Noël Coward chronicled Dietrich’s egocentric caprices in his diary. Dietrich claimed that Coward was the only homosexual she could trust, and he nicknamed her “Prussian Cow” and “Darling Achtung.” The two of them got together in New York, Los Angeles, southern France, London, and Paris. Far more than Dietrich, Coward was part of the urbane, cultivated, European postwar upper crust. Coward took her out to dinner, to the theater, and to the movies. They went to garden parties in Hollywood and the opera in New York. Dietrich’s mood could turn on a dime; she could be wonderful company or someone to get away from as quickly as possible. Most of the time she looked gorgeous, and appearing at her side was sure to create a sensation.
Her first book, Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, was published by Doubleday in 1962. From accordion to zipper, she composed a set of reasonably interesting texts, but this was no substitute for an autobiography. Tynan suggested that they write her biography together. “You know how I hate biographies. Someone better than I said that one has to be without humility to collaborate on one or even write an autobiography. Not that I have humility; I just don’t want to talk about myself.”57 She had already received an advance for a book in which she was to write about the two wars she had lived through, but she had yet to write a single line of it. Tynan invited her to spend the summer with him in Tuscany, but as usual, she turned down invitations that involved vacations or relaxation. She had just finished an exhausting tour through the United States and wanted to go to Paris. “I toured (for the first and last time) in America. . . . Unbelievable, this country. I am through with it. It’s wrotten [sic].”
Tynan’s successful musical Oh! Calcutta! was being performed in New York at this time. She had read all about it, but did not want to see it. “Nakedness and ‘sex’ in public world repulse me. Being German both of those things are very private, personal and not at all ‘funny.’ ”58 Dietrich had a critical and sometimes dismissive view of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s. This attitude was alien to her; she was part of a different generation. She shared this feeling with Leo Lerman, her friend in New York. Whereas Coward and Torberg responded to her egocentricity with humor, Reisch was almost paternal, and Tynan above all curious, Lerman was pessimistic like her. Their gloomy moods notwithstanding, the two of them got along famously. Dietrich and Lerman went to see the remake of The Blue Angel at an old movie theater in Times Square. The film was so bad that she insisted on leaving early. Lerman then took her to Café Geiger in Yorkville, where he ordered her coffee with whipped cream and cookies. The café orchestra played “Falling in Love Again,” “Johnny,” and “Peter.” Lerman was captivated by her beauty and quick-wittedness.
One evening we went to a party together. And she was done up with perfect simplicity. She always let her body speak for itself. There wasn’t a woman in the room—and the room was filled with all sorts of beautiful women wonderfully dressed—who looked better than Marlene. And little Hope Hampton, a flurry of feathers, diamonds, crystal drop-beads, came up to her and peered at her and said, looking up at her face, “Who did it?” And Marlene said, “God.”59
In April 1967, Dietrich was in Los Angeles, sharing an apartment with a girlfriend who, unlike herself, had a love life. “I am still fat. Still feeling awful. Disliking myself.”60 She went to two parties, and that was quite enough for her. Some of the guests were even smoking marijuana. There was no one for her to talk to. She began to diet and decided to stop drinking alcohol, because her stage costumes revealed every extra ounce she was carrying. Her diary entries were chaotic; she noted down, in an assortment of colored inks, what she bought, what she was eating, whom she met, where her costumes were, departures and landings, and her expenditures for friends, family, and relatives. Bacharach suggested that they appear onstage together on Broadway. Her fear of Broadway audiences used to sophisticated performances proved unfounded. Bacharach prepared the concert perfectly and hired the best musicians. The tickets were sold out shortly after the event was announced. Large crowds gathered in front of the theater on Forty-Sixth Street. Photographs show a beaming Dietrich in the middle of a throng that was cheering her on; it resembled her greeting from the Americans after her return from the war. She invited her husband to the premiere on Broadway. Sieber flew to New York. Seated next to Dietrich, whose wig and makeup made her appear far younger, her “phantom hubby” (as the American press often called him) looked like an old man. With a somewhat dazed look on his face and wearing an old-fashioned suit, he accompanied his wife through the city in which he had lived for many years. After ten days he headed back to his farm.
