Blue Angel (14 page)

6: 1930

I
N
1930, M
ARLENE
D
IETRICH JOINED AN IMPRES
sive list of stars at the Paramount studio on Marathon Street in Hollywood: under contract were personalities as diverse as Claudette Colbert, Miriam Hopkins, Jeanette MacDonald, Carole Lombard, the Marx Brothers, William Powell, Harold Lloyd, Clara Bow, W. C. Fields—and Maurice Chevalier, who was filming
Playboy of Paris
and whose dressing room was adjacent to Dietrich’s. Glad for the opportunity to be with another immigrant and to speak French—the forbidden language during the great war—she was soon having tea with Chevalier and then dining frequently with him.

In addition to von Sternberg, still her mentor and a regular visitor to her rented apartment, there were other notable directors under contract at Paramount—among them William Wellman, who directed
Wings
, which had won the very first Oscar for best picture; Victor Fleming, who had directed Jannings in
The Way of All Flesh;
and Ernst Lubitsch, much admired for a series of elegantly crafted pictures (among them
Forbidden Paradise, The Patriot
and
The Love Parade
). These and other Paramount films were remarkable among Hollywood’s products for a unity of visual style, an achievement deriving as much from budgetary considerations as from artistic intent. To save time and money, directors, writers, designers and cinematographers routinely worked in close collaboration from the earliest stages of a film’s preparation.

This was precisely the method employed in the development of Dietrich’s first American film, a project for which
she
had provided the inspiration. When von Sternberg left Berlin in February, she had given him for shipboard reading Benno Vigny’s minor novel
Amy Jolly
. Paramount, delaying the American release of
The Blue Angel
so that Dietrich’s debut would be in a role more glamorous than Lola Lola, had given von Sternberg free choice of a project for her. After reading
Amy Jolly
, he conceived a film about another cabaret entertainer—this time in exotic Morocco—who meets a wealthy artist but eventually declines the stability of his love for the uncertainty of life with a wandering legionnaire. The picture would, therefore, be a variation on
The Blue Angel
, but without quite so much decadence—and with the romance required by Hollywood. Typically, the film would also explore the ambiguity of von Sternberg’s own attachment to his leading lady. The film, he decided at once, would be called
Morocco
.

Sets were constructed and casting completed in April and May, while Dietrich quickly accustomed herself to life in California according to the regulations of those responsible to the studio for star-creation. Although the Depression had affected the vast majority of Americans, film actors seemed to live in an ideal world. To secure an image of almost inviolable glamour, studios often provided the stars with expensive cars and lavish wardrobes; von Sternberg insisted that Dietrich be no exception. Paramount issued her a Rolls-Royce convertible and chauffeur, and her one-bedroom apartment on Horn Avenue (just above Sunset Boulevard not far from Beverly Hills) was decorated and furnished with the movie-fan magazines in mind—a leopard skin rug, overstuffed chintz-covered sofas, a wall of mirrors and crystal whiskey decanters. In matters relative to Dietrich, said photographer John Engstead, “von Sternberg controlled
everything.” As for the car (which appears in the final scene of
Morocco
) and driver, Dietrich always had the impression that von Sternberg’s aim was to limit her independence by preventing her from going off on her own.

Although she posed languorously at home for photographers, there was, in fact, little leisure time. In June Dietrich, Gary Cooper and Adolphe Menjou began work on
Morocco
. Von Sternberg did not provide his cast with the script he had virtually dictated to Jules Furthman, a writer who had borrowed so much money from Paramount to support his gambling habit that they kept him working at the studio simply to collect the debt. Instead, the actors received pages of dialogue as they proceeded; in any case, as von Sternberg cavalierly insisted, the images told the story. So they did, in a picture astonishing for its narrative simplicity and a psychological complexity that makes it an album of the increasingly poignant von Sternberg-Dietrich symbiosis.

Paramount, as the director was repeatedly told, wanted Dietrich to be what the press had for years recognized—a more glamorous, more mysterious and alluring version of Greta Garbo, an image Dietrich had actively sought to imitate long before coming to Hollywood. So von Sternberg and cinematographer Lee Garmes presented Dietrich as a Garbo double for her first scene in
Morocco
. She moves toward the camera, veiled, swathed in black, enveloped in nighttime fog aboard ship. The final scene of the film perfectly reverses all that, as Dietrich moves away from us, without veil or hat, dressed all in white, bathed only by the bright sunlight in the arid desert. Between these two images occurs an almost mythic transformation.

T
AKEN MERELY AS A STORY
,
M
OROCCO
IS ELEMEN
tary indeed, but it advances the director’s peculiar vision of Dietrich as a fateful and fated woman, bound to a code of love that may be exotic but is certainly admirable in its integrity. Whereas in
The Blue Angel
she had played an unfaithful floozy, in
Morocco
she is a faithful follower, exactly as he hoped she might be offscreen.

Amy Jolly, a cabaret performer (Dietrich), comes to work in Morocco and, although pursued by the wealthy, idle artist La Bessière (Menjou), she is drawn to the younger, handsome womanizer Tom Brown (Cooper), a soldier with the foreign legion. She slips him the key to her quarters, but when Brown visits her that night (after he is also propositioned by the wife of the local adjutant) their meeting is tense with mutual wariness. Soon Tom announces that he will give up the Legion for Amy’s sake—a promise he instantly regrets, abandoning her and resuming his wandering life. Amy accepts La Bessière’s offer of marriage, but at their engagement party she learns that Tom may have been wounded on maneuvers, and she leaves her fiancé to find him.

