Blue Angel (50 page)

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“She always admitted to me that she preferred women to men,” said Dietrich’s secretary Bernard Hall after her death. “She said, ‘When you go to bed with a woman, it is less important. Men are a hassle.’ And she knew she didn’t have to make a commitment to a woman.”

*
Few journalists were left unsubjected to recordings of Dietrich’s applause. Eugene Archer described a typical newsman’s meeting with Dietrich in her New York apartment: “She walked to her phonograph and turned it on. ‘Listen to this,’ she murmured. The recording was from [a recent opening], and the applause was both prodigious and apparently endless. ‘I’d never believe that if I didn’t have it on tape,’ she brooded. ‘I had sixty curtain calls. I sold out every performance . . .’ ” (“Light from an Undiminishing Star,”
New York Times
, Sept. 4, 1960). This inspired female impersonator Lynne Carter, in his sendup of Dietrich, to quip, “Have you heard my latest record? It’s all applause!”

17:1960–1973

O
VER THE COURSE OF
M
ARLENE
D
IETRICH
’
S
two weeks in Germany and one in Scandinavia that May of 1960—and despite a superb publicity campaign—her sponsors suffered a major loss because of her nightly
4,000 salary and the inability of patrons to pay high ticket prices. But she was triumphantly content after that first night, undaunted even in Düsseldorf on May 16 when a hysterical young woman rushed up to her in the lobby of the Park Hotel, spat in her face and shouted, “I hate this person who betrayed Germany in the war!”

That moment she used for a sympathy plea in subsequent interviews, but—along with the mostly half-sold auditoriums—it also contributed to her decision “never again [to appear] in Germany . . . The Germans and I no longer speak the same language.” More painful was the broken collarbone she sustained when, momentarily blinded by her spotlight in Wiesbaden, Dietrich high-stepped too energetically and toppled offstage. Moments later she gamely returned in her white tuxedo for the final number with her
line of chorus girls, agreeing only the next day that Bacharach could take her to a clinic. For the residual pain that afflicted her during other performances that year (in Paris, Brussels, Dallas, Los Angeles, Toronto and San Francisco), Dietrich refused anything stronger than aspirin—perhaps because of Edith Piaf and Judy Garland, whose drug addictions greatly alarmed her when she saw them that year.

A pleasanter reunion occurred with Josef von Sternberg, with whom she was honored at the Locarno Film Festival in July. His white hair, moustache and courtly manner gave him the appearance of a benevolent patriarch, but von Sternberg was, as ever, restrained and diffident. Since the end of his connection to Dietrich twenty-five years earlier, they had met only two or three times and he had completed but seven feature films. From a life of genteel semiretirement in California, von Sternberg was occasionally invited to film festivals and universities, where his extraordinary achievements in cinematography were at last beginning to be appreciated.

At Locarno,
The Blue Angel
and
The Devil Is a Woman
were screened, and after a formal dinner the press besieged director and star for comments. Von Sternberg simply expressed his gratitude, and Dietrich’s terse remark was appropriately enigmatic: “As an actress, I belong to an album of souvenirs, an album that will remain silent.” Reporters (Americans particularly) then encouraged them to say something warmly sentimental and to embrace for the benefit of photographers, but this request only confirmed them in their natural public reserve.

Her most satisfying appearance that year was in a way even bolder than her return to Germany. In late June, Dietrich performed in Israel, where she set a new record for encores and, even more significantly, ended the taboo against the public use of German when she asked her audience’s permission to sing in that language. (Earlier that month, Sir John Barbirolli had been forced to conduct the choral parts of Mahler’s Second Symphony in English.) The crowd was at once won over, she sang in her native language, and in 1965 Israel awarded her the Medallion of Valor for antifascist work during the war.

“Well, darling,” she told an American reporter later that year, “there is no parallel to me in show business. There is no film actress . . . 
who has the stage presence I do.” Nor, apparently, the frank self-esteem.

