100,000.AFTER SHE RETURNED FROM GERMANY TO HOLlywood at the war’s end, Marlene Dietrich was the guest of Orson Welles and his wife Rita Hayworth, at their home on Carmelina Drive in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Several film projects failed to reach even serious negotiations with Dietrich, and for several weeks she turned to managing the household chores and social calendar. After a few hints and then a blunt request, she prevailed on Welles to arrange an introduction to Greta Garbo, whom she had seen only from afar and longed to meet. According to him, Dietrich simply adored Garbo; others had the impression that she wanted to see how Garbo looked after several years’ absence from the screen, and that she also wanted to meet the woman whom Mercedes de Acosta had once loved, perhaps because Dietrich’s affair with de Acosta was also history by this time.
And so a party was arranged, at the home of Clifton Webb in Beverly Hills. Welles introduced the two women, and Dietrich gushed that she was thrilled, calling Garbo divine, a goddess, an immortal muse and inspiration. Garbo, who hated flattery as much as crowds, managed only a tight smile and a curt acknowledgment designed to end the conversation, but Dietrich persisted, her praise rising like religious veneration. Garbo, too, persisted, replying nothing but muttering distracted thanks until the exhausted worshiper finally withdrew. En route back to Carmelina Drive later that evening, Dietrich said to Welles, “Her feet aren’t as big as they say.” But the topic was not closed. Over drinks at the house, she insisted that, contrary to popular lore, Garbo certainly did wear makeup: “She has beaded eyelashes! Do you know how long it takes to have your eyelashes beaded?” Welles had no idea, but the matter was not further explored. In any case, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo had met at last; there is no evidence they ever did again.
BY CHRISTMAS 1945, LA DIETRICH WAS IN PARIS with Jean Gabin. The war had aged him: his hair had gone to grey, he had gained too much weight despite military service, the facial lines were deep, and his normally dour expression seemed graver. She, however, kept her hair a lustrous, lacquered blond and her waistline slim, and the few lines round her mouth and eyes were artfully concealed with the best cosmetics. Gabin looked at least a decade older than forty-one, while Dietrich seemed five years younger than forty-four.
Their disparate appearances would perhaps have been meanly discussed in Hollywood, but in postwar Paris Dietrich and Gabin made an attractive Continental couple. “She is the only married actress whose romance is discussed openly by columnists, magazine writers and herself,” noted an American reporter. “There is nothing hush-hush about her and Gabin. She is married to Rudolf Sieber, but they have an understanding. So much so that he has accompanied her on dates with Gabin.” It was still to Rudi’s advantage to make himself agreeable, of course, since the bulk of his income came from Dietrich’s career (however inactive).
Thus happily reunited but each without work, Gabin and Dietrich decided to look for a movie they could make together to subsidize her protracted sojourn in Paris. To the rescue came the great Marcel Carné, who had directed Gabin in two prewar pictures and during the war had made Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), which was, then and forever after, generally regarded as one of the finest films of all time. With his screenwriter Jacques Prévert, Carné was preparing a kind of fatalist, allegorical romance about occupied Paris called Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of Night), whose leading roles he immediately offered to Dietrich and Gabin.
In her statements to the press in 1945 and 1946, she insisted her USO tours had taught her much about “real life,” about courage and commitment, life and death and basic values. Dietrich said she could never return to Hollywood and her former custom of glamorous moviemaking. This was an appetizing morsel of self-promotion designed to suggest the New Dietrich, changed and chastened by the horror of war, and America swallowed it whole. But as Carné recalled, it certainly did not alter her approach to her first postwar film project in January 1946:
Marlene had stipulated in her contract that she would not have to do the picture until she had approved the script, and she began to review it with us, scene by scene. She was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic and began to make a thousand suggestions—each one of which seemed, to Jacques and me, utterly absurd. One example: she wanted to play a night scene completely out of character, descending from a cab and paying the driver by taking the money from the top of her stocking!
Director and writer stood firm, and not even Gabin could convince Dietrich that her role as a benighted wife in war-torn Paris simply must not be prettified. She was equally adamant, and so—“deeply hurt at seeing her talent misunderstood” (thus Carné, with light sarcasm)—she refused to do the picture.
Within days (before the end of February), producer Marc Pelletier contacted her with an alternative project, to be directed by Georges Lacombe. Martin Roumagnac was based on a novel about a high-class prostitute whose passionate affair with her building contractor ends when he learns about her profession, kills her, stands trial, and is then murdered by one of her former lovers. Neither the actors nor the director could enliven the dreary script, and when the film was released (in America as The Room Upstairs) it was dismissed as a languid, unconvincing bundle of clichés, notable only for the many shots of Dietrich’s legs and the Sternbergian lighting—all of this unofficially supervised by herself. But she was consoled for its failure by her fee, which was then the equivalent of 100,000.
