After the fifth or sixth night, I realized I was kind of trapped in a web with Marlene. I was single and every casino had great-looking girls in the chorus line and I wanted to hang out, but I couldn’t do that if I was having dinner with Marlene. Don Rickles was playing the lounge at the Sahara and whenever I would go in there with Marlene, he would lay all this stuff on her about me like “There he goes, looking for broads. Any broad will do. Look out for him, girls. He’s heading to the front door.” I loved Rickles and thought he was hysterical, but Marlene took it seriously and would get really angry at him.
The first time Marlene and I worked together in Vegas, I didn’t stay at the Sahara. I was at the Bali Hai Motel, and one day while I was playing tennis there, I saw Marlene walking by with a big bag of groceries. I hadn’t known her very long at this point but she got the key from the front desk and let herself into my apartment. When I came off the court, she had had the juice from six steaks condensed for me to drink.
It was summertime and I was sweating like crazy, so I threw my tennis clothes on the floor and went to take a shower. When I came back out, she was washing my clothes for me. The amazing thing about Marlene was that despite all the fame and stardom, she was still a German hausfrau at heart and always did everything she could to take care of me.
Marlene and I got a little drunk together one night in Vegas and as I was taking her back to her room, she tried to kiss me and said, “Let’s go inside.” But I just didn’t want to go there with her. Maybe I was smart enough by then to know I couldn’t conduct the orchestra every night behind a woman I was sleeping with, even if I had wanted to sleep with her, which I didn’t. It would have been like falling in love with fire.
After we finished the engagement in Vegas, I stayed on at the Bali Hai so I could get a divorce from Paula. Back then, you could only get a divorce in Nevada if you were there for six weeks but it was a fun city to be in. There were showgirls in every hotel, and a lot of them were real beauties.
Marlene and I then went on tour to South America. In Rio de Janeiro, the two of us would walk in the hills at night and listen to the drumbeats coming up from the city. That was the first time I heard the baion beat, where the one is followed by a one-beat pause and then two half beats. Phil Spector used it in “Be My Baby,” and it’s in Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters. You also can hear it at the start of “Any Day Now,” a song Bob Hilliard and I wrote and Chuck Jackson recorded.
Whenever Marlene and I flew into a city in South America, there would be a big press conference and Marlene always insisted I be there with her. Sooner or later, the question would come up about whether we were together. Marlene, who could speak French and Spanish as well as English and German and I think Italian, would always say, “Oh, no, there is nothing between us because he is so busy and such a ladies’ man, he has women all the time.”
In places like Chile and Argentina, it was always very difficult for me to get a girl past the front desk of our hotel. Since no one thought anything about two women going upstairs together, Marlene would sometimes do me the great favor of bringing the girl to her room so I could pick her up and take her to mine. The funny thing is that most of them were dogs.
The real romance between Marlene and me took place when we were onstage together. There would be a scrim in front of me to help with the lighting effects, but for the last three numbers, they would open the scrim, and lo and behold—a Jewish piano player would be sitting there. Even though it always scared the shit out of me, Marlene would introduce me to the audience every night by saying the exact same thing: “I would like you to meet the man, he’s my arranger, he’s my accompanist, he’s my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer, but that isn’t true. He’s everybody’s composer . . . Burt Bacharach!”
The most amazing tour I ever did with Marlene was in the spring of 1960, when she went back to Germany for the first time since the end of World War II. As soon as the tour was announced, the German newspapers were filled with letters from people denouncing Marlene as a traitor for having fought with the enemy in the war. What Marlene had really done was put on a U.S. Army uniform while entertaining the troops. She had hated Hitler and the Nazis and gotten as many of her Jewish artist friends out of there as she could before the war began.
The outcry against her returning to Germany was so loud that Norman Granz, the promoter, had to cancel our concert in Essen. In Berlin, we went from doing five nights to three and what began as a seventeen-city tour became twelve. Before we opened in Berlin, Marlene held a press conference and told a reporter that since all her former friends in Germany had either left the country or died in the concentration camps, there was no one left there for her to see except for Hildegard Knef, the actress and singer.
On May 3, 1960, we opened at the Titania Palast in Berlin. Because the ticket prices were so expensive, there were five hundred empty seats in the house. Marlene started the show by singing “Falling in Love Again” in German and then she did “The Boys in the Back Room” and “One for My Baby.” She sang in English, German, and French and dedicated one of her songs to Richard Tauber, the great operatic tenor, and Friedrich Hollaender, who had composed the music for The Blue Angel. Both of them had been forced to leave Germany because they were Jews.
Her last number was “I Still Have a Valise in Berlin,” which she sang in a white tuxedo. When she was done, Mayor Willy Brandt led the standing ovation and Marlene took eighteen curtain calls. The reviews were all very positive, and the audience loved her so much in Munich that she had to take thirty-six curtain calls. They liked her a lot less in the Ruhr, and as we were walking through the lobby of the Park Hotel in Dusseldorf, a hysterical young girl who hadn’t even been born during the war ran up to Marlene and spat right in her face while screaming how much she hated Marlene for betraying Germany. Marlene’s response was to tell a press conference that she would never perform in Germany again.
