Authors: Donald Spoto
Rightly, she saw this debut as unremarkable, with no guarantee that her appearance would bring more film assignments. A woman of the moment in her work as in her private life, she was merely seeing to the practical matter of paying her rent and providing a few luxuries. To this she ardently gave herself, apparently never considering that with some guidance she might be more than merely presentable on film, a medium which could evoke her talent, exploit her charm and provide a lucrative international career, all better than the theater could.
She may well have been surprised, then, when soon afterwards she was chosen from a group of fellow drama students for a small but effective role in a film called
Tragödie der Liebe
(
Tragedy of Love
), to be directed by Joe May, a prolific cinematic pioneer. May’s assistant, a handsome, blond and athletic Slovakian-German named Rudolf Sieber, advertised an open casting call to select dozens of extras for the picture, whose climax was set in a crowded courtroom. On a warm September day, Dietrich arrived at the studio, where Sieber quickly took her from a group of young women and rushed her into May’s office. Asked to stand, then sit, turn this way and that, smile and nod slowly, she followed the director’s instructions with a kind of diffident bemusement: this seemed much ado about very little indeed if she were to play an anonymous bit, and she was quickly bored by May’s demands that she repeat a simple gesture or glance.
The following afternoon, Sieber arrived at the Reinhardt rehearsal
hall, only to be told that Dietrich had no classes that day. He found her at her mother’s home, where she was living temporarily because of a cash crisis; there Rudi made several important announcements. First,
Tragödie der Liebe
was to be a major film certain to attract vast audiences, for the star was none other than the robust, burly Emil Jannings—a leading German stage actor also known for his screen portraits of Louis XV, Henry VIII, Peter the Great and Othello. Second, the film was quite different from the kitschy pseudo-history of
Der kleine Napoleon:
this was a violent story of lust, jealousy and revenge, with Jannings cast as a brutal wrestler standing trial for murder. Third, Joe May had sent Sieber to offer her the role of Lucie, the presiding judge’s pert, spoiled mistress who has a brief, pouty scene making a telephone call in bed, and who then whines her way into the crowded courtroom where she causes mild distraction by her giggly insolence—a brief but amusing role injected as a few moments of comic relief. The perfect touch for the wardrobe of this frivolous character, Sieber added, would be a monocle—then a fashionable affectation often worn by young women with perfect eyesight who simply wanted to be noticed. Dietrich accepted the role and offered to prepare Sieber a cup of coffee. Instead, he took Dietrich out to lunch at a nearby café, and very soon they were courting, although the meetings at Wilhelmina’s apartment, held under her vigilant eye, were properly chaste.
Born February 20, 1897 in Aussig, Rudolf Emilian Sieber was a dapper twenty-five-year-old who found Marlene Dietrich winsome, pretty and sensual. When Sieber called at her apartment a month later, Wilhelmina flatly said she disapproved of her daughter’s busy social life when the duties of work should prevail. “This is too boring for me,” Sieber told Dietrich soon afterwards. “I can’t come to your home because of your mother. Why? I can have any of the most beautiful Russian girls in Berlin—any of them I please. We need to stop this, it just doesn’t please me anymore.”
But it was not just her mother’s Victorian propriety that Sieber resented. According to Stefan Lorant, who saw them both socially at the time, Rudi was not quite so freewheeling sexually, and he seemed to disapprove of Dietrich’s rendezvous with women, which she made no attempt to conceal. If indeed that was his objection, he
perhaps harbored the common notion that all she needed was the love of a good man to normalize her preference. Rudi was earnest, conventional and obviously taken with this spirited, energetic woman who was most affectionate and responsive when he was tired or worried. At such times she hovered with concern, nurtured and encouraged him, acted as she had been trained—to gratify a man—and then more than ever willingly applied the soothing unguent of sex. But he was impatient with Wilhelmina and her snobbism.
