From: rjwill6@pbsdts.sdcrc.pacbell.com (Rod Williams)
Subject: Donald Spoto on Dietrich et al.
Originator: rjwill6@pbsdts.sdcrc.pacbell.com
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Francisco
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 20:04:03 GMT

There's a great, dishy interview with Donald Spoto (by Warren
Sonbert) in the current issue of the (San Francisco) Bay Area
Reporter (BAR).  Spoto's latest book, a biography of Marlene
Dietrich, has just been published.  He's also written well-
known biographies of Alfred Hitchcock, Lotte Lenya, Tennessee
Williams, and, most recently, Laurence Olivier (including the
revelation about Olivier's 10-year affair with Danny Kaye).
I feel like typing, so here it is...

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BAR:    How did you manage both the Dietrich and Olivier
        projects in one year?

Spoto:  Actually I began and researched the Dietrich eight
        years ago -- it's just coming out now.  I write them
        separately.  There's much meticulous research, then
        interviews with as many people as I can track down who
        will agree to talk to me, and finally screenings of
        all my subject's work.  For this new Monroe project, I
        have 35,000 pages of documents to digest and organize.
        By the way, forget everything you've ever read about
        Monroe, the conjectures around her death as well as
        the way she lived her life.

BAR:    Can't wait.  In "Blue Angel" you certainly paint
        Dietrich as a cross-dressing, lesbian-loving pioneer.
        Her ground-breaking behavior of bisexuality, flaunting
        multiple lovers by going out with all of them on dates
        -- this might be inconceivable to people today as a
        30's activity.

Spoto:  Her lesbian proclivities were flagrant when she was a
        starlet in her twenties in Berlin.  But unlike the
        incredibly closeted, disingenuous, two-faced,
        hypocritical contemporary Hollywood (where I live),
        Dietrich didn't let her international fame and
        celebrity get in the way of her Sapphic affairs.  She
        always openly carried on multiple liaisons with both
        men and women and made no bones about with whom she
        slept to any of her lovers.  I mean she was discreet
        and didn't plant revelatory items in Louella's columns,
        but from Mercedes d'Acosta (one of Garbo's paramours)
        to Marti Stevens, her homosexual life was active,
        healthy and constant -- and everyone knew.

BAR:    Why do you suppose some people refuse to acknowledge
        this side of the artistic personality -- that fluidity
        and adventurousness?  In American schools they teach
        that Olivier was perhaps the greatest actor of the
        20th century.  And I feel that if mention is made that
        "he was British" then "he was bisexual" should also be
        underscored, but it isn't.  Gay students need to be
        alerted about artistic role models.

Spoto:  That's what's so horrible about Hollywood; it's so
        homophobic and yet all they indulge in is gay sex!

BAR:    I love the outing rampages in your books.  The Olivier-
        Danny Kaye affair and in the Dietrich the stuff about
        Mary Martin and Janet Gaynor going off on vacations
        together, leaving their homosexual husbands alone to
        console each other.  By the way, where have I been
        that I didn't know about Kay Francis, Jean Arthur,
        Edna St. Vincent Millay, Willa Cather, Anna May Wong,
        Tilly Losch and Eva Le Gallienne?

Spoto:  It was certainly a hotbed.  And the men -- Clark Gable,
        Gary Cooper, Robert Ryan, Paul Newman.  Tom Cruise,
        John Travolta and Richard Gere aren't the first hunky
        stars to lead closeted lives.  By the way, the gerbil
        got out of the condom -- that's when the trouble
        started.

BAR:    My, my.  You don't relate Dietrich's plot to
        assassinate Hitler.  She could've been the only one to
        get close enough.

Spoto:  But this delusion that she could change history is just
        like her ploy to convince Edward VIII to give up Wallis
        Simpson -- it was all in her head!

BAR:    Here and in the Olivier and Hitchcock tomes, your
        actual writing on the films is so good that you could
        have been a film critic if you weren't already an ace
        biographer.

Spoto:  The state of criticism in this country is abysmal --
        it's really just reviewing.  I did actually write two
        books on film aesthetics.  One was about Hollywood's
        image of masculinity in the American man.

BAR:    I'm glad you caught the Zarah Leander connection (star
        of Sirk's "La Habanera" and "Zu Neuen Ufern").

Spoto:  Her beauty, vocal art and stage presence were Dietrich's
        strongest influences.  Americans don't know her because
        of her Nazi affiliations, but her songs were incredible.

BAR:    Do you think Dietrich realized that her languor would
        pitch audiences into a frenzy?  By doing "nothing" she
        was affecting everything?

Spoto:  I believe everything she did was calculated down to the
        finest detail and nuance.  She was all manipulation and
        artifice.

BAR:    I love your lines about von Sternberg instructing her
        to "look at that lamp as if your life depended on it"
        and when she first meets John Wayne, her purring to
        director Tay Garnett, "Oh, Daddy!  Buy me that!"

Spoto:  Dietrich was really unique among stars in the way she
        credited her director (von Sternberg) with her total
        creation.  But I actually believe they had some kind of
        perverse domination deal that, in public, she would
        come on as his slave.  Behind closed doors it was
        probably just the opposite.

BAR:    Yes, of course, that kind of fluidity is the floating
        subtext of all their films.  That classic scene in
        "Morocco" when she's in drag in the nightclub, goes up
        and kisses a woman.  She then removes her flower and
        tosses it to Cooper, who proceeds to put it behind his
        ear.  How many gender shifts can you count?

Spoto:  Von Sternberg was a notorious eroticist, and their
        seven films together reflect those shifting sexual
        power plays that inform the films' beauties and
        energies.

BAR:    From "Dishonored" to "Witness for the Prosecution,"
        there's this split in her persona from the glamor puss
        enigma to the earthy, peasant charwoman scrubbing the
        floors.

Spoto:  The "hausfrau" image was cultivated out of guilt for
        the maternal neglect of her daughter Maria (who's now
        writing "Mutter Dearest" by the way) on the one hand,
        and a reflection of her idea of what a man wanted.  She
        would be the servant slave who would cook, clean and
        attend her master if necessary.  There was this
        interesting split between total subservience to a man
        and yet playing the field like a man, controlling her
        affairs like a business pro.  During World War II in
        her USO tours, she actually took on the suffering
        deprivation of a soldier as much as any GI.

BAR:    Does it really matter if these artists (Dietrich,
        Hitchcock, Olivier) weren't Boy Scout material?

Spoto:  I love my subjects.  But genius derives from the human
        point; these were frail, needy people suffering from
        their neuroses -- from petty slights, infantile demands
        and intense megalomania.  Yet they were capable of
        transforming their craziness and perversities into some
        of the greatest art of this century.  Capturing that
        tension interests me.

BAR:    What do you see as your position in life?

Spoto:  The English language is the most nuanced tongue in the
        world.  So to do it justice would be one goal.  The
        other is to think of writing as a sacred vocation --
        something to enchant and yet educate one's readers --
        but some kind of holy mission as well.

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rod williams -=- pacific bell -=- san francisco -=- rjwill6@pacbell.com
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