Marlene Dietrich

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 14th of May 1992, about 1,500 mourners filled the church of La Madeleine in Paris for the funeral of Marlene Dietrich. Thousands more stood outside. Ambassadors from Germany, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom sat among them. A closed coffin rested beneath the altar, covered in white wildflowers and roses sent by the French president, François Mitterrand. At its foot lay three medals, set out in the manner of a military ceremony. The priest told the congregation that she lived like a soldier and would like to be buried like a soldier. That is an odd farewell for an actress whose face once sold the glamour of Hollywood. Dietrich was a German who became American. She was a cabaret singer turned film star, and later a film star who worked mainly before live audiences. How did a Berlin girl who failed an early audition become a figure that governments honored? Why did some Germans protest her when she came home to sing? And what did the woman behind the carefully built image hide from the public?

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• 2. A Berlin Girl

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  Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born on the 27th of December 1901 at Leberstraße 65, in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. Her mother, Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josefine, came from a well-off family that ran a jewelry and clock-making firm. Her father, Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, was a police lieutenant. She had one sister, Elisabeth, born in February 1900. Her father died in June 1916, during the First World War. His best friend, Eduard von Losch, an aristocratic lieutenant in the Grenadiers, then courted her widowed mother and married her later that same year. He died of war wounds in August 1917. He never legally adopted the sisters, so the name von Losch was never Dietrich's own, despite what is sometimes claimed.

  At about the age of 11, she fused her first two given names into Marlene. Her family had called her Lena, Lene or Leni. She attended the Auguste-Viktoria Girls' School from 1907 to 1917 and finished at the Victoria-Luise-Schule in the Wilmersdorf part of Berlin in 1918.

  The violin was her first ambition. A wrist injury ended the dream of a concert career. By 1922 she had landed a job playing in the pit orchestra of a Berlin cinema that showed silent films. She was fired after four weeks.

  The stage offered a second chance. She toured as a chorus girl with Guido Thielscher's Girl-Kabarett and appeared in Rudolf Nelson's Berlin revues. In 1922 she auditioned for the impresario Max Reinhardt's drama academy and was turned down. Soon afterward she was working in his theaters anyway, dancing in the chorus and speaking small parts. Her first screen role, a minor one in The Little Napoleon, came in 1923. On a different set that year she met the man she would marry.

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• 3. The Sternberg Years

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  The role that changed her life was Lola Lola, a cabaret singer whose allure destroys a respectable schoolmaster, played by Emil Jannings. The film was The Blue Angel, made at the Babelsberg studios for the German company UFA and released in 1930. Its director, Josef von Sternberg, later took credit for having discovered her. The film gave her the song that would follow her for life, "Falling in Love Again", which she recorded for Electrola.

  Paramount Pictures held the American rights to the film. The film succeeded abroad, and Sternberg promoted her from Hollywood. In 1930 she signed with the studio and moved to the United States. Paramount wanted to market a German rival to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Swedish star Greta Garbo. Sternberg greeted her with presents, including a green Rolls-Royce Phantom II. The car later turned up on screen in their first American picture, Morocco.

  Between 1930 and 1935 they made six films together at Paramount. Sternberg shaped her into a glamorous and mysterious femme fatale. He urged her to lose weight and coached her hard. She accepted direction that other performers resisted.

  Morocco, with Gary Cooper, is remembered for a scene in which she sings in a man's white tie and kisses another woman. That was provocative for its time. It brought her the only Academy Award nomination of her career. Dishonored followed in 1931, with Dietrich as a spy in the mold of Mata Hari. Shanghai Express, with Anna May Wong, was nicknamed "Grand Hotel on wheels" by critics and earned $1.5 million in worldwide rentals.

  Their last two pictures, The Scarlet Empress and The Devil Is a Woman, were the most stylized and the lowest earning. Dietrich later said she looked her best in the second of them. Sternberg's lighting broke up light with veils and window blinds. Its influence lasted. Fifty years on, a Shanghai Express still inspired the cover of Queen's album Queen II. That image then appeared in the video for "Bohemian Rhapsody".

  Critics still argue over how much credit belongs to the director and how much to the star. Most agree that neither reached the same heights again once Paramount fired Sternberg and the pair parted.

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• 4. Box Office Poison

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  In May 1938, American theater owners publicly named Dietrich "box office poison". She shared the label with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, Norma Shearer, Dolores del Río and Fred Astaire. Her own ranking had slid to 126th. Her first film after Sternberg was Frank Borzage's Desire, a romantic comedy that did well commercially. Her next project, I Loved a Soldier, collapsed several weeks into production. The causes were script trouble, scheduling confusion and the studio's dismissal of its producer, Ernst Lubitsch.

