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A few frames from the life of a goddess
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"You really should be deified Alexander Vertinsky
Chic outfits, expensive jewels and luxury automobiles were only the means by which Marlene Dietrich created her own legend.
She came to Europe on May 19, 1933. But she was no longer the same young actress, who had played in the silents, and not even P-1167, the number under which, as a German immigrant, she had been registered in the huge Hollywood file index. Now she was a star – almost a goddess to the many thousands of her admirers – and St. Lazare Station was crowded with press photographers, who were only there to meet her, as she stepped from the train wrapped in a long men’s coat and wearing a pearl-grey jacket, a beret and dark glasses. Marlene’s baggage consisted of ten suitcases and her own huge, luxury Cadillac V16, which she had brought all the way from America. The reporters and paparazzi followed this limousine all over Paris, while the police kept a stern and silent eye upon it. The goddess would drive from a ball at the Rothschild’s (where, in the ironic opinion of the critics, she had become the main attraction of the evening) to a fashionable concert, where the audience would spend more time looking at the film star’s box than at the stage. Then she would return to her shining Cadillac and float magnificently through the nocturnal streets of Paris, pursued by the ubiquitous reporters...
Uncle Willy’s ‘limousines’ Maria Magdalena Dietrich had been used to earning her own living, since she was a teenager. Nothing, she’d learned, ever came for nothing, and only rarely did Fortune smile. In the 1920s, when Germany was in the throes of inflation, the novice actress found herself torn between the theatre, small roles in B-pictures and dancing at a cabaret. The money she earned was enough to avoid poverty, but nowhere near enough for good living. Instead of costly outfits, she wore elegant, but inexpensive dresses, and instead of luxury limousines, she could sometimes afford a taxi. But Marlene never complained. Her first glimpse, however, at the world of the wealthy came not from any high payments, but from the efforts made on her behalf by Marta Helen, the wife of Willy Felsinger, Marlene’s uncle. The owner of a successful watch making company, Willy Felsinger was an avid theatre-goer, who looked favourably on his young wife’s bohemian ways. Marta, whom her friends called ‘Julie’, was only too ready to help her friends in the arts world, one of whom was, of course, her niece, though Marlene was in fact only a year younger than her aunt.
Marta would lend Marlene her furs and jewellery. Soon the young actress began driving up to the hotel, into which she had moved from her tiny flat, in ‘luxury limousines’. The inverted commas are deliberate: witness accounts of these smart vehicles, such as that given by Greta Keller (later to be a fairly well-known singer, but only a beginner during the 1920s) could well have been exaggerated. The events took place in 1922-1923 against a background of poverty and inflation (the rate for a dollar ultimately rose to 42 trillion marks), when any halfway decent hired car could have seemed like a ‘luxury limousine’ to a young person of an artistic disposition. But Maria Magdalene had little concern for the makers of the cars she rode – at least for the moment. She was far more interested in creating scenes for the heroine of her own life – a certain Marlene Dietrich.
Presentiments of a legend Many years later her name would be surrounded with legends and myths. And the actress herself was not above creating a good few of them, rewriting some of the instalments or obscuring them to suit her own screenplay. Later, admirers and reporters would endow Dietrich with all the riches of the world, and describe her Horch and Maybach in glowing colours. But in Germany the actress had no cars of that calibre. The huge sums paid to her and the cars that went with them did not appear till later, in the United States. At the time in Germany, her earnings were no more than reasonably decent, but admirers were beginning to appear, who treated Marlene like a duchess. One of them was Count Alexandr Kolovrat-Krakovsky, nicknamed ‘Count Kilowatt’ for his energetic lifestyle. Kolovrat- Krakovsky owned palaces in Vienna and Prague, but he also had a film studio in Vienna that was known as ‘Sasha-Film’, where Cafћ Elektric featuring Marlene Dietrich was shot. And he was as well known in automobile circles as he was in the cinema world. It was Kolovrat- Krakovsky that, a few years before meeting Marlene, financed the building of a sports car designed by the well known, but not yet famous designer, Ferdinand Porsche.
