Rory MacLean is the author of ten books, including Stalin’s Nose, The Oatmeal Ark, and Under the Dragon. His most recent book is Berlin: Imagine a City. MacLean, who was born in Vancouver and splits his time between Germany and the UK, will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.
Singer and actress Marlene Dietrich at Expo 67
Over the five years that I’ve lived in Berlin, I’ve written a history of the city, told through the portraits of two dozen Berliners across five centuries. Among them are the wild medieval balladeer whose suffering might explain the Nazi’s rise to power, an ambitious prostitute who refashioned herself as a royal princess, the Scottish mercenary who fought in the Thirty Years War, and David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich, two of the 20th century’s greatest artists — with whom I once had the privilege of working.
In the late 1970s Marlene Dietrich was asked to play a key role in Just a Gigolo, a feature film on which I was the assistant director. At the time she was 77 years old, a recluse, living in isolation in Paris. Seventeen years had passed since her last appearance in a movie. Fifty years since von Sternberg had cast her in The Blue Angel. It took the producer six months to convince her to accept the role. Every time we telephoned her apartment, a woman would breath into the receiver.
“This is the maid. Madame is lunching in Versailles.”
The “maid” was Dietrich, of course.
We were told that she was too busy, that she was writing her memoirs. In truth she was frightened of being unable to live up to her legend, frightened of the toll of years. But in the end the chance to sing on screen one of the songs from her cabaret days proved to be too enticing.
At first the old woman who mounted the steps of the film studio brought back no memories of Shanghai Express. She wore a tired denim suit and hid by the door. Her lips quivered as we were introduced to her. She refused to take off her dark glasses. The makeup artist – fellow Canadian Antony Clavet — moved to her side, and spirited her away into the dressing room.
Two hours passed before she reappeared, wearing a wide brim hat and deep veil over her face. In costume she began to find her confidence, the clothes helping to ease her into the role. She walked onto the set without assistance, sat down and let her long skirt — split to the thigh — slip open. A woman of half her age would have been satisfied with those legs. As the crew tried not to stare, a smile fleeted across her face.
To boost further her confidence Raymond Bernard, her pianist, started to play Falling in Love Again. Dietrich stood by the piano and listened, then insisted on its retuning. “Otherwise you know what people are,” she said to me, “they will be sure to think it’s me.”
As she would only sing once, we decided to run two cameras. I was asked to operate the second one. The lights were checked. Exposure and focus set. We took our positions, settled ourselves, waited for, “Quiet please. Turn over. Sound rolling. Speed. Mark it. Scene 503 take 1. And action…”
I looked through the lens, and my eyes deceived me. There was no old woman standing before me. Instead the veil and a soft focus filter had transformed her. The key light caught her eyes and I saw the star of Blonde Venus and Touch of Evil, the legendary Dietrich.
Dietrich sang a song from her Kurfürstendamm days, Schöner Gigolo, Armer Gigolo. The cameras purred. Celluloid glided through the magazine. She sang in English, “There will come a day/Youth will pass away/Then what will they say about me?”
In all it lasted maybe three minutes, but the intimacy stayed with us. After the cameras had cut, we remained silent. Then burst into spontaneous applause. Dietrich smiled once more and the photographer shot stills until he started to shake.
Dietrich then called the crew around her. She talked to us about her beloved Ku’damm and Unter der Linden. She said, “There are many people who imagine I betrayed Germany during the war… They forget I was never – never – against Germany. I was against the Nazis. Even the press seems not to comprehend that. You can’t know how it feels… I lost my country, and I lost my language. No one who hasn’t gone through that can know what I feel.”
Then she gathered herself and left the set, the last set that she would ever perform on, the crew standing in a line to the door, applauding.