Marlene Dietrich Gets Personal in Charlotte Chandler's New Biography

Prolific biographer Charlotte Chandler has written on the life of a different film legend every year for the past 6 years, beginning with It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock in 2005. Her latest, Marlene, has just been published by Simon & Schuster.

Chandler's biographies are based on personal interviews. She includes filmography and career details, but her style is to convey the story of a life in the first-person as much as possible, using the subject's own words. This conversational approach gives the reader a sense of being in the room, listening in, as the story of a remarkable life unfolds.

Groucho Marx

The author's career as a biographer began with Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends in 1978. Written during Marx's lifetime but published not long after his death, it became a bestseller. Chandler returned to the genre years later with her 1995 Fellini biography, I, Fellini. But it was with her first book for Simon & Schuster in 2002, Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, that Charlotte Chandler’s biographies became frequent and consistently titled, each with the annotation "A Personal Biography."

Who is Charlotte Chandler? Her Simon & Schuster bio is sketchy - we are told that she has written many bios, lives in New York and is on the board of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. The back cover of Hello, I Must Be Going includes a picture of Chandler with Groucho who sits at a piano. Her biography of Alfred Hitchcock contains photos of Chandler with the director as well as his daughter, Pat. The dust jackets of Chandler’s biographies are strewn with the praise of film world luminaries: Isabella Rossellini, Michael Caine, Jack Nicholson, Pat Hitchcock, director Michelangelo Antonioni, producer David Brown and others. Vanity Fair, which has published excerpts of many of her books, proclaims that Chandler “sets the gold standard for celeb bios.”

In a recent interview with Kirkus Reviews, Chandler was asked how she managed to gain access to so many of the most famous, and often famously difficult, stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. About Groucho Marx she recalled that someone had given her his phone number, she called and, though Groucho refused to be interviewed, he invited Chandler to dinner. Then, over dinner, Groucho asked why she hadn't been taking notes on their conversation. It was Groucho who later introduced her to Billy Wilder.  Henri Langlois, film archivist and founder of the Cinématheque Française, introduced Chandler to Hitchcock, Mary Meerson, also of the Cinématheque Française, introduced her to Dietrich, director George Cukor introduced her to Katharine Hepburn…and Bette Davis, ever the formidable outlier, called Chandler herself, the only one of the author's subjects to do so. 

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

Connections abound between Chandler's subjects, most of whom knew and worked with each other, and occasionally one story will overlap into another. For example, Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. had an affair that lasted for years, and the gentleman had many memories of her. He told Chandler about a series of miniature nudes he sculpted of Marlene and how he eventually decapitated all of them to protect her reputation in the event of his demise. This anecdote is told in detail in the Dietrich biography. It is also woven into the Hitchcock biography, in abridged form, in a section on Stage Fright.

Fairbanks was the friend of many film legends and a substantial resource for Chandler; he is quoted in each of the biographies of hers that I’ve read (Bette Davis, Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, Hitchcock). Equally well-connected and forthcoming was George Cukor, who is quoted in the Davis, Hepburn and Hitchcock books. What I wouldn’t give to have access to the stack of notes and tapes Chandler must have made over the years…

Charlotte Chandler met Marlene Dietrich in 1977, when the legendary star was 76 years old and living in Paris. Dietrich’s greeting to her future biographer was, “I don’t mind meeting you because you didn’t know me before, when I was young and very beautiful.” Moments later she added, “It can be a curse being beautiful, after a certain point, as it slips away…”

Dietrich in the 1940s

I have read and watched much about Marlene Dietrich, from her memoirs (Marlene, 1990), to various biographies, including her daughter Maria's lurid opus, to Josef von Sternberg’s eccentric autobiography (Fun in a Chinese Laundry, 1965), the page on the CIA’s website about Dietrich’s work during World War II and Maximillian Schell’s Oscar-nominated documentary (Marlene, 1984). I have to admit that I had something of a “tell me something I don’t know” attitude before I sat down with Chandler’s book. She did.

There are revelations large and small of all kinds...Dietrich's mad plot to kill Hitler, details of her introduction to Ernest Hemingway on the Île de France, the lie she told JFK about his father...Dietrich's memory of her grandmother’s lavender eyes, her habit of giving her hand-me-downs to husband Rudi's mistress...her hatred of knitting because it reminded her of World War I in Germany.

Chandler knows how to set a scene and tell a story. She nimbly leads the reader through Dietrich’s early years, the arc of her career, her personal life and into her late years, when she “closed the door” and retreated inside the rooms of her small apartment across from the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris. Among the many voices heard of those who knew Dietrich at different points in her life and career are her one-time arranger and accompanist, Burt Bacharach and her friend and fellow Paramount star, Mae West.

