One of the most glamorous stars of the 1930s — and also one of the first androgynous sex symbols — Marlene Dietrich was a German actress turned major Hollywood star, thanks to her collaboration with mad genius director Josef Von Sternberg. Disgusted by Hitler, Dietrich became an American citizen in 1939, and with her movie career flagging around 1940, she essentially became the female Bob Hope, a tireless USO performer who worked with the U.S. on top secret propaganda projects. Meanwhile, she took dozens of lovers, male and female, including JFK and Douglas Fairbanks — who claimed Dietrich had told him of her Mata Hari-esque plot to assassinate Hitler.
Show Notes!
A Foreign Affair, which I discuss in the episode and highly recommend, is not on DVD. I first saw it in a rep house in Paris two years ago, and then found a copy on VHS while I was working on this episode. The short clip I included in this episode comes from the radio version of the film, which is on YouTube.
To keep things interesting, this week two of my sources, though very different books, both have the same title. Dietrich’s own autobiography Marlene, first published in 1989, claims to set the record straight on all of the previous books written about her, which she insists are rubbish. She’s so persuasive on this matter that I ignored all other books published while she was alive, and focused on Marlene: A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler, who spent some time with Dietrich in the 1970s and also interviewed many of her friends and lovers, but held back publishing her book until 2011, long after Dietrich’s death.
In looking for information on the making of A Foreign Affair, I discovered two books new to me: Charles Brackett’s diary of working with Wilder, It’s the Pictures That Got Small; and A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films by Gerd Gemunden. I found the former to be almost too bitchy, and the latter to be a little academic but very useful in its detailing of Wilder’s wartime and post-war experience.
Two other sources worth mentioning, both of which I read years ago but did not consult directly this week: Josef von Sternberg’s memoir Fun in a Chinese Laundry, and Gaylyn Studlar’s book on Sternberg and Dietrich’s collaborations, In the Realm of Pleasure.
The bit about Dietrich’s FBI file comes from this Guardian story, and details on Operation Muzak and other aspects of Dietrich’s war experience come from this article on the CIA’s own website.
Discography:
You Go to My Head performed by Marlene Dietrich
Rite of Passage by Kevin MacLeod
Give Me The Man performed by Marlene Dietrich
Assez performed by Marlene Dietrich
Au coin de la rue by Marco Raaphorst
Benbient by Canton
Lili Marlene performed by Marlene Dietrich
Prelude No. 21 by Chris Zabriskie
Look Me Over Closely performed by Marlene Dietrich
Black Market performed by Marlene Dietrich
Gymnopedie No.3 by Eric Satie
Illusions performed by Marlene Dietrich