Blue Angel (9 page)

and I had the feeling her heart wasn’t in film. But she accepted, and she showed up the first day with a red suit and a hat like a pot. Marlene knew how to wear clothes of mediocre quality in a way that seemed elegant; her taste and her choice of colors made up for the cheapness of the material.

She accepted the role not only for the salary but also because it was an opportunity to work with the dynamic and popular Viennese actor Willi Forst. As Erni, Dietrich was to be seduced by a young gigolo named Ferdl (Forst), a denizen of the notorious Café Electric, gathering place of pimps and hookers. In a swift blurring of the distinction between art and life, Dietrich and Forst became the talk of Vienna’s café society within a week. “We had to repeat several love scenes between her and Willi Forst,” said Hard. “Considering their romance, this was no hardship for them, and finally she was outstanding.”

The production had another social advantage for her. Igo Sym, also in
Café Electric
, was a handsome Bavarian actor and musician who taught Dietrich to play the musical saw, a long strip of thin metal like a toothless saw, played with a thickly waxed bow. With her knees grasping the handle of the saw, she bent the metal—more for higher tones, less for lower—and slowly applied the bow to its edge; the sound could be politely described as a kind of mournful vibrato. For decades, Dietrich had a kind of vaguely comic renown
in Germany and America as the first lady of this “singing saw,” although she always regarded this talent with absolute solemnity, as if it authenticated her earlier hopes for a career as a concert violinist.

Not long after the Dietrich-Forst romance became an open secret, Rudi arrived in Vienna and demanded that Dietrich end the affair. This was never the judicious approach to take, for it had the predictable effect of confirming her on the independent route she always marked for herself; his wife apparently barely reacted to this entreaty. Rudi had hoped that the responsibilities of motherhood would alter her conduct, but this was a hopeless fantasy. When he then countered that he had the chance for his own extramarital romance—with a darkly attractive young woman named Tamara Matul—Dietrich was delighted and encouraged him.
*

“I haven’t a strong sense of possession towards a man,” she said somewhat airily not long after her confrontation with Rudi, “perhaps because I am not particularly feminine in my reactions. I never have been.” This was the closest Dietrich ever came to justifying her continuing marriage to Rudolf Sieber, a relationship that was henceforth always cordial. From 1927 to 1930, the Siebers lived together only part of the time in Berlin (and rarely thereafter anywhere). Dietrich never seriously considered divorce, perhaps because even a nominal marriage forestalled another offer and acted as a kind of protection. But that same year, Tamara Matul became Rudi’s constant companion and an attentive surrogate parent to Maria when her mother was absent.

Before returning to Berlin, Dietrich—acceding to Willi Forst’s fervent request to prolong her Austrian sojourn—took a small role in the satiric play
Die Schule von Uznach
by Carl Sternheim, Germany’s reigning comic dramatist. After the November 28 premiere at Reinhardt’s Theater in der Josefstadt, critic Felix Salten (author of
Bambi
) wrote, “Among the girls, Marlene Dietrich was the most refreshing as a beautiful, sensual young woman who rambles on without thinking.”

D
IETRICH RETURNED TO
B
ERLIN IN EARLY
1928, arms full of belated Christmas gifts and toys for Maria; she then devoted two weeks to the child’s amusement, taking her to the zoo, parks and children’s pageants. Then she was back in rehearsals for the Berlin opening of
Broadway
on March 9, and for a celebration in honor of her old boss Guido Thielscher, whose fifty years in show business were marked by a midnight cabaret at the Lustspielhaus on March 27. These two events, following the Berlin premiere of
Café Electric
(retitled for Germany as
Wenn ein Weib den Weg verliert/When a Woman Loses Her Way
) and linked to her increasing prominence as a colorful doyenne of theatrical social life, gave Dietrich the widest press exposure she had so far enjoyed.

She still tended to a portliness all too evident on her short frame, and she worried that her nose (which turned up slightly at the tip) made her less photogenic than she would have liked. But her legs were ideal—perhaps because she was now exercising daily with a prizefighter’s trainer who forced her to lie on the floor for hours, pedalling an imaginary bicycle. Casting directors, not to mention most men and many women, were quick to notice the elegant, sensual line of her legs; she could, therefore, risk an even higher hemline than that dictated by mere fashion.

In addition, Dietrich’s partiality for an onstage pose of profound unconcern continued to work wonders for her image. To receive an almost rapt attention Dietrich had only to lean against the scenery, lower her eyes and light a cigarette with utter indifference to everyone round her. In a comic role, this gave her a deadpan appearance and seemed somehow all the funnier; in a serious part, she seemed more than ever a mysterious, eternally ineffable presence. By such tactics, she effectively stole scenes and was immune to criticism from other players. She was, in other words, refining the theatrical counterpoint of creative indolence to a highly successful technique.

