by Donald Spoto
More and more, she perceived the press as enemies. “You are the dumbest people in America,” she said to a platoon of journalists and critics. “I have never heard such stupid questions.” This was virtually a refrain in the last decade of her tour, but like her audience, journalists were rarely put off by her rudeness. “That horrible woman from the New York Times came to ask me if I like long skirts or short skirts,” she complained to interviewer Rex Reed. “Fashion bores me. Why don’t they ask me about important things, like women’s liberation?” Fine, Reed said; what did she think of women’s liberation? “Nothing. It bores me.” Well, then, what about the upcoming Christmas holidays? “I hate Christmas. It bores me.”
There could be, at times, a nobility to her rudeness. At a Johannesburg restaurant that July of 1964, she suddenly thought of the company chauffeur, left outside alone and hungry while the press dinner was prolonged. Informed that apartheid prevented a black man from entering the place, she cursed loudly, ordered two plates of food and promptly swept out to the car, where she ate her meal with the astonished driver.
Wherever Dietrich toured, photographers without appointments were held in as much contempt as racists. After travelling to Cannes from South Africa, she was disturbed by a flashbulb from the camera of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s personal photographer, who wanted a photo of the performance. Dietrich stopped her show, demanding that the camera be turned over to her and that the offender be forthwith ejected. “So he will give you the film, darling,” Zsa Zsa said to Marlene. “Anyway, he couldn’t sell it for a penny.” On the French Riviera, riots have begun with a less pointed remark.
Even when a photographer represented her host or producer, Dietrich could be downright bellicose if unprepared. Terrified of appearing without every cosmetic artifice that she thought could disguise her age, she interrupted a London lighting rehearsal, reacting to a camera as if it were a cross held up to a vampire: “You with the camera!” she commanded, pointing to a young woman on assignment. “Out! I will not be photographed!” (An identical scene occurred in June 1973, during her appearance at the Espace Cardin in Paris.) More complicated still was her demand that twenty thousand programs for the 1965 Edinburgh Festival be withdrawn from circulation when she disapproved of the printed portrait celebrating her appearance.
By 1975, not only was specially diffused stage lighting employed to correct the appearance of age, she also refused all personal interviews and insisted that a curtained tunnel be erected to shield her from view as she passed from her hotel suite to the elevator, and, on the lower floor, to her dressing room. She may well have longed for von Sternberg’s scrims, fogs and veils to recapture the illusion. “You are all morons!” she shouted at a group of reporters and photographers greeting her in London. “Why don’t you go out and get a proper job?”
Eventually, she categorically refused to meet the press. According to Vivien Byerley, then in the offices of H. M. Tennant (the company that produced her London engagements), this made tasks difficult for management, sponsors and backstage employees, who were variously the object of Dietrich’s wrath if any stranger or spectator somehow managed to wander within the predefined no-man’s-land around her. “It is not,” Byerley said years later, “a chapter in life one wants to remember.”
Producer Alexander H. Cohen felt similarly. After more than a year of thorny negotiations that took him to meetings with her on three continents, Cohen finally saw Dietrich’s signature on a contract that would bring her to New York, a city whose theatrical rejection she had long feared. When at last she made her Manhattan stage debut in the autumn of 1967 (just weeks before her sixty-sixth birthday), it was clear she need not have worried. The press was benevolent and New York theatergoers, amid a singularly dreary season, bought every ticket for six weeks of performances at the Lunt-Fontanne.
For Cohen, however, that period was
the least enjoyable enterprise of my entire career. On opening night [October 9] I saw her go onstage in absolute triumph, receiving the adulation of the crowd throwing flowers at her. But it was all an extraordinary con game! There was really no act at all—she stood there and managed a few notes and everyone went mad—and for this she received 40,000 a week plus a good percentage of the receipts.
