Marlene Page 28
“She’s never cruel, but angry, yes, that she can be, and stupid people get on her nerves, and she makes no secret of it, unless the dunderhead happens to be in need. Whoever needs help, to some extent can count on her sympathies.
“Marlene sets her own rules, but the standards she sets for the manners and honesty of others are no less strict than the original ten commandments. That is one of the things that probably makes her so mysterious, that so beautiful and talented a woman, who can do what she pleases, does only what she considers absolutely right, that she was so clever and courageous to set up her own rules, which she follows.
“I know that I, myself, could never see Marlene without her moving me and making me happy. If that’s what makes her mysterious, it’s a beautiful mystery. It’s a mystery of which we have known for a long time.”
André Malraux:
“Marlene Dietrich is not an actress like Sarah Bernhardt, she is a myth like Phyrné.”
Jean Cocteau:
“Marlene Dietrich … Your name begins with a caress, and ends with a whiplash. You wear feathers and furs that seem to belong on your body like the fur on animals and the feathers on birds. Your voice, your look, are those of a Lorelei. But Lorelei was dangerous. You, on the other hand, are not, since the secret of your beauty lies in your goodheartedness. This goodness of heart places you above elegance, above fashion, above style, even above your fame, your courage, your walk, your films and your songs.
“Your beauty is not to be overlooked, but there’s no need to even mention it. So, I bow before your goodness. It illumines you from within that long wave of glory that you are. A transparent wave that comes from far away and generously deigns to roll in toward us. From the sequins in The Blue Angel to the tails in Morocco, from the shabby black dress in X.27 to the exotic bird feathers in Shanghai Express, from the diamonds in Desire to the American uniform, from port to port, from reef to reef, from wave to wave, from embankment to embankment, bears down on us, sails unfurled, a frigate, a figurehead on the prow, a flying fish, a bird of paradise, the incredible, wonderful, Marlene Dietrich!” (From his presentation of Marlene Dietrich at the “Bal de la Mer” in Monte Carlo, August 17, 1954.)
Jean Cau:
“In a world of Lolitas, small, buxom dolls in short skirts with lips pouting, whose strident voices proclaim they want to ‘live their life,’ and who twist and turn enough to dislocate their vertebrae, I take off my plumed hat to you, Madame Dietrich, and bow deeply to the floor.
“Most beautiful of all women, who fills my dreams with your legend, we bid you welcome, Marlene. May you be welcome all over the world, and homage be paid to your glory and timelessness.
“Whence comes this smoky voice that speaks of broken hearts, this dark voice of a thousand wishes—and from what sea rises this eternal siren that binds Odysseus forever to the mast of his ship. Because of your glory and your beauty, Madame, you are, since time immemorial, our Queen, under our countless rapt gazes that spread over the glittering scales of your body. And since time immemorial, you are our elect, as your soul rises above the legend and above the night.”
Christopher Fry:
“There are legends, legendary islands, legendary cities, legends of courage, righteousness, beauty. They will always be in our innermost thoughts. Not because they are legendary, but because they hold the truth, deep-rooted like all truth. The golden legend, or a nightmare, the legend of the Lorelei, of radiant Apollo, from whose hair were fashioned the strings of his lyre, or the dream of the blond women; the legends will always be an immutable part of the world; as if Eve, herself, on leaving the Garden of Eden, had created a new Paradise of her own mystery, and with this mystery a warmth, a wisdom, a humanity, a truth and a living legend.”
Kenneth Tynan:
“These are aspects of the lady as they surface in my memory, colored no doubt by fifteen years of knowing her and some thirty years of quietly lustful admiration.
“First, there is my friend the nurse—the sender of appropriate pills, the source of uncanny medical tips, the magic panacea. For this Marlene, healer of the world’s wounded, I have often been thankful. Her songs are healing, too. Her voice tells you that whatever hell you inhabit, she has been there before, and survived. Some trace of ancient Teutonic folk wisdom—many would call it witchcraft—still adheres to her. For example, she can predict a child’s sex before its birth. This must, of course, be inspired guesswork or shrewdly applied psychology. She calls it science, as any witch would.
