Toxic sexuality part 2
Picking up, right where I left two weeks ago!
What was definitely really cross bordering is Marlene carrying her used up panties in her purse and rubbing them into her daughter´s husbands nose bragging “Smell that! It’s the president.”John F. Kennedy was amongst Marlene´s many slampieces. I wrote about it before that Marlene was the original Marylin. And yeah, in general if you ever felt like your parents crossed a line with your partner or kids, do yourself a favor and read Maria Riva´s book about her famous mum! Amongst many other cringeworthy moments, Maria Riva describes is the way Marlene hugged her husband and sons, which she calls “the standing in body press”[1] which is descriptive enough so I do not need to describe it right because d´uh awkward. In Marlene´s defense I doubt she recognized how creepy that was and that her sexualized behavior towards men largely ran on autopilot and she did not know how to separate her on- and off-screen persona.
Marlene also told her daughter “Get over it, you survived or not?” when little Maria confided that she was molested by her babysitter. I am wondering if that is partly due to the fact that sexual misconduct is seen as a male crime. Up until very recently, I was guilty of this myself. I did not know that women do that. And it very much seems that I am not alone. Talking about blonde bombshells, Pamela Anderson recently admitted in an interview that she too was a victim of sexual abuse by her female babysitter which went on for about 3-4 years. Mind you, Pam has talked a lot of shit about the Me too movement, but don´t be fooled by Marlene´s status as a feminist icon. She said plenty of problematic things herself. On a sidenote, Marlene did not think of her as a woman or probably even human. Marlene perceived herself as what Nietzsche would call an Übermensch. But let´s have a quick detour over Pam Anderson, because I gotta process this mess of a “I love Pamela-Netflix documentary.
Pamela was born in 1967 and she says her mum was 17 or 19 when she had Pam, so she was from around 1950, so about a generation older than Maria Siva. Pam was also raped by a 25-year-old man when she was 13. When she saw the man lining up at a bank, she told her mother with whom she was queueing as well “Look, mom, that´s the guy that raped me” and was subsequently shushed down by her mother with a “Don´t say anything, don´t embarrass me”. That must have been around 1980 and this story has been repeated a gazillion times. People simply do not believe what they do not want to see, or they are simply to ignorant to get it at all.
I know a bunch of y´all are clutching your pearls right now and act all shocked that I dare to compare the offspring of the epitome of class to the epitome of trash but bear with me, I d actually wanted to compare Marlene to Pamela not her daughter. Marlene might have had an ounce more talent but I’d also like to invite you see Marlene as a celebrity pioneer. Their differences are mainly that Pam Anderson is white trash and Marlene´s bougy ass got an expensive education, but here we are again at the nature vs nurture debate. There were many favorable coincidences in Marlene´s life that helped boost if not jumpstart her career, starting with the fact that ever since she was a young girl she had daily private French and English lesson that would later be one of the reasons why she landed the major female role in the blue angel. (Dubbing was not yet widespread and they were looking for actresses who could speak both English and French in order to export the blue angel to both France and America) Marlene was interested in literature, spoke 2 foreign languages and worked with the cinema elite (Ernst Lubitsch, Joseph von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock) and I doubt Pam speaks anything besides English and Valley girl, but both were really good at being a celebrity. Unlike Garbo who led a very private off-screen life, Marlene did not. I am pretty sure Marlene would have loved social media. And if we are to believe what Leni Riefenstahl wrote about Marlene (hint: it involved crotch-flashing and I read it from another source as well) Marlene would have done camgirl-hustles on the side for sure. While she sought out the company of writers and intellectuals such as Ernest Hemingway or Erich Maria Remarque, Marlene herself was not. I am neither saying that Camgirls can´t be intellectuals nor am I saying that Marlene was stupid. Different to what people might think though,she was a lot more street smart than book-smart and she had more common in Pamela apart from thinly plucked eyebrows.
Nico: You are beautiful and you are alone
Nico on the other side would have been a terrible celebrity. She could never get used to men staring at her, which was ultimately her downfall. You could make a strong case arguing that Nico´s entire life was about finding someone who would see the real Nico, the girl underneath her supermodel looks. And unfortunately, that never happened. In her early days men wanted to sleep with Nico because she was stunning, but no one showed a genuine interest in her persona. The big issue was that Nico did not know herself who she was, she needed a long time to find herself, her thing, her talent. And unfortunately, by the time she produced very unique music, wrote texts and learned how to play instruments her disease had progressed and by disease, I mean addiction. For Marlene on the other side, getting looks was like oxygen to her.
