After the show, still onstage, she saw that all the musicians and technicians got a drink, and thanked each one personally. She was particularly effusive about the local soundman. A short, middle-aged fellow, he came up shyly to say good-bye, and she embraced and kissed him lovingly, not the way I would guess it is usually done in Colorado, or anywhere. The guy looked bewildered, thrilled, overwhelmed all at once; speechless as Marlene Dietrich hugged him to her and told him it was the best sound she had ever had on the road. He wandered away with glazed eyes and a foolish grin, the happiest man in Denver.
In the dingy dressing room, her helpers were packing up. “Closing night is my favorite,” she said, “because I can call and cancel the insurance.” She sipped champagne, then picked up the only photo on her makeup table—a framed picture of Hemingway, the glass cracked, an inscription on it that read, “For my favorite Kraut.” She spoke to the photo. “Come on, Papa,” she said, “time to pack up again, huh? OK, here we go.” And she kissed it. Hemingway had been a lifelong friend but never a lover. Proudly, she showed off a pair of ballet slippers she had been given by the Bolshoi troupe, a sentiment in Russian carved on one sole; and a stuffed black doll she picked up gingerly. “Remember this—from The Blue Angel?”
We all ate at Trader Vic’s and she told stories and unwound from the show. She called Ryan her “blond dream-friend” and said she would have to look at Love Story now. The next morning she came downstairs to see us off, stood at the hotel entrance in her slacks and shirt and cap watching us pull away.
She gave me an envelope as we left. In it were two pieces of hotel stationery —on one she had written out a quote from Goethe: “Ach Du warst in löngst vergangenen Zeiten meine Schwester oder meine Frau.” On the other, her own “literal” translation: “Oh, you were in long passed times my sister or my woman.” You too, dear Marlene, for all of us.
Marlene Dietrich and Cary Grant (in his fifth movie role) in von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus (1932), in which she plays a loving wife (to Herbert Marshall) and mother (to Dickie Moore), and becomes a nightclub star to support her family. Grant said he saw what the director and star “were up to” and “wasn’t going to get mixed up in that.”
We saw each other only one more time. For the first public screening of Paper Moon in New York, she had accompanied Cybill Shepherd and me. Of course, she knew that Cybill and I were living together and I had told her there would be three of us, but I guess the actual experience did not thrill her. We had picked Marlene up at her apartment house in a limousine and she spent the entire brief ride sitting in the middle, her back completely turned to Cybill, talking only to me. Naturally, it created quite a stir when I walked into the screening room with Cybill on one arm and Marlene Dietrich on the other. But Marlene had not only been icy to Cybill, she had been a bit snippy, too, and after the screening told me that “an old friend” (veteran Vogue editor Leo Lerman) would escort her home. The next day, a gigantic bunch of flowers arrived at our Waldorf Towers suite addressed to Cybill. The floral arrangement was so tall and large that it took two bellmen to bring it in, sideways. Inside the envelope marked “To Cybill Shepherd” was a note card which read simply, “Love, Marlene.” As it turned out, neither Cybill nor I ever saw her again.
We spoke on the phone, however, and one time she told me she didn’t know why, but she loved me. I was so thrown that I said something stupid about being “flattered.” She hated that and threw it right back in my face: “Don’t say you’re flattered!” During this period, she did her one television special—for producer Alexander Cohen, whom she hated. She complained bitterly about his cheapness and bad taste, and thought the show was dreadful. She wasn’t wrong; it certainly did not do her justice or come close to approximating the amazing concert I had seen. A couple of years later, she had her disastrous fall. She had just finished a live performance somewhere and, as usual, went to shake her conductor’s hand. He had lost his balance and inadvertently pulled her into the pit. Her legs were terribly hurt, and the wound never healed. She thought it would be all right eventually and didn’t immediately have the proper attention or care. Things got worse. Eventually, she holed up in her Paris apartment and never went out again.
