--- title: That Old Feeling: Marlenes Siren Songs description: Falling in love again, Never wanted to. What am I to do? I cahn't help it. Love's always been my game, Play it how I... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6910767/that-old-feeling-marlenes-siren-songs/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2002-01-27T05:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T16:13:07.363Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: That Old Feeling: Marlenes Siren Songs og:description: Falling in love again, Never wanted to. What am I to do? I cahn't help it. Love's always been my game, Play it how I... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6910767/that-old-feeling-marlenes-siren-songs/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: That Old Feeling: Marlenes Siren Songs twitter:description: Falling in love again, Never wanted to. What am I to do? I cahn't help it. Love's always been my game, Play it how I... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # That Old Feeling: Marlenes Siren Songs > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with Ally. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jan 27, 2002 5:00 AM UTC by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Jan 27, 2002 5:00 AM UTC --- > “” --- — “Falling in Love Again” by Frederick Hollander, Sammy Lerner Marlene Dietrich sang this song for the first time in Josef von Sternberg’s “The Blue Angel,” the 1930 German film that made her an international star and brought her to Hollywood as Sternberg’s glittering protégée. In the film she plays a chanteuse named Lola Lola, the star of a traveling variety show — though she might have been the lion tamer in a tent circus, with humans instead of jungle beasts obeying the snaking whip of her gaze. Her wrought-irony smile suggested there was no depravity that she could perform, no atrocity that could be performed upon her, that would shock or even divert her. Her body was open to all comers, but her heart, if she had one, was encased in an invisible protective shield. Lola Lola wears this smile, along with a brimmed hat and a sleeveless sequined top, when she takes the stage toward the end of “The Blue Angel.” Wrapping her famous legs around the back of a wooden chair, she sings “Falling in Love Again” (actually “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss/ Auf Liebe eingestellt”: “From head to toe/ I’m made for love”). What siren power this song and this singer have! They prod a stern schoolteacher, Prof. Immanuel Rath, to unbutton his inhibitions, renounce propriety, propose marriage and become her crowing cuckold. All because he believed that Lola Lola was singing to him alone as her eyes raked the room for contact with the customers. The Professor fell for the oldest, most seductive lie in show business: the lie of intimacy. Dietrich performed her signature tune thousands of times in her long career — many more times, surely, than Judy Garland did “Over the Rainbow.” But what do the lyrics mean? Who’s falling in love again? Not the singer. No, the tumbler is some man, any man, when he sees a woman like Dietrich. Though her presence warms him, heats him, she does nothing overt to encourage him. (“You’d better go now,” she tells Gary Cooper in “Morocco.” “I’m beginning to like you.”) So she sings like a defiant defendant in the witness box. Not my fault, your honor. Didn’t start it. Cahn’t help it. Why stop it? In matters of the heart and loins she was passive, a magnet aware of and amused by its power of attraction. On this thrill ride she was simply the passenger, yet her presence drove men mad. As mobster-on-the-make Cary Grant in “Blonde Venus” croons to her: “A little of you is worth a lifetime of any other woman.” SOME KIND OF A WOMAN Dietrich would have been 100 a month ago today (if she hadn’t died in 1992), and the occasion has sparked the usual tributes and retrospectives. The definitive work — since Dietrich was essentially not an actress but a fashion model — is a book of pictures: [Jean-Jacques Naud’s “Marlene Dietrich: Photographs and Memories”](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375405348/qid%3D1012073967/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F0%5F1/103-4231264-3558238) (Knopf), which has photos of her childhood, her movies, her clothes, her lovers and friends. The centenary also lends readers an excuse to pick up [Andrew Sarris’ 1966 study “The Films of Josef von Sternberg,”](http://www.strandbook.net/adv%5Fsearch%5Fresults.php?search%5Ftype=keywords&search%5Fvalue=josef+von+sternberg) still a paragon of careful viewing and breathless prose; and Sternberg’s autobiography [“Fun in a Chinese Laundry,”](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/offering-page/ref=sdp%5Fab%5Fub/103-4231264-3558238?index=fixed-price&field-offering-type=used&field-asin=0916515370&field-status=open&size=25&rank=+price) whose prose matches in