“Then there is the self-punishing worker, daughter of an exacting German father, brought up to take pleasure as a prize and a privilege, not as a birthright. This is the Marlene who worships excellence—a high-definition performer who daily polishes her unrusting skills. A small eater, sticking to steaks and greenery, but a great devourer of applause. For some people (said Jean Cocteau), style is a very complicated way of saying very simple things, for others, it is a very simple way of saying very complicated things. Marlene is one of the others. Her style looks absurdly simple—an effortless act of projection, a serpentine lasso whereby her voice casually winds itself around our most vulnerable fantasies. But it is not easy. It is what remains when ingratiation, sentimentality and the manifold devices of heart-warming crap have been ruthlessly pared away. Steel and silk are left, shining and durable.
“And a tireless self-chronicler. For the first half hour of every meeting with this Marlene, you will be told how she wowed them in Warsaw, mowed them down in Moscow, savaged them in Sydney, was pelted with poppies in Ispahan. It is all true and, if anything, understated. She is merely keeping you up to date. Then she moves in—critical, probing and self-abnegating—on your own life and its problems. For the time being, you transfer your burdens to the willing shoulders of this gallant Kraut.
“As I wrote before I met her, she has sex but no particular gender. They say (or, at least, I say) that she was the only woman who was allowed to attend the annual ball for male transvestites in pre-Hitler Berlin. She habitually turned up in top hat, white tie and tails. Seeing two exquisite creatures descending the grand staircases, clad in form-hugging sequins and cascading blond wigs, she wondered wide-eyed: ‘Are you two in love?’ ‘Fraulein,’ said one of them frostily, ‘we are not lesbians.’ This Marlene lives in a sexual no man’s land—and no woman’s, either. She dedicates herself to looking, rather than to being, sexy. The art is in the seeming. The semblance is the image, and the image is the message. She is every man’s mistress and mother, every woman’s lover and aunt, and nobody’s husband except Rudi’s—and he is her husband, far off on his ranch in California.
“She believes in the stars but makes her own luck. Impresarios unnerve her. She has no agent or business manager except herself. Where once, in the high noon of the thirties, she depended on Josef von Sternberg, she now looks to Burt Bacharach, her youthful arranger and conductor. In his absence, she frets, at his excuses, she expressively shrugs. Burt is her generalissimo, the musical overlord on whom, quite asexually, she dotes.
“She laughs a lot, making a honking sound that is not without melancholy. A special note of mournful bitchery invades her voice when the conversation turns to jumped-up starlets who need to be put down. (‘What about that picture? She has to be out of her mind. Honey, it’s to die!’) This professional Marlene is not what anyone would call a woman’s woman. I was not surprised to learn that she had never met Greta Garbo, her major rival in the World Eroticism Stakes of the prewar era. She venerates many kinds of men—great strenuous helpers of our species like Sir Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin; great life-enhancing performers like Jean Gabin and Orson Welles, great self-revealing writers like Ernest Hemingway and Konstantin Paustovsky; great masters of timing and nuance like Noel Coward, and men of great power like General Patton, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and—the latest recruit to the clan—Moshe Dayan. Marlene relishes the breath of power. She is rabidly antiwar, but just as rabidly pro-Israeli. This paradox in her nature sometimes
worries me.
“Aloof, imperious, unfeeling, icy and calculating: These are some of the things she is not. Proud, involved, challenging, ironic and outgoing: These are apter epithets. On stage, in the solo act to which she has devoted the last decade or so, she stands as if astonished to be there, like a statue unveiled every night to its own inexhaustible amazement. She shows herself to the audience like the Host to the congregation. And delivers the sacred goods. She knows where all the flowers went—buried in the mud of Passchendaele, blasted to ash at Hiroshima, napalmed to a crisp in Vietnam—and she carries the knowledge in her voice. She once assured me that she could play Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, and I expect she was right. I can picture her pulling a wagon across the battlefields, chanting those dark and stoical Brechtian songs, and setting up shop wherever the action erupts, as she did in France during the Ardennes offensive—this queen of camp followers, the Empress Lili Marlene.
