Anyone Who Had a Heart (6 page)

Chapter

5

The Blue Angel

I
was about to go to Los Angeles to learn something about scoring films at Paramount Pictures and see this actress named Norma Crane, whom I had met in New York, when I heard myself being paged at the airport. I went to the front desk of the TWA terminal to take the call, and it was Peter Matz, a brilliant conductor, arranger, and classically trained pianist who had worked with Harold Arlen on Broadway. After Arlen had recommended Peter to Marlene Dietrich, he had started working as her accompanist before she loaned him to Noël Coward for an engagement in Las Vegas.

I always liked Peter because we had so much in common, and when I picked up the phone, he said, “Look, I’m in a real jam here. Dietrich is playing in Vegas at the same time as Noël Coward and he wants me to work with him, so do you think you could fill in for me and do the date with her?” Although I was definitely interested, the idea of meeting Marlene Dietrich seemed really intimidating to me. I had no idea if I could even pass the audition, but Peter said he would let Dietrich know I would be calling her at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

After I had put my stuff away in Norma Crane’s apartment on Sweetzer Avenue in West Hollywood, I called Marlene Dietrich and went over to see her in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Marlene was fifty-six years old at the time but she was still beautiful and as famous as ever. We talked a little and she was very nice and got me something to eat, but I was still really nervous because she was a very powerful presence and had the aura of a huge star.

When we started to work together at the piano, she said, “Do you write?” I said, “Yeah, I’m trying to be a songwriter.” She asked to hear something I had written so I played her “Warm and Tender.” Marlene had never heard the song before but when I finished, she told me how much she loved it. Marlene wasn’t going to sing the song herself but she wanted Frank Sinatra to hear it. I gave her the demo I had brought with me and she got it to Frank. When he turned the song down, Marlene got really angry with him and told him he was making a big mistake because I was going to become a really well-known songwriter. “One day you’ll see!” she told him. “You’ll see!”

I asked her what song she wanted to open her show with and Marlene handed me the sheet music for a song Mitch Miller had written for her, called “Look Me Over Closely.” I looked at it and said, “You don’t want to open with this kind of arrangement, do you?” When she asked me how I pictured the song, I began playing it at a different tempo. I got her to try it that way and told her to let herself get carried away by the feeling. I also convinced her to open with “My Blue Heaven.” Then she had me play one song after another.

I began coaching her a little bit because Marlene had a tendency to rush and get ahead of the beat. “Sit back,” I told her. “Just sit back.” I was still a little tentative because Marlene could have just told me to get the fuck out of there, but she soon became very comfortable with me and began getting a strong hold on how to sing these songs. When I was done writing corrections on the lead sheets and orchestrations, we agreed I would come back to see her at ten the next morning. and we spent the next two weeks rehearsing together in Los Angeles.

As a singer, Marlene had a vocal range of not much more than an octave and a note or two. Since I knew we were going to be working with a pretty large orchestra, with what I hoped would be a tight rhythm section, bass, drums, and guitar, with me playing piano, I thought I could get her to swing a little. I kept some songs she had been doing forever, like “Lola,” “Lili Marlene,” and “The Boys in the Back Room,” but added standards like “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” “My Blue Heaven,” “One for My Baby,” “Makin’ Whoopee,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” and of course, “Falling in Love Again,” which Marlene had first sung in Josef von Sternberg’s classic film
The Blue Angel
in 1930.

We opened in Las Vegas at the Sahara Hotel and the show went really well. Marlene was a smash. It was a wonderful time for me because Marlene always insisted that I go out with her after the show. One night we would have dinner with Judy Garland and the next it would be Maureen Stapleton. I didn’t really like the music I was playing for Marlene all that much but it seemed like a terrific life to me, because I was conducting, getting paid, and meeting all these really famous stars.

