Marlene (36 page)

We made long, extensive trips. Bacharach was enthusiastic, since he had not seen much of the world. I would wash his shirts and socks and have his tuxedo hung in the theater's boiler room. In short, I took care of him as though he were my savior. He accepted all this with good humor. But after every performance, he gave his objective judgment. He directed the orchestras that played for us with great patience, but he was also very strict. It was easy for him, because the musicians saw immediately how well he knew the score and all the instruments. The love they felt for him fused with mine.

Burt Bacharach possessed other assets that I think merit mentioning—his estimable knowledge of sound, for one. Tirelessly, he would run around the huge auditoriums in which we were performing, listen to the string instruments, dash back to the stage, position the microphones, and confer with the sound engineers (who also loved him) until he achieved the desired effect.

Moreover, he was clever enough to know when to stop. When he knew that nothing more could be drawn from an orchestra, he would say, “That's all for today.” And we felt that he was satisfied.

I don't know how many years this dream lasted. I know only that he loved Russia and Poland because the violins there were “extraordinary” and artists were accorded very special attention. He also felt at home in Israel, where music was also much revered. He liked Edinburgh and Paris and had a special liking for the Nordic countries. I think it had something to do with the beautiful Scandinavian women, and I often kidded him about this.

He liked
all
our trips, without exception. Latin America, too, where we recorded one of my best albums,
Dietrich in Rio.
In the evenings, we would climb the hills around Rio to listen to the drumbeats that rose from the city. He was tireless when he observed, when he learned, mastered, and arranged, and could refresh his memory with the sounds of the countries in which we had traveled—sometimes only briefly.

He went to West Berlin for a recording session, but spent all
his evenings at the East Berlin Opera, to listen to famous musicians. He had no fear. At that time very few Americans dared to go on the other side of the Wall.

Bacharach certainly didn't forget the exceptional days when he traveled down the Neva with one of the most beautiful girls of Leningrad and lived in a room in which Prokofiev had slept.

He certainly remembered the love and admiration of all those who accompanied us or the disappointment, especially in Germany, where everything could have been wonderful, but I was always disturbed by the love-hate relationship that I encountered there. In 1960, I was boycotted in the Rhineland, and someone spat in my face—nevertheless, I had to give my performance, and I got through it thanks to his help and my own Germanic stubbornness.

Most of the time while I was with Bacharach, I was in seventh heaven.

Up to now, I've spoken of the artist. Burt Bacharach, as a man, 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.

I would like to relate an incident that happened during a recital in Wiesbaden. I sang “One for My Baby, One More for the Road,” sitting astride a chair, in tails. Just a single spotlight lit my face. At the end of the piece, during the last bar of the song, I would make my way back to the wings, followed by the spotlight.

On that day, I was going offstage as usual, but I had misjudged the size of the stage. I went too far to the left, and fell off the stage. It's an eerie feeling when suddenly there is no floor beneath your feet. Since my left hand was stuck in my pants pocket, I hit the floor with my shoulder. I managed to get up and get back on the stage. I saw the chair where the stricken electrician had aimed his spotlight again, sat down, and heard a peculiar faint noise—drops of perspiration falling on my starched shirt
front. I simply could not remember the opening of the next song I was supposed to sing.

Suddenly, there was the noise of a gong in my ears. I wondered where the noise was coming from. Gradually, I realized that it was Bacharach, who kept on striking the same note on the piano to bring me back to reality. He had instinctively sensed that I was about to sing the same song again! Which, of course, I also did. Then I sang two other songs as well as the finale, in which I danced with the twelve girls in the troupe. I still had not yet taken my left hand out of my pants pocket.

That same evening, I went out to dinner with Josef von Sternberg, who had arrived with his son. Only when I got back to my room did I realize that my painful “scratch” might be something more serious. I phoned my daughter in New York.