Despite an arduous production schedule and much evening reshooting, Dietrich insisted that she and Gabin make themselves available to Parisian social and cultural life whenever possible. She sang at a gala revue honoring the Royal Air Force, and on March 15 the couple dined with Noël Coward, whose plays and films she had admired for over a decade, and whose friendship she vigorously cultivated; Coward, on the other hand, had the unenviable task of trying to mediate a Dietrich-Gabin argument that raged throughout the meal. According to Coward, Dietrich “looked lovely but talked about herself a good deal”—her favorite topic of conversation, as he and others learned.
The dispute apparently concerned Gabin’s resentment over Dietrich’s resumption of her affair with General Gavin. For one thing, the names of Gavin and Gabin confused Parisian gossips and journalists, who reported that Dietrich was seen somewhere with Gavin when she had actually been at another place with Gabin, and vice versa; at one point, it was rumored that Gavin would be her co-star in a forthcoming film. Public confusion or no, Dietrich demanded (as always) her independence. But when Gabin countered that he would, therefore, pursue another actress he had met, Dietrich was furious. As usual, she could not approve her lover’s dalliance. Referring to Sarah Bernhardt, she insisted, on the contrary, that it was the prerogative of a woman artist like herself to have a lover (even, presumably, simultaneous lovers).
Coward was not the only witness to the troubles. The writer Max Colpet (formerly Kolpe), whom she had known earlier in Berlin and recently met again, was also in Paris, and in the middle of one night his telephone rang:
“Are you alone?” she blurted, without introduction.
“Yes, why?” Colpet replied, recognizing her voice.
“Can I stay overnight at your place?”
“I’ll tell you when I get there.”
The matter was simple. Dietrich had had a terrific fight with Gabin when she was preparing for an evening with General Gavin. She took refuge with Colpet, prevailing on him to escort her for her rendezvous with the general at Monseigneur, a faded old romantic nightclub overladen with Russian artifacts. In such movie-set surroundings, filled with the sound of a strolling gypsy orchestra, Gavin looked very much the young, heroic leader, recalled Colpet, who added that he “had the impression that she had protracted her affair with Gavin in order to demonstrate her independence from Gabin, who was very possessive.” She also needed good contacts, superb references, and access to quick transport to London or New York, where she had possible film work pending. For all these reasons—and because Gavin was the perfect, glamorous escort and an adoring admirer—the affair continued through 1945 and much of 1946.
But Dietrich’s cavalier independence and the role of lover primus inter pares was finally too much for Jean Gabin; within the year he married the French actress Maria Mauban. This was a devastating blow to Dietrich, who could never understand why a man she still loved (or ever had loved) would commit to another woman. When Robert Kennedy asked her, at a Washington luncheon in 1963, why she said she left Jean Gabin, she replied, “Because he wanted to marry me. I hate marriage. It is an immoral institution. I told him that if I stayed with him it was because I was in love with him, and that is all that mattered. He won’t see me anymore. But he still loves me.”
Josef von Sternberg’s postwar marriage was an equivalent shock to her. (An aphorism frequently on her lips was: “When I devote myself to someone, no one can undo it.”) So far as she was concerned for herself, the Sieber marriage was a sensible model anyone could follow: one married once, for the protection it provided from other, overeager lovers; one married once for the social status and for the children’s legitimacy—and then damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
This attitude was for a time inherited by her daughter. Not until 1946, when Maria wanted to become engaged to a New York scenic and toy designer named William Riva, did she yield to Dean Goodman’s request to terminate their marriage, which had been in name only since the end of 1943. As Maria might have expected, Dietrich again disapproved of the man she chose and strongly discouraged another precipitous marriage. But this second engagement lasted a year, by which time the couple decided to marry (on July 4, 1947) with or without Mama’s blessing.
On January 11, 1946, the night before the Victory March in New York, Walter Winchell announced that Marlene Dietrich and “a certain very young general,” who were both in town for the parade, would soon marry. Informed of this embarrassing (and untrue) development by a phone call from Barney Oldfield, Gavin coolly said the story was of no concern to him. His wife, who had known of the affair for some time, reacted differently, and within two years she was granted a divorce. “I could compete with ordinary women,” she said privately, “but when the competition is Marlene Dietrich, what’s the use?”
AFTER SEVERAL WEEKS IN PARIS THAT SPRING AND summer, the Gavin affair ended. Dietrich now had no prospects of European film work and therefore accepted an offer from Hollywood to appear in a film called Golden Earrings. “I must call the general in Paris” were her first words as she stepped off the airplane and was met by the director Mitchell Leisen.
“But you’ve just come from Paris!” he said.
