CAMP

It had all been quite simple. Marlene Dietrich felt that her new career seemed to be taking off by itself, as she wrote in a positively giddy letter to her daughter in August 1953. She had been in Las Vegas, and “Tulla” (Tallulah Bankhead), who was performing at the trendy Sands Hotel, brought her onstage. Dietrich told her daughter, “I went out to see if I could get them to whistle.”¹ She took the plunge without any rehearsals, or even nervousness, and performed as a nightclub singer. It worked; she still had it in her. So she signed a contract offered by the neighboring Sahara Hotel, which was not quite as chic as the Sands, but it was bigger. Besides, she would be earning ninety thousand dollars for three weeks—ten thousand more than what Bankhead was getting at the Sands. She proudly reported that no one had ever earned this much for performing in Vegas.²

Dietrich was well aware that her presentation would require careful planning. In movies she had not had direct contact with her audiences, but now she would. There would be no close-ups or retakes. Everything would take place in real time. Every inch of her had to be dazzling. Jean Louis, a costume designer at Columbia Pictures whose big coup had been the black satin dress that Rita Hayworth wore in Gilda, designed Dietrich’s outfit. For her stage debut, he made a “see-through” style of dress, which draped her body in beaded lengths of diaphonous fabric that had been dyed the color of her skin and molded to a specially designed close-fitting foundation. Ten seamstresses spent three months of intense and tedious labor sewing each individual bead into place on the delicate fabric. The dress was tailor-made right on her body. She stood in the studio for up to ten hours a day while the seamstresses worked away at her six-thousand-dollar dress. Being the perfectionist that she was, she noticed any pearl that was not in its precise place.

It was worth all the effort that had gone into making this dress. The audience gasped when Dietrich proudly and confidently took the stage. After the first show, she invited the press into her dressing room for a glass of champagne. Media professional that she was, she let it be known that she was naked under the dress. When asked why she was wearing a dress like that, she replied: “This is Las Vegas. If you can’t wear it here, you can’t wear it anywhere.”³ She would not go onstage like this unless she was offered a similar fee, and she let it be known that she would not be staying long-term. The many yellowed newspaper clippings that describe her first performance focus on two things: her fee and her dress. Any mention of her singing was disparaging. Her performance was not regarded as an artistic success, let alone as the beginning of a new career. For Dietrich herself, the key issue was to be free of financial worries for a while and not to have to shoot one of those sappy movies. But not all was well with her in Las Vegas. Shortly before Christmas, she called up her friend Leo Lerman in New York and complained that a ninety-thousand-dollar job was also damned lonely. The soldier’s daughter had gone off to battle alone. This was not so easy, especially because she was always being asked how old she was. Nearly every article called her “glamorous Granny” or “the movies’ senior glamour queen.” On her birthday, she was badgered by journalists to reveal her true age. Of course she kept to herself that she was already fifty-two and claimed that she had just turned forty-eight, even though for a woman over thirty, four years made no difference; either way, she was too old. Whenever she was asked what her next movie role would be—as she often was—she came up with some excuse. Charlie Feldman had the unpleasant duty of informing her that roles she had been promised had been cut out of the films or that the only roles on the table were for someone to play older women, which she categorically refused to do.

In this situation, Major Donald Neville-Willing, the manager of the London nightclub Café de Paris, offered Dietrich a set of performances. Her friend Noël Coward sent her a telegram urging her to accept the offer: DARLING CERTAINLY THINK YOU SHOULD APPEAR CAFEDEPARIS STOP ROOM AND AMBIENCE PERFECT FOR YOU STOP YOU SHOULD GET ONE THOUSAND POUNDS A WEEK STOP MONTH OF JULY VERY GOOD AUGUST TOO LATE IN SEASON ALL LOVE NOEL.⁴ In late March, she agreed to six performances a week for four weeks beginning on June 21, entertaining her audience for forty-five minutes after midnight. For the duration of her stay in London, she would be put up in a suite at The Dorchester. The airfare for Dietrich and her personal assistant would be covered. She insisted on booking seats in the last row, with a seat left empty beside her.

Every table at the Café de Paris was sold out for all four weeks. Each evening she was introduced by a different prominent guest. Coward was first, followed by Laurence Olivier, Robert Fleming, Richard Attenborough, and Alec Guiness. There was such a stampede in front of the café that the police had to contain the crowds. Inside, the illustrious guests enjoying pâté de foie gras and champagne while awaiting her performance included Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Douglas Fairbanks, Lord and Lady Norwich, and Jack Buchanan. Dietrich had not revealed what she would be wearing. To the audience’s great delight, she came onstage in the famous translucent gown. As one critic wrote, you thought you were seeing everything underneath until you realized that you were actually seeing nothing. She knew her routine inside out. She sang a dozen of her most famous songs, including “The Boys in the Back Room,” “Falling in Love Again,” and “The Laziest Gal in Town.” Dietrich sang in both English and German, knowing full well that she was the only one who could get away with introducing German songs. In contrast to her audiences in Las Vegas, these people had experienced the war firsthand. The German language was not music to the ears of the people in this city, which had been attacked by the German Luftwaffe, but Dietrich welcomed the challenge of showing that being a German and being a Nazi were not one and the same thing. She therefore made a point of including “Lili Marleen,” the favorite song of the World War II soldiers, which earned her this caustic comment: “Rommel could have had no complaint about the enthusiasm with which she sang it.”⁵ Her interludes were short and pithy, and she retained a polite distance from her audiences. She did not do encores, no matter how thunderous the applause, even though she was said to have enjoyed playing recordings of the applause she received to friends and visitors—only the applause.

There was only one person in London she wanted to see: Kenneth Tynan. The young theater critic was the star of the London arts scene. Tynan was witty, knowledgeable, eloquent, highly gifted, melancholy, and flamboyant. He always stood out in a crowd, yet he was smartly dressed. After the performance, he generally went backstage, and she reached her hand out of the dressing room and pulled him in while snubbing her other fans. He watched her bathe and get her clothes on, then he took her out to dinner. It was from Tynan that the British learned that Dietrich listened to Beethoven’s late string quartets and the early Stravinsky in her suite in the Dorchester until the early morning hours. Tynan and Dietrich related to each other as equals. She enjoyed his cultivated eccentricity, loved his witty malicious gossip, and admired his intellectual aggressiveness. He was fascinated by her androgynous nature and famously remarked: “She has sex but no particular gender.”⁶ His parties and high spirits were legendary, and his essays universally admired. Tynan numbered Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Lillian Hellman among his friends—and, now, Marlene Dietrich. In his eyes, she was the personification of the kind of glamour that was anchored in the past.⁷ Tynan, who was an exhibitionist by design, knew the kind of energy it took to unfurl this glamour evening after evening. Dietrich was twenty-five years his senior; her history was intertwined with the heyday of Hollywood and went back to the fabled Berlin of Isherwood, Auden, and Spender. With Tynan, she could relax into her actual age. He was interested in her life experience, her professionalism, and her dalliances. Tynan and Dietrich got along famously, and in the summer of 1954, they became friends for life.

