There is a certain kind of star who gets reduced to her surface. The cheekbones. The husky voice. The cabaret sequins under a single spotlight. Marlene Dietrich was that kind of star, and for most of us, that is where the story stops.
It should not.
Dietrich was born and raised in Germany. When the Nazi party rose to power and came calling with lucrative film contracts, she said no. She renounced her German citizenship. She and Billy Wilder set up a relief fund and put her own salary into escrow to help Jews and dissidents get out of the country. She went on to perform for Allied troops on the front lines more than five hundred times, close enough to the fighting that she came home with frostbite.
The woman the world saw as glamorous and a little dangerous in "The Blue Angel," in "Morocco," in smoky rooms singing "Lili Marlene," was quietly doing something far more dangerous than anything on screen. The sexiness was real. It was also the least interesting thing about her.
That contrast is the whole lesson.
We are trained, as consumers and as people, to respond to the surface. The allure, the packaging, the accent, the label. Product marketing depends on exactly this instinct. Bold colors on a shelf, a familiar phrase like "Made in the USA," a face we trust, are all designed to catch the eye before the brain has a chance to ask a single question.
But the label is only the introduction. Dietrich was made, born, and raised in a country whose values she came to find monstrous, and she spent the rest of her career and her fortune working against it. Origin told you almost nothing true about her character. The same is often true on a store shelf. A product's country of origin, its packaging, its slogan, tells you what the manufacturer wants you to feel in the three seconds before you reach for it. It rarely tells you what the company actually does, who it funds, what it puts in the bottle, or what it stands for once the transaction is over.
Here is the real question worth asking, about people and about products: what is underneath?
Sometimes what you find underneath is wonderful, a company quietly funding causes you believe in, ingredients that are exactly what they claim to be, a supply chain you would be proud to support. Sometimes what you find is the opposite, and you never buy that product again. Either way, you only find out if you are willing to look past the introduction.
Every star in a spotlight, every product in a planogram, is placed exactly where it is to be picked up quickly and without too many questions.
Years later, Dietrich took an anti-war lament, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone", and sang it in German on a tour of Israel. She was the first performer to use the German language publicly there since the war, and she was welcomed. From the woman the Nazis had wanted as their symbol, that was its own quiet revolution.
Given her worldwide fame, the financial and cultural value of her star persona, and her many fellow native countrymen who simply allowed horrible acts to occur, she could have cared but stayed focused on the curated "character" of Marlene Dietrich. Instead what we got was to see exactly her actual, unique character as a human being focused on the right things and making a difference in the world; one in which she couldn't tolerate evil.
When it was over, the country she chose gave her its Medal of Freedom. She said it meant more to her than any film she ever made.
The real truth is in the higher story.
Have you ever been won over by a product or a persona that looked like one thing on the surface, and turned out to be something else underneath?
The Higher Story is a series about looking past the surface to the truth underneath: how that shapes the way we see the world, meet our challenges, and, in marketing and communications, do work that lands with more honesty and impact.
Originally published on LinkedIn.