“He made me promise I would call him,” Dietrich replied, “because he was worried about me. He wants me to marry him, but I can’t be an army wife.” Leisen was an expert filmmaker but a poor keeper of confidences, and within hours Hollywood buzzed with the news of Dietrich’s romance with a military hero. Nonsense, insisted the most alert gossips: it was Gabin she would eventually marry; there was no one in her life named Gavin.
Because she had been absent from Hollywood three full years (and had not starred in a successful film since 1939), Leisen had to convince Paramount that Dietrich was the right choice to play Lydia, a vulgar but seductive Middle European gypsy who helps a British intelligence officer smuggle a poison-gas formula out of Nazi Germany just before the war by disguising him as her peasant husband. When she was first offered the role, Dietrich was still in Europe and visited gypsy camps to see how the women looked, dressed and behaved. Now at the studio for wardrobe and makeup tests, she assured Leisen she would play Lydia with complete fidelity to realism—to European neorealism, in fact, which flinched at nothing.
This she did astonishingly well, for although Dietrich could not of course completely abandon her pretension to youthful beauty (nor would the studio have desired it), she dispatched the role of a greasy, sloppy gypsy with the kind of fresh comic panache not seen since her Frenchy in Destry Rides Again. As a sex-starved wench, she swoops down on the stuffy hero played by Ray Milland, supervising his transformation into a Hungarian peasant. Munching bread, gnawing on a fish-head supper, spitting for good luck, diving for Milland’s lips and chest, she is the complete, man-hungry virago—at once crude, funny and sensuous throughout the aridly incredible narrative. “You look like a wild bull!” she whispers to Milland after she has finished with his disguising makeup, pierced his ears and clipped on the golden earrings; then she nearly growls, “The girls—will—go—mad—for you!” Often resembling the seductive young Gloria Swanson, Dietrich does not simply breathe in this picture; she seems to exhale fire.
But the appealing comic nonsense of the completed Golden Earrings did not apply to the rigors of production, for there were bitter feuds. Milland, who had just won an Oscar playing an alcoholic in Billy Wilder’s harrowing film The Lost Weekend, disliked Dietrich and feared she would steal the picture (which she handily did). He also found her commitment to realism somewhat revolting—especially in the eating scene, when she repeatedly stuck a fish in her mouth, sucked out the eye, pulled off the head, swallowed it and (after Leisen had shot the scene) promptly stuck her finger in her throat and vomited.
To make matters even more awkward for Paramount as they considered her option, the finished film was condemned by the watchful Legion of Decency, which disdained both Dietrich’s sexually seething characterization (she could not keep her hands off Milland) and this pair of unmarried gypsies romping lustily in the woods. The Legion’s censure was officially an acute embarrassment for the studio, although it was also splendid free publicity: the picture returned three million dollars in the next two years. After filming was completed in mid-October, she scrubbed off the four layers of dark makeup for the last time, tossed aside the greasy black wig, treated herself to an array of new suits and promptly departed for an extended holiday in New York.
On January 4, 1947, Dietrich embarked for Paris and a film deal that never materialized. Reunited with Rudi, she tried to obtain a visa so that he could visit his aged father in Germany. Then, to ease his disappointment when they were unsuccessful, she gave him half the profits on a sale of the Felsing jewelry stores in Berlin, which she inherited that spring when they were finally returned to the family after the liquidation of Nazi control of private businesses. Rudi was able to send his parents a large portion of the share he received from Dietrich, and thanks to her their final years were much more comfortable.
Neither of her parents replied to Maria’s announcement of her plan to marry William Riva that summer, although Dietrich sent a refrigerator to their tiny apartment at 1118 Third Avenue. Only after she realized that the marriage was indeed a happy and apparently permanent one did she (somewhat reluctantly) endorse the union. The birth of John Michael Riva on June 28, 1948, made Marlene Dietrich a grandmother, and by 1951 she was sufficiently resigned to the marriage to take 43,000 from a tax refund and buy the Rivas a town house on East Ninety-fifth Street.
From Paris that summer of 1947, Dietrich wrote to her Paramount hairdresser, Nellie Manley, that she was “living quietly at the Hotel Georges V, cooking whatever can be cooked. The attitude and the feelings of the people are not as good as they were during the war. It is depressing, but not hopeless. We must all see to it that this is changed and things are better.”
Her own fortunes improved that August, when Billy Wilder stopped in Paris to visit her after filming exterior shots for a forthcoming “black comedy” about life in occupied postwar Berlin; he offered Dietrich the role of Erika von Schlütow in the picture, to be called A Foreign Affair. At first she rejected it, hesitating to play the German mistress of an American army officer who loses him to a winsome visiting congresswoman and is then taken away by military police after her Nazi past is revealed. Nor was she persuaded by the Frederick Hollander songs commissioned for her. Dietrich agreed to the job only when the director showed her screen tests made by two American actresses whose performances she considered hilariously bad. By the end of October she was packing for the trip to California.