While one set of performances was still running, she had to be thinking about the next one. Starting in mid-October, she would be back in Las Vegas. In the intervening time, she had to play the successful, urbane artist, and that role required a suitable wardrobe. She often flew to Paris for the weekend and spent her days there with fittings at Balmain or Dior, meetings with Françoise Sagan, and cooking for her friend Jean Marais. She would spend rainy hours at Fouquet’s, her thoughts on Jean Gabin. Rumor had it that she would watch his new movies on the sly and bemoan the love she had lost. Gabin had banished her from his life. All the same, she remained loyal to France. On August 21 at six in the evening, Dietrich strode down the Champs-Élysées side by side with former front-line soldiers and members of the resistance to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation. She had on a dark blue, high-necked raincoat, her honorary war medals, her American Legion forage cap, and white gloves; the expression on her face was proud and serious. This was the role of her life: standing up for a good cause in a uniform and flats. She would think about Remarque, who always called the Arc de Triomphe a locus of their love. Four years earlier, she had sent him a telegram on his birthday and told him she wished he were with her in New York, “this forsaken town.” He wrote to her every once in a while, telling her about his drawers filled with pictures of Marlene and how nice it was to hear from her, the “floor-scrubbing Nike,” in the middle of the night across the continents. She could not hide her jealousy of Boni’s new girlfriend, the lovely Paulette Goddard, who was close to ten years younger than she. In contrast to Dietrich, Goddard had no financial problems. At the side of the wealthy Remarque, she could afford to live a life of luxury without needing to work. Dietrich conveniently forgot that she had been offered that place first. She missed the company of Hemingway, with whom she could indulge in malicious gossip about Remarque. Hemingway was living in Cuba with his wife Mary, whom he called “Papa’s pocket Venus,” and Dietrich and her friends adopted the epithet. At night he listened to Dietrich’s recordings at his hacienda, and during the day he went fishing and swimming while longing for the camaraderie of the war. Hemingway understood and shared Dietrich’s tormenting loneliness. He wrote to her in 1955: “You sound in worse shape than me. We’ll have to pull ourselves to pieces and throw in the counter-attack. Any good kraut can mount a counter-attack from memory.”⁸ Although he was quite successful—his new book was selling “like the Bible or Mein Kampf in Germany”—and had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature the previous year, he could not find his footing in the postwar world.⁹ Time and again, he invited Dietrich, “my great and bravest and wonderful Kraut,” to Cuba, but just as she had never gone to Porto Ronco, she would never take Hemingway up on his invitation to visit his country home in Cuba.

Her second set of performances in Las Vegas began on October 15. The attraction was once again not her singing, but her dress. This time Dietrich showed her famous legs in a gown that fit tightly to the hip and was made of an almost transparent fabric. As an added effect, a wind machine set the wispy material in motion.

In 1955, her show was divided into a female and a male portion. She was able to shed her dress and slip into a classic tailcoat in under a minute.¹⁰ To this day there is no other actress or female singer who can wear a tailcoat the way Dietrich could. Next to her, everyone else looks like an imitation.

She was still agonizing over Yul Brynner. Waiting for the phone to ring, hoping for signs of love, exhilarating nights of passion, and raging jealousy continued to define her daily life. She lay awake night after night, agonizing and entertaining thoughts of suicide as she pictured him in the arms of another woman. She wrote to him: “If you want to change your mind about us and end the love you called ‘infinite’ you must know that I will end my life. It cannot be that you want to do this without reason, to me who loves you so much since so long.”¹¹ Nothing made sense without him. But where could she actually carry out her suicide—in Billy Wilder’s summer house? She could not come up with a suitable spot, so she dropped the idea. No matter how angry or desperate she felt, she was defenseless when he turned up at her door. She described her jumble of emotions in a letter to Noël Coward:

He came in smiling, bottle under his coat. He came into the bedroom and told me about Paris, the fog around the Eiffel Tower, the streets, the bridges and how he thought about me. I stood there thinking this is not a dream. He is really back and loves me. Then the hurricane broke over me for three hours and I fell asleep for the first time in two months to the day without torture and sleeping pills.¹²

When she was with Brynner, she made solemn promises that she would change and stop asking questions of him, yet the very next moment she would pester him about when they could get together again. It would appear that over the course of their years of enervating conflicts, he lost his respect for her. When he came to see her at night, he was usually drunk, and would wake up the next morning without remembering anything he had said. He was confident that she would stay with him, and she humiliated herself in the process. Her friends had to listen to her unburden herself for hours on end. The affair with Brynner dragged on until the end of the 1950s. She found moments of solace in affairs with other men, but they did not free her from the gnawing fear of being alone.

In 1956, Rudi Sieber suffered his first heart attack. He was still living on his chicken farm, Sunset Ranch. His diary entries had been frighteningly repetitious for years. On any given day, he was sure to provide updates on the number of eggs the hens had laid, his expenditures, the weather, his telephone calls, and any birthdays. He used a sharp pencil to record the minutest details of when he bathed or washed his hair, how often he took down the curtains, and on which day “Russian Easter” was celebrated. Sieber was leading a life that continually looked back to the past and kept old memories alive: “Kaiser Franz Josef’s birthday!” was a typical comment. Apparently his rundown ranch in this California valley had become the perfect nostalgic setting for the homeland he had lost forever. His visitors were friends from Vienna (Josef von Sternberg, Friedrich Torberg) and from the Berlin of the 1920s (Grete Mosheim, Fritzi Massary, Max Kolpé). He would bring back the old times with them over Moselle wine, Salzburg dumplings, or Wiener schnitzel. He was well liked, entertained frequently, and enjoyed hosting parties. Dietrich sent him packages of bockwurst, salami, Berliner Weisse beer, cognac, and shirts. He needed her checks and was positively obsequious in his gratitude, although he did not write to her as often as she would have liked.

Tamara Matul stayed with him. Although this relationship made her ill and unhappy, she was unable to end it. She lived a rootless life in the shadow of Sieber, who in turn was dependent on Dietrich. Matul had hoped to start a family with Sieber and move on from her role as lover, but there was no escaping the family she had been drawn into. Dietrich called the shots, and she wanted Sieber to remain her husband. Dietrich made sure that each of Matul’s pregnancies was aborted. A child born to Matul and Sieber would have posed a threat to their complicated arrangement, and was therefore out of the question as far as she was concerned. Each time Matul underwent an abortion—and there were several—a part of her died. Sieber’s diaries contain lists of his consumption of alcohol and hers of pills. She could not get through the day without psychotropic drugs. She grew bloated from all those pills, and her eyes were red from all her crying. Rumors were swirling that she was mentally ill, but Dietrich and Sieber chose not to comment on them in public. After a visit to the ranch, Dietrich wrote to her daughter: “Tami is nuttier than ever and I was crying into my beard driving home from the ranch because it still affects me to see the crazy be stronger than the sane.” Since Matul was unable to cook, the three of them had gone to their usual diner, “a lousy little joint with a loud jukebox. The food was so greasy that I ate some old cottage cheese instead and did not touch it.” To her horror, Sieber ate up everything. On the way back, she offered to pre-cook a pot au feu in her apartment in Beverly Hills and bring it to the ranch. “When I arrived Tami yelled she could not keep it all, she would still have to wash the dishes even if she would only heat it, and I calmly packed everything together, washed the dishes after dinner and left too sad to say goodbye.”¹³

Dietrich had to go out into the world and earn money. Finally she was offered a part in a new movie with Vittorio De Sica. The Monte Carlo Story was filmed in Rome and Monte Carlo. It was about a destitute count, naïve Americans, jewelry, pawnbrokers, and gambling. Dietrich played the Marquise de Crevecoeur, whose addiction to gambling turned her into a con artist. She looked ill. She was quite thin and had a glazed expression on her face. Her waist was down to twenty-one inches.¹⁴ Clothing and jewelry seemed to be holding together both the role and the actress. She did not go out a single time during the filming, neither in Rome nor in Monte Carlo. The worst part was her insomnia. Although she generally got by on very little sleep and was famous for staying out until daybreak, the sleep she was now getting was too little even for her. Sleeping pills had no effect.

Since leaving Germany nearly thirty years earlier, she had been living out of a suitcase. She always carried lists of which items of clothing were in which location. In her case, location referred not only to a geographical place (Los Angeles, New York, or Paris), but also to which suitcase contained it. For her performances, she could not forget a single thing, and she had to have everything she needed to go onstage—shoes, dresses, wigs, makeup—with her, in duplicate if at all possible. Her daughter Maria, who was familiar with all the logistics, served as Dietrich’s support system and personal help as she had for the past thirty years, even though Maria now had a family and had become a sought-after actress in various television series. In May 1957 she gave birth to her third son, Paul, in New York. Dietrich—or Massy, as she was called in the family—was at her side.

