Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s

5. Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo: The Sexy Hausfrau versus the Swedish Sphinx

108 ★★★★★★★★★★ ✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩✩ 5 Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo The Sexy Hausfrau versus the Swedish Sphinx ALEXANDER DOTY The cover of the 1932 April Fool’s issue of a German magazine , Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, featured Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo as conjoined twins appearing in a hypothetical film titled The Tragedy of Love (Weiss, Vampires and Violets 41). The practice of twinning these stars continues to the present day, particularly among their queer fans. It is a rare article or book on Dietrich that doesn’t mention Garbo at least once, and for Marlene Dietrich, “Paramount’s Answer to Garbo,” gazes upon her model and rival. Collection of the author sound historical reasons, as it turns out. Joseph Garncarz’s essay “Playing Garbo: How Marlene Dietrich Conquered Hollywood” contends that Dietrich was not, as legend has it, made a star by Josef von Sternberg, or by his direction of her as Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel in 1929. Instead, Garncarz claims that, “prior to The Blue Angel, Dietrich modeled her image on Greta Garbo, using Garbo’s high status with American and international audiences to attract Hollywood’s attention. Since Paramount had already been searching for a competitor for MGM’s Swedish star, they saw their ‘new Garbo’ in Dietrich” (Garncarz 104). Indeed, from the early years of Dietrich’s Hollywood stardom popular magazines like Pictorial Review were aware that “without Garbo, there would be no Dietrich in the American movies today. Miss Dietrich was the answer to a rival company’s long, exhaustive search for a personality that might combat the Swedish star’s appeal” (Garncarz 111).1 In the four German films she made before The Blue Angel, Dietrich’s Garboesque look and acting style were already striking enough to elicit a consistent stream of press comment, both pro and con. For example, the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung put pictures of Garbo, Dietrich, and Brigitte Helm on its October 1929 cover, exclaiming the latter two were “doppelgängers” who were “copying the biggest hit” (Garncarz 107). In the United States, Dietrich’s Die Frau, nach der man sich sehnt [Three Loves], released in September 1929, caused the New York Times to comment that the film had “a rare Garboesque beauty in Marlene Dietrich” (Garncarz 112). The English-language version of Sternberg’s The Blue Angel wasn’t even ready for Paramount talent scouts to see on their visit to Berlin, although they may have looked at a few scenes to check on Dietrich’s English proficiency (Garncarz 112). What is clear is that after having contracted Dietrich, Paramount decided to delay the release of The Blue Angel in the United States so that the more Garboesque Amy Jolly in Morocco (1930) would be the American public’s first impression of Dietrich onscreen, not the brazen and vulgar cabaret singer Lola-Lola. Put another way, Sternberg’s “Dietrich” was initially the raucous mantrap Lola-Lola, whereas Dietrich’s “Dietrich” was initially Garbo. Only when they were in the United States and at Paramount Studios did Sternberg’s “Dietrich” take on some of the Garboesque qualities Dietrich was already cultivating in her German films, chief among these being glamour, mystery, and world-weariness. In a telegram sent to her husband the day before shooting began on Morocco, Dietrich acknowledged her status as “Paramount’s answer to Garbo” (Riva 89). Even before Morocco was released, Paramount’s publicity department filled billboards and magazines around the world with ads containing MARLENE DIETRICH AND GRETA GARBO 109 gauzy romantic images of Dietrich and a few words along the lines of “Paramount ’s New Star—Marlene Dietrich,” to promote a sense of Garbo-like enigmatic glamour (Bach 134). Europe, however, had already seen The Blue Angel, so publicity photos of Dietrich in top hat and tails were sent overseas as well, setting the stage for the androgyny, lesbianism, and bisexuality that would become part of the Dietrich star image in the United States with the release of Morocco and its (in)famous first cabaret sequence in which Amy Jolly, performing in a tuxedo, kisses a young woman in exchange for one of her flowers, and then tosses the flower to legionnaire Tom Brown (Gary Cooper), who places it behind his ear. Slyly cultivating Dietrich’s lesbian potential under the cover of female-female identification, one of Paramount ’s publicity taglines for the film proclaimed Dietrich as “the woman all women want to...