Blue Angel (51 page)

Marlene Dietrich was, reflected the great designer and photographer Cecil Beaton in a diary entry,

a remarkable piece of artifice . . . All the danger spots were disguised. Her dress, her figure, her limbs, all give the illusion of youth . . . Marlene has become a sort of mechanical doll. The doll can show surprise, it can walk, it can swish into place the train of its white fur coat. The audience applauds each movement, each gesture. The doll smiles incredulously . . . Marlene has a genius for believing in her self-fabricated beauty. Her success is out of all proportion and yet it is entirely due to her perseverance that she is not just an old discarded film star. She magnetizes her audience and mesmerizes them (and herself) into believing in her. The old trouper never changes her tricks because she knows they work, and because she invented them.

“I give the audience what they want,” she insisted. “In my case it is beauty.” But her complete dedication to maintaining the illusion of youth and eternal allure—what she had to believe people wanted—was slowly exacting the bitter price of a terrible loneliness. This she could not yet acknowledge, although it was manifested in
increasing ill temper toward her staff and even her producers—though never toward her public, whose wishes she always considered.

Her concerts in Moscow, Leningrad and Riga in May 1964, for example, were carefully planned for Russians who knew little of her on film and for whom she sang mostly popular ballads and folk songs in four languages. When Soviet journalists tried to draw her into political statements—“How have you conducted your struggle against fascism? By means of your films or with your songs?”—she neatly parried, “By myself.” She also knew how to win the cold war, and for this she warmed with her monologue: “I have a Russian soul,” she told the audience at the Moscow Variety Theater, offering them an intimacy she had denied Berliners. “I cannot speak Russian, which is very sad. I can tell you I have always loved you, loved you for your great writers, poets and composers and the Russian soul. And so I will learn Russian and come back to you again and sing to you in Russian.” Yekatarina Furtseva, the minister of culture, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, then the angry young man of Soviet poetry, led the cheers.

To reporters she was not quite so genial, however. “You must be an American,” she snapped when one admiringly asked how a grandmother was so energetic, and to another who inquired about her wardrobe and her good looks she shouted, “That’s the same kind of stupid, boring old question!” She might be Venus to her adorers, but Dietrich with the press was a daughter of Mars; she bowed low onstage, but like Concha Perez in
The Devil Is a Woman
, she knew how to make slaves of her audience. (Dietrich’s tartness on the Russian tour was not ameliorated by her exhaustion after she fumigated, scrubbed and waxed her Russian hotel and dressing rooms, for she was convinced that the austerity of each signalled a perilously germ-ridden condition.)

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.

D
IETRICH
’
S OBSESSION WITH MANIPULATING THE EF
fect 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.