The Heavens Over Berlin...

...were once full of stars. Some were born there, some passed through; some lingered long, some burned out young or moved too close to black holes artistic or political. You still feel them, at times, in the streets here, in the makeup of old women and the attitudes of young girls...

Pola, once a serious artist before becoming a Hollywood vamp...

Louise, who arrived something of a Hollywood lightweight and left, although she didn't know it for two decades, a sublime artist - and a has-been...

Miss Dietrich, of whom no more need be said than that she did quite all right for herself...

Anna May, who was here a bigger star than ever she managed to be again...

And the ineffable Lil Dagover, for a while the biggest lady of all of these...

Not to mention the problematic Fraulein Riefenstahl, long-lived - but not enough to live it down...

A trouble shared, to some extent, by the far less villainous (and infinitely more camp) Miss Zarah Leander.

I think I saw at least three of them at yesterday's parade...

Three Smart Girls

Some images perfectly capture the moment they were taken; this is one. Eisenstadt snapped these three at a party in Berlin in 1929, when the most famous of them was the woman in the middle: Anna May Wong.

On the left, of course is Dietrich, who by that point had been toiling away for the better of a decade without becoming much more than a slightly risqué leading lady on stage and in unimportant films, a bit of a show-off and a climber. On the right is Leni Riefenstahl, at that point a rising star still four years from finding her niche as the Nazis' cinema darling.

Wong, though, at 24 here, had been a star since her mid-teens, with 30 Hollywood pictures and a handful of European hits behind her. She was a star in cabaret as well, singing wry songs like Noël Coward's "Half-Caste Woman" and showing off her perfect figure in clinging lamé gowns. Talkies kind of did her in, though, forcing her back to Los Angeles and the sort of supporting parts open to even the most beautiful Asian woman in the world.

If you want to know how the story turns out, Richard Corliss wrote an excellent multi-part feature a couple of years ago in Time. It's worth a read.

The Eastern Star

Oh, yes, I know - Thombeau beat me to it this week, but I swear, carissimi, I already had my little featurette in the works, only because I chanced on a late night broadcast of Shanghai Express last week and Miss Anna May Wong has been on my mind. In any case, he brought you Anna May en couleur; I bring her to you as she was meant to be, in shimmering silver and sable.

What is it about her? Beyond the simple fact that she apparently never took a bad picture? That she was, in so many ways, the perfect Moderne creation?

Perhaps simply that she was a working actress whose poise, humor, and spectacular good looks, in a fair world, would have made her a top star instead of a luminous curiosity.

Her last appearance was on the The Barbara Stanwyck Show, in 1961. Wouldn't you love to know what they talked about in between shots?