The Times Great Women's Lives by Sue Corbett

Author:Sue Corbett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780750962346
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2014-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

MARLENE DIETRICH

* * *

MESMERISINGLY EROTIC, HUSKY-VOICED HOLLYWOOD FILM STAR AND CABARET SINGER

MAY 7, 1992

“Though we all might enjoy/ Seeing Helen of Troy/As a gay cabaret entertainer/ I doubt that she could/ Be one quarter as good/ As our legendary, lovely/ Marlene.”

Thus Noël Coward, introducing Dietrich to a London nightclub audience at the Café de Paris in 1954 by which time the star was well into her fifties and a second career. In her first career she had conquered the screens, first as Lola in The Blue Angel. Others have taken the role of Heinrich Mann’s temptress, on screen — and on stage a version is about to open on Shaftesbury Avenue. But none could match Dietrich. Hollywood seized her and Paramount turned her into a star. She became synonymous with the erotic: no one could light a cigarette more sensuously than she or tell, in the huskiest of voices, the boys in the backroom what they should have. Unlike most actresses who are compelled to evolve with age the image of Dietrich, once established, was amplified rather than altered as time went on. The insolent, ironic style of her youth did at one point mellow into approachability, but it re-emerged in maturer form to haunt her later performances on the screen and in cabaret. But the soul of the Dietrich secret, a quality which kept crowds queuing for her one-woman shows at an age when such a thing came to seem almost preposterous, was something, perhaps, more fundamental.

Reduced to its simplest terms, Dietrich’s appeal was, indeed, sex appeal. But it was a sex appeal which involved not merely the face, the million dollar legs and the air of Do Not Touch, which were all part of the armoury. Essentially, it embodied the idea of the eternal woman and like Garbo it began with beauty of an order calculated to overwhelm the senses, suspending criticism of the roles (frequently in Dietrich’s case tawdry ones) represented by the actress. The crowds who later flocked to see and hear the septuagenarian Dietrich came not to judge the performance but simply to be part of the ambience it created.

The biggest mystery about Dietrich was, for a long time, her date of birth. This was carefully concealed and suggestions for the date ranged from 1894 through to 1912. Then the secret came out when an East German clerk located in his registry and somewhat tactlessly published the entry relating to the birth of one Maria Magdalene (hence the contraction Marlene) Dietrich on December 27, 1901, in the suburb of Schöneberg.

Marlene Dietrich was born Maria Magdalene, the second daughter of an officer in the Prussian police and a mother who came from a well-known family of Berlin jewellers. She grew up against a background of clenched social and financial respectability. A year or two after her birth Dietrich’s father died and her mother married another military man, Edouard von Losch, who was killed on the Russian front in the closing weeks of the first world war, leaving his widow and her daughters in severely straitened circumstances.

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