But there was a good reason to stop in New York, for on November 18 she was awarded the Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor (at the time conferred only by the War Department). At a ceremony at the United States Military Academy, West Point, General Maxwell D. Taylor read the somewhat inaccurate (and breathless) citation:
Miss Marlene Dietrich, civilian volunteer with the United States Service Organization Camp Shows, performed meritorious service in support of military operations in North Africa, Sicily and Italy from April 14 to June 16, 1944, and in the North Atlantic Bases in Europe from August 30, 1944 to July 13, 1945, meeting a gruelling schedule of performances under battle conditions, during adverse weather and despite risk to her life. Although her health was failing, Miss Dietrich continued to bring pleasure and cheer to more than five hundred thousand American soldiers. With commendable energy and sincerity she contributed immeasurably to the welfare of the troops in these theatres.
The allegation that the Medal of Freedom was unofficially sponsored by Patton or Gavin has never been confirmed. However, the fact that she deserved the award seems undeniable.
A week later she stepped from the train at Union Station and accepted a bouquet of flowers from her new director. Wilder, who had known her in Berlin even before The Blue Angel, had co-authored screenplays in Germany, France and America (among them Garbo’s Ninotchka, written with Charles Brackett) and had begun directing in 1942. By 1947, Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend were praised as remarkable excursions to the frontiers of human perversity; Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and many more were yet to come. With his patented brand of acerbic moral cynicism, Wilder had prepared A Foreign Affair as a satiric criticism of widespread military corruption amid the ruins of Berlin, of the Allied involvement in a shameful black market, and of the self-righteous abuse of German civilians by occupying American soldiers. When filming began in December, Dietrich’s co-star as the prissy, investigating congresswoman was Jean Arthur; the leading man was John Lund; and the pianist in the cabaret was none other than Hollander himself, invited in tribute to his long association as Dietrich’s composer.
Like Pasternak, Wilder understood the value of deglamorizing Dietrich. Her first appearance in A Foreign Affair goes beyond anything in Golden Earrings: her hair is unbrushed, her face smirched with toothpaste, water trickles from her mouth as she brushes and gargles. This character is no Amy Jolly, no Concha Perez. As the story proceeds, it becomes clear that Erika can manipulate American officers as easily as she did Nazis, one of whom was her lover and all of whom she easily attended as a fashionable companion. But she has suffered privately, socially and by postwar deprivation for her guilty past; her act at the Lorelei cabaret, singing “Black Market” and “The Ruins of Berlin,” expresses her cool cynicism, her distrust of any nation’s claim to moral supremacy and her necessary, fearful suspicion of everyone. The role was perfect for Dietrich, for she had been long confirmed by Hollywood as von Sternberg’s icon of the tarnished woman masked with pain and capable of the sudden acknowledgment of her own need for tenderness and forgiveness—indeed, for redemption from the past. “I knew,” Wilder said years later, “that whatever obsession she had with her appearance, she was also a thorough professional. From the time she met von Sternberg she had always been very interested in his magic tricks with the camera—tricks she tried to teach every cameraman in later pictures.”
The film, her role in it and indeed her entire public image up to 1947 were synthesized not only by Wilder, but by Frederick Hollander, who was through long association certainly one to understand the swirling patterns of Dietrich’s complex emotional history. Her singing of his touching, bittersweet “Illusions” remains certainly one of the least affected, most deeply felt recordings of her entire career, unmatched even by any of the versions of it she recorded later. In the recording studio and on the set next day—with only Hollander for her accompanist—she somehow cut through every one of her usual tendencies to make a song just a little bit more theatrical, just a bit more perfect, too right. As we hear “Illusions” in the finished film and see her face as she seems to sing to and of herself and her character without affectation, we feel the sting as the words become a summary of her own life:
Want to buy some illusions,
Slightly used, second-hand?
They were lovely illusions,
Reaching high, built on sand.
They had a touch of Paradise,
A spell you can’t explain:
For in this crazy Paradise,
You are in love with pain.
Want to buy some illusions,
Slightly used, just like new?
Such romantic illusions—
And they’re all about you.
I sell them all for a penny,
They make pretty souvenirs.
Take my lovely illusions—
Some for laughs, some for tears.
