternberg himself.
THEIR NEW PROJECT, WHICH BEGAN FILMING IN AUtumn 1931, was set in the most exotic of the four locales so far chosen for the von Sternberg-Dietrich pictures; Berlin, Morocco and Eastern Europe now seemed overshadowed by the ersatz China of Shanghai Express. As Madeleine (a slight variation on her own uncontracted name, after all), Dietrich was—to quote the script—“the notorious woman who lives by her wits along the Chinese coast,” and for whom “it took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” Aboard the eponymous train she meets a former lover (Clive Brook, as a British medical officer), whose life she saves when Chinese revolutionaries waylay the train.
Von Sternberg (taking his inspiration from parts of a story by Harry Hervey) dictated his outline and script to Jules Furthman and finally had something reminiscent of Tosca. Dietrich was never more alluringly rendered, photographed through an endless series of veils, scrims and smoky filters—all of it apposite for the latest version of von Sternberg’s tarnished woman. As before, she is a character capable of a deeper fidelity and a higher morality than what anyone might expect—higher even than that of the minister who advises her to pray and is himself converted by her subsequent genuine piety. This happens in a single moment that transcends the film’s simplistic story, when von Sternberg illuminates only Dietrich’s cool white hands, as she slowly joins them in prayer for the safety of her former lover against a bloodthirsty Oriental brigand. (Her hands are constantly emphasized in this picture; her legs are never exposed.) Shanghai Lily, who has abandoned her name (as Marlene abandoned Maria Magdalene, the original form of hers), now risks her life precisely because she can only be true to her onetime love: thus Shanghai Express carries forward motifs from Morocco and Dishonored. The train takes these principals on a kind of journey toward integration—thus the final scenes, in which the former lovers tentatively rediscover the love that once bound them. And once again, the roles are reversed: Dietrich wears the officer’s cap, brandishes his whip, takes control. She is, in fact, more active, more passionate here than in any prior film.
Von Sternberg, alternately delighted and (he felt) abandoned by Dietrich, spun a tale in which she is faithful in her infidelity while the hero remains loveless in his disjointed memories. According to cinematographer Lee Garmes (who won an Oscar for the film), “Clive Brook wanted to be Clive Brook [but] von Sternberg wanted him to be von Sternberg.” The character Jannings/von Sternberg (in The Blue Angel) was ruined by this woman; Menjou/von Sternberg (in Morocco) was abandoned; Oland/von Sternberg (in Dishonored) was betrayed; but Brook/von Sternberg (perhaps because of the recent history of Dietrich and von Sternberg) has another chance.
In this regard, the laces and veils through which we glimpse Dietrich in Shanghai Express are more than just sexy peekaboo: on the contrary, the shot of her folded hands is central to von Sternberg’s point, for it italicizes the fundamental mystery of the woman he perceived in Marlene Dietrich. “When I needed your faith, you withheld it,” she says to Brook. “Now when I don’t need it and don’t deserve it, you give it to me.” In the romantically complicated world of von Sternberg, love is of course never a matter of balance sheets, and needs and compensations rarely equalize.
After the filming was complete, Paramount arranged almost daily sessions for still photographs with cameramen like Eugene Robert Richee and John Engstead. Over these von Sternberg exerted his usual control, insisting that a high spotlight be used to bring out the shadows under her cheekbones. Often, according to Engstead, von Sternberg asked Dietrich to assume the most uncomfortable positions—to lean over a chair, for example, in an awkward contortion without support. Such a pose she held without complaint while he studied the situation and spoke to her only in German. When the stance was suitable, he began to work on her face, and at his command her head rose and fell, her lids lowered, her mouth opened slightly and his dream took shape. If Dietrich’s expression did not suit von Sternberg, he lapsed into angry English: “Think of something—think of anything! Count the bricks on the wall!” Only when he was satisfied did he then nudge Richee or Engstead, and at last the shutter clicked.
Because of this meticulous attention to her image and the enormous publicity machine operated by Paramount, Marlene Dietrich was, by the end of 1931, simply the most famous actress working in America, and the most chronicled worldwide. Vanity Fair gushed its wonder over the “genuine and tremendous hold she has on the public today,” and the London Times hailed her “careful elimination of all emphasis; the more seemingly careless and inconsequent her gestures, the more surely do they reveal the particular shades and movements of her mind.”
Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier were still in Dietrich’s life, escorting her (sometimes together, by her arrangement) to night-clubs and restaurants. Paramount’s press department tried to finesse the openness of these rendezvous by claiming their meetings were really about business—that she might appear in a new film with Cooper or Chevalier, but not even the fan magazines took this subterfuge very seriously. Von Sternberg, ever accommodating, sometimes agreed to further confound the press by being the third diner at a restaurant table.
