“She has sex but no positive gender,” wrote Kenneth Tynan of film, cabaret and USO star Marlene Dietrich. As pithy as it is accurate, the statement goes a long way in explaining why Dietrich appealed to both women and men throughout her career, with a carefully considered androgyny and a filmography filled with transgressive, or outright “fallen” women that includes classics like The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express, Witness For The Prosecution, and Destry Rides Again. There is no doubt that under the wing and between the bedsheets of director Josef von Sternberg Dietrich was Pygmalioned into her most recognizable image: loose trousers, top hats, and dangling cigarettes, but it was a cumulative process over a number of years with the assistance of photographers, directors, Paramount, and her own reliance on image that ensured her position. in the annals of style.
Having seen her perform in a Berlin cabaret, von Sternberg decided to be von Friendlyberg, and cast her in The Blue Angelthe tale of a respected educator (Emil Jannings) who falls in love with Dietrich’s bonne-vivante cabaret performer, Lola Lola (twice the name, double the fun). Stealing the show with fishnet stockings and questionable singing, Dietrich and Von Sternberg used the momentum to fly to Hollywood and collaborate on Moroccoyielding another turn as a cabaret performer for Fraulein D, but in this instance reciprocating the infatuation toward a womanizing legionnaire played by Gary Cooper. Morocco signaled the birth of Dietrich’s Hollywood seduction, earning her an Academy Award nomination, and beginning the image overhaul. Losing weight to ensure adjectives went from “voluptuous” to “lean,” plucking her brows into an arch of constant boredom, and dying her hair blonde were all part of Dietrich 2.0. Within the narrative itself, Morocco got the wheels turning on a persona of questionable sexuality, with top hats and tails, a lesbian kiss, and as critic Andrew Sarris put it, “bravado that subtly alters her conception of herself as a woman.”
Von Sternberg and Dietrich made seven films together, with Sternberg mentoring her in all areas of technology to enhance her performance, or more strictly speaking, her presence. With a preoccupation for camera placement and lighting, von Sternberg waxed lyrical about the rules imposed to create the ultimate star, writing “the human face should be treated like a landscape, as if the eyes were lakes, the nose a hill, the cheeks broad meadows, the mouth a flowerpot, the forehead sky, and the hair clouds. “He would continue with precise detail surrounding natural versus artificial light sources, filters and gels, and which should be implemented to give Dietrich” that look. ” These lessons were lapped up by his protégée, who would therefore prove to be dedicated or insufferable, depending on whose word you take, when it came to setting up her own lights and filters in post-Sternberg films in order to ensure the utmost radiance. After working together on Stage Fright, her insistence upon the most favorable lighting led Alfred Hitchcock to dub her “the best director (he) ever worked for.” Undoubtedly those with less patience (or money) would describe her otherwise.
It was clear that Dietrich was poised to be Paramount’s answer to Greta Garbo, and with the studio system having a habit of promoting actresses through deliberate fashion choices, Dietrich’s niche as a fallen woman with arched eyebrows and an exotic accent was begging for interesting publicity stills. The most talented photographers including Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold and Cecil Beaton were brought in to help build the Dietrich image, one that would cement her as an icon, but also act as shorthand for the sultry roles she would be tasked with.
The Hays Office was increasingly averse to any image beyond baking pies and tap dancing, leading studios to increasingly rely on “suggestive” icons, particularly around areas of sexuality. For this reason, actresses like Dietrich regularly found themselves the subjects of stories fabricated by their own agents in order to cultivate and progress their image, in turn imbuing their very presence in a film with meaning. In other words, the manufactured image of Marlene Dietrich as a woman who was ambiguous, sexual, subversive and even titillating became a fact that censors were unable to fight.
An attempt at softening the Dietrich brand was made during the filming of Blonde Venus (1932), when the actress’ guilt about being an absent mother became a talking point, with publicity focusing on her maternal side and apparently a new devotion to discussing home wares. Such topics were designed to make her performance more palatable, and allowed Dietrich her standard cabaret performer / prostitute go-to, but with the added layer of a woman motivated by maternal instincts.
The Flame of New Orleans (1941) finally saw Dietrich do what the world had suspected she’d been doing all along. Playing the dual roles of Countess Claire Ledoux and Lili, Dietrich is in hot pursuit of a wealthy bit of crumpet to marry, but apparently finds herself the most animated, comfortable, and honest in the company of another woman, Clementine (Theresa Harris). For Dietrich, the film’s lackluster reviews had little effect, with her mind now focussed on the war effort. The Weimar cabaret background had influenced her pansexual nature, but it had also equipped the star with strong political beliefs that were in opposition to those of her homeland. Despite several personal requests from Adolf HItler to participate in lucrative propaganda films, as well as the promise of carte blanche to make any movie she wanted, Dietrich said nein, and took her top hat and tails away for good. Renouncing her German citizenship, our long and lean disruptor became a fully-fledged denizen of the USA, regularly housing artists fleeing the Nazis, embarking upon USO tours of Europe, donating her salary to assist refugees, and eventually being awarded the US Medal of Freedom. for her entertainment of troops on the front lines.
In later life, Dietrich struggled to maintain her public image, relying on cosmetic surgery, painkillers, and her obsessive knowledge of soft-focus camera lenses to keep her image sparkling. Her return to live cabaret performance was highly-regarded, but backstage the star was at the mercy of wigs, plastic surgery and again, obsessive lighting arrangements. Having admitted that her style was always “for the image, not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men,” Dietrich eventually opted to safeguard the persona, withdrawing from public life.
As Kate Lemay, curator of 2018’s Marlene Dietrich: Dressed for the Image exhibition concluded, “She understood what she had created, and she did not want to have that iconic image disturbed.”