I must explain why I always call my daughter first whenever any problems arise. My daughter knows everything she wants to know or has to know. Beyond that, she's an excellent actress, she has four sons and a husband. She cooks, takes care of her household, and goes on long trips. I know of no one else who better fits the title of a “Mother Courage, Jr.” A good Samaritan to those in need, a loving heart in which I take priority, together with her father, whom she took care of when I was working abroad.

Although she was in New York and I was in Wiesbaden, she advised me to go to the American Air Force Hospital in the city. Don't ask me how she knew about this clinic. For a long time I've given up wondering about her almost uncanny knowledge.

After a sleepless night, Bacharach and I drove to the hospital. The verdict was a fractured humerus, which made us burst into laughter. But Burt's laughter was forced. He was pale when he came out of the X-ray room with the doctor. The doctor, handsome as most Air Force doctors are, explained that it was very much like a “typical paratroop jump injury.” I remembered the many times I had been right next to whole divisions of paratroopers and wondered why I had never seen a cast. So, I said, “I don't need a cast, right?”

“Well,” answered the doctor, “during the war we had to be satisfied with tying the arm to the upper part of the body to set the
fractured shoulder carefully in place. So the fracture had to heal completely on its own.”

I had heard what I wanted to hear. I waited until the X rays were dry and left the room with a very hesitant Burt. We got into the car that was to take us to another city. Burt stood next to me as I tied the belt of my raincoat around my arm and the upper part of my body, and we took off. He was always at my side.

Never did he say, “Let's call off the tour.” He knew that I didn't want to cancel any performances. He, no doubt, had his own thoughts about this, but he never expressed them to me.

He didn't pressure me to give up or try to change my decision. He was my “lord and master,” a designation that probably displeased him, but that's just the way it was.

The first concert I gave with only one arm—the other hidden, tied firmly to my body with a bandage covered with sequins and rhinestones—was a disaster. A single outstretched arm has a dramatic effect, while two outstretched arms express utter abandonment—a plea for help and understanding. After that first failure, Burt and I discussed the problem, and with his help I found a solution. I learned to sing without using my arms and controlling the movements of the one arm. Everything went even better than I imagined it could. The fracture was healing well. If I bent forward, I could even do my hair with my forearm. But I couldn't move my shoulder yet.

Naturally, we were all insured. My producers as well as myself. But I didn't want to cancel the tour and collect the insurance.

I phoned my producer, Norman Grantz, who at the time was in Latin America with our beloved Ella Fitzgerald. He allowed me to cancel my tour whenever I wished but requested I forego any insurance claims. We continued to give our recitals, and closed with “thunderous applause” in Munich (the album
Wiedersehen mit Marlene
originated here).

I had to fly home, but without Burt, who remained a few days longer in Germany to supervise the recording. On the phone he told me that we had received sixty-four curtain calls and that the technicians had apologized for not having enough tapes to record them all.

We found that very amusing, since sixty-four curtain calls were certainly much too long for a record. But we were grateful to the Munich audience.

To the amazement of the specialists, my shoulder healed completely within three weeks. I was still somewhat limited in my movements, but my elbow could be moved enough for me to wash my hair.

You have to be a genius like Bacharach to find, after the musicians have gone home, the right relationship between the individual instruments and the recorded voice, all by yourself.

One day in Berlin, after a recording—the musicians had already gone—we were gathering the scores, and we suddenly discovered that we had forgotten to record one of the songs. We had not brought the orchestration along. Burt ran out of the studio, found some musicians who were still hanging around the halls, took them back with him, and improvised an orchestration on a sheet of paper, rehearsed it over and over again, and finally had the result recorded. It was a song of Friedrich Hollaender's, “Children, Tonight,” witty, full of bounce and
joie de vivre.
We worked at it past midnight, until everyone was satisfied with it.

Finally, this memorable tour came to an end, and we wept in each other's arms. We went to Israel, where we were to be accorded great acclaim. Burt felt as much at home in this country as I did.

