When Marlene Dietrich Met Marilyn Monroe

Blue Angel meets Blonde Bombshell

 

 

I.

 

In a fascinating series of photos taken at a New York party in 1955 [1] - four of which are reproduced above - there are no obvious signs of animosity between der blaue Engel Marlene Dietrich and American blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe. 

 

However, if I may use a rather old-fashioned - some would say sexist - term to describe what amongst men might be regarded as healthy competitiveness, Dietrich had, prior to this meeting, been somewhat catty about Monroe, displaying the jealousy of an older woman who knows she is no longer queen of the silver screen [2].

 

As revealed in a snippet of gossip in the June '73 issue of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, Dietrich had attended a screening of one of Monroe's earlier films and rudely talked throughout her scenes, at one point sneering in her distinctive German accent: 'So this is what they want now; this is what they call sexy!' [3]    

 

One rather wishes that someone had had the courage to turn and shush Dietrich, or to tell her: 

 

'Yes, this is what we want now and this is what we call sexy: a woman who is proud of her curves and femininity and has no interest in appearing androgynous; a woman who looks like she has stepped out of the pages of Playboy, rather than off stage from the Berlin cabaret in the 1920s.'

 

 

II. 

 

Funny enough, a couple of years after the photos taken in New York, Monroe was offered the lead in a proposed remake of The Blue Angel - i.e., the film which had made Dietrich an international star almost thirty years earlier [4]. 

 

Sadly, the project was abandoned. However, in 1958 Monroe would recreate the character of naughty Lola, striking her classic pose reclining on a barrel with her one leg elevated, in an astonishing photo by Richard Avedon [5].

 

 

 

I don't know what Dietrich made of this photo - or indeed if she ever saw it (Monroe asked Avedon not to use the image and it remained unpublished for many years after her death in 1962). 

 

It's worth noting in closing, however, that Dietrich did acknowledge in her autobiography that Monroe was an authentic sex symbol, not only by nature, but by inclination; i.e., she liked being an object of desire and it showed in everything she did [6]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The party followed a press conference called by Marilyn's business partner, the photographer Milton Greene, to announce the formation of their new company Marilyn Monroe Productions. It was Greene, who had worked with Dietrich in the past, who invited the latter to attend and to meet Monroe. 

 

[2] Of course, Monroe was no angel and could also be catty when she wanted. Thus it was that the photographer Eve Arnold remembered Marilyn once telling her how much she loved some pictures taken of Dietrich for Esquire magazine in 1952, before then adding: 'If you could do that well with Marlene, just imagine what you could do with me.'   

      Arnold would in fact photograph Monroe on several occasions and produce thousands of images. The best of these can be found in her book, Marilyn Monroe: An Appreciation, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). 

 

[3] See Evalena Labayen, 'That Time Marlene Dietrich Threw Shade at Marilyn Monroe', Interview (8 October, 2019): click here.

 

[4] The Blue Angel - or, in German, Der blaue Engel - is a 1930 musical comedy-drama, dir. Josef von Sternberg, and starring Marlene Dietrich as Lola. As well as bringing her global fame, it also gave Dietrich what would become her signature song; Friedrich Hollaender's 'Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt' - or, as it is known in English, 'Falling in Love Again' - click here.      

 

[5] As one commentator also reminds us:  

      "Marilyn would take a leaf out of Marlene's playbook again in 1962, asking costumer Jean Louis to recreate the beaded 'nude' dress he had made for Dietrich to wear during nightclub performances. Monroe's version became immortalised that May, when she sang 'Happy Birthday Mr President' to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden." 

      See Marina72, 'When Marilyn Met Marlene', on the Everlasting Star blog (11 Oct 2019): click here.

 

[6] See Marlene Dietrich, Marlene, (Grove Press, 1987). Note that a more recent edition was published in 2018. 

 

 

For a sister post to this one - Marlene meets ... Edith Piaf - click here.

 

 

When Marlene Dietrich Met Édith Piaf

Der blaue Engel embracing la Môme Piaf

 

 

German-born actress and singer Marlene Dietrich first met French chanteuse Édith Piaf in the ladies' bathroom of a New York nightclub, in the 1940s. 

 

The latter had just come off stage and was upset by the cool and somewhat bemused reaction of the audience. Dietrich - already a huge star in America - was quick to reassure the Little Sparrow and decided to take her under her angel's wing. 

 

With Dietrich's encouragement, Piaf quickly established herself in the US (despite her reluctance to sing in English) and although separated by a fourteen-year age gap and wildly contrasting personalities [1], it was the beginning of a long and beautiful friendship between the two women.

 

Indeed, there is textual evidence to suggest that, in the early years at least, it was perhaps rather more than simply a friendship in the platonic sense and that Dietrich regarded Piaf as an honorary member of what she termed the Sewing Circle [2].  

 

I read somewhere that this claim often upsets or irritates some fans of Piaf. For whilst they are pleased that she has iconic status within the queer and lesbian community, they insist that Piaf warrants such purely on the basis of her unique talent as a performer and strength as a woman - and not because she (allegedly) had secret bisexual tendencies.

