Blue Angel (47 page)

that of course Marlene was the center of attention. I began a kind of little interview, urging her to tell us all the story of her fantastic life. I asked her who was the first man in her life and she said her violin teacher. She was holding back nothing, and everyone was hanging on her words. Next I said, “Now tell us about your relations with women,” and she began, “Well, of course there was Claire Waldoff, and then . . .” By this time there was a great silence in the room, and I turned to everyone and asked, “Oh! Are we boring you?”
*

That autumn she was back in New York, theatergoing with Noël Coward and offering companionship to playwright Robert Anderson, whose wife had recently died. (They had met briefly when Maria had appeared in a road company production of
Tea and Sympathy.)
“I understand you’re lonely,” she announced on the telephone to him one day, inviting him to escort her to a play next evening. This Anderson declined, as he did any contact more intimate than a luncheon, for he did not wish to accept Dietrich’s overture.

But it was really she herself who was lonely, and in the following year she embarked on a series of short trips round the country, attempting to visit almost anyone she knew on a first-name basis, as if she felt her span of life was quickly running out. In 1958 and 1959 she performed her annual Las Vegas engagements (now worth
40,000 a week for four weeks), and few in her audiences seemed to care that there was less voice than ever. Everything about her appearances, in fact, seemed more and more frozen, stylized. Her shows were expanded in those years to include concerts in Rio de Janeiro, Sâo Paolo, Buenos Aires and Paris, where she added to her repertory American ballads (“My Blue Heaven,” for example), recent show tunes (“I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” from
My Fair Lady)
, and German, French and Brazilian standards.

“She looks ravishing and tears the place up,” Coward noted in Paris after her show at the Théâtre de l’Etoile in December 1959,
“[but] she has developed a hard, brassy assurance and she belts out every song harshly and without finesse. All her aloof, almost lazy glamour has been overlaid by a noisy, ‘take-this-and-like-it’ method which, to me, is disastrous. However, the public loved it.”

C
OWARD WAS ON THE MARK
,
FOR
D
IETRICH
’
S SHOWS
(preserved on recordings) were unvarying presentations of the same songs, each introduced by her embellished, self-aggrandizing anecdotes about (a) auditioning for
The Blue Angel;
(b) coming to America; (c) making this or that film; (d) serving the troops in wartime. And on each recording the audience’s applause was of course carefully and completely preserved. With Dietrich supervising the final cuts, it was also at least partly created: it was easy for her to demand (and subsequently easy for the listener to discern) the looped repetition of cycles of applause, whistles, shouts of approval. Reporters (like friends) were frequently subjected to documentations of this applause: “She plugged in a tape recorder and played me ten minutes of the uninterrupted applause which greeted her act when she was in Rio,” according to a journalist from London’s
Sunday Express
, “and I knew as soon as she discovered that my breathing was regular and my pupils undilated that there was no hope [that she would like or approve me].”
*

As for her singing, it could hardly be called that. Nor was she properly a
diseuse
in the style of Edith Piaf or Lotte Lenya, for there was something chillingly detached and unemotional about almost everything Dietrich recorded; it was hard to believe that she was wounded by love, impossible to accept from her the lyrics about emotional devastation. She did not, in other words, communicate so much the sense of a song’s lyrics as she marketed herself, and the recordings have none of the vitality or animation of those she did for
films in the 1930s. Dietrich gave no indication that her heart had expanded as the voice contracted. “Let’s not fool anyone,” she admitted in 1959. “It takes money to be glamorous these days. Glamour is what I sell in my act, and it costs plenty. It’s my stock in trade. My clothes arouse more comment than anything except maybe my figure.”

She marketed herself otherwise, too, recording five-minute network radio spots of advice in 1958 and 1959 that were astonishingly vapid even according to the stricter, more conventional requirements of talk-radio at the time:

—“It is very difficult to be happy without working, without taking pride in achievement, however small.”

—“Know your own limitations and be realistic about them. If you are a good carpenter, take pride in being a good carpenter.”

—“Men are so easy to love. All women have to do is to orbit around them, to make them the center, the hard core of existence. The trouble with so many modern women is that they want the men to orbit around
them
.”

—“Teenagers must be patient, more tolerant of our failures. We have some love and wisdom to give, and of course we all have to maintain our sense of humor.”

A sense of humor failed her one night in 1958, however, when she attended Carol Channing’s act at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. In a diaphanous negligée, mesh hose and exaggerated German accent, Channing devastated her nightclub audience with a parody of the queen of glamour, lying on the floor with her legs pointing to the ceiling and, à la Dietrich, chattering endlessly about herself—her songs, her films, her wardrobe, her travels, her wartime service. Then came her punchline: “But enuff about me—let’s talk about
you
for a vile,” she muttered throatily. “Vot do you tink of my outfit? Is it too flimsy for a grandmother?” The spotlight located Dietrich at a table as she rose magisterially and swept out. The impersonation remained in Channing’s act for several years despite Dietrich’s request that it be dropped.