Israel, the big cities, the kibbutzim! How many the memories etched in my mind! Since some of my songs had German lyrics, I had to either drop them or ask permission to sing them.

At that time artists performing in Israel were forbidden to perform in German. I had prepared myself in advance to sing in French or Spanish. So I was surprised when the audience, on the grounds of my record against the Hitler regime, wanted to hear me sing in my native language. I sang old folk songs, hit tunes from the twenties, happy, sad, sentimental songs, and when I closed with a Hebrew song, the response of the audience was overwhelming.

I had learned this song in an airplane from one of the stewardesses, who had sung it to me over and over again on my way to Tel Aviv while Bacharach took notes. The Israeli orchestra surpassed all our expectations, above all, the strings were superb. We performed in the splendid Frederick Mann Auditorium as well as in the biggest theaters of Jerusalem and Haifa. In the kibbutzim, we had a piano, a percussion instrument, and a guitar at our disposal, we trudged through the trenches followed by crowds of children who had never known streets. When we arrived at the performance site, we would wait until evening and the fighting had stopped.

In the big cities, there was always a restaurant open late somewhere, so that we could eat after the show. Despite the difficult period the country was going through, we were welcomed with love everywhere.

The word “love” reminds me of Russia. Russians love, sing and drink like no other people. After the First World War, my native city, Berlin, was inundated by Russians who had left their country after the Revolution. After they had spent all their money, they opened shops—the women made hats, and we young girls were fascinated by their skill and their romantic, and to us, eccentric view of life.

By nature sentimental, I had close contact with the Russians whom I knew, sang their songs, learned a little of their language (the most difficult of all), and gained many Russian friends. Later, my husband, who spoke Russian fluently, reinforced my “Russian mania” as he called it.

Thanks to my new profession, Russia opened her doors to me. This country also had a fantastic and moving surprise in store for me.

I never, never let my sheet-music folders out of my sight. They held the scores for my recital and many other songs that I didn't always sing. I was as careful with them as I was with my costumes. I took them with me on the plane, slid them under my seat, or held them under the blankets on my lap—in short, my music and I were never apart. Their loss would have been a disaster for me.

So I felt myself the guardian of a treasure. I always saw to it that everything was in order, that the sheet music was placed on the music stands. That was my sacred duty, my personal responsibility.

Moscow. After many rehearsals we were finally ready. I stood in the wings, eager to go onstage. The curtain had not yet been raised. Bacharach was standing on the stage. He liked to talk with the musicians before the performance, and when he didn't know their language, he made himself understood through the music.

Suddenly, the lights in the orchestra went out. All the lights went out. The music stands were literally in the dark—the sign to raise the curtain had already been given. Burt hurried over to me and told me that I should have the curtain lowered again, because the musicians couldn't read a single note.

The first violin rushed over to me. In German, he said, “Don't have the curtain lowered, we know the score by heart. We don't need any light.”

He quickly returned to his place, and I waved to Burt. The performance could begin.

The man had not lied, the musicians knew every note, and the orchestra was terrific. After the performance, we had vodka and caviar, and Burt and I embraced each one of them.

I always gave great dinners for my colleagues and invited their wives and relatives. Since you can't take money out of Russia, I happily gave everything to our Russian friends on the spot.

That was my first Russian tour. Others, just as delightful, followed.

The stage was paradise for me … naturally, because through my profession I got to know Joe Davis, who could transform the barest, dirtiest stage into a fairyland. Even when we performed in airport hangars, those gloomiest of sheds, Davis achieved a dreamlike effect, sometimes with a simple flashlight placed far from me on the floor. Joe Davis is the uncontested master of stage lighting. His wishes were always my commands. I endured all his moods and let him do as he pleased. He never gave up, he never compromised. The troupe's technicians adored him. At the end of a tour, when we had to split up, they always insisted on giving him
a farewell party I adored him and his friendship was very dear to me.