Von Sternberg

Falling in Love Again

Falling in Love Again Wars will wash over us . . . bombs will fall . . . all civilization will crumble . . . but not yet, please . . . wait, wait . . . what’s the hurry? Let us be happy . . . give us our moment. —Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch, screenplay for Ninotchka ON OCTOBER 29, 1929, the U.S. stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. By December, Nazi Party membership swelled to 178,000. If von Sternberg or Dietrich noticed, neither said so. Something more important was taking place. One was falling in love, and the other was letting him. Although her husband would disappear for long periods, Riza didn’t immediately notice. She was busy enjoying her own small celebrity , being interviewed and photographed for fashion spreads in magazines such as Die Dame. Once she realized the extent of his infatuation , the arguments began. During one of them, she asked why he didn’t divorce her and marry his “discovery.” Von Sternberg replied, unexpectedly, “I’d as soon share a telephone booth with a cobra.”1 His hostility and Marlene’s passive acceptance of it fueled their relationship. To adore a woman and to have her, in return, admire him and cater to his every sexual whim, yet feel no love, gratified his most profound masochistic desires. Von Sternberg could bully, manipulate, humiliate, or insult her, but she never fought back. Frederica Sagor, no friend of 109 Von Sternberg 110 either, shrewdly assessed their attraction. “Von Sternberg’s sexual weakness was something that she, in her sophistication and worldly outlook on life, could handily take care of. And she did. To Dietrich, it did not matter if the attraction was man or woman. She was cognizant of all the ways of making love and enjoying sex. . . . She worked hard to achieve her stardom. She was no accident. She had what it takes.”2 In the first flush of their affair, the lovers, according to Riza, fornicated on a tiger skin in a bedroom with a mirrored ceiling. The image flirts with writer Elinor Glyn’s sensationalism, yet who is to say they didn’t? Von Sternberg was a closet masochist and role player; Dietrich was a promiscuous bisexual with a flair for cross-dressing and a taste for figures of authority. Sex between them was always going to be what the surrealists called “convulsive”—“as beautiful,” in Lautremont’s phrase, “as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Complementary freaks, they would transit the cinema landscape for the next decade, leaving in their wake a succession of enigmatically gorgeous but discarded objects—stillborn children of a marriage solemnized at the very moment the world came crashing down, a love affair consummated in Armageddon. Nobody grasped the extent of the global catastrophe that would follow the Wall Street crash, but von Sternberg tried to insulate Dietrich from its effects by urging Schulberg to offer her a long-term deal and bring her to the United States. She could, he suggested, be the answer to Greta Garbo that Paramount had long been seeking. “While the filming of The Blue Angel was in full swing,” wrote Dietrich in her memoirs, “von Sternberg brought an American to the studio—B. P. Schulberg, the general manager of Paramount Studios.”3 Schulberg did come to Berlin on October 20, but he had more on his mind than meeting an unknown, untried actress. When the stock market crashed, all German loans were canceled, destroying Hollywood’s financial arrangement with UFA. The Blue Angel would be one of the last productions released as “A ParUfaMet Film.” With the sound patent conflict not yet resolved, influential people in the German film business were actively resisting the release of U.S. films, including many Paramount productions . George Bancroft had been sent to Berlin on a charm offensive. He attracted approving press coverage with his habit of sluicing down Falling in Love Again 111 a few pints of beer for breakfast. Seizing the opportunity, a brewery hired Bancroft and Jannings for an advertising film, some of which was directed, improbably, by Sergei Eisenstein. The Soviet government had cautiously let its most famous filmmaker off the leash, allowing him to tour Europe and the United States with his companion Grigori Alexandrov and cinematographer Eduard Tisse, ostensibly to study techniques of sound film. According to Dietrich, Schulberg “offered me a seven-year contract in Hollywood. ‘I...