Later, Marlene Dietrich spent decades cutting her way through hundreds of renditions of (among many other concert pieces) “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “I Wish You Love” and endlessly repeated choruses of “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have.” From 1953, and for twenty years thereafter, her one-woman nightclub and theater performances would be meticulously planned, artful presentations of herself as she wanted to be known—a woman triumphant who, quite on her own, had successfully stopped the march of time. She would be a creature forever desirable because she perpetually withholds something promised; she is a person whose cool mastery of all she surveys—swathed in sequins and ermine and bathed in pink light—places her in a position of emotional supremacy over all those who dare to draw near. Her many recorded theater songs thus often convey the universal experience of romantic loss. But somehow they remain overrehearsed exercises in technique, and so they rarely communicated the spontaneous, humbling, personal, acute distress of the first recording of “Illusions” for A Foreign Affair, in which she so eloquently sang a woman’s painful confession.
Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Dietrich herself, the woman of so many private affairs and such assertive, prodigal professional and erotic energy, was indeed represented in the polished theatrical stance, in her attitude of controlled distance and detachment. But just as she was amusingly seductive, almost girlishly playful while singing “You Little So and So” and “I Couldn’t Be Annoyed” (in Blonde Venus), nervously desirous during “Johnny” (in Song of Songs) and confidently alluring for “Awake In a Dream” (in Desire), both her voice and her sentiment were deeper for “Illusions.” She was by this time, as Billy Wilder said, “a strange combination of the femme fatale, the German Hausfrau and Florence Nightingale.”
It is not surprising that Marlene Dietrich should have access in early 1948 to such feelings about artifice, and the means to communicate her sentiments. The death of her mother, the end of her affair with Jean Gabin and the permanent departure of James Gavin, the news of her daughter’s pregnancy, her difficulty in finding the contours of a future career, her compulsion to have a face-lift that year (at the age of forty-six)—she was certainly not unmindful of the inevitable encroachment of time. Only one who in a quiet corner of herself had assessed the meaning of her depressions and solitude could have brought to “Illusions” the muted remorse, the confessional simplicity and the unadorned wistfulness. She was in the business of selling illusions, and she knew it. The cabaretist knew whereof she sang; Lola Lola had grown up.
A FOREIGN AFFAIR WRAPPED PRODUCTION IN FEBruary, and Dietrich sped to New York. “I’m doing the chores while Maria’s pregnant,” she said. “The daily woman’s no good—American women have no idea of how to keep house.” The birth of her first grandson that June prompted Life magazine to put her photograph on its August 9 cover, with the caption “Grandmother Dietrich,” and so began the designation of her as “the world’s most glamorous grandmother.” In this real-life role she in fact excelled, doting on Maria’s baby and, later on, his brothers. Her only professional assignment for the rest of the year was in Fletcher Markle’s film Jigsaw (made in New York that summer), in which Dietrich is glimpsed for only a few seconds as she leaves New York’s Blue Angel nightclub. “No, no, no—I’m not interested. Some time later, perhaps,” she says to her escort (Markle). To what she refers we are given no hint, although it is tempting—because Markle was a television producer—to assume they were discussing his real-life offers for her to appear in the new medium; this offer she repeatedly rejected because, as she said, she could not control the key light needed to present her to best advantage.
But she was very much interested, in 1949, in assuming a major role in an Alfred Hitchcock picture, to be made that summer in England. Dietrich would have second billing to the recent Oscar winner Jane Wyman, but the featured part would provide her with an aptly enigmatic personality à la von Sternberg, a Christian Dior wardrobe, sojourns in London and Paris, two songs (one written for her by Cole Porter) and a weekly salary of £7,000 for ten weeks. As usual, she consulted with her astrologist, Carroll Righter, for approval of her transportation and departure day, and by mid-April was in Paris for fittings at Dior.* In France, she resumed her friendship with Maurice Chevalier, although now the relationship was strictly platonic.
Dietrich also met the legendary French singer Edith Piaf, whose life had been wretchedly unhappy since childhood, and whose history of destructive love affairs and addictions were much the stuff of her plangent songs and raw delivery. Their relationship began when Dietrich heard Piaf’s signature tune “La Vie en Rose” and asked Hitchcock to secure the rights to it for her in the forthcoming film. Piaf, in the midst of one of her many near-suicidal depressions, welcomed both Dietrich’s admiration and her strong emotional support: “She made it her duty to help and encourage me, taking care never to leave me alone with my thoughts,” she wrote in her memoirs. Dietrich also, it seems, coveted the role of care-giver to this forlorn singer, often visiting her backstage after a performance and bringing along Chevalier as her escort. Just barely opening the door of Piaf’s dressing room when journalist Robert Bré knocked, Dietrich asked, “What can I do for you, monsieur? I am Madame Piaf’s secretary.” But he was not to be fooled: “Ah, I didn’t know! And I suppose she has engaged Maurice Chevalier as chauffeur!”