When we got to Wiesbaden we were greeted by bomb threats. The French string section we were traveling with freaked out and wanted to leave the tour, but somehow we managed to get them onstage. At one point during the show I would play a “Blue Angel” medley while Marlene went off to change into tails. When she was ready to come back out, I would cut the orchestra and she’d walk to a chair at the edge of the stage, sit down in a spotlight, and sing the Harold Arlen song, “Vun more for my baby, vun more for the road.”
With Marlene, every move was precisely calculated and she would always smoke a cigarette and move away from the chair at a certain point in the song. When she stood up and moved to the left at this show, she misjudged the edge of the stage and fell off it, landing right at the feet of Josef von Sternberg, the man who had discovered her years before. She had her left hand stuck in her pants pocket and hit the floor with her shoulder.
Marlene didn’t know it at the time but she had broken her shoulder and was in shock from the pain. Somehow I realized she was about to start singing the same song she had just done, so I began hitting the same note on the piano again and again to bring her back and it worked. She went out to dinner with von Sternberg and his son that night, but the next morning I insisted she let me take her to the American Air Force Hospital, where the doctor told her she had fractured her humerus.
Marlene refused to take anything for the pain. Instead she tied the belt of her raincoat around her arm and off we went to the next city. She walked onstage that night with her left arm tied to her body with a bandage that she hid with sequins and rhinestones, and I did what I could to help her learn how to sing without moving her arms. She never missed a show. In every way imaginable, she was a warrior.
It took Marlene about three weeks to heal from the injury and then we flew to Israel. On the plane to Tel Aviv, Marlene got a stewardess to sing her a song in Hebrew over and over again so she could learn the words while I took notes so we could do it onstage. When we got off
the plane, the promoter met us and said, “Miss Dietrich, of course you are not going to sing any songs in German here because as you know, the language is forbidden in this country and no German films are shown and German cannot be spoken on the stage.”
The promoter also told her that a couple of weeks earlier, Sir John Barbirolli had conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony in Israel. Even though Mahler himself was a Jew, the public outcry was so intense that Barbirolli had been forced to conduct the choral parts in English. Marlene looked at the promoter for a while and then she said, “I will not sing one song in German. I will sing nine songs in German.”
He thought she was joking, but Marlene was brilliant when it came to things like this. When she got onstage in Tel Aviv the first night, she opened with “My Blue Heaven” and then “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” both of which she sang in English. Then she said, “I would like to sing you a song as a mother sings a lullaby to a child, and the name of the song is ‘Mein Blondes Baby.’ ”
There was a huge gasp from the audience and then a hush fell over the entire hall as Marlene started to sing in German. People were crying and so was I, and so was most of the orchestra. Marlene did nine German songs that night and it was one of the most emotional experiences of my life because the dam broke. Even though Israel was already selling machine guns to Germany and Israelis were driving around in Volkswagens, Marlene broke the barrier against the German language being spoken in the country while also making everyone realize how deep the connection between those two countries really was.
When we worked together in Madrid, Francisco Franco was in the audience. Marlene was offstage trying to get out of her gown so she could change into her white tie and tails as quickly as possible and I was conducting “The Blue Angel” medley. Half the Spanish musicians were playing it and half were playing something else. I started screaming “ ‘Blue Angel Medley’!” at them, and I threw the pencil I was using to conduct with at the drummer.
After the show was over, I gathered all the musicians around me. I was still furious and I kept saying, “We rehearsed it. We rehearsed it!” The problem was that they had been drinking sangria all day and getting loaded. As if none of this was their fault, they started screaming at me. “Why you no speak Spanish? Why you no speak Spanish?”
Whenever Marlene and I went out on tour, she would always make me rehearse the orchestra for eight days before the first show. After the first two days, I wouldn’t know what to do with them anymore and it would all go downhill, but that was just how obsessive she was about every aspect of her performance.
Marlene and I toured all over Russia, with a different opening act every night—a juggler, a dog act, a magician, and a pas-de-deux team of dancers. Right before our last show in Leningrad, Marlene and I were coming back from another terrible dinner to do our final show in Russia. As we were walking across the stage to go to the dressing room, the opening acts were warming up. The juggler was throwing his balls up into the air and one of them came down and hit Marlene right on the head, and she said, “Oooh!”
I said, “Marlene, are you okay?” And she said, “Yes.” As we were walking to her dressing room, I said, “Are you sure?” She said, “Yes.” I left her in the dressing room and said, “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes to check on you.”
Marlene always opened the show with “You’re the Cream in My Coffee.” When I came back into her dressing room, she said, “Burt,” and started to sing to me. She went, “You’re the cream in my vaht?” She had a really puzzled look on her face and I thought she might have been pulling my leg, but I didn’t think she had that kind of sense of humor so I was worried. I asked Marlene if she wanted to see a doctor but she said no. When I came back ten minutes later, I asked her how she was and Marlene said, “Okay.” Then she said, “Burt,” and started to sing “Just Molly and me and baby makes vaht?” Now I was very worried.