 

Maria and Marlene, early '50s

Maria Riva is Dietrich's only child, and Riva's own sensationalistic 787 page version of her mother's life was published shortly after Dietrich's death. Maria is not a direct source for Chandler's book but her youngest son David, who produced and directed a documentary on Dietrich in 2001, speaks at length. His references to his mother as an "Emmy-winning actress" caught my eye - I'd not heard this before and checked the Emmy website. Maria is listed as having been nominated for a Best Actress Emmy in 1952 and 1953. However, Imogene Coca won in 1952 and Helen Hayes won in 1953.

Charlotte Chandler remarked to Kirkus Reviews that Marlene Dietrich had originally been perceived as "another Garbo" very early in her Hollywood career. It happened that Dietrich came to Hollywood as talkies were coming in and MGM was carefully transitioning Garbo, its great star, to sound. When Morocco and The Blue Angel struck box office gold, Paramount saw in Dietrich its opportunity to trump MGM and Garbo. The two actresses were to have distinctly different careers, though both were deemed "box office poison" (along with Katharine Hepburn and others) in the late '30s. However, no one imagined that Dietrich’s film career would outlast Garbo’s (or anyone else's) by several decades or that she would successfully reinvent herself as a high-ticket stage performer.

Chandler told Kirkus that though she didn't interview her, she did meet Garbo. Her impression was that Garbo was too bitter about the past to make a good interview. Asked if she thought Dietrich also became bitter, Chandler responded, “not at all. She loved what happened to her," adding that Dietrich hadn’t expected any of it and “she felt she owed her great life to Josef von Sternberg,” her mentor and the director of seven of her most memorable films.

I enjoy Charlotte Chandler's uniquely readable biographies. I've read more heavily documented books (the fascinating Barry Paris tome on Louise Brooks comes to mind) and books concerned almost solely with a life on film (David Thomson's excellent "Great Stars" series entry on Bette Davis), but for a pleasurable foray into legendary firsthand memories, Chandler is hard to beat.

Marlene Dietrich sculpture by Clark Hanford

Biographies by Charlotte Chandler:
Hello, I Must Be Going: Groucho and His Friends
I, Fellini
Nobody's Perfect: Billy Wilder, A Personal Biography
It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock, A Personal Biography
The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, A Personal Biography
Ingrid: Ingrid Bergman, A Personal Biography
Not the Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford, A Personal Biography
She Always Knew How: Mae West, A Personal Biography
I Know Where I'm Going: Katharine Hepburn, A Personal Biography
Marlene: Marlene Dietrich, A Personal Biography

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for a review copy of Marlene

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Father of the Bride (1950)...and a reflection on mid-century Hollywood...

During World War II Hollywood churned out popular pictures both entertaining and patriotic, bolstering home front morale and earning enormous box receipts. Between 1942 and 1945, Americans were spending 23% of their recreation dollars on movies and by 1946 weekly attendance was over 90,000,000. But the boom years would soon go bust.

A decline in movie attendance began in the late '40s driven by changing audience tastes and two major events. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that certain film industry practices violated anti-trust laws and required studios to divest themselves of their theater chains. Without a guaranteed outlet for every film produced, filmmaking became riskier and the studios began cutting costs and making fewer films. And then, just as the 20^th century reached its mid-point, the industry faced a threat unlike anything that had come before - the arrival of commercial television.

empty seats

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, headed by founder Louis B. Mayer since the 1920s, had been the dominant studio for nearly two decades. But the blow to the studio system and declining audiences affected production companies large and small.  By 1951, Mayer was forced out and MGM’s head of production, Dore Schary, took over.

Director Vincente Minnelli had been one of MGM’s top directors since his breakout film, Meet Me in St. Louis, the top-grossing film of 1944. Minnelli married the film’s star, Judy Garland, in 1945. The following year he and Garland produced Liza Minnelli, but from 1946 to 1948 the director's career was uneven, including only minor successes along with outright failures. But a 1949 effort, Madame Bovary, was successful and a point of pride with Minnelli. For the most part he'd felt sidelined from major film work by the overwhelming demands of his marriage to the emotionally volatile MGM star.

In 1950 MGM assigned Minnelli to a Robert Walker comedy, The Skipper Surprised his Wife. The director was rescued from this bland task by producer Pandro Berman who offered him a more enticing project. Also a comedy, it was an adaptation of Edward Streeter’s 1949 bestseller, Father of the Bride, for which Berman owned screen rights. Because the two stories shared similarities, Berman wanted the director of Meet Me in St. Louis on his new production.

