Even Google Image Search knows what you’re looking for, when it comes to Marlene Dietrich. The Code notwithstanding, she was still absolutely a queer icon. It is, of course, basically impossible to trace who she slept with, inasmuch as all it takes to have people assume you were hiding a secret relationship in classic Hollywood is to have ever exchanged two words. We know a lot more about the men with whom she had affairs than the women, but it’s no secret that she had many affairs with both. All while still being a star and dressing however she wanted, including speaking rapturously about wearing men’s jeans.
In fact, about the only place she remains controversial is in her native Germany, because she sided with the Allies against Germany in World War II. Presumably she either should have stayed neutral or loved her country if not its leadership, because the idea that she should’ve taken the offer to be the biggest film star for the Nazis is . . . a take. Still, there were people who didn’t want the street on which she was born named after her. Because she renounced her German citizenship in 1939, which, if you’re going to renounce your German citizenship, was a good year to do it.
Dietrich didn’t merely appear in movies and work at the Hollywood Canteen, like a lot of people. She may have sold more war bonds than anyone else. She did two tours with the USO, one extremely close to the German lines. She said she spent more time on the front lines than Dwight Eisenhower. Delightfully, what she seems to have done on those tours is not merely sing but do things that would have appeared in her cabaret act back in the ‘20s. She played the musical saw, for pity’s sake, and did a fake mindreading act apparently taught to her by Orson Welles. It makes you wonder if there’s footage.
In later years, after the movie work faded because she was no longer young, she did a lot of performing on the stage, also based on her old cabaret days. She worked with Burt Bacharach for a long time. She appears not to have had plastic surgery, but she certainly used a whole lot of other tricks to appear as young as she could. She didn’t have a great singing voice—hot take, that—but she was certainly capable of getting every inch out of what she did have. If you trace the history of female eroticism in the twentieth century, she’s certainly one of the high points.
Okay, so she seems to have been a pretty terrible mother. And there remains the open question as to what, exactly, her sister was doing in Belsen during the war and what she knew; her sister owned a movie theatre that was visited by the officers from Bergen-Belsen, and in later years, Dietrich pretended her sister didn’t exist. But humans are, after all, complicated, and she’s less of a Disaster Bisexual than, say, Jeremy Brett was. Admittedly a low bar. But did Jeremy Brett have the Medal of Freedom? Not that he had the opportunity.