  Large fees lured her elsewhere. David O. Selznick paid her $200,000 for her first color film, The Garden of Allah. Alexander Korda paid $450,000 for Knight Without Armour, made in Britain, which put her among the best-paid stars of the day. Both films did decent business, but they cost a great deal to make, and her popularity kept falling.

  In London, she later said in interviews, Nazi officials offered her lucrative contracts to return as the leading film star of Germany. She refused and applied for American citizenship in 1937. Angel, a second romantic comedy with Lubitsch, was poorly received, and Paramount bought out the rest of her contract.

  The comeback came through a role that went against her image. Producer Joe Pasternak offered her the part of Frenchie, a saloon girl, in the western comedy Destry Rides Again, opposite James Stewart. Sternberg encouraged her to take it, though it paid far less than she was used to. The bawdy part revived her career. A song she introduced there, "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have", became a hit when she recorded it for Decca. Seven Sinners and The Spoilers, both with John Wayne, gave her similar parts.

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• 5. The Front Line

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  In the late 1930s, Dietrich helped set up a fund with Billy Wilder and other exiles to help Jews and dissidents leave Germany. In 1937 she placed her entire $450,000 salary from Knight Without Armour into escrow for refugees. In 1939 she became an American citizen and gave up her German citizenship.

  After the United States entered the war in December 1941, she was among the first public figures to sell war bonds. She toured the country from January 1942 to September 1943. The Pacific Coast leg alone drew 250,000 troops. She was reported to have sold more bonds than any other star.

  Two long USO tours followed, in 1944 and 1945. She played for Allied troops in Algeria, Italy, the UK, France and Heerlen in the Netherlands. Then she entered Germany with Generals James M. Gavin and George S. Patton. Asked why she risked being a few kilometers from German lines, she answered "aus Anstand", meaning "out of decency". Wilder joked that she spent more time at the front than Dwight Eisenhower.

  Her show mixed film songs with a musical saw, a skill taught to her by Igo Sym. It also had a mind-reading routine she had learned from her friend Orson Welles. She would tell a soldier to think of something, then walk up and say, "Oh, think of something else. I can't possibly talk about that!" American church papers reportedly complained.

  She also worked in secret. In 1944 the Office of Strategic Services started the Musak project, musical broadcasts meant to demoralize enemy soldiers. Dietrich was the only performer told her recordings would serve that purpose. She sang German songs for it, including "Lili Marleen", a favorite on both sides of the war. The head of the service, Major General William J. Donovan, wrote to thank her for her generosity.

  In November 1947 she received the Medal of Freedom. She called it her proudest accomplishment. France gave her the Légion d'honneur.

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• 6. Cabaret Queen

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  Dietrich's screen work never fully recovered its earlier profile, but it did not stop. She appeared in Billy Wilder's A Foreign Affair in 1948, Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright in 1950, and Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution in 1957. In Orson Welles's Touch of Evil she played alongside a man she considered a genius and loved in a platonic way. Her last substantial film part was in Judgment at Nuremberg in 1961. She also narrated Black Fox, a documentary about Hitler that won an Academy Award in 1962.

  But from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s, her main work was live performance. In 1953 the Sahara Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip offered her $30,000 a week. The show was short, just a handful of her signature songs. Publicity centered on her "nude dress", a beaded gown designed by Jean Louis that created the illusion of transparency. The run was so successful that London's Café de Paris booked her for the next year.

  From the mid-1950s, Burt Bacharach arranged her music. Together they turned a nightclub act into a one-woman theatrical show. A contralto with a limited range, she gained from arrangements that played up her drama. They recorded four albums and several singles between 1957 and 1964. When he left to focus on songwriting, she wrote that she worked afterward like a robot. She had lost her director, her teacher and her maestro.

  She opened in a body-hugging dress and swansdown coat, then returned in top hat and tails to sing songs associated with men. Peter Bogdanovich praised how she gave even a light tune an aristocratic air without condescension. Francis Wyndham, writing in 1964, compared the act to a conjuring trick that depends on the audience wanting to believe. Body-sculpting undergarments, tape, makeup, wigs and careful lighting kept the illusion intact as she aged.

  In 1960 she toured West Germany. Despite hostile press and two bomb threats, the crowds were huge. At Berlin's Titania Palast, protesters chanted "Marlene Go Home!" Berlin's mayor, Willy Brandt, a fellow opponent of the Nazis, welcomed her. The tour was an artistic triumph and a financial failure, and she resolved never to return.

