Dietrich, Marlene 1901–1992

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Dietrich, Marlene
1901–1992

Born in Berlin on December 27, Marlene Dietrich was an actress and chanson singer whose public persona reached mythical proportions. Her highly unconventional sex life became notorious.

Dietrich, who made several silent films in the 1920s, was discovered in 1929 in Berlin by the Hollywood director Joseph von Sternberg, originally from Vienna. Von Sternberg was looking for a vamp type to star as the character Lola Lola in a film called The Blue Angel (1930). The film premiered in Berlin in April 1930 and turned Dietrich into one of the most sensational erotic icons in cinema history and popular entertainment culture.

In the film Dietrich plays a femme fatale in a shady night club who draws an uptight professor into her web and destroys him. Driving the eroticized atmosphere are several risqué songs that Lola Lola performs in a mixture of seductiveness and self-mockery, displaying black garters, silver top hat, and legs that would be fetishized throughout her career. Singing in a smoky lower register and lowering her eye lids suggestively, Dietrich embodied the decadent vamp figure envisioned by von Sternberg while accommodating his predilection for ambiguous sexuality. Dietrich became von Sternberg's creation, a creature of the director's complex, erotic imagination that informs the five films they made together in Hollywood between 1930 and 1935.

The success of The Blue Angel enabled von Sternberg to obtain a contract for Dietrich from Paramount. Their first Hollywood movie, Morocco (1930), based on a story suggested by Dietrich, was a sensation. Dietrich plays a cafe singer, clad in a tuxedo, who kisses a young woman in the audience on the mouth, a classic film moment cherished in lesbian circles into the twenty-first century. The plot nevertheless goes on to show Dietrich's character, Amy Jolly, in love with a legionnaire (Gary Cooper) whom she follows into the desert, a captivating cinematic ending. Bisexuality by innuendo was possible although even partial nudity was not, anticipating the Production Code that set industry guidelines for United States Motion Pictures beginning in the mid-1930S. Mae West advised Dietrich on this point: "We have to do everything with the eyes" (Salber 2001, p. 90).

In the 1920s Berlin unconventional sexualities were the order of the day. Outfitted with monocle and silk pants, Dietrich frequented cross-dressing clubs such as the Eldorado. When she starred in a cabaret act with the daring drag queen Claire Waldorf, she became the latter's lover for the length of the run. When she teamed up with a gamin in a show about two girlfriends, she added bunches of violets to their outfits, a gesture understood to symbolize lesbian love. Berlin, with clubs for every erotic preoccupation, where transvestitism was more outrageous than nudity, likely molded Dietrich's nonchalant attitude in sexual matters. In 1924 she married Rudolf Sieber, a production assistant in film, and gave birth to a daughter Maria. Sieber complained about her lesbian affairs but realized that Dietrich could not be tied to a single gender identity. In her biography Maria Riva suggests that her mother was "neither man nor woman" (Riva 1992, p. 198). Sieber and Dietrich never divorced.

Von Sternberg, in his role as Pygmalion, engaged in a kind of gender-bending of his own, insisting: "I am Miss Dietrich—Miss Dietrich is me" (Spoto 1992, p. 54). The film Blonde Venus (1932) contains the first cross-dressing act in white tuxedo, a moment of sovereign glamour that became a staple for the star. "But … what stamped Dietrich on to filmgoers' imaginations was the way she was presented visually on the screen. Von Sternberg wrapped her in more metaphysical material than men's suiting"(Walker 1984, p. 80).

During the making of Blonde Venus, the young Cary Grant, like Morocco's Gary Cooper, became amorously involved with Dietrich. Romantic entanglements on the set developed a pattern, exceptions not withstanding. In Shanghai Express (1932), for instance, Clive Brook was no more than her co-star. The film was very successful and is often considered von Sternberg's finest. The set decoration, visual improvisation of China, and atmosphere created by Les Garmes's camerawork, for which he received an Oscar, all added to Dietrich's mystique. Costume designer Travis Bantan wrapped Dietrich's Shanghai Lilly in black feathers and lace, fantasy costumes celebrated decades later as high camp.

Working with von Sternberg Marlene learned about lighting, specifically with regard to its chiseling effect on her facial features. Like the director, she aimed for a mystifying play of face and limbs, fully aware that this could lead viewers, whether heterosexual or homosexual, to identify with the image, the narcissistic aspect of cinema.

Dietrich's transgender screen appeal echoed in her off-screen romances. Among Dietrich's lesbian partners during her Hollywood years was Mercedes de Acosta who looked like "a young boy, jet-black hair cut like a toreador's close to the head, chalk-white face, deep-set black eyes" (Riva 1992, p. 154). De Acosta was a screenwriter and former lover of Greta Garbo who showered Dietrich with attention. During a stay at the Cote d'Azur in 1939, Dietrich enjoyed spending time onboard the yacht of the Canadian whisky-millionairess Jo Carstairs, amused at the latter's offer to build a palace in the Bahamas filled with young women.

Dietrich is better known as a woman with countless male lovers, both on-screen—James Stewart (Destry Rides Again [1939]), John Wayne (Seven Sinners [1940]), Jean Gabin (Martin Roumagnac [1946]), Michael Wilding (Stage Fright [1950]), Fritz Lang (Rancho Notorious [1952]) and off—French singer/actor Maurice Chevalier, Erich Maria Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front [1929]), and actor John Gilbert. Maria Riva wrote in detail and with surprising frankness about the love-making techniques her mother employed, claiming that she was mostly after romance and less after sex. Biographers concur that Dietrich remained friends with former liaisons long after the romantic affairs ended.

Dietrich was a perfectionist not only with regard to controlling her screen image (which irritated directors of her later films such as Alfred Hitchcock). She also enhanced her stardom in unusual ways. For example, she cultivated platonic relationships with intellectual and literary figures such as Ernest Hemingway, Jean Cocteau, Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, and Orson Welles. To be sure, her glamorous persona continued to reign supreme; Dietrich defined it as something "indefinite, not accessible to normal women, an unreal paradise, desirable but basically unreachable" (Salber 2001, p. 118).

From April 1944 to July 1945, Dietrich, who had become a United States citizen in 1939 after years of voicing anti-Nazi sentiments, was engaged by the United Service Organizations (USO) to entertain American troops abroad. From Algiers (where she met Gabin again) to Berlin, she played the spirited comrade and, more memorably, appeared in the sequined dress that created an illusion of nudity. In this dress, complemented by a lavish white or black swan-down cape, the fifty-two year old Dietrich returned to the cabaret stage. Among the chansons on her program were some by Frederick Hollander, who had written for her in The Blue Angel. Dietrich's world tour lasted from 1953 to 1975 and included Las Vegas, New York, Rio de Janeiro, London, Paris, Berlin, cities in Scandinavia, The Soviet Union, Israel, and Sydney, where she gave her last public performance. Her husband, upon whom she relied throughout the years, died in 1976, after which Dietrich became a recluse in her Paris apartment until her death on May 6, 1992. According to her wishes, she was buried in Berlin.