Queen of the World : MARLENE DIETRICH: Life and Legend, <i> By Steven Bach (William Morrow: $30; 600 pp.)</i> : BLUE ANGEL: The Life of Marlene Dietrich, <i> By Donald Spoto (Doubleday: $24; 302 pp.)</i>

Somebody once asked John Wayne--who did four pictures with Marlene Dietrich and was one of her many lovers--if he had his life to live over again, would he still want to be a film star, and he said: “Yeah, sure, as long as I wasn’t a woman.” But then, did the Duke himself really know what it meant to be a movie star? Director Howard Hawks once remarked: “I think the whole thing is a little over Duke’s head--I mean, everything that’s happened to him.”

How could it not be, though, this business of picture stardom? What exactly does it do to those select few chosen to be shown on gigantic screens across the entire world, performers whose images are magnified a thousandfold? As Cary Grant put it: “They could park a car in my nostril.” There is no precedent in history for this phenomenon, and there has been very little time properly to analyze its effect on viewers, much less on those illusory gods and goddesses themselves.

This is the most vivid subtext of two new biographies of Marlene Dietrich, certainly one of the most enduring and disciplined of movie actresses and performing artists. Hers is perhaps the most resilient star legend of them all--a transcendent 20th-Century icon, which she herself spent most of her life nurturing and cultivating. Dietrich’s career began on the Berlin stage in the early 1920s; she achieved international film stardom in ‘31, and her performances on stage and screen finally ended only in the late ‘70s, by which time Dietrich had been acknowledged by many critics and audiences as “Queen of the World.” After a decade and a half of seclusion in Paris, she died earlier this year at age 91, as legendary as ever, as mysterious.

These two biographies examine that mystery and legend--Dietrich as Goddess, as Woman, as Artist--but they are markedly different in attitude and quality. Donald Spoto--a professional biographer with several successful works published, of varying quality, on subjects from Hitchcock to Olivier--gives an outsider’s view (show-biz people might call him a “civilian”). He never spoke either with Dietrich or the man most responsible for first “revealing” her to the world public--Josef von Sternberg, director of seven of her first eight talkies.

Steven Bach, on the other hand, was heavily involved on the production side of pictures in the ‘70s (as vice-president at United Artists) and wrote a brilliant insider’s bestseller (“Final Cut”). Though Bach tastefully keeps himself out of Dietrich’s story, he did in fact speak numerous times with her on the phone in her last decade, and in the ‘60s studied with Von Sternberg. Of the two authors, Bach is the more thorough researcher (his book includes complete film-disc-theater listings) as well as the better writer: This is the finest picture-star biography I have read.

The Bach version of Dietrich’s life has not only an exciting narrative pull but also an exhilarating sense of passionate interest in his subject--something totally lacking in Spoto’s strangely lackluster, repetitive, often unpleasantly snide work. For Spoto, there seems to be no move Dietrich ever made that was not suspicious, calculating or two-faced. This bespeaks a certain lack of affinity or real understanding for performers or, in fact, artists of any kind who must use themselves as part of their creation. While Spoto’s book seems most to relish the information on whom Dietrich slept with, Bach’s (though no less candid in this area) is most concerned with the complicated inner and outer workings of a consummate professional. To his everlasting glory, Bach actually takes Marlene Dietrich seriously, not only as a woman but also as an artist.

And what a remarkably dedicated and generous Old World artist she was! The only German superstar--and this despite two world wars that made Germany not the most popular country to be from--in a brand-new medium for which no one really knew the rules of the game, Dietrich (her name means pass-key in German) had to make them up for herself. There was no way to predict the price she would have to pay: her last years in seclusion so as not to destroy the legend she had created, the myth that was a part of her art, both of which--though pretending otherwise--she took very seriously.

Marlene’s German-born mother--”the good General” she called her--had said to her daughter repeatedly: “Do something.” And to her European sensibility, implicit in that injunction was: “Do something well .” Marlene did everything extremely well, and made it all look so easy that many people eventually took her for granted. Spoto still seems to: He never fully acknowledges her brilliance as an actress, separating her always from the “serious” actors of the time, as opposed to “personalities.” But successful film stars are those actor-personalities uniquely appropriate to the closely analytic eye of a camera--a seminal difference about this new performing art.

Growing up as a would-be artist in the Weimar Republic, Marlene (a contraction of her own making, from her given names, Mary and Magdalene) had her first affair when she was 16, with her (considerably older) violin teacher. She had affairs from then on with both men and women, long before and long after her one official marriage. In Berlin, in those roaring ‘20s, Dietrich used to explain: “In Europe it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman. We make love with anyone we find attractive.” She used to say--this was, remember, the first decade of female emancipation--”Women are better, but you can’t live with a woman.” For living together, she preferred men.

Of course, Marlene Dietrich did grow up in probably the most open city of the world in that era--Berlin, the city of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, of Ernst Lubitsch, George Grosz and Fritz Lang. Marlene’s first job was as a violinist in a small combo playing for silent movies. She was fired because her legs kept distracting the other musicians. As various Berliners and Viennese quickly began to point out, Dietrich had Those Legs, also That Face, and, on top of everything else, That Voice.