The newspapers, during her New York engagements for Cohen in 1967 and again in 1968, frequently reported near riots at the theater—fans stopping traffic, admirers thronging the streets, flowers everywhere, shouts and hurrahs before and after each performance, in the lobby, at the stage door. Marlene Dietrich seemed to have stormed the city. But as Cohen confirmed years later, all this extreme adulation was under Dietrich’s astute management. Just as elsewhere (even, according to Vivien Byerley, throughout England), Dietrich herself paid for the flowers to be thrown down at her from the balcony and, through intermediaries, hired claques of professionals who—inside and outside the theater—cheered until they were hoarse.
It was important for her to be part of the current theatrical scene, too. Beginning in 1968, Mart Crowley’s hit play The Boys in the Band was a succès de scandale as well as a succès d’estime. The first American drama to treat openly and honestly of homosexuals in a repressive society, it blended high drawing room comedy with a fierce resentment of hypocrisy and a shattering, unsentimental compassion. This Dietrich found fascinating, and she insisted that Cohen escort her to a performance. Afterwards she held court with the all-male cast backstage. “She said repeatedly that she was so envious of young actors in this smash-hit play,” recalled Peter White, one of the players in Boys, “and she insisted that we come to her show on a Monday, when we did not perform. Dietrich also took a fancy to Frederick Combs [another of the actors].”
For Combs, the attention directed at him that night and over several weeks thereafter was confusing. It seemed clear she had no sexual agenda, but she detected (rightly) that his career had involved considerable struggle. “I told her that yes, I had had hungry days,” Combs recalled years later, “and this seemed to set her into a panic. She said that I must never be hungry or needy again—that the very thought of it must be banished, and if I were ever in difficult circumstances I must call her at once.”
Weeks later, the entire cast of The Boys in the Band attended Dietrich’s show. Afterwards, apologizing for a poor performance (at which at least four of her guests thought she was slightly inebriated onstage), she ushered this entire team of handsome young actors to a prominent table at Sardi’s, the nearby theatrical restaurant, for a post-theater supper. Sipping tea and then a few glasses of beer, she spoke openly about her lesbian life in Berlin in the 1920s, about her love affairs with Claire Waldoff and Ginette Spanier, among others. “I became involved with women when men found me intimidating,” Peter White recalled her saying. As for Frederick Combs, whom Dietrich called at least once to escort her home after her show, she quickly lost interest when she saw that his own real-life character—confident, cheerful, intelligent, optimistic—bore little resemblance to the man he played onstage.
DIETRICH’S OBSESSION WITH MANIPULATING THE EFfect of her appearance delayed her television debut until late 1972. For a one-hour taped special, she was paid 250,000 and the astonishing, unprecedented rights (a) to be taped in the auditorium of her choice—the New London Theatre, Drury Lane, whose technically advanced acoustics and electrical configurations she approved; (b) to have Broadway’s Rouben Ter-Arutunian design a flattering pink set and its scrim; and (c) to bring to the project Joe Davis, her personal lighting director, and Stan Freeman, who had replaced Burt Bacharach as musical arranger and conductor. During the rehearsal and taping of the show, Alexander Cohen (its producer) found Dietrich “at times intolerable, without doubt the most demanding star I’ve ever worked with.” She did not endear herself, for example (as an eyewitness recalled), by asking Cohen during a rehearsal, “Do you know what you are doing? A light is a light, an angle is an angle, and I know what I am doing. I was trained by the master—by Josef von Sternberg. I’ll pick the shots I think
are best.”
No one, of course, ever upstaged her in any situation. That season in London she attended a performance of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company and afterwards went to the dressing room of singer Marti Stevens. When Dietrich told her that a woman in the audience had said this had been one of the most wonderful evenings of her life, Stevens replied, “How sweet of you to tell me that! It’s always gratifying to know when someone has enjoyed the show.”
“Oh, darling, it wasn’t the show that thrilled her,” Dietrich continued with absolute gravity. “It was meeting me.”
