It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily.
-- Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932).

I have a child, and I have made a few people happy. That is all.
-- Marlene Dietrich

In her first international hit, The Blue Angel (1930), they called her "Naughty Lola." Ernest Hemingway called her "The Kraut." When her daughter, Maria Riva, had her first child in 1948, the press hailed her as "The World's Most Glamorous Grandmother." The French government officially labeled her a war hero and guaranteed her free rent for life. Marlene Dietrich was all those things and more. On screen, she most often played women who had survived a life of abuse to turn themselves into sexual outlaws. Off-screen, she cultivated her image as an unpretentious, worldly woman who cared little for the trappings of stardom. And yet her preoccupation with her own glamorous image led to years of seclusion at the end of her life, almost destroyed the film memoir on which she collaborated with actor-director Maximilian Schell and may very well have cost her her health.

Dietrich even sought to re-write history to conform to her legend. Many actresses lie about their age, but she even lied about who her father was. The world's most famous German was born in Schoneberg in 1902 (the earliest she would admit to was 1904). Her father was a police officer named Dietrich who died while she was quite young. For decades, she would deny his existence, claiming to be the daughter of a cavalry lieutenant named von Losch (actually her mother's second husband). She would also hide most information about her early silent films (even trying to have some of them destroyed) and deny the existence of a sister who ended up working at a Nazi concentration camp.

She started out to be a violinist but switched to acting in 1921, supposedly because she was so beautiful she kept upstaging the orchestras in which she played. After viewing herself in 1922's Der Kleine Napoleon, she screamed that she looked like "a potato with hair." That didn't stop her from making films. It just meant that she would spend most of the '20s trying to find a more acceptable image. She met her husband, Rudolf Sieber, when he cast her in a small role in Tragedy of Love (1923) that she turned into a scene-stealer. Her only child, Maria, was born a year later (one biographer insists that Maria was actually her child by a noted Communist leader). Shortly thereafter, she and Sieber began to go their separate ways sexually, with Dietrich embarking on a long string of affairs with both men and women.

Director Josef von Sternberg was in pre-production for The Blue Angel and looking for the perfect actress to star as the seductive cabaret singer Lola when he spotted Dietrich performing in a musical; He knew she was perfect for the role. Director and star claim that he was the one who developed her early screen persona as a sexual predator and learned how to photograph her to best advantage. In truth, Dietrich had learned on her own what kind of lighting flattered her most, as demonstrated by her performance in the little-seen The Woman One Longs For (1929), the first film in which she looks like the Dietrich most fans know from her Hollywood films.

Nonetheless, it was The Blue Angel that made Dietrich an international star. Even before the film was released, von Sternberg sent it to Paramount Pictures, the studio for which he worked in Hollywood. They offered her a contract that would make her the highest paid woman in America during the '30s. In Hollywood, von Sternberg launched her American career with Morocco (1930), in which she played a sultry saloon singer torn between legionnaire Gary Cooper and wealthy entrepreneur Adolphe Menjou. The film set the tone for her first decade of Hollywood films, playing Dietrich as a sexually experienced, predatory female as likely to romance a female extra as her leading man. In one sequence, she outrages the Morocco audience by performing a number in top hat and tails, kisses a female fan on the mouth, and then tosses a flower taken from the fan to an amused Cooper. The film was a huge hit and brought Dietrich her only Oscar® nomination for Best Actress.

She would go on to make five more films with von Sternberg, each exploiting her androgynous sexuality. The pictures' mix of studio-bound exoticism (the locations varied from China to Spain to 18th Century Russia even though director and star never left the studio) and stifling eroticism eventually would prove too much for '30s audiences and censors. Over time, however, films like Shanghai Express (1932) and The Scarlet Empress (1934) would be acclaimed as classics of the director's art. They also were far ahead of their time in von Sternberg's stylized direction (which anticipates the work of the French New Wave) and adult sexuality. When their last film together, The Devil Is a Woman (1935) was chopped up by censors, led to a threatened ban of Paramount product in Spain (the film's setting) and flopped at the box office, the studio broke up what they viewed as a losing team. Von Sternberg retired to the sidelines of the film industry, making only a few more movies in his personal style. Dietrich floundered as Paramount tried to re-capture her popularity without luck. In 1938, she was listed in an exhibitor's ad as box-office poison alongside such stars as Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire and Joan Crawford.

