Blue Angel (42 page)

Best known for a series of dark thrillers with ominous implications about society on the brink of anarchy
(Dr. Mabuse, Spies, M, Fury)
, the respected German-American director Fritz Lang had for years wanted to create a film for Dietrich. With writer Daniel Taradash, he fashioned a western morality tale (originally called
Chuck-a-Luck
, after the game of vertical roulette) about a cowboy who sets out to find the outlaw killer of his fiancée. Dietrich’s role was Altar Keane, a notorious, aging dance-hall queen who provides bandits with a safe house in return for a cut of their profits and who eventually falls in love with the vengeful cowboy. In a deliberate theft from
Destry Rides Again
(which it mimicked in several aspects), she is struck down by a bullet intended for another.

“Every year is a threat to a woman,” Dietrich says in character in
Rancho Notorious
. Bored with herself and everyone around her, Altar should have been the perfect role for her. But the script was a tedious affair, and the collaboration with Lang was disappointing and difficult from the first day that March. “I had the foolish idea,” Lang said years later, “of wanting to give Marlene a new screen image. In the script I’d described the character she played as an ‘elderly dance-hall girl,’ [but] . . . Marlene resented going gracefully into a little older category. She came onto the set looking younger and younger in each scene until finally it was hopeless.”

In addition to this diffusion of her character for the sake of her own appearance, Dietrich constantly corrected Lang, implying that certain techniques would have been exploited otherwise by von Sternberg. Such a tactic would not have pleased any director, and Fritz Lang—a stern, severe taskmaster even in the best circumstances—was not one to be manipulated. “I am Lang, not von Sternberg,”
he told her bluntly, adding later that the atmosphere all through production was “very, very disagreeable . . . By the end of the picture, [Dietrich and I] didn’t speak to each other any more.”

As it happened, both director and star were right. The western was not an apt genre for Lang, the script was monumentally ungripping, the exterior/interior sets and painted backdrops for the western desert looked just plain silly, and Dietrich’s role made little sense in her reglamorized appearance. Like the songs she was given, Dietrich’s performance was listless and detached, and as she saw the daily rushes she became more and more depressed. As in
The Garden of Allah
and
Kismet
, so now in her third Technicolor film: Dietrich was not flattered by color film, nor was her appearance improved by cosmeticized youthfulness; to make matters worse, there was no budget for substantial laboratory color correction. Never before had Dietrich so bitterly resented, and with good reason, her own image onscreen.

At the same time—perhaps partly driven by the disappointment of
Rancho Notorious
—she took special pains over her appearance when asked to present the Oscar for best foreign film at the Academy Awards, held March 29 at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Although this annual rite of spring was not yet televised, she was told there would be 2,800 people in the auditorium and so, weeks before, she swung into action.

First, Dietrich learned that the stage sets for the show would be red, white and blue. Then she made dozens of telephone calls to agents, producers, columnists and friends, who collectively informed her that most of the women giving and receiving prizes would dress according to the current fashion—most of them in white or pastel formal gowns, some with beads and sequins, others with vast bouffant skirts. Weeks before her appearance, therefore, Dietrich decided on something radically different. She would appear with the plainest makeup and without jewelry, wearing a simple but dramatic Christian Dior black sheath, unadorned and tight from neck to toe. There would be one touch, however: a high slit up the side of the dress. “Watch Mama make the front page of every newspaper in town,” she had said when about to meet the press, her ankle taped after the accident during
The Lady Is Willing
. Now, this provocative black
dress would have the same publicity effect. (Dior of course needed to know which side of the sheath was to be cut open, but Dietrich could not reply until she learned from which side of the stage she would enter.)

According to her publicist Russell Birdwell, Dietrich prepared for the Academy Awards ceremony (during which she was to present an Oscar) just as she prepared for a dramatic entrance to a restaurant on any ordinary evening. She checked the Pantages lighting configuration on the afternoon of March 29, rehearsed her walk and, when introduced that evening, slithered across the stage, her famous legs revealed to the audience peek-a-boo style with every calculated step. As
Variety’s
headline story reported next day, “
GRANDMA DIETRICH STEALS SHOW
: She gave every woman there a lift by her startling denial of the fifties . . . She sauntered out with her sheath skirt slit to one knee and held 2,800 people in her instep.”