The bewilderment multiplied when Dietrich donned a man’s tweed suit, knotted a four-in-hand and danced the tango at a dimly lit Hollywood club frequented by gay women in cross-dress but not, ordinarily, by image-conscious stars. Her partner on at least two such occasions was Imperio Argentina, the popular female dancer, singer and star of Spanish films, whom Dietrich courted with the usual bouquets of violets. Their evenings together were soon quieter and more intimate—at least until Argentina’s husband, director Florian Rey, revived the ancient marital rights of an Iberian male. He appeared at Roxbury Drive late one evening with a pair of steamship tickets and ordered his wife to pack for an imminent departure—thus Imperio had danced her last tango in Hollywood.
BY SPRING 1932, DIETRICH’S GAZE WAS ALSO DIrected toward Europe, and she startled the press and the public (not to say the studio) by announcing her intention to return to Germany. “I have enjoyed myself in Hollywood,” she told journalist Whitney Williams, “but the urge to be among my own people is stronger than the desire to remain here. Germany is not satisfied with me. It wants to hear me in German-speaking roles.”
This was a typical Dietrich ploy; in fact she was quite aware that in 1932 few Germans abroad were going home and hundreds of thousands were emigrating. The reason for her announcement (which Paramount took as a threat if she did not like her next assignment) was to force an issue relating to von Sternberg. Before the release of Shanghai Express he had decided that his career (and possibly hers) would be best served if he no longer directed Dietrich. But he had not foreseen her reaction. First she accused him of simple sexual jealousy; additionally, von Sternberg said,
She accused me of being determined to demonstrate that she was worthless [and] to aggrandize myself by letting her stand on her own feet; she was nothing and could do nothing without me [she insisted], and all I had done with her was to show how great I was.
Dietrich then went further, informing the studio that she simply would not work under another director—a threat she reinforced by her public statements about returning home. As she doubtless expected, there was panic on Marathon Street before economic considerations, as so often, resolved the dilemma: Paramount offered von Sternberg—then inundated with alimony obligations and attorneys’ fees—a substantial increase in salary for his new contract if he would prepare one last picture with Miss Dietrich. He capitulated, and she spoke no more about Germany.
And so, by April 1932, von Sternberg had drafted Blonde Venus (with the usual assistance on some dialogue from Jules Furthman)—yet another story of an entertainer, this time a wife and mother named Helen Faraday who returns to the stage to earn money for her mortally ill husband, Ned (Herbert Marshall). While he is abroad undergoing an expensive cure, she adds to her professional success a glamorous life as mistress of Nick Townsend, a wealthy politician (Cary Grant). Her husband, returning cured, learns about her life and claims that her immoral conduct denies her the right to keep their little boy, Johnnie (Dickie Moore). She flees with the child, is reduced to prostitution to support him, and is forced to give the boy up to her husband. Her sacrifices are duly rewarded, however, when she is later restored triumphantly to international fame and (against von Sternberg’s wishes but on the insistence of Hollywood’s moral watchdogs) to her family.
The screenplay was not completed without considerable friction between von Sternberg and Dietrich on one side and B. P. Schulberg, Paramount’s production chief, on the other. Director and star were told that her character was unsympathetic to the point of depravity, and that von Sternberg would have to tone down the episodes of the woman’s descent into prostitution. (Particular objection was made to a scene in which the child is hidden under a table while his mother flirts with a prospective customer.) Von Sternberg refused to submit to the required changes, blithely departing for a New York holiday after Schulberg brought in another writer (S. K. Lauren).
To no one’s surprise, Paramount then suspended von Sternberg, discontinuing his weekly salary when he failed to report for the first day’s shooting on Monday, April 25, 1932. But Schulberg and company did not adequately assess Dietrich’s devotion to her mentor, for she was also absent that day, announcing through her attorney Ralph Blum that she would certainly not appear in Blonde Venus with the newly assigned director, Richard Wallace. They had no choice but to suspend her as well, and a threat of lawsuits was announced on April 28. Some script compromises were hastily drafted, and on May 26 shooting began with scenes requiring Dietrich to act the doting mama, bathing and fussing over her little boy. By an odd coincidence, Dietrich felt her real-life motherhood threatened at the same time.
That March, the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped, but the baby was found murdered before the abductors specified how the 50,000 ransom was to be delivered. Throughout America, wealthy and famous parents panicked, and locksmiths, bodyguards and providers of security gates were kept busy round the clock in Hollywood. The children of movie stars (those of Harold Lloyd, Ann Harding and Bebe Daniels among them) were constantly attended, and Dietrich supervised the installation of iron bars over the windows of Maria’s room. Dietrich’s chauffeur, an austere ex-prizefighter named Briggs, escorted the child to school, and she was not permitted to wander undefended even in the enclosed yard at Roxbury Drive.