A
FTER A DISAPPOINTING TWO
-
WEEK ATTENDANCE AT
her Boston engagement in January 1961 (due at least partly to a fierce blizzard the first week), Dietrich signed a contract with producer-director Stanley Kramer to appear in his film
Judgment at Nuremberg
, essentially a courtroom drama about the trial of Nazi war criminals. As Frau Bertholt, the widow of an executed German general, she had several scenes with Spencer Tracy, cast as the presiding American judge.

Obtaining Dietrich’s participation was not easy, as Kramer recalled; she had to be assured that the character and the script by Abby Mann were emotionally honest and accurate. To that end, during production in Hollywood that April she made several suggestions, incorporating her own childhood experiences and attitudes into the text (“I’m not fragile. I’m a daughter of the military. It means I was taught discipline—not to drink when I am thirsty, not to cry when I am sad . . .”). At Dietrich’s insistence, Jean Louis was engaged to design even her simple black wardrobe, and a studio artist was summoned to correct a painting of the Nazi general used in the film. “He doesn’t look dignified enough,” she told Kramer of the image, and so with a few deft strokes Dietrich’s bidding was done. “See how easy I am to please?” she asked rhetorically.

She was not always so, however. “She came on the set each morning,” according to Kramer, “looked around and said, ‘No, put that light there—put this reflector here—move that screen so . . .’ And of course in five minutes she was lighted to the best possible advantage. It was quite uncanny.” To co-star Maximilian Schell, the thirty-year-old Viennese-born actor whose eventual work as a director later intersected her life importantly, Dietrich was

a typical Berlin woman who could handle king and beggar with equal adroitness, and she was totally open about her homosexual relationships. I had the impression that Marlene did not just converse with people she met but rather wanted to provoke
them. There was a spirit of confrontation in the air wherever she was.

Dietrich’s presence in this serious (and sometimes grim) picture was secured, as Schell added, primarily for the drawing power of her name. As a weary, arrogant aristocrat, she played the role with a kind of Berlin Wall round her, and because her voice was by this time thin and almost in the range of an operatic bass, much of her dialogue had to be post-dubbed—which further italicized the curious detachment in her characterization. This was a quietly nervous performance, eyes shifting left and right even as she and Tracy strolled through a dark street at night, the measures of “Lili Marlene” heard nearby, to which she hums a few bars.

But perhaps most ironic of all—and what very much displeased her when she saw the finished film—was that the meticulous care she and the cinematographer had taken over her features had an odd effect. Before beginning the picture, she had submitted to another surgical face-lift, and the result—sharp angles in her cheeks and tightness around the mouth that further limited her expression—made the once supple iconography of her face almost surreally masklike. The press, however, simply noted her austere grief in May, at the Beverly Hills funeral of Gary Cooper, who died of cancer just after his sixtieth birthday.
*

As Dietrich herself approached that milestone, she chose two new projects that did not depend on how she looked in close-up. She had abandoned the idea of an autobiography, but not of some kind of book, and so in the autumn of 1961 Doubleday and Company signed her to a contract for
Marlene Dietrich’s ABC
—a compendium of her opinions gleaned by Dietrich and her secretary from thirty years of press clippings. Her favorite menus (lamb chops, pot-au-feu, goulash) provided the tastiest ingredients of a book over-spiced with high-toned aphorisms but otherwise pasty and insubstantial, as these complete entries indicate:

“Egocentric: If he is a creative artist, forgive him.”

“Gabin, Jean: A magnificent actor without knowing the tools of the trade. Rough outside—tender inside. Easy to love!”

“Germany: The tears I have cried over Germany have dried. I have washed my face.”

“Nail polish: Dark nail polish is vulgar.”

“Travellers: Don’t detain travellers.”

Somewhat more solid was her soundtrack narration in December of a film documentary on Hitler and the rise of Nazism called
The Black Fox
, for whose pictorial horror her dry, affectless and almost androgynous voice was perfect in its clinical coldness.

