First and last, Dietrich was a trouper, a survivor. Her five years with von Sternberg were pivotal, creating the image that made her immortal and to which she always remained true, despite the box-office failures and personal tensions that ended their collaboration. When they parted ways in 1935, she had another quarter century ahead of her in movies, including working with Lubitsch, Welles, Wilder, Hitchcock, and Lang—and appearing in her fair share of kitsch and dross. Von Sternberg’s filmmaking career never recovered. Over the years, her statements about him were consistently and extravagantly generous, crediting him as her teacher and master, with whom she’d shared “the most creative experience I ever had.” His stance toward her was far more complicated and less ingenuous, mixing admiration and appreciation of her gifts with condescension and spitefulness that smelled of festering resentment. In pre-auteurist days, critics often praised her at his expense, and for all her flattery and on-set obedience, she never let him, or anyone else, possess her exclusively. The notion—propounded by Dietrich herself—that she was his creation, his puppet, his Galatea, is one some critics have accepted all too eagerly, despite even von Sternberg’s own admission that “I gave her nothing that she did not already have.”



Their artistic and personal relationship was as richly ambiguous and ultimately impenetrable as their movies are. It is easy to read jealousy over her legendarily prodigious, omnivorous affairs into the stories of men emotionally crippled by her faithlessness, and into the ludicrous misogyny and lurid masochism of The Devil Is a Woman. It is hard not to see their last two films together as the director’s exertion of absolute power over his star—“subjugating” her, as he put it, to his artistic vision, even while grotesquely caricaturing her sexual power. There is a coldness and cruelty about these spectacles, as claustrophobic as they are opulent, but there is also a deliriously ambitious vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk to which Dietrich was more than willing to submit herself. As critics and the public, and even von Sternberg himself, turned against their partnership, she alone remained convinced of its value. She is not “subjugated”; she is fully complicit in these ravishing, mannerist, self-infatuated, and slightly mad movies.

Perhaps the best summation of all is critic John Russell Taylor’s: he called it “some kind of artistic folie à deux.” These two self-invented fantasists—the man who embellished his name with a von and his face with a mandarin mustache, the girl christened Marie Magdalene who at thirteen dubbed herself Marlene—were able, together, to realize on celluloid a creature of impossible beauty inhabiting a “universe of ineffable gaudiness,” like the one spun in the brain of James Gatz before he became Jay Gatsby.

In Orson Welles, Dietrich found another genius far too impractically devoted to his own excessive visions to suit Hollywood, and she gladly gave her services in Touch of Evil—though not, as she later claimed, for nothing. Both director and actress felt that her few brief scenes, shot in a single night, were among their finest contributions to cinema. They were whipped up at the last moment, with Dietrich putting together a gypsy outfit the way, in her earliest years onstage, she had pieced together costumes from her own overstuffed trunks. With a black wig, face stained dark, and cigarette dangling from lacquered lips, she plays Tana, the madam of a ghostly border-town brothel where Welles’s corrupt sheriff, Hank Quinlan, goes to visit his memories of a distant past. He looks like the wreck of the Hindenburg, and she peers at him and drily suggests that he “lay off those candy bars.” In the midst of a feverish movie, she is like a cold towel to the brow, bringing a welcome interlude of humor and melancholy and clear-sightedness. When she tells him his future is “all used up” and suggests he go home, her pronunciation of “ho-o-ome” is piercingly moving—the accent of a woman who, as she said late in life, had lost her country and her language. Without any backstory, she is able to suggest not only Quinlan’s past but the future of Amy Jolly and Shanghai Lily—where they would eventually wash up, tough and weary but undefeated, once their great loves burned out like cigarettes. And she does it all without really doing anything—it is again that “nothing” that Hubsie von Meyerinck described, out of which she creates not just a style but her Art.