As it happens, Tom is quite well (and as usual in the arms of a passing fancy), and is soon to depart again on his endless desert trek. At the end Amy, grateful for the devotion and generosity of La Bessière, leaves him forever and follows Tom into the desert: certain to be hurt, she is still bound to the honor of her love. Our last glimpse of her (one of the most famous images in American film) is a long shot as she slowly disappears over the horizon of a windswept desert, the only sound the receding Legion drumbeats and the eternal wind. Her scarf and white chiffon dress blowing wildly, the sirocco against her face, she doffs her high-heeled shoes, hurrying to join the line of wanderering men and their women camp followers.

T
HE FIRST DAY
’
S FILMING THAT SUMMER DID NOT
augur well. Recording her first scene, von Sternberg was forced to devote numerous takes to a simple shot with only a single line; on the words “I won’t need any help,” Dietrich had difficulty with the word “help,” as she repeatedly inserted a vowel between the final consonants. There had been considerable difficulty recording the English version of
The Blue Angel
because of the actors’ thick accents, and Paramount was insistent that Dietrich’s diction be clear. (In fact when
The Blue Angel
was released the virtually inaudible English version was everywhere supplanted by the more popular German print, with the addition of English subtitles.)

Once the problem of “help” was solved, however (after more
than forty takes), others arose. Not yet fluent in English, she was meticulously prepared for each shot by von Sternberg, who (much to the annoyance of Gary Cooper) spoke with her in German, a practice star and director continued long after she learned English, and one that enabled them to maintain a certain intimacy among their colleagues. Not as maniacally jealous or fearful of Dietrich’s star power as Jannings had been, Cooper (exactly her age) was almost preternaturally handsome, yet wary of Dietrich’s emerging primacy in the picture. This led to several unpleasant exchanges between him and von Sternberg. “Cooper was neither intelligent nor cultured,” Dietrich said rather ungallantly in 1991. “Just like the other actors, he was chosen for his physique, which, after all, was more important than an active brain.”

But her inclination that season was quite different, for Dietrich smoothly engineered an evening
à deux
at Horn Avenue, and soon there flourished an affair that was (at least for Cooper) as hot as Morocco itself. This was no real challenge for Dietrich, since Cooper, although married, readily succumbed to the offer; he had also been involved with Clara Bow (as who was not) and, even more seriously, with Lupe Velez. Of course, von Sternberg was not at all pleased with this new development, but he knew better than to complain.

Some people can evoke from their lovers an attention that is frankly deferential. This ability Dietrich seems to have raised to the level of a fine art, for remarkably often in her life her lovers were not only grateful admirers but somehow felt bound to her. Men were especially vulnerable to this, Cooper among them: for the remainder of
Morocco
, he was her devoted ally, far more ardent to please and attend her in life than in the story they were filming. Von Sternberg, though firmly out of this romantic running of the bulls, quietly raged with jealousy and resentment, according to both Dietrich (“They didn’t like each other . . . [it was] jealousy”) and actor Joel McCrea, a friend of Cooper’s (“Jo was jealous . . . and [Cooper] hated him”).
*

But to make things more complicated still, Cooper soon had his
own reasons for jealousy when he learned that Maurice Chevalier had briefly become a rival. Chevalier’s autobiography claims the friendship was “simply camaraderie,” but his wife used it as the basis for a successful divorce petition. This affair coincided with the Cooper romance. Several evenings each week there was a game of musical automobiles for the limited parking spaces near Dietrich’s apartment, where the situation was one of first come, first served.

It would be easy to regard Marlene Dietrich’s vigorous sexual life as irresponsible, frankly hedonistic or even symptomatic of an almost obsessive carnality. But her affairs, no matter how brief or nonexclusive, were always focussed and intense, never merely casual, anonymous trysts. Lavish in bestowing amatory favors, Dietrich in fact equated sex more with the offering of comfort than with the pursuit of her own pleasure—or perhaps more accurately, the complex, benevolent control she exerted in romances
was
her gratification. Sex was something nurturing she offered those she respected (like von Sternberg), those she thought were lonely (like Chevalier) or those she thought to be in need (like Cooper, who complained, poor man, that he was being nagged by both his wife and by Lupe Velez). None of these affairs seems to have been characterized by any aim of permanence.

Hence, Marlene Dietrich entered on them according to her usual lights: to please others, to win confidence and to secure a place in someone’s life. She was also a healthy and beautiful twenty-nine-year-old woman, alone in a new country and responsive to ardent attention. In this case, the pair she romanced aligned her with the new Hollywood glamour (Cooper) and the old European charm (Chevalier). They represented, in other words, the two realms she wished to combine in herself. At the same time, the quiet intrigues made her the focus of considerable attention. Since she comported herself with dignity and discretion, however, and because she was so thoroughly cooperative in her work, she easily deflected Hollywood’s usual high-toned and hypocritical accusations of moral turpitude.

W
HATEVER HIS FEELINGS OF ROMANTIC ABNEGATION
(and they were clear to everyone working on the project, including Cooper and Lee Garmes), Josef von Sternberg was a calm and creative center for Marlene Dietrich, and she knew it.

In 1924, he had written “The Waxen Galatea,” published in
The Director
the following year. This short story tells of a shy man who becomes obsessed with a plaster mannequin in a dress shop. He gazes each day on the lovely image until he sees a real woman breathtakingly like the figure in the window. He follows her, but she meets a man who, at the woman’s request, then humiliates the silent pursuer, now an annoying intruder on her rendezvous. Shattered, he vows never to love anything other than a wax figure.

“The Waxen Galatea” is an important clue to the character of its author, a secretive and obsessive romantic known to very few. Von Sternberg was enormously successful in keeping his private life from scrutiny, although as with many men with intensely creative instincts there seems not to have been much exterior drama. Reticent and often alone, he indulged a preference for painting and study instead of a Hollywood social life. (His first two marriages ended in divorce, but his third wife—also a painter, whom he wed after World War II—gave him a rewarding stability and his only child.)