In the spring, Dietrich performed in Las Vegas and acted in a movie directed by, and starring, her friend Orson Welles. They knew each other since the 1940s, when they performed together for a group of draftees. She had been crazy for him back then, but he was married to Rita Hayworth and not interested in an affair. Both Welles and Dietrich were horrified by Hollywood, yet they had to keep on working there.¹⁵ Welles had asked her to be in his new movie in no uncertain terms: REFUSE ATTEMPT TO IMAGINE PICTURE WITHOUT YOU. . . . ALL MY LOVE ORSON.¹⁶ Her role was actually not in the original script; the idea was for her to show up during the filming and shoot her part within one day or night. There was no salary, and she would have to provide her own outfit. The blonde Dietrich had to be transformed into a dark-haired, fiery-eyed Gypsy woman, the type of woman that Welles preferred. When she arrived that evening, wearing a dark wig, at the appointed meeting place—a dilapidated bungalow in Venice—Welles embraced her and rejoiced. Dietrich played a cigar-smoking madam in a brothel with whom the drunken police captain, played by Welles, seeks refuge. The police captain is a “bad lieutenant”: he is corrupt, fabricates evidence, and becomes a murderer. Touch of Evil is set in a Mexican border town, yet a lack of funds made it necessary to shoot it in Venice at night. But that is not evident to the viewer, who feels transported to this small town right from the start. Dietrich was the only easygoing character in the movie. She played Tana as a woman of the world who is nobody’s fool. Besides, she is the only one who manages to like the fat, evil police captain. In this film, Dietrich proved what she was capable of when she worked with a good director. She proudly remarked: “I worked with him for only one long evening. But to hell with my modesty; I don’t think I’ve ever performed as well as on that day.”¹⁷

It took years for the outstanding quality of Touch of Evil to be recognized, but a great deal of attention was showered on her next movie, Witness for the Prosecution. Dietrich had seen the stage version of the Agatha Christie play on Broadway and agreed to play the female lead in a movie version if Billy Wilder directed it. She chose Edith Head, whom she knew from the days when Head had been Travis Banton’s assistant, as the costume designer. Head knew whom she was dealing with: “Dietrich was not difficult; she was a perfectionist. She had incredible discipline and energy. She could work all day to the point of exhaustion, then catch a second breath and work all night just to get something right.”¹⁸ Head’s costumes brought out the icy beauty of Christine Vole. The witness for the prosecution wears simple, figure-hugging suits, white blouses, and small hats. Vole is a German woman, and her outfits are her uniforms. The cast also featured Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, and Elsa Lanchester. Dietrich got the impression that Wilder had not thought her capable of taking on this role. When he called to tell her that her acting had been superb, she remarked that this praise was meaningless to her because Yul had not said anything.

In November, Witness for the Prosecution was celebrated with a big party in New York. The guest list included Truman Capote, Rex Harrison, Irene Selznick, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The box-office returns were quite impressive, and the movie was nominated for six Oscars, including Wilder for Best Director (for the sixth time), and Charles Laughton for Best Actor—his third nomination. Dietrich deserved a nomination, but just as in the case of A Foreign Affair, she was passed over.¹⁹

Although she did many radio broadcasts, there was no real money to be made in this medium, because radio had lost a good deal of its attractiveness with the advent of television.²⁰ Dietrich disdained television. She was proud of her daughter Maria, who often appeared on television, but she herself wanted nothing to do with it, apart from watching Peter Pan with her grandchildren in the afternoon. She decided to direct all her efforts at the stage. At long last, she would not have to hide behind imaginary characters but could decide on her own what she would bring to the audience—namely, her life. For her, the outside world—including her friends, foes, and benefactors—existed solely with respect to herself. Her countless love affairs intensified this singleminded concentration on herself. She had spent her whole life playing unhappy women who had suffered for love, and there was no reason not to remain true to this role. She was almost sixty years old when she decided to stand onstage in the spotlight and sing about love, desire, and sorrow. On the stage she was conceived of as ageless. Her show was a wistful reminiscence of a woman who seemed blessed with eternal youth. Dietrich remained tied to the cinema, but now she was directing the film of her life.

Three miracle workers stood by her side in this undertaking. The first was the aforementioned Jean Louis, head costume designer at Columbia Pictures, who kept coming up with bold new creations for her, such as the now-legendary swan coat in 1955 and the “tassel dress” three years later. The second was Joe Davis, who, according to Dietrich, “had the gift of turning even the barest and filthiest stage into a fairy tale world.”²¹ She bowed to his expertise even though she considered herself an inspired lighting artist. Davis was a steadfast worker who was always out to achieve the optimal solution and would not brook compromises. Dietrich liked this division of labor. On the stage, she was unsparingly exposed to the eyes of the audience. She had to hide her age while putting herself on display. In Davis’s light, she felt protected and at the same time shown off to good advantage. The third miracle worker was Burt Bacharach, the man who put the soul in her songs. One fine day, Bacharach showed up at the door of her hotel room.²² She asked him to come in, looked him over, and was instantly smitten: “He was young, very young and very good-looking and I had never seen such blue eyes.”²³ This young god intuited what she wanted. Bacharach became Josef von Sternberg’s successor. She described meeting him as the most profound change in her professional life. Dietrich had blind faith in him, and his praise and criticism became her standard from this point forth. But in contrast to her partnership with Jo, these two were not close to the same age; Bacharach was twenty-six years her junior. Although he was not a big name yet, everyone considered him a man with great promise. When he wrote how, shortly after they met, Dietrich went to his apartment without his knowledge and waited until he came back from playing tennis so she could serve him her famous consommé, it becomes evident that she thought of this as the prelude to an affair. While he washed off his sweat in the shower, she washed his tennis outfit. He does not reveal whether he responded to her advances. Her love for him was an open secret. “As a man, he embodies everything that a woman could want. He was considerate and tender, brave and valiant, strong and sincere, but above all he was admirable, enormously sensitive, and loving. And he was vulnerable.”²⁴ He, in turn, valued her as an artist, respected her as a person, and at times perhaps loved her as a woman. “You are the sweetest of all possible angels. What a wonderful surprise.”²⁵ His arrangements were adapted to the pitch of her voice; he took her preferences into consideration, concealing her weaknesses and bringing out her strengths. She now had an experienced and brilliant songwriter at her side. Bacharach drew his inspiration from many styles of music, including bebop, Maurice Ravel, avant-garde movements, and gospel. His elegant music gave Dietrich a connection to the buoyant modernity of the early 1960s. Bacharach dusted off her songs. Dietrich, who had never been able to take pleasure in the American promise of happiness, suddenly sounded much lighter. With this program, thoroughly tailored to her artistic style, she was poised to take the world by storm. In the preceding years she had usually performed in Las Vegas, and once in London, but she now expanded her radius. Bacharach traveled around the world with her. “When you went into a country with her, you went in as a conquering army.”²⁶

From July to August 1959, she went on tour through South America, giving rousing concerts in Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. SNOWED UNDER ORCHIDS GOOD SHOW GREAT REVIEWS STOP FOUND HEAVENLY ARISTOCRATIC CREATURE LIKE COLETTE PLAY.²⁷ In São Paulo, she met a young man whose youth and naivete she found intriguing. The letter to Maria in which she describes this platonic affair, declaring that she will not try to seduce him despite being sorely tempted, is a letter of farewell to love.²⁸

By now, Dietrich had to admit to herself that her affair with Yul Brynner was hopeless.

