In January 1964, Dietrich traveled to Warsaw with her musicians. They made a stopover at the Berlin-Schönefeld airport, “and there they were all with the flowers and the Russian champagne, which, by the way, is very good, and the tears and the love.”47 She was presented with a bouquet of red carnations and white chrysanthemums on behalf of Helene Weigel to honor her antifascist actions. She had never been received with as much eagerness, enthusiasm, and love as on that visit to Poland. The minister of culture made a toast in her honor, quoting from Proust and Descartes; she felt as though she was in Paris, not Warsaw. The Poles were polite, well educated, and cordial. The traces of war were still evident everywhere.
One Sunday, she placed a bouquet of white lilacs at the monument to commemorate the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. “I went to the Ghetto site (all rebuilt now just the monument of marble Hitler had reserved for his own after the war stands there all alone in the middle of a huge square) and I cried again for the sins of my fatherland.”48
In May and June, she gave guest performances in Moscow and Leningrad. Dietrich was the first American entertainer to perform behind the Iron Curtain. She enjoyed the Russians because they were never lukewarm—they either loved or hated. Dietrich felt that she herself had a Russian soul. Her concerts turned into a grand celebration of this spiritual affinity. Thirty minutes after the end of the concerts, no one in the audience had any intention of leaving.
Once these tours were over, she felt emotionally and physically drained. Her one-woman show was the summation of her life. Dietrich no longer wanted to take on any roles, but instead to portray what life had made of her: a nightclub singer with a rich past. That was the role she had been assigned in The Blue Angel, and it had become the role of her life. The Blue Angel had had two central settings: the stage and Lola Lola’s dressing room. This is where Dietrich’s career had begun, and that is where it would end. The dressing rooms and stages may have changed over the years, yet they remained the closest thing to a home for her. She always took what she needed with her. When she arrived, her suitcases were already there. Her clothing was hung up and inspected. Her swan coat hung over the screen like a trophy. (Hemingway, the big game hunter, would have approved of that.) Others might put up a cross to bless a room; Dietrich attached a photograph of Papa Hemingway to the wall. From the observation point above her mirror, he followed her transformation and waited for her to finish her performance. She piled up her congratulatory telegrams along the edge of the big mirror, so she could keep up with whoever was thinking about her while applying her makeup. The light on the mirror was very bright, and it took several seconds for her eyes to adjust to the blinding glow. Cigarettes, ashtrays, and a lighter always needed to be within reach. She smoked continuously, but never frantically. Even when she was upset, she retained her leisurely style of smoking. Her scissors and tweezers, laid out on her vanity, sparkled like surgical tools in an operating room; there was also an array of jars, bottles, lipsticks, brushes, and ointments, along with Kleenex, wigs, hand mirrors, cotton pads, and hairbands. A glass of champagne or scotch was always at hand. The alcohol alone was not enough to give her a sense of well-being, so wherever she went, she found Dr. Feelgoods to prescribe her amphetamines and sleeping pills. Many of her friends, including Kenneth Tynan, Romy Schneider, and Judy Garland, took these magic pills. She would quickly shake a few into her hand and wash them down with scotch. Then it was time for her medicine to treat her circulatory problems. As she had done so many times before, she successfully transformed herself into the woman the audience out there was awaiting. She needed help putting on her girdle and dress, and she was loath to slip off her silk kimono. As the skintight dress stretched over her body, she was overcome with panic that she had put on weight again. Then she would make a pledge to lay off the scotch starting the following day. She kept threaded needles and pearls handy so that if a pearl fell off, she would be able to sew in a new one on the spot. She squeezed her swollen feet into high-heeled, narrow Ferragamo shoes. She felt like screaming in pain for the first few steps, but slowly made her way to the stage. From the semi-darkness she was warned not to trip over the cables on the floor. Everyone wished her good luck, but she barely registered what they were saying. Finally she was standing alone in front of the curtain. It went up, and she took her first step into the glistening light. From this point on, everything proceeded according to plan. The position of the microphone stand had been precisely determined; before each performance, she checked to see whether the distance and height were set up correctly. Every movement of her head was rehearsed. Dietrich knew how to create great effects with minimal props. After she gave brief introductions to her songs, photographs portraying her life story were projected behind her back. The applause she received was a tribute to her life as a whole. In Berlin, in Jerusalem, in Warsaw, in Moscow, and in Paris, Dietrich was a World War II soldier onstage. Awarded the American Medal of Freedom and several medals by the French Legion of Honor, she kept alive the memory of a war that divided the century in two. Her strict Prussian upbringing taught her how to present herself in public. Her body, encased in seductive clothing, had known war. Dietrich was herself a piece of history. Only she was allowed to sing German songs in Israel. She proudly pointed out that she was a holdover from the Weimar Republic. After the musical tour through her life, which she carried out with a cool distance and a frozen look on her face, she received her applause. She took a bow in front of her audience with perfect posture. By the end of her career, she herself was paying for the bouquets of flowers that were tossed onto the stage. Once she was back in her dressing room, her transformation back into a woman of her age got underway. She was weary and knew that, once again, she would not be able to sleep. When the tour came to an end, her feelings of loneliness and desolation intensified. She had not been enjoying life in the United States for quite some time. She had never liked Los Angeles, and as she grew older, she was less and less content in New York. She felt “unkempt and far from home,” as she wrote to Friedrich Torberg.49
