Authors: Donald Spoto
From that season on, she was a well-known public presence, and not at all because of her professional accomplishments. Known in seedy Kurfürstendamm bars as well as at elegant dances sponsored by producers and musicians, Dietrich was typical of many Berlin actresses
—freewheeling and unconventional in her conduct and eager to meet those who could advance her career; they were often more approachable at night, after they’d had several whiskeys and some cocaine. At such times, however, she always kept a clear head.
Often, as actress Elisabeth Lennartz recalled, Dietrich got attention at restaurants and cafés by “wearing neither bra nor panties, which was very modern and daring.” Dancer and actress Tilly Losch, a leading doyenne of the Berlin lesbian bar scene, recalled that Dietrich was no stranger to such places. “It was chic for girls not to be feminine. I knew Dietrich in those days and she was a tough little nut. But unlike the others, she somehow looked glamorous.” A photograph of the time shows Dietrich as glamorous indeed in a gentleman’s smoking jacket at a ladies’ supper club, flanked by Leni Riefenstahl (soon to be Hitler’s documentarian with her films
Triumph of the Will
and
Olympiad
) and the Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong.
In lounges, cabarets and jazz clubs, however (as Gerda Huber and Grete Mosheim, among others, confirmed), Dietrich had a reputation for combining the most outrageous dances, jokes and sexual capers with unbending opposition to drugs and excessive drinking. She was, in other words, a curious combination of her mother’s Prussian upright moralism and her own sturdy, antic individualism. Käte Haack recalled a formal ball in the mansion of Eugen Robert, director of the Tribune Theater, attended by Reinhardt, playwright Ferenc Molnár, the actors Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt, and Carola Neher (soon to star in the original production of
The Threepenny Opera
).
Only one woman stood out: Dietrich, who appeared and took the hand of Carola Neher, who was also a great beauty. And then the two of them danced a tango. It was an unforgettable sight, and the entire crowd, astonished, made room and watched.
The tango was of course a dance of considerable style, and it drew attention by its controlled, almost stoic eroticism. Dietrich and Neher
glided, swooped and dipped without ever unlocking a breathless embrace. The bystanders cheered.
But there were other ways of attracting attention. Elli Marcus, known for her celebrity photographs, was approached by Dietrich with the blunt request, “Take some pictures of me that will make me a star.” Warily, Marcus complied and Dietrich sat obediently for three days of photography; despite the pleasing results, fame still eluded her.
At home, Sieber at first took his wife’s eccentric liberties calmly, as if they were an actress’s transient fancies or a phase from which she might emerge. Indeed, Dietrich openly discussed her casual amours, which included men from film studios with whom she spent an occasional night, actors from the theater who she thought required a little attention, and those like Anna May Wong and Tilly Losch, who were clever, amusing and exotic companions. She did not proffer sex as barter, to win a role or a favor; it was simply an acceptable form of flattery and a way of being appreciated. From men she was perhaps winning the approval she had been denied by her father and stepfather, while intimacy with women was always natural and easy for her.
I
N LATE SPRING
1926,
DIRECTOR
A
LEXANDER
K
ORDA
cast Dietrich in the role of a pretty, sophisticated society girl in a film showcasing his wife Maria. In
Eine Du Barry von Heute
(
A Modern Du Barry
), billed oddly as Marlaine Dietrich, she had only three brief scenes as a nameless coquette—but she nevertheless revealed a real flair for comedy. After ordering a new dress that requires time for alterations, she sees the shopgirl wearing it at an elegant restaurant that very evening. Furious, she demands that her escort take her away at once, and her quick shift from surprise to annoyance to prissy outrage is comically acute. Next morning, languishing in bed, she telephones the dress shop to demand the clerk’s discharge, only to be told the girl has already resigned (and become an overnight social sensation). Her understated fury—conveyed by simply narrowing her gaze and slowly pursing her lips—is a model of discerning adult acting in silent film.
Despite the small role and modest income—Dietrich was paid only three hundred marks, which was one percent of the star’s salary—she agreed that August to appear for Korda as a mere dress extra for the party scenes of a comedy called
Madame wünscht keine Kinder
(
Madame Wants No Children
.) This she accepted on condition that Rudi be hired as a production assistant, a courtesy won through the intercession of cinematographer Karl Freund, who years later in America was the cameraman for the television series
I Love Lucy
.