AFTER MORE THAN A MONTH IN PARIS, DIETRICH arrived on June 27 at London Airport, where she denied the waiting photographers a shot of her legs: “I am not a chorus girl,” she said with a tight smile. “I have nothing to show.” This was not typical of her, journalists noted—and indeed Hitchcock had a stipulation in her contract that throughout the term of her employment with him she was to be presented to the press only as he approved. She was not pleased, but this approach was consistent with the mysterious woman he wanted to create and not the glamorous grandmother easily lifting her skirt. But here, in the realm of the artist-fantasist, any comparison between Hitchcock and von Sternberg ceased, for her new director certainly entertained no romantic notions about himself and Marlene Dietrich, nor was he personally obsessed with her. His concern was the character of Charlotte Inwood in Stage Fright—not Lola Lola or Amy or Frenchy but an extremely sophisticated, astonishingly self-possessed actress of a certain age now doing musical star-turns and able to goad a young admirer into killing for her.
There was no formal introduction to the press (this was deferred to a luncheon at the Savoy several days later); instead, Dietrich was at once whisked off to Elstree Studios for meetings with her director, crew and fellow players. “Everything is fine,” Hitchcock told a reporter two days later with bemused irony. “Miss Dietrich has arranged the whole thing. She has told them exactly where to place the lights and how to photograph her.”
Hitchcock, who suffered no rivals for absolute authority on his productions, was at first considerably dismayed over Dietrich’s presumption, for after studying the dialogue, production designs and scene requirements, she met cinematographer Wilkie Cooper early each morning and simply dictated where she would stand, how she would be lighted and framed, how she or the camera would move. She also designed her own makeup and chose her own costumes from the Dior outfits paid for by the production company. “Marlene was a professional star,” Hitchcock said later, as usual selecting his words with utmost caution but elaborating her considerable influence. “She was also a professional cameraman, art director, editor, costume designer, hairdresser, makeup woman, composer, producer and director.”
Such autonomy—rare in any case—was completely unprecedented on a Hitchcock set. For several days Dietrich’s sovereignty caused raised eyebrows and shocked glances among the crew, and many nervous glances toward the director. But Hitchcock wanted her complete cooperation—indeed, her concrete contributions—for in fact the “Sternbergian image” of Marlene Dietrich was very much Hitchcock’s intention for the role of Charlotte Inwood.
For many years, Stage Fright was regarded as a mediocre work by Hitchcock and a negligible moment in Dietrich’s career. Few judgments about a film could be more shortsighted, for this film—although highly complex, full of demanding verbal nuances and with the multiple layers of a complicated plot—is certainly nothing less than a masterwork. As for Dietrich’s acting, it remains (with Witness for the Prosecution eight years later) one of her two finest late performances, perhaps because it struck so close to her own emotional experience as a performer enduring the shifting fortunes of success. And insofar as it was conceived, directed and released as a kind of encoded tribute to her image, it deserves as careful an assessment as The Blue Angel or Morocco.
STAGE FRIGHT CONCERNS A YOUNG DRAMA STUDENT named Eve Gill (Jane Wyman) who pretends to be a theatrical dresser to the stage star Charlotte Inwood (Dietrich) in order to clear her friend Jonathan Cooper (Richard Todd) of the charge that he murdered Charlotte’s husband. Eve finally learns, however, that Jonathan (for whom she harbors a secret love) is indeed guilty, and that he lied in saying that Charlotte killed her husband in a jealous rage. In the process of her discovery, Eve also falls in love with Detective Wilfred Smith (Michael Wilding), the inspector on the case. Charlotte, as it turns out, had been cruelly abused by her husband and had exploited Jonathan’s lunatic impulses by goading him to murder. In the end, Jonathan is captured and accidentally killed, while Charlotte will stand trial for obstructing justice by not revealing her knowledge of Cooper’s murder of her husband.
From the beginning of the project (based on a novel by Selwyn Jepson), Hitchcock, his wife Alma Reville (always closely involved in story construction) and screenwriter Whitfield Cook had Dietrich in mind for the story’s most colorful character. Hitchcock added that “the aspect that intrigued me is that it was a story about the theater.” The structure of the finished film everywhere supports that. The asbestos safety curtain of an English theater slowly rises under the credits, revealing not a stage set but real-life London in full motion; when the curtain is fully raised, the action of the story begins.
Immediately, the distinctions between appearance and reality, between theater life and street life, begin to blur. Everything that follows is an interconnected series of ruses, costumes, lies and artifices, and everyone in the story plays a variety of real-life roles (a recurring Hitchcockian motif since his 1930 talkie Murder!). As in the director’s darker romances, appearances and identities slip and slide. Nothing is certain in the world of disguises, performances, matinées and theatrical garden parties. And at the center of the swirling patterns of deception is Dietrich—abused and abuser, victim and victimizer. “When I give all my love and devotion and receive only treachery and hatred,” she says in a final line added by herself with Hitchcock’s approval, “it’s as if my own mother had slapped me in the face.” The event in her mind may have been her mother’s slap when, in adolescence, Marlene had refused to dance with a boy she did not like. As for the “treachery and hatred” (ostensibly referring to Charlotte’s husband), this was always, for Dietrich, associated with the end of any love affair.