The Cadillac series 452 with a V16, 175 hp engine was during the 1930s one
of the most luxurious and fast cars in the United States. This was the car with bodywork by Fleetwood that Marlene Dietrich used for touring Europe in 1933 As a tribute to the generosity of his sponsor, Porsche named the car ‘Sasha’ after the film studios. Count Kolovrat-Krakovsky knew a lot about good, expensive cars and almost certainly would have brought them to the notice of Marlene, for whom his feelings were more than just friendly. And she for her part, according to the stories of some contemporaries, responded in kind. At all events, she was a frequent visitor at the hospital, where in December 1927 the cinema baron died, and many years later she took ‘the Widow Kolovrat’ as the name of the heroine in the film Dishonoured.
A few years after the death of Kolovrat, Marlene Dietrich left her native country. From now on it was American standards that came into her life.
Standard of the World The motto of the Cadillac Company, which drew attention to the fact that its cars dictated fashion throughout the world, seemed during the early part of the last century to be nothing less than the literal truth. But it was not only in the automobile world that the Americans set the tone; in architecture, furniture, household appliances and, of course, the cinema, they were at the top. This was something that almost everyone agreed with, including Marlene Dietrich, who first stepped on American soil in the spring of 1930.
Here a film star had to live in a house with a swimming pool and drive something expensive and luxurious. Clark Gable and Greta Garbo owned supercharged Dusenbergs, while Dolores Del Rio, a fairly close friend of Dietrich, preferred the no less luxurious Cord. Rolls-Royces were in high demand, and to satisfy it the British cars – in the late twenties and early thirties – began to be assembled in the States.
The Rolls-Royce Phantom I, which had been filmed together with Dietrich in her first American movie, Morocco, was presented to her by the company directors after the film’s premier. Spacious and elegant, severe and aristocratic, the car was ideally suited to Marlene. It went with her long, close-fitting semi-transparent dresses, with her trouser suits that shocked the narrow-minded, and with her elegant hands that held a cigarette or a long cigar. Incidentally, Marlene Dietrich, who smoked a lot and for a long time, was frequently called an ‘advert for the tobacco industry’, which is hardly surprising considering all the photographs of her face framed in clouds of smoke. And the famous automobile companies could be equally proud of a client like her.
She hired a chauffeur, a former boxer, but frequently drove herself negotiating the winding streets of Hollywood without any apparent difficulty, despite the fact that the heavy Rolls Royce was not so easy to handle. But not long afterwards, she parted with the car – it was just another episode in her career as a star, and the actress was already shooting the next frames of her greatest film...
Marlene's second Cadillac was a Series 90 – also fitted with a V 16 engine. In 1935 only fifty cars with this engine were sold
An essential part of this take was the most expensive Cadillac on the market. The size of a ship and with about as much room and comfort as a house, the car with its amazing 16-cylinder engine could produce tremendous speed, yet move as smoothly and silently as a hunter. No wonder during the early thirties it became something of a fetish in the United States. It was a dream car for millions, but a reality for only a few. And that few included the captains of industry and finance, the uncrowned king of Chicago, Al Capone, and the stars of the screen and the stage. Among whom was a certain Marlene Dietrich, who had proved to the New World – and thus to the whole world – that she was the queen of the screen.
Even in Paris, the ‘Capital of the World’, cars like that in 1933 were pretty few and far between. So driving around in her huge Cadillac was the best way to inform the whole city (at least that part of the city that counted – the reporters, the critics and, of course, the fans) exactly where at any given moment the adorable Mme Dietrich was to be found.
Two years later the queen exchanged her coach for a new one, another 16-cylinder Cadillac, but with updated bodywork and salon (in those years the company changed the looks of its cars almost every year). And next to her new ‘street-cruiser’, Marlene looked even more sophisticated and insubstantial – exactly the way she wished to look...
A ‘cloud’ for a ‘puma’ But for Marlene Dietrich the Cadillac was both too much and not enough. A huge limousine of this kind presupposed a liveried chauffeur, but Marlene knew just how attractive it looked to see a woman behind the wheel of a car, particularly a woman like her. And the film Desire, in which Dietrich was partnered with Garry Cooper and filmed in several smart automobiles only served to confirm this belief.
Soon afterwards she acquired an Auburn 851 Speedster, a huge, elegant roadster with the most modern design at the time – a rear end that was pointed like the prow of a speedboat and for which the car was referred to as the Boat-tail.
