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                                                                                CINEMA, Page 72

The Secret in Her Soul


Sexy, elusive, contradictory, Marlene Dietrich transcended her
screen roles to create an indelible image of femininity and one
of the century's enduring enigmas

By RICHARD SCHICKEL


    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.