  Israel received her warmly. From 1962 she sang a German version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" there, breaking an unofficial taboo on the German language. In 1965 she became the first woman and the first German to receive the Israeli Medallion of Valor. She played Broadway in 1967 and 1968 and won a Special Tony Award in 1968. Clive Hirschhorn once asked why she kept going. She replied that it was hard work and nobody would do it if they did not have to.

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• 7. The Hidden Woman

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  Dietrich guarded her private life as carefully as she managed her image. She spoke German, English, Italian and French. In 1920s Berlin she frequented gay bars and drag balls, including Mali und Igel, run by Elsa Conrad. She also boxed at Sabri Mahir's studio, which opened to women in the late 1920s. Dietrich was bisexual.

  She married Rudolf Sieber, an assistant director, on the 17th of May 1923. Their only child, Maria, was born on the 13th of December 1924. The marriage lasted until his death. It was far from conventional. Dietrich had numerous affairs, almost all known to Sieber, and she would hand him her lovers' letters, sometimes with sharp remarks. She supported both Sieber and his mistress, first in Europe and then on a ranch in the San Fernando Valley.

  The list of lovers reads like a Hollywood guest book. It includes Gary Cooper, whose other affair with the actress Lupe Vélez drew a furious threat from Vélez. It also includes James Stewart, with whom she became involved during Destry Rides Again. The list continues with Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and, probably the love of her life, the French actor Jean Gabin. That affair ended in 1948 because she wanted to live in New York and he would not leave France. She also had relationships with women, among them Mercedes de Acosta and Joe Carstairs. She called the closeted circle of women in Hollywood a "sewing circle". Édith Piaf was a close friend, and Dietrich was matron of honor at Piaf's wedding in 1952.

  Her daughter, Maria Riva, later worked as a television actress and as organizer of her mother's one-woman shows. After Dietrich's death, Riva published a candid biography in which Dietrich appears cold and manipulative, treating her daughter as an assistant. Riva said she saw herself as a biographer, not the daughter. Her mother, she added, could mentally erase anything she did not want to hear.

  Dietrich also erased people from her story. At the end of the war in Europe she was reunited with her sister Elisabeth. Elisabeth had spent the war in the village of Belsen, running a cinema that Nazi officers overseeing the Bergen-Belsen camp attended. Dietrich vouched for her sister and her husband, protecting them from possible prosecution. Later she left them out of every account of her life and claimed to be an only child.

  She had also lost her faith. After hearing preachers on both sides of the First World War claim God for themselves, she abandoned the Lutheran tradition of her youth. Quoting Goethe in her autobiography, she wrote that if God created this world, he should review his plan.

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• 8. Avenue Montaigne

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  On the 29th of September 1975, Dietrich fell on stage in Sydney, Australia, and broke a thigh bone. Her show business career was essentially over. Her health had been failing for years. She survived cervical cancer in 1965, struggled with poor circulation in her legs, and leaned increasingly on painkillers and alcohol. Sieber died of cancer on the 24th of June 1976. Her last time on camera was a brief singing appearance in Just a Gigolo in 1978, starring David Bowie.

  She then retreated to her apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne in Paris, where she spent her final 13 years mostly bedridden. Only family, employees and a select few were admitted. She wrote letters and made phone calls, and her autobiography, Nehmt nur mein Leben, appeared in 1979. In 1984 the documentary Marlene, directed by her Judgment at Nuremberg co-star Maximilian Schell, was built from recorded interviews with her. She refused to be filmed, so he had only her voice. It received an Academy Award nomination.

  The phone remained her link to power. According to her daughter and grandson, she spoke with Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher, running up monthly bills above US$3,000. In 1990 a radio appeal of hers to save the Babelsberg Studios was broadcast on the BBC.

  She died of kidney failure at her Paris flat on the 6th of May 1992, aged 90. Her will asked to be buried near her family in Berlin, and her body was flown there on the 16th of May. Her coffin was draped in an American flag. Bystanders threw flowers onto it, fitting for a woman who had saved flowers thrown at her in performance for later shows. She was buried in Schöneberg, close to her mother's grave and to the house where she was born.

  Berlin's regard for her took longer to settle. In 1993 her heirs sold her estate to the city for US$5 million, after American institutions showed no interest. It included over 3,000 textile items, 15,000 photographs and 300,000 pages of documents. In 1996, after debate, the city declined to name a street in Schöneberg for her. On the 8th of November 1997, however, it opened the central Marlene-Dietrich-Platz, and in 2002 it made her an honorary citizen. A Google Doodle for her 116th birthday, designed by the drag artist Sasha Velour, appeared on the 27th of December 2017. Walt Disney drew on her looks, with those of Joan Crawford and Garbo, for the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. An asteroid, 1010 Marlene, carries her name.

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