Perhaps predictably, the widespread promulgation of these security tactics provoked the very threats they were meant to forestall. In mid-May, extortion letters were received by Dietrich and by one Mrs. Egon Muller, wife of a German linen importer: if money was not delivered according to specific instructions, their children’s lives would be in danger. After Dietrich obeyed police advice to ignore the threat while they tried to trace the letter, a second was received, doubling the extorted sum to 10,000. This was to be left in a package on the rear bumper of an automobile at a particular location. Meantime, Mrs. Muller (also acting under police counsel), placed 17—instead of the 500 demanded—under a designated downtown palm tree.
At this point, frightening though the situation seemed, an atmosphere of comic unreality prevailed, for the swindlers were stupid and incompetent—straight from an episode of The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. On May 30, Dietrich was puzzled when she opened her morning mail demanding “the 483 you forgott to leave!” That same day, Mrs. Muller received a letter:
You Marlene Dietrich, if you want to save Maria to be a screen star, pay, and if you don’t she’ll be but a loving memory to you. Don’t dare to call detectives again. Keep this to yourself. Say, what’s the big idea! Attention! Is the future of your girl worth it? Wait for new information. 10,000 or pay heavily later on. You’ll be sorry. Don’t call for police or detectives again.
District Attorney Buron Fitts and Chief of Detectives Blaney Matthews revealed nothing when they ceremoniously called a press conference: “The people clipping and sending these letters are just a bunch of cheap chiselers. They are probably inexperienced, too, and the threats are more or less idle.” And so they were. The Sieber and Muller children were never threatened again, the clumsy extortionists were not apprehended, and by midsummer (although Dietrich kept her bodyguards on full-time alert for several months) the matter was no longer a prime concern to anyone.
THROUGHOUT THE ORDEAL, VON STERNBERG WAS the most anxious and vigilant protector, and in fact the danger of losing Maria that spring directly inspired the revised plot of Blonde Venus—wherein, despite her maternal devotion, Dietrich must forfeit her child. Perhaps because of his own childhood poverty and the enormous sacrifices lovingly made by his mother, Blonde Venus began as a paean to motherhood, as von Sternberg’s son later recalled: “When I was young, my father showed the film to me as an example of what he thought about motherhood, which he regarded with an almost maudlin sentimentality. Blonde Venus shows his great attachment and gratitude to his own mother for holding the family together in hard times.”
But the picture also contains the usual network of references to Josef von Sternberg’s relationship with Marlene Dietrich, and the plot synthesizes every love triangle in their previous quartet of films. Like von Sternberg, both the husband Ned and the lover Nick fall in love with the cabaret performer Dietrich when they see her onstage (shades of Zwei Krawatten); like von Sternberg, Nick then becomes her lover while the husband (Sieber) is in Germany, and the latter returns with threats to take her child away. There follows Helen’s half-willed descent to the life of the demimondaine—von Sternberg’s continual fascination for Dietrich’s prodigal erotic life (as also in The Blue Angel, Morocco, Dishonored and Shanghai Express)—and her final victory as a performer, dressed triumphantly in white top hat, tie and tails, a manly woman boasting she neither loves nor is loved.
By the finale Dietrich has, then, revealed the significance of her justly famous first song in Blonde Venus; whereas she had not sung at all in Dishonored or Shanghai Express, she is here given three important numbers. The first, “Hot Voodoo,” she sexily croons after emerging from a gorilla costume—her beauty latent even within the beast; the sequence directly recalls Dietrich in a woman’s sexy outfit after changing from a man’s evening suit in Morocco. This is followed by “You Little So-and-So,” in which the crooning Dietrich (smiling, winking, pointing a gentle accusatory finger at men in the audience) is teasingly photographed through potted palms and past rows of spectators. Finally, she sings—in her victorious male garb—“I Couldn’t Be Annoyed”; any crazy inversion of the so-called natural order is acceptable to her (“if bulls gave milk . . . if everyone stood on his head and on his hands he wore shoes . . . if we ate soup with a fork, and if babies brought the stork”).
BECAUSE OF THE DANGER TO MARIA, THE ATMOsphere during filming was tense, but throughout the summer Dietrich worked bravely and without evident anxiety. According to lyricist Sam Coslow she was “a joy to be with . . . a good trouper and nothing at all like the secretive, Garbo-like woman of mystery the Paramount press agents and fan magazine writers were selling to the public.” She was also affectionate and reassuring toward child actor Dickie Moore, whose parents also feared kidnappers, and who recalled that she was “obviously on close terms with [von Sternberg]. They yelled at one another constantly in German, but always ended up laughing and embracing.”