P
ERHAPS RARELY HAS MERE CELEBRITY SO SUCCESS
fully sustained itself as in the case of Marlene Dietrich. “I don’t ask whom you are applauding—the legend, the performer or me,” she told an audience at the Museum of Modern Art after a retrospective tribute in April 1959. “I personally liked the legend. Not that it was easy to live with, but I liked it.” Tens of thousands agreed with her in the coming decade.

Everywhere, she knew how to exploit that legend. In Rio (part of a three-city South American tour in August 1959) a vast throng gathered to greet her arrival at the theater and she apparently swooned. “I didn’t really faint,” she later admitted, “but it was the only way I could get inside. Besides, there were many photographers present, and it was a good chance for publicity.” But as Rupert Allen later verified, many in the pressing crowd were paid, professional theatrical extras glad to be part of a documented mob scene. They were present after she stormed into the local constabulary and demanded that off-duty police attend her that evening.

Just so in Paris, where the following December she planned every detail of her arrival: Maurice Chevalier and Jean-Pierre Aumont were recruited to meet her at the airport. On her arrival, she carried a small, decorated cigar box which, as arranged, finally evoked a question about its contents when she stepped before the waiting microphones. It was, she said with a wink, the gown for her show. The following day (November 19) every Paris newspaper announced the imminent display of the scantiest costume outside the Folies-Bergère.

To old friends like Coward, such tactics made her “boring and over-egocentric, poor darling”; new acquaintances, like Paris correspondent Art Buchwald, found her curiously fascinating when she read him her best reviews and explained the two portions of her act—revealing gown for the first, white tuxedo and top hat for the second (bringing to life her final costume from
Blonde Venus):

You could say that my act is divided between the woman’s part and the man’s part. The woman’s part is for men and the man’s part is for women. It gives tremendous variety to the act and changes the tempo. I have to give them the Marlene they expect
in the first part, but I prefer the white tie and tails myself . . . There are just certain songs that a woman can’t sing as a woman, so by dressing in tails I can sing songs written for men.

Although there was, in 1959, a brief liaison with the athletically handsome forty-two-year-old Italian actor Raf Vallone, Marlene Dietrich by the end of the year had restricted her romantic life to her musical arranger and conductor Burt Bacharach, then thirty—“a man who took me to seventh heaven,” as she wrote later, often reverting to language hitherto reserved for her affair with Gabin.

He was the most important man in my life after I decided to dedicate myself completely to the stage [and] my highest goal until the day he left was to please him . . . I lived only for the performances and for him . . . With the force of a volcano erupting, Bacharach had reshaped my songs and changed my act into a real show. On tour, I washed his shirts and socks. In short, I took care of him as though he were my savior. And as a man, he embodied everything a woman could wish for. He was considerate and tender, gallant and courageous, strong and sincere; but above all, he was admirable, enormously delicate and loving. And he was reliable. His loyalty knew no bounds. How many such men are there? For me he was the only one . . . He was my lord and master.

And so Bacharach remained for several years of international travel with her and her show. His youth, charm and talent made him enormously attractive to Dietrich, who desperately required proof that she could still compete with younger women, and who knew few ways other than sex to fascinate a man she needed and to sustain his attention. For Bacharach’s part, the life of a bachelor/traveling musician could otherwise have been dismally lonely, and his simultaneously personal and professional intimacy with Dietrich quickly proved to be enormously valuable. Additionally, he indeed cared for her patiently, coping with her ego and her moodiness, her self-absorption, her constant need to be confirmed as an artist and as a
woman. Twenty-eight years her junior, Bacharach was certainly among the most estimable to her. He was also, it seems, her last male lover.

To Burt Bacharach belongs at least part of the credit for perhaps the single most dramatic period of Dietrich’s seniority, for had he not encouraged and attended her she might not have returned to Germany in 1960—an event of which the success (not to say her safety) could not be guaranteed.

On Thursday, April 14 (following a three-week engagement in Lake Tahoe, Nevada), Dietrich and Bacharach arrived in London en route to Paris, where she had scheduled wardrobe fittings at Dior and Balenciaga. The German tour had just been announced, to include concerts in Berlin, Hamburg, Oldenburg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne, Hanover, Wiesbaden, Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt (for which she would receive almost
4,000 for each performance). But when Noël Coward took her to dinner, she admitted that she had some hesitations about the journey. “She was in a dim mood,” he noted in his diary, “because all is in a state of chaos [and] the German press has come out against her.”