T
HE FILMING OF
T
RAGÖDIE DER
L
IEBE
PROCEEDED
smoothly, and Dietrich’s brief appearance as Lucie delighted the other players and then audiences. Although the film is silent, no dialogue intertitles are needed to appreciate Lucie’s coy manipulation. Dietrich’s eyelids flutter, her shoulders seem almost to project her request, her lips to promise a rewarding kiss. But in the courtroom finale she steals the scene from a hundred other players, exchanging her monocle for opera glasses—her idea, and it must have exhilarated Joe May, for he intercut close-ups of her comic reactions to the tense legal proceedings as she fluttered, laughed and yawned, everything in counterpoint to the solemnity of the situation. This remains the earliest documented evidence of a sly theatrical wit and a sense of how best to direct a director’s attention to herself.
September 1922 was triply busy, as Dietrich travelled to the studio in early morning, rehearsed in her drama classes in the late afternoons and was onstage several evenings each week in her first roles. Beginning September 7, she had a small, four-line role in Wedekind’s
Die Büchse der Pandora
(
Pandora’s Box
) at the Kammerspiele, which she played nine times until March 3, 1923; her friend Grete Mosheim was also in the cast. The director was an amusing man named Friedrich Holländer, who was also a musician and composer; he occasionally coached Dietrich in singing, for her voice lay uncertainly between soprano and (perhaps because she had been smoking heavily for five years) a rather gauzy baritone.
She also appeared forty-two times, from October 2 to April 22, in a German translation of
The Taming of the Shrew
at the Grosses Schauspielhaus. The popular star Elisabeth Bergner played Kate, and
Dietrich the Widow, a small part made smaller by the director’s generous cuts of the text. She was, however, so frankly awestruck by Bergner’s beauty and poise that she diluted what little character the Widow had and made no impression on colleagues or audiences. Not much more promotion was given to her career by her appearance (again with Mosheim) in two small roles in a forgettable play by Hennequin and Veber called
Timotheus in flagranti
(which was permanently removed from the repertory after only twelve days). This she immediately followed by twenty-three performances (from January 24 to March 5, 1923) at the Kammerspiele in yet another small, colorless role, Anna Shenstone in a translation of Maugham’s
The Circle
—again with Elisabeth Bergner in the lead. Looking like a refugee from a road tour of
Die Walküre
, she also appeared nine times as an almost comically overdressed Amazon warrior in Kleist’s epic tragedy
Penthesilea
.
Her relationship with Sieber, which proceeded thornily, was also very nearly as tragic as the play. “The realization that he might marry another girl just about drove her to suicide,” according to Grete Mosheim. “Finally she stole some coal and food from her mother and one winter night she went through the snow to his house. She gained access to his quarters, laid on a hot meal and waited for him to return.” From that night the affair flourished, and next day Rudi gave her the money to take a small flat on her own—Wilhelmina to the contrary notwithstanding.
But by April 1923, Dietrich was professionally bored. Her several stage roles were minuscule and unrewarding, and she had just spent four days dressed as a peasant girl in a pious trifle called
Der Mensch am Wege
(
Man by the Roadside
), a film starring, written and directed by Wilhelm Dieterle. “One had the impression that she came from a milieu where one had to go through the kitchen to get to the living room,” Dieterle said years later, describing her directness and simplicity. “Despite this, she could seem very much the
grande dame
.”
The affectation of sophistication may have been assumed for the sake of Dietrich’s escort, for by this time Rudi was virtually her constant companion and accompanied her to the suburban studio where the film was made. To make herself more attractive, she also
joined Grete Mosheim in an exercise regimen under the direction of a powerful Swedish gymnast named Ingrid Menzendick, who had a studio in the Lützowplatz.
Then, on Thursday, May 17, 1923, at the town hall of Berlin-Friedenau—as if on a whim—Marlene Dietrich (then twenty-one) married Rudolf Sieber (twenty-six). The newlyweds moved into her apartment on the Kaiserallee.
The marriage, according to friends like Stefan Lorant, Grete Mosheim and Lotte Andor, had its own capricious logic. For Rudi’s part, he was beguiled by her sensuality and wished to settle into a conventional marriage and raise a family. At the time of the wedding, Dietrich did not object to this plan; besides, she appreciated his influence at the film studios and his professional recommendations on her behalf. He was also handsome, polite and articulate—and a man to care for and attend, which was very much part of her training. In this regard, she eagerly assumed the role of
Hausfrau
, cooking and housekeeping for her husband.