As far as love is concerned, I am still suffering from an old wound from the time before it even was one. It wouldn’t be so hard if he would let me go, but he isn’t doing that. From time to time, he shows up again and then I don’t have the nerve to end it. I haven’t seen anything new for years. All this is not good, I know. The children get all the love that remains, so all is not lost. I am lost, and that is a shame. Waste, waste, waste.²⁹

Her grandchildren were a source of comfort to her. Her home was where the Rivas were, she wrote in one of her dejected letters to Maria. “Kiss Michael’s knee, Peter’s black eyes, Pauly’s mouth and your heart and all that is in it.”³⁰ The boys were aware that they had a very special grandmother, but she was quite easygoing with them. She took them to the movies, baked delicious jelly doughnuts for Christmas, and made them scrambled eggs that turned their stomachs.

In November, she performed in Paris at the Théatre de L’Étoile near the Arc de Triomphe. Maria sent her a telegram to let her know she was thinking of her: GO GIRL AS THEY SAY IN THE OLD COUNTRY MACHS GUT.³¹ Dietrich wrapped the pampered Paris audience around her little finger. Her cosmopolitan spirit, charm, style, and beauty were a far cry from the popular perception Parisians had about dumpy German women. She celebrated her triumph at Maxim’s nightclub, with a smiling Burt Bacharach to her left and a doleful Yves Saint Laurent to her right. During this fall season, she was seen at the side of Jean Cocteau, Noël Coward, Maurice Chevalier, and Alberto Giacometti, and sitting at dinner tables with Yves Montand, Sophia Loren, Alain Delon, and Romy Schneider. Rumor had it that Gabin was planning to show up with his wife. The photographers and Dietrich waited every evening, but Gabin did not come.

In March 1960, Dietrich’s American promoter, Norman Granz, told the press that Dietrich’s tour of Europe would start in Germany. Her first concert was planned for April 30 at the Titania Palace Theater in Berlin. This announcement created quite a stir. Why was this artist, whose antipathy to Germany was well known, giving concerts in Germany? The short answer was: for the money. “Will Marlene Dietrich—as people have been saying—be getting 15,000 to 20,000 marks per performance during her tour? No—she will not be pulling in 15,000 or 20,000 marks every evening. As Norman Granz tells us: ‘Marlene is getting much more!’ The ticket prices will reflect this.”³² Dietrich’s high fee, which commanded respect from Americans, was scorned by some members of the German press. There was an explosion of envy about an artist who had proved that one could preserve one’s dignity as a German when confronted with Hitler as a Führer. A parochial mob ran riot in letters to the editor with the usual clichés about her being a traitor to her country, and there were demands that she stay away from Germany. But some journalists were mortified by these carryings-on, and understood that Dietrich’s visit fifteen years after the end of the war represented a test of character for the Germans. The chief reporter at Die Welt traveled to New York for an interview. In Dietrich’s Park Avenue apartment, he met “a lady full of reserve and culture.”³³ She talked with him while smoking one cigarette after another, and made it clear that she was coming to Germany to sing, not to face the Nuremberg trials. She hated Hitler, but not her own people. She had no need for explanations; she had gone to Bergen-Belsen with the American troops when thousands of murder victims were still lying there. Asked how she felt about being a German, she replied, “If you’re a Jew, it’s easier to forgive, the way that you can more easily forgive something that is inflicted on you by others. But I feel the shared responsibility; I was part of the nation that caused all of it.” Even so, Dietrich wanted her visit to Germany to be viewed as a statement that it was time “to stop making accusations and to bury the shadows of the grim past.”³⁴

There was no direct flight from Paris to Berlin. On April 30, after a stopover in Frankfurt, Dietrich flew on Air France and landed in Berlin’s Tegel airport at 10:30 p.m. Hildegard Knef picked her up. The two of them are laughing in almost every photograph, but Dietrich’s laughter looks forced. She had on a beige spring outfit under a three-quarter-length mink coat, and she wore a big hat. Her rooms were reserved at the Hilton, where her eagerly anticipated press conference would also take place the following day. The crowd was enormous. For over an hour, there was such a racket that people could not hear their own words. Dietrich was in black: a simple dress with a sophisticated cut. High-heeled shoes showed off her lovely legs, and her face was partly concealed behind the wide brim of her hat. The small French Legion of Honor ribbon was her only adornment. She endured the popping of flashbulbs in grim-faced silence. She wore white gloves and smoked one unfiltered cigarette after another, seemingly indifferent to her surroundings. Der Tagesspiegel published this lyrical description, “Eyes with a good deal of past, cool polished eroticism, a white pain in her composed face that does not allow for the expression of feelings and remains inscrutable. She has lovely, large, and patient movements. Something monkish about her; so severe. Lasciviousness, devil from head to toe? No.”³⁵ Dietrich answered questions in a soft voice. No, she had not been to the Tiergarten section of town, and no, she had not visited her former apartment building on Bundesallee either. She had recognized the zoo, where she had played marbles as a child, from her hotel room. She did not have mixed feelings. You don’t go to a city to be sad just because you had been a child there. She did not lapse into Berlin dialect, nor did she wax nostalgic. Instead, she displayed wit and intelligence. When she discovered that reporters were secretly holding microphones, she threatened to call off the press conference. She had explicitly asked that no microphones be used, because she had an exclusive contract with NBC. She had come to Berlin in order to work and to earn more money; that was all there was to it. The room-service receipts indicate that she ate in her room—veal steaks, green salad, and tea with lemon. She did not eat at the bar. Why go out? Where would she go, and with whom? The Silhouette was closed down, and Schwannecke and Mutzbacher had not been there for quite some time either.

On Tuesday, May 3, at 8 p.m., she gave her first concert. Sixty police officers were on hand in order to contain possible rioters, but this precaution proved unnecessary. Even though it has become customary to describe her reception in Berlin as hostile, there were no organized protests. The people who had declared their antipathy in anonymous letters or in letters to the editor were nowhere in evidence. There were only “two timid individuals waving cardboard signs saying ‘Marlene go home’ and ‘Marlene get lost,’ who were first quite proud of their efforts, but later felt rather stupid.”³⁶ The attendees included the governing mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt, with his wife, Rut; film producer Atze Brauner; Hildegard Knef in a skintight black sheath dress with her companion, David Cameron; and director Harry Meyen with his colleague Wilhelm Dieterle. Everyone who was anyone in Berlin showed up. There were many elderly married couples who were dressed festively but modestly. Dietrich made her audience wait while a French jazz group played a set. Finally she came onstage. Dietrich was visibly moved by the big applause. The concert began with “Allein in einer grossen Stadt” and ended with “Wer wird denn weinen.” Her notes show that the banter she had jotted down to fill the time in between songs was in English. Dietrich’s well-crafted lecture to the people of Berlin, which was insistent but never condescending, emphasized what they had lost by having Hitler as their Führer. Friedrich Luft compared her art of showmanship to Piaf and Montand. “She didn’t have the tear in her eye that people were hoping to see. She did not bow to an inflamed public opinion, but instead remained consistently and courageously the person she was, and held firm to her stance.”³⁷ After the concert, former emigrant Brandt rose from his seat and prompted the audience to give her a standing ovation.

In Bad Kissingen, the concert hall was only half filled. Afterward Dietrich had to leave through the back entrance; out front, a waiting throng of teenagers was cursing and booing her. This jeering crowd was not a group of former Nazis; these were young people who had come of age in the 1960s. A similar situation had occurred in Düsseldorf when a seventeen-year-old girl spit in her face and yelled “traitor” at her as she was leaving her hotel. Bacharach, who was standing next to her, was still horrified by this incident decades after the fact. He thought it was acid. Dietrich bore up, and her proud and lovely face was unscathed. She wrote in her memoirs that when she was spat upon and then had to go onstage, Bacharach’s support and her own German obstinacy are what got her through. But the succeeding events make it plain that she was quite thrown. In Wiesbaden she fell off the stage. It was the first fall of her singing career—and another fall of this kind would bring her career to an end fifteen years later. But more bad news was to follow. Josef von Sternberg, her discoverer, was witness to her fall. He was sitting in the audience with his son, and they had planned to have dinner with her afterward. She had no intention of calling off the dinner, and she spent the evening with Jo. It was only when she returned to her room that she realized that something was terribly wrong. Maria urged her to have X-rays done at the American hospital, and it turned out that her collarbone was broken. Dietrich did not cancel any of her concerts. For the press conference in Munich, she lashed her broken shoulder to her raw silk dress with a Dior chiffon scarf. The roses on the scarf were the same shade of red as the tiny ribbon from the French Legion of Honor she had fastened to her dress. Her tour in Germany was a financial disaster, and she looked forward to leaving the country once again.