With her success on Broadway, she had achieved everything a singer could achieve. After Bacharach left, she made very few changes to her show. From year to year, she came more and more to resemble the machine she had described herself as. Without Bacharach, the verve of youth was gone. Everything was mediocre, and she hated mediocrity. Almost ten years after they had parted ways, her feelings of loss had not changed in the slightest. “I still look for you every time I stand in the wings. I also look for you every time I finish the show. In other words: I look for you and to you and wish you were there to tell me what I did right and what I did wrong.”61 Dietrich was weary. She had been on the road, and around the world, for forty years. When she was in Los Angeles, she rented a small apartment. All she needed was two rooms and a refrigerator for her Dom Perignon and liverwurst. Her daily planner is full of notes about which suitcase is where, which dress has to be altered or cleaned, and when she needs to be at which fitting. In Paris, she frequented the fashion boutiques of Chanel, Balmain, Dior, and Balenciaga. Now that she was over sixty, she gravitated to the timeless ideal of the elegant lady. Her minimalism is evident in her Chanel suit and her fashionable Mao-style jacket. She knew how to wear haute couture in a way that made her body stand out rather than the fashion itself. She worried about being overweight, even though she still had a good figure without doing any sort of exercise or sports. Fashion was a means to keep the artist “Marlene Dietrich” alive. She picked out her clothes as though she were fighting a battle. She knew exactly how to outshine all the other women. Her visits to the boutiques of Paris were just as feared as her earlier shopping trips to Hollywood. She arrived early and did not say hello. Any attempt to chat with her was doomed to failure; she did not like small talk, nor could she be talked into trying on something she had not selected, because she knew how clothing was made and how it looked on her. Her search could take hours. She paid no attention whatsoever to lunch breaks and showed no signs of fatigue or hunger. Pale, beautiful, and unapproachable, Dietrich studied the fabrics with an unerring eye. And she spent the whole time on her feet, despite her aching legs and her high-heeled shoes. She kept a cool head while making her selections. Other women might revel in the luxurious pastime of shopping for clothes, but for her it was the fulfillment of an obligation. Shoes, hat, gloves, stockings, handbag, and jewelry had to go with skirts, dresses, slacks, blouses, and overcoats. It was only when she was satisfied with her purchases that the desired effect could be achieved.
Her life revolved around flight schedules. For years, she had been traveling primarily in the triangle of Paris, Los Angeles, and New York, punctuated by visits to the rest of the world, such as Montreal, Melbourne, Moscow, and Connecticut. She made a lifestyle out of restlessness. “I don’t know what world you’re living in that makes Copenhagen ‘far away.’ It’s 1½ hours from here. That’s nothing at all. I was just in Japan and Australia. That is far. Zurich to Paris is 45 minutes. What does that mean?”62 Dietrich did advertising for Pan Am. Her lack of a home base was regarded as cosmopolitanism. She visited Sieber for several days a year on his farm. In July 1969, they were sitting together in front of the television set watching the landing on the moon. Now that passions were behind her, she found contentment in their longstanding familiarity. At least with Rudi she could count on being the center of his life.