But there was no time—nor did she have the inclination—to be despondent over a negligible film career. In late August, Dietrich was busy rehearsing daily at the Grosses Schauspielhaus when an ailing actress (Erika Glässner) withdrew from Eric Charell’s eighteen-scene musical revue
Von Mund zu Mund
(
From Mouth to Mouth
.) This show, which opened September i, was important for several reasons.
First, this was Marlene Dietrich’s initial appearance in a singing role—an assignment for which she did not believe herself well suited and a skill she had hardly refined. Nevertheless, on short notice she worked with Charell (a noted choreographer and director of operettas, revues and folk musicals) and with composer Hermann Darewski. By opening night, Dietrich had learned three songs that were inserted into her spoken material as the show’s mistress of ceremonies. Wearing a bright yellow dress with a long train and rose-colored ruffles at the neck and wrists, she stood—quite still, as she insisted to Charell at dress rehearsal—and sang the undistinguished melodies, barely acknowledging the grandeur of her surroundings or the vast audience. Her apparent detachment created, as she must have suspected, an atmosphere of intrigue about herself and what experience might have been behind the lyrics of the song; she barely regarded her audience, half-closing her eyes and never smiling until she walked, slowly and with a kind of muted eroticism, along the extended ramp over the orchestra pit. With one glance and a hushed word, as actor Hubert von Meyerinck recalled, she communicated more than any performer who cavorted wildly in the show.
It was with the delivery of her second song in
Von Mund zu Mund
that Dietrich brought the audience to a standing ovation. Altering her stance and tone to present a slightly tense, perky sexiness,
she revealed a voice not of great beauty or warmth, but one with unusual spirit, range and subtlety. A recording released the following year was a minor sensation among private collectors in Berlin, along with her renditions of “Wenn ich mir was wünsche” (patently modeled on American blues singers) and “Leben ohne Liebe,” sung in a disarmingly innocent style, rather like a sad, distracted nightclub performer offering a weary conviction that “You can’t live without love,” and that an abandoned woman knows this better than anyone.
W
ITH THESE FIRST RECORDS
, M
ARLENE
D
IETRICH
was about to join an array of German actresses who tried to sing (and singers who tried to act). Many, like her, had distinctive styles, but many were facile mimics of other Europeans or Americans who vocalized with more or less a personal manner. Among the most famous was Lilian Harvey, the British actress raised in Germany (where she became a star), who was perhaps closest to an accomplished operetta artist when she sang onstage or in film (as in her 1926 film
Prinzessin Tralala
.) Renate Müller, on the other hand, had a slightly nervous vibrato when she sang “Ich bin so glücklich heute—I’m so happy today,” rather as if she were protesting too much (in fact she committed suicide at thirty). They avoided the blunt attack of those like Fita Benkhoff (who liked to flavor her songs with Americanisms like “Oh, baby!”). On the other hand, Trude Hesterberg was certainly one of the most trained voices—almost operatic—and Evelyn Künneke was one of those most influenced by American popular song.
But Zarah Leander and Claire Waldoff were perhaps the most famous, controversial and prominent singers at the time and later—and the most influential on the development of Dietrich’s singing style. Leander had an astonishingly smoky, androgynous baritone, but her delivery was in a strange way strongly, almost severely feminine. When she sang about a pursuit of casual amours (“every night brings me a new stroke of luck”) there was a strain of knowing defeat, of loneliness; just so in a lyric of fatigued waiting (“each night, by the telephone . . .”) or Gallic compromise as she thanked
a lover as he (or she) departed (“Merci, mon ami . . .”). Enormously popular, Zarah Leander—with her adult, apparently unemotional but acutely felt trademark of knowing distance—was certainly a model for Marlene Dietrich in the late 1920s. She prepared the way for Dietrich’s delicate balance between eternal romantic optimism and tiresome self-pity.
