Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich 60-year feud after ‘they were lovers’

On this day in history, Marlene Dietrich became an international sensation. The 1930 film The Blue Angel was not only her breakthrough performance, it was her first ‘talkie’ after starring in 19 silent movies in Germany, and was filmed twice over in German and English. She was rushed to Hollywood by a Paramount Studios desperate to find a rival to MGM’s Greta Garbo, who was already a Hollywood silent movie sensation and would also have spectacular success with the advent of sound. The actresses had both come through the Berlin film industry at the same time yet would insist publicly that they had never met, despite Orson Welles claiming he introduced them at a 1945 party – or recent claims they had shared a torrid affair which had ended very badly. Asked about their rivalry in later years, Garbo simply replied, “Who is this Marlene Dietrich?” The German-born actress, in return, had frequently said far more and far worse.

Garbo famously retired at 35 after 28 films and being the biggest female star in the world. She was the epitome of ice-cool confidence, sophistication and control, always an enigma, who then suddenly distanced herself from Hollywood and disappeared from the public eye.

The Swedish star’s background, however, was an impoverished childhood struggle in the slums of Stockholm, about which she was always self-conscious. She left school at 13, shortly before her labourer father died, leaving the family in even more desperate straits.

Early jobs as a barbershop soap lather girl and department store errand girl were followed by modelling work, which lead to acting work in mid-1920’s Berlin, where Dietrich was already becoming a star.

In the early 1920s Dietrich was the toast of inter-war Berlin, a hotbed of sexual liberation and exploration. Washington Post columnist Diana McLellan wrote: “Marlene was perhaps the busiest and most passionate bisexual in theatrical Berlin… (she had) a notorious and compulsive appetite for the sexual seduction of other beautiful women.”

In her book, The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood, McLellan describes how the two actresses met on the 1925 set of little-known (and lost) film The Joyless Street, despite their later claims they didn’t know each other

At 23 and from a formerly wealthy family, Dietrich was sophisticated, confident, irresistible and rather callous. By contrast, the younger and far more naive Garbo was totally unprepared for what happened between them and its ugly end.

The Swedish actress was just 20, provincial, poor and inexperienced in life and love – and was left shattered and humiliated by the other actress.

Dietrich later denied that she appeared in The Joyless Street but McLellan caused a sensation when she announced she had spotted the star in the remaining archived fragments of the film. She detailed an affair between the two women and devastating subsequent betrayal.

Dietrich was notoriously indiscreet and cavalier with personal details about her affairs. She would often mockingly describe her lovers and their devoted declarations to her husband Rudolph Sieber, who she married in 1923.

Garbo was self-conscious at the time about her lack of means and her lack of refinement in manners and lifestyle. Shy and modest, she was understandably horrified to hear that Dietrich has been publicly mocking her and spilling salacious details, including spreading the word that she wore “dirty underclothes.”

McLellan said: “Garbo felt betrayed by a monster who spoke of her secrets, mocked her roots and sneered at her sex. She was wounded, shamed and traumatised.”

Luckily, her fortunes took a sudden and stratospheric turn when Hollywood studio boss Louis B. Mayer saw her in 1925 and signed her to MGM. For the next 15 years, she was one of the acknowledged queens of the silver screen, with iconic roles in Queen Cristina, Mata Hari, Grand Hotel and Anna Karenina.

Years later, Dietrich reached out to try and apologise but Garbo refused to ever speak to her in private again.

McLellan’s claims that Dietrich appeared in The Joyless Street have subsequently been disputed, with the role attributed another actress, Hertha von Walther, but Garbo and Dietrich’ were both in Berlin at that time and their decades-long divide remains part of Hollywood history.