How Flash Gordon made James Stewart fall for Marlene Dietrich: “She knew all kinds of tricks”
In 1939, one of Hollywood’s most alluring sex symbols, Marlene Dietrich, supposedly seduced James Stewart in one of the kookiest ways imaginable: by weaponising his love of comic strip hero Flash Gordon.
Geek culture has ruled the roost in Hollywood for at least the last two decades, with more comic book, video game, and fantasy novel adaptations being made than anyone could shake a toy lightsaber at. This has been a fate worse than death for many stars who couldn’t care less about superheroes, button-mashing, or whatever the hell a Hufflepuff or Wookie is, but for the stars who grew up loving nerdy pursuits, it’s been a godsend.
Icons like Samuel L Jackson and Nicolas Cage love comics, for example, while Vin Diesel is a Dungeons & Dragons geek, and Henry Cavill is a die-hard Warhammer fan. On top of that, Rosario Dawson adores Star Trek so much that she can speak fluent Klingon, and Margot Robbie once described herself as a “massive Harry Potter nerd.” Fittingly, these stars have all embraced the modern geek dominance by starring in as many geek-friendly projects as possible.
Hollywood wasn’t just infiltrated by nerds in the 2000s, though. Instead, a nascent version of geek culture can be traced all the way back to It’s a Wonderful Life star Stewart, who was reportedly a voracious reader of Flash Gordon, Alex Raymond’s classic newspaper comic strip about a handsome, blonde-haired space adventurer.
The strip, which was effectively Buck Rogers meets John Carter of Mars with the serial numbers filed off, was first published only five years before Stewart starred in Destry Rides Again alongside Dietrich, and it would soon become a weirdly integral player in their salacious behind-closed-doors affair.
According to co-star Burgess Meredith (who later became his own geek idol when he played The Penguin in the campy Batman ‘60s TV series), “Dietrich wanted Jim as soon as she saw him.” The sultry, exotic star of The Devil Is a Woman was no stranger to male attention in Hollywood, with Meredith telling Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend author Michael Munn, “Men couldn’t resist Marlene. She knew all kinds of tricks. So, once she seduced a man, he was hers until she got bored with him.”
Of course, it takes two to tango, and Stewart was only too happy to welcome Dietrich’s advances. According to Hollywood lore, they engaged in a steamy affair while working on the film, and he all but confirmed this 10 years later when he admitted, “That was such a long time ago, in another lifetime. But yeah, we had some fun together. Nothing too serious, just horsing around.”
There are differing schools of thought on how serious their tryst became, from the very serious (a rumoured pregnancy and abortion) to the farcical (director George Marshall once claimed Stewart became “visibly” excited while shooting a love scene, if you catch my drift). Meredith’s take on the situation, though, was that Dietrich “knew how to play to a guy’s weakness”, and with Stewart, that was apparently his fondness for comic strip derring-do.
“One day Jim was in his dressing room and she locked him in and told him she was coming back with a surprise,” Meredith claimed. “She had found out that Jim loved reading comic books, and he liked Flash Gordon.”
This morsel of information supposedly gave Dietrich the idea to rubber-stamp her seduction with “a life-size doll” of Gordon, in his classic red costume, made by “the props department.” When she finally decided it was time for Stewart to be allowed out of the dressing room, he was confronted with this life-size version of his comic strip hero staring back at him from the doorway; apparently, Dietrich’s way of saying, “he was hers.” It was unorthodox, to say the least, but they do say there’s more than one way to a man’s heart…