arch elegance the images with which he caressed Dietrich and in which he encased her. For more moving evidence, Turner Classic Movies has a weekly series of her films, including a pair of documentaries: “Marlene Dietrich — Her Own Song,” directed by her grandson J. David Riva, which emphasizes the star’s political support for the Allied effort in World War II and her love-hate relationship with her homeland; and Maximilian Schell’s “Marlene,” an interview filmed when Dietrich was living, in Paris, in seclusion, in her 80s. The series ends this Thursday with two of her best late efforts, “Witness for the Prosecution” and “Judgment at Nuremberg.” A shame “Touch of Evil” is not included. In this Orson Welles melodrama, Dietrich, looking great at 56 in a dark wig, speaks the most admiring and ambiguous epitaph for Welles’ character: “He was some kind of a man.” Her last line is a dismissal of all biography, all gossip, and all articles like this one: “What does it matter what you say about people?” To many, Dietrich was some kind of a woman. She had the same effect on writers, critics and colleagues that her characters had on the hapless fellows in her films Ernest Hemingway, a reputed lover, said of her: “If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and the timeless loveliness of her face. It makes no difference how she breaks your heart if she is there to mend it.” Jean Cocteau (not a Dietrich sex partner) wrote: “Whoever knows her and has been able to experience her has experienced perfection itself.” John Wayne (maybe) called her “the most intriguing woman I’ve ever known.” In the 1983 book “”Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood,” Ethan Mordden, who writes acutely and amusingly about films and Broadway musicals, devotes a chapter to “this amazing female who was made of sex. All kinds.” Mordden’s remark is a gloss on an earlier one by Kenneth Tynan, the most quotable critic of the 20th century: “She has sex, but no particular gender; her masculinity appeals to women, and her sexuality to men.” When Dietrich was in her late 60s, Tynan wrote: “Her eyes were a pair of mournful rebukes, twin appeals to us not to lose our heads by becoming ’emotionally involved’ but the milk-soft skin (which still shows no signs of curdling) gave the lie to them. And how cynically witty were the lips!…” He continues in this enthusi-woozy-astic vein, then says that Dietrich has “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.” Well, not me. Or, at least, not exactly. First of all, my writing style is high-blurb; I can spume on almost any subject. Second, I’m fascinated by the Dietrich myth but I’m not ready to surrender to it. It’s spooky to me, her agelessness, that older-than-Eve lassitude she exudes. David Thomson began his wise consideration of Dietrich in The New York Times last month by writing, “She would have been 100 on Thursday — or is it 1,000?” He means she’s immortal; I wonder if she isn’t the undead, less a seductress than a succubus, not so much vamp as vampire. Is her world-weariness post-coital or post-mortem? Is she singing from a bedroom busier than Berlin Alexanderplatz, or from beyond the grave? Her career is a monument, all right — an imposing but chilly slab of granite. Perhaps I should say Dietrich is a blackboard on which impressionable boys, feeling the first stirrings of attraction for a remote goddess, draw a heart in chalk. If I can’t be one of those Dietrich boys, it may be because I’m a Garbo man. To me, Greta Garbo, the Swedish star whose Hollywood career spanned the years 1925 to 1941, was the cinema’s great dramatic actress; and it would be hard to love equally Garbo and her German rival. They are like dogs and cats, Palestine and Israel, or the Yankees and the Mets: one could hate both with the same fervor, but when it comes to love one has to make a choice, and I choose Garbo. Her films were the chronicle of a woman’s search for love; Dietrich’s were the photographic record of her effect on men whose lives were complicated, compromised or destroyed by their love for her. Garbo was ecstasy to Dietrich’s irony, romantic intensity to her witty inertia. Tynan wrote: “What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober.” Garbo was an intoxicant; Dietrich sobers me up. She was a dash of cold water in the fantast’s adoring face. In an impish or impious moment, I might almost prefer Madeline to Marlene — the Madeline Kahn of Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles,” in which she plays Lili Von Shtupp, “the Teutonic Titwillow” (and, to her enemies, the “Teutonic twat”). In a delicious dance-hall number, Lili sings that she’s “tired of being admired” and of men who are “always coming and going and going and coming/ All always too soon.” What’s beautiful about Kahn’s performance — besides her legs, which are slimmer and shapelier than Dietrich’s ever were — is the acuity of the impersonation. Her singing moans