I spoke to her a few times while the trauma of her leg injuries was going on, but we lost touch at the end of the seventies. In 1980, my life was shattered by personal tragedy, and about a year later, Marlene’s Hollywood agent, Paul Kohner, had called to say that Marlene had personally requested me to direct a documentary about her life and career. Her first choice had been Billy Wilder but he had politely declined. I was her second choice. Again, I said I was flattered, but told Kohner that I was not in any shape to take this on, that I simply couldn’t accept such a difficult and important responsibility. This was the last connection I ever had with Marlene. Though I wrote to her a couple of times and did a TV tribute to her on CBS’s morning show in the late eighties, a tape of which I sent to her, she never responded. The documentary Marlene was finally done by Maximilian Schell and Dietrich was quite vocal about hating it.
Almost immediately after she died in 1992, two biographies were published—the one by Stephen Bach being exceptionally good (I reviewed it very favorably for the Los Angeles Times)—but both were overshadowed by her daughter Maria Riva’s voluminous memoir. Orson Welles, who had been rather ambivalent about Marlene—affectionate at times, quite cutting at others—told me long before his own death in 1985 that Marlene’s daughter “hated her” and was “just waiting for Marlene to die” so she could publish a devastating portrait. Dietrich died seven years after Orson—ironically, on Welles’ birthday—and his prediction turned out to be quite accurate. Clearly, being Dietrich’s daughter was a tough life. Nevertheless, what the artist in Marlene left behind was haunting and unique, and personally I prefer to recall that part of her legacy together with the brief good times and conversations we had together. Being Marlene Dietrich couldn’t have been very easy, either.
Dietrich, in a black wig, as Tanya the Gypsy in Orson Welles’ originally dismissed (in the United States), now widely treasured crime thriller, Touch of Evil (1958); in this scene, she reads co-star Welles’ cards and tells him his future is “all used up.” Welles’ first studio picture in ten years, it was also to be his last. Dietrich especially liked herself in the role.
Years later, I would remember that Marlene always carried with her—“for good luck,” she had said—a little plastic bag of Scottish heather, which she had shown me in Denver. “If you carry this with you,” she told me in her cramped little dressing room more than thirty years ago, “it means you will come back.” Perhaps Dietrich knew (as I certainly didn’t then) that in the Celtic Scottish Highlands, heather was the sacred plant of the Queen Bee, the Summer Goddess, known in Rome as Venus Erycina, “Love goddess of heather,” and in ancient Greece as Urania, meaning Queen Heather or “Heavenly One” or “Earthly One” or “Queen of the Winds.” This same deity’s original symbol was the Sphinx, as both Dietrich and her only rival, Greta Garbo, were sometimes pictured during their careers. Of course, like the Sphinx, Dietrich’s own riddle would always be tantalizing and probably unsolvable. But, like the winds, Marlene would be forever; she would always come back.
Born Maria Magdalene Dietrich, December 27, 1901, Schöneberg; died May 6, 1992, Paris.
Selected starring features (with director):
1929: Ich küsse ihre Hand, Madame/I Kiss Your Hand, Madame (Curtis Bernhardt); Die Frau nach der man sich sehnt/Three Loves (Bernhardt)
1930: Der Blaue Engel/The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg); Morocco (Sternberg)
1931: Dishonored (Sternberg)
1932: Shanghai Express (Sternberg); Blonde Venus (Sternberg)
1934: The Scarlet Empress (Sternberg)
1935: The Devil Is a Woman (Sternberg)
1936: Desire (Frank Borzage)
1937: Angel (Ernst Lubitsch)
1939: Destry Rides Again (George Marshall)
1940: Seven Sinn
ers (Tay Garnett)
1941: Manpower (Raoul Walsh); The Flame of New Orleans (René Clair)
1948: A Foreign Affair (Billy Wilder)
1950: Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock)
1951: No Highway in the Sky (Harry Koster)
1952: Rancho Notorious (Fritz Lang)
1957: Witness for the Prosecution (Wilder)
1958: Touch of Evil (Orson Welles)
1961: Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer)
19
ANTHONY PERKINS
The first time I saw Anthony Perkins was on the Broadway stage in 1953. I went alone to a Saturday matinee of Tea and Sympathy, a successful new play by Robert Anderson, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Deborah Kerr and John Kerr. However, for this particular performance John Kerr’s role was taken over—said a little note slipped into every Playbill—by an understudy named Anthony Perkins. The coming-of-age drama was about a confused, sensitive teenager who is helped to find himself, as well as initiated finally into the mysteries of sex, by his school headmaster’s wife, and Perkins was absolutely riveting, extremely touching. He reminded me of a very young, slightly more neurotic Jimmy Stewart, and had amazing intensity, skill and charm. If this was the understudy for the highly-praised portrayal by John Kerr, how good must Kerr have been? I found out when I saw the Vincente Minnelli movie version (1956) starring the leads from the original stage cast: John Kerr wasn’t nearly as good as Anthony Perkins had been—not by a long shot. Of course, Kerr never became a major actor, either, eventually drifting out of show business and ending up as a lawyer, while Tony Perkins became a star, in the theater and in pictures.