Two weeks later, she flew from Paris to Israel. When she arrived in Tel Aviv, one of the reporters advised her that she would not be allowed to sing in German. It was forbidden to speak German on the stage and in movies. Dietrich replied quite calmly: “No, I won’t sing one song in German; I’ll sing nine.” Bacharach, who related this story, claimed that the man was shocked by her response. Her concert in Tel Aviv began with two English-language songs: “My Blue Heaven” and “Cream in My Coffee.” Then she sang her first German song: “Mein blondes Baby” (“My Blonde Baby”), a mother’s lullaby. According to Bacharach, this moment in the concert hall in Tel Aviv was one of the most emotional experiences of his life, “because it was sort of like the dam had broken, and people were crying. Nobody was upset in a negative way. It was like a catharsis that freed them.”³⁸ Next came the Richard Tauber song “Frag nicht warum” (“Don’t Ask Why”). She sang all nine German songs in a row, including “Lili Marleen,” in response to a request from her audience. The Israeli author Ephraim Kishon thought the audience had lost its mind: “A stanza of Mahler, who was a Jew—they’d rather die. A Nazi song by a German singer—by popular request.”³⁹ Dietrich donated the proceeds of her first concert to a rehabilition center for the Israeli army. She had agreed to this tour in Israel on the condition that she be able to meet Moshe Dayan and perform for the armed forces. Dietrich’s estate contains handwritten letters she received from German Jews whose lives had been saved by heading to what was now Israel. They thanked her for having come and for her commitment to fighting Hitler, wrote about the suffering they had endured, and celebrated her as a great artist of the twentieth century. Dietrich had been invited to Yad Vashem, but she did not visit the Holocaust research center until her second tour through Israel in February 1966, when she was honored as one of the “righteous.”

Dietrich had become a businesswoman. She spent her days writing letters, making telephone calls, sending telegrams to all parts of the globe, giving instructions, and rehearsing. Photographs had to be taken and sent out, lists drawn up and gone through, recordings arranged, and studios found. There was a constant hustle and bustle on matters concerning notes, dollars, and percentages. Even though she had her agency, a great many matters still fell to her in ensuring successful performances. She had to make arrangements for the musicians, hotel rooms, clothing, new songs, and finances. Although she was always working, she did not end up with much income. Her chaotic life, her thriving business, her financial worries, and, increasingly, her physical ailments also meant that she had no time left to focus on men.

Her sister Elisabeth was the only remaining member of her close family. There have been many speculations as to why she rarely mentioned Elisabeth. Was it because Elisabeth’s husband had been a member of the Nazi party, or was it a simple question of vanity, a means of disguising her age? The letters that the sisters exchanged until Elisabeth’s death in 1973 show that Dietrich wanted only to protect her. It was clear to her that Elisabeth would not be able to endure being hounded by the press. These two very different sisters had retained their childhood intimacy. Elisabeth called Marlene “pussycat,” and Marlene called her “my sweetie.” Elisabeth ungrudgingly acknowledged that her younger sister was the cleverer and more beautiful of the two. She described her physical appearance in self-deprecating terms: “I am fat, not dainty, and know that I look hideous.”⁴⁰ When she made awkward attempts to show interest in her sister’s life by talking about Paris or New York, she seemed to have no idea what she was saying. For her, Marlene lived only in the memories of the childhood and teenage years they had spent together in Berlin and as a film star on the screen, in photographs, and in magazines. She commented on the films and enjoyed the many pictures Dietrich gave her. She felt close to Boni, Étoile, and all the other famous lovers without ever having met them. Elisabeth was Marlene’s tie to her childhood and adolescence. When she wrote her memoirs, she asked her sister what color the army postal service envelopes were or what area their father’s side of the family was from. Elisabeth received a monthly check from her as well as the royalties from Deutsche Grammophon. Without this help, she would not have known how to get by. In addition, she got regular packages with dresses, stockings, instant mashed potatoes, records, and English-language newspapers. A whiff of the big wide world spread through Elisabeth’s little apartment in Celle whenever a package arrived from Fauchon in Paris. Elisabeth felt that her sister Marlene brought “sparkle and shine” into her otherwise bleak life. She found it somewhat disconcerting to put on Marlene’s luxurious coats, but she enjoyed being the sister of a woman who frequented Parisian fashion boutiques. To return the favor, she copied out page after page of poems by George, Hölderlin, Platen, Goethe, Heine, and Shakespeare for her sister; tracked down song lyrics for her; got her books by Joseph Roth; and at the pharmacy, large quantities of a drug called Geriatrea, which Rudi needed to take as well. Dietrich’s shy, humbled sister may have been ingenuous and poor, but she had attained a reasonable level of education and decorum. Journalists kept ambushing her, hoping to take pictures of her in her apartment or get an exclusive story about how the sister of the antifascist Dietrich had been the wife of an SS man. Elisabeth assured her sister in 1965: “My dear pussycat, all I can say is that neither my husband nor my son worked in a concentration camp. . . . We spent five years showing movies to the Jews.”⁴¹

Although she did not want to stir up her own family secrets, Dietrich was willing to play the cinematic role of a German who was convinced of the innocence of her people, a conviction she had never held in real life. In late January 1961, the shooting for Stanley Kramer’s film Judgment at Nuremberg began in Los Angeles. This would be the last movie with a leading role envisaged for Dietrich. Her fellow cast members were Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and Maximilian Schell. Never did she play a more Prussian character than in Judgment at Nuremberg. In this movie, she is the standoffish widow of a Wehrmacht general who has been executed by the Americans because of his war crimes. Her antagonist, whom she hopes to convince of the innocence of the Germans, is Dan Haywood, an American judge played by Spencer Tracy. He comes to Nuremberg to mete out justice to judges who cooperated with the Nazis. Dan is fascinated by and drawn to the poise and beauty of the widow Bertholt. She introduces him to German Moselle wine and the German way of life. She proudly rebuffs his compassion for her plight. While making him real coffee that she had managed to save in the war, she explains to him:

I’m not fragile, Judge Haywood. I’m a daughter of the military. You know what that means, don’t you? . . . It means I was taught discipline. A very special kind of discipline. For instance, when I was a child . . . we used to go for long rides into the country in summertime. But I was never allowed to run to the lemonade stand with the others. I was told, ‘Control your thirst. Control hunger. Control emotion.’ It has served me well.