Blonde Venus was a surprise hit for Paramount when it opened that autumn, earning three million dollars in its first release. But most critics were as unenthusiastic as they had been about the previous von Sternberg films: by this time there was a consensus that her director rendered Dietrich enchanting to behold, but that as an actress she had little range. As for her own estimation of her talents, she was remarkably self-aware and candid: “I do not care,” she said at the time. “I am not an actress, no . . . I don’t like making pictures, and I haven’t got to act to be happy. Perhaps that is the secret.”
The criticism of her talents was in a way justified; no one ever accused Marlene Dietrich of being one of the great actresses of the century, convincing in a variety of roles. Subsequently, as if by sheer repetition and increasing confidence, she would display an occasional flair for comedy. But in a sense analysis of her movie acting fails to acknowledge that the primary requirement of the job is a mysterious connection between face and camera—and, as well, the careful presentation of a presence by studios and directors able to exploit appearances.
Marlene Dietrich brought to the roles, after all, precisely what was required by von Sternberg’s variations on a theme. The deeply muted passion, the affectless gaze, the slow and moody reactions, the grey envelope of suspicion that ever surrounded her character—everything had been calculated by him and realized by her for a specific effect. The public seemed to realize what reviewers and essayists in Depression America did not: that Lola Lola, Amy Jolly, X-27, Shanghai Lily and Helen Faraday were not women who begged for admiration or endorsement. Much less did they, according to the tradition of movie romance, plead for the counterfeit salvation of romantic love. Wounded and cautious, tainted by experience, wise, sometimes diffident but always accessible to the astonishment of living, they were at once all women von Sternberg imagined and the one woman Marlene Dietrich was.
NONE OF THIS HELD ANY INTEREST FOR HER. “IT IS behind the cameras I should like to be,” she admitted that year, “as Mr. von Sternberg’s assistant director. But he will not let me.” He did, however, offer her the kind of complete education in filmmaking technique directors rarely offer actors. D. W. Griffith was virtually a professor to his actresses, and Alfred Hitchcock often gave leading ladies extensive training in everything from story development to the final cut, but such tutelage is the exception in the swift, ordinarily impersonal business of moviemaking.
Von Sternberg taught Dietrich the fine points of cinema magic, especially as it pertained to the exhibition of herself. In addition to the positioning of lights and props there was of course a meticulous approach to makeup, and by 1933 (the fourth year under his guidance) she knew more about transforming the face, as John Engstead recalled, than makeup artists Elizabeth Arden, Max Factor and the Westmores combined. She knew that if she held a saucer over a candle a black carbon smudge would form on the underside, and that if a few drops of lanolin or mineral oil were warmed and mixed with the soot, this could be effectively applied to the eyelids. Painstakingly, she learned to use this concoction throughout the 1930s, heavier at the lash line, then fading up toward the eyebrow. (The entire procedure is detailed as Dietrich/Helen prepares backstage for her first cabaret number in Blonde Venus.)
But it was the camera’s potential for artifice that Dietrich learned most about from her mentor. The photographer George Hurrell recalled Dietrich pausing on a staircase between setups of a von Sternberg film, casually surveying the technicians and knowing, by this time, what each man was doing and why. For a session of still photos afterward, she assumed a pose, checked herself in a mirror and called, “All right, George—shoot!” The full-length mirror positioned near her, just to the side of the camera, was in fact Dietrich’s invariable requirement and she could be (as Hurrell recalled) quite angry if it had been forgotten.
But as 1932 drew to a close, there were other reasons for her to be annoyed. Von Sternberg’s conflict with Paramount over the development of Dietrich’s role in Blonde Venus had precipitated a number of private meetings with Schulberg and with vice-president Emanuel Cohen, and they agreed with von Sternberg that star and mentor might be well served if her next film—her last under her current Paramount contract—could be created with another filmmaker. The project chosen was Song of Songs, based on Edward Sheldon’s dramatization of the famous Hermann Sudermann novel; for it von Sternberg suggested Rouben Mamoulian, who had successfully directed Applause and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—and who, as everyone in Hollywood knew, had already been selected by Greta Garbo for Queen Christina later in 1933.
Song of Songs, tightly scheduled for an eight-week shoot that winter, required Dietrich to be on the set the morning of December 20, 1932; her attorney announced a few hours later that she would, in fact, not appear at all. Ignoring the possible legal and financial consequences of her actions, she would not submit to direction from Mamoulian (or any director other than von Sternberg) and renewed her threat that when her contract expired in February she would simply embark for Germany.