are perfectly off-pitch, her smile wan and used-up, her speech a generous parody of Dietrich’s slightly impaired diction. But Kahn is simply the best and most prominent of the many entertainers and ordinary people who, knowingly or not, took their cues from the fictional character known as Marlene Dietrich. THE IMAGE To moviegoers and fashion mavens of several generations, Dietrich could be summed up in two words: legs, and pants. Somebody called her Glamour Gams. She used to sing a song, written for her, titled “Nach meine Beene is ja janz Berlin verrückt” (“Berlin’s Just Crazy About My Legs”). Later she would say, “Darling, the legs aren’t so beautiful. I just know what to do with them.” And if she didn’t, Sternberg — her mentor and torturer in the most renowned director-diva relationship in movie history — would instruct her. In “Dishonored,” the third of seven films they made together from 1930 to 1935, she sprawls in a chair and provocatively hikes one leg over the side, Later, standing by her bed with a suitor at the door, she puts her foot up on the bed, as if it’s a stirrup and she’s about to mount the furniture for a hard ride. Odd that Dietrich could be famous both for displaying her legs and for covering them up. But in the history of fashion she is considered a prime influence, helping convert the American woman from skirts to trousers. (Katharine Hepburn had a hand in those pants too… wait a sec, that can’t be right!) Dietrich’s haberdashery also set her up as a bisexual icon. Tynan’s comment about Dietrich’s gender is often misquoted as: “She was sexy — but which sex?” That’s her richness, her mystery, the ambiguity that has keep her legend fresh. And it’s all atomized in few seconds of the night club scene in “Morocco,” her first Hollywood film. As Amy Jolly, one of the “Foreign Legion of women,” Dietrich materializes in top hat, white tie and tails, brandishing a cigarette After singing “Quand l’amour meurt,” she asks a woman customer if she can take a flower in the woman’s hair. In an act of gratitude or attitude, she leans into the woman and kisses her on the mouth. The woman withdraws and gasps out a nervous laugh. Dietrich takes the flower, inhales its fragrance and tosses it to Gary Cooper, preening at a ringside table. The erotic geography is impressive; it establishes Dietrich as a man’s man and a woman’s too. Indeed, she is more manly than Cooper, who early in his career was a long, luscious thing, and who here plays the coquette to Dietrich’s pursuing male. The tailoring of her clothes and character in “Morocco” gives a spin to one of the actress’ more Delphic comments: “I am at heart a gentleman.” So: movie icon, music icon, fashion icon, gay icon. I wonder if Dietrich would have dismissed this overused epithet. I’d bet that, if you were to say “icon” to her, she would snap back, “No, you cahn’t.” But if icon means a pinup for intellectuals — an 8×10 glossy to paste on the right side of a busy brain — then Dietrich was that. And though Sternberg took credit for molding her from a pudgy nobody to a synonym for hauteur, she was finally the chief merchandiser of her own glamour. Like Lola Lola, she convinced a world full of impressionable professors that she was what she wasn’t. She realized — more than most, and earlier than most — the sweet charade in the word icon. It is really the popular artist’s declaration of duplicity: “I con.” You could argue (I will) that Dietrich was one of the first performers who deserve to be called modernist: she forced those watching her to ask, “Does she mean to do it these way?” Thus she refined or redefined traditional notions of acting and singing. These had been elitist crafts with their own vocabularies and standards. One acted with a certain vigor; one sang on key. Dietrich didn’t do the first, and couldn’t do the second. “Didn’t,” “couldn’t,” in the sense that Brando didn’t enunciate like Vincent Price, Picasso couldn’t paint like Whistler and Bob Dylan couldn’t sing like Bing Crosby. It took a while for the public to realize that radically different didn’t have to mean abysmally bad; that vision and personality could replace aural and visual artisanship. Dietrich, surely, was a super saleswoman of her superwoman personality. She built the dichotomy of seduction and solitude. Whereas Garbo’s screen image was of the neurotic angel who needed a man’s love, Dietrich’s was the devil — her last film with Sternberg was called “The Devil Is a Woman” — who permitted men to have sex with her. She demanded no worshippers; anyone else was, frankly, irrelevant to the lover who knew her best: herself. Though her early films were full of self-sacrifice for husband, son, Foreign Legionnaire, Dietrich’s true soul mate was the mirror. It was there she found her most honest and appreciative appraiser. No man’s moods could surprise her, because she had anticipated them all as she considered herself — her image — in that gilded