Similarly, the following winter she attended the pre-Broadway tryout of Christopher Fry’s play
Venus Observed
in Philadelphia, making her entrance in a simple black suit seconds before the house lights dimmed. Again, the audience was stunned, and then there was clamorous applause. By the sheer force of her personality and never promoting her wardrobe above herself, Dietrich capitalized on her legend and italicized it by a carefully studied presentation. She also used to her advantage every means of publicity—like the press luncheon she quietly suggested to honor the twenty-first anniversary of her arrival in America. The Colonial Room of the Ambassador Hotel was jammed with reporters and photographers on May 4, film clips were shown, Maria entered with her mother, and after lunch Dietrich carved an enormous cake. Except for finely rendered portraits in very few films, there had been nothing remarkable in her career for years, and so Dietrich turned herself into the object of critical acclaim, creating the image that art did not. She became, in other words, her own self-generated product.

M
ARIA
R
IVA, MEANWHILE, HAD SLIMMED TO A STAR
let’s weight and, while her husband worked and taught scenic design at Fordham University, she was working under the terms of a contract
with CBS-TV. During the so-called Golden Age of Television (generally the decade beginning about 1949), Maria had the leading role in over a dozen live television plays and was one of three performers seen most often (the others were Charlton Heston and Mary Sinclair). For much of the second half of 1951, Dietrich shuttled back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, furnishing a four-room apartment she took at 993 Park Avenue and frequently watching Maria at work at the studio. When completed, her living room had bookshelves lined with titles by William James, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner and Hemingway, and the walls were adorned with original art by Cézanne, Delacroix, Utrillo and Corot. Also strategically positioned were personally inscribed photographs of General Patton, Jean Cocteau, Alexander Fleming, Maria Callas, Noël Coward, Hemingway and others.

During this time, Dietrich also successfully pursued the thirty-year-old actor Yul Brynner, then achieving spectacular fame on Broadway in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical
The King and I
. His sexual relationship with Dietrich indicates how successfully she managed both her own obsession with youth and the power of her legendary status.

This affair was certainly not a case of Dietrich landing an innocent in the net of her own wiles. Brynner, born in Vladivostok, had created a fanciful autobiography and, although married at the time to the actress Virginia Gilmore, was as much a libertine as Dietrich. Throughout the 1950s they met irregularly in New York, finding one another’s company physically gratifying and intellectually stimulating. Brynner was an impressive autodidact fluent in several languages, and together they spoke French, wandered into Manhattan art galleries and antiquarian bookshops, discussed the post-Impressionists and read the classics aloud to one another. Often seen publicly with Brynner, Dietrich was also invited to late suppers with him. He encouraged her return to the stage, and that year it was announced that she would appear with him in Jacques Deval’s musical play
Samarkand
, a project she soon abandoned, still fearing the acting demands of nightly stage performance.

With her career now stalled, Dietrich foresaw the possible loss of
her own celebrity, and neatly employed her association with Brynner to keep herself before the press; because their relationship was controversial, it could only augment her status as the ultimately unpredictable and romantic iconoclast. She would indeed be all things to as many men as possible, and simultaneously a challenge, a threat and a rebuttal to the women of her day. Advancing by her appearance and appeal the myth that women do not (indeed,
must
not) age, she publicly challenged the taboo of the older woman with a younger man.

Very much a person of her time, she had been raised and confirmed in the cultural presumptions that women were essentially inferior to men. As witness of this, she had for years been scornful of what she called the feminine mind and will and had even expressed regret that she had not been born a man—a fact she had unconsciously tried to counter by proxy during her USO tours. (“I admire men’s minds,” she insisted throughout her life. “They are not like women. They think things through.”) But, as always, herein lies a central contradiction in Dietrich’s character, for at the same time she needed to demonstrate
her own superiority
to men: thus her lifelong special attraction to the morose, brooding, weak or confused man (or one simply sick with a cold) who was—or who she thought was—in need of a gently controlling take-over.