Beauty
That leads us to their relationship to beauty. In several documentaries, articles and books I have read and heard that Nico at her prettiest was probably the unhappiest and the happiest when she became overweight and dyed her hair black while Marlene would never allow herself to gain weight and most definitely would she never dyed her hair back. Just like the majority of the world population, Marlene put a premium on Aryan features such as blond hair and blue eyes. Her favorite grandchild was Michael since he had inherited her “elegant, thin bones” and light eyes (Yes direct quote, and yes Marlene can also be accused of bonafide fatphobia while Nico´s chubby self comfortably gave interviews in her later years) so she basically considered him her own. She also complained about her grandson Italian heritage and dark features because those darkies would always be dominant when it comes to inheriting their suboptimal features. And yes, we´ll discuss racism right after this section, consider yourself trigger-alerted. This is not to say that Nico was not vain. Nico got out of poverty because of her beauty when she was discovered as a model at Kaufhaus des Westens. Witts describes an incident in his biography that the Velvet Underground got into quite a lot of problems when she did not take her passport to Canada and had to hide in the bus toilet out of fear that the others would find out that she had already reached the dinosaur old age of 28. Because if you have not evaporated into prehistoric dust by the time you are 30, you are obviously a marvel of humanity. But James Young who played keyboard in her band for many years recounts in this stunning documentary how in her later years when her skin was bad, her hair gray and her teeth rotten and her arms marked by needle tracks, she embraced it as an aesthetic that went along with her very own creation of gothic rock.
Marlene managed to fall into complete delusion when it came to her age and was hell-bent on getting pregnant in her 50s with Jean Gabin´s child and wondered why it did not work. When her obgyn recommended to go on hormones as her estrogen was tanking, she was baffled and said that if those hormones were this good her daughter (who was in her thirties then) should be getting on them too. She was completely clueless about the fact that she was not exactly fertile Felicia anymore. This was way before IVF became commonplace and the likes of Naomi Campbell, Janet Jackson or Gianna Nannini comfortably birthed out their firstborn into their 50s.*
Marlene´s sexuality was in your face-there while Nico Icon´s was mystical and non-committal. So, in terms of toxic sexuality Marlene wins this round big time.
Racism
Well just because Marlene took a strong anti-Nazi stance did not mean she was not racist (“How can I be racist if I am friends with Nat King Cole?” is what she would say to that, haha) . She had strong opinions about Black people being nurses “These people should not be nurses”. Marlene also talked really bad about Josephine Baker, although there was probably no female apart from her daughter that she did not trash-talk.
And in the same sense we can say that just because she had lots of Jewish friends did not mean she was not antisemitic. As already stated, she loved to be surrounded by artists, writers and intellectuals a group of people that naturally contains Jews to a large percentage. Despite being somewhat enamored with Aryan features she was smart and saw that an “Aryan elite” in the arts would not bring anything to the table except for an insipid soup of vapid movies. But it did not deter her from commenting on Israel with a shrewd “All the Jews that didn´t make it in Hollywood are there. What do you think you are going to get done there?”. It also did not keep her from wisecracking “I gave up my country for them and what are they doing for me??” when shops were closed on Yom Kippur. Truth be told I find these comments hilarious. I find that Marlene has a really good humour, something that Nico completly lacked, but I am not only Jewish (unless ethnically counts than I am very likely sephardic but lets not get into my 23andmeresults now)
One more score on the commonalities, Nico said antisemitic things and openly disliked Black people. Nico stated that she was raped by a black US sergeant. And now I am getting on thin ice, so let me straight up say this: I do not know. I have not been there. Rape is awful and so is racism. Being a white girl and being raped by a Black man should not be an excuse to say racist remarks or even commit hate crimes but we all know that human beings are a bit more complex than a sociology children’s book. Nico says she was raped by said sergeant and took him to court where he was hanged but the problem is that there is nothing to back it up. “The United States Army archives hold no record of this case. The Military Staff Judge Advocate´s office knows nothing of it. Berlin´s daily newspaper did not report it, though by 1952 such a case would have been newsworthy.”[2]
Nico mentioned this incident whenever she was accused of racism. She apparently also occasionally mentioned that “Negroes are not like us”[3]. It already does not look for Nico, but Witt does not even mention the worst racist thing Christa Päffgen has done, and now yes, we have moved from saying to doing.
