Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich by Donald Spoto

Author:Donald Spoto [Spoto, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 1992-02-16T11:00:00+00:00

A man who was committing suicide

Said, as his feet left the earth

Which had grown too small for him:

“How soon shall I regret this?”

Dietrich, seeing only her daughter’s inchoate lyric gifts, proudly showed the quatrain to Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker (whose own grim sensibilities were perfectly matched to the young poet’s); they only remarked on the child’s gravity.

But Maria never acted out her darkest fantasies; instead, she began to take an interest in the theater. Her life had little comfort or stability until she contracted her second marriage (at the age of twenty-two) and began her own career. “Mommy grows younger and more beautiful every year,” she said when still young, “[but] I never felt good enough for her.”

During the summer of 1940, Mommy (then thirty-eight) was certainly considered beautiful and popular enough by executives at Universal that, when Joe Pasternak asked for her to star in another comedy, she was readily signed at twice the salary of Destry Rides Again. Pasternak had commissioned writers John Meehan and Harry Tugend to capitalize on the success of Destry and Dietrich’s self-satire by constructing a spoof of the Sadie Thompson–South Seas epic subgenre. Accordingly they created the role of “Bijou Blanche,” a torch singer of benevolent ill repute who floats from island to island, following and wreaking havoc among the fleet. They all arrive at a gin joint called—thus the film’s title—Seven Sinners, on the fictitious island of Boni Komba, a name contributed by Dietrich and inspired by her nickname for Remarque. Among the latest naval arrivals is a tall, handsome lieutenant (John Wayne) who almost loses his career for her sake; they part, and Bijou returns to a boozy ship’s doctor and a wandering life.

Pasternak and director Tay Garnett suggested the rugged, six-feet-four-inch John Wayne to play Dietrich’s leading man. Although Wayne, a contract player at the B studio called Republic Pictures, had made more than eighty films since 1927, he had just appeared in Stagecoach and was on the brink of his mythic stardom. But his salary was still merely four hundred dollars a week, and he was supporting a wife and children. Wanting Dietrich’s approval, Garnett invited Wayne to the Universal commissary for lunch and arranged for Dietrich to walk casually nearby to assess him. “With that wonderful floating walk,” according to the director, “Dietrich passed Wayne as if he were invisible, then paused, made a half-turn and cased him from cowlick to cowboots, then turned to me and whispered, ‘Oh, Daddy, buy me that!’ ”

According to John Wayne’s third wife, Pilar (not married to him at that time), the subsequent developments were sheer Dietrich. Wayne was invited for a private conference in her Universal dressing room one day that June, after a session of wardrobe fittings for Seven Sinners. Dietrich dismissed the others, closed and locked the door and fixed a provocative look on Wayne while slowly asking the time. Answering her own question, she then lifted her skirt, and there, encircling her upper thigh, was a black garter with a watch.

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