Books, Arts & Manners: Quintessential Sultry Female

You can’t touch her. She is more an | idea than a person. Onstage at the Mark | Hellinger Theater, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, at one of those cavernous outdoor military theaters, she is always far away, on the other side, across the footlights. Which is why you know so little, about her. Have you ever read an intetview with Marlene Dietrich that was really satisfactory, really illuminating? “Miss Dietrich is a sophisticated realist who thinks the legend business is 4| bore.” Or: “You learn she isn’t t00 keen to be known as a glamorous grandmother.” No. The interviewer probes, she makes some ambiguous comment, and you sense that the interviewer is panicked, afraid he’s going to offend her. Even the Dietrich gossip isn’t definitive. The things you know about other celebrities, you don’t know about her. Just imprecise rumors. A bitch? Did she really sit down to have a drink with French resistance fighters just for the publicity? Has she really had a thousand operations in Geneva to keep the body that looks so good at one hundred feet in shape? No one knows, maybe not even Rex Reed. _ The image that comes to you in the – films—flickering through the seemingly —gaslit celluloid of The Blue Angel— – accentuates the distance. You remember her films, but they were a long time ago. Even in a comparatively recent film appearance, Witness for the Prosecution, She plays the woman you didn’t know about, the woman with a secret. When she pulls back her hair to reveal a little of her secret, sparks fly: a scar! You think you’ve learned a lot. _ She glides onstage in sequinned gown. It isn’t always sequinned but that’s the effect. The lights are just slightly blue, and you start thinking you’ve seen her before. Somehow she evokes the idea of herself, and you think how well she’s lasted. “She looks just like she did when. … Without ever being very near you, she has been omnipresent, one of the creatures of the century who has been with us every year since when. She _hasn’t come from anywhere, but she never seems quite at home where she is. Dietrich, the wandering, expatriate _mid-European, just here for a visit “and to singk you a few songks.” She has seen more than the rest of us. Akin to Mother Courage, she doesn’t belong to any particular war, but she seems always to be out there with the boys, wearing her ubiquitous beret. So when Dietrich begins to sing “Where _ Have All the Flowers Gone?” you think, “That’s a soldier’s song. That must have thrilled the boys.” Somehow it’s not Peter, Paul and Mary’s song anymore, just another variant of “Lili Marlene,” sung with a husky, throaty, but infinitely light tone. _ When she sings, you sit wondering how she can stand up to it. Will she hold together? After all, Mae West didn’t last forever—or probably won’t. But Dietrich you expect to disintegrate before your eyes. No one can be that perfect. You look at her through your Opera glasses, and it all looks real, even if it’s just a hundred feet away. Her greatest impact always comes in person. Having been everywhere and seen everything that the rest of us have missed, she brings you her assimilated experience. It lazes across the orchestra pit in the nuances of all those too-familiar songs. Each one of the songs— Peter, Paul and Mary’s, and everyone else’s—sounds like hers, like you heard her sing it first. But being there onstage, in person, she lets you know she really exists. Dietrich puts herself up— for inspection, the woman who has been through it all, and she’s far enough away to let you know she’s beautiful and to leave you wondering. You won’t see very much, with all the sequins and the blue lights, no matter how strong your opera glasses are. But she makes you look and look hard. Which explains why Marlene Dietrich is so good. You can’t ever know much about the quintessential sultry female. Not even who she is—the Mona Lisa, Mata Hari, Dietrich? If we ever knew more about her than we do, she would vanish. And so she does at the end of the show. You’ve heard her go through “The Laziest Girl in Town” and “Marie” and “Lili Marlene” (always) and listened to her reminisce about “beautiful men and some of them mine” and watched her move through an infinity of curtain calls, swaying the curtain around her like a robe that hides more than it shows and making you tease her into coming out just one more time. The band keeps playing, and you cheer and cheer. And then she is gone. She’s gone traveling but she’ll be back next year. Then you can go and find out what she’s really like.