 

Fans of Dietrich, on the other hand, are delighted by the story of a romance between Marlene and Édith; it simply adds to her image as someone who wilfully defied sexual norms and gender roles; someone who, in the early 1930s, for example, had an affair with the notorious lesbian Mercedes de Acosta, who openly boasted of her sapphic power to seduce any woman away from any man (including Rudolf Sieber).       

 

Notes

 

[1] Although sharing the same birth month of December, Dietrich and Piaf had different star signs: the latter, born on December 19th, was Sagittarius (emotional, impetuous, fearless, etc.); the former, born on December 27th, was Capricorn (haughty and erudite; the sort of woman able to elevate style to an art form, yet remain practical and down to earth).

 

[2] The Sewing Circle was a secret group of Hollywood women from which Dietrich allegedly drew several of her lesbian lovers. Members included Tallulah Bankhead, Claudette Colbert, Joan Crawford, Lili Damita, Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, Agnes Moorehead, and Dolores del Río (the latter considered by Dietrich to be the most beautiful woman in Hollywood).

      See Axel Madsen, The Sewing Circle: Hollywood's Greatest Secret - Female Stars Who Loved Other Women, (Citadel Press, 1996). 

 

 

For a sister post to this one - Marlene meets ... Marilyn Monroe - click here.

 

 

Women in Trousers 1: The Case of Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn (1907 - 2003)

Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt (1939)

One of the things that Roland Barthes doesn't like is women wearing trousers.

Obviously, he's not alone in this. Indeed, I prefer to see women in skirts myself. But it depends on the woman. And it depends on the skirt or slacks in question ...

For some skirts are very ugly. Whilst some trousers - such as a classic cut pair of Capri pants as worn by Grace Kelly - are very beautiful. And some women look so sexy and stylish in trousers that this is how they are best remembered within the cultural imagination. Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Katharine Hepburn are very obvious examples.*

And let's be clear, when these women pulled on a pair of pants it took real courage. For in the twenties and thirties clothing was regarded as an outward sign of gender rooted naturally and essentially in biology. Crazy as it seems in our gender fluid non-binary times, women could be arrested for wearing trousers in public back then as it was illegal to masquerade as a man (particularly for the purposes of deception).**

Further, many medical professionals were convinced that if a woman persisted in her desire to wear trousers it was clear evidence of lesbianism or mental illness, both of which were stigmatised as conditions betraying some kind of moral failing or weakness.

Hepburn in particular took a lot of criticism for her provocative appearance and prickly personality. Intelligent, outspoken, and fiercely independent, she refused to conform to society's narrow definition of womanhood and was equally contemptuous of the Hollywood lifestyle. One article, written in 1934, accused her of being a strutting revolutionary who aimed to destroy models of traditional (and cinematic) femininity - which, of course, was true.      

My favourite story concerning Hepburn, however, comes from the time she was still under contract at RKO: Studio heads decided they didn't like her turning up to work wearing blue jeans, so one day had them removed from her dressing room whilst she was on set filming. Far from persuading her to toe the line and put on a skirt, however, she returned to the set in just her knickers and refused to cover up until her jeans were returned.

As Dewey Finn would say, that is so punk rock ...


* The argument has been made by her biographer that Hepburn's androgyny was angular and sexless in comparison to the undeniably erotic allure projected by Garbo and Dietrich. Whilst I agree that for Hepburn her dress sense was more about personal freedom and comfort, rather than cultivating a seductive queer style, I find it hard to ever think of her as sexless - in or out of trousers. See William J. Mann; Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn (Henry Holt and Company, 2006). 

** Various US cities passed legislation barring women from wearing trousers in the 19th and 20th centuries, including San Francisco, Chicago, and Houston. But before any Europeans smile at their American cousins and congratulate themselves on their own sophisticated liberalism, it's worth noting that it was only in 2013 that the French finally revoked a 200-year-old law forbidding women to wear trousers in Paris (unless riding a bicycle or on horseback). If interested in this subject, see Clare Sears, Arresting Dress (Duke University Press, 2015). 

To read part 2 of this post - a brief history of Capri pants (featuring Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn) - click here.     

A Letter to Heide Hatry (Parts III-V)

Heide Hatry

III. The Truth of Masks

I don't want to appear dim, but I'm not sure I understand this opening sentence from your third text: "whatever sort of opposition one might want to level against the subject-object/presence-absence dichotomy ... it, too, will be inherently fissured by its origins".

In as much as I do understand it - you're saying that both terms in a binary originate, circulate and ultimately coincide within the same conceptual schema or identity - I agree. That's why I try not to engage in oppositional thinking and why I'm not interested in Hegelian dialectics, nor in simply inverting terms (even if this can be fun and may well be a necessary first step in a more profound deconstruction, as Derrida concedes). 