On September 12, 1970, Torberg asked her whether she had heard that
Boni was quite ill. Remarque had suffered a stroke in 1963, which brought him his first brush with death. In the years that followed, he had a series of heart attacks and experienced ongoing pain and panic attacks. When Torberg wrote to Dietrich, Boni had been admitted to the clinic in Locarno again, and they were prepared for the worst. Dietrich received this letter after her return from Japan. Every day, she had flowers sent to Remarque at the clinic. On September 25, Remarque died in the Clinica Sant’Agnese in Locarno. “I feel the loss very much because I had always hoped that I might see him again.”63 In Dietrich’s eyes, Paulette Goddard was at fault, because Goddard did not want Remarque to get together with her. Was she afraid he might give her one of his precious paintings? She could not picture Boni being happy with another woman. “Boni must have been very lonesome when he died. But then—he was always lonesome with his thoughts.” She did not attend the funeral. In a letter to Maria on the day of Boni’s burial, she wrote about a beautiful old Russian cemetery she had gone to, and conveniently included a sketch of how to get there. The cemetery was near Orly, fifteen miles from Paris and close to the town of Massy. This would have been an appropriate burial place for her, near the airport and near Paris. She had had to take two Valium pills the previous night to stave off troubling thoughts. Remarque’s death made it apparent to her that she had lost him long ago. No matter how much she may have loved him, his wife was now in charge. In the eyes of the world, Goddard was Remarque’s heiress and widow. Dietrich had not even been allowed to visit him. She wondered what would happen with Gabin if she outlived him. He had always been fair, but one never knew how a man’s wife would react. Perhaps she ought to ask for the valuable paintings to be returned. “Maybe I am wrong. But when the people you have been so close to, much closer than one knows, die and you have no way to contact them before or his family after—then you start thinking more terrible thoughts.”64
In the year that Remarque died, Dietrich made two trips to Montreux for live cell therapy treatments. Since the early 1960s, she had been a regular guest at the Clinique La Prairie, where she would be injected with fresh cells taken from fetal sheep, a procedure that was said to slow down the natural aging process. She spent an average of a week at the clinic. “On Thursday, the injections, and then five days of rest, and then back to Paris.”65
When Coco Chanel died on January 10, 1971, Sieber entered that fact into his daily planner. Dietrich was with him, and they may have thought of Coco while dining on roast veal and Dom Perignon. She flew to Paris for Chanel’s burial. Charles de Gaulle died in November 1970. Dietrich paid her last respects to the “capitaine.” She felt as though everyone around her was dying, and she was receiving medals. The president of France, Georges Pompidou, awarded her the rank of officer in the Legion of Honor at the Élysée Palace. Dietrich was sure that there could not be so many existing medals to award, and that they were invented especially for her. She wrote to Orson Welles shortly before her seventieth birthday that she was faring badly both physically and mentally. And to make matters worse, she was convinced that she now looked like a toad: “Cannot drink because of that. So, have no, even momentary, lift. Too much flying too. Money-worries as always but cannot take advances on the contracts before not everything is in order. All in life is miserable at the moment. Not even sleeping-pills make me sleep which doesn’t help the TOAD-LOOK.”66 She had had it all in life: love, money, beauty, and success. Now she had the feeling that she was losing it all.
On July 27, 1972, Dietrich signed a contract to tape a television show. It was the $125,000 fee that lured her; she hated television. She paid for her wardrobe, the orchestration, and the conductor, Burt Bacharach, out of pocket. When the preliminary work began in November, it was soon clear that she would not be her own boss the way she was used to. The rehearsal times were cut back drastically, and all the titles in German were taken out. The orchestra was supposed to play behind the stage. She ranted and raved, but the taping proceeded without undue difficulty. The interviews to which she was contractually obligated to submit were another matter. In conversation with the final journalist, she did not mince words, declaring that the taping had been amateurish. “The first thing you see is a curtain with my portrait, drawn by René Bouché. That is okay. Then I’m supposed to sing ‘La Vie en Rose,’ and the light turns orange. What’s going on? Am I supposed to sing ‘La Vie en Orange’ now?”67 The interview continued along these lines. When it appeared in print in the major British and American daily newspapers, her producer, Alexander Cohen, declared that he was finished with Dietrich. A five-year legal battle ensued about the pending fee. In 1977, she received a payment of sixty thousand dollars. In view of the costs she had already incurred and the immense expectations, this was a paltry sum of money.
A few days after the television broadcast of the show, there was a revue for Noël Coward in New York. The honoree appeared on the arm of his friend Marlene Dietrich. The two of them were in good form; they gossiped, joked, sang, and clung together. Two months later, Coward was dead. Then Dietrich’s sister died in Celle. Only Elisabeth had known what it was like to be on Sedanstrasse or to skate on the Neuer See. Dietrich was glad that this news reached her while she was in London, where Maria lived. In the evening, she went to see Maria and made dinner for the children. She was in terrible shape; not even scotch helped. Now Rudi was the only one left to remember the time in Berlin with Dietrich. She did not want to eat for days, and she only drank tea. On May 14, the day her sister was buried in Hanover, Dietrich opened her show in Birmingham.