But two weeks after the wedding, it was clear that Marlene Dietrich was not to be confined by matrimony. She made no secret of her infatuation with a girl she had met at an audition for a Bjornstern Bjornson play about budding romance (aptly titled
Wenn der junge Wein blutt/When the Young Vine Blooms
), and Rudi, as she might have predicted, was suitably concerned. Once the play began regular performances (as Dietrich’s fellow cast member Lotte Andor recalled), Sieber delivered his wife to the theater each evening and waited backstage to escort her home. The object of his wife’s attention was quickly discouraged.
Dietrich’s career was not much advanced by the Bjornson play—nor by either her two-minute bit part in the movie
Der Sprung ins Leben
(
The Leap into Life
), filmed in July, or her stage appearance as Hippolyta in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Theater in der Königgrätzer Strasse in February 1924. For the remainder of 1923 and 1924 she was essentially unoccupied, and so it was not surprising to friends when she told them she was pregnant. On December 12, 1924, after a difficult delivery, Dietrich gave birth to Maria Sieber.
There must have been complications and perhaps even some danger attending the event, for Dietrich was confined to a long
recuperation; as she wrote in a card of thanks to her former violin teacher, Julius Levin, in May, she was still resting at home and unable to look for work. But she was in no hurry, for the role of doting mother eminently suited her. She would not accept a servant to help care for the baby, she nursed her lovingly for eight months, and when friends invited the Siebers to a vacation in Westerland on the North Sea during the summer of 1925, she accepted on condition that Heidede was welcome too.
This holiday immediately preceded Dietrich’s return to the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg, where she was hired to play the coquette Micheline in Arthur Robison’s sumptuous production of
Manon Lescaut
. In a half-dozen scenes with the stars Lya de Putti and Fritz Greiner, Dietrich had the most screen time of her career thus far.
*
Flirting at a sidewalk café by merely lowering her head and affecting weary insouciance that would soon become a virtual trademark, she impressed at least two critics with a provocative kind of repose—as if she might seduce by merely waiting in a kind of languid indifference. While many other performances of the silent screen era (and later) were almost theatrically overripe, Dietrich knew how to do nothing brilliantly. And this quickly became a way to attract attention by a sort of inversion: while everyone round her seemed almost hysterically fussy, she claimed a scene by appearing detached, liberated from the action.
But the image of cool independence was not entirely simulated. By early 1926, Rudi was again (as often) unemployed: he kept house and cared for Maria while Dietrich went to auditions and casting calls and effectively supported the family. As he might have anticipated, this arrangement had serious risks, for marriage and motherhood were no hindrances to his wife’s autonomy.
*
Some recent chroniclers of Marlene Dietrich’s career (among them Cadden, Higham and Kobal) have insisted she appears as an unbilled extra in a crowd scene of G. W. Pabst’s classic
Die freudlose Gasse
(
The Joyless Street
). But no archival materials or subsequent cast list support this, and she is nowhere recognizable. Because no complete version of the original film exists, it is remotely possible she fell to the cutting room floor; even this explanation, however (advanced by Dickens), seems unlikely, for the crowd scenes were shot in February 1925, when Dietrich was still resting at home after her daughter’s birth.
4: 1926–1929
O
N
F
EBRUARY
1926, M
ARLENE
D
IETRICH AS
sumed the role of Lou Carrère in Hans Rehfisch’s social satire
Duell am Lido
. Cast as an amoral girl tottering on the brink of the demimonde, she arrived at the first rehearsal and was told by director Leopold Jessner that she looked just right in her own outfit—silk trousers, a dark jacket and a startling monocle—and that she should wear all these in the performances. He may not have known that she had come directly from an all-night frolic at a transvestite bar called Always Faithful, whose patrons were certainly not. Dietrich may have taken her performance cue from that place, too, for she played Lou as frantically decadent. “The role should have been acted by Marlene Dietrich not in a demonic revelry but icy-cold,” remarked critic Fritz Engel.