Marlene Dietrich
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Marlene Dietrich is not as well-known today as in the past. But that's probably true for about anyone who was born in 1901. Marlene was, though, one of the most internationally known movie celebrities from the 1930's through the 1950's.
Oh, yes. Marlene's name is pronounced "mar-LEEN-uh DEE-trish" where the final "ish" is a bit different than in English. It's the same as in the German pronoun "ich" which means "I" in English1.
Footnote
One description of the pronunciation is to place the tip of the tongue behind the lower front teeth and position the tongue as if you are saying "yes" but drawing out the "y". Then you blow air over the top of your tongue to produce something of an "h" sound. Imitating a cat hissing has also been suggested.
That said, when taking German classes in college you can hear some native speakers who sure as heck sounded like they were saying "ish".
Without doubt Marlene's most famous film was one of her first. That was Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel) released in 1930. The plot is set in Germany and is, we must admit, rather complex. We'll just say that The Blue Angel is the name of a cabaret and Marlene plays one of the performers.
Marlene moved to America the next year and continued her meteoric rise. She became so famous so quickly that when Maria Schicklgruber's grandson became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, she was asked to return to continue her film career in her home country. Wanting nothing to do with a regime that based its appeal on intolerance and xenophobia, she turned the invitation down flat.
Marlene's acting was distinctive. She sang in a low contralto and spoke with only a mild German accent. Of course with her singing ability she was often cast as a singer, not just as a cabaret performer as in The Blue Angel but also as a dancehall girl in Destry Rides Again. (Yes, there really was a movie called Destry Rides Again and in addition to Marlene it starred Jimmy Stewart).
Marlene married Rudolf Sieber in 1923 and they had a daughter, Maria. Although Marlene and Rudolf later separated they remained married until Rudolph's death in 1976. Marlene never remarried.
During World War II, Marlene made two USO tours. That may not sound like many but the last one - to France and Germany - lasted eleven months. The tours were also not far from the front lines and Marlene became famous for her patriotism. Yes, she had become an American citizen in 1939.
Marlene was not, as was her contemporary Greta Garbo, a celebrity to eschew publicity. But as true of many stars she was conscious of her image as the following episode shows.
One of Marlene's friends was the writer Ernest Hemingway. Ernest said they met when Marlene was about to sit down to dinner and noticed that there were twelve people. Not wanting to be the thirteenth, she was about to leave, when Ernest, who was also in the restaurant, volunteered to join the group so Marlene would be the fourteenth guest.
Whether the story is true or not or a pardonable exaggeration, there's no doubt that Marlene and Ernest became lifelong friends. Then in October, 1949, and after Ernest had completed what most readers (including his wife Mary) considered his absolutely worst novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, he had flown to New York to deliver the manuscript to his publishers.
Before he arrived Ernest had agreed that the writer Lillian Ross could write a "profile" about him for the New Yorker Magazine. Lillian met the Hemingways at Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy International Airport) and Marlene dropped by the Sherry-Netherland Hotel after Ernest and Mary had checked in. Lillian took notes and wrote down the conversations in shorthand. In May 1950, the article was published as "How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?"
Most people saw the profile as a hatchet job. Ernest was shown drinking almost constantly and quoted as speaking in what people - including Lillian - called "Indian talk", ergo, English as imagined was spoken by stereotypical Native Americans where he dropped definite and indefinite articles and omitted pronouns. If Ernest kept the verbs, he put them in the present tense.
"Book too much for him," Lillian quoted Ernest as saying about a man who had read the manuscript on the flight over. "Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand."
Did Ernest really talk like that? John O'Hara, a friend of Ernest's, expressed his doubts in his New York Times column:
The most recent, and most disgusting, example of the intrusions into Hemingway's private life was made by a publication that reported on Hemingway's drinking habits somewhat in the manner of a gleeful parole officer. It also included some direct quotes, in tin-ear fashion, of what were passed off as Hemingway's speech, but sounded more like the dialogue written for the Indian chief in Annie, Get Your Gun2.
Footnote
Annie, Get Your Gun was a hit broadway musical about the life of Phoebe Ann Mosey, ergo, Annie Oakley. Written by songmeister Irving Berlin, the original Broadway show starred Ethyl Merman while Betty Hutton filled in for the later motion picture. Among the songs in the show were "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)", "(We'll Have) An Old Fashioned Wedding", and of course, "There's No Business Like Show Business".
On the other hand, not all people thought Lillian was inaccurate. Ernest's youngest son, Gregory, wrote that when his dad reached fifty:
... Papa had become a snob and a phony ... pidgin English dominated his way of speaking, as if all personal pronouns had become battle casualties. His speech was punctuated by, "How do you like it, now, gentlemen?" said over and over to no one in particular and described so graphically by Lillian Ross in her New Yorker profile, a piece of work which was unintentionally devastating because it showed him exactly as he was at that time.
In light of latter comments, it has to be emphasized that at first the principals - including Ernest - didn't characterize the profile as inaccurate or even particularly negative. To Lillian Ernest wrote that it was "a good straight piece". But it did, as Ernest realized, show him as he was when he had finished a book and had come to town to relax. It didn't necessarily mean that he always spent his mornings drinking champagne, partaking of meals flowing with wine, taking nips from a hip flask, and ending the day with liberal nightcaps3.
Footnote
Although it was denied by one of Ernest's closest friends, the consensus of scholars who have studied Ernest's life is that his drinking was indeed excessive and contributed to the physical and mental decline of his later years.