After the fifth or sixth night, I realized I was kind of trapped in a web with Marlene. I was single and every casino had great-looking girls in the chorus line and I wanted to hang out, but I couldn’t do that if I was having dinner with Marlene. Don Rickles was playing the lounge at the Sahara and whenever I would go in there with Marlene, he would lay all this stuff on her about me like “There he goes, looking for broads. Any broad will do. Look out for him, girls. He’s heading to the front door.” I loved Rickles and thought he was hysterical, but Marlene took it seriously and would get really angry at him.

The first time Marlene and I worked together in Vegas, I didn’t stay at the Sahara. I was at the Bali Hai Motel, and one day while I was playing tennis there, I saw Marlene walking by with a big bag of groceries. I hadn’t known her very long at this point but she got the key from the front desk and let herself into my apartment. When I came off the court, she had had the juice from six steaks condensed for me to drink.

It was summertime and I was sweating like crazy, so I threw my tennis clothes on the floor and went to take a shower. When I came back out, she was washing my clothes for me. The amazing thing about Marlene was that despite all the fame and stardom, she was still a German hausfrau at heart and always did everything she could to take care of me.

Marlene and I got a little drunk together one night in Vegas and as I was taking her back to her room, she tried to kiss me and said, “Let’s go inside.” But I just didn’t want to go there with her. Maybe I was smart enough by then to know I couldn’t conduct the orchestra every night behind a woman I was sleeping with, even if I had wanted to sleep with her, which I didn’t. It would have been like falling in love with fire.

After we finished the engagement in Vegas, I stayed on at the Bali Hai so I could get a divorce from Paula. Back then, you could only get a divorce in Nevada if you were there for six weeks but it was a fun city to be in. There were showgirls in every hotel, and a lot of them were real beauties.

Marlene and I then went on tour to South America. In Rio de Janeiro, the two of us would walk in the hills at night and listen to the drumbeats coming up from the city. That was the first time I heard the baion beat, where the one is followed by a one-beat pause and then two half beats. Phil Spector used it in “Be My Baby,” and it’s in Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters. You also can hear it at the start of “Any Day Now,” a song Bob Hilliard and I wrote and Chuck Jackson recorded.

Whenever Marlene and I flew into a city in South America, there would be a big press conference and Marlene always insisted I be there with her. Sooner or later, the question would come up about whether we were together. Marlene, who could speak French and Spanish as well as English and German and I think Italian, would always say, “Oh, no, there is nothing between us because he is so busy and such a ladies’ man, he has women all the time.”

In places like Chile and Argentina, it was always very difficult for me to get a girl past the front desk of our hotel. Since no one thought anything about two women going upstairs together, Marlene would sometimes do me the great favor of bringing the girl to her room so I could pick her up and take her to mine. The funny thing is that most of them were dogs.

The real romance between Marlene and me took place when we were onstage together. There would be a scrim in front of me to help with the lighting effects, but for the last three numbers, they would open the scrim, and lo and behold—a Jewish piano player would be sitting there. Even though it always scared the shit out of me, Marlene would introduce me to the audience every night by saying the exact same thing: “I would like you to meet the man, he’s my arranger, he’s my accompanist, he’s my conductor, and I wish I could say he’s my composer, but that isn’t true. He’s everybody’s composer . . . Burt Bacharach!”

The most amazing tour I ever did with Marlene was in the spring of 1960, when she went back to Germany for the first time since the end of World War II. As soon as the tour was announced, the German newspapers were filled with letters from people denouncing Marlene as a traitor for having fought with the enemy in the war. What Marlene had really done was put on a U.S. Army uniform while entertaining the troops. She had hated Hitler and the Nazis and gotten as many of her Jewish artist friends out of there as she could before the war began.

The outcry against her returning to Germany was so loud that Norman Granz, the promoter, had to cancel our concert in Essen. In Berlin, we went from doing five nights to three and what began as a seventeen-city tour became twelve. Before we opened in Berlin, Marlene held a press conference and told a reporter that since all her former friends in Germany had either left the country or died in the concentration camps, there was no one left there for her to see except for Hildegard Knef, the actress and singer.