Together, according to Brynner’s son, “they could
almost
overlook the fact that Marlene was twenty years older; at least, Marlene could. She was also the most determined, passionate and possessive lover he had ever known, not in the least concerned about discretion.” Just so did Dietrich dally with Frank Sinatra, with whom she had an occasional, stormy affair for two years beginning in 1955. Toward its conclusion, she noted in her diary (on September 4, 1957) that they spent an hour and a half together in bed, while she soothed his fears that he had been sexually out of practice. “But everything was fine,” she concluded—although not, perhaps, in the honesty of one or the other of them.

In addition, Dietrich commandeered friends and relatives in catering to him. Among these were Rudi and Tamara, who were also in New York that year, staying several months at a hotel while
Tamara consulted neurologists and psychologists for a worsening but still undefined nervous condition (for which Dietrich paid the bills). Stefan Lorant, whose friendship with Dietrich had resumed when he, too, relocated to Manhattan after the war, recalled several occasions when she blithely rang Tamara and sent her—as if she were a servant—on a mission to a local delicatessen for a particular kind of bagel favored by Brynner.

T
HE YEAR
1952
BEGAN WITH A NEW ANGLE TO HER
career. On Sunday evening, January 6, at nine-fifteen, after several months of negotiations with the American Broadcasting Company affiliate in New York, Dietrich announced the premiere of her own radio show,
Café Istanbul
. With Dietrich playing the manager of a Turkish haunt for spies and secret agents, the half-hour dramatic series had complicated plots frequently interspersed by her singing or humming a few measures of French, German and English songs associated, of course, with herself—like the name she chose for her character, Mademoiselle Madou, after her surrogate in Remarque’s
Arch of Triumph
. (The series was written by Murray Burnett, coauthor of “Everybody Comes to Rick’s,” the basis for the film
Casablanca.)

The weekly recorded series did not materialize easily, as producer Leonard Blair recalled years later. Although the idea for a Dietrich program originated when (through her agents) she contacted radio executives, she affected a certain indifference when Blair was sent to their first meeting. “Her movement and her demeanor were studied, almost calculated. In fact, she was so sparing in her enthusiasm that it wasn’t at all clear she would commit to the series.”

Dietrich hosted this initial conference and the subsequent story meetings at her apartment, where she insisted on cooking breakfast for Blair. Moving from refrigerator to mixing bowl to frying pan, she asked detailed questions about her character, the story line, music, sound effects, supporting roles and setting. “There was no bright green light from Dietrich; we moved step by cautious step, but with
each weekly serving of scrambled eggs I could see the slow cementing of her confidence. If I was well prepared and in full command, she was polite and responsive. But if she detected an ill-considered idea or the slightest lack of preparation—or simply idle flattery—she could be pointedly tart.” Self-protective and apprehensive about the series, Dietrich was virtually a one-woman creative enterprise, redrafting scripts, coaching the actors, supervising the music and collaborating on every aspect of production (except in the control booth, from which union rules barred her). The program was heard successfully for two thirteen-week seasons.

After recording several shows in advance, Dietrich departed New York in February for a brief publicity tour on behalf of the opening of
Rancho Notorious
, stopping first with her co-star Mel Ferrer at a Chicago movie theater. Not content merely to say a few polite words at the launching of a film she detested, Dietrich had arranged a surprise for the moviegoers and the house manager. She stepped onto the darkened stage and, dressed in a full-skirted, strapless gown, sang “Falling in Love Again.” The audience went wild, whistling and cheering as she returned moments later, one spotlight illuminating her bare legs and black bodice as she offered three more songs. At the conclusion, she gathered up bouquets of roses, bowed humbly and slowly departed. It was her first theatrical solo in America—and in fact became the test run for a major one-woman show she was then considering.