The opening scene of flight from the police (in Wyman’s open roadster) establishes the film’s tripartite structure, a series of ever slower journeys until the finale. In this regard, the film is built like a geared rallentando, a gradual slowdown from that first car chase, to the midpoint of the more leisurely ride in a taxi (the love scene between Wyman and Wilding), to the final immobilization of Eve and Jonathan in the unused eighteenth-century stage-prop carriage. Within this framework, Wyman, a young novice actress in the story, is disabused of her belief that the theater is a glamorous life and—precisely by her success at playing multiple roles offstage—endangers herself and her family before confronting the shifting and specious nature of her own romantic illusions about art and men. And Dietrich, as the singing actress, stands at the center of that theme—virtually, as Hitchcock insisted, playing herself.
Aptly, at the end Wyman must go under the stage, to confront a more paralyzing fear than one could know onstage in a role. And there beneath the boards she invents an ingenious acting ploy whereby she disarms a pathological killer and saves herself. Real stage fright, in other words, is something deeper than mere onstage panic, demanding an improvised courage. Thus the melodramatic play Wyman is first seen rehearsing at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (and in which she seems to be egregiously incompetent indeed) at last becomes a “thriller” from which she must extricate herself by a superlative performance.
Besides Wyman, Dietrich and her demented lover are professional performers, and everyone in the story plays roles. “You’re an actress. You’re playing a part. No nerves when you’re on,” Todd tells Dietrich (although this exchange occurs in his mendacious flashback), just after she begs him to “draw the curtains, Johnny!” The scene points forward to the final horrific moment, when a stagehand is asked to “lower the iron curtain,” effectively cutting off Todd’s escape (and by implication his head). But Wyman’s witty father (Alistair Sim) is also a role-player. “You’re just dying to get into a part in this, and you know you are,” Wyman tells him.
“A part in this melodramatic play, you mean,” he replies, in the triumphant comic scene in his cottage. “That’s the way you’re treating it, Eve—as if it were a play you were acting in at the Academy. Everything seems a fine acting role when you’re stagestruck, doesn’t it, my dear? Here you have a plot, an interesting cast, even a costume [a blood-soaked dress]. Unfortunately, Eve, in this real and earnest life we must face the situation in all its bearings . . . [or else] you’ll spend a few years in Holloway prison, meditating on the folly of transmuting melodrama into real life.”
Wyman/Eve, we should note, is different things to different people. To Cooper she is a patient and helpful friend whose love for him he conveniently exploits, while to her father she is an apprentice actress: “You’re my audience, Father! I wish you’d give me a little applause now and then”—which he later does, after she unmasks Charlotte. To Detective Wilfred Smith, Eve is an innocent actress, to Charlotte’s regular maid Nellie Goode (Kay Walsh), she is a newspaper reporter eager to disguise herself to gain access to Charlotte. And to Charlotte she is Nellie’s cousin Doris—whose name Charlotte simply cannot remember (she calls her Phyllis, Mavis and Elsie).
But Dietrich’s Charlotte is a performer on a deeper level still; her widowhood, especially, becomes her most pointed attempt at self-glamorizing. (“Couldn’t we work in a little color?” she asks about the funereal black dress. “Or let it plunge just a little in front?”) And she orders others about, directs them (Eve especially) in their forms of address, their tones of voice and their wardrobes. Strangers and police inspectors are addressed as “darling.” Everything, in other words, is done for effect.
Quite early, we are told (but tend to reject) the truth about Jonathan—that he is a mad killer; this Charlotte tells the police and Eve overhears. Charlotte then tries to extricate herself from involvement in the crime, but what she says of her younger lover Cooper is absolutely true (and disbelieved by the romantic Eve):
I suppose I shouldn’t have seen him as often as I did, but I didn’t realize how madly infatuated he was with me. I just didn’t realize. You’ll never know how much I blame myself for all this. When my husband came back from New York last week and I told Johnny I couldn’t see him, he kept on phoning me. He wouldn’t let me alone. Oh, maybe if I’d agreed to see him he wouldn’t have done this dreadful thing.
Much of her dialogue, it must be stressed, was both expanded and fine-tuned by Dietrich herself, with Hitchcock’s approval.