“I have to earn money as always” had become her mantra. Even close friends had to rely on the newspaper or television to find out where she was at any given time. It became harder and harder for her to manage everyday chores on her own. She wanted someone to talk to, to take care of her, to help her out. To take her mind off her unhappiness, she overate. “I look awfully fat in those amateur photos and now I am even fatter. I don’t know how I will get down because I am hungry all the time and as I am at home I eat anything in sight except what is good for me. . . . It is now 5:30 p.m. and it is raining and windy. My six geraniums are falling over and I go and put them up. Some occupation!”68 At a concert on November 7, 1973, in Washington, she suffered a fall. At the end of the concert, she reached her hand down to the orchestra pit to shake hands with her musical director, Stan Freeman, as she always did. He decided to stand on the piano bench to come closer, but the bench broke, and Freeman pulled her into the pit. She lay on her back like a helpless insect, unable to move. Her calls for help went unheard because “Falling in Love Again” was booming. She had not broken any bones, but half her leg had been sliced open. Still, a veteran of a world war was not about to head straight to the hospital; instead she gritted her teeth and called up her old friend Ted Kennedy, who discreetly sent a doctor to examine her. The upcoming concerts in Washington were canceled. As her friends and family had feared, she did not fly to New York to rest up, but decided to fulfill her concert obligations in Canada. Maria made all the preparations for her arrival in Montreal. Although the accident had been extremely painful and vexing for Dietrich, it posed a challenge that she was determined to rise to. She mobilized her strength and put on a fine performance. No one noticed that the ageless woman on the stage was seriously injured.
Before embarking on her tour through South America, she had to undergo heart surgery. Michael DeBakey, a renowned cardiac specialist, told her that she would lose her leg if her circulatory disorders were not remedied. In earlier years, she had used the name “Sieber” to book hotel rooms for her amorous escapades; now she was being admitted to the Methodist Medical Center in Houston as a patient under this name. DeBakey, who was only seven years her junior, had pioneered cardiac artery bypass surgery back in 1964. Dietrich and Lyndon B. Johnson were two of his famous patients. Once she left the intensive care unit, she focused on her leg. She no longer sent celebrity phtographs to her friends, but instead pictures of her leg, complete with skin grafts.
Soon after she left the hospital, with her legs still swollen and painful, she resumed her performances. Her life gathered momentum again, and she went back to focusing on the usual issues of contracts, rehearsals, flight schedules, and checks, with a hodgepodge of hotel reservations, departure times, proverbs, recommended medications, and notes about who had gotten how many dollars from her and on what date. These papers make it hard to fathom how she was able to keep up with her schedule and make it onstage.
On August 10, Dietrich fell in her bedroom in Paris and fractured her left hip. Because she had no faith in French doctors, she was flown to New York for a hip operation. Maria, who brought her to the hospital, had to come up with an elaborate scheme to keep the press from getting wind of what was going on. The operation was a success. One month after her hip surgery, Dietrich began her concerts in London. She came onstage without limping. Her doctors declared that she was in extraordinarily good shape for her age. “I certainly don’t live a good life. I eat like a dog (whatever I find) and the only thing that I don’t do is smoking. . . . Still poor as a church-mouse, but a young one All Love Marlene.”69
In early December she flew to Japan, where she gave concerts until the end of 1974. Since returning from the conservatory in Weimar, Dietrich had earned her living with acting and singing. She had always worked hard and spent extravagant sums of money. She could not imagine a life without an audience, admiration, and spotlights. The older she grew, the more she lived for this one hour on the stage. She was not cut out to spend her time visiting friends at the Côte d’Azur, picking up the children from school, organizing charity balls, or sitting on a park bench holding hands with an aging lover. Her biggest concessions to old age were her apartments in New York and Paris, which were the sanctuaries she needed from the world.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 49