The night I met Marlene . . .
Marlene Dietrich was born on 27 December 1901. If you don’t know who she was, this won’t interest you. But if you do, you’ll be impressed. Or amused. Or both.
When I was a boy Marlene Dietrich was one of my heroines. She was a heroine, too, to my best friend at boarding school, the actor Simon Cadell.
On Saturday 5 November 1966, during half-term, Simon and I came to London and went to the Golders Green Hippodrome to see Marlene Dietrich live on stage. She was sixty-four, a siren from the Berlin of the 1920s and the Hollywood of the 1930s, and we were in our teens, in the age of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but she was our heroine. We knew she would be sensational: the reality exceeded our expectations. The show was so artfully contrived: the delayed start; the sense of anticipation; the prolonged overture; the rustling of the curtains; the completely manufactured but nonetheless real anxiety: will-she-won’t-she-be-appearing . . . and, suddenly, she does, in a spotlight, in that dress, with an outrageous floor-length fur, and those eyes and that teasing smile. We stood, we cheered, we roared − and she laughed at us and took it as her due. Every element of the evening was impeccable: her appearance, her face, her hair, her arched eyebrows, her voice, her banter, her timing, her repertoire, her arrangements. I remember thinking, ‘Take a bow, Burt Bacharach – I want my life arranged by you!’
In the programme, there was a note about her by Ernest Hemingway: ‘I think she knows more about love than anyone. I know that every time I have seen Marlene Dietrich ever, she has done something to my heart and made me happy. If this makes her mysterious then it is a fine mystery.’
When it was over, the moment it was over, Simon said, ‘Follow me!’ We raced into the street and round to the stage door. A crowd was already gathering and a car was waiting. Simon said, ‘That’ll be the decoy car – let’s wait at the front.’ So we did. And we were rewarded. After about half an hour another limousine appeared and drew up in the street in front of us. A policeman arrived and then another. There was a flurry of movement around the theatre doors and suddenly she was there, before us, within touching distance. She was small and looked so gentle – and she smiled at us. As she walked towards the car, from around the building a crowd came surging – men and women, young and old – and just as I thought she was about to be trampled underfoot I realised that two men – her driver and one of the policemen – were lifting her bodily onto the roof of the limousine. They held her as she struggled to her feet (she was wearing a sort of leather miniskirt) and, on spindly high heels, she then began to teeter about the roof of the car – her arms outstretched to maintain her balance. She looked down at us, laughing, as we began to cheer. As she mouthed the words ‘I love you!’ her driver held up a sheaf of photographs for her – already signed – and she took them and, wobbling to and fro on the roof, began to distribute them to the adoring fans. When the pictures were all gone, she revolved slowly, surveying the scene one final time before lowering herself onto her bottom and edging herself towards the side of the car – and me. This was Golders Green at midnight and Marlene Dietrich was coming off the roof of her limousine into my arms. Her legs were thrust towards me. As the policeman helped her to the ground, for a never-to-be-forgotten moment in my hands I held Marlene Dietrich’s left thigh.