Dietrich’s focussed rendition of the Cole Porter song “The Laziest Gal in Town” is the film’s clearest tip-off to the resolution of the plot: “It’s not that I shouldn’t, it’s not that I wouldn’t, and you know it’s not that I couldn’t—it’s simply because I’m the laziest gal in town,” she sings in a triumphant proclamation with multiple meanings. Our first thought about the lyrics is the obvious sexual reference, but later we realize they are also a clue to what she did with her young lover, exploiting his fanatical devotion to the extent that he killed her husband. She was just too lazy to do it herself. (Her rendition of “La Vie en Rose,” on the other hand, was simply her appropriation of Piaf’s signature for herself.)
Wyman’s refusal to believe the guilt of the man she loves (despite overwhelming evidence) is highlighted when her affections begin to shift from Todd to Wilding, and this happens when Todd embraces her. Convinced of (what she thinks is) the ineradicable bond between Todd and Dietrich, she gazes at the piano and we (with her, from her viewpoint) remember the romantic piano melody played by Wilfred. It is additionally important, therefore, that this sequence is at once followed by Wyman’s taxi ride with Wilding, accompanied by the same music; this is one of the most funny-tender love scenes in the Hitchcock canon. This ride is also psychologically acute, although audiences decades later find it a little arch and coy. Wilfred and Eve are more interested in one another than in the logic of their own remarks, and finally they are so locked in the collusion of their romantic gaze that their words meld and become senseless interphrases. Hitchcock is, at this point, one up on the sophisticates, for this is the gentlest puncture of the romantic fallacy. It is the director’s quiet, compassionate little joke, a grace note to the richness of this undeservedly neglected comic masterpiece.
On its most serious level, Stage Fright is a typically Hitchcockian reflection on romantic illusion, with the popular ikon of Marlene Dietrich at the center—and to this she herself made important contributions as the screenplay was polished even during shooting. Central to the picture’s richness is her presence, her complete blending into the role as both star-image and mysterious mover of events, for finally Stage Fright is about the tragic wisdom of the older performer (Charlotte/Dietrich), the concomitant cynicism, the superior experience and the ability to exploit her image to her own best advantage. Dietrich has not a false moment in this picture. Breathless with anxiety and with a cunning invented from moment to moment, Charlotte Inwood was a kind of totem of Dietrich’s dark side, encapsulating the entire range of her image. She suggested her frantic first words—“Johnny, you do love me, don’t you? Say that you love me!”—and we hear her voice before we see her (a great tease, Dietrich thought).
BLURRING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ART AND LIFE again, Dietrich took a younger lover (not Richard Todd) quite soon after filming began, just as in Stage Fright itself. Michael Wilding—handsome, gentle, sophisticated and artistic—was eleven years her junior and had scarcely been introduced to her when she offered herself to him, as if the way for her to feel young was to prove to herself that she could keep a young man. “I am too old for you,” she said bluntly. Gallantly, Wilding tried to recall an appropriate response from lines in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and when he faltered, Dietrich interrupted: “Why not just settle for kissing me?”
“From that moment,” according to Wilding, “we became inseparable. In fact she would not move a step without me. She insisted that I accompany her everywhere, and she took as much interest in my appearance as she did in her own.” As Hitchcock and members of his crew remembered, the lovemaking was not always discreet, sometimes conducted even in their dressing rooms on the soundstage. “But close as we became,” Wilding added, “there was an unfathomable quality about Marlene, a part of her that remained aloof. Sadly, our relationship came to an abrupt end.” Dietrich was again surprised at the temerity of an ex-lover when Wilding’s engagement to Elizabeth Taylor was announced a few years later: “What’s Liz Taylor got that I haven’t got?” she asked a friend, who added that the news made her “very sad.” As she had said, “When I devote myself to someone, no one can undo it”—not even, she thought, the former beloved.*
* Over the next two decades, Dietrich would continue her regular offer to have Carroll Righter draw up her colleagues’ astrological charts. Typical of many such attestations was that of Richard Todd (who appeared in her next film, Stage Fright): “When she heard that I was engaged to be married, she asked me for details of my birth date and also Kitty’s, saying she would send for a horoscope for us. It was just as well I did not share her obsession, because when the horoscope reached us, it was a terrible one, forecasting no good at all for Kitty and me.”
* At precisely this time, Dietrich’s friendship with Ernest Hemingway was perhaps her great support. When she wrote to him of her romantic solitude he replied, on July 13, 1950, that after all they were two of the most forlorn people in the world; that he loved her not as a screen goddess but as a friend—the woman he first knew in a military uniform now discarded, when she reeked of all the smells of war. The exchange of letters—none of them anything like passionate communiqués—continued for years, most of them addressing one or another of Dietrich’s problems with lovers. On August 12, 1952, for example (in response to her complaints about problems with her lover Yul Brynner), Hemingway invited her to come to his home in Cuba. The Dietrich-Hemingway letters are full of news, mutual affection, recipes, memories and matey advice; they remain crucial evidence that the two were indeed not lovers.