We have an indication of how much Ernest drank - and how much others drank in the mid-20th century - by looking at his tally under medically controlled conditions. In 1956, Ernest was still suffering from injuries from a plane crash two years before when he and Mary were on safari in Africa. So while in Madrid, he visited his friend Dr. Madinoveitia, one of Spain's leading physicians. Dr. Madinoveitia prescribed a severely restricted diet which limited Ernest to - get this - "only" one glass of wine per meal and five ounces of whiskey per day.
Alcohol intake is determined by the "standard drink". A standard drink can be a glass (5 ounces) of wine, a 12 ounce beer, or 1½ ounces of distilled liquor which is 40% alcohol (80 proof). So we see that on Dr. Madinoveitia's diet, Ernest was downing five drinks a day.
Now today fifteen drinks a week is above the recommended intake. So Ernest was drinking more than double what is now is considered excessive. As to what he drank when he wasn't on this 1950's doctor prescribed abstemious diet is anyone's guess.
Lillian herself said that because she had reported Ernest accurately, people thought she was ridiculing him. She fully understood that the visit to New York was to have fun and was only a brief snapshot of Ernest's modus vivendi.
Marlene, though, was extremely irritated with the profile, particularly since she said no one had told her that Lillian was writing for publication. On the other hand Lillian said she had indeed told Marlene that she was writing an article and had even asked about doing a profile of her.
So what, we ask, is the TRUTH?
A way to wade through the conundrum is to understand this episode as an example of the Rashomon effect4. What likely happened is that Lillian told Marlene that she was writing an article about Ernest but Marlene didn't realize that the article was what we now call a "fly-on-the-wall" profile. She certainly didn't think that she and her verbatim words would be part of the article. So from Marlene's standpoint she wasn't told what Lillian was doing.
Footnote
The Rashomon Effect is used to describe how different people can see the same event and due to their different viewpoints describe it differently and even contradictorily.
The name is derived from the Japanese movie Rashomon where each character describes the same event differently. Although when speaking of the Rashomon Effect the implication is usually that the witnesses are speaking honestly, in the movie - and in The Outrage, the American remake reset in the Old West - the characters are deliberately lying to cover up the truth and protect themselves.
But from her standpoint Lillian felt she had told Marlene that she was writing an article and thought that since Marlene saw her taking down notes and conversation Marlene would understand the nature of the profile. But what particularly irritated Marlene was that the article quoted her saying that when she baby-sat her grandkids, she cleaned her daughter's apartment with towels which she took from the Plaza Hotel. That, she thought, made her look like a jerk.
Marlene managed her money well and could be selective in her movie roles. In later years she appeared in classics like Witness for the Prosecution in 1957 and Judgement at Nuremberg in 1961. The latter featured a star-studded cast including Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Maximilian Schell, Montgomery Clift - and not quite stars yet - William Shatner ("Captain Kirk"), and Werner Klemperer ("Colonel Klink").
After the 1960's it was easy to forget that that Marlene was now a senior citizen. In 1975 she fell down while performing and broke her hip. After that she didn't perform much and what she did was limited. Her last movie was Gigolo starring David Bowie in 1978. But as her songs are often used in sound tracks, she is credited in movies that are being made to this day.
Of course, no star can avoid having a tell-all biography being written about them. So it happened with Marlene. But we won't spoil the plot.
Marlene moved to France where for the last decade she was largely bedridden. She continued to live in Paris until her death in 1992, age 90.
References and Further Reading
Marlene Dietrich: Life and Legend, Steven Bach, Da Capo Press, 2000.
Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, Donald Spoto, G.K. Hall, 1993.
"Marlene Dietrich", Internet Movie Data Base.
"Hope for America: Performers, Politics and Pop Culture Entertaining the Troops", Library of Congress.
"How Do You Like It Now Gentlemen?", Lillian Ross, The New Yorker, May 1950.
Papa Hemingway, A. E. Hotchner, Random House, 1966.
Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner, Ernest Hemingway (Author), A. E. Hotchner (Author), Albert DeFazio III (Editor), University of Missouri, 2005.
"What Is A Standard Drink?", National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.
"The Moods of Ernest Hemingway: The writer, unenthusiastically, visits New York", Lillian Ross, The New Yorker, July 21, 2014, (Reprint of "How Do You Like It Now Gentlemen?").
"We Call it the Rashomon Effect", Suzan Haskins and Dan Prescher, Huffington Post, December 6, 2017.
Rashomon, Toshiro Mifune (Actor), Machiko Kyo (Actor), Masayuki Mori (Actor), Akira Kurosawa (Director), Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Writer), Akira Kurosawa (Writer), Shinobu Hashimoto (Writer), Daiei, 1950, Internet Movie Data Base.
The Outrage, Paul Newman (Actor), Claire Bloom (Actor), Laurence Harvey (Actor), Edward G. Robinson (Actor), William Shatner (Actor), Howard Da Silva (Actor), Martin Ritt (Director), Akira Kurosawa (Writer), Ryunosuke Akutagawa (Writer), Shinobu Hashimoto (Writer), Fay Kanin (Writer), Michael Kanin (Writer), MGM, 1964, Internet Movie Data Base.
Judgement at Nuremberg, Spencer Tracy (Actor), Burt Lancaster (Actor), Richard Widmark (Actor), Maximilian Schell (Actor), Montgomery Clift(Actor), William Shatner (Actor), Werner Klemperer (Actor), Stanley Kramer (Director), Abby Mann (Writer), 1961, Internet Movie Data Base.
Marlene Dietrich, Maria Riva, Knopf, 1993
"The Last Days of Marlene Dietrich", David Lobosco, A Trip Down Memory Lane, August 14, 2017.