Making an entrance

I'm not willing just to be tolerated

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”

“Living is a horizontal fall.”

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?”

“A little too much is just enough for me.”

“I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.”

“I am a lie that always speaks the truth.”

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5th July 1889 – 11th October 1963)

Glamour is assurance

"Glamour is assurance. It is a kind of knowing that you are all right in every way, mentally and physically and in appearance, and that, whatever the occasion or the situation, you are equal to it."







"It takes too much time to be a well-dressed woman. I have watched others. Bags, shoes, hats. They must think of them all the time. I cannot waste that time."



Dietrich.

Jewellery.

These are a few of my favourite things.

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich (27th December 1901 – 6th May 1992)

Marlene on the Wall

"I had no desire to be a film actress, to always play somebody else, to be beautiful with somebody constantly straightening out your every eyelash. It was always a big bother to me."

"I'm not an actress - I'm a personality."

"There is a lack of dignity to film stardom."

"I never ever took my career seriously."

"I was an actress. I made films. Finish."

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich (27th December 1901 – 6th May 1992)

Mystery guest of the day...

...it's none other than Our Princess Kylie Minogue as Marlene Dietrich!

Remarkable.

Check out dear Marky Mark's Shine One And On blog for more photos from lifestyle magazine Sorbet, for whom this photo-shoot was commissioned.

I dress for the image, not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men

From The Observer, March 1960:

The murmur in the quiet hotel bar froze. Quite suddenly, in a few silent strides, Marlene Dietrich was there.

She really is quite something. She was wearing a wild mink coat; a black Balenciaga dress embroidered, at the left breast, with the scarlet bar of the Légion d'honneur; a stiffened black tulle hat; white kid gloves; black patent leather pumps; and a black crocodile handbag. That's all. But the quality of her body gave the mink a luxury no advertiser could ever buy: the black dress was littler and subtler than volumes of Vogue could imply, and her single decoration was somehow more worldly and wicked than all the jewellery in Paris, London and New York put together.

Unlike the sculptured image of films, in which only the voice moves, she is alert and friendly. Her face has got lines, luckily: two deep ones from nose to chin and several on the forehead. It is alive with warmth and humour. She ordered coffee and the waiter brought it and watched tenderly over the first mouthful.

"I dress for the image," she announced. "Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men." The image? "A conglomerate of all the parts I've ever played on the screen. When I was in 'The Blue Angel' people thought that was me: they really thought that was me!

"If I dressed for myself I wouldn't bother at all. Clothes bore me. I'd wear jeans. I adore jeans. I get them in a public store – men's, of course; I can't wear women's trousers. But I dress for the profession. I get my clothes in Hollywood and Paris, and if I can't come to Paris, I wait.

"For the past five years, I have got my clothes for the profession from Jean-Louis in Hollywood. We go together to these places where they import materials and pick what we like. I know what I want to look like and he makes the dress.

"When I come to Paris, I get my clothes at one house or another. I went to Dior when he started. There hasn't been any fashion since that. There is fashion in magazines, but where are these dresses we see in them? I never see them being worn. They belong to a different sect. But since Dior made his great revolution, what change has there been? Waist here, waist there, flat – what does it mean?

"I never go to a collection. It takes too long to pass. They know me now and they show me only the clothes that are mine. I never consider money when I order clothes. Before I had money? I don't remember.

"I have always had to have clothes made for me because of my unusual shape – broad shoulders, narrow hips. I have never made a mistake. I can see if something goes wrong during the making. And I stop it.

"I have no fur coat. I haven't the courage any more. This one isn't mine. Balenciaga sent this over because he thought it was cold."

Marie Magdalene "Marlene" Dietrich (27th December 1901 – 6th May 1992)

Enjoy it!

"Unpack your sense of humour, and get on with living and ENJOY IT."

Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16th December 1899 – 26th March 1973)

PS That picture of The Merm and The Master is the latest addition to our "Wall of Fame" here at Dolores Delargo Towers...