glass. FACE + SMILE = FACSIMILE What self did Dietrich see in that mirror? What Dietrich do we see through the window of the still or movie camera? The Hollywood moguls didn’t think much of it at first; as Mordden writes, “Nor was she thought to have a photogenic face — a nose problem or something; ridiculous, the face is ingenious.” It is that, as well as an imposing object of architecture and a supreme subject of photography. As Thomson wrote in The Times, “If ever any bad pictures existed some devilry burned them, or had them wither in her gaze.” In [“Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood,”](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312252072/qid=1012088654/sr=1-1/ref=sr%5F1%5F14%5F1/103-4231264-3558238) Mick LaSalle observes that Dietrich “introduced a distinctly modern strain of amused irony into the twentieth century.” This smile absolved the actress and her characters of all responsibility for the damage around them; that’s why Dietrich, unlike many other performers, couldn’t be ambushed or embarrassed by kitsch material. It was also a smile that can from far away — above, perhaps; certainly beyond. It held a queen’s indulgence and a whore’s contempt for the men who gazed on her. Dietrich, like Medusa, would say: Gape at your own risk. As she notes in “The Devil Is a Woman,” “No flies enter a closed mouth.” And through it all the Dietrich face smiles, in a facsimile of sympathy. How seriously can a goddess, or a succubus, take the human drama? Life is a comedy to the dead, to the survivor. Which was Dietrich? You decide. But anyway, she’d been around. And moviegoers would come to this totem seeking brittle wisdom. Mordden writes that viewers would “watch her eyes for the flicker of insight into what women see in men.” Like an Easter Island stone carving whose personality evolves and matures with the passing millennia, the Dietrich face was a sculpture that took a while to carve. Maria Magdalene Dietrich, born December 17, 1901, was a true Prussian — one of the things Hitler would love about her — and a military man’s daughter. As Frau Bertholt in “Judgment at Nuremberg,” she tells Spencer Tracy: “I’m not fragile, Judge Haywood. I’m a daughter of the military… It means I was taught discipline… Control your thirst, control hunger, control emotion. It has served me well.” Asked to describe herself in the Schell documentary, she says, “Professional. Disciplined. And good.” The first two came from her upbringing as a good German girl, a daughter who learned discipline until it was part of her nature. The early pictures in the Knopf book — including the only known nude photo of Marlene, taken on a beach when she was about four — offer just the vaguest hints as to the shape that face will take. A high school class portrait from 1915 shows 24 girls, at least half of them as fetching as the 13-year-old Maria. In her 20s, she is again on a beach, with her one and only husband Rudolf Sieber, and he’s the one with the great legs. By this time she had conflated her two Christian names into Marlene (which later allowed Cocteau to poetize: “Your name, at first the sound of a caress, becomes the crack of a whip.”) But she was still lumpy, if not dumpy, in the full-figured fashion of the decade. In the films she ornamented before “The Blue Angel,” she displayed thick arms and legs. She was 27 — no kid — when Sternberg found her and literally reshaped her, supervising a diet that would slim 20 pounds from her frame and a makeover that would find “the face” under the excess flesh. JO AND MARLENE Nobody at Ufa, the German movie studio to which Sternberg had come from Hollywood to make his film, wanted Dietrich to play Lola Lola. Both Erich Pommer, the production boss, and Emil Jannings, the star, strongly disputed Sternberg’s choice; they wanted Brigitte Helm, the virgin and robot from Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis.” The curious thing is that Dietrich wasn’t crazy about getting the part either. She flounced lazily through an audition, insolent and indolent. And he was hooked. “That’s what interested Sternberg,” she told Schell a half-century later: “that I was not interested.” She was hired, and stardom immediately followed; the day after “The Blue Angel opened in Berlin, she was on a ship to Hollywood. So the question lingers whether, without Sternberg’s discovery and transformation of her, the plump ingenue would ever have become “Dietrich.” The Sternberg-Dietrich love affair was played out in their movies. In all of them — “The Blue Angel, “Morocco,” “Dishonored,” “Shanghai Express,” “Blonde Venus,” “The Scarlet Empress” and “The Devil Is a Woman” — some older man, often with a Sternbergian mustache, watches in jealousy or desperation or amusement as the Dietrich woman wreaks her pretty havoc and, usually, land in the lap of a younger, more strapping fellow. And behind them Sternberg seemed to cry out, like a masochistic Pygmalion