RC

About the Author

Richmond Crinkley

Featured Tags

You can’t touch her. She is more an | idea than a person. Onstage at the Mark | Hellinger Theater, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, at one of those cavernous outdoor military theaters, she is always far away, on the other side, across the footlights. Which is why you know so little, about her. Have you ever read an intetview with Marlene Dietrich that was really satisfactory, really illuminating? “Miss Dietrich is a sophisticated realist who thinks the legend business is 4| bore.” Or: “You learn she isn’t t00 keen to be known as a glamorous grandmother.” No. The interviewer probes, she makes some ambiguous comment, and you sense that the interviewer is panicked, afraid he’s going to offend her. Even the Dietrich gossip isn’t definitive. The things you know about other celebrities, you don’t know about her. Just imprecise rumors. A bitch? Did she really sit down to have a drink with French resistance fighters just for the publicity? Has she really had a thousand operations in Geneva to keep the body that looks so good at one hundred feet in shape? No one knows, maybe not even Rex Reed. _ The image that comes to you in the – films—flickering through the seemingly —gaslit celluloid of The Blue Angel— – accentuates the distance. You remember her films, but they were a long time ago. Even in a comparatively recent film appearance, Witness for the Prosecution, She plays the woman you didn’t know about, the woman with a secret. When she pulls back her hair to reveal a little of her secret, sparks fly: a scar! You think you’ve learned a lot. _ She glides onstage in sequinned gown. It isn’t always sequinned but that’s the effect. The lights are just slightly blue, and you start thinking you’ve seen her before. Somehow she evokes the idea of herself, and you think how well she’s lasted. “She looks just like she did when. … Without ever being very near you, she has been omnipresent, one of the creatures of the century who has been with us every year since when. She _hasn’t come from anywhere, but she never seems quite at home where she is. Dietrich, the wandering, expatriate _mid-European, just here for a visit “and to singk you a few songks.” She has seen more than the rest of us. Akin to Mother Courage, she doesn’t belong to any particular war, but she seems always to be out there with the boys, wearing her ubiquitous beret. So when Dietrich begins to sing “Where _ Have All the Flowers Gone?” you think, “That’s a soldier’s song. That must have thrilled the boys.” Somehow it’s not Peter, Paul and Mary’s song anymore, just another variant of “Lili Marlene,” sung with a husky, throaty, but infinitely light tone. _ When she sings, you sit wondering how she can stand up to it. Will she hold together? After all, Mae West didn’t last forever—or probably won’t. But Dietrich you expect to disintegrate before your eyes. No one can be that perfect. You look at her through your Opera glasses, and it all looks real, even if it’s just a hundred feet away. Her greatest impact always comes in person. Having been everywhere and seen everything that the rest of us have missed, she brings you her assimilated experience. It lazes across the orchestra pit in the nuances of all those too-familiar songs. Each one of the songs— Peter, Paul and Mary’s, and everyone else’s—sounds like hers, like you heard her sing it first. But being there onstage, in person, she lets you know she really exists. Dietrich puts herself up— for inspection, the woman who has been through it all, and she’s far enough away to let you know she’s beautiful and to leave you wondering. You won’t see very much, with all the sequins and the blue lights, no matter how strong your opera glasses are. But she makes you look and look hard. Which explains why Marlene Dietrich is so good. You can’t ever know much about the quintessential sultry female. Not even who she is—the Mona Lisa, Mata Hari, Dietrich? If we ever knew more about her than we do, she would vanish. And so she does at the end of the show. You’ve heard her go through “The Laziest Girl in Town” and “Marie” and “Lili Marlene” (always) and listened to her reminisce about “beautiful men and some of them mine” and watched her move through an infinity of curtain calls, swaying the curtain around her like a robe that hides more than it shows and making you tease her into coming out just one more time. The band keeps playing, and you cheer and cheer. And then she is gone. She’s gone traveling but she’ll be back next year. Then you can go and find out what she’s really like.