As Burt Bacharach was her last male lover, so was Marti Stevens Marlene Dietrich’s last close female friend. Daughter of Nicholas Schenck (head of Loews, Inc.), wealthy, intelligent and well educated, she had been close to Dietrich since the early 1960s. Under Dietrich’s tutelage, Stevens developed into a mannered blond singer who—onstage in an identical coiffure and diamanté-beaded dress—looked uncannily like her friend and mentor. Dietrich and Stevens were on several occasions the guests of Noël Coward at his home in Switzerland, and they were known to be so close that artist René Bouché celebrated them in identical drawings.
DIETRICH’S MOODS DURING THE 1960S AND 1970S were certainly, according to her staff, affected by the multiple deaths of former lovers and friends—Hemingway, Cooper, von Sternberg, Remarque, Chevalier, Piaf, de Acosta. Noël Coward, too, was dismayed at the loss of people he had known well over the years, and to Dietrich he said with black humor, “All I demand from my friends nowadays is that they live through lunch”—to which, uncomprehending, she replied, “Why lunch, sweetheart?” Later, Dietrich forgot the remark she had not caught, and when an interviewer asked if she would spend a winter holiday with Coward, she replied airily, “Oh, he could be dead before I get there”—which, she thought, might be before lunch.
Dietrich’s low spirits led her, at least once, to fire without reason an employee—a maid who had come daily to her Paris apartment. The dismissal seemed capricious, and the woman, hurt and angry, devised an ingenious retribution. Four days after the maid had been sent away, Dietrich had arranged a dinner for eight friends. The woman returned to the public foyer of the apartment building and, as each guest arrived, announced sadly that Madame had come down with laryngitis and influenza and was thus forced, at the last moment, to cancel her party. The invited guests went sadly home and Dietrich was left to wonder why no one came to her dinner.
COWARD AND DIETRICH MET FOR THE LAST TIME IN January 1973 when she escorted him to a performance of a musical revue in his honor; when he died that March 26, she was deeply upset. Of Judy Garland’s death in 1969, on the other hand, she had simply said with a shrug, “There was someone who wanted to die, so I was glad for her.”
She had to cope, too, with the loss of Bacharach, who in 1965 had left Dietrich to marry actress Angie Dickinson and to proceed elsewhere with his career (although he returned briefly for the 1967–1968 New York engagements). For Dietrich, his departure was a personal rebuff, virtually a defection from the loyal ranks. “When he became famous,” she wrote,
he could no longer accompany me on tour round the world . . . From that fateful day on, I have worked like a robot, trying to recapture the wonderful woman he helped make out of me . . . I thought of him, always longed for him, always looked for him in the wings, and always fought against self-pity . . . When he left me, I felt like giving everything up . . . I was wounded. Our separation broke my heart.
“The issue was simple, and a little sad,” said Alexander Cohen. “Dietrich was in love with Bacharach. And she thought he was in love with her. The fact of Angie Dickinson didn’t faze her.”
* During the next fifteen years, Dietrich was a frequent visitor to the famous spa and rejuvenation clinic managed by Dr. Paul Niehans at Clarens, near Vevey, Switzerland, where she subscribed to a series of injections, hormone treatments and chemical regimens. “She really believed in it,” recalled her secretary, Bernard Hall, “and she thought her life could go on almost forever.”
18: After 1973
ON JUNE 7, 1972, MARLENE DIETRICH SUStained painful bruises after falling onstage during her London engagement: her beaded, body-hugging gown was so tight and her Ferragamo pumps so high-heeled that she was thrown off balance and stumbled, sustaining painful bruises and causing the cancellation of the show.
An even more serious accident occurred the following year, in November 1973. After her performance at the Shady Grove Music Fair, near Washington, she bent over from the front of the stage to shake conductor Stan Freeman’s hand in the orchestra. But he was standing precariously on a stool to reach her and he lost his equilibrium, fell and dragged her down into the pit with him. Dietrich refused to be moved until she was covered with a blanket, to conceal the split in her dress which revealed the intricate foam rubber “living foundation” that gave her the figure of a woman one-third her age.
Besides the severe bruising (but no fractures), there was a deep gash along her left leg. Dietrich insisted on superficial treatment only, and by the time she had visited several other cities and arrived for a show at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel she was confined to a wheelchair with a serious infection. Her condition forced the cancellation of a Carnegie Hall concert scheduled for January 1974, and she was transported to Houston, where Dr. Michael De Bakey performed a skin graft at Methodist Hospital.