In 1963, she rented an apartment in Paris on the elegant Avenue Montaigne, near the Champs-Élysées. Her friends Ginette and Paul-Émile Seidman lived around the corner. The furniture from Sieber’s former Paris apartment was taken out of storage after nearly thirty years. Dietrich sent him photographs of her new apartment and of his furniture. He had left the decision to her on what ought to happen to it, thus signaling that he had no intention of returning to Europe. At least once a year, when she was setting up her show in Los Angeles, she would visit him on his farm. He had not been well for the past few years. He suffered from chest pains and found it difficult to endure being alone all the time. The phases that Tamara had to spend in the clinic grew longer and longer. All he had left were the chickens and television. Then Dietrich received a telegram from Tel Aviv with the news that her mother-in-law had died. Sieber did not go to Europe for the funeral; he sent wreaths. Dietrich was his link to the world. On one occasion, he spent forty minutes listening to her concert in Las Vegas by telephone, and on another, he was with von Sternberg at Dietrich’s concert in the Congo Room of Hotel Sahara. On occasions of this kind, he bought a drink at the hotel bar and entered the cost into his daily planner. She sent him the exact schedule of her performances, and in return he kept her up to date about their old friends. He criticized her nostalgic recording (the album was called “Berlin—The Smashing City”) for featuring too many “ghosts”: “Cannot imagine that this record would interest younger people; how is it selling?”50 When Dietrich came to see him along with Jo and Jo’s family, and cooked a meal for them all at the farm, Sieber cherished the memory of this evening. There was some tension between von Sternberg and Dietrich. His creation was enjoying triumph as a singer on the stages of the world, and he was jealous. Sieber wrote to her, “A new star was born! Never have I read reviews like those, and I cried so much and am so happy for you. . . . I’ll write more soon, especially about Jo, who behaved horribly again—mean, hostile,
surely envious of your success. He is dead to me—I will never call him up again.”51
In June 1961, Dietrich and Sieber became grandparents for the fourth time. Dietrich was with Maria in New York when she brought her son David into the world. Conscientious as he was, Sieber wanted to be a good grandfather. Although he had to count every penny and did not see his grandchildren very often, he sent each of them five dollars for their birthdays and at Christmas. Tamara needed to be hospitalized, but he was out of money and could not pay a previous bill. “I could use some money urgently—if you can. Forgive me!”52 The check arrived promptly, but this money was not enough for the expensive clinic. Dietrich paid, and insisted that he hire someone for the farm work. Tamara now needed electroshock therapy. In order to save money, Sieber wanted to take her home right after the treatment. After the first round, in March 1963, he wrote, “A sad sight when she came out into the waiting room. Red in the face, crying, staggering. In the car she kept on crying for a while, then she slept nearly the whole way. At home, she can’t do anything, and if she tries, she does everything wrong.”53 Her speech was slurred, she was unwashed and unkempt, her teeth were unbrushed, and her face was smeared with lipstick. The beautiful young woman she had once been was gone for good.
Sieber assured Dietrich that no one in the clinic knew who he was. Every letter to his wife ended with a request for money. He urged Tamara to write to Dietrich, and she tried her best, but her memory had been impaired by the shock treatments. In early 1965 she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and about a year before her death, Tamara seemed to lose her mind altogether. Sieber described the woman he had loved as “a living corpse.” On March 26, 1965, his daily planner noted in bold letters, underlined in red, “Tamara has died.” On March 31, she was buried in the Hollywood Memorial Cemetery. Dietrich didn’t attend the funeral.
During her dazzling, stirring performances, Dietrich was wracked with pain in her legs. An obstruction in her aorta was blocking the blood flow, and her famous legs were giving out. She knew that in public she had to appear unchanged, otherwise she would be regarded as old, and that would spell the end of her career. The latest fashion worked in her favor, and she took to wearing slacks again. The now-famous series of photographs that Alexander Liberman took in her New York apartment shows her in slim-cut black leather pants and a black pullover; her lipstick is red and her hair is short. Marlene Dietrich looks astonishingly young and energetic.
In the mid-1960s, she began to be plagued by frequent bleeding and unexpected weight loss. Panic-stricken, she examined her daily habits for clues to what might be causing it. She noted what she was eating. Although she certainly liked being slim, she feared that an insidious illness was at the root of the weight loss. Just as she had spent many years frantically noting telephone calls and visits from Yul Brynner, she was now busily recording her bouts of bleeding. Kamillosan ointment and Tampax were her constant companions. For several days in a row, she restricted herself to water and avoided her beloved champagne. She could not decide whether the bleeding had originated from a physical or a mental condition.
Eventually, Maria persuaded her to see a Swiss specialist. Maria asked the doctor to tell her the diagnosis before talking to her mother. When he called her up to let her know that Dietrich had cervical cancer, she realized that it would be best not to reveal the unvarnished truth to her mother. The doctor recommended inserting radium inlays. He claimed that the success of this therapy was miraculous, and at the very minimum, it would postpone the need for surgery. Dietrich was told simply that this therapy would impede the development of cancer. Maria took her mother to the clinic. While Dietrich was being treated for cancer in a clinic in Geneva, Tamara Matul died in California.