to his heedless Galatea: “I made you, and you can destroy me.” In these erotic conquests, perhaps even the Dietrich character was bruised by her victories. As the actress herself said: “The weak are more likely to make the strong weak than the strong are likely to make the weak strong.” These are gorgeous films, whose wit is as much in the details of swirling lace (Sternberg’s first job was in a milliner’s shop) as they are in Dietrich’s face. And, as Sarris cogently observes, the films’ interior decoration was a clue to the characters’ interior desolation: “The colorful costumes, the dazzling decors, the marble-pillared palaces merely underscore by ironic contrast the painfully acquired wisdom of the all too human prisoners of grandiose illusions…. There are no codes or systems in those dream worlds; the characters retain their civilized graces despite the most desperate struggles for psychic survival, and it is their poise under pressure, their style under stress, that grants them a measure of heroic stature and stoic calm.” Sternberg’s avid, yearning camera insured that every Dietrich movement would be eroticized. In “Dishonored,” playing an Austrian spy, she lifts her veil to blow out a match, but holds the pucker for a few beats before the blow, in a nice little hint of fellatio. The Dietrich woman had a past that stretched back through the history of the race — the history of man’s inhumanity to woman. To quote her famous line in “Shanghai Express”: “It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.” She could also have a good time getting low-down. In the “Hot Voodoo” number in “Blonde Venus,” Dietrich performs a bit of a striptease in a monkey suit, then dons a blond Afro with a silver arrow through it (four decades before Steve Martin’s camp-comedy routine with a similar prop). She’s an albino vision — though, to me, any six of the chocolate chorines prancing around her in that number are prettier, sexier, more appealing. Indeed, some of her co-star consorts (Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, John Lodge) were also more luscious than she. Dietrich once said that “The Devil Is a Woman” was her favorite film “because I was my most beautiful in it.” That lovely caprice — in which Sternberg puts his wry comic impulse in the foreground, and in which Dietrich is unusually vivacious in a series of ravishing Travis Banton frocks — was the last film they would make together. Their collaborations look like a magnificent seven to film scholars, but back in 1935 nobody was paying to see them. Dietrich left Paramount (where she had been making about $125,000 a picture) for some free-lance work in “The Garden of Allah” ($200,000) and “Knight Without Armour” ($450,000). But if moguls had hoped she’d be popular away from her mentor, they were disappointed. She was labeled “box office poison” (so was Hepburn). She thus had to consider herself lucky to be signed at Universal in 1939 (for $50,000) to revive her career as the saloon chantoosie opposite Jimmy Stewart’s sheriff in “Destry Rides Again.” Warbling “See what the boys in the back room will have,” she made fun of her old image. That western comedy domesticated Dietrich, made her a suitable foil for lumbering all-American types like Wayne, and assured that she wouldn’t be a one-decade phenomenon. Her movie career continued, in lurches and flourishes, through the 60s. But by then she was an icon for another reason. One of her biggest fans was Adolf Hitler, who saw in Dietrich the German ideal and begged her to make movies at Ufa again. “Up to 1939 Hitler sent messages to me that I should come back,” she noted in a letter written (in English!) to her mother after the war, “and when I refused they said that they had means to make me very unhappy. I knew that they meant you and I nearly went crazy with fear they would take it out on you.” Of course she did not go back. Throughout the war she went to every military base and war front she could find, to see what the boys in the foxholes would have — a glimpse of German-American star quality. THE SOUND OF SEX “Her voice,” Tynan wrote of Dietrich, “tells you that whatever hell you inhabit, she has been there before, and survived.” But not her singing voice. For a start, she had an exotic speech defect, similar to Elmer Fudd’s. In her wry, scornful mouth, Gary Cooper becomes “Gawwy Coopuh,” and ringmaster, “wingmaster.” In the “wefwain,” she sings of “Pawadise.” What Thomson describes as the ruefulness of her songs could, in her delivery and pronunciation, become woo-fulness. Then again, she didn’t sing the lyrics — she mooed them, bleated them through a fog horn — and so frequently hit notes on the flat side that one could think she intended it that way. (Catch her rendition of “Near You,” with a mild rock backing of a heavy snare drum, a piano drilling triplets and a few da-doo-doo male backup singers. The number is on the [MCA CD “Falling in Love