Much less womanly but equally influential was Dietrich’s co-star in
Von Mund zu Mund
, the redoubtable Claire Waldoff, a barrel-chested little Valkyrie who—seen in photos and heard on recordings decades later—resembled no one so much as Mickey Rooney in drag. Waldoff’s theatrical songs and recordings, crudely refined in cabaret, were not so much sung as rasped or bleated with an almost painful, choking coarseness that many Berliners loved precisely for its unconventionality. Spitting and punching her way through the measures of “Hannelore” (a paean to a rudely educated peasant girl) or “Willi” (in which she poked fun at the deposed Emperor), Claire Waldoff raged along like a boozy stevedore. An intelligent performer unafraid to offend with her openly gay songs, she also enveloped everything with a self-mocking humor.
In fact—unlikely a pair though they might have seemed—the now occasionally blond Marlene Dietrich and the red-headed Claire Waldoff became lovers (or at least sexual partners) in the autumn of 1926. Geza von Cziffra, Elisabeth Lennartz and Stefan Lorant knew that Dietrich was quite besotted with her new friend, with whom she often dined after midnight, sometimes singing along the Kurfürstendamm or (to the delight of theater patrons) in the alley near the theater. This brand of professional-personal intimacy, however briefly it lasted, was typical throughout Dietrich’s life; it seemed to have its own truth and reward, and when the affair ended Waldoff remained a genial buddy to her. Fritzi Massary, the reigning queen of musicals and operettas at Berlin’s Metropol from 1904 to 1932, later wrote that Dietrich learned from Waldoff to laugh at herself as well as at the pretensions of hypersophisticated audiences.
Dietrich was also (according to Mia May, the leading lady in
Tragödie der Liebe
) “constantly pursued by people who found her fascinating, [and] she went around with a group of young actresses who adored her. Usually she wore a monocle or a feather boa,
sometimes as many as five red foxes on a stole.” Perhaps inevitably, an increasing number of adoring colleagues and theater fans were therefore responsible for Dietrich’s growing self-confidence in Berlin from 1926 to 1930. At a party she gave for friends at home at Christmastime 1926, word circulated that she was going to change her outfit. Käte Haack recalled that Dietrich had ordered an ensemble with seven silver foxes that had just arrived, and she made a second grand entrance, forcing (as she doubtless intended) everyone’s attention on herself. Such tactics often assured that she would be noticed in public, too—at the Cabaret Nelson, for example, a notorious nightspot where high art could be found one moment and low humor the next. On the other hand, she discouraged others from calling attention to themselves. When the actress Lili Darvas admired Dietrich’s fur coat but compared it unfavorably to her own, she was told, “Oh, don’t worry, Lili, dear—no one is ever going to bother to look at
you
.”
A
FTER THE BRIEF BUT MEMORABLE PRESENTATION OF
Von Mund zu Mund
, Dietrich supplemented her income from late 1926 through early 1927 by rushing through three films. In
Kopf Hoch, Charly!
(
Heads Up, Charly!
), she again assumed the small role of a French coquette; in
Der Juxbaron
(
The Imaginary Baron
), she had a major comic role as a young woman whose parents hope to marry her off to a nobleman; and in
Sein Grösster Bluff
(
His Greatest Bluff
) she was a high-priced prostitute involved in a jewelry theft. In each of these productions were actors (Michael Bohnen, Trude Hesterberg, Albert Pauling) who recalled Dietrich’s thoroughly professional attitude; indeed, she had a lifetime reputation for punctuality and preparedness. She was also remembered for honoring colleagues’ birthdays with cakes or strudels or trinkets—gestures that were certainly sincere but also perhaps reflected her wish to gratify and to be considered generous and thoughtful.
Dietrich was herself pleased when she won a small role in the European premiere of George Abbott and Philip Dunning’s American play
Broadway
, a tense romantic melodrama still selling out in New York after a year’s run. The premiere was given at the Vienna
Kammerspiele on September 20, 1927, where she made a brief appearance as Ruby, a chorus girl in a spicy jazz-age story about speakeasy gangsters, bootleggers, corrupt police and a vaudevillian’s climb to stardom.
The role was almost negligible, but once again Dietrich managed to attract attention by raising her hemline just a trifle higher than the other chorines’ (although there was no dancing). In the first-night audience was Karl Hartl, then in Vienna as executive producer for a movie with characters similar to those in
Broadway;
two days later, he invited Dietrich to his office and offered her a part in the film
Café Electric
. “She showed only a mild enthusiasm,” Hartl said years later,