 

Jack Benny

As the project began to develop, comedian Jack Benny heard about it and approached Dore Schary. He told the production boss he wanted the role of Stanley Banks, the father of the bride. Without consulting the film’s production team, Schary all but promised Benny the part. Berman was not pleased, nor was Minnelli who went to Benny Thau, veteran MGM executive, and told him he wanted Spencer Tracy for the part and no one else. Thau gave Minnelli the bad news that Tracy was out of the running – the actor had already flatly refused to do the picture.

1950 would mark Spencer Tracy’s 20^th year in movies. The winner of back-to-back Best Actor Oscars in 1938 and 1939, he was by this time one of the most respected actors around. Laurence Olivier remarked that he learned more about acting from watching Tracy than from any technique. But away from the set Tracy wrestled with a serious problem - he was a notorious drinker. Between the efforts of MGM’s PR team and Katharine Hepburn’s care, Tracy had been able to avoid scandal and continue working. By the late '40s it appeared the actor’s drinking had tapered off somewhat, however, his hard living had aged him and he looked older than his years. Despite all this, Tracy was still much in demand and worked steadily, even as the industry went into a serious slump.



Hepburn and Tracy, Adam's Rib (1949)

In the midst of the box office downturn, Adam’s Rib (1949), one of the the best of the Tracy/Hepburn battle-of-the-sexes comedies, became a major hit. Though Tracy’s follow-up had been a less memorable potboiler called Malaya (1949), Vincente Minnelli remained convinced that he was the only actor to play Stanley Banks. Eventually, Minnelli decided to enlist Katharine Hepburn’s help. Hepburn invited him over for dinner and, during the meal, Minnelli told Tracy that with him in the lead the comedy had the potential to become a real classic.This was all it took to win Tracy over and he agreed to take the part. It came out that the actor had not refused to do the picture at all, but had known others were being considered for the part and assumed Minnelli didn't want him. To save face, Tracy had resorted to spreading a rumor that he had turned down Father of the Bride.

Joan Bennett was chosen to play the bride's mother, Ellie Banks. Bennett and Tracy had last co-starred in Raoul Walsh’s Me and My Gal (1932) eighteen years earlier. That film had ended with Tracy and Bennett’s characters marrying each other, and Tracy liked to joke that the plot of Father of the Bride indicated that his 1932 “marriage” to Bennett had worked out.  



Elizabeth Taylor in the 1950s

 Elizabeth Taylor, as bride-to-be Kay Banks, supplied the delectable frosting on the rich cake of Father of the Bride's cast. Spencer Tracy cracked that the film's only hard-to-believe detail was that the lovely girl could possibly be his daughter. Taylor was just 17 when she made the picture, but had already begun to portray more mature characters; at 16 she’d played the wife of 38-year-old Robert Taylor in Conspirator (1949). But Elizabeth Taylor was not so mature off-screen. She was still under the thumb and eagle eye of her mother and although the young actress had begun to date, her romances consisted of girlish infatuations and arranged dates mined for publicity by MGM. She was, despite her stunning beauty and poise, quite naïve when it came to love.

Father of the Bride, like Meet Me in St. Louis before it, is in its way a fond glimpse into American family life. Contemporary when it was released, the film plays today as a snapshot of a bygone, fairly idyllic, era. That mid-century moment is caught as if in amber by the solid screenplay of screenwriting team Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, Vincente Minnelli's meticulous attention to what is now period detail...a well-chosen cast, cinematographer John Alton and the minimal, mostly diegetic soundtrack of Adolph Deutsch. Father of the Bride is invariably referred to as a “sparkling comedy.” It most certainly sparkles and brims with sophisticated humor as it casts a skeptical, if bemused, eye on the incongruous goings-on at the heart of its plot, the American marriage ritual, circa 1950. The plot follows suburban lawyer Stanley Banks who is by turns besieged and put upon as he as he spends an enormous amount of money to finance every stage of a tradition that will end in his beloved daughter Kay leaving home. Adding insult to injury, Banks is (amusingly) ignored, belittled, the butt of jokes and barely tolerated while at the same time forced to pay and pay and pay. As the wedding nears he is beset by irrational fears and surreal nightmares. Given that the Stanley Banks character, a lovable and loving curmudgeon, carries the film, Minnelli's judgment was unerring when he insisted on Tracy or no one for the part.


Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Bennett

Father of the Bride was released on June 16, 1950, and was an immense hit. Contributing what can best be described as a publicist's dream, Elizabeth Taylor married her first husband, Nicky Hilton, just weeks earlier. Hilton was the son of the founder of Hilton Hotels, and though the pair had only begun dating months earlier, they succumbed to a whirlwind courtship. MGM naturally, and heartily, approved. Taylor's marriage at the very moment she starred as a virginal bride onscreen was an early indicator of something that would become a habit...her life imitating her art. Taylor's marriage to Hilton ended less than a year after it began...even before a quickie follow-up film to Father of the Bride was released in late 1951.