In April, Dietrich was back on stage in Johannesburg; this concert was followed by many others in Great Britain, and in early October she headed to Australia. Before her departure, she spent an evening with Sieber at his farm. He brought her to the airport the following morning. The long, exhausting flight was followed by days full of rehearsals and sleepless nights, but the opening night on October 7 was a success. As long as she had something that needed to be done, she bore up. The lonely Sundays and nights were hard on her. She had no one to confide in down in Australia, so she typed a letter to Maria on a tattered piece of hotel stationery almost entirely in capital letters, which reinforced the sense of panic conveyed by the contents. She told her daughter about her first sexual encounter after the medical treatment in Switzerland and about her persistent bleeding. Between rehearsals, interviews, and going on stage in the evenings, she had to find a doctor to prescribe Proluton, a progestin drug. She wrote about the color, consistency, and frequency of her discharge in excruciating detail.
I am sick with worry as you can imagine. . . . I have nobody to talk to. I am talking as I am writing. The damned logic. Call me collect whenever you want to. . . . I am 9 hours later than you. I go to the theater from 7.30 p.m. till 1 a.m. (latest) Thursday and Saturdays from 1.30 p.m. till 1 a.m.54
She still had four weeks and a great many performances ahead of her, and she was not expected back in Los Angeles until November 14. She was now considering flying to her gynecologist in Europe directly from Sydney. Maybe she could have a third round of radium? She wrote out the new flight connections by hand. But what would happen with Rudi, who had been looking forward to her return? The first thing was to get this Australian tour behind her. “Love joy and call me. I am lonely lonely lonely down under,” she wrote at the bottom of the letter.
Dietrich survived the cancer. As planned, she landed in Los Angeles on November 14 and visited Sieber on his farm. She cooked scallopini for him, and they enjoyed a bottle of Pouilly Fumé.
Her year came to an unhappy conclusion when Bacharach announced that he would be ending his partnership with her. Bacharach embodied everything Dietrich sought in an artist and a man. They had gone through quite a bit together. He had been at her side when she was spat at in Düsseldorf; he had gone with her to the hospital after her fall in Wiesbaden, celebrated with her in Warsaw, was deeply moved along with her in Jerusalem, and strolled through Moscow with her. Dietrich was aware that he was more interested in younger women, but she never fully accepted this. Bacharach was from a different generation. He admired her long and glorious past, yet he also knew that the place at her side offered no future for him. But Bacharach’s solo career was successful; he was known as “this generation’s Gershwin.” He had everything to gain by parting ways with Dietrich, while she lost her maestro. When von Sternberg and Dietrich had gone their separate ways, she was still young enough to find new directors. Back then, she could rest assured that something new would come along after their split. This time was different. Dietrich was sixty-three years old, and she knew that she would no longer find anyone better than him. His departure made her painfully aware that she was anchored in the past.
From this point on she returned to the sites of her success, and she flourished. She spent an average of four months a year on tour. But once Bacharach left her, singing was no longer a pleasure. She was also missing love. Dietrich had always gotten any man she wanted, yet was never satisfied. She thought she had found the love of her life in Yul Brynner. He enjoyed her desire for him and she was enraptured by the sexual intensity of the relationship, but from the very start, this love affair had no future—which was probably the true basis of her attraction to him.
From time to time, she reignited old affairs, but the grand passions of her life were behind her. Her relationships with her friends were no easy matter either. Over the years, von Sternberg checked up on her every now and then, and at times their paths crossed: at Sieber’s farm, at the memorable concert in Wiesbaden, or at film festivals in France. Now that von Sternberg had undergone psychoanalysis, entered into another marriage, and enjoyed fatherhood, he was able to ward off the shadows of the past. He sported a white beard and continued his eccentric ways. His ivory tower kept growing higher, he assured Dietrich. Photo
graphs of the two of them in the 1960s seem to suggest that they belonged together. The same melancholy and shyness can be read in their eyes, and they still clung to each other. They responded to the impertinences of the world with elegance. In his letters, he would continue to strike the “Marlene tone.” “Yesterday I came from Venice to Vienna by way of the North Pole. In Venice, our Spanish film was being shown to great success. Once again, you acted brilliantly. The people there were captivated by the twenty-year-old movie, which looked as though it had just been shot.”55 In 1966, the forthcoming publication of von Sternberg’s memoirs was announced in the United States. Dietrich was beside herself: “Von Sternberg’s book is coming out here and there is a lot of comment in the papers, but they like me better. The son of a bitch. When I read frontpage headline POOR MARLENE I could kill him.”56 Once she had read the book, she no longer wanted to see him. On December 22, 1969, von Sternberg died of a heart attack in Los Angeles. Sieber noted it in his daily planner, and also that Dietrich was on his farm at this time. Dietrich did not attend von Sternberg’s funeral. It is unknown whether she shed a tear for her creator.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 48