M
ARLENE
D
IETRICH DID NOT MARK HER SIXTIETH
birthday in December 1961; she was preparing her opening at the Sahara, Las Vegas. At least in her one-woman show she had no story to act out, no part to study and assume other than the ikon she had made of herself.

By this time she had only two or three tones in her range, and with increasing frequency in the coming years Dietrich seemed to be on a kind of automatic pilot, although audiences were overwhelmed by the sheer impudence of a legend. “The showmanship is all very calculated and deliberated,” ran a typical review by 1974, “even to the point of management placing flowers to be thrown from key theater spots—but the audience is more than willing to play along with their idol.”

When someone suggested that her voice was now occasionally indistinguishable from a man’s, Dietrich was blunt as ever: “Well, I would have liked to have been a man, a great man.” Instead, she had to be content with dressing like one, which she continued to do in her act, adding more and deeper songs to the first portion and now appearing in her bejewelled gown only long enough to satisfy the crowd’s need for the traditional glamour. From 1962, the gown, at her demand, fitted so tightly that she was able to take only tiny, precarious steps, and two assistants had to support her as she moved from dressing room to stage; eventually, it was almost a lethal
weapon that turned against her. Nevertheless, in Paris for her show at the Olympia that spring of 1962, she had perhaps her greatest Continental success—singing, as even the benevolently critical Noël Coward noted, “with far more authority and technique” than ever before.

And so her performances continued through much of the decade—in dozens of cities round the world (among others Tokyo, Washington, Minneapolis, Johannesburg, Stockholm, Taormina, San Francisco, Cardiff, Moscow, Vancouver, Edinburgh, Warsaw, Los Angeles, Melbourne), with the dutiful Burt Bacharach as her arranger and conductor until his marriage and career advancement took him from her. Her decision to add modern songs to her repertory—numbers like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon”—did not bring vast numbers of a new generation of admirers to her show. But when she appeared onstage with the Beatles at the Prince of Wales Theatre, London, on November 4, 1963, the quartet agreed with reporters that Dietrich was indeed one of the most elegant women in town.

And so she was. Typically, she wore designer clothes everywhere, and everywhere it was noted that they fitted her to perfection even in her sixties—simply because each dress, suit and gown were made to order. A city’s most expensive tailor was summoned at two in the morning if she required a new hook or seam, and Dietrich had to see the color sample and texture of any thread used even for a minor repair. It was apt, therefore, when early in 1964 Coward asked her to appear in the film
Paris When It Sizzles
, a comedy that did not, but in which Coward co-starred with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden. In her momentary, wordless cameo, Dietrich—all in white—stepped from a white limousine into the House of Dior (not far from her rented apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne, just across from the Plaza-Athénée Hotel). Even those who may not have known what Marlene Dietrich represented could tell that here was a handsome woman who knew how to dress.

Her life was remarkably peripatetic from 1960 to 1974, but it was also (contrary to popular misperceptions about show business on the road) grindingly monotonous. She toured from city to city with her loyal and long-suffering little retinue—a hairdresser and a wardrobe
mistress; her musical conductor; sometimes her manager, Major Donald Neville-Willing, formerly impresario at the Café de Paris; a companion named Ginette Vachon; and usually her secretary, Bernard Hall, who had earlier been in the dance troupe that briefly accompanied the second half of her show. Demanding to be treated like a star in each city, she was, and the results were predictable. Marlene Dietrich was greeted, hailed, lauded and applauded, she gave press conferences and met mayors, she accepted keys to cities and pronounced weightily on any topic put to her, from international politics to medicine, from child-rearing to modern art. Besieged by deliveries of flowers, champagne and requests for autographs, she never wavered in projecting the image of a legend, which was precisely what she insisted she was not. But people do not respond warmly to those who insist on remaining legends, and so there were never simple, quiet evenings with a few friends, nor old acquaintances with whom she could relax.