It was my good fortune to see him at his brilliant best twice more on Broadway: later in the fifties, as the surrogate character (Eugene Gant) for writer Thomas Wolfe in Ketti Frings’ popular adaptation of Wolfe’s autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel; it was a beautiful, poetic, natural, yet towering performance. In the seventies, when we already knew each other, I saw him do the complicated lead role of the psychiatrist in Equus, and felt that he made the character and play more believable than anyone else could ever play it. In the sixties, I became friendly with two directors who loved working with Perkins: one who generally loved actors, Orson Welles, on The Trial (1962); and one who said he often didn’t, AAlfred Hitchcock, on Psycho (1960). When I finally met Perkins around 1972, I found him awfully likeable, really a terrific guy, with such a great sense of humor that to work with him must have been a joy.
Anthony Perkins in his first movie role, playing Jean Simmons’ boyfriend in George Cukor’s amusing, sensitive and touching small-town film The Actress (1953), based on Ruth Gordon’s autobiographical play Years Ago, and starring Spencer Tracy and Teresa Wright as her parents.
The first director ever to cast Tony in a movie was George Cukor in The Actress (1953), shot right before I saw him in Tea and Sympathy. (Cukor certainly had an eye; just four others among the many he started in pictures: Katharine Hepburn, Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, Angela Lansbury.) The Actress is a beautiful small-town period film based on actress-writer Ruth Gordon’s teenage years dreaming of being what she did in fact become: a Broadway star (plus a great screen-and memoir-writer). The lovely and touching Jean Simmons played Ruth, with Spencer Tracy and Teresa Wright as her parents, and Anthony Perkins in a small role as her first boyfriend. He was gangly, slightly awkward, and immediately appealing. The picture was a modest one the studio did little to promote; essentially, it was an art film before its time. I didn’t see the movie until a decade after its release—long after Perkins had become a star—indeed, he had already peaked with Psycho.
In 1953, however, with the studio system starting to have problems, Tony went back to New York to work in live television and on Broadway until his next film appearance three years later in William Wyler’s extremely popular Civil War family drama Friendly Persuasion (1956), starring Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire as Perkins’ Quaker parents. Playing their sensitive and troubled teenager fraught with conflicting emotions about the war, Tony was superb in that role, nearly stealing the picture from Cooper, and receiving the one Oscar nomination of his life, as Best Supporting Actor. This set him up to play the psychotic baseball star Jim Piersall, in a low-budget biopic based on Piersall’s autobiography, Fear Strikes Out (1957). In my movie-card file for the picture, which I saw when it came out, the first thing I noted was “Tony Perkins’ exceptionally fine performance,” and ended with the effusive paragraph: “It is a very powerful document with a splendid performance by Mr. Perkins.” The picture, sensitively directed by Robert Mulligan, was a critical, if not a commercial, success.
After that, though, Perkins never stopped working, and through the remainder of the fifties I saw most of his pictures when they came out, but none of them hit the mark, despite Perkins’ being never less than excellent in them. Yet, except for Anthony Mann’s little Western The Tin Star (1957) with the still indestructible Henry Fonda, and René Clément’s re-cut and truncated This Angry Age (1958)—and just the fact of co-starring with Audrey Hepburn in Green Mansions (1959), weak though it was—none of his other fifties pictures really worked. Unfortunately, Anthony Perkins had started to become established just as the original studio system was falling apart; it was essentially over by 1962. Thus Perkins signed no long-term contracts, and the notion of guiding star-actors into their particular niche and mining it soon vanished completely. If he had become a star Before 1950, his own special American characteristics would have been exploited and turned to far better advantage.