Dietrich took all of this with good humor. Allegedly when she met Hepburn on a train, they fought about which had the honor of being more poisonous than the other. But she was also running out of money. At the time, she was trying to maintain a glamorous lifestyle, supporting her husband (although they had not lived together for years) and helping many of her fellow Germans to flee the Third Reich. Salvation came in the unlikely form of a Western, Destry Rides Again (1939). The role of saloon singer Frenchy allowed her to play broad comedy, share an on-screen brawl with Una Merkel, romance James Stewart and introduce the hit "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have." She was still a woman with a past, but in place of stifled eroticism she was now one of the guys, just waiting for the right leading man to carry her off into the sunset. She would repeat this stereotype to great success in films like Seven Sinners (1940), with John Wayne, and Manpower (1941), with Edward G. Robinson.

By the '40s, however, Dietrich was involved in something more important than her film career. She had left Germany just before Hitler came to power. While making a film in England in 1937, she had sternly refused an offer to return home and star in propaganda films. Two years later, she won her U.S. citizenship. With the start of World War II, she signed on with the USO, touring the war zone to entertain GIs and broadcasting anti-Nazi messages to her native Germany. At times she performed on the back of a truck as mortar fire burst around her and slept in the trenches alongside the GIs. When there was time, she sang songs, played the musical saw and told jokes. When there was no venue handy, she simply visited with the men and made sure their letters home were put in the mail. Her work brought her the French Legion of Honor and the Medal of Freedom from the U.S. But it also led to her being branded a traitor in Germany, even after the war.

When peace came, Dietrich spoofed her exotic image to play an earthy gypsy in Golden Earrings (1947), with Ray Milland, and played a German singer in post-war Berlin in A Foreign Affair (1948) for director Billy Wilder. But Hollywood's turn to more realistic films didn't leave much room for her. After the cult western Rancho Notorious (1952), directed by fellow German and former lover Fritz Lang, she cut back on screen work to move into a new medium, nightclubs. Her Las Vegas act was a huge hit that brought her new generations of fans and led to decades of international concert tours and acclaimed recordings.

At this stage in her career, the decision to make a film was an event. She showed off her still shapely legs in a cameo as a saloon singer in the all-star Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), then delivered a straight, no-frills dramatic performance as the wife of an accused murderer in Billy Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution (1957). She should have won an Oscar® nomination for her work, but to protect the thriller's surprise ending, Wilder couldn't reveal that Dietrich played one scene in disguise. Rumors that another actress had played the scene cost her the nomination. Dietrich had only two other major film roles after that. She spent a night doing an unpaid cameo as a gypsy fortune teller in Orson Welles's 1958 Touch of Evil, a flop at the time that has won acclaim as one of Welles's greatest accomplishments. Then she returned to Germany to co-star with Spencer Tracy, Maximilian Schell, Burt Lancaster, Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), a powerful dramatization of the Nuremberg trials.

The rest of Dietrich's career was devoted to her daughter and grandchildren, her concert tours and maintaining her glamorous image. Part of this included binding herself, eventually from head to toe so that she could present a svelte figure during public appearances. The binding wreaked havoc with her circulation and eventually contributed to a series of accidents that ended her performing career in the late '70s. Dietrich moved into seclusion in a small apartment in Paris. She supported herself by making a few spoken word recordings, selling off pieces from her legendary jewelry collection, signing deals for her memoirs and applying for rent-free status as a French war hero. In 1983, former co-star Schell approached her about collaborating on a documentary about her life. She agreed on condition that she not appear on camera, though she did allow him to film parts of her apartment and her collection of memorabilia. While taping the interviews that would serve as narration, however, she took issue with some of his questions and ended the collaboration. Still, he had enough tape to create Marlene (1984), a dazzling consideration of her career that received an Oscar® nomination and a New York Film Critics Award as Best Documentary.

During her remaining years, Dietrich was mostly confined to her bed. Although she frequently called friends on the phone at all hours, she always answered the phone pretending to be her maid. She died of kidney failure in 1992. Her body was shipped back to Germany, where she was once again viewed as a national hero.

by Frank Miller