“In a New York restaurant in 1971 she cut open the face of the young Black Panther singer-activist Emmaretta Marks, after Marks had complained to an adjacent table of racial inequalities. “Suffering!” Nico reportedly yelled at her. “You don’t know what suffering is!” Marks needed 20 stitches but pressed no charges. No eyewitness agrees on what actually happened but Bickerdike exonerates Nico from charges of racism and attributes the violence to an eruption of long pent-up childhood anxieties. “In Nico’s mind, almost any kind of suffering would have paled by comparison to what she saw and experienced during her early years in Nazi Germany.” Nico’s insecurity was the catalyst for the altercation, then, not the colour of Marks’s skin. (Some may choose to disagree.)”[3]
Note that I am working a lot with quotes in this section and not much with my own words. This is due to the fact that it’s hard to not define a person by what might have been the lowest point in their life but as much as I am trying to stay neutral here, it is pretty obvious that Nico icon was a very racist woman and wins the racism category big time. Marlene was too powerful, too good with words to get physical. She did box though and maybe that was her physical outlet. If that surprises you, I can tell you that a few of those Berlin birds-clichées are very old. Berlin-boss babes have been boxing since the 20s. Leni Riefenstahl boxed too. Boxing was glamourous back then. Remember Million dollar baby? Remember that it was a Berlin chick who got Hilary Swank´s character into the hospital. You know what else BBB´s are known for, starting out with Marlene? Deep voices. That is what Berlin has been known for. Zarah Leander, Hildegard Knef and of course Nico Icon. When Romy Haag, the famous transwoman that I keep on namedropping was on her 50th life as a teenage-dancer in Paris, they announced her as “Romy from Berlin” because she had such a deep voice. Ironically that is also where she ended up. And it does not matter that Zarah Leander was Swedish and Romy Dutch, deep women voices were (and are?) apparently a Berlin thang.
Unfortunately, Nico did not have an outlet such as boxing. Nico was later dropped by her record label Island records due to another round of next level fuckery-racist comments.
“I said something that was misinterpreted. I said to some interviewer that I did not like negroes. That´s all. They took it so personally, although it´s a whole different race. I men Bob Marley does not resemble a negro, does he? He´s the archetype of Jamaican, but with the features of white people. I don´t like the features. They´re so much like animals…it´s cannibals no?”[2]
Pheeew. Apart from the fact that there are no typical Jamaican features because they are a mix of African slaves (mostly from Ghana I was told by a Ghanaian friend who studied anthropology and spent long stretches of time in Jamaica doing ethnological field work and researching a tribe that had fled British slaveholders and their language showed strong elements of a language spoken in Ghana) Jamaican natives, Whites and Chinese. Naomi Campbell is part Chinese! Obviously, Nico did not receive much of an education. But trust me I know plenty of “educated” people who mouth fart these kinds of things. Despite carrying around Nietzsche with her during her modeling days in Paris, most of her friends said she never read it just carried it along. Jim Morrison made her read Romantic poets such as Blake and Sylvia Plath which evoked pretty hilarious interview moments where she said thing like “There is a German poet I like who wrote a poem about me called `lazy lady` or something.” She did mean Sylvia Plath and Lady Lazarus but well even the bell jar is quite a short novel so yeah not much there. Once again, education and intelligence are more than the writers you read and Nico learned how to write songs and all so she was not stupid but I am feeling a bit of a Kruger Dunning effect once we leave her comfort zone of America and Europe.
Anyway, let´s call this a wrap for today and I ll be back next week with more toxic talk and gory gossip!
Yours truly
Kyria A. Sobrinho.
*Gianna Nannini claims her baby was an accident that occurred in her 50s. I am agnostic on the topic, might be true, might not be, but note that IVF is slowly being detaboo`d in the recent years so maybe she just did not feel like spilling the tea to the press.
[1]Riva, Maria (2017) Marlene Dietrich: The life, Pegasus Books , New York, London Kindle edition; p.563
[2] Witts, Richard. Nico (1993) The Life and Lies of an Icon. Penguin Random house. Kindle edition 2017; p. 300