One particular beauteous star

Patrick Skene Catling

MARLENE DIETRICH by Donald Spoto Bantam,f 16.99, pp. 306 It is too much to hope that this 'un- authorised but surely definitive' biography may be the last word on Marlene Dietrich. It was written when she was alive but almost dead. Now that she has been buried and can't sue, malicious biographers, un- inhibited by authorisation, can be just as definitively nasty as their poisonous little hearts desire.

'Unauthorised' nowadays is offered as a promise of scandal rather than an admis- sion of failure to get the subject's co- operation. The more letters and telephone calls that were unanswered, the more doors that were slammed, the more guard dogs that were unleashed, the more confident the reader can be that the persistent and imaginative biographer has left no stone unturned to find the subject's most dis- appointed ex-colleagues, ex-lovers and ex- competitors, to testify to vanity, avarice, ruthlessness and sexual unorthodoxy. The prevailing rule of biography seems to be, the bigger the subjects, the harder they must be seen to fall.

If by any chance you cherish any fond memories of Marlene Dietrich's illusory showbiz glamour on screen and stage, per- haps you should avoid this book, which is as thorough, unromantic and humourless as an autopsy report. If, on the other hand, you share Donald Spoto's satisfaction in the debunking of stardom, you may get a kick out of examining close up what the boys and the girls in the back room would have seen when Marlene sang she was falling in love again. And again, and again.

As Spoto's relentlessly penetrating research reveals, only ingenious and ener- getic presentation and self-promotion enabled Dietrich, a second-rate beauty, a third-rate actress and a fourth-rate singer, to sustain an extraordinarily long, richly rewarded career as an international star of the first magnitude.

The second daughter of a monocled, moustachioed royal Prussian police lieutenant, she was born in 1901 in Berlin, when it was the third largest city in the world. Her baptismal name was Maria Magdalene, from which she took the first and last syllables to coin Marlene. As Jean Cocteau introduced her to an audience in Monte Carlo, 'Her name begins tenderly and ends with the sound of a cracking whip — Marlene Dietrich,' an apt metaphor for her unsecret androgyny.

By the age of 17, she had attained her full height of five feet five inches, 'tended to corpulence' and seemed 'almost Rubenesque'. As she later told her friend Billy Wilder, her music teacher was her first lover. She was violated by a violinist. After that, a very busy sex-life must have burnt off a lot of calories; and top hats, on special occasions, increased her apparent stature.

By the time she and the century were in their twenties, Berlin, as Spoto puts it, was noted for 'a curious blend of absolute despair and desperate gaiety'. If Isherwood was a camera in those days, Dietrich was a model of amoral seductiveness. It was then that Josef von Sternberg perceived that she was the perfect Lola in The Blue Angel, an image of natural eroticism and bewitching indifference, a woman entirely (if unwit- tingly) capable of effecting a man's com- plete ruin.

From that moment on [Spoto writes], accord- ing to Dietrich, 'von Sternberg had only one idea in his head: to take me away from the stage and to make a movie actress out of me, to "Pygmalionise" me.'

She was an eager Galatea, and, for a while, his lover. Although, at the age of 22, she married Rudolf Sieber, whom the bio- grapher describes as handsome, blond and athletic, and though she had a child by Sieber the following year, the main func- tion of her marriage was to serve as a pro- tection against further marriage. He and she were never divorced but they led sepa- rate lives. She had brief affairs with almost all her leading men and many others, men and women.

Spoto's prose isn't as daring as his sub- ject, but he has his moments of inspired phrase-making. Would anyone else have thought of calling Dietrich 'a saucy little strudel'? However, he seems to be baffled by the magical essence of her style, which somehow transformed absurd melodramas into cinematic events.

In a serious part, she seemed ... a mysteri- ous, eternally ineffable presence ... She effectively stole scenes and was immune to criticism from other players. She was, in other words, refining the theatrical counter- point of creative indolence to a highly suc- cessful technique.

He seems to be saying that she achieved success on the screen simply by being rather than doing. While performers around her over-acted, she acted hardly at all.

Von Sternberg focused audiences' atten- tion on her by means of lighting. An over- head baby spot, aimed downwards, created an impression of interesting bone structure, accentuating her eye-sockets and cheek- bones in an otherwise rather ordinary face. In the book's 16 pages of photographs, she often looks surprisingly plain. His technical perfectionism taught her how to make the most of her appearance, with lights, make- up and costumes. Subsequent directors, camera crews and fellow actors were dismayed by her bullying insistence on dis- playing herself her way — and were usually bound to acknowledge the effectiveness of the results.

By 1936, Dietrich was the best-paid woman in the world, and was said to be 'the best-dressed man in Hollywood'.

Dietrich blazed a fashion trail around town, making a tuxedo and fedora the ne plus ultra of the ultra-chic woman's formal wear and enabling women to challenge another level of sexual stereotype. In this regard, rightly exploiting those freedoms long enjoyed exclusively by unconventional women, she brought a refreshing candour and dignity to life in Hollywood.

Her love affairs were countless. 'In Europe,' she said, when trying, in vain, to beguile Bianca Stroock with champagne and 'a book on the techniques of lesbian lovemaking', 'it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman. We make love with any- one we find attractive.'

Among the men who succumbed, accord- ing to Spoto, were Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Jean Gabin (her favourite), Mike Todd, Eddie Fischer, John Wayne and General George ('Blood and Guts') Patton.

There was always something of the haus- frau in Dietrich, as Noel Coward, Kirk Douglas and others noted. She had a pen- chant for scrubbing her lovers' and friends' kitchen floors. Spoto calls this eccentric switch 'exchanging the role of Queen Mother for Visiting Charwoman'. Yet she claimed credit for inventing the short shorts called 'hot pants, and, in her des- perate attempts to extend glamour into old age, she submitted to at least four surgical face-lifts.

Having been a star of stage, screen, entertainment for troops overseas during the second world war, and one-woman con- certs and cabarets, Marlene Dietrich spent her last years in lonely reclusion in a flat in Paris. Towards the end, she drank her first whisky for breakfast. She died this year at the age of 90 and is buried in Berlin. She was not so much a femme fatale as a femme facile.