This widow of a general and daughter of an officer claimed to embody the better Germany: She emphasized her anti-Nazi stance and the necessity of forgetting. Still, the American stood firm. He sentenced all the defendants to life in prison, and Frau Bertholt condoned neither his action nor this American tendency to paint all Germans with the same brush. Maria reported how hard it was for her mother to play this role.⁴² Even so, she was able to embody the role of the widow convincingly with her detached charm, self-discipline, and moral haughtiness. Judgment at Nuremberg was nominated for nine Oscars, and it received two.⁴³ Dietrich was not even nominated for her role as Frau Bertholt. However, Black Fox, a film in which she had no acting role but served as narrator, won an Oscar that same year as the best feature-length documentary. Black Fox was a film about Hitler inspired by Goethe’s retelling of the folk tale “Reynard the Fox.” The film posters read, “Marlene Dietrich tells the story of Adolf Hitler.” For Black Fox, Dietrich contacted Remarque and asked him to translate the text. Remarque, who had married Paulette Goddard in 1958, was delighted to receive this letter. He had also collaborated on the German version of Judgment at Nuremberg and thought Dietrich was “beautiful and magnificent” in it.⁴⁴ But he could not help her now because he had to continue working on his new book, and he assumed that the translation would not pay well. Remarque was quite business-minded and not as generous as Dietrich.⁴⁵

Gary Cooper died in May 1961. Dietrich attended the funeral service alone, looking stony-faced. In the summer of 1961, Ernest Hemingway committed suicide; the soldier and hunter had shot himself. Dietrich grieved for a great love of her life. She would most likely never be called “the Kraut” again.

In the same year that Hemingway took his own life, the young, charismatic John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Dietrich had known him from the last carefree summer before the outbreak of World War II. This president initiated an American age of “poetry and power,” as Robert Frost had prophesied. Kennedy was the youngest man ever to be elected president—a war veteran who appealed to Americans to work together for a better country. He was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. “The days go by, and there are always hundreds of things to do, although I get up early; once again I’ve been unable to sleep since the Kennedy thing. Maybe it’s the loneliness,” Dietrich wrote to Rudi on November 29. She enjoyed telling her friend Kenneth Tynan about her affairs—including the one with Kennedy. In 1962, she had performed in a nightclub in Washington. The president’s brothers, Bobby and Ted, came to the performance, but a president cannot go to a nightclub—so he invited her to the White House for a drink. A bottle of German white wine had been chilled for her. The president started to talk about Lincoln, then asked her how much time she had. She replied that she had an appointment in half an hour. “ ‘That—doesn’t give us much time, does it?’ said J.F.K., looking straight into her eyes. Marlene confessed that she liked powerful men and enjoyed hanging their scalps on her belt. So she looked right back at him and said: ‘No, Jack, I guess it doesn’t.’ ”⁴⁶ With that, he took her glass and led her into his bedroom.

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. Photographs 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.

Noël Coward chronicled Dietrich’s egocentric caprices in his diary. Dietrich claimed that Coward was the only homosexual she could trust, and he nicknamed her “Prussian Cow” and “Darling Achtung.” The two of them got together in New York, Los Angeles, southern France, London, and Paris. Far more than Dietrich, Coward was part of the urbane, cultivated, European postwar upper crust. Coward took her out to dinner, to the theater, and to the movies. They went to garden parties in Hollywood and the opera in New York. Dietrich’s mood could turn on a dime; she could be wonderful company or someone to get away from as quickly as possible. Most of the time she looked gorgeous, and appearing at her side was sure to create a sensation.

Her first book, Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, was published by Doubleday in 1962. From accordion to zipper, she composed a set of reasonably interesting texts, but this was no substitute for an autobiography. Tynan suggested that they write her biography together. “You know how I hate biographies. Someone better than I said that one has to be without humility to collaborate on one or even write an autobiography. Not that I have humility; I just don’t want to talk about myself.”⁵⁷ She had already received an advance for a book in which she was to write about the two wars she had lived through, but she had yet to write a single line of it. Tynan invited her to spend the summer with him in Tuscany, but as usual, she turned down invitations that involved vacations or relaxation. She had just finished an exhausting tour through the United States and wanted to go to Paris. “I toured (for the first and last time) in America. . . . Unbelievable, this country. I am through with it. It’s wrotten [sic].”

Tynan’s successful musical Oh! Calcutta! was being performed in New York at this time. She had read all about it, but did not want to see it. “Nakedness and ‘sex’ in public world repulse me. Being German both of those things are very private, personal and not at all ‘funny.’ ”⁵⁸ Dietrich had a critical and sometimes dismissive view of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s. This attitude was alien to her; she was part of a different generation. She shared this feeling with Leo Lerman, her friend in New York. Whereas Coward and Torberg responded to her egocentricity with humor, Reisch was almost paternal, and Tynan above all curious, Lerman was pessimistic like her. Their gloomy moods notwithstanding, the two of them got along famously. Dietrich and Lerman went to see the remake of The Blue Angel at an old movie theater in Times Square. The film was so bad that she insisted on leaving early. Lerman then took her to Café Geiger in Yorkville, where he ordered her coffee with whipped cream and cookies. The café orchestra played “Falling in Love Again,” “Johnny,” and “Peter.” Lerman was captivated by her beauty and quick-wittedness.

One evening we went to a party together. And she was done up with perfect simplicity. She always let her body speak for itself. There wasn’t a woman in the room—and the room was filled with all sorts of beautiful women wonderfully dressed—who looked better than Marlene. And little Hope Hampton, a flurry of feathers, diamonds, crystal drop-beads, came up to her and peered at her and said, looking up at her face, “Who did it?” And Marlene said, “God.”⁵⁹

In April 1967, Dietrich was in Los Angeles, sharing an apartment with a girlfriend who, unlike herself, had a love life. “I am still fat. Still feeling awful. Disliking myself.”⁶⁰ She went to two parties, and that was quite enough for her. Some of the guests were even smoking marijuana. There was no one for her to talk to. She began to diet and decided to stop drinking alcohol, because her stage costumes revealed every extra ounce she was carrying. Her diary entries were chaotic; she noted down, in an assortment of colored inks, what she bought, what she was eating, whom she met, where her costumes were, departures and landings, and her expenditures for friends, family, and relatives. Bacharach suggested that they appear onstage together on Broadway. Her fear of Broadway audiences used to sophisticated performances proved unfounded. Bacharach prepared the concert perfectly and hired the best musicians. The tickets were sold out shortly after the event was announced. Large crowds gathered in front of the theater on Forty-Sixth Street. Photographs show a beaming Dietrich in the middle of a throng that was cheering her on; it resembled her greeting from the Americans after her return from the war. She invited her husband to the premiere on Broadway. Sieber flew to New York. Seated next to Dietrich, whose wig and makeup made her appear far younger, her “phantom hubby” (as the American press often called him) looked like an old man. With a somewhat dazed look on his face and wearing an old-fashioned suit, he accompanied his wife through the city in which he had lived for many years. After ten days he headed back to his farm.

With her success on Broadway, she had achieved everything a singer could achieve. After Bacharach left, she made very few changes to her show. From year to year, she came more and more to resemble the machine she had described herself as. Without Bacharach, the verve of youth was gone. Everything was mediocre, and she hated mediocrity. Almost ten years after they had parted ways, her feelings of loss had not changed in the slightest. “I still look for you every time I stand in the wings. I also look for you every time I finish the show. In other words: I look for you and to you and wish you were there to tell me what I did right and what I did wrong.”⁶¹ Dietrich was weary. She had been on the road, and around the world, for forty years. When she was in Los Angeles, she rented a small apartment. All she needed was two rooms and a refrigerator for her Dom Perignon and liverwurst. Her daily planner is full of notes about which suitcase is where, which dress has to be altered or cleaned, and when she needs to be at which fitting. In Paris, she frequented the fashion boutiques of Chanel, Balmain, Dior, and Balenciaga. Now that she was over sixty, she gravitated to the timeless ideal of the elegant lady. Her minimalism is evident in her Chanel suit and her fashionable Mao-style jacket. She knew how to wear haute couture in a way that made her body stand out rather than the fashion itself. She worried about being overweight, even though she still had a good figure without doing any sort of exercise or sports. Fashion was a means to keep the artist “Marlene Dietrich” alive. She picked out her clothes as though she were fighting a battle. She knew exactly how to outshine all the other women. Her visits to the boutiques of Paris were just as feared as her earlier shopping trips to Hollywood. She arrived early and did not say hello. Any attempt to chat with her was doomed to failure; she did not like small talk, nor could she be talked into trying on something she had not selected, because she knew how clothing was made and how it looked on her. Her search could take hours. She paid no attention whatsoever to lunch breaks and showed no signs of fatigue or hunger. Pale, beautiful, and unapproachable, Dietrich studied the fabrics with an unerring eye. And she spent the whole time on her feet, despite her aching legs and her high-heeled shoes. She kept a cool head while making her selections. Other women might revel in the luxurious pastime of shopping for clothes, but for her it was the fulfillment of an obligation. Shoes, hat, gloves, stockings, handbag, and jewelry had to go with skirts, dresses, slacks, blouses, and overcoats. It was only when she was satisfied with her purchases that the desired effect could be achieved.