The slow and painful recovery required four months in bed, and no one seriously considered her return to singing onstage. But that autumn, not long before her seventy-third birthday, Marlene Dietrich astonished everyone by keeping a contracted date at the Grosvenor House hotel, London. Wheeled to the edge of her performing area, she walked slowly but then sang robustly, receiving perhaps the most tumultuous applause of her career. She was, according to Stan Freeman, “a perfectionist, although she certainly wasn’t the world’s greatest singer. She could be very difficult, but she could also be generous. If she thought you were ill, she’d send to Paris for the medicine she swore by, but she could be miserable if you were well.”
Photographers, of course, were forbidden to approach, and because she did not want her wheelchair, her array of elaborate cosmetics, prescriptions, ointments and creams to be noted, she turned visitors away from her suite. When Princess Margaret arrived to greet her, however, Dietrich was forced to emerge. According to Bernard Hall, “her quick eye spotted the Princess gazing at a row of vitamin bottles on a table, obviously thinking they were some kind of ‘stay young’ pills. Furious, Marlene then headed for the table, pointed at me and exclaimed, ‘They’re his! Remove them, Bernard!’ The Princess clearly did not believe it.”
Remarkably, Dietrich summoned the stamina for several more concerts in early 1975, but that spring in San Francisco she was clearly more frail than ever, and her unsteady gait was not helped by her increasing reliance on large beakers of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch whiskey, which she sipped throughout the afternoon and evening (and which she made no attempt to conceal even from interviewers). The boredom of which she had so plangently complained was now more painful than her weak leg.
But she insisted on working—most of all, she said, because she needed the money. She maintained the pretense of being poor, according to Bernard Hall, yet a New York safe still held a valuable cache of jewels; additionally, her income after 1960 was never less than a million dollars annually, and even after American taxes her allowable deductions left her with more than 400,000. In 1987, some of her jewelry was put up for auction at Christie’s, who eventually sent her a check for 81,500.
Yet she often and loudly cried, “I need the money. Nobody believes me when I tell them I am poor.” This was a far cry from the pretense of great wealth that she had insisted on for years, and the reason she gave did not much please her son-in-law, whom she implicitly represented to the press as an inadequate provider. “I have to support my daughter Maria and four grandchildren . . . The money I make will keep them going for years, [but] Maria went to Switzerland to ski wi
th my money and left me alone.”
Finally there was a last stage appearance (although not, as it happened, her last professional engagement). After shows in Melbourne and Canberra, Dietrich was concluding her Australian tour in Sydney when, on September 29, 1975, she collapsed just seconds after walking slowly onto the stage of Her Majesty’s Theatre. She had drunk too much whiskey and had not eaten all day, and so it was more difficult than ever for her to walk in her tight dress. Dietrich fell awkwardly, and an examination determined that she had broken her left femur. Her shattered leg was encased in plaster and next day she was flown to the Medical Center of the University of California at Los Angeles. From Houston, Michael De Bakey returned her telephone call, recommending a New York orthopedist, and three days later she was in Columbia University–Presbyterian Hospital Medical Center, New York.
There she remained until the spring of 1976, first supine and immobilized by traction and then, after weeks in another plaster cast, subjected to protocols of physical therapy that left her exhausted and angry. For a woman of resonant independence, this was the most frustrating experience of her life, as the medical staff quickly learned. Dietrich dismissed three private nurses in as many weeks, she threw across her room platefuls of what she called “chunks of indigestible, half-frozen food,” and she denounced the American (but not the foreign) Medical Center nurses for being “keen on only two things: their ‘rights’ and their salary.” But her anger might really have been self-directed, for when she fell with such disastrous effects it was into the harsh light of day. There could be no more illusion—and hence, for one defined by illusion, no more identity. “You can’t live without illusions,” she had said during a London tour, “even if you must fight for them.”