As for the question of the face, maybe you're right and I need to rethink it. Certainly there are faces I love to look at. What Barthes felt about the face of Greta Garbo, I feel about the face of Marlene Dietrich for example; it's a pure and perfect object that appears to be untouched by time or finger-tips, unmarked by traces of emotion. It's a face that belongs to art, not to nature and which has all the cold and expressionless beauty of a mask; a face that has not been painted so much as sculpted. An archetypal and totemic face. A fetish object.

"And behind a mask there is still an identity, an identity that has chosen a mask ..."

No, sorry, I don't agree with this. The truth of masks is far more radical and disconcerting than that; it's the truth that masks don't hide faces or disguise identities, they mask the fact there's nothing behind them. That's why the invisible man is a more interesting and, to those who fear the thought of non-being, a more terrifying figure than the phantom of the opera. When the latter removes his mask he merely reveals scars. But when the former strips away his bandages, Dasein is obliged to confront the ontological truth that it rests upon the void of non-being (sein Nicht-mehr-dasein, as Heidegger writes).

It's this that produces Angst - particularly in those egoists who "dare not die for fear they should be nothing at all" [D. H. Lawrence] and in those who hope to still find a smiling face beneath the bandages, behind the mask, or in the ashes.


IV. The Lugubrious Game

As for the base material from which you compose your "micro-mosaics", my friend, the poet and translator Simon Solomon, is planning to write of ghost, of flame, and of ashes in the manner of (and with reference to) Derrida and I don't wish to anticipate his remarks. However, you might like to read my Reflections from a Sickbed, in which I muse on the problem of corpse disposal and what to do with cremains.

I think, were I an artist, I might be tempted to mix ashes with excrement and smear the combination across a large white canvas to show how what we leave behind us when we die - when we become that shipwreck in the nauseous - is not a face, but a slimy and disgusting residue, as when a snail or slug passes by. Or, to put it more crudely, a shit stain. (Obviously, I'm thinking back to Bataille here and to Dalí's 'The Lugubrious Game'.)

You say that human remains can be "ennobled by art" and maybe they can. But, for me, it's not the job of art to elevate anything belonging to mankind; on the contrary it should bring us back down Pisgah with a bump and remind us of our mortality and material nature; to make us grunt like pigs before the canvas, rather than sigh like angels full of smug self-satisfaction. It's important to realise that when Nietzsche says art is the great anti-nihilistic force par excellence, he implies also that it's a form of counter-idealism; for nihilism is not simply the negation of all values, it's the positing of ultimately hollow ideals in the first place.  


V. Iconography is Never Innocent

I'm glad to hear you don't intend to "freeze the dead in a permanent subordination" to an image. Though it's difficult for me to imagine this won't be an unintended consequence of producing icons in ash that are so realistic in their facial representation and reconstruction. Do you remember how some tribal peoples used to worry that the camera stole their soul? Well I have similar concerns. Indeed, I even have some sympathy with the authors of Exodus warning against graven images and the making of idols etc.

I certainly agree with Baudrillard that, whatever else it may be, iconography is never innocent. In fact, it plays a complicit role in the perfect crime by which he refers to the extermination of singular being via technological and social processes bent on replacing real things and real people with a series of images and empty signs. When this happens, we pass beyond representation (or, in the case of the dead, commemoration) towards obscenity; a state wherein everything and everyone is "uselessly, needlessly visible, without desire and without effect".

I worry, Heide, that those who are indecently exposed in a game of posthumous exhibitionism (you describe it in terms of self-expression and self-revelation) are left without secrets, without shadows, without charm. They become, if you like, ghosts caught up in a commercial art machine ...

Finally, I smiled when you wrote "if, as you seem to contend, the 'goal' or 'desire' of life ... is to merge back into material indifference, we might as well be dead already" - for don't you see that, in a very real sense, we are dead already ... 
 
Yours with respect, admiration, and affection,

Stephen Alexander


To read parts I and II of this letter to Heide Hatry, please click here. 

To read Heide Hatry's extensive series of comments please see the posts to which they are attached: Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash and On Faciality and Becoming-Imperceptible with Reference to the Work of Heide Hatry.

The Face of Marlene Dietrich

What Roland Barthes felt about the face of Greta Garbo, I feel about the face of Marlene Dietrich: it's a pure and perfect object that appears to be untouched by time or finger-tips; unmarked by traces of emotion. It's a face that belongs to art, not to nature and which has all the cold and expressionless beauty of a mask; a face that has not been painted so much as sculpted. An archetypal and totemic face. A fetish object.

Dietrich knew all this herself. And she knew better than anyone how to capture on film the face that she and von Sternberg created between them; make-up artists, lighting technicians, cameramen and directors all spoke of her brilliance in their fields of expertise.

She was an icon also to the top fashion designers, who were seduced by the fact that she dressed neither to please them, her lovers, her public, nor even herself, but solely for magical effect.  

I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marlene_dietrich.html#zBgFe3sa1iLvR7bc.99

I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marlene_dietrich.html#zBgFe3sa1iLvR7bc.99

I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marlene_dietrich.html#zBgFe3sa1iLvR7bc.99