Her life revolved around flight schedules. For years, she had been traveling primarily in the triangle of Paris, Los Angeles, and New York, punctuated by visits to the rest of the world, such as Montreal, Melbourne, Moscow, and Connecticut. She made a lifestyle out of restlessness. “I don’t know what world you’re living in that makes Copenhagen ‘far away.’ It’s 1½ hours from here. That’s nothing at all. I was just in Japan and Australia. That is far. Zurich to Paris is 45 minutes. What does that mean?”⁶² Dietrich did advertising for Pan Am. Her lack of a home base was regarded as cosmopolitanism. She visited Sieber for several days a year on his farm. In July 1969, they were sitting together in front of the television set watching the landing on the moon. Now that passions were behind her, she found contentment in their longstanding familiarity. At least with Rudi she could count on being the center of his life.

On September 12, 1970, Torberg asked her whether she had heard that Boni was quite ill. Remarque had suffered a stroke in 1963, which brought him his first brush with death. In the years that followed, he had a series of heart attacks and experienced ongoing pain and panic attacks. When Torberg wrote to Dietrich, Boni had been admitted to the clinic in Locarno again, and they were prepared for the worst. Dietrich received this letter after her return from Japan. Every day, she had flowers sent to Remarque at the clinic. On September 25, Remarque died in the Clinica Sant’Agnese in Locarno. “I feel the loss very much because I had always hoped that I might see him again.”⁶³ In Dietrich’s eyes, Paulette Goddard was at fault, because Goddard did not want Remarque to get together with her. Was she afraid he might give her one of his precious paintings? She could not picture Boni being happy with another woman. “Boni must have been very lonesome when he died. But then—he was always lonesome with his thoughts.” She did not attend the funeral. In a letter to Maria on the day of Boni’s burial, she wrote about a beautiful old Russian cemetery she had gone to, and conveniently included a sketch of how to get there. The cemetery was near Orly, fifteen miles from Paris and close to the town of Massy. This would have been an appropriate burial place for her, near the airport and near Paris. She had had to take two Valium pills the previous night to stave off troubling thoughts. Remarque’s death made it apparent to her that she had lost him long ago. No matter how much she may have loved him, his wife was now in charge. In the eyes of the world, Goddard was Remarque’s heiress and widow. Dietrich had not even been allowed to visit him. She wondered what would happen with Gabin if she outlived him. He had always been fair, but one never knew how a man’s wife would react. Perhaps she ought to ask for the valuable paintings to be returned. “Maybe I am wrong. But when the people you have been so close to, much closer than one knows, die and you have no way to contact them before or his family after—then you start thinking more terrible thoughts.”⁶⁴

In the year that Remarque died, Dietrich made two trips to Montreux for live cell therapy treatments. Since the early 1960s, she had been a regular guest at the Clinique La Prairie, where she would be injected with fresh cells taken from fetal sheep, a procedure that was said to slow down the natural aging process. She spent an average of a week at the clinic. “On Thursday, the injections, and then five days of rest, and then back to Paris.”⁶⁵

When Coco Chanel died on January 10, 1971, Sieber entered that fact into his daily planner. Dietrich was with him, and they may have thought of Coco while dining on roast veal and Dom Perignon. She flew to Paris for Chanel’s burial. Charles de Gaulle died in November 1970. Dietrich paid her last respects to the “capitaine.” She felt as though everyone around her was dying, and she was receiving medals. The president of France, Georges Pompidou, awarded her the rank of officer in the Legion of Honor at the Élysée Palace. Dietrich was sure that there could not be so many existing medals to award, and that they were invented especially for her. She wrote to Orson Welles shortly before her seventieth birthday that she was faring badly both physically and mentally. And to make matters worse, she was convinced that she now looked like a toad: “Cannot drink because of that. So, have no, even momentary, lift. Too much flying too. Money-worries as always but cannot take advances on the contracts before not everything is in order. All in life is miserable at the moment. Not even sleeping-pills make me sleep which doesn’t help the TOAD-LOOK.”⁶⁶ She had had it all in life: love, money, beauty, and success. Now she had the feeling that she was losing it all.

On July 27, 1972, Dietrich signed a contract to tape a television show. It was the $125,000 fee that lured her; she hated television. She paid for her wardrobe, the orchestration, and the conductor, Burt Bacharach, out of pocket. When the preliminary work began in November, it was soon clear that she would not be her own boss the way she was used to. The rehearsal times were cut back drastically, and all the titles in German were taken out. The orchestra was supposed to play behind the stage. She ranted and raved, but the taping proceeded without undue difficulty. The interviews to which she was contractually obligated to submit were another matter. In conversation with the final journalist, she did not mince words, declaring that the taping had been amateurish. “The first thing you see is a curtain with my portrait, drawn by René Bouché. That is okay. Then I’m supposed to sing ‘La Vie en Rose,’ and the light turns orange. What’s going on? Am I supposed to sing ‘La Vie en Orange’ now?”⁶⁷ The interview continued along these lines. When it appeared in print in the major British and American daily newspapers, her producer, Alexander Cohen, declared that he was finished with Dietrich. A five-year legal battle ensued about the pending fee. In 1977, she received a payment of sixty thousand dollars. In view of the costs she had already incurred and the immense expectations, this was a paltry sum of money.

A few days after the television broadcast of the show, there was a revue for Noël Coward in New York. The honoree appeared on the arm of his friend Marlene Dietrich. The two of them were in good form; they gossiped, joked, sang, and clung together. Two months later, Coward was dead. Then Dietrich’s sister died in Celle. Only Elisabeth had known what it was like to be on Sedanstrasse or to skate on the Neuer See. Dietrich was glad that this news reached her while she was in London, where Maria lived. In the evening, she went to see Maria and made dinner for the children. She was in terrible shape; not even scotch helped. Now Rudi was the only one left to remember the time in Berlin with Dietrich. She did not want to eat for days, and she only drank tea. On May 14, the day her sister was buried in Hanover, Dietrich opened her show in Birmingham.

“I have to earn money as always” had become her mantra. Even close friends had to rely on the newspaper or television to find out where she was at any given time. It became harder and harder for her to manage everyday chores on her own. She wanted someone to talk to, to take care of her, to help her out. To take her mind off her unhappiness, she overate. “I look awfully fat in those amateur photos and now I am even fatter. I don’t know how I will get down because I am hungry all the time and as I am at home I eat anything in sight except what is good for me. . . . It is now 5:30 p.m. and it is raining and windy. My six geraniums are falling over and I go and put them up. Some occupation!”⁶⁸ At a concert on November 7, 1973, in Washington, she suffered a fall. At the end of the concert, she reached her hand down to the orchestra pit to shake hands with her musical director, Stan Freeman, as she always did. He decided to stand on the piano bench to come closer, but the bench broke, and Freeman pulled her into the pit. She lay on her back like a helpless insect, unable to move. Her calls for help went unheard because “Falling in Love Again” was booming. She had not broken any bones, but half her leg had been sliced open. Still, a veteran of a world war was not about to head straight to the hospital; instead she gritted her teeth and called up her old friend Ted Kennedy, who discreetly sent a doctor to examine her. The upcoming concerts in Washington were canceled. As her friends and family had feared, she did not fly to New York to rest up, but decided to fulfill her concert obligations in Canada. Maria made all the preparations for her arrival in Montreal. Although the accident had been extremely painful and vexing for Dietrich, it posed a challenge that she was determined to rise to. She mobilized her strength and put on a fine performance. No one noticed that the ageless woman on the stage was seriously injured.