“What we have here, by way of summary, is a defiant and regal lady with no hobbies except perfectionism, no vices except self-exploitation, and no dangerous habits except an infallible gift for eliciting prose as monumentally lush as this from otherwise rational men. Marlene makes blurb writers of us all. She is advice to the lovelorn, influence in high places, a word to the wise, and the territorial imperative. She is also Whispering Jack Schmidt, Wilhelmina the Moocher, the deep purple falling, the smoke in your eyes, how to live alone and like it, the survival of the fittest, the age of anxiety, the liberal imagination, nobody’s fool and every dead soldier’s widow. On top of which, she has limitations and knows them.” (From “One or two things I know of her …”)
I agree with Tynan—not completely, but with his last sentence, at any rate. I do, in fact, know my limits, and never overstep them, or almost never.
I’m easily discouraged. A shrug of the shoulders is enough to send me back into my shell. On the other hand, I defend my principles like a lioness, and I defend a friend, whether or not he’s in need. I’ve fought for my friends whenever I’ve felt they were being attacked, even when they themselves were utterly indifferent, even risking danger to myself, which didn’t matter at all to me, either then or now. I don’t think I’ll ever change.
I’ve never been very self-confident, either in films or on the stage. On the stage, Burt Bacharach’s praise gave me a much-needed feeling of security. It’s already known who gave me this feeling in films. But outside of these two areas, I’m as helpless as a newborn. I’m not really strong; I have firm convictions. But, as regards a crisis, I feel unsure. I’m speaking here of my own crises, I courageously confront a misfortune that strikes my family or friends, since I feel it’s my duty to help—a feeling that gives me a certain strength.
I’ve been unable to apply this “philosophy” to myself. When a misfortune strikes me, I sink into deep despair. Even my closest friends are not aware of this weakness, which I cannot overcome. And since I learned long ago that self-pity is strictly forbidden, I had to get used to this disaster and could not bother others with my troubles.
Death has wrested many friends from me, my best friends. I’ve lost my husband, my most painful loss of all. Every friend who departs from us deepens our loneliness. It hurts me to no longer be able to pick up a phone and hear a beloved voice, and I confess I’m tired of suffering.
I miss Hemingway and the jokes he would shout to me from the other end of the world, his humorous advice, which he concluded with a “Sleep well.” These words haunt me, and my early rage flares up again. But that doesn’t help me through the night. But is there a remedy against sleepless nights? Nobody knows any. And, although the “professors,” as Hemingway called them, still write thick, learned books on this subject, no remedy exists against this nightly angst. That’s the way it is.
I’ve spent almost all of my life with highly intelligent men. They’re not like other men. Their spirit is great and stimulating. They hate strife, indeed they reject it. Their imaginations are aware of those around them. Their inventive gifts are boundless. They demand devotion and obedience. And a sense of humor. I happily gave all this. I was lucky to be chosen and clever enough to understand them.
Women who have problems (men have fewer) run to their psychiatrists and pay them to listen to them. (I know an analyst who has an earphone that he can turn on or off as he pleases, but always gives the impression that he is listening attentively to his patient’s problems.) Naturally as a realist, I’ve never understood how one could pay a stranger cold cash to listen to him or her.
When people of my generation look back on their lives, many of them feel they have wasted their youth. I think that, at that time, we didn’t know that we were squandering our time. We lived from one day to the next, only the moment counted, as it does for all young people, then as now. “After me, the deluge …” That’s a wonderful expression and perhaps not the worst attitude. It would have been a good title for this book, but it doesn’t really communicate the feelings we experienced in our youth. We never thought of the “deluge.” On the other hand, the youth of today know that such a deluge is possible.
At that time, or so we thought, everything was simpler. I’m sure that today’s young people, who don’t interest themselves in politics—who pursue their daily jobs, as we did then—would say the same. This wonderful attitude of youth triumphs over all. I hope it doesn’t decline and that it will be able to confront the terrifying events threatening the world, that it will survive and preserve its peace of mind.
