Authors: Donald Spoto
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 F
OREIGN
A
FFAIR
WRAPPED PRODUCTION IN
F
EB
ruary, 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!”
A
FTER MORE THAN A MONTH IN
P
ARIS
, D
IETRICH
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
.
S
TAGE
F
RIGHT
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.