I
T WAS PRECISELY
D
IETRICH
’
S IMPRESSION OF VARI
ous inner moods and mysteries that inspired writer Marcellus Schiffer
and composer Mischa Spoliansky to cast her in their fantastic musical revue
Es Liegt in der Luft
(
It’s in the Air
) at the Komödie Theater that spring of 1928. Set in a department store, the show was a series of twenty-four episodes about those who visit and work among an array of luxurious, useless items; most notably, it offered a series of short sketches about those who became lost in the crazy array of goods, died and remained there as wandering spirits.

Dietrich appeared in seven of the twenty-four scenes, and one of them caused a sensation. Schiffer’s wife, the tall, boyish French actress Margo Lion, was already known to be openly bisexual, and a number was prepared for her and Dietrich called “Sisters.” Ostensibly a parody of the sort of friendly girls’ duet offered by the Dolly Sisters, the song deliberately pointed to the bond between two women, happily buying underwear for one another while temporarily released from the company of their boyfriends.

Audiences and critics loved the frank but elegant sexual inferences of the number. Then, after the first week, Dietrich—protesting that their dark outfits needed a touch of color—naughtily capitalized on one of the most notorious sexual symbols of the day and pinned bunches of violets on herself and Lion. These flowers were a widely understood token, since the popular German poet Stefan Georg (and those he inspired, called the Georgists) had taken the color lavender as an emblem of homosexual love and violets as markers of its erotic expression. The play
La Prisonnière
by Edouard Bourdet, a compassionate assessment of modern lesbianism, had recently been successful in Paris and Berlin and one of its most daring visual motifs was violets shared by women in love. That edible flower, prized by French gourmets, also had a long Gallic association with sexual pleasure.

Each night there were several curtain calls after Dietrich and Lion strolled back and forth across the stage in an expressionless daze of mutual obsession, clasping hands and singing—Lion in a high falsetto, Dietrich in a smoky, low register that Spoliansky had found to be just right for her. “Marlene Dietrich,” reported that dean of critics, Herbert Jhering, “sings with delicacy and tired elegance. The number [“Sisters”] goes beyond anything so cultivatedly daring we’ve ever seen.”

The success of
It’s in the Air
led film writer and director Robert Land to Dietrich’s dressing room, where he offered her a handsome salary to appear in a romantic comedy as a Parisian courtesan famous for her lessons in lovemaking. The film was quickly produced that summer with Dietrich in the title role of
Prinzessin Olala
—an obvious satire of Lilian Harvey’s chaster story of
Princess Tralala
, who won hearts by song rather than sex. When the picture was released in September, critics took notice of Dietrich’s resemblance to another European star: “When Dietrich mimes her coquette role,” gushed the critic of
Film-Kurier
, “here’s another Garbo! It seems the director had all he could do to tone down her deliberate Garbo imitation.”

The reviewer was on the mark, for by this time Marlene Dietrich was well on the way to modelling herself on the mysterious and alluring Swedish actress. She had the same coloring as Garbo, and she mimicked the expression of cool diffidence that was meant to imply fires within. Dietrich had seen Garbo in several films,
The Saga of Gösta Berling, The Torrent
and
The Temptress
, which was already released in Berlin. She spoke with Mosheim and Andor (among others) of her passionate admiration. Garbo, then working in Hollywood at MGM, had quickly become one of the world’s biggest stars, and Dietrich was much taken with her remote, sphinx-like beauty.

By late summer, Dietrich was rehearsing back at the Kömodie for her role in Shaw’s
Misalliance
(presented as
Eltern und Kinder/Parents and Children
.) Windy and meandering, this is not usually rated a Shaw masterpiece: “It never stops—talk, talk, talk,” whined Dietrich (as Hypatia Tarleton), describing the Tarleton family; she might have been reviewing the play. The author’s stage directions describe Hypatia as living in “a waiting stillness, [with] boundless energy and audacity held in leash,” and from this stillness Dietrich, Garbo-like, took her cue. As a woman eager to marry only for adventure (“Who should risk marrying a man for love? I shouldn’t . . . it would make a perfect slave of you”), she played Hypatia with an almost stoic self-confidence—but the character’s sentiments were not, after all, so different from her own. Her co-star, Lili Darvas, later recalled how Dietrich made Hypatia’s independence even more arresting by speaking in a low, sultry voice, scarcely moving. “She simply sat down on the stage and smoked—very slowly and sexily—and everyone forgot the other actors were present!” Dietrich’s pose seemed so natural, her gestures so economical, that she already seemed to have the tranquil energy of a Modigliani female.

Wilhelmina Felsing after her marriage to Police Lieutenant Louis Erich Otto Dietrich.

Maria Magdalene Dietrich at the age of five (1906).