The Auburn, with its powerful 150 hp engine, fitted with a compressor, was the latest in American fashion design, and was bought by Hollywood stars like Mary Astor and George Murphy, by sports and stage stars, and by young and wannabe young playboys.
The Auburn Boat-tail Speedster with a straight 8-cylinder, 150 hp engine
could reach speeds of 100 mph. In the mid 1930s the Auburn was one of the most fashionable cars in the arts and cinema world
Marlene said that the car looked like... a cloud – a typically Dietrichesque comparison that was unlikely to occur to any other Auburn owner.
This fast and elegant automobile was in all probability also fully appreciated by Erich Maria Remark, the writer, who followed Marlene from France to Hollywood. Remark was a great lover of sports cars and, according to Dietrich, during the thirties in France he frequently went tearing about the streets at night in a condition that just as frequently was far from being sober. But the writer’s passion for fast cars was rivalled by his no less powerful passion for Marlene. To some people comparing the great actress to a ‘chunk of iron’ might seem a little excessive, but not to Remark. In line with his habit of animating cars in his books, he frequently referred to his favourite Lancia Dilambda, which he had left in his garage in Switzerland, as his ‘grey puma’; while the actress he called his ‘golden puma’.
The Auburn, of course, made a strong impression on Remark – it could easily beat his favourite 100 hp Lancia. Incidentally, apart from their interest in beautiful, powerful cars, the writer and the actress were united by an equal passion for smoking, particularly smoking expensive cigars. But while Remark and Dietrich were loving and quarrelling, and making their plans and creating works of art, the clouds over Europe were gathering...
The Goddess of the Second Front The Nazis offered Marlene piles of gold to return to the Fatherland. And talks on the matter were held in Paris with one of the Reich’s highly placed personages: possibly Goebbels, but much more likely Ribbentrop. But the actress had taken out American citizenship and, when war was declared, she donned the uniform of the US Army and went round the front giving concerts.
Without the slightest trouble and with tireless courage she exchanged her luxury home in California for a front-line dugout, and the Cadillac and the Auburn for a bumpy, wind-blown, Spartan Willys. This was the vehicle – later to go down in history as the jeep – that the actress most frequently chose for touring the front-lines in France, Belgium and Germany, where she was met and accompanied by soldiers and officers alike and given tremendous ovations. For the liberators of Europe, Marlene Dietrich was not only a famous actress and singer, but a reminder of their distant homeland and their families and their loves...
Rough like a soldier and reliable like a friend, the Willys became the symbol of the liberation of Europe, and it became Marlene’s symbol too, the symbol of a stage and screen goddess. And, as always, it was her choice, her will...
The star that never fell She still had many years in front of her, years of work, triumph, adoration and envy. Both rapture and ridicule awaited her, as did the vast theatres of Las Vegas, Warsaw, Moscow and Melbourne... Marlene travelled from one luxury hotel to another in long, flashing limousines... Though she received enormous payments (at one time she was the highest paid actress in the world), she never bothered to buy a house of her own and never became a slave to luxury. On the other hand, she paid off her husband’s and his girlfriend’s debts as well as those of her daughter, her daughter’s several husbands, and her children and grandchildren.
As she got older, Marlene seemed to distance herself more and more from the world of material possessions. The luxury hotels and limousines were only the means for the next and possibly the greatest frames of her personal film. A hotel was only a springboard for entry on to the stage, where a frail, but elegant woman stood in the floodlights before a darkened hall, her eyes and her voice acting like super-powerful magnate on the eyes and ears of the thousands that watched her...
After her concerts, she would sometimes pose for photographs and sign autographs, balancing on the roof of her latest luxury limo. And then she would be driven off to the hotel or the plane for a brief rest before her next concert. She no longer had to choose her makes of car – that they should be the most fashionable and expensive was accepted as a self-evident fact. Marlene had already written the screenplay of her own life, and the scenery for this, the last part of this great film, was of no importance. She was a star that never could be and never will be eclipsed by other stars. And even when it sometimes appears that this star has dimmed, it is not a question of the star dimming, but the point of view of the watcher...
Cigar Clan 1'2004. Sergey Orlov
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