The Secret in Her Soul

SHE CREATED, DURING 62 YEARS OF international fame, one of the century’s most indelible (if ambiguous) images. Yet she passed the last 13 years of her life as a virtual recluse — cranky, litigious and, considering the length and strength of her celebrity, by no means wealthy. She was, by common critical consent, one of the great stars of the movies’ Golden Age. But she was never wildly popular with the mass audience and was once dubbed box-office “poison” in an exhibitors’ poll.

It was artists and intellectuals, trying to explicate her mystery, who did the most to propagate her legend. She was Ernest Hemingway’s pal (he called her “the Kraut”), and she conducted famous liaisons with men ranging from John Wayne to the gloomy popular novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Yet she was also a devoted mother and grandmother who never divorced her only husband, even after he became a chicken rancher in the San Fernando Valley. She was, everyone agreed, “sexy,” but no one ever satisfactorily defined the nature of her appeal, which eventually settled into a dislocating combination of threat and good nature, the elusive and the earthy. When she died alone at 90 last week in her tiny Paris apartment, the world did not exactly mourn her, most of it being too young to have powerful emotional connections with her. But it did pause to ponder, one last time, the enigma that was Marlene Dietrich.

She carried within herself more than her share of the calamitous contradictions of this century. She was born bourgeois in Berlin, avatar of some of the best in modern art and much of the worst in modern politics. Her father died when she was a child, her stepfather was killed in World War I, and her hopes for a career as a violinist were ended by a hand injury. By 1929 she was making a career on the German stage and screen. It was then that another of this century’s perpetual emigres, gifted, egomaniacal Josef von Sternberg, noticed the “cold disdain” with which she eyed the nonsense of a theatrical farce in which she was appearing. It was just the quality he was looking for in the leading lady of a film he had come to Berlin to make.

Leading slut is more like it. For The Blue Angel is the tragic (if now faintly risible) story of the sadomasochistic relationship between a nightclub singer and a middle-aged high school teacher who becomes obsessed with her. The callousness of Lola-Lola’s manipulations was memorable, but not more so than the soon-to-be-famous legs that walked all over her victim. Von Sternberg returned triumphantly to Hollywood, and Dietrich followed.

Paramount teamed them for six more pictures. But Von Sternberg was a Svengali who used his Trilby less as a performer than as another element in his lush decor — and an androgynous one at that. It suited him to dress her in white tie and tails (and to have her kiss a woman before she embraced Gary Cooper in Morocco). At first Dietrich fit into Hollywood’s pantheon of sexual ambiguity somewhere between Greta Garbo and Mae West. Von Sternberg did nothing to soften her exotic sexual challenge or penetrate her masklike countenance, both of which were largely his creations. The studio finally separated them.

Her revision of his creation made her a more flexible, enduring and ultimately more appealing figure. She learned to purr vulnerably in Desire (1936) and demonstrated that quality still more poignantly in such later films as Witness for the Prosecution and Judgment at Nuremberg. People began to suspect that her watchful coolness was a way of avoiding pain. But she also demonstrated her gift for raucous invulnerability (and bold self-parody) in Destry Rides Again (1939), and that humanizing talent would later serve her in vehicles as varied as The Spoilers and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil.

But she did not depend on her increasingly spotty screen career to sustain her legend. Her fierce anti-Nazism before World War II and her heroic exertions to entertain Allied troops during it endeared her to people as no movie role ever did. And the “glamorous grandmother,” sewed into her astonishing costumes for her fabled cabaret and concert appearances, finally confirmed the still distant yet remarkably tenacious terms of the public’s devotion. “She knows where all the flowers went,” critic Kenneth Tynan wrote of her solo act. They are, he said, “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.” It is possible that she carried that instinctive knowledge in her soul long before she or anyone else recognized it. And that it required long years before she could break through her own reserve and other people’s ideas about her to express it.