AN APPRECIATION : Auf Wiedersehen, Marlene

Once, in the days not too long ago, when magazine covers were still in black-and-white, Life ran a picture of Marlene Dietrich, who died Tuesday at the age of either 86 or 90, depending on which legend you choose. At the time of the Life story, her famous legs were still splendid but they could be improved, as she made clear to the photographer and the editors, by some discreet retouching.

The magazine had a resident genius of the airbrush named Matt Greene who inherited the assignment. His work so pleased the great lady that she made a grand appearance in the layout room, followed by an aide bearing a case of champagne and by most of the staff, including a thin and owlish junior writer. She presented Matt with the champagne and a large ceremonial kiss and, after this superbly dream-like episode, swept out and away into the rest of her life.

It was the first time I had seen her plain, to use the poet’s term for in person. With Marlene Dietrich, the poet’s term seems more the fitting, because, even in her reclusive retirement, when she loaned her voice but not her image to a documentary about her, she remained the kind of mythlike figure poets do write about.

The meeting at Life was more than incidental. It seemed to me absolutely characteristic of the grand gestures and the exotic confidence with which she had invested her life. It was also, as I thought then and later, revealing of the hard-headed practicality and operational shrewdness that also marked Dietrich’s career. Maintaining the legend is a never-ending work.

Someone once described Sonja Henie as combining an elfin charm with a keen sense of double-entry bookkeeping. Whether Marlene Dietrich could keep books worth a damn is not clear, but she had, especially in the years after her association with Josef von Sternberg ended, a sharp and objective sense of herself as an entertainer.

The mystique of Lola-Lola, the zaftig temptress who led Emil Jannings to his doom in “The Blue Angel,” became a kind of perfume that never faded from Dietrich, even when in later times she kidded it and revealed herself as the wonderful and rambunctious comedian of “Destry Rides Again,” for example.

From the time she left home as a teen-ager to join a chorus line, Dietrich was independent-minded and ambitious. And, like all those who are found to have real talent, she became the thorough professional, a versatile actress whose gift for high drama and impersonation were sensationally employed in “Witness for the Prosecution,” and in a brief but memorable cameo in Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.”

The sylph-like creation wearing a gleaming white dress so skintight she had to be sewn into it (or so legend said) when she appeared as a nightclub chanteuse in Vegas and elsewhere was, in a sense, not different from the throaty young woman in “The Blue Angel.” She was still one of the preeminent sex symbols of her time, it was just that the colorations had changed.

The earthy, fleshy allure of Lola, a siren not quite conscious of the strength of her song, had yielded to a far more sophisticated allure, slightly mocking of sex as a game and leaving no doubt that what really counted was a woman’s spirit--mysterious, amusing, intelligent, provoking thoughts of partnership rather than conquest (until, perhaps, the gents saw that they had been conquered).

Dietrich did not, like Mae West, de-steam sex by making it a wonderful, raucous joke, nor like Madonna flaunt it with a cynical contempt that reduces it to a sort of depersonalized rutting. Dietrich, taking it lightly but never spilling over into camp, let the life-force keep its charm, its importance and its infinite, intimate variety.

I saw the lady once more, at the opening of a musical in New York. James Thurber, by then totally blind, was sitting at the end of our row. Before the curtain rose, Dietrich stopped by his seat, kissed him and said, “ ‘Allo, Jeem, it’s Marlene.”

“I know it’s Marlene,” Thurber said almost testily. He meant, I had no doubt, that you didn’t even have to see Marlene Dietrich to know she was there; you could feel her presence.