We got onstage and I hit an E major seventh on the piano to start the opening number. I didn’t know what to expect and she sang, “You’re the cream in my . . . la-la-la-la,” and never came back to any of the lyrics. The same thing happened with “My Blue Heaven” and “Go See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have.” And every song for the entire show was just like that. The title of the song and then “la, la, la, la-la-la-la” because she could not remember any of the words.
After the show, we got on the midnight train to Moscow. I went to see Marlene in her compartment and said, “You’ve got me scared out of my mind because I don’t know who to call or what to do.” Then she said, “Look, if I die on this train, you call my daughter Maria. She’s got the A-list and the B-list for my funeral and she’ll work it all out.” I didn’t know what to think but when we got to Moscow the next morning, she was just fine.
In Russia, the food was awful and the hotels were worse. Between shows, I would walk around looking for a girl who didn’t have gold teeth. By our third week in Russia even the cows were starting to look good to me. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.
I once flew to meet Marlene for a show in Warsaw. After we landed, I walked down the steps of the airplane in a driving snowstorm and Marlene was waiting for me with a huge mohair scarf from Dior, which she wrapped around my neck, and a flask of vodka. I had a couple of shots and I was drunk before I got into the terminal, but that was the way Marlene always took care of me when we were out on the road together. In Poland, she arranged for me to stay in a room where the great Polish pianist Jan Paderewski had slept, but there were so many ghosts and so much history in there and the drapes smelled so bad that I could not sleep at all.
After I’d had some R&B hits, Marlene and I were doing two weeks at the Olympia Theater in Paris and Quincy Jones came backstage after one of the shows. Quincy was a friend of mine and said, “Why are you doing this? You write good music. You gotta get back to it.” I said, “Well, Q, I’m seeing the world.” It was an answer I knew he would understand but I was also doing it for Marlene, because I felt like I couldn’t let her down. Whatever else I had going on, I always said yes whenever she asked me to go back out on the road with her.
There was always a duality with Marlene because she never wanted me to leave her. She always wanted me to be there conducting for her but the more famous and successful I became, the more likely it was that she would lose me. Marlene knew this but she was so proud of having been right about me as a songwriter that whenever I got good reviews, she would cut them out of the newspapers and send them to people all over the world.
On November 4, 1963, Marlene headlined the Royal Command Performance at the Prince of Wales Theater in London. There were nineteen acts on the bill and the Beatles came on seventh. At the end of their set, John Lennon stepped to the microphone and said, “For our last number, I’d like to ask your help. The people in the cheaper seats, clap your hands. And the rest of you, just rattle your jewelry,” and then they went into “Twist and Shout.”
Queen Elizabeth was giving birth to Prince Edward, so she couldn’t be there that night, but the Queen Mother came back after the show to say hello to everyone. Marlene bowed to her and the Queen Mother spent a lot more time talking to her than she did to the Beatles.
Elvis Costello: The annual big show of the year in England back then was the Royal Command Performance. It began in 1912 and benefits the Entertainers and Artists Benevolent Fund, founded by George V, so over the years it had a history of being a concert party for the royal family, and everybody from shows in the West End to comedians, jugglers, and ventriloquists would be on the bill, along with one or two big American or international stars.
This particular edition of the show is still remembered because the Beatles were on it and John Lennon said the thing about “rattle your jewelry.” When you watch the footage now, it was obviously a rehearsed remark, but at the time it seemed like he had done something incredibly cheeky and it was in all the papers the next day.
The curious t
hing about this is that Burt was on the bill with Marlene Dietrich. So were the Joe Loss Orchestra, the band my dad, Ross MacManus, sang with. When I finally met Burt many years later, I told him, “My dad was on the bill with you in sixty-three.” I’ve written a bunch of songs with different people but my two big cowriting collaborations are twelve songs with Burt and twelve songs with Paul McCartney and they were both on the bill that night with my dad. How strange and spooky is that?
Long after I had stopped working for Marlene, I agreed to conduct for her for six weeks on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. She was sixty-seven years old but still looked great and the show sold out for the entire run. On opening night, there were so many fans on the street outside the theater that they stopped traffic and a couple of cops had to hoist Marlene on top of a limousine so she could sign autographs and pose for photographs.
During the last five years of her life, Marlene became a recluse and would never leave her apartment on the Avenue Montaigne in Paris. She wasn’t working anymore and she wasn’t going out, and sometimes when I would call her, she would pretend to be the maid answering the phone and I would have to say, “Marlene, cut the shit. It’s me, Burt.”
Other times when I called her, Marlene would say, “Burt, I vant to make one more record.” She wanted to sing “Any Day Now” and had already worked out how she wanted to do it and how the timpani would sound. She would say, “Burt, I vant to sing it for you,” and then she would go right into “Any day now / I vill hear you say / ‘Goodbye my love. . . .’ ”
Anyone Who Had a Heart: My Life and Music Page 6