Marlene - cipher, allegory, fantasy, queer

To call Marlene 'lesbian' would not be quite accurate. To call her bisexual would also not tell the whole story. Perhaps 'queer' describes her best or simply, as one commentator said, 'unstraight'.

She made love to those she was attracted to at any particular time in her life, their gender was immaterial. This is extraordinary, given that most of her career was built on being the ultimate fetish object for straight men. The film critic Kenneth Tynan defined this bisexual appeal when he said "she has sex without gender."

"Dietrich was a legendary movie star, but she was much, much more than that - she was a cipher, an allegory, someone who could fulfil any fantasy or fit any construction. But most of all she was entirely her own woman whose amazingly full life was an example that all of us can take inspiration from."

Thus Terry Sanderson (president of the National Secular Society and lifelong Marlene obsessive) described his idol, a tribute to whose life he lavishly presented for us last night at the twee Conway Hall as part of the celebrations for Camden and Islington LGBT History Month 2014.

Mr Sanderson took us on a journey all the way from Miss Dietrich's early Berlin life, her transformation from podgy teenager into the glittering god-like creature beloved of photographers, queens and audiences the world over, her determination to decry the devastation the Nazis had wrought upon her homeland and its people (mainly by working her proverbial arse off, entertaining the Allied troops), and her love-hate relationship with Hollywood - and its leading ladies and men.





Juicy titbits emerged, such as the fact she once shared a wealthy lover with Garbo (Mercedes de Acosta), her views on religion were singularly scathing (“I lost my faith during the war and can't believe they are all 'up there', flying around or sitting at tables, all those I've lost,” she said), and her fabled last screen appearance opposite David Bowie in (the universally panned) Just A Gigolo was actually filmed hundreds of miles away from her co-star as she refused to leave Paris for the studio in Berlin where the film was being made; they had to build a re-creation just for her, opposite her apartment.



But it was her sexual allure and defiant self-determination that most explains her enduring legendary status, and it remains a favourite topic of gossip even today.

According to her daughter Maria's tell-all biography/expose, "Marlene used sex as a kind of weapon in her affairs with men - she didn't actually care much for "it". It was a way of controlling and manipulating them. With women it was different. Marlene actually enjoyed the sex, and the relationships were much more satisfying for her."

The late Maximilian Schell (who made an academy award-nominated documentary about Marlene in 1984) said of her: "She was a typical Berlin woman who could handle king and beggar with equal adroitness, and she was totally open about her homosexual relationships. I had the impression that Marlene did not converse with the people she met but rather wanted to provoke them. There was a spirit of confrontation in the air wherever she was."



Among the rarer bits of footage Terry Sanderson unearthed for our delight was this clip of her successful audition for The Blue Angel - as Mr Sanderson said, "I wouldn't have liked to be that piano player!":



To conclude his cornucopia of uber-camp clips of Dietrich at her most alluring (an exotic dancer in in Kismet; "that lesbian kiss" from Morocco; the smouldering vamp in Shanghai Express and Desire) and most surprising (arriving in a gorilla suit in Blonde Venus; brawling and boozing in Destry Rides Again), Mr Sanderson provided us with a real treat - Marlene's Stockholm concert in 1960, when she was absolutely at the top of her cabaret success, in full.

And here it is. Enjoy!

Read Terry Sanderson's full article on Marlene in the Huffington Post.

Marlene Dietrich website

In the Corner

Mrs William Rhinelander Stewart


Igor Stravinsky


Gypsy Rose Lee


Marcel Duchamp


Martha Graham


Salvador Dali


Marlene Dietrich


Truman Capote


Wallis Simpson

"A good photograph is one that communicate a fact, touches the heart, leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective."

"I myself have always stood in the awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel."

Portraits "in the corner" by Irving Penn (16th June 1917 – 7th October 2009)

It's snowing out there...

...keep warm, folks!