As Eugene Gant in the 1957 Broadway stage production of Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical first novel, Look Homeward, Angel, adapted by Ketti Frings, with Jo Van Fleet as his mother. Perkins’ performance was magnetic and had great size.
Ironically, it took Alfred Hitchcock to synthesize Perkins’ qualities in Psycho—and turn them to striking dramaturgical effect—as directors and screenwriters had always done with star personalities in movies, of course, for the previous fifty years. Tony’s essential persona of troubled, sensitive and neurotic young all-American boy (which was not unlike Tony himself, but largely without his humor) had been firmly established in Perkins’ first two sizeable movie roles. So Hitchcock took advantage of that and completely threw initial audiences for a loop. Not Tony Perkins! It couldn’t be! The shock of his turning out to be the killer in Psycho nearly equaled the shock of star Janet Leigh getting murdered a third of the way through the picture. The double irony, however, was that the film was both Anthony Perkins’ making and breaking. Suddenly, he became in many ways so identified with the character of Norman Bates that people had trouble seeing him any other way.
Yet Perkins was in the Brando tradition of the fifties, not wanting to be typed; otherwise he might have stayed in Hollywood and done horror pictures for a while. Instead he went to Europe and attracted challenging work on both continents throughout the rest of his career. Overseas, he seemed to be more respected than in his own country. Tony was something of an actor’s actor; other players could see how brilliant he was, but it was completely organic to him, without any grandstanding, and therefore largely invisible: the best kind of acting, but too effortless for prizes. He was awfully smart, too, and, as Robert Mitchum used to say, he “brought a lot to the party.”
One time, I was discussing Perkins with Hitchcock and repeated to the director what Tony had told me about his bringing in the bag of candy corn to eat during the memorable scene with private detective Martin Balsam, and said that Hitchcock, as always, had encouraged him. “Yes,” Hitchcock responded, “and Balsam, too. I said, ‘Fellows, you both do a lot together in this scene. Now, why don’t you both go in a corner and have a go.’ After all, there are limits. You can’t direct good actors in a scene that should come naturally—hesitancies and so on. No, people like Tony and Balsam are intelligent men and you leave them to it.” Which translates to mean that the totally real, seemingly spontaneous, absolutely perfect interaction between the two a
ctors came out of those rehearsals together and that Hitchcock just shot it—from all the correct angles.
Orson Welles cast Perkins as the perfect guilt-ridden Joseph K. (giving the character thereby an American spin) in his version of Franz Kafka’s nightmare novel, The Trial, photographed entirely in Europe. It was never my favorite Welles picture, but I eventually came around to the work when Orson made me understand that a lot of the film was meant to be very black comedy; and then I saw it with him in Paris and he kept laughing at moments which made his intention clear. “Tony and I,” Welles would recall, “spent a good deal of the time convulsed with laughter! What a treat he was to have on a picture.”
Perkins used to say of Welles that there wasn’t anyone better in the world to be directed by or to hang around with. (We had that in common, because I’d been directed by Welles and hung around with him, and I agreed.) Tony felt the greatest pride of his career that he had played the lead in an Orson Welles picture. (Again, I felt similarly, mine being the still unreleased The Other Side of the Wind.) We used to talk about Welles, exchanging stories about him, experiences with him. I was with them together once in the early eighties, Perkins’ abject admiration of Welles being obvious. And Orson treated him with undeniable affection and a considerable sense of intimacy and trust. Tony and I could barely exchange hellos and we were then separated by the party—a gallery opening of sculpture by Oja Kodar, Welles’ constant companion since The Trial, so, of course, she and Perkins were friendly. As it turned out, that was also the last time I actually saw Tony or Berry Berenson Perkins, who had been his wife by then for about a decade.
Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates with Martin Balsam as Detective Arbogast in the ambiguously suspenseful interrogation scene for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). The director said the two actors worked out all their complicated moments together while rehearsing by themselves.
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