I detest modern-day “self-exiles.” I’ve read all the books on them. Also those of Elia Kazan. Such people should find a place where there are no laws, where no restrictions disturb their aimless lives, where they can beg for their food, go utterly to the dogs. First sell their possessions and then their own bodies, and finally have themselves killed and carried off in anonymous coffins, bearing the inscription, “Family Unknown.”
Since so many people ask how I spend my time, I’ll be frank: I read incessantly. I receive almost all the new books published in America—good as well as bad. I’ve read the new god of modern literature, Peter Handke, in German. But he remains a riddle to me. He has declared that he cannot live in Germany and prefers to live in Paris. He seems to have had enough of Germany, and of life in general. Moreover, I consider him to be deeply masochistic—one of the chief reasons why I can’t identify with the characters of his books. But I’m not a critic, just an ordinary reader. After his third book I felt bored, nauseated, and finally gave up. Probably my fault! Perhaps his books are better in the English translation. But I don’t like to be disappointed. As for German writers, I’ll have to stick with Heinrich Boll and Günter Grass. But I find it easier to read French authors. Of course, I like English and American writers most of all and spend whole nights with their books.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Now as before, I’m astonished at the permanence of sadness and its power over humans. Perhaps time does heal superficial wounds, but it has no power over deep wounds. Over the years, the scars hurt as much as the wounds. “Keep your head high,” “Chin up,” “This, too, will pass,” etc.—none of this advice is very useful. What is important is to spin a cocoon around your heart, to suppress the pull of the past. Don’t count on the sympathy of others. You can manage very well without them. I know that.
What remains is solitude.
SELECTED CHRONOLOGY
Note
IN THE 1920S MARLENE Dietrich performed in plays and films not mentioned in this book or listed in this chronology. Her Berlin stage credits for this period include The Circle, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, When the New Vine Blossoms, The Imaginary Invalid, Spring’s Awakening, From Mouth to Mouth, Broadway, Duel on the Lido, Die Schule von Uznach, and Back to Methuselah. Her film credits include The Little Napoleon, Man by the Roadside, The Leap into Life, The Joyless Street, A Modern DuBarry, Madame Doesn’t Want Children, Heads Up, Charly!, The Imaginary Baron, His Greatest Bluff, Cafe Electric, Princess Olala, The Woman One Longs For, T
he Ship of Lost Men, and Dangers of the Engagement Period.
1901 born in Berlin on December 27
1906 entered Auguste Victoria School for Girls, Berlin
1918 death of father
graduated from Auguste Victoria School for Girls, Berlin
1919 entered Weimar Konservatorium to study violin
1920 returned to Berlin and began career as actress
1921 auditioned for Max Reinhardt Drama School
1922 Widow in The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (Schumann Theater, Berlin)
1923 Lucie in The Tragedy of Love (Joe May—Film production directed by Joe May)
1924 married Rudolf Sieber on May 17
1925 gave birth to daughter Maria
1926 Micheline in Manon Lescaut (UFA production directed by Arthur Robison)
1928 multiple roles in It’s in the Air, a revue by Marcellus Schiffer and Mischa Spoliansky (Komödie Theater, Berlin)
Hypatia in Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw (Komödie Theater, Berlin)
1929 Laurence Gerard in I Kiss Your Hand Madame (Super-Film production directed by Robert Land)
Mabel in Two Bow Ties by Georg Kaiser and Mischa Spoliansky (Berliner Theater, Berlin) auditioned by UFA
1930 Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel (Erich Pommer/UFA production directed by Josef von Sternberg)
UFA refused to exercise option on contract with Dietrich
Paramount signed contract with Dietrich emigrated to United States, settling in Hollywood
Amy Jolly in Morocco (Paramount production directed by Josef von Sternberg)
1931 X.27 in Dishonoured (Paramount production directed by Josef von Sternberg)
1932 Shanghai Lily in Shanghai Express (Paramount production directed by Josef von Sternberg) brought daughter, Maria, to live with her in Hollywood kidnap threats against Maria