Marlene Dietrich. - book reviews

National Review, May 24, 1993 by Richard Rodriguez

MARLENE DIETRICH was nearly as old as the century. She grew up in Berlin in the years preceding World War I, and became famous in Hollywood in the Thirties. Dietrich made the transition from silent films to talkies. She became a U.S. citizen during the war and entertained the Allied troops. She knew Noel Coward and five-star generals. She was a thorn in the mind of Hitler. She was a movie star--of that first generation of movie stars who lived with the implications of a smile as long as a Cadillac, eyes as high as windows. Dietrich was a screen goddess, literally a projection, who in her later years managed a transfiguration, a miracle.

I remember her in the late 1960s, in concert on Broadway.

"Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Marlene Dietrich" . . . the tish of cymbals, the wah-wah of trumpets and trombones--"Falling in Love Again," the articulation of her louche hymn, announcing the arrival of the goddess.

Trailing a coronation-length fur coat, erect (the Prussian officer's daughter, after all), a white-blonde Dietrich on stage impersonated Lili Marlene of the movies--a theatrical recollection of our cinematic memory (the theater challenging the power of movies). Her beauty was celebrated in Playbill by Hemingway, Cocteau, and Colette. She was the century.

Our century is infatuated with celebrity--the royal, the athlete, the politician, and especially the movie star--her face enlarged beyond human scale. The movie star assures us it is possible to evade the anonymity of mass society. But the movie-star biography--the chronicle of the star's private failings--has become the moral tale we train against celebrity and against our own ambition to be larger than life.

Marlene Dietrich is written by her daughter, Maria Riva. Though, in life, Mrs. Riva conspired with her mother to create Dietrich's celebrity, in her book the daughter conspires with us against her mother, attempts to tear the image down.

That Mrs. Riva is a reliable witness, I have no doubt. She grew up in Hollywood, an only child, yet never a child. Some of the best chapters in Marlene Dietrich describe life on the Paramount lot in the Thirties. What an interesting, optimistic, industrious place it was, that celebrity factory.

Movies are for the eyes, Dietrich knew. "If sound comes, that will be the end of acting with the eyes--no more faces, only stupid talk."

Beginning with her brilliant collaboration in Berlin with Josef von Sternberg, Dietrich's primary interest was always her look--anticipating our perception--the costumes she would wear, the makeup, the faces, Psychological verity was not a consideration. Emotion could be painted on; the slant of an eyebrow could portray anger or despair. Dietrich and her daughter would spend entire days with Travis Benton, the head designer at Paramount, conspiring amidst laces and pearls and hats and wigs. Dietrich was not a great actress nor a very good singer. Her genius was to understand (well before Warhol) that exaggeration is all.

"Only pansies know how to look like a sexy woman."

Maria Riva is not shrewd enough, nor is her book expansive enough, to reflect fully on her mother's gay aesthetic or how it was that Dietrich became so important an icon for homosexuals. Mrs. Riva does disclose that it was in imitation of a Berlin transvestite that Dietrich modeled herself in her notorious Berlin films. In the sensational scene in Morocco Dietrich appears in a dinner jacket (the goddess as a young god), and bestows a kiss on the upturned lips of a female admirer.

The daughter describes her mother locked in a studio dressing room, with Mae West. The daughter can hear them giggling. Mrs. Riva speculates: "I always wanted to see them together in a film. What fun they would have been, and then again, maybe not; they might have canceled each other out."

They were both women who became famous by imitating women.

Mrs. Riva rehearses the list of lovers--the directors, the leading men. The lesbian lovers were usually less famous. There were singers (Chevalier, Sinatra), politicians and millionaires (old Joe Kennedy and, decades later, son Jack), as well as famous soldiers and journalists and writers. Dietrich reduced them, most of them, to courtiers, by playing the cool, distant lady of the sonnets.

Dietrich would doubtless be horrified to be called a lesbian. She was free of our modern reductionism. The love-goddess was, more truly, a woman who "always preferred glowing romance to actual sex." Dietrich's durable marriage was a strange mixture of affection and freedom; her husband lived at a distance, often befriending discarded male lovers.

There was little sentimentality in Dietrich. And little loyalty, apparently. There was an ego as inflated, as burnished as her screen image--"little people" got discarded, little people got hurt, little people were forgotten. On the other hand, the daughter seems at times too dismissive regarding the difficulty or the achievement of her mother's celebrity. Describing Dietrich's famous war effort, her entertainment of the Allied forces: "The Prussian was in her element; her German soul embraced the tragedy of war with all its macabre sentimentality." Perhaps. But perhaps valor is not inconsistent with manipulation. Of course Dietrich must be in the front lines during World War II. Where else would Athena be?