Sunday, August 23, 2009

Personal branding from the WWII front

My husband, the resident WWII buff, left his copy of Stephen Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers on the couch, and flipping through the photo pages, I found a photo of a USO tour performance with the following caption:

Movie stars made tours to boost morale, but not many got near the front lines. Marlene Dietrich did. Here she sings for front-line infantry in a barn near Bixieres, France; the town was shelled during her performance.

What's striking about the photo is how comfortable Dietrich looks--hands in pockets, slouching slightly backward--in her makeshift limelight. A quick perusal of her biography (via IMDB and Wikipedia) reveals the reason: Her film-work was, speaking broadly, an aberration in a career that began and ended in cabaret singing.

One feature of Hollywood that is no longer familiar is that that "Golden Age" actors and directors were more often than not under long -term contract, meaning that they were paid to do a given number of films in a given time period. Under the "studio system," major film companies had a vested interest in the longevity of their acting "stable." That they were more than a trifle over-sensitive to fluctuations in popularity is not surprising. In fact, Dietrich, along with other notables such as Fred Astaire and Katherine Hepburn, were billed as "box office poison," which had a detrimental--if temporary--effect on their careers. (Ironically, Hepburn had then only won one of her record-setting four "Best Actress" awards, the rest coming when she was in her sixties and seventies.)

It may be too cynical to even imply that Dietrich was simply looking beyond her movie-star shelf-life. It may be that she simply relished interacting with human beings without a camera in the way. But one wonders how many former GIs went out of their way (geographically and financially) to attend a Marlene Dietrich performance in the years after the war. I feel pretty darned safe in betting that it was more than a handful. Indeed, her singing career ended when she was in her seventies, and then only after an onstage fall broke her leg.

When asked why she would risk performing within mere clicks of the Germans, she replied simply, "It was the decent thing to do." And she had extra incentive, having become a naturalized American citizen just a few years before. A life-long bisexual, she would not have fared well under the Third Reich, and her very public criticism of the Nazis was controversial in her native Berlin even after her death in the 1990s.

As much of a history freak as I am, I shouldn't be surprised to see "new" ideas popping up in decades, centuries, or even millenia past. To be sure, Hollywood stars of the silver screen era went out of their way to cultivate or even re-invent their "brands," some successfully negotiating from vaudeville to silent movies to "talkies" to television. No small accomplishment, that, but Dietrich's versatility as a gifted singer and actress and (most especially) brand manager make her stand out nevertheless.