ne day in 1922, in Berlin, Germany, a casting call went out for the part of a voluptuous young woman in a film called Tragedy of Love. Of the hundreds of struggling young actresses who showed up, most would do anything to get the casting director's attention, including exposing them-selves. There was one young woman in the line, however, who was simply dressed, and performed none of the other girls' desperate antics. Yet she stood out anyway.

The girl carried a puppy on a leash, and had draped an elegant necklace around the puppy's neck. The casting director noticed her immediately. He watched her as she stood in line, calmly holding the dog in her arms and keeping to herself. When she smoked a cigarette, her gestures were slow and suggestive. He was fascinated by her legs and face, the sinuous way she moved, the hint of coldness in her eyes. By the time she had come to the front, he had already cast her. Her name was Marlene Dietrich.

By 1929, when the Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg ar-rived in Berlin to begin work on the film The Blue Angel, the twenty-seven-year-old Dietrich was well known in the Berlin film and theater world. The Blue Angel was to be about a woman called Lola-Lola who preys sadistically on men, and all of Berlin's best actresses wanted the part—except, apparently, Dietrich, who made it known that she thought the role demean-ing; von Sternberg should choose from the other actresses he had in mind. Shortly after arriving in Berlin, however, von Sternberg attended a perfor-mance of a musical to watch a male actor he was considering for The Blue Angel The star of the musical was Dietrich, and as soon as she came on-stage, von Sternberg found that he could not take his eyes off her. She stared at him directly, insolently, like a man; and then there were those legs, and the way she leaned provocatively against the wall. Von Sternberg forgot about the actor he had come to see. He had found his Lola-Lola.

Von Sternberg managed to convince Dietrich to take the part, and im-mediately he went to work, molding her into the Lola of his imagination. He changed her hair, drew a silver line down her nose to make it seem thinner, taught her to look at the camera with the insolence he had seen onstage. When filming began, he created a lighting system just for her—a light that tracked her wherever she went, and was strategically heightened by gauze and smoke. Obsessed with his "creation," he followed her every-where. No one else could go near her.The Blue Angel was a huge success in Germany. Audiences were fasci-nated with Dietrich: that cold, brutal stare as she spread her legs over a stool, baring her underwear; her effortless way of commanding attention on screen. Others besides von Sternberg became obsessed with her. A man dying of cancer, Count Sascha Kolowrat, had one last wish: to see Mar-lene's legs in person. Dietrich obliged, visiting him in the hospital and lift-ing up her skirt; he sighed and said "Thank you. Now I can die happy." Soon Paramount Studios brought Dietrich to Hollywood, where everyone was quickly talking about her. At a party, all eyes would turn toward her when she came into the room. She would be escorted by the most hand-some men in Hollywood, and would be wearing an outfit both beautiful and unusual—gold-lame pajamas, a sailor suit with a yachting cap. The next day the look would be copied by women all over town; next it would spread to magazines, and a whole new trend would start.

The real object of fascination, however, was unquestionably Dietrich's face. What had enthralled von Sternberg was her blankness—with a simple lighting trick he could make that face do whatever he wanted. Dietrich eventually stopped working with von Sternberg, but never forgot what he had taught her. One night in 1951, the director Fritz Lang, who was about to direct her in the film Rancho Notorious, was driving past his office when he saw a light flash in the window. Fearing a burglary, he got out of his car, crept up the stairs, and peeked through the crack in the door: it was Diet-rich taking pictures of herself in the mirror, studying her face from every angle.

Marlene Dietrich had a distance from her own self: she could study her face, her legs, her body, as if she were someone else. This gave her the ability to mold her look, transforming her appearance for effect. She could pose in just the way that would most excite a man, her blankness letting him see her according to his fantasy, whether of sadism, voluptuousness, or danger. And every man who met her, or who watched her on screen, fan-tasized endlessly about her. The effect worked on women as well; in the words of one writer, she projected "sex without gender." But this self-distance gave her a certain coldness, whether on film or in person. She was like a beautiful object, something to fetishize and admire the way we ad-mire a work of art.

The fetish is an object that commands an emotional response and that makes us breathe life into it. Because it is an object we can imagine what-ever we want to about it. Most people are too moody, complex, and reac-tive to let us see them as objects that we can fetishize. The power of the Fetishistic Star comes from an ability to become an object, and not just any object but an object we fetishize, one that stimulates a variety of fantasies. Fetishistic Stars are perfect, like the statue of a Greek god or goddess. The effect is startling, and seductive. Its principal requirement is self-distance. If you see yourself as an object, then others will too. An ethereal, dreamlike air will heighten the effect.

You are a blank screen. Float through life noncommittally and people will want to seize you and consume you. Of all the parts of your body that draw this fetishistic attention, the strongest is the face; so learn to tune your face like an instrument, making it radiate a fascinating vagueness for effect. And since you will have to stand out from other Stars in the sky, you will need to develop an attention-getting style. Dietrich was the great practi-tioner of this art; her style was chic enough to dazzle, weird enough to en-thrall. Remember, your own image and presence are materials you can control. The sense that you are engaged in this kind of play will make peo-ple see you as superior and worthy of imitation.

She had such natural poise... such an economy of ges-ture, that she became as absorbing as a Modigliani....

She had the one essential star quality: she could be mag-nificent doing nothing.

— BE R L IN ACTRESS LILI DARVAS ON M A R L E N E D I E T R I C H