Again”](http://music.barnesandnoble.com/search/product.asp?userid=68ID08P8LW&ean=8811184926) — one of six Dietrich albums with that title — and it’s hilarrrious, darling.) Strip away the charisma, and she is reminiscent of Leona Anderson, the proto-bad operatic singer of such 50s anti-classics as “Rats in My Room.” But Dietrich wasn’t trying to be bad. Or good. Just Dietrich. And that was enough for the millions who, over the years, attended her concerts, making Dietrich for a time the world’s highest-paid nightclub entertainer. I doubt they came to hear her vocal interpretations of “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” or “Honeysuckle Rose.” They were there to see a monument that had brilliantly preserved itself. Dietrich, applying her Prussian discipline to her figure, her couture and coiffure, still looked fabulous in her 60s. Indeed, when dolled up in a platinum-blond do with a cute flip on one side, she looked like Angie Dickinson en gelée — odd, since Burt Bacharach, her musical director (and, of course, reputed lover), was Dickinson’s husband from 1966 to 1980\. For a modernist singer, vocal craft is irrelevant; attitude is all. And Dietrich’s attitude reeked sex. Speaking to Schell, she claims, “I wasn’t erotic at all. I was snotty” — as if her insolence was come-on, and bad manners could be a fanfare to hot sex. But whatever she had, people wanted it, or wanted to talk about it. Rumors of her liaisons with men and women have persisted for 70 years; anecdotes about her sexual activities enlivened many a dinner party. One website says “She regularly douched with ice water and vinegar to avoid getting pregnant.” Here’s a better story, supposedly true, told by a prominent writer. It’s about the time Dietrich went for an abortion in the late 30s. She told the writer she went out to San Fernando Valley so she wouldn’t be recognized. But Marlene, the writer said, you had one of the best-known faces in the world! And Dietrich replied, “I vore a veil.” Lovers? We got lovers. The A List, an amusing website roundup of Hollywood babble-on, proclaims that Dietrich was “Linked with Brian Aherne, Burt Bacharach, Cecil Beaton, George Bernard Shaw (!), Yul Brynner, Claudette Colbert, Colette, Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper, Mercedes De Acosta, Kirk Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, Eddie Fisher, John Gilbert, Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hughes, Joseph P Kennedy, JFK, Burt Lancaster, Fritz Lang, Hattie McDaniel, Burgess Meredith, Edward R. Murrow, Edith Piaf, George Raft, Erich Maria Remarque, William Saroyan, Frank Sinatra, Barbara Stanwyck, Adlai Stevenson, Jimmy Stewart, Mike Todd, John Wayne, and Orson Welles.” She denied she had an affair with Hemingway, denied most of the whispers of liaisons. She told Schell, “What’s true is: What you read is untrue.” But yes, oh yes, she had lovers. What’s the fun of being famous and gorgeous if you can’t have priapic parties with other beautiful people? And where’s the responsibility of stardom if you don’t deny, even with a wink, most of what you do? HER KIND OF A WOMAN In “Witness for the Prosecution,” Dietrich as Charlotte Vole says: “I never faint because I am not sure that I will fall gracefully.” Here, alas, the star could not imitate her fictional poise. She too often fell during concerts, and after a serious one in 1975 stopped performing. She made a brief, ghostly appearance singing the title song in the 1977 film “Just a Gigolo” and retired to a two-room apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne in Paris. There she became the hidden caretaker of her reliquary, curator for life of the Museum of Marlene Art. There she sat for Schell’s documentary portrait, though she refused to be photographed for it. Why? “Because I’ve been photographed enough, thank you. I’ve been photographed to death.” She knew that being photographed had given her life (anyway, a career) and made her what we could call a legend. No, that’s a cheap word. Icon? Everybody’s an icon these days. I will pay her the compliment of calling her the 20th century’s foremost female impersonator. She impersonated a certain kind of woman and, in doing so, became a model for many other women. That’s not a small achievement. Though she’s not my idea of a great actress, perhaps she is one — because she sustained, for a lifetime, the demanding role of Marlene Dietrich, mythical siren, modernist woman. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6910767/that-old-feeling-marlenes-siren-songs/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6910767/that-old-feeling-marlenes-siren-songs/"},"headline":"That Old Feeling: Marlenes Siren Songs","datePublished":"2002-01-27T05:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T16:13:07.363Z","description":"Falling in love again, Never wanted to. What am I to do? I cahn't help it. 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