Blue Angel (19 page)

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.

T
HROUGHOUT THE ORDEAL, VON
S
TERNBERG 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”).

B
ECAUSE OF THE DANGER TO
M
ARIA, THE ATMO
sphere 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.

N
ONE OF THIS HELD ANY INTEREST FOR HER
. “I
T 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.

8: 1933–1935

O
N
J
ANUARY
2, 1933,
EXECUTIVES AT
P
AR
amount filed a breach of contract suit against Marlene Dietrich, asking the courts for
182,850.06—the precise amount the studio insisted they had lost since her failure to report for work on
Song of Songs
. Fearing her departure from the country, they also appealed to Judge Harry Holzer for an arrest warrant. This he denied, but he did issue a temporary restraining order against her employment by another studio, and he demanded her appearance in court the following week. Relaxing over the weekend with Maurice Chevalier at her Santa Monica beach house on Ocean Front Boulevard (later Pacific Coast Highway), Dietrich affected an airy unconcern worthy of Lola Lola or Shanghai Lily. Ralph Blum, her attorney, repeatedly telephoned her about the obvious professional (not to say monetary) ramifications of her recalcitrance, but she was inflexible. She would not work until von Sternberg promised to return to her for one more picture before the year was over.