Blue Angel (52 page)

D
IETRICH
’
S MOODS DURING THE
1960
S AND
1970
S
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.

C
OWARD AND
D
IETRICH 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

O
N
J
UNE
7, 1972, M
ARLENE
D
IETRICH SUS
tained 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 with 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.”

D
IETRICH WAS FURTHER DISPIRITED BY THE NEWS OF
several more deaths, among them that of Frederick Hollander, at age seventy-nine in Munich. He had written her songs for many films, from
The Blue Angel
to
A Foreign Affair
—melodies sassy and pungent that he fitted to her personality. From “Falling in Love Again” to “Illusions,” Hollander’s tunes became identified with Dietrich’s voice and presence, and composers for her other films invariably turned to those recordings for inspiration.

This death was followed, on June 24, by that of Rudi, who was also seventy-nine. He had suffered a fatal heart attack and was found by his housekeeper sitting upright in a rocking chair in his San Fernando cottage. For several years, he had lived alone, for Tamara—who had finally endured irreversible mental breakdown—had to spend the last years of her life in an institution, care which Dietrich underwrote. Hectored for years by the press, Rudolf Sieber had resolutely negated every request for interviews and had kept a dignified silence about his marriage to Marlene Dietrich. She had occasionally visited him, and there was no doubt of their loyalty, manifest in his financial advice and her ongoing support. According to their old friend Stefan Lorant, who had known them both for over half a century, the Sieber marriage—always more accurately defined as a friendship—was preserved by its very nonconformity to any standard. Marriage was a legal and social status they saw no reason to forgo. “Poor Rudi,” Marlene Dietrich Sieber said a few years after his death. “He was such a sensitive, sensitive man. I don’t know how he could have put up with it, living his whole life in the shadow of a famous woman.”

Her confinement throughout 1976 reinforced Dietrich’s tendency toward seclusion; thenceforth, she declined all requests for visits from friends (much less photographers or interviewers) either in hospitals or at her Paris apartment, to which she finally returned, with Maria’s help, late in 1976. She had devoted her entire life to the manufacture and presentation of a carefully calculated artifact, and when it was no longer presentable she seemed to feel there was nothing for anyone to see—that in a way Marlene Dietrich no longer existed.

Apparently at Maria’s suggestion, Dietrich decided to make her solitude creative by writing her memoirs. This turned out to be a more intriguing possibility than a satisfying reality, and the publishing history of Marlene Dietrich’s autobiographies was finally somewhat byzantine.

A book was indeed contracted in 1976, and it appeared in Germany three years later, published by Bertelsmann as
Nehmt nur mein Leben—Reflexionen (Just Take My Life—Reflections;
the words are taken from Goethe). Condensed, these random, shallow anecdotes formed the basis of Dietrich’s own English manuscript, submitted to and summarily rejected by her British publisher, Collins, to whom she was forced to return the advance. In this book, Dietrich offered nothing like a life story, gave not a single date, ignored the basic facts of her background and family and provided little more than a few vague comments on people she had known. Any journalist could have revealed more.