Starting out in small stage roles and working her way up (she studied at the Max Reinhardt school and played more than 30 roles in the theater), she had acted in nearly 20 German movies--seven of them leads--before her European “debut” in “The Blue Angel.” She was even a singing star in Berlin with numerous recordings before Josef von Sternberg “discovered” her for the Lola Lola part in “The Blue Angel,” a supposed vehicle for the great Emil Jannings, which Dietrich stole with a vengeance. After that, she stole every single movie she was ever in, all 37 of them, often with material and collaborators of infinitely lesser quality.

In their discussion of her films, the two current biographers differ quite a bit. Spoto’s writing gets markedly better, more enthusiastic, more comfortable. Naturally, he is less at a disadvantage here. Bach’s understanding of the human effort involved in making even the lousiest picture allows him, perhaps, to be more truly admiring of the work Marlene Dietrich accomplished. He also connects this to her life far more sensitively.

Both writers (unpredictably) agree about Alfred Hitchcock’s one Dietrich movie, “Stage Fright,” putting it among the best of the two artists’ work; both seem to undervalue Orson Welles’ one Dietrich film, “Touch of Evil,” though Bach better grasps her artistic contribution and Welles’ awareness of it. Bach is much sharper about the unknown ‘20s German films. On the subject of Von Sternberg--among Dietrich’s most lasting influences--Bach’s views are clearer, better argued, though sometimes with a sense of the reproach one has for one’s heroes after discovering their less attractive sides.

That Dietrich (married by then, her daughter already a little girl) and Von Sternberg (also married) were “an item” was a big issue in its day and the given cause for Von Sternberg’s divorce from another actress. According to her biographers, Marlene was not faithful to any of her lovers, not even to the one with whom she seems most to have been in love, French star Jean Gabin--the only one who wouldn’t forgive her leaving. When Gabin died, shortly after the death of her husband, Dietrich said: “Now I am a widow for a second time.” The man she most wanted to please, however, was Von Sternberg--who seems to have withheld his total approval to the end of his days, as she withheld from him the constancy he perhaps hoped for. But he had to understand--and did in his films with her--her need for freedom at all times.

Certainly she always dressed as she liked, was in fact the most famous cross-dresser of all time: white tie, top hat and tails and apparently see-through dresses were in equal evidence at her legendary concerts. And this in-person aspect of Dietrich is perhaps the most amazing--though, sadly, the least available to experience: Only one (barely adequate) TV special and a few live LPs/CDs testify to those electrifying theater experiences.

I saw this myself once--in Denver, in 1972, only two or three years before a couple of bad falls put her physically out of commission--and the memory is haunting: a woman of 71, looking 35, sexy in all ways, and witty about it, maternal, cool, fragile, dominating, stoical, intimate, inspiring. She brought all this personally to more than 500,000 men of the armed forces for more than three years, performing on various fronts of the Second World War more than any other star ever did. For this, she won the Medal of Freedom--America’s highest civilian honor--as well as France’s most valued Legion d’Honneur--and won, most important to her, the heart of every soldier who saw her.

Probably the most moving chapter in Bach’s “Marlene Dietrich” deals with those war years, those terrible days of death and gallantry she witnessed at closer quarters than many of the military brass.

In her stage performance, this was all brought back in a touching introduction she would do for “Lili Marlene,” the old German song forbidden under Hitler. U.S. troops used to play it on loudspeakers at night across the front lines to the Germans. Hearing Marlene talk of the war on stage called to mind what Ernest Hemingway--a lifetime pal of hers but never a lover; she called him “Papa,” as many did, but only he called her “the Kraut”--had written in “A Farewell to Arms”: “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names.” And that’s what Dietrich conveyed as she would say: “. . . Africa, Sicily, Italy, Greenland, Iceland, France, Belgium and Holland--Germany--Czechoslovakia . . .” Her every inflection carried a different untold story of what she’d seen, what the soldiers had seen. Of course it was there in the way she sang “Lili Marlene,” and suddenly you understood something else Hemingway had written about her (for Life magazine) and knew all the boys understood it too: “If she had nothing more than her voice she could break your heart with it. But she has that beautiful body and that timeless loveliness of her face. It makes no difference how she breaks your heart if she is there to mend it.”

After that show in Denver, I remember Dietrich in her dingy dressing room, sipping Champagne, picking up the only photo on her makeup table--a framed picture of Hemingway, glass cracked, an inscription on it reading, “For my favorite Kraut”--and saying, “Come on, Papa, time to pack up again, huh? OK, here we go.” She kissed it, then proudly showed off a pair of ballet slippers she’d been given by the Bolshoi, with a Russian sentiment carved on one sole. She gingerly picked up a stuffed black doll: “Remember this--from ‘The Blue Angel?’ ” There was also a plastic bag of Scottish heather--for good luck: “If you carry this with you,” she said, “it means you will come back.”

Perhaps Marlene knew that in the Celtic Highlands of Scotland, heather was the sacred plant of the Summer Goddess, the Queen Bee, known in Rome as Venus Erycina (love-goddess of heather), in ancient Greece as Urania, meaning Queen Heather or Queen of the Winds. And like the winds, Marlene is forever: She will always come back.

With these two book-length appearances--one synthetic, one real, plus an amiable picture-book recently published (“Dietrich: Style and Substance,” see review on Page 6), her daughter Maria Riva’s memoir promised early next year and at least one TV movie about her in the works--Marlene Dietrich has already begun her latest comeback, that stuff of which all the truest show-biz myths and legends are made.