On May 3, 1960, we opened at the Titania Palast in Berlin. Because the ticket prices were so expensive, there were five hundred empty seats in the house. Marlene started the show by singing “Falling in Love Again” in German and then she did “The Boys in the Back Room” and “One for My Baby.” She sang in English, German, and French and dedicated one of her songs to Richard Tauber, the great operatic tenor, and Friedrich Hollaender, who had composed the music for
The Blue Angel
. Both of them had been forced to leave Germany because they were Jews.

Her last number was “I Still Have a Valise in Berlin,” which she sang in a white tuxedo. When she was done, Mayor Willy Brandt led the standing ovation and Marlene took eighteen curtain calls. The reviews were all very positive, and the audience loved her so much in Munich that she had to take thirty-six curtain calls. They liked her a lot less in the Ruhr, and as we were walking through the lobby of the Park Hotel in Dusseldorf, a hysterical young girl who hadn’t even been born during the war ran up to Marlene and spat right in her face while screaming how much she hated Marlene for betraying Germany. Marlene’s response was to tell a press conference that she would never perform in Germany again.

When we got to Wiesbaden we were greeted by bomb threats. The French string section we were traveling with freaked out and wanted to leave the tour, but somehow we managed to get them onstage. At one point during the show I would play a “Blue Angel” medley while Marlene went off to change into tails. When she was ready to come back out, I would cut the orchestra and she’d walk to a chair at the edge of the stage, sit down in a spotlight, and sing the Harold Arlen song, “Vun more for my baby, vun more for the road.”

With Marlene, every move was precisely calculated and she would always smoke a cigarette and move away from the chair at a certain point in the song. When she stood up and moved to the left at this show, she misjudged the edge of the stage and fell off it, landing right at the feet of Josef von Sternberg, the man who had discovered her years before. She had her left hand stuck in her pants pocket and hit the floor with her shoulder.

Marlene didn’t know it at the time but she had broken her shoulder and was in shock from the pain. Somehow I realized she was about to start singing the same song she had just done, so I began hitting the same note on the piano again and again to bring her back and it worked. She went out to dinner with von Sternberg and his son that night, but the next morning I insisted she let me take her to the American Air Force Hospital, where the doctor told her she had fractured her humerus.

Marlene refused to take anything for the pain. Instead she tied the belt of her raincoat around her arm and off we went to the next city. She walked onstage that night with her left arm tied to her body with a bandage that she hid with sequins and rhinestones, and I did what I could to help her learn how to sing without moving her arms. She never missed a show. In every way imaginable, she was a warrior.

It took Marlene about three weeks to heal from the injury and then we flew to Israel. On the plane to Tel Aviv, Marlene got a stewardess to sing her a song in Hebrew over and over again so she could learn the words while I took notes so we could do it onstage. When we got off the plane, the promoter met us and said, “Miss Dietrich, of course you are not going to sing any songs in German here because as you know, the language is forbidden in this country and no German films are shown and German cannot be spoken on the stage.”

The promoter also told her that a couple of weeks earlier, Sir John Barbirolli had conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony in Israel. Even though Mahler himself was a Jew, the public outcry was so intense that Barbirolli had been forced to conduct the choral parts in English. Marlene looked at the promoter for a while and then she said, “I will not sing one song in German. I will sing
nine
songs in German.”

He thought she was joking, but Marlene was brilliant when it came to things like this. When she got onstage in Tel Aviv the first night, she opened with “My Blue Heaven” and then “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” both of which she sang in English. Then she said, “I would like to sing you a song as a mother sings a lullaby to a child, and the name of the song is ‘Mein Blondes Baby.’ ”

There was a huge gasp from the audience and then a hush fell over the entire hall as Marlene started to sing in German. People were crying and so was I, and so was most of the orchestra. Marlene did nine German songs that night and it was one of the most emotional experiences of my life because the dam broke. Even though Israel was already selling machine guns to Germany and Israelis were driving around in Volkswagens, Marlene broke the barrier against the German language being spoken in the country while also making everyone realize how deep the connection between those two countries really was.