Before embarking on her tour through South America, she had to undergo heart surgery. Michael DeBakey, a renowned cardiac specialist, told her that she would lose her leg if her circulatory disorders were not remedied. In earlier years, she had used the name “Sieber” to book hotel rooms for her amorous escapades; now she was being admitted to the Methodist Medical Center in Houston as a patient under this name. DeBakey, who was only seven years her junior, had pioneered cardiac artery bypass surgery back in 1964. Dietrich and Lyndon B. Johnson were two of his famous patients. Once she left the intensive care unit, she focused on her leg. She no longer sent celebrity phtographs to her friends, but instead pictures of her leg, complete with skin grafts.

Soon after she left the hospital, with her legs still swollen and painful, she resumed her performances. Her life gathered momentum again, and she went back to focusing on the usual issues of contracts, rehearsals, flight schedules, and checks, with a hodgepodge of hotel reservations, departure times, proverbs, recommended medications, and notes about who had gotten how many dollars from her and on what date. These papers make it hard to fathom how she was able to keep up with her schedule and make it onstage.

On August 10, Dietrich fell in her bedroom in Paris and fractured her left hip. Because she had no faith in French doctors, she was flown to New York for a hip operation. Maria, who brought her to the hospital, had to come up with an elaborate scheme to keep the press from getting wind of what was going on. The operation was a success. One month after her hip surgery, Dietrich began her concerts in London. She came onstage without limping. Her doctors declared that she was in extraordinarily good shape for her age. “I certainly don’t live a good life. I eat like a dog (whatever I find) and the only thing that I don’t do is smoking. . . . Still poor as a church-mouse, but a young one All Love Marlene.”⁶⁹

In early December she flew to Japan, where she gave concerts until the end of 1974. Since returning from the conservatory in Weimar, Dietrich had earned her living with acting and singing. She had always worked hard and spent extravagant sums of money. She could not imagine a life without an audience, admiration, and spotlights. The older she grew, the more she lived for this one hour on the stage. She was not cut out to spend her time visiting friends at the Côte d’Azur, picking up the children from school, organizing charity balls, or sitting on a park bench holding hands with an aging lover. Her biggest concessions to old age were her apartments in New York and Paris, which were the sanctuaries she needed from the world.

She could not imagine any option but to carry on as she always had: living out of a suitcase, spending nights in hotel rooms, jotting down flight schedules, inspecting stages, taking bows, handing out checks, descending on fashion boutiques, and creating sensations. At the age of seventy, she had crossed a threshold that would make it harder for her to take hold of the future. Being young had become such a part of her that she could not let go of it. In addition to makeup, corsets, live cell therapy treatments, and vitamin pills, she now also availed herself of the services of cosmetic surgery. Her friend Kenneth Tynan, who got together with her for dinner in London in May 1972, noted, “Marlene has clearly undergone some facial renovation: cheeks and neck are smooth and unwrinkled.”⁷⁰ But alcohol was most important. In the past, she had enjoyed drinking a glass of champagne before going onstage, but after all these years she had lost control of it. Champagne turned into scotch, and one glass turned into many. Because she could no longer overlook the fact that she was a lonely old woman, she needed the alcohol to revive the memory of her youth and erotic omnipotence. Was she still able to bring magic to the stage? Only if she herself believed in what she was singing, but she failed to realize that the alcohol only heightened her inertia. Alcohol made her indifferent even to her perfection. Every time she sang “Sentimental Journey,” she had to cry. And when she listened to her Berlin record, she teared up. She had grown old and sentimental. Her famous swan coat was showing signs of wear, and her once breathtaking dresses had seen better days. If she was too drunk when she sat down at the dressing table, she smeared her lipstick, applied her makeup sloppily, and put on her wig askew. Without a masquerade, she could no longer appear in public. She no longer dreamed of enticing a man, who would, after all, see her swollen feet, the thinned-out hair on her head, and her many wrinkles. Now that she had problems with balance, she had to be brought to the stage curtain in a wheelchair. As long as no photographs of that got out, she enjoyed this little luxury, which made it less apparent that she was no longer so steady on her feet after a good helping of scotch. Alone in her hotel room after the show, she was unable to sleep. “No wonder I don’t sleep other than drugged. (I take no more than one.) But I still wake up at 2 p.m. and then what?”⁷¹ How much could she read? She had already devoured every book by her favorite author, Rex Stout, and sometimes, out of pure desperation, she resorted to reading a cookbook at night. Dietrich, whom the stage had finally freed from the necessity of portraying other women, had become “a prisoner of her own legend,” as Coward cleverly put it. Only she could free herself from it.

She still had to take care of Sieber. In the 1970s, his handwriting looked like an old man’s, and he began to repeat himself. The reader can almost feel him frantically grasping for something to say to Dietrich, but there was not much to report. On the final pages of his daily planner, he had entered the birth dates of his friends after their names. During the final years of his life, the dates of their deaths, marked with a cross, were added on. And there were more and more crosses. He held to his routine of noting every detail of his life. Gifts, expenses, telephone calls, Russian Easter, Dietrich’s flight schedules and performances, food, drink, reading, hair washing, bathing, and bedtimes. At one point he asked Dietrich to go out with him, reminding her that he had the good suit he had bought for Tamara’s funeral. She sent him packages with pear brandy; a type of vodka that could be found only in Paris; autobiographies of their friends; articles about his hometown, Aussig; records by Horowitz; medicines; and products to stimulate hair growth. He sometimes dreamed about his time in Berlin; he collected wine labels from back home, and looked forward to visits from his grandchildren, who were as big as giants. There is little information about Sieber’s feelings. He recorded every last detail of how his life was slowly coming to an end. Dietrich was caught up with her own illnesses and did not have as much time for him as she had had in the past. When she sent him ten stamped and self-addressed envelopes, he asked huffily whether she wanted some from him as well.

Sieber’s whole life had revolved around Dietrich, and she had assumed full responsibility for him. Not even Tamara could induce him to venture out on his own. Now it was too late to do so. Dietrich had never freed Sieber from his obligations to her, and he had never asked her to do so. The farm had become a refuge for her. No one there was interested in the star. There is a photograph of Dietrich at Sieber’s farm, sitting in a wheelchair dressed in a denim outfit and smiling uncertainly at the camera.

At the beginning of 1975, she resolved to drink less. Alcohol was making her fat, and she no longer fit into her clothes. Before leaving on another tour in Australia in the fall, she had to get through almost two dozen performances in North America and Europe. Maria called her mother on August 11 with the news that Sieber had had a stroke and been brought to a clinic, where he was unresponsive. Mother and daughter were in constant contact by phone. In late August, Dietrich arrived in Los Angeles. She visited Sieber, then flew on to Sydney via Honolulu. The tour did not go well. Ticket sales were sluggish, and the producer was considering canceling the entire tour. He had not failed to notice that his star was rarely sober. At a concert in Sydney, she stumbled and fell over a cable that was lying around as she came onstage; she was quite likely drunk. The audience was sent home, and Dietrich was brought into her dressing room to be examined. The doctor diagnosed a fracture of the left femoral neck. Wrapped up like the finest porcelain, she was flown to Los Angeles. A photograph shows her on a stretcher at the airport covered up to her neck. Sieber suffered from paralysis after his stroke, and Dietrich was in a full body cast after her fall. Since she had no faith in Californian doctors either, she was brought to New York and then to Paris, where she lay in extension bandages until February 1976. Dietrich’s life had come to a standstill.