Father's Little Dividend (1951) is a charming, if less inspired, sequel. The dividend is Kay and her husband's first child and the plot, once again, covers the indignities Mr. Banks (Tracy) must endure...this time as grandfatherhood approaches. It, too, was a hit, but it was not on a par with Father of the Bride which had earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Screenplay and Best Actor and become an instant classic.

By the time both films had been released, Minnelli and Garland were divorced. Their final split came not long after MGM terminated Garland's contract in 1950. As she struggled to rebound and rebuild her career, Minnelli went back to work with a vengeance. He embarked on the most productive and celebrated decade of his career, a period that included An American in Paris (1951), The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), Brigadoon (1954), Lust for Life (1956), Designing Woman (1957), Gigi (1958) and Some Came Running (1958). Minnelli received a Best Director Oscar nomination for An American in Paris (winner of six Oscars including Best Picture) and won for Gigi (winner of nine Oscars including Best Picture). Though Minnelli wasn't nominated, The Bad and the Beautiful won five Oscars.

Spencer Tracy went on make another 17 films and earn five more Best Actor Oscar nominations. His later years were difficult; he fell off and got back on the wagon, became withdrawn and taciturn and lost his health. He was fired from a picture for the first time with Tribute to a Bad Man (1956); it would the last time he worked for MGM. He was so ill during the making of his final film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) that he was uninsurable and Hepburn put up her own money to help cover the costs. Spencer Tracy died a few weeks after the film was completed and received a posthumous Academy Award nomination for his performance.

Elizabeth Taylor made a permanent transition to adult roles with Father of the Bride. Her stardom was cemented a year later with the haunting George Stevens drama A Place in the Sun (1951). Taylor went on to become one of the biggest film stars of the 1950s and 1960s and remained a celebrity for the rest of her life.

The studios of Hollywood met a less cheerful fate. By 1951, TV had made significant inroads into the movie audience. Cities with TV stations showed a decrease in movie attendance and wherever TV appeared, theaters closed. The age of the studio system came to an end by 1954. In 1956, Dore Schary, who had tried in vain to restore MGM's glory, was fired and in 1957 Louis B. Mayer, who had never recovered from his ouster, died at age 73. Television, of course, continued to flourish. By the end of 1952 there were 19,000,000 TV sets in homes across America and by 1955 there were 31,000,000...

Some have called Father of the Bride prototypical of the family-oriented TV sitcoms of the '50s and early '60s. In fact, in 1961 a series version of Father of the Bride debuted on CBS; it was shot at MGM studios. Ruth Warrick (Citizen Kane) played Ellie Banks, Myrna Fahey starred as Kay...and Leon Ames, who had portrayed the father, Alonzo Smith, in Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis, took the role of Stanley Banks.

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(Not Quite) All About Bette...

Bette Davis was born 103 years ago on April 5 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She attended drama school as a young woman and made her Broadway debut in "Broken Dishes" in 1929. She headed to Hollywood in 1930 where she was tested and signed by Universal. When her Universal contract was not renewed and she was on the verge of returning to New York and Broadway she received a call from Warner Bros. This was not exactly the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but it was the beginning of the truly legendary screen career of a groundbreaking actress.

In her career of more than 100 films, Bette Davis was nominated for 11 Best Actress Academy Awards (including one write-in campaign) and won two.

In her heyday, Bette received Best Actress nods five years in a row and, in 1942, was the highest paid woman in America.

She won the Cannes Film Festival's 1951 Best Actress Award for All About Eve.

She was nominated for four Emmy Awards and won one. The list of her various award nominations and wins goes on and on...

She was the first woman to be the president of AMPAS and the the first woman honored with the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award.

She was one of a group of Hollywood stars who established the Hollywood Canteen for soldiers traveling through Los Angeles during World War II.

Not to be forgotten (for it speaks to Bette's status as an icon)...the #1 single of 1981 and the winner of "Song of the Year" and "Record of the Year" Grammy Awards was "Bette Davis Eyes," sung by Kim Carnes.

Even after suffering breast cancer and a stroke, Bette Davis continued acting until the final year of her life.
 

All About Eve (1950)

Bette Davis's performances in these films were nominated for Best Actress Oscars:

Of Human Bondage (1934) ( write-in)
Dangerous (1935)
Jezebel (1938)
Dark Victory (1939)
The Letter (1940)
The Little Foxes (1941)
Now, Voyager (1942)
Mr. Skeffington (1944)
All About Eve (1950)
The Star (1952)
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)

She won for Dangerous and Jezebel but was also "robbed" on more than one occasion...

What else can one say about Bette Davis? A lot! However, what actor James Woods had to say in a TCM "Word of Mouth" segment a few years ago hits the bulls-eye for me and bears repeating in honor of her birthday...

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